NSA, Surveillance, Secrets 3: General Background

Here is some necessary background to understand the context of the NSA brouhaha currently ongoing.

Everything here is based on public sources and everything here is, I think, somewhat necessary to understand what people are talking about. To the best of my knowledge, nothing I am saying is or should be the least bit controversial.

1. The following issues have always been subject to debate and controversy in this country, since the very beginning (1789 and before):

What can be held secret from the people of the United States and under what circumstances? How can the citizens of the country know what their government is doing? When can the government of the United States of America violate the laws of other countries? What controls need to be in place so that American's rights are not violated?

2. The answers to these questions are changing constantly as are the procedures put in place to manage them and to see that there are no abuses. But the system changes, the system is complex, there certainly are abuses, and so forth. Furthermore, while there may be a working concensus in Washington, that does not mean that the American people would necessarily approve of the result if it were in some way brought to a direct vote. But, like everything else in America, there is rarely a direct vote on issues. You vote for representatives, and they vote on issues.

3. We may not know the details and the specific programs but a lot of this is discussed in public and what is generally going on is available to you if you wish to know about it. This is because people are always arguing over who gets what resources, who is in charge of whom, and so forth. But they do not take ads out in the newspaper, there is a certain skill involved in knowing what is happening, and you have to pay attention.   I list various sources here.   (1) 

4. You also have to realize that different parts of the US Government are very different from each other. They are not a "communal" group mind, they do not necessarily cooperate, and they do compete. For example, the FBI, the CIA and the NSA are not interchangable. They are very different, and most of the time, historically speaking, they do not talk or cooperate with each other. There are some notable exceptions to this, when they did work together, but they are notable exceptions and we will mention a few later.

5. One of the essential contradictions of the activities we call "intelligence" is that it often involves breaking someone's law, if not exactly ours. And the question is what is the legal procedure when we do this? When we spy on the military secrets of Russia, we are clearly violating their law. When can we legally violate their law?

6. For all the attention given to the CIA and the NSA, the agency that seems to have violated the rights of American citizens the most egregiously seems to have been the FBI and perhaps the IRS. I am referring in particular to J. Edgar Hoover activities and the various activities associated with COINTELPRO.

7. If you want to understand the NSA and their culture, there are four events/projects that you need to be aware of. They are: Enigma, Midway, Zimmerman, and Venona.   There are certainly many other projects, but these four are public and these four have been acknowledged as being foundations of the NSA and its mission.

Part 4:
http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2013/06/nsa-surveillance-secrets-4-four-case.html


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1. Here is an example of what I mean by being able to know what is going on in general, without knowing the specifics.  There is ample evidence that our various submarines are regularly used for covert missions of various types, including listening to and measuring signals from up close to various nations, inserting and extracting people from foreign nations, and other highly secret intelligence collection methods including tapping underwater cables and tracking Russian submarines.   I do not know what they are up to today, but I know that the Navy has increased the latest submarine, the Virginia Class, ability to do these things.   Therefore when some underwater project of this type is discussed and announced breathlessly by the sensationalist press in the future, I will not be the least surprised unless it is truly audacious and original.   Otherwise, I will say, what else is new?

NSA, Surveillance, Secrets 2. Open Sources

A tremendous amount of information is in the public domain about the NSA and other intelligence agencies. It is true that you will not be told the details of specific programs, but you can get the general direction of most of what is going on, and rarely be completely surprised when the truth comes out. There are several reasons why this is true, e.g. that the information is public, but the major ones are: policy debate inside the government, competition for scarce resources, and various interested outside organizations that maintain archives of information and analysis in order to influence policy.

Here is a short list of my favorite sources in the areas of intelligence and national defense policy. There are many others.

1. George Washington University's National Security Archive http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/

2. The Federation of American Sciences (www.fas.org)

This pro-arms control group maintains an excellent collection of background material on matters related to defense and intelligence, in conjunction with www.globalsecurity.org.

