A Latinist, an Intel analyst, and a Chatbot walk into a bar

 

dj] Trace the use of "Principiis intelligendi obsta".

 

AI]  "Principiis intelligendi obsta" a playful or philosophical modification of "Principiis obsta"  “Nip it in the bud";

Today, Principiis obsta is widely used as a legal maxim meaning to stop minor violations, political overreaches, or bad habits early before they become dangerous precedents.

 

dj] > legal maxim

Cf. “broken-windows policing”  (which itself is contradicted by another Latin maxim “de minimis non curat lex”).

 

The full phrase "Principiis intelligendi obsta" -- upon your evidence, a modern coinage -- occurred, as I recall, apud Theodor Reik:  Don’t suppose you understand (a patient/dream-interpretation/etc) right at first blush: dig deeper.  Or, proverbially:  “Don’t jump to conclusions”.

The same maxim, though not in that wording, applies as well to physics, where some phenomena receive an initial/plausible/good-enough-for-government-work explanation, which then can slip imperceptibly into received wisdom;  until, perhaps decades later, a more genuine explanation is discovered using new techniques (quantum theory; homology theory; ….)

 

AI] Your recollection strikes right at the heart of the psychoanalytic ethos. Theodor Reik—and indeed Freud himself—frequently warned against the analyst's temptation to understand too quickly. In clinical practice, an immediate, plausible interpretation often acts as a resistance (Widerstand) or a defense mechanism for the analyst, closing off the deeper, unconscious currents of the patient's material before they can truly emerge. By "resisting the beginnings of understanding," the investigator forces a state of productive confusion or suspended judgment, ensuring the deeper structure isn't obscured by a neat surface narrative.

 

dj]  Idiomatic/proverbial equivalents to “Nip it in the bud" and “Don’t jump to conclusions”, in (a) French (b) German.

 

AI] Étouffer dans l'œuf

Couper l'herbe sous le pied -- Closer to "cut the ground out from under someone," but used to thwart an action early.

 

Im Keim ersticken

Wehre den Anfängen! This is the exact, direct translation of Ovid's classical Latin maxim (Principiis obsta).

 

dj] Note, btw, that, epistemologically, “Nip it in the bud”/ "Principiis obsta"  advises the *opposite *  of "Principiis intelligendi obsta"/”Don’t jump to conclusions”.  The latter advises observant patience (cf. Freud’s “gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit”): *let that bud bloom *, and see what sort of plant grows out of it.

A similar dichotomy occurs between local law-enforcement vs the intelligence community.  As, X commits an infraction, observed in flagrante delicto.  The default policy trifurcates according to the legal authority:

 

Cop on the beat:  Book ‘im!

FBI agent:  Shh, hold on -- Who is X working for?  (Then arraign the bunch.)

SIGINT mavens:  Hmm, let’s see if X has any links (one, or two hops out) to  extant target-circles, and cross-check with Analyst Notebook; then expand the SIGINT target set accordingly, and then,  looping back  …. (usw, till the heat-death of the universe).

 

Actually that reads like a perfect set-up for a joke: 

“A cop, a Special Agent, and a SIGINTer walk into a bar…”

 

And, meta-actually, *that * joke-scenario (like all those A/B/C bar-jokes) can trifurcate further, according to whether the type  of humor accords with the world-view of A,B, or C -- usually some one of them comes  out the ‘winner’.

 

Try it if you like.

 

 

AI] Version A: The Cop’s Worldview (The Triumph of Common Sense)

 

A local beat cop, an FBI Special Agent, and a SIGINT analyst walk into a bar.

They sit down, and after a few minutes, a unruly patron at the end of the counter stands up, smashes a beer bottle, and starts screaming threats at the bartender.

The FBI agent immediately pulls out a wire notebook, slides into the booth behind the guy, and whispers into his collar, "Hold on, let's see who he calls next. He might be part of an interstate racketeering ring."

The SIGINT analyst pulls out a hardened tablet, starts mapping the bar’s Wi-Fi network, and mutters, "Wait, let me cross-examine the MAC address of his phone. If we trace his metadata three hops out, we can map the entire logistics chain of the brewery that supplied the bottle."

Meanwhile, the guy swings the broken bottle at the bartender.

The cop sighs, walks over, hits the guy over the head with a nightstick, and cuffs him. He walks back to the bar, finishes his draft beer, and looks at the other two. "While you guys were waiting for the heat-death of the universe, I just saved the bartender. Next round is on you."

