The Square Root of Thoughts?

The Department of Homeland Security is not foreign to getting shrapnel blasted into them from the media flak-cannons. Most of the time it's not worth reading; however, there was one article that has caught my attention and is a good laugh.

It has to do with the notion that terrorist thoughts have been quantified into arithmetic formulas--that number into the billions--used to determine the likelihood of a certain place being subject to terrorist attack.

A small clip from the article:
"And now Jim O'Brien, the director of the Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security in Clark County, Nev., has discovered another hard-to-fathom DHS notion: a mathematical value purporting to represent the square root of terrorist intent. The figure appears deep in the mind-numbingly complex risk-assessment formulas that the department used in 2006 to decide the likelihood that a place is or will become a terrorist target — an all-important estimate outside the Beltway, because greater slices of the federal anti-terrorism pie go to the locations with the highest scores. Overall, the department awarded $711 million in high-risk urban counter terrorism grants last year.

O’Brien took an active interest in how the government runs its risk-assessment numbers when the department announced this year that it was downgrading Las Vegas from among the highest-risk urban centers to the lowest 25 percent grouping of such potential targets.

That shift put Las Vegas on what’s called a “sustainment” line of funding, which represents a loss of more than $700,000 in federal counterterrorism money. The city — the population center of Clark County — previously had placed among higher risk targets thanks to its highly visible skyline and the vast complement of tourists it attracts.

As O’Brien reviewed the risk-assessment formulas — a series of calculations that runs into the billions — he found himself unable to account for several factors, the terrorist-intent notion principal among them. “I have a Ph.D. I think I understand formulas,” he says. "Take the square root of terrorist intent? Now, give me a break.” The whole notion, O’Brien says, is a contradiction in terms: “How can you quantify what somebody is thinking?""

What ever happened to using common sense? Read the full article here: "Root of All Terror"

In other news:

Still working for the abolish-winter movement. Not much progress as of late. Official petition to follow soon...

Music:

Filo & Peri feat. Fisher - Ordinary Moment (Breakfast & Big Mike Remix)
Wow. You gotta hand it to these two TA's from the east coast. They really knew how to make a bangin' remix of an already epic tune from 2006. Ferry has canned this Ordinary Moments for a while, and it's been a great listen. However, this remix takes the cake--by far--in my opinion. A wonderful listen!!!