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Afghan Militias Battle Taliban With Aid of U.S. - NYTimes.com about 13 hours ago
- The Americans also say they will tie them directly to the Afghan government.
  These checks aim to avoid repeating mistakes of the past — either creating more Afghan warlords, who have defied the government’s authority for years, or arming Islamic militants, some of whom came back to haunt the United States.
- The Americans say they will keep the groups small and will limit the scope of their activities to protecting villages and manning checkpoints.
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- - “The idea is to get people to take responsibility for their own security,” said a senior American military official in Kabul, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “In many places they are already doing that.”
  - The emergence of the militias, which took some leaders in Kabul by surprise, has so encouraged the American and Afghan officials that they are planning to spur the growth of similar armed groups across the Taliban heartland in the southern and eastern parts of the country.
  - By harnessing the militias, American and Afghan officials hope to rapidly increase the number of Afghans fighting the Taliban. That could supplement the American and Afghan forces already here, and whatever number of American troops President Obama might decide to send. The militias could also help fill the gap while the Afghan Army and police forces train and grow — a project that could take years to bear fruit.
Obama's Afghanistan strategy should team our soldiers with their militias. - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine about 13 hours ago
- A tribe-centered strategy may appeal to Obama in several ways. First, it keeps the Afghan people, not American occupiers, at the center of the operation. The U.S. soldiers live alongside the tribes, build trust, train them, supply them, gather intelligence from them, and fight with them. We are supporting players, not the lead.
- Second, these teams of U.S. soldiers are small. As Gant puts it, the approach requires a lot of time—many months to gain a foothold, years to make the bonds stick—but not a lot of manpower.
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- - First, it is reminiscent of the Anbar Awakening in 2006-07, when Sunni tribal leaders in western Iraq formed alliances with U.S. forces—whom the Sunnis had been shooting just months earlier—to beat back the bigger threat of al-Qaida.
    Second, it has drawn high-level attention to a 45-page paper by Army Maj. Jim Gant, the former team leader of a special-ops detachment stationed in Konar province. The paper, called "One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan," recounts his experiences with organizing "tribal engagement teams" to help local fighters beat back the Taliban—and it spells out a plan to replicate these teams across the country.
  - Third, the strategy makes military success less dependent on the political fortunes of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Counterinsurgency campaigns work through local authorities; if the authorities are seen as corrupt, the campaign can't succeed. Karzai has promised reforms, which may boost his legitimacy among the Afghan people. But it he doesn't follow through, or if his efforts have scant effect, it won't matter so much with Gant's strategy, because the key authorities are the tribal leaders, not the central government in Kabul.
  - An explicit and essential part of Gant's strategy is to draw the individual tribal teams into a network of tribes—first across the province, then the region, then the nation—tied in to the Kabul government through a web of mutual defenses and the supply of basic services.
Why not pay for what works? | ZDNet Healthcare | ZDNet.com on 2009-11-12
- They point to a RAND Corp. study saying that “one-third or more of all procedures performed in the United States are of questionable benefit.”
- The way to enforce it is through comparative effectiveness. Analyze data from millions of patients, develop best practices, and move physicians toward the most cost-effective solution.
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- - Formularies drive care, based on cost effectiveness. Anyone who wants to go outside what works had better have a good explanation.
  - McCaughey’s scare worked. Explicit promises were made not to use comparative effectiveness in any way to deny care, not to use evidence to decide what we should pay for.
  - The alternative to evidence is politics.
    Jeff Walzer on 2009-11-12
    