 

Version B: The FBI Agent’s Worldview (The Triumph of the Syndicate Bust)

 

A local beat cop, an FBI Special Agent, and a SIGINT analyst walk into a bar.

They notice the bartender is acting nervous, slipping a small white envelope into the coat pocket of a man in a sharp suit.

The cop immediately reaches for his handcuffs. "In flagrante! I’m booking him for a hand-to-hand transaction right now."

The FBI agent grabs the cop's arm. "Hold your horses, rookie. If you bust him now, you get a misdemeanor. Let him walk."

The SIGINT analyst looks up from his screen. "Actually, I’m already intercepting the encrypted RF pings from the courier's key fob. If we monitor the signal attenuation over the next six months, we can build a predictive model of..."

The FBI agent ignores them both. He trails the courier out the door, follows him to a warehouse, documents the meeting with the regional cartel boss, wires a confidential informant, and three weeks later executes a multi-state, 40-defendant RICO indictment that makes the front page of the New York Times.

Back at the bar, the Agent raises a glass to the cop. "That's how you clear a ledger, son. You don't just swat the wasp; you dig up the nest."

 

Version C: The SIGINTer's Worldview (The Infinite Loop of Total Information)

A local beat cop, an FBI Special Agent, and a SIGINT analyst walk into a bar.

The cop says, "Hey, look at that guy in the corner booth. He just slipped a thumb drive to that woman."

The FBI agent's eyes light up. "A dead drop! Let’s tail her, find the safehouse, and arrain the whole cell on conspiracy charges."

They turn to the SIGINT analyst, who is staring placidly at a flashing terminal screen, completely unfazed.

"Don't bother," the analyst says, taking a slow sip of his drink. "We've been spoofing that exact thumb drive's firmware since 2018. The woman is a triple-agent we spun up through a front company in Cyprus to feed disinformation to a targeting cell in Murmansk. By analyzing the time-delay in her uploads, we've successfully mapped the social graph of the entire foreign ministry, which we are currently cross-referencing with a geostationary SIGINT sweep of their defense attachés."

The cop and the FBI agent stare at him, bewildered. "So... when do we arrest them?"

The analyst looks at them with genuine pity. "Arrest them? Why would we ever stop the data flow? If we arrest them, they'll just change their protocols, and I'd have to rewrite the entire Analyst's Notebook schema. Drink your beer. The system is working perfectly."

 

dbj]  Kudos on a triplex trifecta!

 

 

 

Memoriam / Memento

 

On this day of remembrance, we honor  both those who perished in the attacks, and those, volunteers or first-responders, who waded in to the still-steaming rubble, not only on that day, but for days or weeks thereafter,  braving the health-hazards which, alas, as the years rolled by, claimed many of them before their time.

On that day, I resolved to leave my corporate job -- not to simply move on to a different job, but to join a mission -- the CT mission -- down by the beltway.  That mission filled my waking hours for the next twenty years, until my recent retirement.

 

*

 

The mission has evolved, but it isn’t over.   It has morphed:   we now have more to fear from cyberattacks than from airplanes.   Still, certain strands from the old days may yet be discerned.  For instance:

The Huthis have re-emerged from media dormancy, and are once again making mischief in Yemen, and in KSA and the Red Sea as well.  Along with that -- a tiny detail, but the only one now within my wheelhouse -- there’s the matter of how to pronounce that Arabic tribal name.  Mispronunciations have reëmerged on the airwaves.   De minimis, maybe;  but, as a licensed Arabist and orthoëpist, I can still contribute my linguist’s mite to the pile.

 

Herewith a re-posting of a piece from 2019.

 

*    *    *

 

Having improbably broken out of their northwest-Yemen fastnesses, first to overrun Yemen itself, later to seek targets elsewhere,  a previously obscure Zaydi tribal formation  has now captured world headlines and are all over the airwaves.   It’s still early days, and two pronunciations are vying for mastery, one correct and one a mispronunciation.  The correct pronunciation is: 

 

HOO-thee 

 

with the voiceless version of the interdental fricative which English transcribes as th,  thus rhyming with toothy.  (Were it the voiced version of our ambiguous digraph th, it would rhyme with smoothie.)  Some broadcasters are mispronouncing it HOO-tee;  this post is an effort to strangle that in the cradle.   (We earlier offered the same service w.r.t.  ISIS vs ISIL;  in that case, the changeling won out.)

