The Battle for Marjah: US Must Win with Both Hands Tied Behind it's Back

Jack Linthicum wrote:
On Feb 22, 12:40 pm, Pat Flannery wrote:
On 2/22/2010 2:54 AM, Jack Linthicum wrote:



I've never heard of canibalism being part of the ritual - do you
have a cite for that?

Would this do?

http://www.plu.edu/~arnoldwp/

I just had a great thought...we should figure out some way to have
the
Taliban get a peek at where this posting thread has drifted off to,
as
they may think that our troops are coming to tear their hearts out
and
then dismember and eat them.
Even in Afghanistan, this approach to warfare is bound to get us a
new-found respect in the eyes of our enemies for its manliness, as
will
our new combat
fatigues:http://www.xispas.com/blog/images/no...pocalypto3.jpg
BTW, they recently had a cardiac surgeon do tests on a simulated
human
torso using a obsidian knife to find out if the Aztec priests went
through the ribcage or under it to get the heart out fast enough to
have
it still beating on removal.
The results showed that the only way to do it quick is go in under
the
ribcage, cut upwards through the diaphragm, sever the veins and
arteries connected to the heart, and pull it back out under the
ribcage.
He could do that in around 30 seconds.

Pat

Wow, a new Olympic event. Goes with those X-Games things that just got
on, like the four-man down hill over bumps. Maybe we could widen the
bobsled track and put two or more on at once.

Yeah, complete with a chicane, for a spot of excitement.

cheers.....Jeff

"William Black" wrote in message
...

wrote in message
...

When we decimated the country we attacked the residents knew they lost
and needed us desperately to survive.

It's Afghanistan, they expect to lose, expect to be decimated, and
expect their irregular tactics to triumph in the end, as they have done
for the past 2,000 years.


Sorry to interrupt this America bashing session, but the Soviets lost from
the
determined resistance....combined...with the introduction of US weapons,
training
and suitcases full of cash. The Soviets lost over 300 helicopters and a 150
jets
in Afghanistan, does anyone here think they used locally produced weapons
to accomplish that?

The US was providing some $600 million a year, including hundreds of
stingers
and the UK and Saudis almost doubled that. We urged China to supply
tanks and rpg's, Egypt to provide boatloads of assault rifles. The CIA
trained, equipped hundreds of resistance officers and...led.. many
Mujahadeen
units in battle. CIA chief Casey was even directly involved in planning
cross border
attacks into Soviet territory. And the US gave Pakistan lots of support to
aid
the resistance, if you remember, the Pakistan Air Force even fought the
Soviets for a while, using mostly US supplied jets.

And maybe one reason the Soviets weren't unable to win any 'hearts and
minds'
there might have been due to the carpet bombing of Kandahar, just to name
one, and the 10 million or so landmines the Soviets scattered about
everywhere.

The Taliban are not at all representative of the Afghan public and have
little
support with the people. The support the Taliban has is largely due to the
lack of any other choice, the govts in Afghanistan have been, and still
are, pathetic. Our primary mistake is in leaving after the war and
refusing to do any nation building.

Nation building is our primary goal this time around.

If anyone remembers it took only a couple thousand Northern Alliance
troops backed by the US a few weeks to run the Taliban out.
There was no public outpouring of support for the Taliban then
and neither is there now.

I really find it offensive when people ignore the facts in order
just for some feel-good America bashing.

The Ahghans will chose an ...effective...democracy in a heartbeat
over the Taliban, and we are fighting now to give them that long
overdue choice.








--
William Black


I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Barbeques on fire by the chalets past the castle headland
I watched the gift shops glitter in the darkness off the Newborough gate
All these moments will be lost in time, like icecream on the beach
Time for tea.

Jonathan wrote:
"William Black" wrote in message
...
wrote in message
...

When we decimated the country we attacked the residents knew they lost
and needed us desperately to survive.
It's Afghanistan, they expect to lose, expect to be decimated, and
expect their irregular tactics to triumph in the end, as they have done
for the past 2,000 years.


