Recently a friend of mine, with whom I never talk about politics, asked my opinion on the Wikileaks release of 70,000 secret documents about the War in Afghanistan. Somehow I sensed he knew that I would be diametrically opposed to his viewpoint. I'm a proponent of an open Internet, with pro-piracy attitudes, spouting quotes like "information wants to be free" or "the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." But then my friend sent me a news article stating that the Taliban are hunting down informants mentioned in the leak. I initially explained this away as a bluff or taunt. And I told my friend that Julian Assange (pictured), the Swedish hacker in charge of Wikileaks, assured the public that he scrubbed the docs of anything that could endanger lives.

In order to disprove the outcry about named informants, I went ahead and read the secret documents myself. After about an hour, I couldn't find any informants, and became more confident in my initial opinion. I was going to write a blog post about how the nature of the docs makes it very unlikely or impossible to contain the names of informants, and so I continued scanning the docs to bolster my case. Another hour passed, and still I found no mention of informants.

But then, at around 2AM, my heartbeat raced when I stumbled upon the full name and location of an Afghan civilian who gave valuable information to the US. And then a few minutes later, I found another informant, and a few minutes later, a few more. I was stunned by how easy this was (I won't reveal my search strategy, for fear of aiding the enemy). And I was haunted by each revelation. Reading each name felt like I was killing the ACs (Afghan Civilians) myself.

The next day, though, I sobered up and assured myself of a few mitigating factors. The Pentagon already has a task force of 100 intelligence analysts combing through the documents and notifying any targets possibly at risk. Also, the years these informants reportedly talked are like 2007, and so there's a good chance they've left their current location. Plus, If they talked, they were probably the first people to search for their names in the documents (or word must have gotten to them quickly).

My estimation is that there are a total of 15 informants named in the documents. And these aren't the kind of informants we see in movies like The Departed who work as undercover agents for years. Rather, these informants are just random civilians who point out where a cache of enemy weapons are. In exchange, we give them some petty cash. There are tens of thousands of ACs who've given little datapoints of intel about the Taliban. And so I'm going to step out on a limb and claim that no one has (nor will) die as a direct result of the leak.

The informants issue was the only materially negative thing I could see about the documents. Beyond the release of these informants, the leak provided no other national security risk. Defense officals have said multiple times that the leak posed no immediate threat to U.S. forces, and that they are not changing any military operations as a result of the leak.

So, what exactly was accomplished by the docs? The public didn't really learn anything new, except confirm various suspicions they already had: Karzai is corrupt, Pakistan is aiding the enemy, and the whole war is a quagmire. Part of the reason we got so little out of the docs is because the American public doesn't care about the War in Afghanistan. All the national priority polls show show that less than 10% of Americans consider the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan top priorities. This parlays well into Petraeus and "no-drama" Obama's strategy of making the war boring.

But there will be one major impact of the leak: the meta-leak. This is very similar to the impact of the Pentagon Papers, which was a leak of about 7,000 documents on the Vietnam War. The Pentagon Papers came out after the serious anti-war events, like Kent State, already happened. And similarly, the papers talked about past conduct of the war, not current. What did result from the Pentagon Papers, though, was an extra clarification about freedom of speech. The New York Times, which initially reported on the Papers, won a Supreme Court case against the government. However, the victory was a mixed bag. On the one hand, the ruling stated that the government did not have a significant enough of burden of proof to justify "prior restraint," which is the preventing of the publication of unwanted information. On the other hand, the ruling re-asserted the Espionage Act which prohibits any attempt to convey information with the intent to interfere with the operation or success of the armed forces, or to promote the success of the enemy.

Likewise the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary seems to be more of a media event about the act of the leaking itself. This parallels how my debate with my friend eventually evolved. Initially he was against the leaks because they harmed our troops, and initially I was in favor of the leaks because they informed the public's interest in war. But ultimately, we cast both those points aside, and discussed whether someone has the right to make such leaks in the first place. To which, we didn't arrive at a good resolution.

Ultimately, we did agree on one thing. That in a time of growing public unease about privacy (Google watching your every move, Facebook knowing your dirty laundry, and the U.S. granting 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances), this handsome hacker from Sweden is a natural folk hero.