3. The CIA Online Library  https://www.cia.gov/library/index.html

4. The NSA Web Site  www.nsa.gov

5. The Washington Post and the NY Times

Pretty much everything involving defense and intelligence is discussed in the Washington Post and the NY Times. The Post is better for details of Washington push and shove, both are good for broad strategy and policy issues. Any given article in the Washington Post is likely to have 100s if not 1000s of comments by crazed, angry partisans of one side of an issue or another.

www.washingtonpost.com

www.nytimes.com

6. Congressional Research Service

The CRS is a branch of Congress that prepares reports on various topics for the House and Senate.  I use the Open CRS archive and the FAS archive for the most part which can be found at:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/
http://www.opencrs.com

For example, here is a report on "Covert Action: Legislative Background and Possible Policy Questions".

https://opencrs.com/document/RL33715/2013-04-10/

Part 3:
http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2013/06/nsa-surveillance-secrets-3-general.html

NSA, Surveillance, Secrets 1: Why Should We Trust the Government?

My theory is that the brouhaha about the NSA and surveillance is only partially about the NSA and surveillance.    It is about two other things as well: (a) Americans do not know anything about how their government works and (b) Americans do not trust their government.  I think that the former is regrettable and that latter is a fair judgment, the government has proven to not be trustworthy on many occasions.

There have been many occasions in the last 40 years when the US Government explained events or actions in ways that have not held up to scrutiny.     Exactly why certain things happened may or may not point to conspiracy to defraud the American people, I very much doubt that it is any one conspiracy given the wide range of actors and policies.   These are not subtle matters at the fringe of American life, these are matters of central importance.   It may be that there are explanations for each of them, but I have looked, and for the most part, they are not obvious.   Some like the Gulf of Tonkin may indeed have a degree of screw up to them instead of malicious intent.   But the fact is that most people in America do not believe the Warren Commission, whatever the truth may be.  Whatever happened with COINTELPRO, gross violations of American law by the FBI and their paid informers were never brought to justice.   Leonard Peltier is still in jail and he will die in jail for a crime we all know he did not commit.   The supreme court pissed on the constitution in public when they put G. W. Bush in power in 2000.    There were no WMD's in Iraq.    Each of these are different events with different causes and different factions and the only generalization that I am drawing from them is this: the American people have been given ample reasons to be skeptical about what their government tells them about any given matter.   Any given explanation should probably not be taken at face value if the issue is of importance to you, and further study is warranted.  That is certainly the case with the recent NSA brouhaha which I personally think is not even close to what most people think it is.

Nevertheless, I think that people are right to look closer and try to understand it and not take the government at their word.

Think of these recent disclosures as part of a giant civics lesson: you now have an opportunity to learn how your government works.   I don't think you are going to like it.

How do I know this stuff, you may ask.  Years of dedicated study, wasted years that will do me no good and only alienate me from my fellow biped who does not know this stuff and does not want to know.    A tremendous amount of this information is public even when the details of specific operations aren't.

So I am going to outline a basic introduction on how and why certain types of Intelligence matters are handled in this country, specifically NSA.   Using public sources, of course, what else?  But at the end of the day, if you do not trust the government, and if you do not believe that I know anything about this, then it won't make any difference.

I also realize that I am held in complete contempt by my friends who do not believe that I could possibly know anything about this stuff.   This has been made extremely clear to me in the last few days.   Be that way, see if I care.

Part 2:
http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2013/06/nsa-surveillance-and-civics-sources.html

All Will Be Well in the Garden (Summer 2013)

In the garden, growth has it seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.  

My status report on the 1.5 year experimental container garden is as follows:

-- gardening is expensive, you will not save money, except for maybe an herb garden

-- plants are weird

-- plants have enemies, lots of enemies. your only hope is to proactively spray with copper spray and neem oil unless you go non-organic.

-- all substances must be bought in quantity and mixed yourself or you will spend even more money. specifically, I mean potting mix, copper spray and neem oil.

-- potting mix is not dirt

-- throw away diseased plants and potting mix. do not reuse potting mix after one year.

-- replenish with time release fertilizer and immediate release cool aid

-- tomatoes are a pain in the ass, get all sorts of diseases, are very picky about their watering and fertilizer.

-- there is good information on the internet and there is crazy information on the internet. You will have to find out which is which.

-- buy disease resistant plants/seeds or you will be sorry

-- inspect every day

-- harvest the peas and beans relentlessly or the damn things will stop producing.

-- buy vining and indeterminate, stay away from determinate and bush.

-- concrete mixing bins from home depot / lowes make good garden containers

-- use wire to trellis

-- plant serially, use nature's simultaneity to your advantage. when harvesting basil from a productive plant, start the next plant so you will have something in three months.

-- using the simultaneity and economies of scale are the keys to successful gardening

-- if you want to improve your quality of life and save money, just do an herb garden, and leave it at that.

