Anyone want to place a Long Bet on when the DoD will establish a Nano Command?

When the Air Force formed Air Force Space Command in 1982, it marked formal recognition that space was a distinct operating arena. The first commander, Gen. James V. Hartinger, said, “Space is a place. ... It is a theater of operations, and it was just a matter of time until we treated it as such.”

Meanwhile, around that same time, sci-fi author William Gibson published a novel entitled Neuromancer, a work that gave the world a strange new term—“cyberspace.” The book didn’t call cyberspace “a place” but a “consensual hallucination” of billions of humans. Few military men gave it much thought.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, though, it’s deja vu all over again. The Air Force has come to recognize cyberspace, like “regular” space, as an arena of human activity—including armed activity. It is, to reprise Hartinger, a theater of operations.

Cyber Command has in place systems and capabilities for integrating cyber operations into other Air Force global strike options. All that is lacking, according to one top official, are the “organizational and operational constructs” to integrate cyber ops with those of air and space operations.

John Arquilla worries about a “wildcard” threat: “individual hackers of very great skill.”

Wynne said the American “information mosaic”—the sum of data from all sensors that can be “collected and downloaded and cross-loaded for use by all in the fight”—is the key target of Air Force adversaries and a key cyber vulnerability.

...

At least one Russian official has said that a cyber-attack on Russia’s critical transportation or power infrastructure would warrant a nuclear response.

Yes, you read that correctly. See Deterring Information Warfare: A New Strategic Challenge for more background on the subject.

War in the Third Domain

Many of the concepts on the drawing board suffer from fundamental flaws that become readily apparent once one looks beyond the technology to how such weapons would actually be used.

So the military ought not to focus on stun guns, rail guns or other exotica. Instead, the crucial choice should be whether to impose a temporary moratorium on development of such weapons and instead shift our focus to identifying better tactics and more efficient organizational structures.

The silver bullet is MemeStreams.

Billions for guns, and one won't kill

“Listening to Noam Chomsky,” said a psychologist in her 50s, “always turns me on.”

This psychologist is by no means alone. A few months ago, in the Harvard Coop, a 20-something customer explained to her friends as they all walked past the cash registers, "I have such a crush on Noam Chomsky!"

A plethora of new findings, however, suggest that the experience of desire may be less a forerunner to sex than an afterthought, the cognitive overlay that the brain gives to the sensation of already having been aroused by some sort of physical or subliminal stimulus ...

Seeking the Keys ...

In follow-up to the recent batch of Southern sayings posts. [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]

A weary old hound dog (ping!), hindquarters practically drooping from the exertion of poor Southern life, slouches down a dirt road (ping!). Close by, the door opens to a tiny shack (ping!), and an aging black man, stock-thin and slightly stooped (ping!), steps off his porch with grave solemnity, favoring the cumbersome table-leg prosthesis that is his plight. Sweet Jesus, we haven’t been watching Born for Hard Luck but a minute, and already the damn thing has our heads ringing with its steady toll of bathetic po’-folk clichés.

See also the first such article, from 2002, 13 Essential Southern Documentaries.

13 Essential Southern Documentaries

Vanity Fair is the latest magazine to publish images from the Worldmapper project.

Complex data—on fuel, plants, or recycling—can tell a simple story. With maps from a joint project between the Universities of Michigan and Sheffield (U.K.), a famed Harvard biologist lays bare the environmental bottom line.

Wilson offers a few tidbits of scientific trivia, such as:

If the bodies of all 6.5 billion human beings alive on earth today were log-stacked, they would fill less than a cubic mile.

Problems Without Borders, by E.O. Wilson

"There are a lot of names you can remember from the last 50 years or so in history, but few individuals have had more impact on American security and technology prowess than Ramo. He's really one of the giants."

Ramo asked the architect to lay out the buildings to offer every engineer a window with views of gardens and sculptures so they could "think up big things." Spacecraft manufacturing or laboratory work would take place in the center of the buildings, with offices facing out.

Do you see gardens and sculptures outside your office?

That vision stood in stark contrast to the rest of the aerospace industry, which typically seated engineers side by side at drafting tables in cavernous, windowless hangars.

"I wanted it to be like a campus because that's where all the best minds were," Ramo said as he toured the facility recently. "I wanted them to look forward to coming to work."

...

Operating in secrecy, Ramo and Wooldridge moved the ICBM operations to a former Catholic church in Inglewood, where the pair had to pull out the pews and the urinals in the bathrooms to make room for their research.

