Here in Germany, we again have the debate about ending the draft, a change that I support. My guess: It’ll be gone by 2020, but survive this legislature period (which runs until 2013). In the debate about this, one hears a lot of phrases like “Staatsbürger in Uniform” (uniformed citizen) or “Verankert in der Gesellschaft” (anchored in society) as support for the draft and the dreaded “Staat im Staat” (state within a state) as the opposite. What the hell is all that supposed to mean?

The idea behind it all seems to be that a steady flow of people who would not normally become soldiers are suitable and indeed necessary to make sure that the Bundeswehr, the german military, does not suddenly throw over the government or gradually starts to influence politics.

That raises two questions: How dangerous is our military, and how well is the draft suited to reducing this danger? In times where, in the name of fighting terror, we are giving up more and more of our rights (for example by transmitting banking data from Europe to the US without any control what the americans do with it in the SWIFT accord), the Bundeswehr is notable for having not actually received any new powers. The ones that were planned, allowing them to shoot down hijacked planes, were cancelled. So I don’t think things look that bleak for the german population yet.

Of course, the danger that is often mentioned is “Weimarer Verhältnisse”, i.e. a situation like the chaotic time from the end of the first world war until the Nazis grabbed power, the era known as Weimar Republic. But was the military responsible for that? Much of the troubles were caused by radical right- and left wing organizations. While they undoubtedly had close connections to the WWI army, they were decidedly not the same as the actual, official military. That one was pretty radical as well, of course, but due to the treaty of Versailles, also quite powerless.

Comparing to the time directly before each world war makes no sense at all, of course, as there was a draft in place then, which obviously was not able to stop any world war. Also, in both cases, as well as partly in Weimar, the politicians actively encouraged a strong military, so “state within a state” would not apply. After all, the entire country was highly militarized.

How would, in practice, a draftee help keep the Bundeswehr in line? If the goal is to keep the army weak by forcing it to waste its time on training lots of people who aren’t allowed to fight and will soon leave again anyway, well, there are experts who say that this is working splendidly. Realistically, though, it is more likely the intention that a draftee will sooner scream if something is going really wrong than someone who joined voluntarily and for a long time. My guess, however, is that it more depends on the internal culture. When everybody knows that it only causes trouble to complain, then a draftee will keep his head down as well. If, on the other hand, people are encouraged and free to state what is causing trouble, then volunteers will probably be as vocal as draftees. In the interest of full disclosure, it must be said that I am a conscious objector. So if someone was in any military and had a completely different experience about this than the one I imagine, I’d be very interested in hearing from you in a comment!

But let’s assume that draftees would work to keep the army nice and under democratic control. Then we still have the problem that german draftees are only allowed on NATO territory and not to the places where the army is actually working, such as most importantly Afghanistan. A draftee can voluntarily extend his stay there and will then be allowed (and likely also required) to serve in the sand box, but I don’t think there is a large difference between them and full-on volunteers.

Afghanistan, however, also shows a completely different problem. The Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany has a very effective limitation on the power of the Bundeswehr. It is normally only allowed to fight on NATO territory and for defense. That limits its possibilities and potential power considerably. At least, that is the theory. Practically, they are stationed in Kabul. I don’t care what words like “stabilizing mission” our politicians invent, the Afghanistan War, but also most other international missions, miss the idea of those constitution clauses by a mile. Suddenly we have an army that is actively fighting, even though nobody has attacked Germany, and whose decisions have real, dramatic consequences, and that therefore takes up a lot more time in the minds of the politicians. If I were truly more afraid of the Bundeswehr than of Family minister Ursula von der Leyen, then I’d be scared about the Afghanistan mission, not an end of the draft.

I finally did it and wrote the spam filter that I had promised a while back. It was less work than I thought, actually. Anyway, you can now write comments again.

The filter is a so-called Naive Bayes filter. It calculates the probability that a comment is spam, based on how often the words in the comment were observed in spam comments and in normal comments. The implementation generally follows the english Wikipedia article about this, without any additional heuristics for rare words and the like.

If anyone cares, I can post the code for you all to read. It isn’t that much. The most significant single point that I noticed was that the spam filter might go crazy if it finds a word that was never seen either as spam or as not-spam, which is a so-called zero frequency problem. To solve that, whenever I add a new word, I first set both sightings as spam and sightings as not-spam to one (and then one more for whatever I saw it as). This makes the results slightly less accurate, but it remains good enough to work.

Currently the filter has three levels. If the probability that a post is spam is higher than 95%, then the comment isn’t even written to the database, but rejected immediately. A comment that has a chance of more than 70% is saved, but remains hidden until I’ve decided whether it is spam or not. Every time I make such a decision, the spam filter gets trained a little bit to become more accurate. Of course, I may have to change these thresholds in the future.

I had not originally planned to bother you with a blog post for this, but Björn argues that I ought to. So behold, my new car!

To provide some background, my previous car was damaged beyond repair in a small accident¹, which made me rather sad. This new car, however, cures that. It is an Alfa Romeo 147, built in 2004, with 2.0 TwinSpark engine (petrol, 150 hp), manual transmission and lots of extras such as leather seats, lowered suspension, a sunroof, ESC, ASR and lots of other things I don’t technically need, but really enjoy having.

It needs a new radio, for iPod compatibility (I am currently using an FM transmitter, and while it works, it is not exactly an ideal experience). In every other respect, it is great and I love it.

I used to fight spam in comments here using a simple blacklist, which contained words that only spambots used and that were hence forbidden here. That worked pretty well. Now, however, I seem to be locked in some sort of epic struggle with a spambot who posts very similar posts, but has an astonishing variety of expressions at its disposal and thus manages to slip through again and again.

To stop this, I decided to write a more advanced, learning spam filter, similar to those used in E-mail clients. This isn’t as hard as it sounds, there are tutorials online, but to train this I need training data, i.e. actual and annoying spam.

Unlike normal messages, I don’t store Spam, so to get this I now deactivated my old spam filter completely. Since I don’t want lots of random crap to appear on this site, though, I have disabled display of new comments. They are stored in the database, but not shown anymore. How long this will take I don’t know (it is possible that the spam bot stops when it sees that none of its post appear anymore, believing the site to be broken), so please don’t be surprised if no new comments appear anymore!

By the way: I haven’t posted any new pictures here lately. That is because I plan to change that part of the site a lot. At the moment, you can find all my new railroad pictures only at http://zcochrane.deviantart.com/gallery/, though I plan to post them here as well once I’m done.

First of all: Sorry it took so long, I finally put up a PDF version of the slides of my presentation on March 27th, 2010 about my bachelor thesis. The movie in there won’t play, this being PDF and all, but it really is just the same as in my last blog entry about this, minus the “real” part because that just didn’t look good enough to be projected with a huge beamer.

Now, about my current status. There are a number of official milestones, which are listed in the slides and the proposal, but I think just as important, if not more, are the informal milestones. This simulator just hit the most important one for me: It is fun to play with it. This is such an important step because “This really annoys me” is a far more precise and useful sentiment than “I guess I could do it that way as well”, and you won’t get it if you don’t play with the program.

The important piece was to implement sensors, which are now fully supported. Let me give you a short overview: