Just a few months following his inauguration as president of the world’s most powerful military, political and economic entity, Barack Obama spoke of the need to deal with the threat of attacks from hostile states and terrorists on the electronic information infrastructure of the US. Obama was following a number of expert commentators on the subject of cyber warfare. His speech was at the time widely reported, but it appears relatively little discussed.

I’m reminded now of Obama’s cyber warfare speech by an announcement from the University of Hertfordshire that Luciano Floridi, a UNESCO-funded philosopher specialising in information and computer ethics, has been awarded a grant of €170k from the European Union’s Marie Curie programme to embark on a two-year research project titled “The Ethics of Information Warfare: Risks, Rights and Responsibilities”.

Working with University of Padua philosopher Mariarosaria Taddeo, an expert on trust in electronic information systems, Floridi plans to address the following three questions:

1. How can the risks of increasing the number of ICT-based conflicts in the world and hence of civilian casualties be avoided?
2. How can the erosion of individual rights of privacy, anonymity and personal liberty be balanced against the right of a community to be safe from cyber-attacks?
3. How can the levels of responsibilities for the actions performed by robotic weapons be fairly evaluated?

“The nature of conflict is changing and we now witness scenarios where countries may have wars online and use IT to disrupt the proper functioning of whole social sectors, such as energy, transport or health services, and hence put human lives at risk,” says Floridi. “The need for a new ethics of information warfare has arisen due to the demands of cyberwar.”

It may not be as headline grabbing as Obama’s lofty rhetoric, but ethics research is needed to resolve the kind of problems outlined by politicians, public and academics alike. Surely it’s time to move beyond the simplistic security vs civil rights debate that fills the comment pages of our supposedly serious newspapers and popular journals.

Forgive me, but I’m a little confused.

Following media and political attacks on the UK’s security services owing to their alleged collusion with CIA torture of suspected Islamist terrorists, we’ve had a gaggle of government ministers insist that Britain’s intelligence agencies are “the best in the world”. Yesterday, however, up popped a former director of MI5 to say that she hadn’t a clue what was going on.

Given that knowing what was going on was a fundamental part of Eliza Manningham-Buller’s job description, you must admit that her candid admission doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the organisation she led for five years.

Our Lord on a marmite jar lid…

“We’ve had a tough couple of months; my mum’s been really ill and it’s comforting to think that if he is there, he’s watching over us.”

Next, Our Lady in a toilet bowl.

NGC 346 (source: ESO) – click for a larger view

Over two hundred thousand light years away, in the constellation of Tucana (the Toucan), the young star cluster NGC 346 is like many others. With images of such astronomical phenomena you see a relative concentration of points of light, and possibly a wispy nebular of gas and dust. The pictures are often pretty, and some may even be described as dramatic. But what impresses me most about images of star fields is the sense of scale and perspective they can impart.

The computer on which I write is an Apple Mac. One of the features of Apple’s OS X operating system is a backup program that takes historical snapshots of the system, and the user interface to this so-called “Time Machine” is a field of stars that move out of the screen toward the viewer. The effect is an example of “eye candy”, and to my mind it is rather tacky.

Look at a static image of real stars, however, and the power of imagination alone can set the mind roving through the field. With a large enough picture of stars in front of me, I feel myself sucked into the image, and this can be an exhilarating experience.

The Small Magellanic Cloud within which NGC 346 is located may be no more than a tiny satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, but the distances involved are nonetheless vast. To put matters in stark if not ludicrous perspective, NGC 346 is around 200 light years across, or nearly two million billion kilometres. This is roughly equivalent to seven thousand billion times the length of Wales, or fifty times the distance between the Sun and its nearest stellar neighbours.

The headline above may seem unkind, but rest assured that the target is not the late Michael Foot, but rather British media reporting of current affairs and one of the most principled politicians of the 20th century. I was never particularly keen on Foot’s Old Labour politics, but I like to think I can recognise a great individual, whatever his ideological makeup or level of management skill.

RIP Michael Mackintosh Foot (1913–2010)

It’s official – Prince Charles and other senior members of the Windsor-Saxe-Coburg-und-Gotha clan are at the heart of the British state, but entirely out of sight.

Are you aware that Westminster MPs voted last night to amend freedom of information rules so as to provide an absolute exemption for top royals? I thought not. That’s because the move has so far barely been reported.

It all comes down to the definition of “public authority”.

“Far from protecting royal impartiality this amendment gives Charles a green light to get even more stuck in to politics… We can only conclude that the palace has a lot to hide and the government is helping them keep it hidden. It is time for full disclosure on royal lobbying and their meddling in politics.”

Republic has more.

The veneer of democracy is looking decidedly tattered.

