Jim Townsend

30+ years at the Pentagon/NATO working Europe/NATO final 8 years as DASD, now Senior Fellow at CNAS cohost of Brussels Sprouts podcast & teaching at SciencesPo

[Jim Townsend @jteurope]

@latikambourke Brace for impact!!

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

In Arizona I drove to the edge of the earth.

The Grand Canyon.

It was the first time in my life I had nothing to say.

A ranger in a flat hat told me the rock at the bottom is two billion years old.

I asked who this belongs to.

"Everyone. It's a national park."

I paid thirty-five dollars. For thirty-five dollars I received two billion years of earth, a sunset that was being painted while I watched, and a parking spot.

In my country the most beautiful garden belongs to the emperor.

In this country the most beautiful canyon belongs to a family in matching t-shirts eating trail mix out of a Ziploc bag.

They were taking a photograph. The mother said "everybody say GRAND CANYON" and they said it and it echoed and I think the canyon said it back.

Thirty-five dollars. Two billion years. Everybody.

This country is out of its mind and I am never leaving.

[François Valentin @Valen10Francois]

France England is always great sports' drama

But my favourite memory was the 2015 game, a few days after the Bataclan terrorist attac. The entire Wembley stadium sang the Marseillaise in solidarity

Gives me the chills every time

A very "cordial" gesture in a very dark moment

[Johanna Nyman @JohannaNyman5]

Whether you’re for or against a more federal Europe, we should all recognize that the current system isn’t working. Bulgaria’s and Greece’s vetoes of sanctions against Russia are the latest examples of sabotage of European security.

Abolish the national veto and replace it with qualified majority voting (a supermajority) on foreign and defense policy.

[Jim Townsend @jteurope]

@latikambourke Very insightful!!

[Patrick M. Cronin @PMCroninHudson]

https://t.co/1zjiksrU29
@DefAeroReport # Washington_Roundtable with @PMCroninHudson @JTEurope @MichaelHerson1 #Dov_Zakheim & #Vago_Muradian discuss Congress, U/S Colby’s dismissal of “middle power” strategies, Zelenskyy’s cabinet reshuffle, Netanyahu’s visit, Iran conflict, Xi’s latest purge, US Coast Guard in South China Sea, & Sen. Graham’s legacy

My Asian-related remarks from c. 50:00-1:01: Asian views of #Iran“bounded instability” (c. 50:30); #Xi's military calculus (c. 52:15); on China aerospace & #CCP_corruption (c. 54:00); #NorthKorean military corruption (56:30); US #USCoastGuard cutters in #South_China_Sea(58:00); #Sen_Graham (1:04:35)

[Molly Ploofkins @Mollyploofkins]

Trump released documents that prove that HIS administration, & likely Russian paid MAGA influencers, CONSPIRED with Russia in order to manufacture a "high-profile corruption scandal...(against Biden) at the peak of the 2020 US presidential campaign."

[Jan Eliasson @JanKEliasson]

The constant denial by Trump
of the fairness of the 2020 US election
is a major cause of democracy under siege in many countries.
By obsessively returning to this issue
he also casts doubt about upcoming elections.
By this, Trump keeps a dangerous
democratic disease alive.

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

The documents are so damning in refuting Trump's own case that I wonder if anyone in the White House actually read them (or understood what they were looking at)

[Juliette Kayyem @juliettekayyem]

Do not laugh about this speech. It’s impossible to follow but he’s directly challenging our right to vote. The president of the United States is lying in order to wage war on our democracy and against the states. I don’t care your politics; everybody should be outraged.

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Japanese engineer invented the QR code for one job, tracking car parts on a Toyota line, then his company chose to give the patent away for free, which is the only reason it ended up on every restaurant table on Earth.

His name is Masahiro Hara. The company was Denso Wave, a parts supplier owned by Toyota.

In 1992 the problem landed on his desk, and it was not glamorous. Workers on the factory floor were drowning.

Every car part had a barcode, but a barcode can only hold about twenty characters, so to track one component they had to stick five or ten barcodes on it.

A worker would stand there scanning a single part ten times in a row. Some of them were scanning close to a thousand barcodes a day. The job had stopped being about building cars and turned into pointing a scanner at stickers all day long.

And there was a second problem nobody upstairs cared about. This was a factory. Oil got on everything. A smudge of grease across a barcode and the whole thing became unreadable, and the line stopped.

Hara was asked to make the scanner faster. He looked at it for a while and realized the scanner was not the problem. The barcode itself was the ceiling. A line of black bars can only hold information going one direction, left to right.

