My Smartphone Hears Voices - And Transcribes Them

It is said that idiots are easily amused. By that criterion I am one. I am easily amused by the degree to which speech recognition software has improved from my college days 47 years ago to the present. It still has a few problems even today, but I am managing to write this post using the Google speech to text software built-in to this phone.

And that pleases me more than you can imagine, or at least more than words can express. I am having fun with a technology for the first time in years!

ANNOTATION from the desktop's keyboard: my dictation was halting, as you might expect of someone who is not by training or nature a dictator. But there were only two errors I could not easily correct by speaking rather than typing: one was the sentence "I am one"; the s/w was absolutely determined to change the "one" to the digit "1" no matter what I did. One time it even visibly transcribed it as "one" and then visibly changed it to "1". (sigh!) The other had to do with inserting explicit newlines. The s/w recognizes some punctuation and a few formatting characters when their names are spoken, and "newline" is one of them, but something about my Texas accent must have thrown off the recognition algorithm: sometimes it inserted a Unicode/ASCII newline character; sometimes it rendered it "Near line" or something even more unrecognizable. Even so, there were no more transcription errors than I learned to expect from the cheeky and uncooperative keypunch operator in my first job right out of college. (sigh again!)

Things That Make You Look Over Your Shoulder

Two articles well worth your time to read:

• It turns out Donald Trump's father was the racist landlord Woody Guthrie hated
  

  

  I admit I am a fan of Woody Guthrie (I wish I could truthfully say "This Keyboard Kills Fascists," as Guthrie often labeled his "machine" [guitar]), and not so much a fan of Donald Trump or landlords in general, but based on this article, Fred Trump was worse than the lot regarding racial discrimination. Like father, like son? I wouldn't go that far, but things one learns in youth about interaction with other people tend to last a lifetime, and a racist parent makes me nervous about the child.

• U.S. will use facial recognition at airports
  

  

  I no longer fly because I do not like undergoing invasive searches without a warrant, but these machines, however well they appear to work, make me very uncomfortable. What happens if you're a close match (as the device reckons) with a terrorist? Are your happy urban life, your career, your relationships personal and business, etc. immediately over? I wouldn't bet against it. It's the no-fly list writ large. ("No-live list"?)
  
  And then there's the fact that these machines work, um, badly. Here's the ACLU on the subject:
  

  A study by the government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), for example, found false-negative rates for face-recognition verification of 43 percent using photos of subjects taken just 18 months earlier, for example. And those photos were taken in perfect conditions, significant because facial recognition software is terrible at handling changes in lighting or camera angle or images with busy backgrounds. The NIST study also found that a change of 45 degrees in the camera angle rendered the software useless. The technology works best under tightly controlled conditions, when the subject is starting directly into the camera under bright lights - although another study by the Department of Defense found high error rates even in those ideal conditions. Grainy, dated video surveillance photographs of the type likely to be on file for suspected terrorists would be of very little use.

  Does that give you a lot of confidence?

(I'm afraid I didn't log the sources of these links. If you published one or both, and you are on my blogroll, please accept my thanks.)

Now THAT Is 21st-Century Technology!

Contributors at Juan Cole's Informed Comment outline for us an emerging technology use by Kenya's nomadic shepherds that may possibly leapfrog that nation into the 21^st century in a hurry: solar panels attached to the sides of donkeys. Usage is straightforward: the panels are mounted on the sides of donkeys, which are then released for some unspecified time to graze; when the donkeys return, the charged panels are dismounted and used to power cell phones and lighting in the shepherds' manyattas (encampments or settlements, often temporary) at night:





Note how neatly this avoids the need for a grid or a connection to a grid, at least on the client end... expect TV ads here in the US, explaining to us why the same approach wouldn't work here, in three... two... one...

(UPDATE: Oh, and don't miss this:
Google Wants To Help You Buy Solar Panels For Your House. Seriously.)

The Creepy IoT (Internet Of Things)

Sue Halpern at The New York Review of Books dives from her review of four books (by Jeremy Rifkin, David Rose, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, and Jim Dwyer) into the deep and murky waters of the IoT (Internet of Things), the world of daily living enabled by the use of the Internet to interconnect various kinds of new devices with each other and occasionally with mere humans to accomplish results that are indeed nearly miraculous, as well as utterly destructive of anything that can reasonably be called privacy.