The quote above is from Being There.

Other notes, 6/18/2013

-- relentlessly remove diseased leaves or parts, and throw into trash
-- be aware that some of this is spreadable, so take some care not to spread disease by
contact, wash hands, etc
-- plants must be placed separate from each other to provide good ventilation, this helps stop the spread of disease
-- you must have full 360 access to plants to remove disease parts, inspect them etc
-- I use a green translucent ribbon to tie up plants to metal supports
-- I make use of hanging plants a lot to achieve separation and to keep plants off the ground where different pests like to live (e.g. slugs, etc)
-- yield will be greatly increased if you have something like a simple greenhouse or cold frame
-- if you are working from seed you are expected to cruelly thin plants, e.g. choose a winner and clip off the losers in any one area so that plants are not crowding each other.

The Suspension of Disbelief, James Bond and Skyfall

In an economy destroyed by globalization, the formerly prosperous citizens must look to entertainment of various forms to distract themselves from the poverty and despair of their lives. That is one of the reasons why such entertainment has an importance far beyond its nominal place in society. Thus the failure of a film to properly entertain must be seen as not merely a disappointment but a form of betrayal.

All fiction requires some "willing suspension of disbelief" in the audience to be effective. This by itself is not a problem. That the spaceships in Star Wars made whooshing noises as they went by never caused me the least concern. The audience wants to work with the filmmaker and be entertained. We want to believe that the mysterious "man in black" can climb the Cliffs of Insanity and win a duel with the fabulous swordsman Inigo Montoya, all in the name of true love. But when the authors of a piece go too far and stretch our credibility, then the suspension of disbelief may be revoked by the audience and the film may fail to serve its designated role in our formerly great society. That is a terrible fate for any work of fiction, and is to be avoided.

Everyone in the world knows that James Bond is fiction, not reality. The author, Ian Fleming, and his imitators, was writing entertainment fiction, occassionally informed by the author's experience in Naval Intelligence during the war, but not too often. Unlike LeCarre's George Smiley, Bond is intentionally the slightly disreputable scion of a noble family who drinks too much, sleeps around too much, and works as an elite operative of the double-nought section of British Foreign Intelligence. Although the original novels vary in their believability, only occassionally do they throw reality completely out the window, and when they do, they make up for it with colorful villains and so forth.  No, I never believed that Honor Blackman was really going to be able to take Fort Knox, but I was willing to go with it.  

There are no hard and fast rules here. The line between belief and disbelief in fiction is a fuzzy one, but when one steps over it, then the road to hell is slippery and the fall is complete.

Expectations may lead to an even greater fall from grace, and that was the case with me and Skyfall. I had heard generally very good things about this film, and I expected a lot. I had heard that the new villain was very interesting, and he is/was. The performance by the Komodo dragon was exceptional as well. Even Q was generally amusing. But one is asked to suspend a lot of disbelief here, an awful lot, and I just couldn't do it.

The Komodo dragon may be simulated but at least is not completely unrealistic.  I think they toned down the blood in this scene. 

1. Nobody survives that fall

The fact of the matter is, when you are shot with a high powered rifle and fall off a moving train 200 or so feet into a rocky stream, you are extremely unlikely to live. Every bone in your body will be broken, you will have internal bleeding, you will probably be unconscious and you will drown, assuming you are still alive. You will not be able to pull yourself out of the water, nor will you be able to make it to a nearby town. Even if there was a rescue team at the bottom ready to apply critical aid and care and rush you to a hospital, you are unlikely to make it. 

2. There is no reason for Q and Bond to meet in a museum

They are in London. They should meet in a safe house or other secure facility. If for no other reason than they will have to adjust the biometric sensor on the revolver. Its not as if they have to do the handoff in Moscow or something. Also, most museum galleries these days have guards and/or surveillance. Why bother ? 

3. There is no reason to send Bond out alone if he is not in good shape.

If he doesn't pass the tests, he will know it. If they want to send him out anyway, then generally you team these people up, rather than send them out as a loner (which you never do anyway but which is part of the conceit of a double-nought agent). There is no reason to lie to him about his condition. But most of all, there is no reason for M to violate rules to send him out. If something goes wrong, she is vulnerable to criticism. MI6 is not a little terrorist group reliant on a single person. If they need to borrow someone from the SAS then they will. 