Sorry to interrupt this America bashing session, but the Soviets lost from
the
determined resistance....combined...with the introduction of US weapons,
training
and suitcases full of cash. The Soviets lost over 300 helicopters and a 150
jets
in Afghanistan, does anyone here think they used locally produced weapons
to accomplish that?

The US was providing some $600 million a year, including hundreds of
stingers
and the UK and Saudis almost doubled that. We urged China to supply
tanks and rpg's, Egypt to provide boatloads of assault rifles. The CIA
trained, equipped hundreds of resistance officers and...led.. many
Mujahadeen
units in battle. CIA chief Casey was even directly involved in planning
cross border
attacks into Soviet territory. And the US gave Pakistan lots of support to
aid
the resistance, if you remember, the Pakistan Air Force even fought the
Soviets for a while, using mostly US supplied jets.

And maybe one reason the Soviets weren't unable to win any 'hearts and
minds'
there might have been due to the carpet bombing of Kandahar, just to name
one, and the 10 million or so landmines the Soviets scattered about
everywhere.

The Taliban are not at all representative of the Afghan public and have
little
support with the people. The support the Taliban has is largely due to the
lack of any other choice, the govts in Afghanistan have been, and still
are, pathetic. Our primary mistake is in leaving after the war and
refusing to do any nation building.

Nation building is our primary goal this time around.

If anyone remembers it took only a couple thousand Northern Alliance
troops backed by the US a few weeks to run the Taliban out.
There was no public outpouring of support for the Taliban then
and neither is there now.

I really find it offensive when people ignore the facts in order
just for some feel-good America bashing.

The Ahghans will chose an ...effective...democracy in a heartbeat
over the Taliban, and we are fighting now to give them that long
overdue choice.

Many good points. Also the eye in the sky system wasn't available when
the Soviets were there. Pretty hard to sneak up on modern technology.
There is no night for modern forces.

Pat Flannery wrote in
dakotatelephone:

I'm old enough that I can remember the days down at our church when they
had a list of banned books up on the wall in the entrance alcove, a last
vestige of the Inquisition.

A reading list for when you next went to your public library, set up by
that Presbyterian, Andrew Carnegie?
--
Andrew Chaplin
SIT MIHI GLADIUS SICUT SANCTO MARTINO
(If you're going to e-mail me, you'll have to get "yourfinger." out.)

On Feb 22, 8:41*pm, Alexander wrote:
Jonathan wrote:
"William Black" wrote in message
...
wrote in message
....

When we decimated the country we attacked the residents knew they lost
and needed us desperately to survive.
It's Afghanistan, *they expect to lose, expect to be decimated, *and
expect their irregular tactics to triumph in the end, *as they have done
for the past 2,000 years.

Sorry to interrupt this America bashing session, but the Soviets lost from
the
determined resistance....combined...with the *introduction of US weapons,
training
and suitcases full of cash. *The Soviets lost over 300 helicopters and a 150
jets
in Afghanistan, does anyone here think they used locally produced weapons
to accomplish that?

The US was providing some $600 million a year, including hundreds of
stingers
and the UK and Saudis almost doubled that. We urged China to supply
tanks and rpg's, Egypt to provide boatloads of assault rifles. The CIA
trained, equipped hundreds of resistance officers and...led.. many
Mujahadeen
units in battle. CIA chief Casey was even directly involved in planning
cross border
attacks into Soviet territory. And the US gave Pakistan lots of support to
aid
the resistance, if you remember, the Pakistan Air Force even fought the
Soviets for a while, using mostly US supplied jets.

And maybe one reason the Soviets weren't unable to win any 'hearts and
minds'
there might have been due to the carpet bombing of Kandahar, just to name
one, and the 10 million or so landmines the Soviets scattered about
everywhere.

The Taliban are not at all representative of the Afghan public and have
little
support with the people. The support the Taliban has is largely due to the
lack of any other choice, the govts in Afghanistan have been, and still
are, pathetic. Our primary mistake is in leaving after the war and
refusing to do any nation building.

Nation building is our primary goal this time around.

If anyone remembers it took only a couple thousand Northern Alliance
troops backed by the US a few weeks to run the Taliban out.
There was no public outpouring of support for the Taliban then
and neither is there now.

