the earth: January 2008 Archives

from The Spymaster, a report on the US Intelligence Community by Lawrence Wright for The New Yorker (January 14, 2008).

Ed Giorgio, a security consultant who worked at the N.S.A. under [current Director of Intellgence Mike] McConnell, and who is the only person to have been the nation's chief code breaker and its chief code maker, said, "Early on, Mike had what many directors of the N.S.A. have near the end of their tenure -- that is, an info-sec epiphany.

Giorgio warned me [reporter at large Lawrence Wright], "We have a saying in this business:

'Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.' "

I [Wright] asked McConnell if he believed that Al Qaeda was really the greatest threat America faces.

"No, no, no, not at all," he said. "Terrorism can kill a lot of people, but it can't fundamentally challenge the ability of the nation to exist. Fascism could have done that. Communism could have. I think our issue going forward is more engagement with the world in terms of keeping it on a reasonable path, so another ism doesn't come along and drive it to one extreme or another. And we have to have some balance in terms of equitable distribution of wealth, containment of contagious disease, access to energy supplies, and development of free markets. There are national-security ramifications to global warming."

"In the afternoon, everyone on the expedition was at the gully, sectioning off the site and preparing for careful collection which eventually took three weeks. That first evening they celebrated at the camp, staying up all night, and at some stage during the evening the fossil AL 288-1 was nicknamed Lucy, after the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", which was being played loudly and repeatedly on a tape recorder in the camp.[8]"

"Lucy," as most of us know her, was named in two ways: a proper name - randomly assigned courtesy of The Beatles :-) - and a scientific name, situating her in relationship to other fossils in a theoretical structure. That theory has been created on the basis of a logic of relationships (time - by carbon-dating, and other paleoanthropological principles) which is largely deductive. Deduction moves "from general evidence to a particular truth or conclusion." In contrast, Mendeleev's theory of the Periodic Table of the Atomic Elements induced the presence of elements we didn't yet know existed, and even enabled the creation of man-made elements. This distinction between induction and deduction might be a way (?) of explaining the power of language as a force that creates and establishes meaning.

The title of Mendeleev's work states the relational quality of his theory up front and center: The Dependence Between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements.

"The strange new ordering of elements according to their properties and their atomic weight led to a series of conclusions. First, that certain properties occur periodically (hence the name), then that certain places in the table had to be left blank, for undiscovered elements."

According to the astronomer-architect of the modern UMass Sunwheel, Dr. Judith Young,