He decided to build something that held information in two directions, up and down as well as across, so it could store hundreds of times more in the same little square.

Then came the part that sounds made up but is not.

Hara played Go on his lunch breaks, the old board game with black and white stones sitting on a grid. He was staring at the board one day and it clicked.

The grid of black and white stones was already a way to store information in two directions. That was the shape of his code.

But building the code was the easy half. The hard problem was speed, because the whole point was to be fast, and a scanner wastes most of its time just trying to figure out where the code is and which way it is turned.

The fix came to him on a train. He was looking out the window at buildings, and one building stood out from all the others because of its shape against the sky. That was the idea.

He put three little square targets in three corners of the code. The moment a scanner sees those three squares, it knows instantly where the code is and how it is rotated, even upside down, even at an angle.

Now here is the detail that shows how far he was willing to go. Those three corner squares only work if nothing else on the page looks like them.

If a magazine ad or a cardboard box happened to have the same black and white pattern nearby, the scanner would get confused and grab the wrong thing.

So Hara and his tiny two-person team went and surveyed printed material. Magazines. Flyers. Cardboard boxes. Piles of it, for days, reducing every picture down to its ratio of black to white area, hunting for the one ratio that almost never shows up in print anywhere. They found it. One to one to three to one to one.

That exact rhythm of black and white is baked into every corner square of every QR code on Earth, and it is there because it is the pattern the printed world almost never produces by accident.

Then he solved the oil.

He built the code so it carries a backup of its own information, spread mathematically across the whole square. You can tear off, smudge, or scratch out up to thirty percent of a QR code and it still scans perfectly, because the code rebuilds the missing piece from the copy it kept of itself.

A worker could get grease on a third of the label and the line would keep moving. This is the same math that lets a scratched CD still play and lets a spacecraft send data back across the solar system without asking to repeat itself.

He finished in 1994. He named it Quick Response, after what it does for the person using it, not after what it is.

And then Denso made the decision that actually mattered.

They held the patent. They could have charged a fee on every single scan, and given how many billions happen now, that would have made someone unimaginably rich.

Instead they announced they would not enforce their rights to collect royalties, and they published the specification openly so anyone could use it. Hara later said it was not even a big argument inside the company.

That one choice is the whole story. A code that costs nothing to use is a code everyone builds on. Airlines put it on tickets. Phone makers built readers into cameras.

Then a pandemic hit and the world needed a way to hand someone information without touching anything, and the free little square that a Toyota engineer built for greasy factory workers was suddenly on every menu, every payment, every door.

Hara still works there. He has said, more than once, that he never imagined it would spread this far, and that the part he is proudest of is that it got used to keep people safe.

The man built it to survive oil on a factory floor. It ended up surviving everything else too.

You have scanned his work a hundred times this year. Now you know whose it was.

[France en Finlande 🇫🇷🇪🇺 @ambafrancefi]

Puolustusvoimien 19-henkinen osasto marssi 14.7. Pariisissa Ranskan kansallispäivän sotilasparaatissa osana halukkaiden koalition ryhmää 🇫🇷🇫🇮
Un détachement de 19 Finlandais a participé au défilé militaire du 14 juillet à Paris 🇫🇷🇫🇮
@FR_DA_Finland @Puolustusvoimat

[Jo-Anne Pollock @Pollock1953Jo]

No kidding.

[Ia Meurmishvili @iameurmishvili]

Russia ignored air defenses for years to focus on tanks & strike weapons. Now it’s desperately playing catch-up, but Ukraine is making it much harder. Also, RAND engineer @mbohnert says Russia likely can't produce desired amount of missiles because Ukraine is hitting the factories that make them. Modern war reality: supply chains are the new front line!

[Benjamin Haddad @benjaminhaddad]

Un géant de la tech américaine soutient une candidat qui veut affaiblir l’Europe. Qui peut être surpris?

[Gérard Araud @GerardAraud]

C’est terrifiant de bêtise. Et terrifiant tout court.

[Johanna Nyman @JohannaNyman5]

The U.S. State Department is allocating funds to organizations in Europe under a program aimed at promoting what it calls “Western civilizational heritage.”

This isn’t about “heritage.” It’s about bankrolling far-right, Russia-friendly political forces in Europe. The EU should treat it as the political interference it is.

[Jim Townsend @jteurope]

@latikambourke Just amazing!

[Anders Åslund @anders_aslund]

Colby seems to combine arrogance and ignorance. The worst combination.