 

This interdental fricative phoneme is not especially common among the better-known world languages, but Arabic in fact has it, as a full-fledged phoneme (rather than as subphonemic contextual variants)  in both voiced and voiceless versions, respectively spelled  ذ   and   ث  .  The latter appears in the Yemeni name حوثي

 

Both the mispronunciation with “-tee”, and the variant spelling “Houthi”, stem from the French.  The French language lacks both of these “th” phonemes, and the h sound as well,   hence they are reduced to bleating   “oo-tee”.  But you wouldn’t want to sound like that, now would you.

 

Footnote:  Re "the 'h' sound": 

Ambiguous.  (“It depends upon what the meaning of “the ‘h’ sound” is.”)

Arabic actually boasts two phonemically distinct versions, a breathy one, passably similar to the English initial in "house", and a ‘strong’ or pharyngealized one, in Arabic spelled with ح .   There is no need to attempt the articulatory acrobatics necessary to bring forth that sound, most people learn it from the cradle or not at all.  Plain “HOO-thee” will do.

 

 

*    *    *

 

Update 14 Sept 2026: 

So now those frisky Huthis  are messing with the Bâb al-Mandab, gateway to the Red Sea.   Again, the pron:

The vowel in Bâb, core-meaning ‘door’, is phonemically long (a fact indicated by the circumflex in the transcription; a macron would do equally well), and phonetically somewhat fronted -- how múch fronted depends upon the dialect, but no matter: pronounce it like the “a” in man.

The vowels in Mandab (dictionary-meaning ‘lamentation’, but the application here is somewhat cloudy) are both short, in quantity; and in quality, they may vary, subphonemically,  between a relatively-fronted sound, and a more back one as in father.  

The noun is sometimes transcribed with an “e”: Bab el-Mandeb, in reflection of this vocalic fronting. 

Key point:  since the final vowel is short, the word-stress is on the initial syllable:  MAN
-dab.

So  now you know.

 

*Another* Day that will Live in Infamy

Historians have long wondered, how, as late as December 1941, with a world war raging, and a litany of Japanese grievances against the U.S., the officers and sailors at our principal Pacific naval base  were all sitting around with their thumbs up their butts, the ships berthed cheek-by-jowl, an impossibly alluring target.

A secondary puzzle was, did FDR have any advance intel that such an attack was likely, but ignored it?   (Let us set aside the conspiracy-theory that he knew but let it happen.) If so, he would take a seat beside Stalin, who likewise had been remarkably lackadaisical with respect to Nazi Germany, which had been waging blitzkrieg, but from whom he felt safe, owing to the piece of paper known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.  Stalin actually did have warning, from Japan-based master-spy Richard Sorge, and quite precise warning at that:    “Der Krieg wird am 22. Juni beginnen, ” a message sent on 15 June.   This was ignored.

Toleja so ...

A lesser-known possibility is that Washington did receive warning of an impending sneak-attack, and indeed from Sorge’s circle.   A Comintern memoirist who had repeated contact with Sorge  writes:

Kurz vor ihrem Hochgehen in Tokio   gab die Gruppe “Ramsay” [i.e., Sorge] noch eine hochbedeutsame Meldung  an zwei Adressaten durch:  Moskau und Washingtron.  Gewiß gelangte sie auf auf den Schreibtisch Stalins, vermutlich nicht auf den Schreibtisch Präsident Roosevelts:  die Meldung, daß die Japaner  ohne Kriegserklärung  auf den wichtigsten Flottenstützpunkt der USA im Pazifik, Pearl Harbor, für Anfang Dezember  unter strengster Geheimhaltung  vorbereiterten.
-- Ruth von Mayenburg, Hotel Lux (1978), p. 144

She goes on to state that Sorge’s Yugoslav coworker Branko Vukelić tipped off an American friend as to the impending attack, to no avail.

In any event, the lesson of 7 December was not promptly learned, for on 8 December, in the Philippines, another branch of the service was likewise caught with its breeches down.   Let Professor Wiki tell it:

Even though tracked by radar and with three U.S. pursuit squadrons in the air, when Japanese bombers of the 11th Kōkūkantai attacked Clark Field at 12:40 pm, they achieved tactical surprise. Two squadrons of B-17s were dispersed on the ground. Most of the P-40s of the 20th PS were preparing to taxi and were struck by the first wave of 27 Japanese twin-engine Mitsubishi G3M "Nell" bombers; only four of the 20th PS P-40Bs managed to take off as the bombs were falling.