Everything from the much-debated and sophisticated Google Glass to simple pills you swallow that keep your doctor informed of your basic physical state and whether and/or when you take your meds, Internet-enabled light bulbs that turn on when your car signals by Internet that you are almost home, Internet-enabled sensors that locate every member of your household within the city in which you all live, truly automated purchases and other transactions, Internet-monitored status of your car's engine/brakes/etc., and other scary data collections about your person and your world... it's all there.

What happens to privacy? (Obsolete, say some sages; humans never had it in the genuinely old days anyway.)

What happens to the livelihoods of people who make their living providing some of these goods and services now, and hence what happens to capitalism? (Gone, say the sages.)

What happens when a person or group succeeds in hacking these systems? (Power outages that make Hurricane Sandy and 9/11 look like minor blips, say the wizards.)

The general message is that such changes are inevitable in our future, and I tend to believe that is true. But I admit it makes me glad I don't have all that much longer to live... I doubt it will be a world I can adapt to. Leave it to the kids who don't care about the things I care about!

(H/T neighbors George and Barbara [NOT Bush!], who loaned me the dead-tree edition of NY Review.)

Cell Phone Owners Should Prefer Passcode To Fingerprint Protection

In America, you can't legally be forced to testify against yourself, or forced to reveal a cell phone passcode. But according to a judge in Virginia, a cop can commandeer your finger to accomplish the same thing. Here's Megan Geuss at Ars Technica:

A Virginia Circuit Court judge ruled on Thursday that a person does not need to provide a passcode to unlock their phone for the police. The court also ruled that demanding a suspect to provide a fingerprint to unlock a phone would be constitutional.

More than just the phone can be bent

The ruling calls into question the privacy of some iPhone 5S, 6, and 6 Plus users who have models equipped with TouchID, the fingerprint sensor that allows the user—and ideally only the user—to unlock the phone. It is possible for users to turn TouchID unlocking off and simply use a passcode, and Apple has provided certain extra protections to prevent TouchID privacy issues—requiring the entry of a passcode if the phone hasn't been used in 48 hours, for example. But if a suspect simply uses TouchID to open their phone, police could have a window to take advantage of that when apprehending them.

[/sigh] It's always something, and seldom something good. The assertion of courts is that knowledge from testimony (e.g., telling police a passcode) reveals the suspect's mind and thus cannot be compelled under the 5^th Amendment... but a fingerprint is just a biometric, traditionally collected in police investigations. Once again, the law uses a quirk of technological change to enforce a distinction without a difference. Self‑incrimination, here we come.

(H/T Charles Kuffner.)

The Three Laws Of Something-Or-Other

David Swanson at FDL discusses The Three Laws of Pentagon Robotics:
 

   Actually, this one plays ping-pong...

The notion of a Pentagon-devised Three Laws of Robotics should be very disturbing, especially to the tech-minded among you. Asimov did not miss the point when he devised the traditional Three Laws.

When A Bargain Is Not A Bargain

Robert Reich

Robert Reich explains the flow of the process by which the "great deals" Americans find on holiday purchases ultimately come at the expense of American workers. Americans either lose their jobs to lower-wage workers in other countries (the Pacific Rim is noteworthy in this respect) or to new technologies (e.g., robots in manufacturing processes), or else see their own wages driven down dramatically by the same factors that give them such "great deals."

Reich correctly observes that there are no easy answers to this very real problem, but I am going to look sideways to another class of possible solutions: more equitable distribution of the wealth gained by such savings. Since Saint Ronald Reagan's days in office, those gains have gone almost exclusively to the top 1%, 0.1%, 0.01%, even 0.001% of Americans. While there are intrinsic reasons... technology and offshoring... for the savings and wealth themselves, there is no intrinsic reason for its distribution exclusively to the wealthiest Americans. If we of the 99.999% ever regained control of our government by one means or another (*cough* *cough*), a more equitable distribution of wealth could be legislated.

There is a fundamental human right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," a right we declared along with our nation's independence, the birthright of every American regardless of their economic status. There is no comparable right to unbounded personal or corporate wealth. As the late lamented Molly Ivins used to say, God is in the details. We can address those details!

NSA: No Surge Agency? No Shutdown Agency?