I really find it offensive when people ignore the facts in order
just for some feel-good America bashing.

The Ahghans will chose an ...effective...democracy in a heartbeat
over the Taliban, and we are fighting now to give them that long
overdue choice.

Many good points. Also the eye in the sky system wasn't available when
the Soviets were there. Pretty hard to sneak up on modern technology.
There is no night for modern forces.

More concepts for those eyes in the sky


Fill in the Blanks: Using Math to Turn Lo-Res Datasets Into Hi-Res
Samples

* By Jordan Ellenberg Email Author
* February 22, 2010 |
* 12:00 pm |
* Wired March 2010

Illustration: Gabriel Peyre

Using a mathematical concept called sparsity, the compressed-sensing
algorithm takes lo-res files and transforms them into sharp images.
Illustration: Gabriel Peyre

In the early spring of 2009, a team of doctors at the Lucile Packard
Children’s Hospital at Stanford University lifted a 2-year-old into an
MRI scanner. The boy, whom I’ll call Bryce, looked tiny and forlorn
inside the cavernous metal device. The stuffed monkey dangling from
the entrance to the scanner did little to cheer up the scene. Bryce
couldn’t see it, in any case; he was under general anesthesia, with a
tube snaking from his throat to a ventilator beside the scanner. Ten
months earlier, Bryce had received a portion of a donor’s liver to
replace his own failing organ. For a while, he did well. But his
latest lab tests were alarming. Something was going wrong — there was
a chance that one or both of the liver’s bile ducts were blocked.

Shreyas Vasanawala, a pediatric radiologist at Packard, didn’t know
for sure what was wrong, and hoped the MRI would reveal the answer.
Vasanawala needed a phenomenally hi-res scan, but if he was going to
get it, his young patient would have to remain perfectly still. If
Bryce took a single breath, the image would be blurred. That meant
deepening the anesthesia enough to stop respiration. It would take a
full two minutes for a standard MRI to capture the image, but if the
anesthesiologists shut down Bryce’s breathing for that long, his
glitchy liver would be the least of his problems.

However, Vasanawala and one of his colleagues, an electrical engineer
named Michael Lustig, were going to use a new and much faster scanning
method. Their MRI machine used an experimental algorithm called
compressed sensing — a technique that may be the hottest topic in
applied math today. In the future, it could transform the way that we
look for distant galaxies. For now, it means that Vasanawala and
Lustig needed only 40 seconds to gather enough data to produce a
crystal-clear image of Bryce’s liver.

Compressed sensing was discovered by chance. In February 2004,
Emmanuel Candès was messing around on his computer, looking at an
image called the Shepp-Logan Phantom. The image — a standard picture
used by computer scientists and engineers to test imaging algorithms —
resembles a Close Encounters alien doing a quizzical eyebrow lift.
Candès, then a professor at Caltech, now at Stanford, was
experimenting with a badly corrupted version of the phantom meant to
simulate the noisy, fuzzy images you get when an MRI isn’t given
enough time to complete a scan. Candès thought a mathematical
technique called l1 minimization might help clean up the streaks a
bit. He pressed a key and the algorithm went to work.

Candès expected the phantom on his screen to get slightly cleaner. But
then suddenly he saw it sharply defined and perfect in every detail —
rendered, as though by magic, from the incomplete data. Weird, he
thought. Impossible, in fact. “It was as if you gave me the first
three digits of a 10-digit bank account number — and then I was able
to guess the next seven,” he says. He tried rerunning the experiment
on different kinds of phantom images; they resolved perfectly every
time.

Candès, with the assistance of postdoc Justin Romberg, came up with
what he considered to be a sketchy and incomplete theory for what he
saw on his computer. He then presented it on a blackboard to a
colleague at UCLA named Terry Tao. Candès came away from the
conversation thinking that Tao was skeptical — the improvement in
image clarity was close to impossible, after all. But the next
evening, Tao sent a set of notes to Candès about the blackboard
session. It was the basis of their first paper together. And over the
next two years, they would write several more.

