Ten years ago this week, a campaign of terror began in which over 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by Hutu extremists, mostly armed with machetes, garden hoes, and spiked clubs. Thousands of women were raped; many of them now live with AIDS. Thousands of children were orphaned. In the terrible slaughter that followed, spurred by hate propaganda broadcast by the French-backed Hutu government, it is estimated that about 8,000 people were killed every single day of the rampage.

Also, some white dude offed himself.

Guess which event is memorialized on the covers of dozens of glossy magazines all over the newsstand? And guess which one is being described as the unique event of suffering that defined a generation of American youth?

If I have to listen to one more self-important 20-something journalist waxing nostalgic about his teenage ennui and how Kurt spoke to it, I am going to go out into the street and start systematically knocking people’s hats off.

Posting on Geekery Today may be held up for a while in the next several days, as I grudgingly prepare the paperwork for my annual surrender of tribute to the State.

In honor of the occasion, though, you can follow my argument on Slashdot with Shakrai, who castigates those who would dare to cheat the State of its booty. Since I argue that taxation is nothing more than robbery with more paperwork, I can’t muster much outrage at those who lie to the taxman in order to keep some of their own damn money (thank you very much!).

For what it’s worth, while I don’t see anything morally wrong in cheating on your taxes, that doesn’t mean that I do it; since I make most of my money through self-employment I no doubt look pretty suspicious to the IRS from the get-go, and I have no desire to encourage them to come along and help me get my finances in order by being less than scrupulous in my reporting. It just goes to show that while nothing immoral could count as expedient, lots of things that are morally permissible are still not particularly smart. Such is life in this possible world.

In international news, Donald Evil Lord Skeletor Rumsfeld has announced that the situation in Iraq is not out of control. Meanwhile, in Iraq, your tax dollars are hard at work:

FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) U.S. Marines battled insurgents for control of this Sunni Muslim stronghold Wednesday, calling in airstrikes against a mosque compound where witnesses said dozens were killed in six hours of fighting. An anti-U.S. uprising led by a radical Shiite cleric raged for the fourth day in southern cities.

The Abdel-Aziz al-Samarrai mosque was hit by U.S. aircraft that launched a Hellfire missile at its minaret and dropped a 500-pound bomb on a wall surrounding the compound.

The U.S. military said insurgents were using the mosque for a military fire base. Iraqi witnesses estimated 40 people were killed as they gathered for afternoon prayers. U.S. officials said no civilians died.

An Associated Press reporter who went to the mosque said the minaret was standing, but damaged, apparently by shrapnel. The bomb blew away part of a wall, opening an entry for the Marine assault. The reporter saw at least three cars leaving, each with a number of dead and wounded.

Chaos spreads, people are murdered, and you and I are forced to foot the bill for a war that many of us wanted absolutely no part of. Sooner or later there will be a reckoning for the terrible destruction that is being wrought on Iraq; I can only hope against hope that terrorist logic will not win the day, and that we will not be forced to face the consequences yet again for things that other people decided to do–using stolen money and professing to act on our behalf.

I’m no great fan of Hillary Rodham Clinton. But she does have her moments. Among them is this:

It’s always sad when anyone dies.

… when asked for her thoughts when J. Strom Thurmond finally shuffled off this mortal coil.

(Thanks to One Good Thing for the pointer.)

I’d like to interrupt the recent stream of political posts for a moment to geek over the prospects of robotic automobiles. Well, not quite; there will be a bit of political grumbling before the end, and there are a few mixed feelings about the technology. But first–the robots!

DETROIT, April 3 — The modern car does not have to guess your weight. It already knows.

It watches how you drive and it can pull a Trump. Skid, and before you can blink, you’re fired — the car is driving for you, if only for a moment. Cars today can decide when to brake, steer and can park themselves. They can even see.

In short, the back-seat driver now lives under the hood. And it does more than just talk.

This is all technology on the road now, if not in a single country or car. But industry engineers and executives view it as the start of a trend that will play out over the next decade, in which automobiles become increasingly in touch with their surroundings and able to act autonomously.

…

Diminishing returns from air bags and other devices that help people survive crashes have led to a wave of new technology to help avoid accidents. Or, if an on-board microprocessor judges a collision to be inevitable, the car puts itself into a defensive crouch. Mercedes S-Class sedans will even start shutting the sunroof and lifting reclined seats if a collision is deemed likely.

This trend is made possible by the car’s evolution from a mechanical device to an increasingly computerized one, in which electronic impulses replace or augment moving parts. That means microprocessors can take control of the most basic driving functions, like steering and braking.

At the same time, there is a parallel evolution in sensory technology. Most advanced safety systems are equipped with sensors that look inside the car, tracking tire rotation, brake pressure and how rapidly a driver is turning the steering wheel.

…

Japanese automakers have pushed the boundaries of these technologies farthest in their home market, a society with an affinity for gadgetry. Toyota recently introduced a car that parks itself.

