DuVernois Blog

Discoveries in Antarctica

Not physics, but good stuff anyway. :) Track down the pictures online and you'll be pretty surprised and impressed at the odd forms of life. Revealed by global climate change.

The insanity of college athletics

Well, it seems apropos that this article in The Nation lambasting the spending frenzy that is college athletics appears as the University of Minnesota hires on a $1M+ (on the books) per year new football coach. This is a university in which trash collection is a questionable proposition, I'm teaching nearly 200 students in a peeling lecture hall before they go off to lab to study the wonders of the universe with broken lab equipment. Ah...priorities.

Snapshots of casualties in Iraq

No comment needed.

Zimbabwe anti-mining operation

With unemployment around 80%, there is little enough work--legal or otherwise.

"Big black nemesis"

Parthenogenesis observed in Komodo Dragons. Shriekback's rhyming of parthenogenesis improved my zoological vocabulary...

Pimp my nutcracker!

Make 'em all.

"So, cast thine eyes in my righteous bag and see/What insane object I shall lay on thee!" - From the Be-Bop Santa Clause

Swedish holiday traditions

Nope, not the Swedish Chef! Destroying a public sculpture of the Christmas-tree protecting goat. Last year with flaming arrows? Shot by people dressed as Santa and the Gingerbread Man?

You can watch the live webcam of the goat as well to see if it really is fireproof. If you look up the Galve Goat on wikipedia you'll see what has happened previous years.

35th anniversary of the Cannonball

Brock Yates is still reveling in his 15 minutes of fame. But it was a great moment. "At no time did we exceed 175 mph." Hopefully they'll figure some way of pulling off a 2007 version of the race...

Good and bad uses of money

Bad. The US government's vote-gathering operations which funnel money to Cuban "exiles" in Florida.

Good. Send some money to help this guy get psychiatric assistance. He's spent more than 25 years chained up since he went "mad" and became dangerous.

Munchen synagogue rebuilt after 68 years

Kristallnacht to today.

"The Intrepid stands for everything we believe in ... our freedom and our values."

It then got stuck in the mud. What more fitting tribute to what this country believes in and the state of our freedom and values. Stuck in the mud. Maybe tomorrow will bring some relief.

Bush's antiproliferation strategy success stories!

Six more Arab states join the race for nuclear weapons.

More on climate change denials and deniers and their tactics

Questionable tactics, ad hominem attacks, and corporate polluter money.

Another day, another hypocritical fundie Republican

Head of the National Association of Evangelicals, a man who frequently rants about the evil of gays and drug addicts, wait for, yep, regularly pays for gay sex and methamphetamines. Oh well, it's not as if his followers would have learned anything from previous examples.

"The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

That was Martin Luther King talking about his country shortly before his murder. Still true today with Iraq in a state of chaos, at least 300 000 dead Iraqis (best estimate of over 600 000), 90% of Iraqis reject the presence of the US "liberators." The war must be ended and the damage to this country undone. And we must resolve to create no more killing fields.

It's the environment stupid

Yeah, I know, we're losing two wars at the moment, our rights are under constant threat, and we're dearly hoping that there will be a fair election in the United States, so we're a bit distracted. But, there are some other serious matters to consider...global climate change in particular.

The UK government report from today indicates that we have only a slight chance of avoiding dangerous levels of greenhouse gases in the near future. The economic benefit of dealing with this problem sooner rather than later are also detailed. The Brits are also looking to see why the environment isn't a big issue here at the moment. It's the wars. Let's also note the effect of global climate change on the severity of Atlantic hurricanes and the fact that the world is as hot as its been in 12 000 years.

So here's just about the weirdest thing I've seen recently

Dubya's new ranch of 98,000 acres in Paraguay. Okay, here is where it gets weird. Is that his little hiding spot to avoid prosecution for war crimes? Of does the 2.2 mile long runway (look on google earth) mean he's moving full-time into the cocaine exporting racket? Weirder still is the connection with the Moonies and their purchase of land in the same area. Okay, and then the Jenna connection? Too strange for words.

New popemobile and new London cabs

New popemobile.

White cabs in London?

Top Gear followup

The Hamster appears to be recovering well.

What's the difference between the Sunni and the Shia?

Most of the foreign policy and security folks in Washington can't answer correctly! Okay, we've got a problem here.

Bad truck name

That would be the "Cervix Lord (Lawrd)?"

Two minutes with Ananova

A tale of marital revenge.

Stalin and Surf Music? Okay, why not?

Continuing with the Eastern Bloc, how about a vodka pipeline?

And the Queen of England giving a Nazi salute? Onstage? In Germany?

The North Korean nuclear problem timeline

Rather than let get away with saying "Clinton did it," go ahead and read Jimmy Carter's description of the course of events.

Shocking new estimate of the Iraq War deathtoll

Nearly 2/3 of a million people. This was calculated from comparing prewar and current death rates. The statistics are certainly complicated, but if this is true then about 2.5% of the population of Iraq has died as a result of the invasion and subsequent breakdown of all institutions.

It would be interesting to read through the full paper and try to evaluate it. Since the final number of 655 000 additional deaths comes from multiplying a small number (derived death rate) by a large number (the population of Iraq), relatively small errors in the former introduce large numbers of missed or excess deaths. Very similiar to estimates of Chernobyl casaulties---small number (chance of death) multiplied by large number (exposed people). In physics, these are called Fermi Problems referring to Enrico's habit of asking students the (easily estimatable) question of how many piano tuners there are in Chicago.