    A great quote that sums up this debacle
  - This is what is wrong with the present system. State regulation of insurance is based on politics, so your coverage includes any procedure that becomes politically powerful in your state. That’s why insurance costs are rising through the roof.
  - Thus, by tossing away evidence as a way to rule-out certain coverages, you pay for a lot of stuff you don’t need.
  - Any mandate should be based on science, not politics, and by giving up on comparative effectiveness early in the process, it became impossible to set that standard, either through the federal government or through the states.
untitled on 2009-11-11
- Here's how Starnes described the idea behind carb cycling:
  "By fluctuating macronutrients on a daily basis, we can ensure
  that performance and muscle building can be optimized on the days
  when it's most important, while burning fat on the other
  days."
- If you never vary your daily calories or macros,
  you end up overfeeding yourself on the days you're either
  resting or training light, and perhaps eating too little on the
  days you train the hardest.
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- - You fuel your body on the brutal
    training days that would ordinarily suck the life out of you, but
    treat your body as if it's in a cutting phase on the days you
    don't need excess energy.
  - "High days," in which you're giving your body all
    the carbs it can handle, refill your glycogen stores and promote an
    anabolic environment.
  - You don't need as much protein, since the extra carbs generate
    more insulin, which helps you get more protein into your muscles.
    ("It's not how much protein you take in, but how much
    your body can utilize," Harris told us.)
  - "Medium days" allow you to maintain your glycogen
    levels with fewer total calories. You'll have enough carbs to
    fuel your workout and prevent tissue breakdown, but not enough to
    be highly anabolic.
    
    "Low days" are ideal for the days you do cardio only,
    or don't train at all. Your body, with its low insulin levels,
    will be primed for burning fat. With fewer carbs, you'll be
    eating more fat, which benefits hormone production and helps keep
    your body sensitive to insulin on the medium and high days.
  - The most predictable are the most highly processed, and those
    are the ones you want to avoid. The nutrients they remove, add, or
    process into oblivion to make the foods conform to their own labels
    aren't worth the convenience.
  - The key, Harris and Starnes said, is to choose clean foods and
    prepare your own meals. You won't be able to calculate the
    calories and macros precisely, but at least you'll know what isn't in the food.
  - "Gaining muscle is a really slow process," Starnes
    told us. "In four years, I've put on 30 pounds of pure
    muscle mass. That's less than half a pound of muscle per
    month."
  - If you're going for fat loss, plan on one or two high days
    per week. When gaining, go for two to four weekly high-carb
    days.
  - It's better to start a little too high than a little too
    low, Starnes added, for two reasons: First, the extra calories help
    you preserve muscle mass. Second, you have something to cut back
    when progress stalls.
untitled on 2009-11-11
- Carbohydrate allows you to continue training hard. It also controls
  the body's insulin levels - and insulin is a very anabolic and
  anti-catabolic hormone. Proper insulin management / manipulation is
  a HUGE factor in losing fat while maintaining (and even gaining)
  muscle.
- Don't be afraid of carbs - just be afraid of mismanaging
  them. A good general rule is to keep carbs in your first meal
  or two of the day, and also in the peri-workout
  window.
- 6 more annotations...
- - Generally speaking, I prefer using a
    carb cycling approach both for fat loss as well as muscle gain as
    it allows us to take advantage of the powerful effects of insulin.
    But for some individuals (those with very slow metabolisms and a
    lower insulin sensitivity), insulin must be "kept quiet"
    pretty much all the time for efficient fat loss. For these
    folks, more of a low-carb Keto approach may be
    indicated.
  - Another reason I prefer carb cycling
    is that it allows for a much greater variety of food choices which
    tends to keep dieters from getting bored, and everyone knows what a
    bored dieter ends up doing...
  - It takes calories to build muscle, just like it takes bricks and
    mortar to construct a building.
  - If you aren't giving your body enough calories to grow (calories
    BEYOND what it takes to maintain your current physique), then it
    won't build new muscle despite how you train.
  - Casein and whey are
    exceptional protein sources though, but get them on their own (in
    high quality powders like Biotest Metabolic Drive) without the fat
    and lactose found in milk.
  - Despite their sweet taste, most fruits are surprisingly
    low in the glycemic index, and the fact that they don't contain a
    lot of calories makes their glycemic load low as well. They're
    also chock full of vitamins and minerals, something many lifters
    don't pay much attention to.
Schneier on Security: Is Antivirus Dead? on 2009-11-10
- Often it's impossible to do both A and B -- there's no time to do both, it's too expensive to do both, or whatever -- and you have to choose. In that case, you look at A and B and you make you best choice. But it's almost always more secure to do both.
- Yes, antivirus programs have been getting less effective as new viruses are more frequent and existing viruses mutate faster. Yes, antivirus companies are forever playing catch-up, trying to create signatures for new viruses. Yes, signature-based antivirus software won't protect you when a virus is new, before the signature is added to the detection program. Antivirus is by no means a panacea.
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- - On the other hand, an antivirus program with up-to-date signatures will protect you from a lot of threats. It'll protect you against viruses, against spyware, against Trojans -- against all sorts of malware. It'll run in the background, automatically, and you won't notice any performance degradation at all.
  - Certainly security would be improved if people used whitelisting programs such as Bit9 Parity and Savant Protection -- and I personally recommend Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware -- but a lot of users are going to have trouble with this.
  - The average corporate IT department doesn't have a good idea of what software is running on all the computers within the corporation, and doesn't want the administrative overhead of managing all the change requests. And whitelists aren't a panacea, either: they don't defend against malware that attaches itself to data files (think Word macro viruses), for example.
  - In this kind of environment, computers are going to connect to each other without a whole lot of trust between them. Untrusted computers are going to connect to untrusted networks. Trusted computers are going to connect to untrusted networks. The whole idea of "safe computing" is going to take on a whole new meaning -- every man for himself. A corporate network is going to need a simple, dumb, signature-based antivirus product at the gateway of its network. And a user is going to need a similar program to protect his computer.
    