A second bomber attack (26 Mitsubishi G4M "Betty" bombers) followed closely, then escorting Zero fighters strafed the field for 30 minutes, destroying 12 of the 17 American heavy bombers present and seriously damaging three others. Two damaged B-17s were made flyable and taken to Mindanao, where one was destroyed in a ground collision.

A near-simultaneous attack on the auxiliary field at Iba to the northwest by 54 "Betty" bombers was also successful: all but four of the 3rd Pursuit Squadron's P-40s, short on fuel and caught in their landing pattern, were destroyed No formal investigation took place regarding this failure as occurred in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. The Far East Air Force lost fully half its planes in the 45-minute attack, and was all but destroyed over the next few days, including a number of the surviving B-17s lost to takeoff crashes of other planes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines_Campaign_(1941%E2%80%9342)

Thus, not only December seventh, but December eighth,  is draped in crape.

Ungainly Acronyms

The thing we’re trying to do, to prevent another 9/11, keeps getting rebranded.

Stylistically, the low point came with the designation “GWOT”, which stands for “Global War on Terror”.

Those who prosecute this mission, normally pronounce it “GEE-watt” (though the acronym has largely fallen out of use);  but I persist in pronouncing it as a monosyllable,  the gwot -- rhyming with blot, not, sot, rot, snot, and other words less respectable still.   “How goes the gwot?” I greet those thus engaged.

An even uglier acronym (if such be possible), likewise self-important in origin, was used, satirically, against Hitler:

Before it was over, his commanding generals  were referring to him bitterly as Gröfaz:  a name ugly enough to have served some monster of mythology, some twisted kobold or goblin  embodying and spreading evil.  In actuality, it was a contraction of the title that General Keitel bestowed upon the Führer  in June 1940:  Größter Feldherr aller Zeiten.

-- Gordon Craig, Germany 1866-1945 (1978), p. 714

As to the pronunciation of this ungainly confection:  it is best described as something between a grunt and a groan, followed by an escape of acrid gas.
(For a similar exercise in non-IPA transcription, cf. the case of "oahspe".)
[More empirically:  GRU-fahts, with "U" as in "put".]

For a nice rhyming poem about this unusual creature, click here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/08/gare-le-grofaz.html

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

The US military-diplomatic world  abounds in acronyms pronounced phonetically as words.   Another ungainly one, designating (so to speak) the “Gröfaz” of the United States, is POTUS;  he rules over CONUS.   -- In the opening episode of “West Wing”, a young fellow gets an emergency call on his cell, explaining to his girlfriend that it is from “Potus”.  She said the fellow should learn not to call at ungodly hours, and moreover “Potus” is a strange name.  “It means ‘President Of The United States’”, he explains.

Note:  The pronunciations of such things is normally alphabetic-phonetic, rather than etymological.  Thus CONUS (meaning, ‘the Lower 48’) is pronounced CONE-uss, with long “o”, even though it is from  CONtinental United States, with short.

~

Und nun:  HoGeSa.

Further, re Cambodia in May 1970:

Formation d'un gouvernement en exil, le GRUNK (gouvernement  royal d'union nationale du Kampuchéa).

-- Mémoires du XXe Siècle , vol. 8, 1970-1979 (Bordas, 1989), p. 56

.

Code Red !

This morning,  the deck-chairs  look like snow-thrones  for polar bears.

            Code -- Red!

            Rest in bed.

            Time to soothe

            your sleepy head.

{ for more about the lovely snow,

   gently press …    here …. }

Why not spend this morning  learning everything there is to know
about our invisible snow-chums, the snowbunnies ?? 

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/snow%20bunnies

“A Delicate Truth”

It is not axiomatic, that the ideal Vorleser of a work  should be its author.  (One would not wish to sit through a performance of Heart of Darkness, or A Brief History of Time, under those terms.)   But  David Cornwall turns out to be a perfect interpreter of John Le Carré, in a recent audiobook recording.

