| 05 October 2006 Multi-path We had an extended meeting in the Pentagon yesterday about multi-path communications. We were in the little cafeteria off the Third Corridor on the second floor. We were there because a zealous contract security officer was on the prowl in the office we were supposed to visit, and word was that my associate's laptop was subject to immediate confiscation. You wouldn't recognize the magnificent old pile of a building. The old eating facilities were vast spaces filled with spare utilitarian tables and chairs. The food came from steam tables and a central kitchen. The motif was Willow Run industrial, circa 1941. Now there are brown couches and semi-comfortable chairs in what the designers have created as a realistic simulation of a shopping mall food court. The old Pentagon continues to be reamed out and its contents carted away. The workmen are scouring out the wedge under where the Army had its headquarters, taking things right down to bare concrete. The parts of the building that have been refurbished look just like a real office building. Having a meeting in the food court meant distraction. While explaining the principle of multi-path radio communications is a challenge, but actually an illuminating exercise. We explained that our wave-form acted just like the storm of voices around us, and that our unique processing algorithm acted just like the human brain, permitting us to understand each other, hunched over the laptop, and discarding all the extraneous noise. I think the meeting went well, though it was hard to tell. When we emerged from the Building it was unseasonably warm, and I parted company with my associate on the train under the Macy's department store to retrieve my car. I reluctantly turned on the radio, cringing at what I might hear. There was a blast of multi-path communications, enough to make me sick. The Foley scandal was continuing to unravel, and the famous phrase “What did they know, and when did they know it” was on the lips of the commentators. Scandal is the very life blood of this town. The most consequential recent one was the Republican's salacious fixation with Mr. Clinton's consensual conduct in the Oval Office. The gravest was the public assumption that Republican Gary Condit had actually murdered his intern and hidden her body in the Rock Creek Park. Those two scandals were heterosexual; but even the inverse is not new. Barney Frank, D-MA, was accused of having a roommate who ran a gay escort service out of his Capitol Hill row house, and he is still serving the people of Boston. Gary Studds, D-MA, got a pass on exactly the same situation as Mark Foley R-FL. Of course, Studds took his scandal a little further. He actually “dated” a seventeen-year-old page back in 1983, which is something that Foley is not accused of doing, at least not yet. Studds was censured for his conduct and then re-elected for another seven terms, which tells you something about the people of Massachusetts. Good or bad, I don't know. Those were different times, and the Democrats had a lock on the House. They also did not run around spouting moral platitudes as substitutes for national policy. On the whole, I think Foley's resignation should about cover it, pending evidence of physical crime. I say that as the father of a former Senate page. I was comfortable with the security that body had in place, but they say that body is a more civilized place than the House. If something had actually happened to him, even an e-mail, I might feel differently. But it didn't, and I don't. Across town earlier that day, even as we were trying to make ourselves heard in the din of the food court, Christopher R. Hill, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, was talking to the US-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins University. He is quoted as saying: “We are not going to live with a nuclear North Korea, we are not going to accept it.” Those are strong words, if the quote is true, and I assume he was speaking for all of us. He concluded his remarkable address by saying that the North “… can have a future or it can have these weapons. It cannot have both.” That was when I had to turn off the radio and think extra hard. I assume that if Mr. Hill is going to do something in Korea he is going to want someone to go along with him. I have spent too much of my life looking across de-militarized zones as it is, and I have other things on my calendar. Adding war with Korea is going to be a scheduling problem. There are American troops in peril on the battlefield. Real threats from real bad people in the homeland. Greenhouse gases and the sea-levels are rising. We cannot even address the oil crisis that fuels the whole thing. I agree something must be done, though for the life of me I do not know what. I suppose Mr. Hill considers that we have tried everything else, and we are on the brink of having apocalyptic lunatics acquiring arsenals of nuclear weapons. Maybe the State Department is trying to raise the level of discourse, get us back to talking about something serious. That seems unlikely, though I am going to keep listening and hoping, even if it means turning the radio back on. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |