I don't want to cause him any trouble, seeing as he's going through severe treatments, but one of my wild-eyed beliefs just got shattered.

Looking over Robert Jordan's blog, which until his treatment began was largely a question and answer blog, I ran across this gem:

For Pat, who asked subtly, yes, I am, but like my father and grandfather before me, I don’t advertise. We like to believe that no man in this country should feel in danger because of his beliefs, but times change. History tells us that, even here. Political practices we see as unthinkable were carried out as a matter of course by Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Who can say what tomorrow will bring, or next year, or next decade? So should you ask me again, I have no idea what you are talking about unless you are inside the walls of a Lodge.

OK, I was stuck for a little while. But read the first and last sentences again: "I am, but like my father and grandfather before me, I don’t advertise. ... So should you ask me again, I have no idea what you are talking about unless you are inside the walls of a Lodge."

Hmm, which so-called "secret organization" meets in Lodges? Could Robert Jordan be a Mason? That doesn't bother me. What bugs me is that Robert Jordan (which, BTW, is not his real name) is known for unforseen plot twists, and Masons have a reputation for cryptic communications. And here we get a blindingly obvious "yes, but ask again and I won't know what you're talking about." On what planet does that count as cryptic?

Update OK, I found Pat's question:

I have a burning question for you. Time after time in the WOT series you’ve made references, words and subtle symbols that lead me to believe that you may be a [] member of AF&AM. If you read this please post an answer or drop me an email. I’d love to know if my suspicions are correct.
All possible hopes and prayers are with you. Your work is an inspiration and a pleasure to read. I wish you a fast recovery and many more prosperous years of writing.

Fraternally, Patrick

Just type AF&AM into Google. Put in the words Lodge or Fraternally if you think they're needed, and see what pops up.

The Yard and Heron projects are very similar to a class I need for my Computer Science degree (compiler design). But the Yard and Heron projects ask the kinds of real-world questions that are glossed over in a classroom. For instance, Yard's currently debating whether to use static data like Chris Diggins originally designed, or references like the other programmer on the project has suggested. (To be honest, this is work that I won't be actually doing, the other programmer will likely be the one working on it; not to fear, though, I'll stay busy).

A project that I want to do, that happens to be similar to another class I need to take (operating system design; yes, it's the class that led Linus Torvalds to write Linux), and that I haven't started yet (and that will be more useful than the class because it will involve real-world questions and answers) is the eCos Template Metaprogramming project. This isn't really the right kind of blog to talk about the details (in fact, I'm likely to start a blog for that when I do actually get around to starting the project). Basically the idea is to take a ten-year old operating sytem, and modernize its internals to make it easier to update. eCos is currently distributed by Red Hat.

However, while technology's getting more complex (making it harder for one person to pull off the next big thing), strategies for dealing with that complexity are becoming common knowledge (making it easier for one person to pull off the next big thing). Overall, we get cooler products each year.

It looks like I jumped the gun on Roberts' nicer, more unanimous Court. Yesterday, the Court released a 132 page decision in the DeLay gerrymandering case (PDF, no I haven't read the whole thing yet), which was definitely not unanimous ("KENNEDY, J., announced the judgment of the Court and delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts II–A and III, in which STEVENS, SOUTER, GINSBURG, AND BREYER, JJ., joined, an opinion with respect to Parts I and IV, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and ALITO, J., joined, an opinion with respect to Parts II–B and II–C, and an opinion with respect to Part II–D, in which SOUTER and GINSBURG, JJ., joined. STEVENS, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, in which BREYER, J., joined as to Parts I and II. SOUTER, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, in which GINSBURG, J., joined. BREYER, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part. ROBERTS, C. J., filed an opinion concurring in part, concurring in the judgment in part, and dissenting in part, in which ALITO, J., joined. SCALIA, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment in part and dis-senting in part, in which THOMAS, J., joined, and in which ROBERTS, C. J., and ALITO, J., joined as to Part III."). My head's still spinning, trying to figure out who supported and dissented from what.

My last post referred to my personal drive to read Supreme Court decisions largely so I can get at least some news "from the horse's mouth." In the interest of full disclosure, I haven't yet read the Patriot Act. I've tried, but aside from the first section (basically an official statement by Congress that the US doesn't hate all Muslims), the Patriot Act is just a litany of "amends section 235 by erasing the comma in the third sentence, changing the period in subsection (c) with a semicolon, and adding the phrase 'unless the President believes it's a good idea' to sub-subsection 4."

I read the entire Brazilian Constitution and Amendments (roughly 200 pages of legal Portuguese), and Dependency and Development in Latin America (about 150 pages of good material with all the life sucked out and academic wording substituted for any exciting passages, it's a great book that I simply can't force anyone to read). I know I physically can read the Patriot Act, but I don't think I'll get anything out of it.

Of course, that could be the point.

I honestly didn't realize that the Hamdan decision was set to be released today (to be completely honest, I didn't know the case was named Hamdan, although I did know there was a case being argued about the military tribunals). I started reading current Supreme Court cases with Hamdi and Padilla, so I can't complain about Hamdan (PDF).