Bonus dad comment: You can usually trust Swedish people

Here is my research dump:

• Afghan National Army
  • Currently has 134,000 active troops.
  • Goal is to reach 260,000 active troops, costing $20B, supported by Obama.
  • History of foreign support:
    • Established in 1880s with the help of the British.
    • During WWI and WWII the Afghan army was supported by Germany.
    • From 1960s to the early 1990s, the army was trained and equipped by the Soviet Union.
    • Current support from US:
      • 4,500 Humvees
      • 104,000 M-16 assault rifles
      • 4,000 military trainers from the US and NATO
• Afghan National Police
  • About 90,000 members. Expected to reach 160,000 in coming years
  • Currently being trained by NATO (primarily U.S.)
• Afghanistan
  • Population (2009) is 28,150,000.
  • So the goal is about 1.5% of population either in ANP or ANA.
  • This is not an unusual level per other countries' active troop counts.
  • Land area is 647,500 km², or roughly the size of Texas.
  • Population is roughly the same as Texas.
• War in Afghanistan
  • Started in October 2001.
  • July 2011 is the withdrawl deadline set by Obama.
  • According to polls as of Aug. 27, 2010, the conduct of the war is a top priority for less than 10% of Americans.
• Wikileaks
  • Wikileaks has 91,732 reports from the U.S. armed forces covering the Afghanistan War from Jan. 2004 to Dec. 2009.
  • 75,000 were released as of July 25, 2010.
  • Documents were classified as "secret" which is the 2nd highest secrecy classification. Release of secret documents may cause "serious damage" to national security.
  • Informants named
    • FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) from The Times
      • If you Google "informants wikileaks," as of Aug. 24, 2010, the top links, with headlines like, "Taliban hunting down informants" or "Leaked War Files Expose Identities of Afghan Informants" refer to the same Times article. Since its behind a pay-wall, this link by the Australian will suffice.
      • Taking a deeper look at the two particular documents cited by The Times:
        • A Mar 31, 2008 report has an interview with a named Taliban fighter considering defection. His father's name and village were included. However, if you read the document closely, the person in question is not an informant.
        • Nov. 10, 2007, "a report that read '[named person] said he would be killed if he got caught interacting with any coalition forces, which is why he hides when we go into [named location].'" However if you read the document it doesn't show the person is an informant, just someone the coalition is trying to recruit.
      • A former intelligence official is quoted in the July 28, 2010 article, "It's possible that someone could get killed in the next few days." As of August 27, 2010, no one has been reported killed in connection with leak.
    • The Register reported on Aug. 12, 2010 that 100+ intelligence analysts are going through the full 91,000 documents to identify Afghan citizens who might be at risk and reach out to them.
  • Jul. 28, 2010: Major General John Campbell, head of the 101 Airborne Division and in charge of a key regional command in eastern Afghanistan, said that the leaks have not resulted in any changes in military operations.
  • July. 27, 2010: The Pentagon made a preliminary review of the documents and said they posed no immediate threat to U.S. forces.
  • The Pentagon Papers
    • An internal, top-secret, encylopedic history of US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967
    • Brought to public's attention by the New York Times in 1971
    • Vietnam War started in 1955, ended in 1975.
    • Includes 3,000 pages of historical analysis and 4,000 pages of original government documents
    • Showed that Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson misled the public about the war
    • Showed that the US deliberately expanded war by bombing Cambodia and Loas
    • It did not give secrets to the enemy
    • Nixon was generally laissez-faire toward the docs because they embarassed prior Administrations
    • The impact of the Papers had more to do with determining what latitude newspapers have in publishing such leaks.
    • I don't immediately see a mention of the Papers affecting public support for the war.

Here is the end-game for Afghanistan: make it boring. General David Petraeus wants to take the "War" out of Afghanistan. It's what he did to Iraq. We're "out" of Iraq, and yet have 50,000 troops still there. Iraq is more like an international police matter. Fighting crime is not as interesting as fighting war. More Americans die in gangland violence per month than they do in Afghanistan, but nobody cares. It's simply boring. He's trying to make the war in Afghanistan boring enough for us to forget about it. So that ultimately we can have a group of armed forces semi-permanently stationed there, just like we have all over the world. In other words, Afghanistan, like Iraq, will become another node in our international network of peacekeeping monitors, making sure regions are stable and pro-American enough.