4. Helicopters are very noisy.

All of a sudden we are subjected to an immense number of plot holes. First, I don't know where MI6 got 3 helicopters worth of special forces in a hurry, unless they planned this, but lets go with that, because worse is coming. Helicopters are noisy, and they are on an island. I live near two Marine Corps bases here in Rincon del Diablo, and they are very noisy.  Oh are you saying that they did not have a lookout posted? And even if they did not notice those incredibly noisy helicopters flying over the water in daytime towards them, his many guards are armed with machine guns and I would not be surprised if they did not have an RPG or two in their facility. I certainly would. You can do a lot of damage with some machine guns and a few RPGs on those big helicopters just hovering there.

Or maybe you think he, the bad guy, wanted to be captured so he could confront M with her crimes. Sure, that would make sense, except it doesn't. Once you put yourself in your enemy's power, anything could happen. Someone could put a revolver to your head and shoot. Its a terrible idea. There are lots of other ways of confronting M, if that is what you want to do. 

5. M turned Silva over to the enemy.

This is just crazy. No matter how fucked up someone might be, he's your guy and he knows all kinds of stuff about your organization that you don't want the other people to know. He was your station chief in Hong Kong for Christ's sake. They turn him and he could make your life hell. No, you recall him and put him in a dark hole for the rest of his life.

6. Silva is so fucking brilliant that he thinks its a good idea to get into a gun fight in Parliament?

I mean what the fuck? Manipulate a jetliner to fall on them sure, but a gun fight? 

7. What is this about the train crash ?

Huh ?

8. Attack Scotland with a crew ?

Why bother. Go home. Enjoy life. M will come after you and then you will be in your place and they can find whatever you want them to find. You don't really care about M anyway, you have all that money to manage, and that takes time in this volatile market.

9. Password in the Encrypted Text

But worst of all, in this day when cybercrime is so important, the idea of finding the password in the clear in the bad guys encrypted data is just laughable.  That is too stupid, I am sorry.

I just don't buy it. I love secret tunnels and old mansions but I just dont buy it. And why is it called Skyfall? Is the sky fallling? Did I miss something?  I must have missed something.

I loved the villain, I love the homosexual seduction scene, but it was not enough.

Not nearly enough, Mr. Bond.

I hope you will do better next time. If you need a script consultant, do not hesitate to call.

­

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For more about Ian Fleming and his fabulously wealthy family see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fleming_%26_Co.

Ubuntu Linux Now Controlled / Owned by the People's Republic of China

For those of you who care, Ubuntu Linux is now for all practical purposes owned by the People's Republic of China. I doubt very much if you care, but since we are in a war with the PRC (an undeclared one), the PRC will be putting a variety of trap doors and other compromises into the system. Now the fact is that it is very unlikely that anyone who reads my blog is going to be doing anything serious for national security, which will no longer be able to use Ubuntu, so it doesn't really matter.

Of course if you do proprietary technical work, you should think twice about using Ubuntu Linux because pretty much any Chinese hacker can get access to it.   Of course that might be true using any OS given all the energy the Chinese put into stealing intellectual property.

Just thought you should know.

Here is an article that goes over the public elements of the deal.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/22/china_makes_linux_os_with_canonical_help/

The Garden of Allah: An Editorial About the Preservation of Architecture in Los Angeles

Whenever you read about a famous building in Los Angeles, you are pretty sure that the story is going to have an unhappy ending. Los Angeles as a community, as an economy, and as a culture is very clear about the buildings and architecture that at one point made it famous: it doesn't give a fuck. LA will tear down anything to make a fast buck, no matter how significant, architecturally or culturally.

It is easy to be critical of this policy, but I think it misunderstands what Los Angeles is all about, and tries to make it something that it is not. The people of Los Angeles are not pretending to be shallow, they are shallow. They are not pretending to be stupid and corrupt, they are stupid and corrupt.

Once you understand this, then the clouds of confusion will lift and a positive spin can be placed on what otherwise might seem to be an obscene and offensive disregard of their responsiblity to preserve cultural resources of our civilization that happen to be placed in their district.

In other words, destroying buildings that are an important part of Los Angeles history is not in any way a bad thing, it is a good thing, because it is the true and valid expression of the beliefs of the people who own and run Los Angeles. To save historically significant buildings would be false to their nature, and hypocritical.

