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Road to Gauntanamo

Have you seen the film Road to Guantanamo yet? If not then go see it. I have put it off for some time but now that I have – it absolutly terrified me. The story is about four young men who travel to Pakistan. One is about to be married and the others are there to attend.

Through a mix of youthful carelessness, bad luck and the chaos of war they are detained and considered to be members of Al-Qaeda. The brutal treatment and torture they face at the hands of the US military is absolutly barbaric. They are abused and tortured to obtain confessions – something which the military fail to obtain despite their treatment.

Even if they had obtained forced confessions from the men – what are these results worth? They are not the truth. And the treatment makes those carrying it out less human. The US cannot claim to be the “good-guy” anymore. Their brutality does not make them better than any other “evil” torturer which we would condemn elsewhere.

Despite the torture being carried out at Guantanamo and the number of detainees and the number of years they have been held it is important to remember that the US has not achieved one single conviction. It is only brutality without law. To those who want to claim the honour of fighting for their beliefs and country – the actions of the men at Guantanamo put your actions, your country and your armed forces to shame.

See this movie!! It is an important movie about the horror of war, the madness of belief over reason, against the evils of torture and the strength of those who are subjected to evil treatment.

What terrifies me the most is the ability of countries to commit crimes while being able to maintain a rhetoric of peace and humanity…

The movie website contains both the trailer and information about the infamous prison. Amnesty International has a broschure to accompany the film: The Road to Guantanamo Action Guide.
About the detainees at Guantanamo Amnesty International writes:

None of the detainees have been granted prisoner of war status or brought before a â??competent tribunalâ?? to determine his statusâ?¦The US government refuses to clarify their legal status, despite calls from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to do so. Instead, the US government labels them â??enemy combatantsâ?? or â??terroristsâ??, flouting their right to be presumed innocent and illegally presuming justification for the denial of many of their most basic human rights.

Posted on by mklang

The Boredom of Programmers

I doubt that there is an authoritative history of boredom in the workplace but anyone making an educated guess would probably point to the factory and the division of labour as the point where large-scale workplace boredom became a serious problem. For those looking for a movie depiction of the problem of machine/man interaction need look no further than Chaplinâ??s film modern times where the character Chaplin plays attempts to keep pace with the inhuman rhythm of the machine.

When stuck in boredom many workers attempt to relieve the monotony in different ways. By searching code we can now see that bored and frustrated coders suffer from the same industrialised worker phenomena of boredom.

The results? Strange messages in the computer code. By using the search function in koders.com we can find lots of messages from programmers venting their frustrations by writing small messages. Here is an example:

ptr = buffer;
/* This f*cking sh*t is still giving problems downloading
* the f*cking images through the motherf*cker http, the only
* code we share with the other s*cking implementation is
* the code that follows, so I guess this is the damn sh*t that’s

or how aboutâ?¦

// I REALLY hate this kind of SHIT!
// yes I know MYSQL can be switched to ANSI bla bla but
// it is obviously not the default…

Nice to see that despite our developments we basically remain the same – humans dislike boredom and handle frustration badly…
(via TheRegister)

Posted on by mklang

Homage to Catalonia

One of the things that I promised myself was that I would read more fiction after I was done with the PhD. Right now I am reading Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia” which is a mix of memory and description of the Spanish civil war were Orwell went to fight against facism. For Orwell the journey to Spain was necessary since it was the first country to actually protest the facist regime and to put up a fight against what was to prove to be the last centuries biggest political mistake.

He also writes with brutal honesty about the terrible conditions of those involved in the everyday fighting of the war. There is no glamour and even less honour.

An example which takes place after an attack on a facist position outside the town of Heusca. They took the facist trench but were driven back again:

They had left the parapet and were coming after us. ‘Run!’ I yelled to Moyle, and jumped to my feet. And heavens, how I ran! I had thought earlier in the night that you can’t run when you are sodden from head to foot and weighted down with a rifle and cartridges; I learned now you can always run when you think you have fifty or a hundred armed men after you. But if I could run fast, others could run faster.

On the totality of his experiences in Spain, Orwell writes:

When we went on leave I had been a hundred and fifteen days in the line, and at the time this period seemed to me to have been one of the most futile of my whole life. I had joined the militia in order to fight against Fascism, and as yet I had scarcely fought at all, had merely existed as a sort of passive object, doing nothing in return for my rations except to suffer from cold and lack of sleep. Perhaps that is the fate of most soldiers in most wars. But now that I can see this period in perspective I do not altogether regret it.