Three of the secondary characters have a distinct local accent:  Glaswegian, Welsh, and Irish.  His rendition of these  fixes in pleasure and memory, what are in any event well-sculpted personalities.  The Welshman, who shows up one day in a remote village, rickety caravan in tow, and with a mysterious past (and demons lying inside), is a reprise of the Jim Prideaux character, who so memorably opens Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Two of the central characters -- professional diplomats -- have professionally and personally  rather flat affect.  (Again, cf. TTSS's Smiley.)The author is sufficiently confident about his own work, to let that happen, without worrying that we’ll be bored.

The story-arc hangs together nicely, moreso than in most of the thrillers we have waded through.
The novel (published 2013) is quite in tune with the times, in selecting, as theme, the beating-up on contractors in the defense/intel field.

Footnote:  The title of the book is as smarmy as that of  An Inconvenient Truth.   But it is a sight better title than Our Kind of Traitor , which we critiqued here.   One wishes to believe that neither stemmed from the author, but were foisted upon the novels by some publisher's underling (chained  drooling  in the basement, and let loose only for such functions) who normally has the last word in such marketing-related decisions.

Bait and Switch

John le Carré’s  Our Kind of Traitor (2010)  begins as auspiciously as any mystery-thriller in memory.

Among the chief pleasures of the mystery genre, is that the reader walks through its world with heightened senses:   Every oddity, each detail, may be a clue;  and the mind gathers them up  like a squirrel stashing-away nuts.    Ultimately, these clues need to cohere in some plausible way, or the reader feels cheated -- we have wasted our time.  But getting there is half the fun.

The old Cold War master’s recent novel  deftly adds another layer to that.

First, we meet an English academic couple, vacationing on a Caribbean island.   They meet a seemingly rich but rather louche Russian -- or rather, he scrapes acquaintance, via a dubiously ingratiating resort manager.   They agree to a game of tennis.  From there, things get a little strange, but not in a way that you can quite put your finger on.

So far so good -- the set-up is reminiscent of those superb opening scenes in David Mamet’s movie thriller-cum-puzzlebox “The Spanish Prisoner”.

But now comes the next narrative layer.

In the second chapter, the story suddenly breaks off, and we unexpectedly find ourselves amid the brick walls of a basement room, where our vacation-pair is being patiently, expertly interrogated;  it is unclear by whom.   This interlude lasts but a paragraph, as though a mental fugue, then we are back on the island, to resume the game.

Then again, we are back in that blank basement room.  Narratively, it is a flash-forward. The two interrogators have acquired names;  the interrogees  are wary but cooperative.   Are they themselves suspected of wrongdoing?  -- At this point, the rather dreamlike switching between the original “real-time” tennis-story, and this eerie alternate venue, is atmospherically quite effective, and reminiscent of William Kotzwinkle’s elegantly structured  The Exile.

Evidently the interrogators already somehow know a vast though lacunary amount  about some equally vast but perplexing conspiracy  that centers on, or at least involves, the Russian.   As in a police procedural, they proceed through the recounting of a seemingly innocent random tennis-match,  whose (bored) spectators consisted of the Russian’s friends and relations.  The female interrogator asks the wife:

“So where were the wee girls located at this point?  Below you?  Along the row from you?  Where, please.”  (Urgent italics in original.)

Somehow, such details are ineffably important.  The reader grows increasingly intrigued.

~

Only, it turns out the whole thing is an authorial scam.  None of those details come to really matter, most are unexplained;  and the only reason the interrogators even have a clue about the island events  is that the vacationers brought them a tape made by the Russian.   In other words, there was not some intricate pre-existing intelligence project, with Analyst-Notebook-style webs of interconnections  lining the walls;  so all that guff about where the wee girls sat  and the like, was just flimflam.

At that point, the only twist that might have saved the plot  would be if the interrogators turned out not to be MI5  (as we, and the vacationers, had assumed), but rather (in a false-flag situation) some sinister group connected to the Russian.   But no such luck.

In the end, the book does not deserve the category of mystery-thriller, but merely thriller (generally a lesser genre, except in cinema),  and not a very thrilling one at that.

Post-scriptum:
Given that le Carré spent decades writing about British counterintelligence, and given the history of Kim Philby and his fellow-moles, the title Our Kind of Traitor quite definitely should point to a Cambridge Five kind of scenario, in which an English agent covertly working for the nation’s enemies  is tolerated far too long, since he is “our kind”, one of the Old Boys, the Right Sort.   But nothing of it.  There are no traitors here, Cantabridgian or otherwise;  the title seems to have been imposed by the publisher, on a whim or by mistake.

