Aircraft Carrier

I think one thing the US government can save some money on is to have more missile destroyers than aircraft carriers. And missile defence system is the most important in the future.

- Wen
Sent from mobile phone

Obama administration is going to miss its own deadline for Gitmo report on how to deal with prisoners there. I think after they looked at all the facts and talked to people, they finally realized that Gitmo is very hard to be closed. I think it is ok for him to miss the deadline, because closing it so soon is not realistic. Liberals are going to attack Obama, however, just like they have done many times before, they have no idea what they want to do.

Do liberals really believe the prisoners in Gitmo are innocent? Do they really want to take the responsibility if some of these guys were aquited by a civilian court, released and then killed more Americans? Are they going to pay for the trials? Can they convince any local people to allow these prisoner to stay in their local jails? What if other prisoners try to kill the Gitmo detainees? Are the liberals going to pay for the extra care we have to provide? What about security and jail breaking protection?

None of the liberal have a realistic solution and Obama finally found out the truth. At least I think Obama is doing a responsible thing by trying to meet an realistic deadline that's set out of thin air. Without any study and work done how could Obama and his team came up with a realistic date in the first place?

I read that some researcher are moving semiconductors to use carbon instead of silicon. It makes sense, because both are in the same column of the periodic table, and do share some common properties.

But besides the more immediate benefit of faster circuit and smaller geometry, I think move to carbon opens the door to connect electronic to organic living world. Most of the living organisms are made from carbon based compounds. With hydrogen, oxygen, and some other elements, nature created this vast diversity of plants and animals. Once electronics starts moving towards carbon, I can see the next step is to use carbon based organic compounds in circuits. May be some more complicated logic can be more efficiently done by organic compounds than bits of electrons. There is already research on DNA based computing. And quite possible, eventually human can build organisms and eventually living things to do some basic work for us.

The other effort on this is from the biochemistry and biophysics side of science. There, people are looking at what are already made in the world and try to understand how organisms work. If we can understand more about how living things use chemistry reaction to achieve complicated actions, electronics can use the same principle to control the electronics.

Anyway, I wish some science fiction writers would take on this kind of thoughts and put this idea ahead of current technology. After all, a lot of Sci Fi ideas became real in the last century. Who could imagined that people can pull out a small device from their pocket, take picture, talk to other people, lookup information and get connected to millions back to the 19th century?

I am very hopeful that human can achieve creating lives, as long as human society does not collapse on its own. Wars and social unrest is really the real challenge of allow these innovation to become real.

The latest riot in Xinjiang shows how hard it is to keep a harmonic society. I want to talk about two things.

The first thing is my thinking about Uyghur and Han relationship. I am of one that hate to use history to justify a country's claim of a land. To me it is ridiculous to say that because a Chinese dynasty 2000 years ago ruled Xinjiang, therefore it has to be forever be part of Chinese. And equally ridiculous is the notion that just because a region had be autonomous for a few years in the past century, therefore, they should be independent. I think politicians on both side, Chinese and Uyghur groups wants independence, exploit history and nit picking events to justify their hunger for power. So on independence, I am neither against nor support it. I think people live there today need to decide.

But I am against violence and wanting to know the truth. Again, I think both side are at fault on this. The riot was triggered by an incident in a Guangzhou factory, where some rumor about Uyghur workers raped a Chinese girl caused a fight between Chinese and Uyghur workers. 2 Uyghur workers were reported killed. I think people spread the rumor has to be punished. They have to take responsibility of what they have caused. Same to the people involved in the fight. However, such an incident does not justify rioting. Protesting is ok, but beating bystanders and women and children is simply evil. The wrong went from Chinese rumor spreaders to violent Uyghur rioters. Then the Chinese youth went into streets and looking for revenge, beating Uyghurs. Unfortunately, only peaceful people get beaten, Han or Uyghur. The cowards beating other people would have not way try to beat someone with a big stick.

I think it is important for majority of the people to understand violence cannot solve problems. I don't know what the Chinese government need to do, but some kind of dialog between community leaders of the two group would be nice. Trust has to be rebuild, otherwise it would be impossible for the peoples to live together.

The second part is my complaint to the non-Chinese medias. I think there are foreign governments wants to take the chance to weaken China. Western medias, especially US media, tends to root for the weaker side. However, it typically end up making things even worse, by viewed not being fair, it only hardens each group and build more resentments. I think the international community need to make sure a government does not over react, however, it is more important to be fair than to be haste. So far the US and western governments are dealing with the situation reasonably, but not the media. The Muslim media are even more biased towards Uyghurs. But one good thing is that they are not buying the lies the World Uyghur Congress spills out. They typically turns the issue for an ethic fueled riot into a fight against Chinese rule. I am fine if people want to discuss right of people, but using dead people, especially in this case Chinese dead as a political tool is disgusting.