That was the beginning of compressed sensing, or CS, the paradigm-
busting field in mathematics that’s reshaping the way people work with
large data sets. Only six years old, CS has already inspired more than
a thousand papers and pulled in millions of dollars in federal grants.
In 2006, Candès’ work on the topic was rewarded with the $500,000
Waterman Prize, the highest honor bestowed by the National Science
Foundation. It’s not hard to see why. Imagine MRI machines that take
seconds to produce images that used to take up to an hour, military
software that is vastly better at intercepting an adversary’s
communications, and sensors that can analyze distant interstellar
radio waves. Suddenly, data becomes easier to gather, manipulate, and
interpret.

How Math Gets
the Grain Out


Compressed sensing is a mathematical tool that creates hi-res data
sets from lo-res samples. It can be used to resurrect old musical
recordings, find enemy radio signals, and generate MRIs much more
quickly. Here’s how it would work with a photograph.


1 Undersample

A camera or other device captures only a small, randomly chosen
fraction of the pixels that normally comprise a particular image. This
saves time and space.

2 Fill in the dots

An algorithm called l1 minimization starts by arbitrarily picking one
of the effectively infinite number of ways to fill in all the missing
pixels.

3 Add shapes

The algorithm then begins to modify the picture in stages by laying
colored shapes over the randomly selected image. The goal is to seek
what’s called sparsity, a measure of image simplicity.

4 Add smaller shapes

The algorithm inserts the smallest number of shapes, of the simplest
kind, that match the original pixels. If it sees four adjacent green
pixels, it may add a green rectangle there.

5 Achieve clarity

Iteration after iteration, the algorithm adds smaller and smaller
shapes, always seeking sparsity. Eventually it creates an image that
will almost certainly be a near-perfect facsimile of a hi-res one.

Photos: Obama: Corbis; Image Simulation: Jarvis Haupt/Robert Nowak


Compressed sensing works something like this: You’ve got a picture —
of a kidney, of the president, doesn’t matter. The picture is made of
1 million pixels. In traditional imaging, that’s a million
measurements you have to make. In compressed sensing, you measure only
a small fraction — say, 100,000 pixels randomly selected from various
parts of the image. From that starting point there is a gigantic,
effectively infinite number of ways the remaining 900,000 pixels could
be filled in.

The key to finding the single correct representation is a notion
called sparsity, a mathematical way of describing an image’s
complexity, or lack thereof. A picture made up of a few simple,
understandable elements — like solid blocks of color or wiggly lines —
is sparse; a screenful of random, chaotic dots is not. It turns out
that out of all the bazillion possible reconstructions, the simplest,
or sparsest, image is almost always the right one or very close to it.

But how can you do all the number crunching that is required to find
the sparsest image quickly? It would take way too long to analyze all
the possible versions of the image. Candès and Tao, however, knew that
the sparsest image is the one created with the fewest number of
building blocks. And they knew they could use l1 minimization to find
it and find it quickly.

To do that, the algorithm takes the incomplete image and starts trying
to fill in the blank spaces with large blocks of color. If it sees a
cluster of green pixels near one another, for instance, it might plunk
down a big green rectangle that fills the space between them. If it
sees a cluster of yellow pixels, it puts down a large yellow
rectangle. In areas where different colors are interspersed, it puts
down smaller and smaller rectangles or other shapes that fill the
space between each color. It keeps doing that over and over.
Eventually it ends up with an image made of the smallest possible
combination of building blocks and whose 1 million pixels have all
been filled in with colors.

That image isn’t absolutely guaranteed to be the sparsest one or the
exact image you were trying to reconstruct, but Candès and Tao have
shown mathematically that the chance of its being wrong is
infinitesimally small. It might still take a few hours of laptop time,
but waiting an extra hour for the computer is preferable to shutting
down a toddler’s lungs for an extra minute.