Zoe Schlanger at TPM:

NSA's Power Glitch Center, Utah

The National Security Agency's massive new data-storage center in Utah has been crippled by 10 meltdowns in the past 13 months, halting the agency's computer use in the facility, according to documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal.

Electrical surges described as "a flash of lightning inside a 2-foot box" have destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machinery and delayed the opening of the one million square-foot facility, WSJ reported. The cause of the repeated failures is under investigation.

...

I am reminded of the early days of the Large Hadron Collider: perhaps humankind simply doesn't know, even to this day, how to build large, complex systems that are robust in the face of power problems.

Or perhaps God is not amused by attempts to spy on Her people in their private daily lives... nah. I'll stick with the abovementioned hypothesis until there's hard information to the contrary.

Open Software — Followup

Following up on the post below, I offer continuing adventures in open software...

I finally got the underpinnings of my project working, the whole stack of apps and components all connected together and (minimally) running. I don't feel like quite such a dolt tonight, though it may be a while before I feel comfortable developing apps for UNIX-Linux systems. One has to start somewhere.

In this case, my frustration was caused by problems in not just one but two of the four layers, the Tcl/Tk library from ActiveState and the PAGE visual form design tool. Unsurprisingly there were no actual errors in ActiveState Tcl/Tk 8.6, only a misunderstanding on my part as to how it was to be hooked up to the PAGE tool. And PAGE worked fine once I ran a configuration script that determined for PAGE just where it should look for its underpinnings. To complicate matters, versions of Python built in the past few years all have an earlier version of Tcl/Tk built in to the runtime/development environment, so that PAGE was attempting to talk to Tcl/Tk 8.5.11 rather than 8.6 . Both errors on my part were educational; I learned still more about some very basic *nix operations in chasing down the problems. I'm afraid I have a lot more very basic things to learn.

I also learned the challenge of installing and configuring software packages that do not reside in well-defined online repositories, which is how a lot of Linux software is distributed. The tools on Ubuntu (some of them borrowed from other distributions of Linux) do not make it easy to install a single package from a vendor who simply provides a single compressed archive (think: zip file).

One frustration to a newbie like myself is that in the *nix world, hardly anyone writing documentation... man pages, forum posts, introductory articles, whatever... feels a need to explain one single fact more than the minimal amount necessary for an experienced person (user or programmer) to use the software described. One painfully common fault is describing the changes one must make to a configuration file without ever mentioning where to find the file. Fortunately I found a good search tool; I'd have been unbearably taxed by doing all the searching in something as slow at searching as, say, Nautilus. This is a marked difference from the Windows world, where the doc writers' assumption is typically that the consumer of documentation is an utter idiot.

Onward into the fray...

Open Software: What You Get For Free And What You Don't

The First Computer Bug

Back in 1947, a year before I was born, when early computer wizard Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (USN) found a moth fouling a relay in the Harvard Mark II electromechanical computer, she removed the moth and taped it in the project log book, where I presume it is still preserved for posterity. In other words, it's not my fault: computer bugs have been around quite literally all my life. I'll be polite and not speculate on what Adm. Hopper said when the bug got into the relay; I assume that since she was Navy, she knew how to curse.

Geany

Tcl/Tk

Fast-forward (now there's an increasingly antiquated term!) to 2013, where I am in the middle of my n'th attempt to become even minimally competent at programming for a *nix (i.e., UNIX or Linux) system, n being a regrettably large integer. With great deliberation over each choice, I have chosen to learn the programming language Python (yes, it's named after Monty Python), the lightweight integrated development environment Geany (perhaps the only piece of developer software with which I've felt instantly comfortable; on the n-1'th attempt I used Eclipse on an old, slow machine and came to regret it), the graphical interface library Tcl/Tk (also known for historical reasons as Tkinter) and the visual form design tool PAGE. I don't know how common these things are out in the real world of *nix because I never had a contract in that world; I just have to start somewhere.

Things went swimmingly up to a point. I managed to construct manually a few simple programs using Tcl/Tk, tapping the code by hand, copy-pasting bits and pieces from examples provided by other people. That all worked pretty well.

Then, after the aforementioned deliberation, I set out to install PAGE. The author of PAGE claims it rests on version 8.5.4 (or newer) of Tcl/Tk. The version installed on this box by the original Ubuntu installation is 8.5.11, so I should have been OK.