    Bottom line: antivirus software is neither necessary nor sufficient for security, but it's still a good idea. It's not a panacea that magically makes you safe, nor is it is obsolete in the face of current threats. As countermeasures go, it's cheap, it's easy, and it's effective. I haven't dumped my antivirus program, and I have no intention of doing so anytime soon.
Phys Ed: Why Doesn’t Exercise Lead to Weight Loss? - Well Blog - NYTimes.com on 2009-11-04
- It is well known physiologically that, while high-intensity exercise demands mostly carbohydrate calories (since carbohydrates can quickly reach the bloodstream and, from there, laboring muscles), low-intensity exercise prompts the body to burn at least some stored fat. All of the subjects ate three meals a day.
- “The message of our work is really simple,” although not agreeable to hear, Melanson said. “It all comes down to energy balance,” or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning 200 or 300 calories” in a typical 30-minute exercise session, Melanson points out. “You replace that with one bottle of Gatorade.”
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- - “If you work out at an easy intensity, you will burn a higher percentage of fat calories” than if you work out a higher intensity, Carey says, so you should draw down some of the padding you’ve accumulated on the hips or elsewhere — if you don’t replace all of the calories afterward.
  - “Heart rates of between 105 and 134” beats per minute, Carey said, represent the fat-burning zone. “It’s probably best to work out near the top of that zone,” he says, “so that you burn more calories over all” than at the extremely leisurely lower end.
Up the Cosmic Distance Ladder § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM on 2009-10-19
- Consider this: We live in a universe so large that light itself (and nothing goes faster) takes years to travel between stars, eons to travel between galaxies. All we see in the sky are essentially old photos of celestial objects as they were when their light first left to travel to Earth. When we look across space, we also look back in time.
- the closer an object is to the two observation points, the greater that object’s parallax. Using the principle of triangulation, an observer can calculate the distance to an object using the object’s observed parallax and the known distance between the two observation points.
Being pushed around by empty space: The Casimir Effect « Gravity and Levity on 2009-10-12
- What makes everything so confusing is that apparently the quantum field is always “boiling”. It is filled with a certain dense energy, one which allows particles to spontaneously pop in and out of existence. In fact, our most detailed and accurate description of forces is that they involve the transfer of energy across the quantum field via short-lived excitations which can be called “particles” or “virtual particles”.
- Currently, we have to say that we don’t even understand the zero-body problem! We can’t say for sure anymore what “empty space” is like, so apparently we have been making negative progress over the past 300 years.
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- - If the space around me is filled with bubbling energy, why doesn’t it push me around?
    