I gathered this mostly from general Afghanistan War research and from Petraeus's interview on Meet the Press on Aug. 15, 2010. Here is an excerpt from my notes:

Petraeus's Thinking

• On objectives:
  • "I didn't come out here to, to carry out a graceful exit or something like that."
    
  • "We're here so that Afghanistan does not once again become a sanctuary for transnational extremists the way it was when al-Qaeda planned the 9/11 attacks in the Kandahar area, conducted the initial training for the attackers in training camps in Afghanistan before they moved on to Germany and then to U.S. flight schools."
    
  • More specifically, we need to improve security so that Afghans can vote in elections without fear of retribution from Taliban
    
  • Reduce the level of violence by some 90 to 95 percent, as was the case in Iraq, to below a threshold which allows commerce and business and outside investment to take place
    
  • Petraeus mentions "reintegration" but then he swaps the word out with "reconciliation."
    
  
  
• Strategy is to take the relatively peaceful and stable area of Kabul, and spread that region of peace and stability to the rest of the country.

• Why is this time different?
  • We haven't had to worry about Iraq over the last 18 months, and so we've reassessed all our "inputs."
    
  • We're doing reintegration now, whereby instead of killing the whole enemy, we're reintegrating some of them.
    
  • We're seeking a surge in Afghan national security forces (100,000 more).
    
  
  
• Re-framing July 2011 withdrawl deadline: That deadline is more like a delivery date. The armed forces have to show a certain amount of progress by that date. Withdrawl is the what we want to do then, but of course, we will re-assess the situation based on conditions.
  

When I was given my first Tarot reading, I immediately thought to myself, "this would be perfect on the iPhone." The Tarot cards fit the shape of the iPhone nearly perfectly, and creating a Tarot app would then make carrying your iPhone like you're carrying a deck of cards.

Click here to check out Tarot Pro on the App Store:

Here are some screenshots of the app:

The first thing I did was have an artist redraw all 78 classic Rider-Waite Tarot cards to fit the aspect ratio of the iPhone. I then modified my app so that cards would fit full screen, without any other tools bars or other UI cruft.

Here are screenshots of the Rider-Waite Deck in action:

The next big project was to provide users with a choice of deck art. The latest release, 1.5, is the beginning of that process, by letting users choose between the Marseilles deck and the Rider-Waite:

Here are screenshots of the Marseilles Deck:

We also added a mini-achievement system, where you have to do a few steps necessary to "unlock" the Marseilles deck. These are simple tasks, like doing some readings, and hopefully will encourage users to get to know the app a little better:

Lucid dreams, which are dreams you can control, can be repeated with enough practice. The core tenet, according to lucid dream experts, is to write down your dreams every morning. Surprisingly, we have something on the order of fifty dreams every night, and it's just that when we wake up, we don't remember any of them. In the ten or so seconds after you wake up, there's little scrubbers in your brain that just erase every memory of all those dreams. These are just some of the neat little details you learn when studying lucid dreaming techniques.

I credit Inception for getting me back into lucid dreaming. I had a lucid dream just yesterday, where I asked the characters in it, "What are you made of?" One of the characters replied, "We're just machines in your head, and you're just a machine in God's head." I then posted this on Facebook along with the word "inception" spelled like this: I N C E P T I O N. I did this to make my "deep" dream notes seem like they were written in jest. I also did this because Inception has become a meme. You invoke Inception whenever you want to call someone or something out for being stoner-deep. There's even a website with a button you can press that plays the "kick" music from Inception, which is supposed to be the sound you hear over your dream-world PA system to let you know that you're dreaming.