~     ~     ~

By way of somewhat compensating  for even having taken up your time with all this,  here are a couple of snatches of “found poetry”  quarried from the course of three hundred pages of prose.

In the road above the basement,    an ambulance tears past,

and the howl of its siren

is like a scream for the whole world’s pain.

~

The rain was rattling like hailstones   on the car’s roof.

The windscreen wipers   groaned and sobbed

as they tried to keep up.

~

Holidaymakers   with sticks and sunhats

peered into windows   of souvenir  shops.

Tableau!

[For additional reviews, see  The Thriller Literature.]

[Update] In 2019,  le Carré published a better novel, though again with a bad and ambiguous title:  Agent Running in the Field. That could be read with run as either transitive or intransitive: "Agent-running in the field"; "Agent, running in the field".  And neither fits the plot.
Once again we begin with a court game, in this case badminton; and once again, the Russkies figure prominently.   Only, this time he got it right.

Do those who prepare the PDBs, labor in vain, to penetrate the Presidential bubble?

Some Presidents (like Obama) have been very open to detailed factual analysis from the diplomatic corps and the  IC, whereas others (like Clinton) pretty much blew them off.

As to the current situation -- I have nothing to say.  But again, a niblet of history.  The time is October, 1961:

[The US ambassador to Vietnam] concluded that Kennedy relied much more on news reports  and the impressions of intimates, than he did on the yards of cables he sent from the embassy  each day.

-- Richard Reeves, President Kennedy:  Profile of Power (1993), p. 240

The I’s have it (or, ISIS it is)

A couple of years back, when the media was confused about the labels ISIL versus ISIS, I posted a politico-linguistic explanation:

   http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/06/isil-vs-isis.html

Summary:

(1)  The expert bodies that had been following the group from the start (State Department, IC) used ISIL, where the “L” stands for “Levant”, which is the closest equivalent to the term in the Arabic name for the group,  al-Shâm, which includes Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine.

(2)  Since that is what he’d been hearing from his briefers, that is what President Obama said.

(3)  Possibly by confusion with the name of the goddess Isis, along with the unfamiliarity of the term Levant among the laity, the popular media took to using ISIS, despite the fact that this term singles out only Syria.   (As a sideshow to this, certain conspiracy-minded lo-info voters tried to read some nefarious significance into President Obama’s continued use of the term ISIL, that he and his discussion-mates had been using all along.)

But now we have a new POTUS -- one who, for most (or actually, still all) of his life, has paid more attention to the pop media, than to academia or the State Department.  And he says “ISIS” -- just like they do on TV.

Accordingly -- and gracefully -- government entities have bowed and followed suit:  where previously their briefing-papers used ISIL, now they use ISIS.

The IC thus arrives, by a circuitous route, at exactly the position advocated by The New Yorker a year ago:  to speak “ISIS” with the vulgar, but to maintain an academical-casuistical mental reservation, to the effect that the final “S” stands not for “Syria”, but for… al-Shâm.

 And thus does language evolve.

“Wes Brot ich ess’,  des Lied ich sing’.”

Given recognition at last

[Footnote:  An alternate explanation, that you’ll hear around town,

is that the use of ISIL was nixed because people couldn’t figure out how to pronounce it.  Some IC miscreants were even pronouncing the word to rhyme with pizzle.  (Look it up.)  And this, despite our wise guidance here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/09/isilisis-update-to-pronunciation-wars.html

Wa-Llahu-a`lamu.]

~

Actually -- there's a bright side to the switchover to “ISIS”:

(1)  That “Levant” business was always a stretch on ISIL’s part.  They never did get a real foothold outside Syria.

(2)  As for any association with the goddess Isis, that’s great:  any depiction of that goddess, ISIL would destroy on principle, so quasi-“naming them” after her  can only annoy them.   (For similar reasons, some people say Da’esh, since ISIL doesn’t like it.)

A propos of nothing at all;  added merely to annoy ISIS

. 

Non-Acronym of the day: “Jason”

The saga of Jason and the Argonauts  has spun off some delightful dubbings.  One, the “Argo” escapade, we discussed here.   Another was the secret elite group of physicists called Jason.  

An intrepid historian of science  ran down the true etymology, after an initial (indeed, “initials”) red-herring:

I asked my husband’s physicist-colleagues  “What’s Jason?” and collected the following:  Jason is an acronym fof July-August-September-October-November, the months this group of academic physicists   met secretly to solve the problems  the Defense Department couldn’t.