I love gadgets. And while I like having a car available, I hate the routine unpleasantness that goes along with driving most places you need to get. A self-parking car is just so tomorrow–and so nice a solution to one of the more routine frustrations of driving, that it will leave my geeky soul all a-glow for weeks.

I do have to confess, though, that the glow wears off a little when I think about it more. Sure, I’m all for intelligent machines–and robots, no less! And sure, I think that increased road safety is all for the best. But–as Thomas Landauer pointed out back in 1996 in The Trouble With Computers–all too often we end up wasting a lot of productive energy by investing it in sophisticated technological solutions to problems that were created by the inappropriate application of technology in the first place. Landauer discusses this in the context of uncritical transfer of tasks to the computer; but it’s no less true of transportation.

Think of it this way: the reason that people are working on sophisticated robo-cars is because when you have millions of people individually driving cars on crowded streets at high speeds, it makes it all too likely that a lot of people will crash into each other and get killed. One way to do this is to pour a lot of technological effort into making the cars more aware of their surroundings and able to automatically take actions that will reduce the likelihood of a crash, and reduce the damage if one occurs.

Another way to get cars to carry a lot of people without running into each other is to tie a bunch of them together, move them as a unit, and call it a train.

But trains have floundered over the past century while automobiles have flourished. Why? Well, not because stressful, dangerous, polluting, rage-inducing car commutes are really how the average person wants to get from place to place; it has a lot more to do with the fact that the various levels of government in the United States have effectively forced us to adopt automobiles as our method of mass transit through creating a cartelized financial disaster-area in the train industry, and by pouring billions of dollars every year into subsidies for creating and maintaining free highways.

Don’t get me wrong. I wish I had the resources to get myself one of those self-parking cars. I think a future filled with robo-mobiles is one I’d like to live in. But I also appreciate a simple solution to what ought to be a simple problem. So two cheers for robo-cars, and one boo held back for the Interstate Highway System.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled jeremiads against the Bush Administration.

A happy slightly-belated April Fools’ Day! (It’s after midnight on April 2, but, on the other hand, I don’t consider the day to have ended until I go to bed. So there.)

The web is full of silly posts today; this website, bold in its conformity, will be no different. Today’s selection is a bit of a re-run; Alina Stefanescu tipped me off to this April Fools’ 1995 article from the Economist:

THE new field of empirical mathematics (EM), a discipline pioneered in the early 1970s by P.G. Somerset and elaborated by V.M. Singh, has already scored some notable successes. Among these are a shortened procedure for the renormalisation of transintegers and refinement of Haberlein’s encryption algorithm. EM, as its name suggests, seeks advances in mathematical theory by means of counting things. As might be expected, the development of computer technology has allowed far more rapid and comprehensive counting of things than previously possible.

It is the belief of the present authors that our work in progress may constitute EM’s most important advance to date. In the course of conducting routine surveys of things counted so far, we discovered that the number of things tended generally to increase more than it decreased. Among the things that proliferated were (in alphabetical order) area of the universe, cable television channels, crime, Economist columns, four-minute milers, lawyers, persons with jobs, persons without jobs, population, potholes, tarts, torts, toxic wastes, video games and weevils. Some things did, of course, decrease. However, our statistical analysis demonstrates to a high degree of confidence that a strong element of hysteresis, or lag-induced upward stickiness, is present in the numbers of things. Put simply, on average everything is proliferating.

This would seem puzzling. Given the conservation laws of natural science, one would expect to see a rough balancing of things that became more numerous with things that became fewer. The persistent upward drift in the average number of things–or burgeoning, as the news media call it–suggests that what is changing is not things themselves but rather numbers. Numbers are losing their value over time; counting any given array of things requires slightly more numbers each year. We refer to this phenomenon as number inflation.

…

A great many previously puzzling phenomena are now explained–or, more accurately, seen to be illusory. For instance, many have wondered why ever-more athletic records are broken every year. The answer is that adjusted for number inflation, human athletic performance turns out to have been roughly constant over time. Similarly, astronomers devote much attention to the apparent fact that the universe is expanding. Since the universe cannot expand forever (eventually it will run out of space and bump into something), this hypothesis seems less than satisfactory; and, indeed, when proper integer-value adjustments are performed, the expansion of the universe proves to be an artifact of number inflation.

It is, however, in the realm of human affairs and social policy that the implications are richest and most consequential. For example, in America a widely noted phenomenon is the consistent tendency of budget deficits to increase despite all efforts to reduce them. Why should something grow even when cut? Because, of course, what needs to be deflated is not the deficit but the digits.

(The best part about this is that the satire is even better for those of us who are praxeologists. After all, are the findings of number inflation any more ridiculous than the idea that forcing banks to give money away for free is an effective way to encourage productive investments, or that taking billions and billions of dollars worth of human labor and blowing it up in another country is an effective way to increase overall wealth? Yet these are typical results produced by the practitioners of empirical economics…)