The concept of a "kick" may seem like a clever invention, but this is actually a legitimate reference to the lucid dreaming technique of dream triggers. There are often recurring motifs in our dreams, and to trigger lucid dreaming more often, you have to recognize those motifs, and ask yourself whether you're dreaming or not. These triggers are so important to achieving lucid dreams regularly, that some practitioners inevitably get into a state of mind where they're constantly on-call for those "kicks." For example, my trigger is blue birds, which commonly occur in my dreams. And so, whenever I see one, I'm supposed to ask myself, "Am I dreaming?" If I see one, there's a 50-50 chance that I am. One time I was riding my bike, spotted a blue bird, and asked myself if I was dreaming. I realized I was and then gleefully took off ET-style, riding up into the atmosphere. But then another time, I asked myself the same question, and was excited by the prospect of spacing out of my reality. I kind of stood up on my bike, hoping to take off again, only to be disappointed that everything was real.

Getting deep into lucid dreaming leads to some intense side effects. I have literally had sexual relations with famous actresses. Some of my dreams have been so vivid, that I remember little details, like the goose bumps on Scarlett Johansson's thighs bristling against my legs. Our brains do reality-checks on our memories to make sure that they are real, and I believe it's vivid details like these that put a little checkbox in the column that says, "this memory is real." I feel 98% certain I've slept with Scarlett Johansson. Which is close enough.

Understanding the way dreams work tells you a lot about the way consciousness works. Dennett's Consciousness Explained (which is a mind-bender of a book) emphasizes how our brains constantly fill-in-the-blanks to create coherent narratives. Consciousness is simply an awareness of the self, and awareness is a lie told to us by our minds in bits-and-pieces. For example, look at your room, and be aware of yourself thinking about the objects in the room. You do not actually have a total visual inventory of all the objects in the room at-once, but rather you have a belief that you do. And the way that belief is constructed, is that all your doubts are filled one-by-one. For example, you can tell yourself, "Well, I'm aware that there's a lamp there, and that there's speakers right here, and my headphones are lying on my table, etc." And so you think that you are actually possessing a complete snapshot in your head at this moment. The truth is, that you only become aware of that lamp, or speakers, or headphones, at the moment you do that inventory, and your brain synthesizes a complete picture of all the objects at once, when really, you are only aware of one thing at a time.

We think that we see the world in high-def with a lot of pixels in our images (and our eyes do actually receive all that light input), but our brain processes that input like a flashlight. So when the flashlight is shining, on, let's say, only the upper-left-hand corner, how come we don't freak out and say, "What happened to my eyes, I can only see a small spot in the upper-left-hand corner!"? It's because at the precise moment we contemplate whether we see the bottom-right-hand corner, our flashlight moves right to that spot. And when I ask what else I see, the flashlight moves right to it. And after a few of those, I extrapolate and think, "Hmm, I think I see the whole picture at once."

We often don't realize we're dreaming (despite seeing things that contradict reality), because for every doubting thought, our brain swoops right-in and fills-in-the-blanks. If I see someone who has been long dead appear in my dream, I'll naturally wonder, "Wait, I thought he was dead?" But then my brain will invent a memory of having seen him the day before. If I doubt that too, there will be another series of memories that will fill in all the logic holes. And because there's a certain myopia in dreaming, you stop questioning and just accept. When I was having sex with Scarlett Johansson, the flashlight of my mind was asking my brain to invent details to make it real. My brain invented her goose bumps to make the events convincing.

It's like when you're dreaming, the best story-teller in the world comes out of the woodwork. A poorly written story doesn't feel real because the details aren't convincing or certain plot points don't add up. In dream narratives, if you have a question on any plot point, your brain will immediately fill in the hole. And if that contradicts something else, it'll fill another hole. And you won't see those holes being filled, but rather your memory of having recognized the contradiction will be replaced with acceptance.

This story-teller probably only comes out in dreams because it doesn't have external stimulus to deal with. If I'm awake, and have the image of a dead person in front of me, it would immediately be replaced by visual input from the world of no one standing there. In the dream world, with no new data to compete with, your dream-teller can take you on incredible journeys. I imagine that great fiction writers are almost tapping into that same instinct. They simply posit some strange premise, and keep just filling in the blanks and holes as they go along to shape a convincing suspension of disbelief.