-- Ann Finkbeiner, The Jasons (2006), p.  xii

That suggestion quickly dissolves  in the universal solvent of Common Sense:

These stories I didn’t believe.  An acronym for months sounded silly.  [But more tellingly:] Academics couldn’t meet that long during the school year because they had institutional responsibilities.

-- id.

Another false-lead was the assertion that Jason was named after one of the members’ family dog.   Not.  The true story she tells on pages 39-40:  the wife of one of the members chose it, after the Greek myth -- most appropriate for a group that was going after the scientific equivalent of Golden Fleece.

The author adds some linguistic details:

“Jason is both a collective and a proper noun:  if you belong to Jason, you are a Jason.” (p. xiv)

Jason is usually capitalized [completely],  JASON, as though it were an acronym.  I have no idea why -- maybe because, written like a name [with only the first letter a capital], it might be taken to be a personal name.  I shall not capitalize it.

(p. xxviii)

Another reason it was initially written all-caps is that DoD and the IC often so style cover-terms.

~

The choice of Jason as a group name  is typical of the playfulness of physicists.  When DoD does the dubbing, the result is likely to be humdrum. As,

The task force was called the Defense Communications Planning Group, or DCPG, a name chosen for its meaninglessness.  (p. 77)

When a secret project does get a lexical designation, this may be chosen precisely to throw off anyone to whom the term might get leaked.  Thus, the Manhattan Project:  so named because it had nothing to do with Manhatten, and indeed was centered at locations far from any city.  One of the things they worked on (my Dad did, for one) was called “Tube-alloy”, a nicely misleading alias for uranium (which is an element, not an alloy).

Lawrence Livermore monostich

a glowing yellow tent   against a black sky

and a laser shining   straight up to God

[Source: Ann Finkbeiner, The Jasons (2006), p. 166]

“Red Mercury”

Re the age of alchemy:

Many authors chide the reader, telling him that, if he uses common mercury, he will be wasting his time;  instead he should use ‘the mercury of the philosophers’, our ‘our mercury’.

-- M. P. Crosland, Historical Studies in the Language of Chemistry (1962; ²1978), p. 26

There is a curious contemporary parallel to this, in the terrorists’ will-o’-the-wisp “red mercury”, a mythical WMD.

More on Renaissance cover-terms -- alchemical COMSEC:

There were many cases where the name of a substance … was definitely misleading, by falsely suggesting its composition.  For example, the term cinnabar of antimony suggests a compound of antimony, whereas the name was applied to red mercuric sulphide, prepared from antimony sulphide and mercuric chloride.

-- M. P. Crosland, Historical Studies in the Language of Chemistry (1962; ²1978), p. 88

Otnemem

[Note:  “Otnemem” is Western Bulgarian dialect for “Who am I?”]

[Meta-note:  That's a joke.  If you came here to read about the fine film "Memento",
here is where you want to be:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/01/redismembering-memento.html  ]

This morning, under circumstances exactly the same as for “Die Vermessung der Welt”, I saw what turned out to be a quite good and little-known movie, this time not about math, but about … Hackers (German for ‘hackers’, and pronounced  “Häckers”).   To add spice to it all, the movie was both (mostly) set, and seen, in a “skiff”.

The title of the movie is “Who Am I – Kein System ist sicher” (…. ‘no system is safe’).  Now, that’s the German title.   As an English movie-title, “Who Am I” would mean something quite different, and uninteresting.   But:  German.   What to conclude?

In German, the title is clever.   At the simplest level, it has its English meaning:  for the hackers are all, like Anonymous, anonymous, daring you to divine their identity.   But additionally:  in German and any other language, computer commands for sophisticated programming languages written in English, retain their shape in other languages;  so, the Unix command   whoami, which gives back your username, is the same in German (and not “Wer bin ich”, unless you go to the trouble of writing a whole extra interface).   -- For a really good movie-title, the producers would simply have left it at that;  but for practical reasons, for a German audience, they felt they needed to show that it was indeed a German-language movie.

"Wer bist du?"   "Wer bist *du*?"

The film turns out to be much more trickily plotted, and carefully interwoven, than one expects.   After having gradually grown disgusted by the red-herring plotlets that lead nowhere, in “24” and others, I really appreciated this. 