    Well, the short answer to that question is the same as the answer to “why don’t I get pushed around by the energetic air molecules surrounding me?” Namely, the air molecules are all very small and they surround me equally, so that on the whole I don’t get pushed in any particular direction.
    
    But there is such a thing as air pressure, and it actually can actually push you around under the right conditions. So is there such a thing as “vacuum pressure”? Can something be pushed around by empty space?
    
    The answer, surprisingly, is yes. It’s called the Casimir Effect, and it usually gets stated like this: two metal plates, sitting next to each other in an absolute vacuum, will be attracted to each other as they are pushed by the “boiling” vacuum energy.
  - The picture is complicated by the fact that even in the absence of electrons, the quantum string is always vibrating. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, it is vibrating quite violently, in a way that can best be described as “white noise“: all possible frequencies of oscillation are equally represented.
  - One thing should bother you, though: when I say that the string vibrates with all possible frequencies, it implies that the string has infinite energy.
  - The vacuum oscillations of our quantum string somehow have contributions from all of these modes, which means the string contains the sum of all their energies, plus infinitely more. If you think it sounds silly to say that vacuum oscillations have infinite energy, so that all of space is filled with an infinite density of energy, then I would agree with you. But that is precisely the case in our best description of the vacuum.
  - The idea behind the Casimir effect is this: maybe a piece of metal can block not just the electric field made by charges, but the vacuum oscillations themselves.
  - So there is a certain amount of energy outside the two metal plates that is not present inside. This is the main idea behind the Casimir effect.
Discover Interview: Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics | Cosmology | DISCOVER Magazine on 2009-10-06
- Quantum mechanics is an incredible theory that explains all sorts of things that couldn’t be explained before, starting with the stability of atoms. But when you accept the weirdness of quantum mechanics [in the macro world], you have to give up the idea of space-time as we know it from Einstein. The greatest weirdness here is that it doesn’t make sense. If you follow the rules, you come up with something that just isn’t right.
- It doesn’t make any sense, and there is a simple reason. You see, the mathematics of quantum mechanics has two parts to it. One is the evolution of a quantum system, which is described extremely precisely and accurately by the Schrödinger equation. That equation tells you this: If you know what the state of the system is now, you can calculate what it will be doing 10 minutes from now. However, there is the second part of quantum mechanics—the thing that happens when you want to make a measurement. Instead of getting a single answer, you use the equation to work out the probabilities of certain outcomes. The results don’t say, “This is what the world is doing.” Instead, they just describe the probability of its doing any one thing. The equation should describe the world in a completely deterministic way, but it doesn’t.
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- - You’re led to a completely crazy point of view. You’re led into this “many worlds” stuff, which has no relationship to what we actually perceive.
  - The trouble is, what can you do with it? Nothing. You want a physical theory that describes the world that we see around us. That’s what physics has always been: Explain what the world that we see does, and why or how it does it. Many worlds quantum mechanics doesn’t do that. Either you accept it and try to make sense of it, which is what a lot of people do, or, like me, you say no—that’s beyond the limits of what quantum mechanics can tell us.
  - My own view is that quantum mechanics is not exactly right, and I think there’s a lot of evidence for that. It’s just not direct experimental evidence within the scope of current experiments.
  - In my view the conscious brain does not act according to classical physics. It doesn’t even act according to conventional quantum mechanics. It acts according to a theory we don’t yet have.

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