If art imitates life, does the popularity of films like The Matrix and Inception indicate that we are all collectively losing a sense of reality? Physicist and sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke once said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." In a way, surfing cyberspace does feel like you have superpowers, as you teleport from virtual reality to virtual reality. The Onion had a great article recently, "Man Lives In Futuristic Sci-Fi World Where All His Interactions Take Place In Cyberspace." Does the strangeness of this cyber-reality make us question fundamental tenets of human existence?

When I asked the characters in my dream what they were, I was actually trying to grope at the ethics of the dream world. In my dreams, is it unethical for me to kill whoever I encounter? The answer is no, because they are not real. But assume for a second that you don't know whether they're real or not (which is often the uncertainty you live under in dreams), then under that cloud of ignorance, it isn't okay to commit murder in dreams. I spend most of my dream time unaware that I'm dreaming, and so I try to lead an ethical life. I obey the Ten Commandments and am generally polite to the monsters and angels I meet. I see all sorts of villainous idiots flopping around, and I don't stab or shoot them because I haven't realized yet that they're not real. But when I do recognize I'm dreaming, I become a total nihilist and sociopath. Which is really fun.

That is the scary implication of movies like Inception. If you get people to believe that nothing around them is real, then why not jump whole-hog into nihilism? I wonder if lucid dreaming will reach a moral-panic stage, with newspaper headlines like, "Kansas authorities warn that kids are getting high off 'lucid dreaming.'" The article would talk about listless teenagers who sleep all the time so that they can get high off actuating their ultimate fantasies. The teenagers get so into it that they disregard the real world, doubting whether the adults in their house are their real parents, and disobeying all authority and rules. This epidemic was kicked off by the film Inception, which fetishized criminals who stole secrets in dreams. Writer/director Christopher Nolan claims that he was simply trying to reflect the beauty of dreams, but didn't know his film would be a danger to society. And of course Sarah Palin and the Tea Party would come out and decry lucid dreaming, urging lawmakers to ban it.

Either way, I'm really glad Inception put lucid dreaming back on the map. According to Google Trends, you can see that searches for the term "lucid dreaming" skyrocketed after Inception hit theaters. Maybe if people got more into lucid dreaming, we'd realize just how much we go to crazy lengths for cheap thrills, when really the wildest stories and adventures are available to us, for free, everyday in our sleep.

Photo credit: Gavin Todes

Apple just approved my latest creation, Nebulous Notes, which does one thing, and one thing really well: edit text files in the cloud. If you're like me, you are constantly editing text files, and based on my survey of all the available tools out there, Dropbox is the smartest way to backup your files and access them anywhere.

Nebulous Notes lets you edit your text files that are stored on your Dropbox. Here are some screenshots, see for yourself:

Reviews have already started to trickle in! Here's what AppAdvice.com had to say: "This is quite possibly the best tool for any writer, blogger, or journalist that needs to get work done on-the-go, and also live by Dropbox, which is one of the easiest ways to manage files in the cloud."

Click here to learn more about Nebulous Notes

If you're a developer, I've also open-sourced the file management interface, which shouldn't take no more than an hour to integrate into your iOS apps. For example, if you have an app that lets you record memos or organize photos, rather than forcing users to FTP their files off their iPhone, or have to email the files to themselves, or sync to their iTunes, you can just let them save to their Dropbox accounts. To find out more, check out Nebulous Controller.

What happens when you play the perfect cover along with the original?

Earlier I wrote about how emulation is an artform, in regards to the Fab Faux's inspiring cover of The Beatles' Abbey Road (side two). I was revisiting that video, when I tried playing Abbey Road along side it, just for kicks. The whole process seemed bizarre, and so I recorded it for your pleasure. Here is obsession²:

We cling onto this idea that knights were heroes and role models. But what if, at that time, they carried the same connotation as gangsters and drug lords today? I got this idea while reading this New Yorker article about Mexican drug lords and how in the absence of government, drug lords in Mexico were regarded with deep respect in some regions. Members of their communities perceived the gangsters as being gentlemen and adhering to a strict code. This is then juxtaposed with stories of dismembered limbs wrapped in newspapers strewn across the sidewalk. What if knights were just dapper thugs? What if "killing for the glory of their King" was the same as "gettin' respect" or "enforcing one's rep'." What if they were generally minorities (dark-skinned folks from Spain), and what if they spoke with what, at the time, were considered vulgar dialects (now our English).

