Fog of war

It's easy to be confused during traumatic events.

During the shooting at the Naval Yard, there were conflicting reports as to whether there was one, two, or even three shooters. Even after killing the shooter an hour after the rampage that began at 8:30 am, authorities weren't sure if there was a second shooter. Consequently, people who were in hiding did not leave until almost midnight.

Yesterday, media reports and eyewitness testimony of shootout at the US Capitol seem to conflict that it leaves some doubt as to what really happened.

Here is one report:

The driver of the black Infiniti had a toddler with her, confounding everyone who watched the car crash through barriers and lead police through the heart of high-security Washington.

Here is another:

“Whoa! Whoa!,” Secret Service officers were shouting at the car, according to a witness, Shawn Joseph, 29. “It looked liked [the driver was] scared or lost. I thought they might have been a tourist.”

But then, witnesses said, officers tried to place a barrier in front of the car. The driver swerved. The officers moved the barrier. She hit it, and a Secret Service officer was thrown up on the hood and then off the car.

In one the driver crashed through it, in another she merely hit it. Of course I described this as a shootout in the preceding paragraph which of course it wasn't.

This is definitely a mystery: why would a seemingly normal person behave the way they did? Did the authorities overreact by shooting here? At least one was close enough to see that it was a woman and possibly with a child in the car. Could it no have been interpreted as a hostage situation? It's hard to know in the fog of war.

Shutdown Puzzle #1

From the Washington Post:

What Washington area commuters hoped would be a silver lining of a federal government shutdown — a less-frenzied rush hour — didn’t materialize for many Wednesday, leaving some to ask: If hundreds of thousands of federal workers stayed home, why was my commute still so bad?

In fact it seems to be worse?

It was the volume that shocked me,” said Jean Stoner, who had expected a breeze of a drive between her Arlington County home and her office at the Health Information Services division of 3M, in Bethesda. Eastbound Route 50 and roads through Rosslyn were “incredibly slow and congested,” she said.

“I was yelling at the other cars, ‘Aren’t you furloughed today?’ ” Stoner said with a laugh.

But ...

Some Metrorail and bus riders, on the other hand, found nearly empty buses and vacant seats on trains that are usually standing-room only. About 56,000 fewer people than usual — enough to fill 60 trains — rode Metro between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m., Metro said. That amounted to a 20 percent drop in ridership from the previous Wednesday morning.

One rider tweeted a photo of an empty Metrorail car with the headline “Furlough train.” Another wrote: “Ghost train/ snow day feel to the Metro this morning.”

The answer?

The short answer: Federal workers telecommute, carpool and take transit in disproportionate numbers, local commuting experts said. That means they don’t take up as much room on the road as their numbers might indicate.

Moreover, experts say, the Washington area’s traffic volumes are so crushing that even taking thousands of people out of the equation leaves enough traffic that everyday occurrences — fender benders, debris in the road — still create quick backups that can take hours to dissipate.

Meanwhile, some carpools partially made up of federal workers likely have broken up, leaving the remaining people to drive in individual vehicles, experts say.

Another leading theory: Some people who prefer to drive but usually don’t jumped at the notion of open roads.

“Some people who didn’t drive before may be thinking, ‘Ooh! I can drive now!’ ” said Ronald Kirby, transportation planning director for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.

Here's a new one

The title of the article from The Guardian was:

How the last US government shutdown almost cost Clinton the presidency

...

During the 1995 shutdown, unpaid interns had taken on tasks normally performed by staff who'd had to be sent home. One of those interns brought the president pizza and the two got chatting. Her name? Monica Lewinsky.

Or in statistical terms: How the government shutdown caused Clinton to have an affair with Monica Lewinsky.At least this article was more tongue-in-cheek:

Government shutdown winters tend to be cold and snowy in D.C.

Let’s at least momentarily assume that hot air is cast away from the city in a shutdown, causing a ripple effect that ultimately impacts winter.

Example? The last time the federal government shut down in 1995-96, 46 inches of snow paralyzed D.C.! It was one of the snowiest winters on record.

 

Growing old

A post discussing Niall Ferguson became one that also discussed Chomsky and among other things how scholars behave as they get older. Do they get less smart? Do they take more risks in terms of what they say?

In general (not just scholars) there are at least two stereotypes that persist in my mind:

1. We become wiser, gentler and more patient.
2. We become crankier, cantankerous, rude and impatient.

I find myself falling into the second bucket these days.

The unberable stupidity of bureaucrats

Reading this made me incensed (emphasis mine):

The Board of Supervisors also asked the board to review the library’s policy for discarding books, “to ensure that every usable book is either resold or redistributed,” which also drew applause when Jasper read it. The issue arose because volunteer Friends of the Library, and Supervisor Linda Smyth (D-Providence), had photographed Dumpsters full of seemingly reusable books for months behind the library’s technical operations center in Chantilly, while the Friends were pleading for books. The library suspended the sharing of books with Friends groups beginning last October when it shifted to a “floating collection” system, and has only supplied 3,000 books to the Friends since May, while discarding 20,000 per month. After Smyth removed a pile of usable books from the Dumpster on Aug. 29, the county ordered an immediate stop to the discarding. About 250,000 books have been thrown out since October, officials said.

Is it in a bureaucrats nature to be not have any common sense?

The low productivity of investment bankers

Megan McArdle confirms what I always suspected:

The investment banking associates I observed seemed to spend most of their time on basically clerical tasks, tabulating data and proofreading PowerPoints.

NSA bleh

For lack of a proper blog title.

Details of the NSA surveillance project in the Guardian on XKeyscore and installation of back doors on encryption software left me breathless. Part of me was impressed - especially with XKeyscore. The first thought was "Is this is the same government whose computer upgrades at the FBI and IRS years ago was plagued by cost overruns and failure?" (For instance, see this and this.) The next thought was: "Hey I want to be in on that!"

The next series of articles that I read left me uncertain.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

• Laura Poitras
• David Miranda 
• Destruction of hard drives at the Guardian
• Blog takedown at Johns Hopkins
• Loveint

are all signs of an (over?) zealous government working to protect its "territory" rather than the spirit of the program which is to save lives.

The installation of back doors to encryption technology reminded me that in  "Person of Interest". Here's the Wiki on the character Nathan Ingram:

Ingram came to realize that the people who were to receive the Machine were not entirely trustworthy. During a meeting with Alicia Corwin, he accidentally let slip that eight people knew about the Machine rather than seven. Later, he tried to convince Finch to make a back door into the machine, only for Finch to refuse. Just prior to shipping the Machine, Ingram used his administrative access to install a new function named "contingency". After creating the back door, the Machine was relocated to its new home. ("No Good Deed")
 
After the Machine is shipped out on a freight train, Ingram meets with Finch in their now empty laboratory. Finch tells him that he has been thinking about Ingram's desire to help people, and proposes they use their wealth to invest in new projects, such as clean water initiatives and sustainable farming. Ingram retorts that they built the "single most powerful technology known to man, a machine that knows when someone needs help, and you just gave it away." He tells him that they had their chance to help people and they missed it. Finch replies that "we built it, and it saves lives." Ingram argues that it doesn't save enough lives, and Finch responds that the machine is gone. Ingram implies he built a back door into it, which angers Finch as they had agreed not to. He tells Ingram that they agreed not to play God, but Ingram reveals that he isn't proud of that agreement. Finch argues that they did what they set out to do, and that "either we move onto the next thing together, or we don't." ("One Percent")

(Emphasis added)