Example:  The protagonist, a sort of Peter Parker character (and later seemingly not one, and later maybe sort of after all), is first seen in the company of a lone IC interrogator.   He has confessions to make (he says), but first he wants to do a David Copperfield, and tell us all about his tragic life.  (That ploy strikes one as either merely human, or -- taking matters one step meta -- a scheme to curry sympathy from his captors;  but actually, it turns out to be much more meta than that.  And I can tell you this much, without it being a spoiler, because you’ll never guess.  Though at the end, it all does make sense.)  He trots out a forgettable little metaphor about hacking/online-masquerading being like magic-tricks;  and performs a humble one, involving four cubes of sugar that become one cube, and then four again.   And that easily-dismissible interlude turns out to be a schema for the plot-surprise of the whole movie.  (Again, no spoiler:  I dare you to guess.)

His interrogator, and the audience’s principal representative of the IC,  is a woman (no longer quite young, though celibate and, in this case,  barren), like Carrie in “Homeland”, or the heroine of “Zero Dark Thirty” (and the threatened senior in the upcoming Bauerless “24”), along with many a more forgettable recent offering.   Now, I’m no particular fan of affirmativeAction-Movies, especially when they go so far as to distort old classics (recasting Dr Watson as a woman, or Sherlock as gay);  but in this case, not only is she entirely plausible in the role, but her gender ultimately plays a (quite unexpected) role  (and no, it isn’t some tired trumped-up love-interest)  in the tricky ending to the plot.

~

This just in!

Reaktionen nach Cyberangriff auf Bundestag, IT-Experten kritisieren mangelnden Schutz vor Hacker-Angriffen, NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss vernimmt Kanzleramt-Mitarbeiter, Juristen kritisieren Vorratsdatenspeicherung

http://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/sendung/ts-8645.html

The movie could not be more timely.

~

Before even delving into the structure and execution of the film, certain basic ‘vital statistics’  tell in its favor.

* I’ve often knocked the prevalence of the “serial killer” as a central figure in movies.  Serial killers -- apart from being vanishingly rare in the actual landscape of crime, let alone of history and society as a whole -- are inherently uninteresting, since, being psychopaths, they fall outside the Christian calculation of morality:  a serial killer is not so much a real villain like Donald Trump or Richard the Third, as a mere Godzilla.

By contrast, hackers are increasingly prevalent, almost ubiquitous -- in post-industrial societies, almost everyone’s life has been effected, directly or indirectly, in multiple ways.  (My own, for example, by Chinese hackers, in the headlines just this morning.)   Most of them are reasonably complex people, with a sense of right and wrong -- though the sinful Superbia that can easily infect them as they exult in their expertise, can pervert them ever further from their initial path.  This movie follows a group of hackers  from the inside, neither romanticizing nor demonizing.

*  Unlike “24”, which grossly abused the trope, season after season, “Who Am I” features no moles, no Mr Big (the one character who seems as though he might fit that latter bill, is poignantly, almost comically deflated at the end).   People’s motivations for their sketchy actions are quite comprehensible, a mere tweak to the everyday;  no unmotivated treacheries serving as a diabolus ex machina to keep a wheezing plot going.

* While definitely a thriller, the movie does not rely on violence to supply the thrills.   The closest we get is a brief glimpse of three still images that show only edge of what seems a murder scene (but which turns out to be something else).   It would not need a rating more restrictive than PG-13 -- and indeed, in Germany, it was explicitly recommended for schoolchildren. (“Der Film wurde über die SchulKinoWochen für die Unterrichtsfächer Deutsch, Politik, Sozialkunde, Ethik, Informatik, Philosophie, und Psychologie ab der 8. Schulklasse als Unterricht im Kino vorgeschlagen.” -- Wikipedia.)

~

As in “War Games”, the jeune premier and his love interest Meet Cute;  a nerd, he tries to woo her with what mite he has to offer, hacking her school’s computer to improve her grade.   Later, another motif from that movie is borrowed -- using Visitor’s Pass status to penetrate a highly sensitive secure (not) facility.

The nod to the “Spiderman” movies is even more explicit:  the marginalized young man dreams of being a Superhero.   The actor actually looks like Peter Parker, and plays the part throughout -- never turning (implausibly) into someone like Spiderman;  which is why this movie, though fiction, is woven strictly from patches of reality, whereas “Spiderman” is mere fantasy, barely above the level of onanism.

[Fortzusetzen …]