I just created a website, RealOrFake3D.com to keep track of which 3D films coming out were originally shot in 2D, and then converted in post-production to 3D. The film studios are trying to trick you into paying extra fees for 3D, but don't get ripped off!

I play a lot of video games, and one of my favorite mechanics is achievements. Achievements provide little goal posts for gamers to focus in on, and help structure gameplay in a way that maximizes flow. Team Fortress 2, which has a particularly well-designed achievement system, has goals like "Be Efficient: Get 3 kills with the Sniper rifle without missing a shot." So instead of randomly playing the game for an hour, these goals give you something to organize your energy around. And by doing so, you become a better gamer.

When you finish an achievement, the game will award you a nice badge:

This adds a "collection game" on top of the game you're playing. Your goal is now to collect all the badges in a set. And usually, if you get enough badges, you are rewarded with unlocked weapons or special powers.

Achievement systems are highly addictive. You could say that World of Warcraft is simply a variation on the achievement system, and is the primary reason gamers are hooked on it.

But can achievements be applied to other domains? Could they be applied to movie-watching? I experimented with this by creating spreadsheets (that I share with friends), where we track different collections of movies we want to watch. For example, I have a spreadsheet tracking every Woody Allen film, and I have another spreadsheet tracking which of the 500 films in the National Film Registry (up to 2009) that I've watched. By doing this, I watch more movies, and better quality ones, and because of the social aspect, it feels like I'm working toward something with a group.

And then I thought, "This should be automated somehow." At first I thought of programming a facebook app or an iPhone app, and then it hit me, that the perfect place for this would be Netflix.

And so below, I present my mock-up for achievements in Netflix:

I'm not sure Netflix would implement such a system. In March of 2010, Netflix announced the discontinuation of the Friends feature after finding out less than 2% of their customers used it. Also, a lot of movie-watchers dislike games, and so they may not be as susceptible game mechanics.

On the other hand, film aficionados do have a packrat mentality, and I'm sure that many of them, before they became Netflix users, had stacks of DVDs or Videocassettes that they prided over. Actually, all of my friends who use Netflix regularly still have DVD collections.

Perhaps the reason Friend features are less used on Netflix is that when you log in, you enter a walled garden that is personal space. So perhaps achievements would make more sense for free and open services like Hulu.

UPDATE: Half of the fun of creating these UI mock-ups is to see people come out of the woodwork with services they love that do similar things. I just spent 30 minutes on iCheckMovies importing my movies. They also have a list feature which includes the National Film Registry. (via Hacker News)

I just watched an inspiring 18 minutes of Beatles covers by the Fab Faux. I don't know enough Beatles covers, but for me, this is also the "Best Beatles cover I've heard:"

As beautiful as this video is, someone commented:

This is not what classical orchestras do, conductors/orchestras interpret. This is pretty impressive craft. Not much art.

I disagree. I think it's just a different kind of art. You'd know it if you loved karaoke, and believed that karaoke is an art, like I do. Emulation is about trying to reach a goal post that gets further away the closer you get. I've tried to do Beatles covers before, and the pleasure is in the tension and release between two thoughts, "I really nailed that one little nuance of the original!" to "Hmm, but I'm still missing this one component." For example, in the beginning when Frank Agnello does Paul McCartney's part of You Never Give Me Your Money, you notice that as his voice bounces around his cheeks, it comes out slightly more muffled than McCartney's original. But that's fine. Hell, that's the point. After watching this cover, I now have a heightened awareness of the details of the original. Actually, let's stop calling them "covers." These are studies in masterpieces. And you come away with a finer appreciation of those masterpieces when the emulation is done well.

The instinct to interpret and to emulate are distinct. For example, when I tried to learn Japanese, I obsessively went through books and tapes about Japanese accents, so I could get it just right, and convincingly sound like I naturally learned the language. Alternatively, I could have tried to interpret Japanese, and create my own pidgin or Japinglish. Both approaches fulfill important human inclinations. And art is about distilling these natural human inclinations into something appreciated for its own sake.

(Link to Fab Faux via waxy)