New England gets a taste of what the Southeast deals with every year.

Three New England governors declared states of emergency as torrential rains flooded parts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine yesterday, washing out roads, flooding basements, and forcing emergency evacuations.

In Massachusetts, members of the National Guard and Red Cross and emergency workers from 20 state and local agencies worked to evacuate people in Peabody and Melrose after sewage backed up into apartment buildings. Five feet of water sloshed over downtown Peabody yesterday afternoon, rendering useless the sandbags laid out on Saturday. In Melrose, local officials requested boats in case they needed them to help rescue stranded residents, emergency officials said.

With river levels rising throughout the region, and rain expected to continue, emergency management officials predicted more flooding over the next several days, especially in Middlesex and Essex counties, the areas already hardest hit.

"This is going to get worse before it gets better," said Peter Judge, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency. "We're having a hard time anticipating how extensive the damage will be."

"It's a very serious situation," said New Hampshire governor John Lynch, adding that forecasters were predicting 12 to 15 inches of rain by the end of the storm in parts of southern New Hampshire.

A deluge of woes for region

As illustrated by Negroponte's remarks last week, administration officials have been punctilious in discussing the NSA program over the past five months, parsing their words with care and limiting comments to the portion of the program that had been confirmed by the president in December.

In doing so, the administration rarely offered any hint that a much broader operation, involving millions of domestic calls, was underway. Even yesterday -- after days of congressional furor and extensive media reports -- administration officials declined to confirm or deny the existence of the telephone-call program, in part because of court challenges that the government is attempting to derail.

I continue to be surprised that no one else has recommended Black Arts, by Thomas Powers, more than a year after its publication and appearance on MemeStreams. For this reason, I will reiterate his closing statement for you:

About the failure everyone now agrees. But what was the problem? And what should be done to make us safe?

It wasn't respect for the Constitution that kept the NSA from reading the "Tomorrow is zero hour" message until the day after the disaster. It was lack of translators. To meet that kind of problem, the Comint professionals have a default solution: more. Not just more Arab linguists but more of everything -- more analysts, more polygraph examiners and security guards, more freedom to listen in on more people, more listening posts, more coverage, more secrecy.

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

Don't say you were surprised by the USA Today story last week.

You might also recall this thread from February, in which Russell Tice testified before Congress about the broader program. Again, no one recommended that article.

Negroponte Had Denied Domestic Call Monitoring

If you liked City of God, check this out.

Premiering this month on Sundance Channel is the hit Brazilian television series CITY OF MEN. A comedy/drama about two teenage boys growing up in a dangerous Rio De Janeiro slum, CITY OF MEN was created by the team behind the Academy Award-nominated feature CITY OF GOD, including that film's directors Fernando Meirelles (THE CONSTANT GARDNER) and Kátia Lund. The series stars Darlan Cunha and Douglas Silva, who were also featured in CITY OF GOD. The first season airs starting in April, but watch for seasons two and three to follow shortly thereafter.

Set in the present day, the series mixes comedy and drama as it follows the struggles, schemes, and dreams of Acerelo (Douglas Silva) and Laranjinha (Darlan Cunha), thirteen year-old best friends trying to lead normal lives in an impoverished favela. In many respects, Acerelo and Laranjinha are ordinary teenagers, interested in videogames, the latest sneakers, and girls. But they live in a place where violence is an everyday occurrence and outsiders rightly fear to tread; a neighborhood where drug barons impose their own kind of moral code and serve as community authorities, hearing complaints, providing aid, and imposing punishment.

It is only now coming to the US, but it aired on BBC 4 in 2004. There are some exclusive interviews at the BBC site that may be of interest.

City of Men | Sundance Channel

If you haven't seen City of God, it is definitely worth your time.

Two boys growing up in a violent neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro take different paths: one becomes a photographer, the other a drug dealer.

Jello wrote:

Really good movie about a favela-ish neighborhood in Rio, and the drug trade as an industry there, the culture of youth violence, and a big ass gang war in a hood that has no police.

You'll note this film is presently #17 on the IMDB top 250. This puts it ahead of such classics as Dr. Strangelove, Citizen Kane, North by Northwest, Once Upon a Time in the West, Lawrence of Arabia, Vertigo, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Chinatown, and much more. In fact, everything except for, well, 16 films, and of those, only two were released in the last ten years.

Roger Ebert says:

The film has been compared with Scorsese's "GoodFellas," and it deserves the comparison.

Stephen Holden of NYT says:

"City of God" conveys the authenticity of a cinéma vérité scrapbook. Cesar Charlone's restless cinematography is a flashy potpourri of effects that include slow and accelerated motion, the use of split screens and a dramatically varied expressionistic palette.

Cidade de Deus (2002)

"Getting on Oprah is like winning the lottery," said Marianne Diorio, senior vice president of global communications for Estee Lauder. "Because her audience really trusts her, if Oprah or her producers sincerely fall in love with some product or person, the results can be spectacular," Ms. Diorio said.

The Oprah Treatment

The grace of wildness changes somehow when it becomes familiar.