Roberts sat out Hamdan because he already had a shot at the case when he was an appellate judge. Since Roberts' decision ruled for the President's military commissions, a tie vote would have left that in place (without being binding on other apellate courts, but a law passed last year requires all challenges to the commissions to be filed in Roberts' old courtroom). The Court ruled 5-3 against the commissions as they currently exist. One reason I like to read the actual opinion is that there's going to be a lot of spinning about how this is a setback to the President, or how bringing in international law (in this case the Geneva Conventions) is a terrible mistake, or how this is actually a victory for the commissions in general.

I haven't actually finished the Court's summary yet, but important parts that stand out include the statement:

The military commission at issue is not expressly authorized by any congressional Act. Quirin held that Congress had, through Article of War 15, sanctioned the use of military commissions to try offenders or offenses against the law of war. ... Quirin recognized that Congress had simply preserved what power, under the Constitution and the common law of war, the President already had to convene military commissions.

Since the US signed the Geneva Conventions, they are a very clear part of the current laws of war. In fact, it seems pretty clear that the "common law of war" is basically international law. So, yes, this is a decision that's going to include international law.

The military commission at issue lacks the power to proceed because its structure and procedures violate both the UCMJ and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949.

The rest of the decision maps out where the commissions (designed before the UCMJ was passed) violate the UCMJ. So, the Court did not strike down the idea of using commisions, but it did decide that these commissions need overhauled before they're used. I'm sure Congress will be writing that overhaul next week.

Al Gore's made some headlines by starring in his own movie. I honestly don't know if he's simply posturing as the hipper Al Gore for another run at the Presidency, or if he's finally put politics out of his mind and he's doing personal projects to keep himself busy. As long as there's a chance he's still a politician, people will read politics into anything he does. So, while An Inconvenient Truth is supposedly about putting politics behind us and finding common ground based on science, having Gore appear as the spokesman does more to say "this is a political movie" than anything else he could have done.

Especially when, after the movie's debut, a scientific convention tries to distance itself from Gore's starring "hockey stick" graph because of faulty statistical reasoning (more technical info here).

Additionally, a Nobel Laureate's attempt to suggest a cure for global warming that doesn't involve Kyoto ran into significant scientific political pressure. Yes, I'm worried, but not how you'd think.

I wrote a pretty long post when US forces killed Zarqawi. The Iraqi Prime Minister wisely offered peace talks to terrorists or insurgents who decided that things had gotten too hot for them. That offer is bearing fruit, and, although the insurgents speaking with the Iraqi government want a timetable for US withdrawal they seem to realize, better than some people in this country, that our troops simply can't be out before Christmas if we don't want to go back.

I already admitted to scanning Supreme Court rulings for entertainment. Unfortunately, one of the rulings I was waiting for won't be issued. After getting legal briefs, friend of court briefs, and hearing arguments, the Court decided that it made a mistake in agreeing to hear LabCorp v. Metabolite (LabCorp is based in Burlington, NC, a few blocks from our house, and yes, that Metabolite).

The case is about Metabolite getting a patent that effectively covers a law of nature, even though patent law states you can't get a patent on a law of nature. Metabolite got around this by patenting the process of taking a blood test, or a series of blood tests, and then using the information in those tests to determine that, according to a law of nature, the patient was likely to have a certain condition. LabCorp originally paid royalties to Metabolite when it used the blood test Metabolite's doctors developed, but did not pay royalties when it used other blood tests that determined the same thing.

The lower courts decided that Metabolite really did have a patent on the process of using any blood tests that determined levels of certain chemicals to diagnose this particular condition. Most courts don't like hypertechnical patent law, and the Supreme Court is no exception. Getting the Court to take a patent case was an uphill battle, and now the Court has decided that it didn't take the case after all.

As technology becomes more important, laws about technology, especially patent law, will become more important. It's important that the Court make sure the laws mean what they say, and if the law says you can't patent a law of nature, then the Court needs to make sure nobody sneaks around that provision with clever legal wording.

Although the Russians didn't join the US invasion of Iraq, they have been working behind the scenes in Iraq for a while. You may remember that during the invasion, there was an issue where the US accidentally shot on a caravan of Russian diplomats (out of curiousity, at the time I went to Al Jazeera's site, and their article about the incident was "here's proof that the Russians are trying to evacuate Saddam").

Former KGB officer President Putin has ordered the Russian secret service to destroy (his words) terrorists that killed four Russian diplomats in Iraq recently. Yes, this is the same Putin that President Bush said was trustworthy because Bush had looked into his soul. It's also the same secret service that ended a terrorist occupation of a Moscow theater by gassing everyone in it (and identifying and shooting the unconscious terrorists). And it's the same secret service that handled the Beslan school occupation.

I'm curious how the Iraqi invasion would have played out if Russian soldiers had been part of coalition forces. But having Russia, and Russia's reputation, work behind the scenes is probably just as valuable.

Last week Paige and I started designing the Yard parser website. The Yard parser is a small part of a personal project of mine. Well, a small part of Heron, which itself is a project that Christopher Diggins started. My project is making Heron work on Linux.

So, anyhow, while the Yard parser's website is still in its infancy, it is up and running. This is the first time Paige and I have worked together on a website, and the first time I've written a decent database-driven site. I'll be adding more articles to the database, and a few more scripts. I'm also working on some new features, one graphic (Paige's idea) and one stet-based (stet is what makes the GPL v 3 commenting process work).

Because the site is hosted on Sourceforge, however, I don't have complete freedom in what libraries I get to use, or which Perl modules are available. Overall, though, it's been a fun project.