This is the most iconic photo of this conflict. It is Robert Capa’s Death of a Republican

Posted on by mklang

More on Walls

In a previous entry I wrote about walls of design and segregation. I tried to write about the impact of segregating people by using physical barriers â?? but mainly I pointed to the fact that there are many walls out there but we tend to forget this fact since we remain pleased with ourselves that THE WALL (the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain) has been removed.

Probably the easiest way to discover a wall is by looking at an area of the world which is troubled. Find a trouble-spot and all you have to do is to glance at the more fortunate neighbors to find a hefty wall.

So it should come as no surprise that the Saudi Arabian government is planning to build a security fence along its 550 mile stretch of remote desert northern frontier. This is a huge project. The wall or barrier will be equipped with ultraviolet night-vision cameras, buried sensor cables and thousands of miles of barbed wire.

Through this fence the Saudi Arabianâ??s now can join the great wall builders of the world such as the Israeli security barrier, the massive migration fence in southern Spain, and the U.S./Mexico border.

The Saudi Arabian barrier consists of a double fence running about 100 meters apart with 135 electronically controlled gates, fence-mounted movement detection sensors, and buried radio detection sensor cables. Naturally the equipment will also combine the standard hi-tech ultraviolet night-vision cameras with face-recognition software and communications equipment.

(via Subtopia)

Posted on by mklang

Yesterday's Anti-DRM

As you may have known yesterday was the international day to protest against DRM. For more information see http://drm.info. Despite the fact that I defended my PhD and partied until two. I pulled myself out of bed at 6am to get dressed in yellow overalls and demonstrate outside Chalmers University at 7.30. At about 9.30 stopped handing out leaflets and took a well deserved break.

This did not mean that we were done for the day. Oh no. At 11.30 we gathered at the center of town to continue our demonstrations until 1pm. The results? We handed out well over a thousand leaflets, we were interviewed by two newspapers and my headache never left me for a moment.

It was a brilliant way to celebrate my new life as Dr. Klang. This is the first time I wrote Dr. Klang! Feels kind of strange, but nice…

Posted on by mklang

Memory Slot Repair

Now that the thesis has been handed in and passed I have to return to real life again. One of the tasks I have been putting off is the fact that my laptop has to go in for repairs. The problem is that one of the memory slots is not working so this means that I have only half the amount of RAM that I should have. This slows down my computer considerably. The good news is that this problem is well known and Apple has a special repairs program which fixes this for free.

The PowerBook G4 Memory Slot Repair Extension Program is a worldwide program covering repair or replacement of the memory slot in PowerBook G4 models manufactured between January 2005 and April 2005 that are experiencing specific component failures.

Still this means that I am without my laptop for anything between a few days to a couple of weeks? I just don’t know.

So I am backing stuff up and attempting to maintain the important stuff available so that business can keep on as usual. I am not a happy camper…

Posted on by mklang

Everything Changes & Everything is the Same

I passed my PhD on Monday. The day was amazing. The defence began at 2pm so up until then I was running around like a headless chicken fixing things and attempting to keep my nerves in place. I had decided to have U2â??s â??Sunday Bloody Sundayâ?? as a theme song so in my head the lyrics were rolling around until I stepped up on the podium:

And the battles just begun
Theres many lost, but tell me who has won
The trench is dug within our hearts
And mothers, children, brothers, sisters torn apart

Anyway the defence began with the opponent explaining that he liked my work. This was great but I knew that there was a big BUT just waiting to come along. It did. We had some interesting and lively question and answer sessions. I think that I managed to get my points across. The good part was that I was so wrapped up in the discussion that I really enjoyed myself. I did not notice that we had gone on for more than two hours. The examination board then placed their questions which gave some more discussion.

In action at the Disputatio

Then it was over. The committee went off to discuss my fate. I was surrounded by friends and family wishing me well and, in what felt like a short while, the committee came out and notified me that their verdict was unanimous. I passed. I was a PhD.

The party continued until the early hoursâ?¦

Posted on by mklang

PhD Defence Preview

So it’s all happening tomorrow. I defend my thesis. Not only will I be the placed under scrutiny and stress – but I will also be wearing a suit! For those of you who may want to read the thesis it’s over here.

If you don’t feel like reading it you can get the main arguments & counter-arguments by attending the defence tomorrow in Göteborg (again more info here).

If you cannot attend then you can catch me presenting my thesis at Humlab in Umeå. The presentation has been streamed and is online here.

Here are some “promotional” pictures…

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Posted on by mklang