When I say the grace of wildness, what I mean is its autonomy, its self-possession, the fact that it has nothing to do with us. The grace is in the separation, the distance, the sense of a self-sustaining way of life. That vixen may rely on us for a duck or a chicken now and then, and to keep the woodland from closing in. How she chose to den so close to us is beyond me. The answer is probably as simple as an available hole. But our only choice is to leave her alone, to give her enough room to raise the next generation.

The next generation

If you liked the video of Fedex arrivals during thunderstorms, you might be interested in some of the following.

RAPT Automation Tool

The New York Port Authority, through a cooperative research and development agreement, has sponsored the development of a decision support tool to assist air traffic controllers with the management of traffic in the busy New York terminal airspace during convective weather events. The Route Availability Planning Tool (RAPT) uses the convective weather forecast of the Corridor Integrated Weather System and modeled aircraft trajectories to determine when specific departure routes will be blocked by severe weather. During its first year of operation, the prototype RAPT has permitted substantial delay reduction in the New York area.

Weather Forecasting Accuracy for FAA Traffic Flow Management: A Workshop Report

The characteristics of these tools suggest how operational users might utilize highly accurate 2- to 6-hour convective forecasts when they are developed. A departure route availability planning tool (RAPT) that uses the 0- to 60-minute Terminal Convective Weather Forecasts commenced operational evaluation at the New York terminal area and surrounding en-route facilities in August 2002. RAPT examines four-dimensional intersections of planes with forecasted storm locations to determine appropriate departure times from a runway. The RAPT software will utilize the 0- to 2-hour Regional Convective Weather Forecasts at a number of air traffic control facilities in 2003. Direct use of convective forecasts to assist air traffic users in making decisions about traffic routing, such as illustrated by RAPT, has significant implications for the presentation of convective weather forecasts and validation. First, the uncertainty of convective forecasts needs to be expressed in a way that allows tools such as RAPT to provide guidance to operational users as to the likelihood of a route being available for use as a function of time. And second, convective forecast accuracy needs to be verified in the context of operational value to the user, particularly by explicitly addressing the accuracy for route usage decisions. Key Points Identified by Presenters on Ways to Present Forecasts Two- to 6-hour convective weather forecast products should be designed to facilitate air traffic control and airline decisions such as predicted capacity, route availability, and the fuel to be loaded on aircraft. Because accurate deterministic 2- to 6-hour forecasts are not available, it is necessary to develop probabilistic forecasts that can readily be used by both humans and automated air traffic management decision support tools. The FAA will need to also have a robust “tactical” convective we... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Le Monde was nice enough to transcribe the faxed, typewritten letter, making it considerably easier to read.

Despite its clunkiness due to the language barrier, this letter is a fascinating artifact. I enjoyed this tidbit:

Mr President, it is not my intention to distress anyone.

I must question NYT's assertion that "the letter did not address directly the central issue that divides the two countries: Iran's nuclear ambitions." His position is straightforward, if unconvincing and logically flawed. He writes:

You are familiar with history. Aside from the Middle Ages, in what other point in history has scientific and technical progress been a crime? Can the possibility of scientific achievements being utilised for military purposes be reason enough to oppose science and technology altogether? If such a supposition is true, then all scientific disciplines, including physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, engineering, etc. must be opposed.

Essentially, he is pointing toward the Bill Joy argument, although he gets rather carried away when he writes that "all disciplines must be opposed." And while this is superficially "addressing" the topic, it is really more at misdirection than resolution. I don't think he's going to have much luck getting the UNSC to argue about GM vegetables in lieu of uranium enrichment.

The NYT article did offer this amusing pull-quote from the CFR pundit of the day, in regard to the "values" questions Ahmadinejad raises:

"He might actually inadvertently have a point."

Letter from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to George W. Bush | Le Monde

You could tell that the people who worked on the first generation of social networking services were not members of the IM generation.

We were thinking, if we could be topical to whatever is going on right now that's cool, and show people behind-the-scenes content, it would be a great way to illustrate the idea and get mindshare. It's been amazingly successful. The thing we've noticed is people are incredibly impressed with what you can do with imeem. They aren't jaded like everyone in Silicon Valley. When they see what you can do with it, they say "Wow, this is way better than MySpace." That is their frame of reference.

Our tools are very powerful. It's almost like they're too powerful. If you give people this huge beautiful blank canvas, where do they start?

In social networking, there are the Yahoos and the MySpaces, and then there is a huge pack of companies that no one has heard of. I think we're officially in the middle now. It's been fun being in tiny startup mode, but I think we're graduating to real-business mode.

imeem: IM-Based Social Networking

The routine wasn't very funny, not because it came so close to the truth but because, like so much of "SNL" lately, it just wasn't funny.

It's funny because it's true. Not to be confused with Colbert's Press dinner speech, which wasn't funny because it was true.

Comedy is complicated, but that's a nice dress. And the new movie looks interesting. I read about it yesterday in FLM.

Portrait of the Party Girl as a Young Artist