Compressed sensing has already had a spectacular scientific impact.
That’s because every interesting signal is sparse — if you can just
figure out the right way to define it. For example, the sound of a
piano chord is the combination of a small set of pure notes, maybe
five at the most. Of all the possible frequencies that might be
playing, only a handful are active; the rest of the landscape is
silent. So you can use CS to reconstruct music from an old
undersampled recording that is missing information about the sound
waves formed at certain frequencies. Just take the material you have
and use l1 minimization to fill in the empty spaces in the sparsest
way. The result is almost certain to sound just like the original
music.

With his architect glasses and slightly poufy haircut, Candès has the
air of a hip geek. The 39-year-old Frenchman is soft-spoken but
uncompromising when he believes that something isn’t up to his
standards. “No, no, it is nonsense,” he says when I bring up the work
of a CS specialist whose view on a technical point differs — very
slightly, it seems to me — from his own. “No, no, no, no. It is
nonsense and it is nonsense and it is wrong.”

Candès can envision a long list of applications based on what he and
his colleagues have accomplished. He sees, for example, a future in
which the technique is used in more than MRI machines. Digital
cameras, he explains, gather huge amounts of information and then
compress the images. But compression, at least if CS is available, is
a gigantic waste. If your camera is going to record a vast amount of
data only to throw away 90 percent of it when you compress, why not
just save battery power and memory and record 90 percent less data in
the first place? For digital snapshots of your kids, battery waste may
not matter much; you just plug in and recharge. “But when the battery
is orbiting Jupiter,” Candès says, “it’s a different story.” Ditto if
you want your camera to snap a photo with a trillion pixels instead of
a few million.

The ability to gather meaningful data from tiny samples of information
is also enticing to the military: Enemy communications, for instance,
can hop from frequency to frequency. No existing hardware is fast
enough to scan the full range. But the adversary’s signal, wherever it
is, is sparse — built up from simple signals in some relatively tiny
but unknown portion of the frequency band. That means CS could be used
to distinguish enemy chatter on a random band from crackle. Not
surprisingly, Darpa, the Defense Department’s research arm, is funding
CS research.

Compressed sensing isn’t useful just for solving today’s technological
problems; the technique will help us in the future as we struggle with
how to treat the vast amounts of information we have in storage. The
world produces untold petabytes of data every day — data that we’d
like to see packed away securely, efficiently, and retrievably. At
present, most of our audiovisual info is stored in sophisticated
compression formats. If, or when, the format becomes obsolete, you’ve
got a painful conversion project on your hands. But in the CS future,
Candès believes, we’ll record just 20 percent of the pixels in certain
images, like expensive-to-capture infrared shots of astronomical
phenomena. Because we’re recording so much less data to begin with,
there will be no need to compress. And instead of steadily improving
compression algorithms, we’ll have steadily improving decompression
algorithms that reconstruct the original image more and more
faithfully from the stored data.

That’s the future. Today, CS is already rewriting the way we capture
medical information. A team at the University of Wisconsin, with
participation from GE Healthcare, is combining CS with technologies
called HYPR and VIPR to speed up certain kinds of magnetic resonance
scans, in some cases by a factor of several thousand. (I’m on the
university’s faculty but have no connection to this particular
research.) GE Healthcare is also experimenting with a novel protocol
that promises to use CS to vastly improve observations of the
metabolic dynamics of cancer patients. Meanwhile, the CS-enabled MRI
machines at Packard can record images up to three times as quickly as
conventional scanners.

And that was just enough for 2-year-old Bryce. Vasanawala, in the
control room, gave the signal; the anesthesiologist delivered a slug
of sedative to the boy and turned off his ventilator. His breathing
immediately stopped. Vasanawala started the scan while the
anesthesiologist monitored Bryce’s heart rate and blood oxygenation
level. Forty seconds later, the scan was done and Bryce had suffered
no appreciable oxygen loss. Later that day, the CS algorithm was able
to produce a sharp image from the brief scan, good enough for
Vasanawala to see the blockages in both bile ducts. An interventional
radiologist snaked a wire into each duct, gently clearing the
blockages and installing tiny tubes that allowed the bile to drain
properly. And with that — a bit of math and a bit of medicine —
Bryce’s lab test results headed back to normal.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_algorithm/

Jack Linthicum wrote:
On Feb 21, 12:02 pm, "Roger Conroy"
wrote:
"Andrew Swallow" wrote in message

news
Jack Linthicum wrote:
{snip}
But isn't a country, it's a variation on a fundamental image of a
religion. How do you "defeat" a religion?
Ask the Spanish Inquisition they succeeded several times.
Both in Europe and South America, including parts of the USA that
used to be Mexico.
Andrew Swallow
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Anyone aware that the Conversos outlasted the Inquistion?