I spent about 10 years or so of my life (1982 - 1992 or so) in a little cabin up Laurel Canyon, 8726 Lookout Mountain Ave. My landlady had been married to Bundy Marton, 2nd Unit Director of Ben Hur (1959). My neighbor across the street was Eddie Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten. This was not a rich neighborhood, this was a funky neighborhood. I lived up the street from Pat O'Neil of Lookout Mountain Films, and when we did our test for The Abyss, we shot the footage in that cabin with the YFS camera and took the footage to Pat for compositing.

I had a bank account at an anonymous little branch of some appalling financial institution in an undistinguished building on Sunset Boulevard, a block or two west of Crescent Heights. In the lobby of this branch, against the wall, was an architectural model of some building enclosed in a glass case. One day I looked closer, and I saw that it was a model of a small cluster of buildings, called, rather grandly, The Garden of Allah.

The Garden of Allah had apparently been an apartment complex made up of many, 20 or more, little cottages, what we call bungalows, each of them themed, it seemed to me, as something out of the Thousand and One Nights. Although it did have an Arabic feel to it, it also felt right at home in the Hispanic bungalow tradition of that part of town. A sign next to the model at the bank explained that this was a famous apartment complex that used to be located on this site that it had been torn down to build this bank, and that it had something to do with famous actors, actresses and writers of Hollywood in the days of silent pictures.

That was an understatement.

This was The Garden of Allah.

Our story begins in 1879 when a young girl named Miriam Leventon was born in Imperial Russia, which in case you did not know, was not the best place in the world to be born, particularly if you were Jewish. She decided to become an actress and studied with Stanislavski at the Moscow Arts Theatre, which is incredible just in itself. Moving to NYC in 1905 she co-founded with her boyfriend a Russian language theatre on the Lower East Side. It was not successful, she broke up with her boyfriend, he returned to Russia but she stayed. The director and actor Henry Miller discovered her and placed her in a play in 1906. She had a very successful Broadway career for 10 years under her stage name, Alla Nazimova.

So one more time we have a brilliant but poor immigrant who comes to America to fame and fortune. But our story is just beginning.

She was brought to Hollywood's attention in the very early days and from 1916 to 1918 she was a successful actress under contract to Selznick. She made a fortune, and apparently threw it away making her own films that were not commercially successful. Easy come, easy go, I guess. But with a few million left in the bank,  a financial advisor suggested she do some real estate development as a long term investment and income property.

So at last we come to the part of the story which is The Garden of Allah.

Alla Nazimova developed a property on Sunset Boulevard that was a themed hotel and apartment complex whose name, The Garden of Allah, was a pun on her first name, Alla. I don't completely understand the sequence of events, but she went broke building it, sold it to someone, but continued living there in one of the Bungalows for the rest of her life.

And her life was very colorful. For those of you who find the stories of wild Hollywood sex with famous celebrities interesting, you could do worse than study Alla. She was apparently a pioneer of the Hollywood lesbian subculture and a very active participant. It was she who came up with the term "ladies sewing circle", and there are apparently many rewarding chapters of her activities in this area for those who study such things.

Many stars, writers and producers, stayed at The Garden of Allah if they were working in Hollywood temporarily.  

Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Dorothy Parker.  Not to mention Ernest Hemingway, Robert Benchley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Kaufman, Charles Laughton, Frank Sinatra, Tallulah Bankhead, John Barrymore, Marlene Dietrich, Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, Errol Flynn, the Marx Brothers, Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers.   Dorothy Parker was staying at the Garden of Allah when her husband died. When a neighbor asked if she needed something, she famously said "Another husband".

The Garden of Allah had a main building with lobby, a restaurant, the bungalows, presumably some rooms in the main building and of course a swimming pool and some palm trees. It was torn down to build the most stupid of boring boxes that we put banks into here in Los Angeles. You can see this atrocity even today.

So let us be clear. The Garden of Allah was a distinguished and important landmark of early Hollywood. To tear it down would make as much sense as tearing down the Chelsea Hotel in NYC. Those who did so should be held accountable, even if they are dead.  There are lots of ways of punishing the wicked after they are dead and we will write a separate essay on how to do so.

Los Angeles, if it wishes to be held in any respect by the rest of the world, needs to start paying attention to these landmarks and not destroy them. They must stop their cultural vandalism in desperate search of a fast buck, but they never will. This is who they are, this is who they want to be.

Shallow criminals who do not give a fuck.