I installed PAGE with no significant error messages, I attempted to run it from a command prompt. It quit with a complaint (presumably from the Python runtime) that the program (i.e., PAGE) was attempting to use calls to Tcl/Tk version 8.6, the latest version... NOT 8.5.4, as advertised in the documentation. Thus entered the dark side of free software.

ActiveState, one of the major commercial software and support companies in the Tcl/Tk world, offers a prebuilt freebie version 8.6 package of Tcl/Tk, with no support. I can see the advantages of their doing so: programmers that grow up using the freebie version could very likely influence the subsequent purchase of commercial licenses by their employers or clients. Freebies are pretty much traditional in the Linux world, and the market of people who use them would be a good market to tap into.

I downloaded the Tcl/Tk 8.6 freebie package and attempted to install it... three times, using three different install tools. I got hundreds of error messages, which I could not redirect to a file (due to my ignorance, I'm sure). I ran a few of the handmade programs using 8.5.11 to make sure I hadn't destroyed that; apparently it's OK. But after an entire evening of my life spent on this project, I am back to square one. Even for a guy who used to do this stuff for a living, that's pretty frustrating.

And like Adm. "Amazing" Grace, I know how to curse!

Stephen Hawking Derided For 'Hypocrisy' For Boycotting Israeli Conference While Using 'Israeli' Technology

Harriet Sherwood in The Guardian:

Stephen Hawking's decision to boycott an Israeli conference in protest at the state's 46-year occupation of Palestine was derided as hypocritical by some, who pointed out that the celebrated scientist and author uses Israeli technology in the computer equipment that allows him to function.

Hawking, 71, has suffered from motor neurone disease for the past 50 years, and relies on a computer-based system to communicate.

According to Shurat HaDin, an Israel law centre which represents victims of terrorism, the equipment has been provided by the hi-tech firm, Intel, since 1997.

...

Give. Me. A. F**king. Break!

I am frequently critical of some oil-producing countries in the Middle East, e.g., Saudi Arabia and Iraq, for their society's policies on women's rights. But no one has yet vilified me for continuing to drive my car. (Full disclosure: at the moment, I am physically unable to drive my car. But I would drive it if I could, thereby undoubtedly burning Saudi oil.)

And labeling Intel an "Israeli" firm is stretching the notion of corporate nationality past the breaking point. Intel is a multinational firm headquartered in the US. It happens to have an Israeli branch.

To the people in Israel who are critical of Hawking for using Intel technology, I offer the following advice:

• Unplug your own Intel-based PC from the Internet and the power grid. After all, you'd be using "Israeli" technology. Even if your PC has a chip from another company, you are using a technology originated by an "Israeli" company. Yes, I'm telling you to give up your computers. How does that feel? And yet, I am asking far less of you than you are asking of Hawking.
• Take your gun (I believe it is a fair assumption that every Israeli owns a gun), shoot yourself in both feet, then in both hands, rendering yourself permanently disabled, but still not quite as disabled as Hawking without his electronics. Welcome to crippledom... it's great fun, isn't it?
• While you're at it, stop attending Hollywood movies, because many Hollywood stars are openly critical of Israel on human rights grounds. Let's face it: you're slamming Hawking because he is a star, and you can leverage his stardom to obtain publicity for yourselves. Can you see how some people might see that as hypocrisy on your part?

From what I've read, Hawking, a celebrity as few scientists have ever been, can be an annoying person to deal with, sometimes even in professional contexts. But people do not deserve to be told they should not use the technology that allows them to interact with other people day to day. Telling Hawking to unplug his electronic prostheses is exactly equivalent to telling me that I must live my life without my artificial limb. And that's real hypocrisy.

Back Online In My Own Chair

I now have a working Ubuntu Linux 12.04.2 LTS machine, a probably 5-year-old PowerSpec retired when I retired, functional and effectively free, but at a cost: the install DVD (downloaded .ISO) insists that it could not install Ubuntu Linux so it could cohabit with Windows XP. It may be something was wrong with Windows (it was virus-ridden; that's why I retired that already somewhat old computer in the first place), but I had to sacrifice that copy of all my photos. I have several backups if I can only find them. That's one of many things I need to look for. Oh well, at least this box is noticeably faster... Blogger's editor no longer drags down; both processor and memory are adequate to the task.

