USS Clueless: This isn’t a Clone War, it’s a Clown War.

How good would the Jedi be at defending themselves against cluster bombs? If you forget the gee-whiz CGI and analyze the abilities of the weapons themselves, the infantry turn out to be using weapons with approximately the same capabilities as the American M1 Garand, the standard infantry rifle used by the US Army in World War II. Their aircraft are approximately equivalent to Korean war fighters armed with medium caliber cannon.

Nobody in that galaxy a long time ago and far away seems to have invented bombs or missiles! (We’ve seen them used once; to attack the first Death Star.) Their aircraft strafe; the weapons on their walkers are little better. Their infantry use human-wave tactics. The US military of 2002 would make short work of them. If one of their aircraft tried to take on ours, it’d take an AMRAAM up the snoot long before reaching gunnery range. Apache gunships would destroy their walkers. Then heavy bombers would slaughter their men on the ground with area-effect weapons. How good would the Jedi be at defending themselves against an FAE with�a light saber?

And the clones, the clones; why did the bad guys even bother with them? It’s not like there’s ever been any difficulty coming up with cannon fodder.

I guess the answer Lucas would have to that is: he never intended to make something along the lines of a realistic war movie. The real malaise is a little deeper, I think. See the opening sequences of Gladiator and LOTR:FOTR, the Mahabharata telesoap telecast on Indian networks, Attack of the Clones… all show epic battles, but the basic setting is the same: battlefields full of jostling soldiers, blood and mayhem all around.

On the other hand, the rules of war have changed. The last major war fought that way would be WWII, with a similar pattern followed in (among others) Korea, India/Pakistan and India/China — and Vietnam. Today, the attitude — perhaps shaped by the huge losses in Vietnam — is (and rightly so): put men on the ground, but don’t turn them into cannon fodder. Hence the entire paraphernalia of cluster bombing, surgical strikes, media management, the whole nine yards. The entire paradigm of war changed in the last 10 years or so — starting with the Gulf War in 1991 and the Afghan Conflict now. And while it is undoubtedly better for all actually involved, it makes for pretty tepid storytelling. Can you imagine the battle on Ice Planet Hoth in ESB reduced to a series of tactical sorties? No? Well, I wouldn’t count on the battlefields disappearing from storybooks and movie theatres just yet.

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Beyond 2000: Perfect Match. Until now, a donated kidney has been a tragic impossibility for many people with renal disease. But now scientists at the Johns Hopkins University in Maryland have come up with a way for kidneys to be used in transplants regardless of their type.

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BBC: Fake fingerprints trick biometric systems. How long before retinal scans crumble, I wonder?

Update: The good people (person?) at Neuroprosthesis News point out that iris identification may be much more reliable than retinal scans.

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Dave on the Strange Case of Dr Lessig and the Campus Police.

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Hollywood movies finally releasing nearly on time in India: Look at these release dates: Spider-Man: May 24, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones: June 7, ET: May 31, Men in Black II: August, Minority Report: August. All of them screened in India within weeks of their US premieres, which is much better than the humongously stupid 4 months I had to wait for LOTR:FOTR.

I think I have a happy summer ahead of me. All of these movies ought to be pretty watchable.

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ToI: Heavy Shelling along border. The situation’s not yet out of control, because mortar fire is a level both India and Pakistan have done and come down from in the recent past. What’s different about this time is that there’s much less talk about retaliation and aggresive action — which in Indian bureaucracy is a sign that they are serious about something. I still think India will find the diplomatic game easier to play. At least it results in less body bags.

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Google is a cool search engine, but has a pretty glaring problem when indexing blog posts. Acts of Volition documents this flaw using a picturesque metaphor of Joe, Sam and hang gliding. Essentially the problem is: the page is not necessarily the finest unit of web content. In a blog’s case, the post is. Garrity went on to suggest BlogML, which would right these wrongs via XML. Others suggested proximity operators for Google.

While proximity operators are nice, they don’t necessary solve the problem. BlogML does, but it’s overkill. A better solution would use what bloggers already use — HTML and RSS. Here’s my take. It’s a voluntary system, but is a win-win for searchers, blog authors and a search engine’s credibility.

Here’s how it’d work: any page that identifies itself as a weblog would include a meta tag like this in all its pages: and . Further, the block within the weblog where the posts begin and end would be bounded by the HTML comments and . Given markup like this, it would be trivial for a search engine to consult the ’semantically enriched’ version, but only for the content region within the html that needs to parsed in a semantically richer manner. And RSS (or any other public DTD) can be used — in this case, RSS is perfectly adequate since it demarcates posts very unambiguously.

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While playing around with Metadot, I discovered WebGUI. If you are looking for a Free toolset to build an online community with, check both of these out.

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The Standard: Everything you think you know about Star Wars is wrong.

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The Best Star Wars Review Line goes to CmdrTaco:

Anakin is little improved from menace. I know he’s supposed to be full of anger and angst, but mostly he just comes off as constipated and bitchy.

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