I finally got around to reading up on the Alaskan Pipeline corrosion story. I couldn't understand the problem of shutting down the pipeline for maintenance and discovering corrosion when I understood the pipeline was routinely stopped for yearly inspections and maintenance. Apparently I was wrong on that. There are little devices that get sent through the pipeline for that kind of work, so that they don't have to stop the flow of oil.

And the corrosion apparently affects sixteen mile of pipe. I don't know how that compares with other pipelines, but it doesn't sound like something that can be done quickly.

Oh, and BP wasn't using the mechanical "pigs" that inspect and clean the pipe from the inside.

It used to be very easy to tell who won a battle: whoever held the battlefield after the fight was the winner. That wasn't always true, because sometimes holding the battlefield wasn't the important part of the equation.

When I lived in Greensboro, I lived across the street from the Guilford Courthouse Battleground, where General Cornwallis won the battlefield, but was weakened enough that he had to go to Yorktown Virginia to resupply. He was still in Yorktown when he surrendered to General Washington six months later.

The American general went to South Carolina where he lost a battle at Hobkirk's Hill, but again forced the winner to retreat.

And, of course, the big battle in War and Peace followed the same outline: Napolean took the field, but had to retreat to France because of his "victory."

There are a couple of directions I can go with this. Although the US eventually "won the field" in the Cold War, I've heard some people suggest that it's too soon to determine if the US actually won the Cold War: Russia and China are both on the UN Security Council and are willing to side with Iran largely to put a thumb in the US's eye; and many communist memes still run wild, including the one about how the rich nations stole their money from the poor ones.

But, worse than that, I've recently been reading what will eventually become the Army's Counterinsurgency manual (PDF). "When Colonel Harry Summers allegedly told a North Vietnamese counterpart in 1975 that 'You know you never defeated us on the battlefield,' the reply supposedly was, 'That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.'"

The enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq haven't ever won anything other than an ambush; they haven't taken any land (Al Qaeda in Iraq can't capture a university, let alone a city), they are more likely to run in the night than give battle, Al-Sadr couldn't surrender fast enough when he was trying to avoid arrest, and their weapon of choice is a remote-controlled bomb. But that may be irrelevant.

On the bright side, page 24 of that manual says "In any situation, whatever the cause, there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral or passive majority, and an active minority against the cause." This sounds right. In high school US History we learned that 1/3 of Colonists supported the Revolution, 1/3 opposed it, and 1/3 sat on the fence.

So, in Iraq, the US is trying to set up a viable democracy, and the enemy admits that its proposal isn't democratic ("We don't want to repeat the mistake of the Taliban, who restricted participation in governance to the students and the people of Qandahar alone"). I once suggested that the answer is to carpet bomb remote regions with 10-ton bombs. Paige said that might be overkill. I said that was the point.

However, the proposed field manual on this says "Any use of force generates a series of reactions. There may be times when an overwhelming effort is necessary to intimidate an opponent or reassure the populace. But the type and amount of force to be applied, and who wields it, should be carefully calculated by a counterinsurgent for any operation. An operation that kills five insurgents is counterproductive if the collateral damage or the creation of blood feuds leads to the recruitment of fifty more" (page 29).

Yep, that's another case of Paige being right.

Sometimes I have a hard time remembering what it was like before I learned something. The Register has a write-up about common programming mistakes that occur with fractional numbers. Apparently lots of organizations that should know better have forgotten that computers don't really count like people do.

Any time a computer uses a floating point or fractional number, there is a possibility of rounding behind the scenes. There are some cool programming libraries that deal with this (remember significant digits from science classes?). But the easiest trick, especially when working with money, is to stop thinking of $1.20 as 1.2 dollars, but rather as 120 cents. Computers handle whole numbers perfectly well.

I can't remember when I learned that, but I'm amazed to see a pension fund miscalculate things because it didn't know this little secret.

Driving to work this morning I heard about a cease-fire in the Israeli-Hezbollah war. That was great news. However, things aren't as rosy as they appear.