Today, if you wish to see the Garden of Allah, you must go to Universal Studios Florida where they built a replica in their park. It stands unused, mysterious, alone, in Orlando.

Maybe Alla walks the abandoned halls at night.

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A write up of Gardens of Allah

http://hollywoodlostandfound.net/locations/gardenofallah.html

A description of the Garden of Allah at Universal Studios Florida

http://awolairwaves.com/2012/07/03/the-garden-of-allah-villas/

The Youtube (unofficial) tour of the Garden of Allah at Universal Studios Florida

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb9HmODtzh8

Reviews of Alla Nazimova

http://looking-for-mabel.webs.com/nazimova.htm

Someone's partial list of lost Hollywood

http://www.hollywoodusa.co.uk/losthollywood.htm

SIGGRAPH 2013: Rejection is So Annoying

I really hate being rejected. I hate it just about as much as anything. Dont they realize my genius? Dont they know who I am (or at least, who I used to be)?

The latest rejections of course are from SIGGRAPH.

Almost a year ago, I write an essay about some things that I think SIGGRAPH needed to address, or at least think about. I send it to as many people I know who I think might be interested, including, indirectly through friends, to the Executive Committee.

You can read it here:

http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2012/08/siggraph-2012-issues-for-discussion.html

Terrence Massan was very positive about it, and forwarded it to the right people. But very little response back. I heard two comments. The first was "Who is this guy?" How soon they forget. The second was a response from someone who suggested that I volunteer. Well, I try and try to volunteer but nothing ever seems to work.

You see, I can't even give it away.

I must be so worthless, so uninteresting, that they can not think of a single useful thing to do with me, although I volunteered at least a half dozen possible ideas to see if they were interested in any of them, and they were not.

And yet I know that my SIGGRAPH "Topics for Discussion" essay is the most popular thing on my blog. It gets hits everyday, lots of them. So someone must be reading it, perhaps.

So many of the problems I identified before are still there, from my point of view, or worse, and I think that there is much more that they can do.

Now maybe I will discover that in fact, they have had endless discussions on these topics, but I am just not in the loop, nor do they want me in the loop, and I will just discover how much progress they have made at SIGGRAPH. Sometimes, still waters run deep.

But because to me they just look like "still water", I will write another memo, suggesting more clearly what I think they should do about some of the issues I brought up. My thinking has evolved as has the situation. I will also write up why I think it is SIGGRAPHs responsibility to do some of these things, at least arguably.

Also, I think I need to run for the SIGGRAPH Executive Committee and get that out of my system. I wont have any trouble writing up a position statement, that at least is comforting.

Lots of Data

One difference between now and then, between the world before the WWW and now, is access to data. It used to be that there were not that many data sets that were online and available. Just collecting the data, or inputing the data was a task of monumental scale. But today, we have detailed maps of the United States down to the most amazing level of detail readily available. A variety of people must have worked on that project for years and years, and there must be hundreds, if not thousands, of people working to maintain accuracy of that data as it changes with time. But we do not see that and, somehow, we do not seem to have to pay for it. Someone does, but not us.

It used to be that certain groups would maintain their datasets and you could get a copy by sending them a tape. Astronomy catalogs are a famous example. We all used the YBSC (Yale Bright Star Catalog) because that is what was readily available. Now there are many catalogs available, easily, on the Internet. Of course, that does not mean it is all that easy to interpret that data, but that is a different (if related) problem.

By accident, while my life is collapsing around my head, and the future looks as dark as it ever has, I was wasting time as I usually do and came across a remarkably useful collection of datasets. It seems to be associated with the Introduction to Computer Science course at Princeton University.

You can find that dataset in its original form here. 

War and Peace, what we normally call "the Bible", the works of Dickens, the Official Scrabble Dictionary, a few human chromosomes, the ranked list of last names in America, all the locations of Wendy's burgers in the world, and so forth. The Communist Manifesto. Its all here.

The table of contents, in image form, is:

Now you will never need data again.

I plan to download all these and make a giant tar available on the internet of all of them.  Why? Because I believe that everything that exists on the WWW will go away, one day, whether we know it or not.

Photograph of Lance Williams

A photograph of Lance Williams and son, probably taken at his birthday party perhaps six or seven years ago.   Among other things, Lance invented MIP mapping, is a recipient of the SIGGRAPH Coons award, an alumni of NYIT, a recipient of an Academy Scitech Award, and a pioneer of computer animation.