I did my exercises today. I can really feel the effects, positive and otherwise. Daily exercise is a foreign notion to many programmers, especially old guys like me. But if I want to stay alive and walk on my own two feet (one natural, one purchased), I have to do it.

Time to look for a few more missing items for the computer... sigh!

IT (And PT And OT, And Probably ET), Phone Home!

Of all the annoying aspects of homecoming, the utter demise of my home land-line phone has to be the most vexing. The failure must have happened in the first couple of weeks I spent in hospital: the land line itself did not fail, but the failure of the old VTech multi-handset cordless phone's base unit answering system exposed all incoming calls to the AT&T CallNotes^® behind it, which I normally do not use... at least not intentionally. It's just part of the package I subscribe to, normally eclipsed by the phone's answering system, which I do use intentionally. Not "do"; "did" ... it's dead, Jim.

The result? Voice messages from ancient history emerged from the void. Forty of them... 40 messages... floated forward from holidays, elections, hurricanes and power failures past, SBCGlobal system failures from hours to weeks long. Four years' worth of incoming voice messages came alive again, and all newer messages were swallowed by the hungry system.

Needless to say, as I had never used CallNotes^® in a practical setting, I had long since lost the printed documentation supplied by Ma Bell. The Blue-and-White-Striped Lady is not fond of putting her documentation on the web, so it took considerable browsing... and one phone call to a very testy help representative... to obtain enough info to work out the rest in my fatigued brain. No, none of it was difficult. Yes, all of it was (apparently intentionally) obscured from public view. Oh, and the testy rep gave partially bad info, of which I had to figure out which parts to ignore.

Why did I so desperately need a working answer system or voicemail? because this old house has only one jack for my phone line (which must have been used as a phone for a business at home a few years back... Stella's line enters at several points; mine at only one). When my line survived while my fancy phone failed, there remained only one POTS ("plain old telephone service") phone in my boneyard, which I was forced to hook up to it. The whole setup... the end of the drop and the POTS phone... was about 5-10 minutes by walker from my usual seat in the den, which meant that I missed most phone calls, which meant that I really needed to provide callers an answering system to talk to. Now they will soon have one. It's cumbersome, but it beats nothing.

Step Two was to acquire a replacement fancy phone. Where does one look on the 'net, and what does one look for? Search for any obvious set of terms, e.g., cordless speakerphone without answering, and try to make practical sense of the thousands of phones for sale out there. It isn't easy. In the above query, "with" matches "without" and is enough to drive one crazy, or to Best Buy... if indeed anything could drive a person with my physical failings to a big-box store! Eventually, Amazon came to the rescue... Amazon and about three hours of poring over ads. I ended up ordering a less-than-brand-new design of Panasonic's familiar cordless phone, without an answering system which could interfere with CallNotes^®. I can only hope this does the trick.

DARPA, Harvard Create Soft Robots, Self‑Camouflaging Like Squid

Was the Internet DARPA's last useful, civilized invention? This time (h/t ellroon, from TPM), they've created at least 75 robots with soft bodies, not readily recognizable as technology (think pillows or rocks or whatever the background is; look at the TPM article's photos and video), in colors that change with the background they're on.

Can anyone think of a benign use for such a device? anyone? just one use? Me neither. These robots are good for spying on people in their private spaces... and not much else. Your tax dollars at work!

AFTERTHOUGHT: to the article's point that "Right now, the robots are attached to cords or 'veins' of liquid, but eventually, researchers hope to make them self-contained," commenter Elvan Poots responds with the thought that "[t]hey can also hope for an infinite supply of unobtainium to power them."

One Nation, Under Surveillance: TrapWire

It's the latest thing in government-sponsored warrantless surveillance of American citizens, 24x7, every aspect of their lives... and it's here today. Here's a sample from FDL's TheCallUp:

...

So what is TrapWire, and why has its leak created such a commotion? According to reporting at RT, TrapWire is a detailed surveillance system that “can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw[s] patterns, and do[es] threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” Anything suspect gets input into the system to be “analyzed and compared with data entered from other areas within a network for the purpose of identifying patterns of behavior that are indicative of pre-attack planning.”

According to the article, this system has been secretly installed in most major cities and around landmarks across the United States, in Canada, and in the UK. Most local police forces are installing their own monitoring software that works in conjunction with TrapWire. Private properties, including casinos, are now signing up to TrapWire. Essentially, it sounds like Big Brother identifying you, watching you, assessing your every move for abnormalities, then indexing your behavior.