Now that's old school.

Working at the highest level

"You just put on the gloves and go," Parent explains. "Think turbo PowerPoint."

Within five years "you could use gesture recognition to get rid of the remote control," predicts Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner.

File Gesture Studios and GoodPoint alongside Jeff Han's multi-touch displays.

The Mind-Bending New World Of Work

As with William Gibson, author Steven Hall uses the communications revolution to play with new story ideas. Unfortunately, Hall is no Gibson and his writing is not a patch on the conceptual brilliance and terse noir style of the sci-fi master who has delivered genre-busting books Neuromancer (1984) and Pattern Recognition (2003).

Yet despite being a hideously cliched and limited writer, Hall is a surprisingly talented pattern-maker. He has an impressive ability to make narrative devices connect. And therein lies the book's appeal as an inter-textual pulp thriller for the online generation.

Not to mention any studio that may wish to boil down The Raw Shark Texts into a script that does away with the turgid writing and puts the focus back on Hall's inventive plotting and startling knack for images.

See also this review by Sophie Gee in the Sydney Morning Herald; she is more sympathetic:

The Raw Shark Texts inhabits the same conceptual universe as the film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The Eternal Sunshine is one of many homages Hall pays. The Raw Shark Texts also engages Christopher Nolan's Memento, Paul Auster's detective fiction, The Matrix, Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and, inevitably, Jaws. This last reference plays out in the novel's long climax: a literal re-enactment of the film, in which Sanderson and Scout come face to face with the shark-made-of-words.

The Raw Shark Texts is not cynical and knowing, nor is it fully in control of its own trickery. But that's precisely its charm - charm that made it the star of the 2006 London Book Fair, made Hollywood studios compete to acquire it and made 25 foreign countries rush to buy translation rights before it was even published.

When all's said and done, the memory-eating shark was a killer idea, fearlessly pulled off, and Steven Hall deserves his new-found status as a Big Fish.

The Raw Shark Texts

It won't be in the US until September ...

Another previously undiscovered Nemirovsky novel has been unearthed. A powerful tale of love, betrayal and death in a Burgundy village, "Chaleur du Sang" - provisionally titled "Fire in the Blood" in English - was published to warm reviews here in March.

In this novel - which her biographers believe was conceived as early as 1937 though it was written at the same time as "Suite Française" - there is no suggestion of war. Rather, in the spirit of a novel by, say, Jane Austen, it dwells on intense, often repressed emotional conflict set against bucolic country life.

Its story is told by Silvio, a 50-something bachelor who has settled in the village after many years abroad. An observant loner, he watches the goings-on of his extended family, including his comely cousin Hélène; her childhood sweetheart husband, François; and their lively daughter, Colette.

Then tragedy - self-inflicted, not accidental - strikes and, with the complicity of ever-watching and ever-whispering villagers who prefer not to become involved, a cover-up follows.

What "Chaleur du Sang" and new editions of her other books, notably "Le Bal: Autumn" and "David Golder," have demonstrated is that "Suite Française" was not a solitary jewel in an otherwise ordinary literary career. Belatedly, Némirovsky has now taken her place among the small but illustrious group of foreign-born writers who have enriched French literature.

Appreciating Irene Nemirovsky

The first complete book by J. R. R. Tolkien since the posthumous publication of “Silmarillion” in 1977 will be published next week by Houghton Mifflin. Tolkien, the author of “The Hobbit” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, began “The Children of Húrin” in 1918 but never finished it. Christopher Tolkien, 82, the author’s son, edited the book from several drafts. Mr. Tolkien has also added hand-drawn maps and genealogy tables to the tale, whose story takes place thousands of years before “The Lord of the Rings.” Houghton Mifflin plans an initial printing run of 250,000 copies.

See also On The Children of Húrin:

Remarkably, considering that the earliest passages in The Children of Húrin are 90 years old, Christopher's reworking of the book works brilliantly. In a sense it is not a new book, for versions and pieces of the story will be familiar to some readers. For example, the whole tale was condensed down into a single chapter in The Silmarillion, as was the story of The Lord of the Rings at the end of that book, so what you have here is the reconstructed version, complete with familiar elements and also passages that have never appeared before. (It might be compared to a sort of literary Director's Cut, the long version of the story assembled from all the best footage available, though my father probably wouldn't welcome the filmmaking comparison!)

Before ‘Lord of the Rings’