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/.../Marranos.html



The Jews were a sort of hobby. The Spanish Inquisitions main targets
were the wrong sort of Christians, Muslims and new world pagans.

Andrew Swallow

On 2/23/2010 3:56 AM, Andrew Chaplin wrote:
Pat wrote in
dakotatelephone:

I'm old enough that I can remember the days down at our church when they
had a list of banned books up on the wall in the entrance alcove, a last
vestige of the Inquisition.

A reading list for when you next went to your public library, set up by
that Presbyterian, Andrew Carnegie?

In our town's case, Alfred Dickey: http://www.adpl.org/History.php
Many an hour spent there as a kid.
When their books get to old and beaten up, they sell them for ten cents
apiece, and I've purchased a few that still have the old return date
stamps in them from when I took them out as a kid.
In fact in some cases, I was the only person who _ever_ took them out.
The book list down at the church was always fun, as the adults would be
taking notes from it to find about new books that might have sex scenes
in them for them to read.
Anything by Henry Miller or Anais Nin was a shoe-in for the list, and
the Papal Seal Of Disapproval no doubt upped their sales greatly; but
one wonders how many churchgoers spent hours vainly digging around in
obscure Marxist screeds looking for the sex stuff. ;-)
Movies were also on the list*, and this led to one of the more surreal
moments of my childhood, when DeMille's "The Ten Commandments" was
re-released in 1966. The church wanted we kids in St. John's Academy to
see it, but not all of it, especially the sexy stuff when Moses is
growing up as an Egyptian prince. So our nun-teacher, Sister Margaret de
Sade, walked us all down to the cinema, where we watched the first part
of the movie...then went out and waited in the lobby till the sex stuff
was over...and went back in and watched the rest of it. The Bishop of
the parish had watched the movie and used a stopwatch to figure out at
what time we should all be chased out and herded back in again.

*And watching "God's Little Acre" required an immediate confession
afterward, lest you die in a damned state...like North Dakota.

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote in
dakotatelephone:

*And watching "God's Little Acre" required an immediate confession
afterward, lest you die in a damned state...like North Dakota.

I know what you mean, I spent more than nine years in Westman, and have
seen the rampant turtle at Boissevain on my way to Minot.
--
Andrew Chaplin
SIT MIHI GLADIUS SICUT SANCTO MARTINO
(If you're going to e-mail me, you'll have to get "yourfinger." out.)

On 2/23/2010 7:52 PM, Andrew Chaplin wrote:

I know what you mean, I spent more than nine years in Westman, and have
seen the rampant turtle at Boissevain on my way to Minot.

You know, I've gone through that border crossing way back when, and
somehow completely missed Tommy The Turtle:
http://www.boissevain.ca/visitors/turtle_statue.html
Just what the Peace Garden needs...its very own Gamera. :-)

Pat

On Feb 24, 2:16*am, Fred J. McCall wrote:
"Roger Conroy" wrote:

::"Pat Flannery" wrote in message

hdakotatelephone...: Jack Linthicum wrote:

:
: This is all a war of perceptions, General McChrystal said. This is
: not a physical war in terms of how many people you kill or how much
: ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the
: minds of the participants.
:
: Oh, dear God... the "hearts and minds" routine again.
: We'll be seeing "the light at the end of the tunnel" shortly.
:
: Pat
:
:Who first said, "If you've got them by the balls their hearts and minds will
:follow"?
:

Uh, if you paid attention, Roger...

--
"If you grab them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow."
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * -- Chuck Colson

Wrong, see my post on this. Someone gave Colson a plaque with this on
it. Mendell Rivers is the real source.