Gobby Little Englander Nigel Farage MEP is overly fond of overblown metaphors, but all of us who are unconstrained by the need for political and diplomatic niceties can play that game. Farage may think that he belongs in this category, but his recent outburst in the European Parliament could so easily come back to bite him in the bum.

This afternoon Farage looks set to be disciplined by the president of the European Parliament for his insulting behaviour in the chamber. Last week Farage turned on Herman van Rompuy, saying among other things that the European Council president had “the charisma of a damp rag”.

Farage knew exactly what effect his rant would have, addressed as it was to a domestic audience, courtesy of the TV cameras and an army of scribbling hacks who were no doubt briefed beforehand about the planned spectacle. Farage cares not what his fellow European parliamentarians think of him, and is unconcerned with any sanctions that Jerzy Buzek may impose today. In a few weeks Farage will stand for a Westminster seat, and, whether or not he takes Buckingham from its nominally Conservative incumbent, his political future lies in London, not Brussels.

So what should Buzek do? If the European Parliament president has any nerve, he will use the British media to address the voters of Buckingham. Whatever these electors may think of the European Union and its leaders, they should ask themselves whether Nigel Farage is a man of honour and integrity. Do they want an MP who is so contemptuous of the hand that for the past decade has fed him so handsomely?

Wales’ finest wish you a happy St David’s Day.

Yacky dar!

Venus Express reveals the complex cloud patterns of our neighbouring planet

For earthbound sky watchers Venus is the bright star that chases the Sun below the horizon in the western evening sky. When it comes to scientific knowledge of our neighbouring planet, popular accounts often paint a Dantean picture of a fiery cauldron with a crushingly dense atmosphere.

Ultraviolet image of the southern hemisphere of Venus, taken by the VMC instrument onboard Venus Express. The picture was taken from a distance of 30,000 km from the surface, and shows how the planet’s clouds change from spotty and fragmented at low-latitudes, to streaky at mid-latitudes, and hazy around the poles.

That hellish vision is part of the story, but only with the European Space Agency’s Venus Express mission have we come to appreciate the complexity of a world which like Earth is meteorologically active. On 11 April 2010 Venus Express will have been four years in orbit around the planet, and during that time the mission has provided much scientific insight into the Venusian atmosphere.

Orbiting close to the Sun, Venus is subject to intense heating, and this leads to a dynamic atmosphere. We have long known that Venus is covered with dense clouds rich in sulphuric acid. Now, with observations down to a few hundred metres’ resolution from the Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) and VIRTIS thermal imaging spectrometer onboard Venus Express, we have learned that the clouds range from fragmented patches around the equator, covered with a bright lace of sulphuric acid droplets, to an almost featureless haze high above the poles.

The equatorial patchwork of clouds is due to vigorous convective heating of discrete parcels of air in the region where most of the incoming solar energy is deposited. At mid-latitudes this mottled cloud pattern gives way to streaky, banded shapes, providing evidence of more laminar atmospheric flow. The transition between these two regimes is one of the outstanding questions in our understanding of the atmosphere of Venus.

Perhaps the most spectacular cloud feature observed by Venus Express is an ‘S’-shaped polar vortex around 1500 km across, which appears to be part of a global vortex-like organisation of the planet’s atmosphere. The feature rotates around the south pole at latitudes above 70 degrees, with a period of around two Earth days. On a planetary scale, clouds on Venus extend upwards from around 45 km altitude; the cloud top at low- and mid-latitudes is located at about 75 km altitude, descending to 65 km in the eye of the polar vortex.

By analysing light from stars as they set through the atmosphere of Venus, the SPICAV spectrometer on Venus Express has revealed that the night-side cloud layer extends up to 90 km altitude in the form of an opaque haze, and another 15 km on top of that as a transparent haze. Ozone is present at higher altitudes.

In October of last year the European Space Agency extended the Venus Express mission to the end of 2012, allowing for some overlap in time with the Japanese Planet-C spacecraft. It is expected that the complementary approaches of the two missions will lead to further major discoveries about the atmosphere of Earth’s sister planet.

Further reading

Titov et al., “Venus express: Highlights of the nominal mission”, Solar System Research 43, 185 (2009)

“You’re my bitch now, Mr Seidenfaden!”, says Saudi lawyer Faisal Yamani.

Denmark’s once respected broadsheet newspaper Politiken yesterday lost its battle with journalistic integrity, and gave up the ghost in a deep sigh of petite-bourgeois liberal angst. The funeral will be a private affair, attended only by a small number of shame-faced hacks and members of the Copenhagen chatterati who would rather not be photographed, let alone quoted.

The newspaper’s demise was precipitated by an apology from the editors for their re-publication in 2008 of the infamous Mohammed cartoons. Denmark’s government is not particularly pleased by the latest development.

In other pages, Politiken declares that a former editor spied for the Zionist Entity. Stories about Danish Jews disembowelling København kittens for fiddle strings will no doubt follow.