...

Please read the whole article. This is effectively the old Total Information Awareness program actually implemented, either in defiance of federal law and the Constitution, or else in compliance with some secret law we have no knowledge of.

Oh, by the way... as WikiLeaks and Anonymous began releasing documents pertaining to the program, they were subjected to the DDoS attack from Hell. It looks like the scariest obstacle to your freedom of speech and your right to know what your government is doing is now... your government.

Your Tax Dollars At Work: DARPA Funds Network-Hacking Power Strip

Just... read about it. Here. I've got to go throw up. (H/T ellroon.)

AFTERTHOUGHT: After a couple minutes, I thought of some possibly benign uses for such a device, e.g., to find obvious holes in the security of a system you are newly responsible for. But you'd still be taking an awful chance, just hooking it up, even with the boss's approval. And... what if there's a manufacturer's back door? or a No-Such-Agency back door? You could find yourself with a lot of visitors!

One Nation Under Surveillance: FDA Spies On Its Own Scientists

Mordor - Total Information Awareness

From the NYT, we learn that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) engaged in a "wide-ranging surveillance operation... against a group of its own scientists", using "an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails" to everyone from Congress to journalists and the president:

...

The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.

The extraordinary surveillance effort grew out of a bitter dispute lasting years between the scientists and their bosses at the F.D.A. over the scientists’ claims that faulty review procedures at the agency had led to the approval of medical imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies that exposed patients to dangerous levels of radiation.

A confidential government review in May by the Office of Special Counsel, which deals with the grievances of government workers, found that the scientists’ medical claims were valid enough to warrant a full investigation into what it termed “a substantial and specific danger to public safety.”

...

It seems very likely that the FDA's actions were worthy of reporting. But nothing could so effectively reinforce the mostly false image of scientists as brilliant in their field of study but naive about political matters as those scientists' allowing their external communications to be spied upon.

A few simple rules of thumb would probably have allowed the scientists to continue undetected and unimpeded: use your own personal equipment to send the emails, not something your employer's IT department supplied to you; don't use your employer's network to transmit the emails; obtain and use your own personal privacy keys to encrypt the email; don't make copies of files onto removable media. Yes, all of that makes whistle-blowing considerably more inconvenient, but if you're going to do it at all, you may want to exercise at least that much common sense and good judgment.

(H/T Mustang Bobby.)

Trackers

Peter Maass and Megha Rajagopalan at Pro Publica provide us with details of how your cell phone can easily be the subject of warrantless location tracking: many of the 1.3 million law enforcement requests for called numbers and location information last year alone were warrantless. To me, that bears the stench of being forced to testify against oneself.

Maass and Rajagopalan conclude by suggesting we drop the term "cellphones" as no longer adequately describing their multiplicity of functions. Call them "trackers," they say. Excuse me, my tracker's ringing...

Human-Powered Helicopter Breaks Record

... of flight time for a human-powered rotorcraft. The flight was still under a minute, and was only barely off the ground. I believe this also captures the "oddest-looking aircraft" award:

If your CPU and graphics card can handle it (my box is over 5 years old and cannot), watch full-screen for maximum visual disorientation. :-)

AFTERTHOUGHT: in my bicycling years, we used to distinguish cyclists between "spinners" and "pile-drivers" based on their preferred gear at maximum speed. This fellow is definitely a spinner.

AFTERTHOUGHT: add this to the list of things about which Samuel Johnson said, "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

GMO Grass Near Elgin, TX Apparently Kills Cattle

ellroon has the basics, and a link to an article with details. The GM grass, Tifton 85, is a "scientifically modified" (?!) hybrid of a hybrid, in use since 1992, but suddenly, on a number of farms in central Texas, it apparently started generating cyanide. Cyanide, f'chrissake! Sixteen of eighteen cattle on one ranch died; other farms showed traces of cyanide but no deaths.

I've driven through the countryside surrounding Elgin, TX. There is nothing even remotely strange about the farmland there; it looks like any other central Texas farmland, and I've never seen it glow in the dark. But... Jeebus on a crutch... cyanide?

If you've been thinking of writing your member of Congress about labeling foods that contain GMOs, or labeling meat or milk from animals have been fed on plants with genetic modifications, now might be a good time.