In any case, there's some evidence here that the total number of deaths is very high. Perhaps more than a factor of ten above the documented death totals. Though we do need to be careful since these are measuring different numbers. The 655k number is "how many people died in Iraq since the US invaded minus how many people would have died in Iraq if the death rate were unchanged" during the same time. The 50k number is "media reported deaths of civilians due to US, anti-US, or sectarian forces committing violent acts."

You can read the full report online. I just now realized that these are the same folks who prepared the Darfur analysis that US State Department uses to condemn the Sudanese regime. 200 000 deaths in Sudan. That's genocide according to most reasonable observers (and even the state department). What is 655 000 deaths in Iraq? It's a civil war at least.

By the way, you can see a rebuttal of supposed problems in the earlier cluster analysis story and continued here. It's worth noting that cluster sampling tends to UNDERestimate rare (like death) effects, not overestimate them. But read the article for yourself.

Continuing the NYT religion-based legal preferences

Tax breaks on paychecks, housing, books, and many more things. Just the housing provision shifts $1/2 billion dollars of taxes onto the rest of us. "The power of religious entities 'is at its apex.'"

The other half of the Iraq story

We hear about the tortured and mutilated bodies of 30-60 Iraqi men being found each day after being abducted by rival militias. (And how the Shiite militias appear to be very fond of using power tools as torture devices.) What of Iraqi women? Many who dare to have jobs are murdered. Rape and kidnapping are endemic. And clerics are blessing "pleasure marriages" (rape) that had long been uncommon under Hussein's rule.

Religious institutions in the US...

...have long had special rights. No property taxes, non-profit status even when they build theme-parks, salons, and bookstores. They aren't subject to OSHA, state child protection, EEO, or EPA guidelines. Recent iterations of the federal government have funnelled more money to the churches (under the banners of "stop abuse of xtians" and "faith-based initiatives) and given them additional right beyond those of individuals, non-profits (that are non-religious), and corporations.

The New York Times is running a series of articles on these issues. The first two have appeared already.

• Religious institutions being exempted from regulations. The focus here is on child safety and property rights.
• Employee rights discussed here.

Why shouldn't churches pay property taxes? They receive fire protection, police protection, and are connected to city water, gas, and sewers where applicable. Here in Minneapolis, they run apartment buildings, a nightclub, and bookstores and repay nothing to their community. A sorry state of affairs.

Addedon October 10th: The third part of the story, with a focus on property taxes and tax breaks for those with religious affiliations.

The religious right worries that their children won't follow them

Some of the discussion in abstracted in this New York Times article. Do note the t-shirts that the girls in the photo are wearing. Electrical outlets. There are corresponding electrical plug shirts for boys...

Anyway, I think this highlights again the oddity of indoctrinating children with theology. Christianity (or Islam or Hinduism or Jainism) is right because your parents happen to be members of that cult? And everyone else is wrong? I think the time will come (and not soon enough) when the concept of "catholic child" or "jewish child" can only have a cultural meaning. Theological indoctrination of the young by authority figures will come to be regarded as no more acceptable than other forms of child abuse.

What we did while the President fiddled...

Do they think that the Supreme Court has been packed to the point where the Constitution is irrelevant? Just what was in the antiterrorism bill? Meanwhile, Woodward, previous caught up by the Bushite's propaganda (did you read Bush at War from 2002?), has gone in and seen the horror of crazed incompetence of his certainty, of his vision thang. What a mess. And no impeachment in sight.

Auto news from Paris and from Texas

There's a new version of Renault's Twingo being shown at the Paris Auto Show. I enjoyed renting these when I was in Europe in the 1990s. Weird interior graphics, oddly curved car. Very chick-mobile in the US parlance, but kinda cool. The new one appears to be pushing ahead the car<->computer connection with USB ports, webcam, internet connection, bluetooth, and socket connections (of what type?) at each seat. Hey Renault, want to try the US market again?

Heading further into "not in the States" car territory, we have what some Finnish students think would make a good city cab. Let me applaud absolutely anything other than a Crown Vic.

Meanwhile Ford has made the F-450 available (in the new model) as a consumer pickup with a new diesel engine. Why? "The trailer builders will be writing us thank-you letters because they can sell trailers with granite countertops and fireplaces." Okay.

The hidden iman

Now we know what the Russians must have thought of Reagan's apocalyptic rantings with Iran's president channeling god as well and working towards a Muslim apocalypse.

What we value

We value freedom of speech, so so an opera which beheads Muhammad (along with Jesus, Buddha, and Poseidon). "It is a signal to other stages in Germany, or even elsewhere in Europe, to put no works on their programs that criticize Islam." Once again religion gets a free ride due to its threat of violence.

We value reason and rationality, so a report on how the US is failing the war on terror is hidden away, to avoid discussion, or critical voting in November. It seems as though there should be a real discussion here as the "war on terror" has produced two wars that the US is in the process of badly losing. Not to mention setting the state for other wars to come.

Turnitin.com in the news

I've never been comfortable with forcing students to turn their papers in to this commercial operation. The company makes money from the intellectual property of students who are assumed to be cheaters. Heck, even if the assumption is right, Unersities are the last entities that should be so cavalierly disregarding intellectual property rights. Washington Post article is here. There's also a discussion on Slashdot. Having caught plenty of plagiarized papers by reading them, and sometimes googling sentences from them, I have to think that this sort of shortcut is perhaps not completely useful.

As the UMN has a license for turnitin, we can test it pretty easily. Send some text you wrote and see the "percent likely plagiarized" score. Oh wait, is testing the engine forbidden under the terms of use?

Back to space...

Okay, some of the payload items are ridiculous, but so are some on the shuttle launch manifest.

Though it didn't work too well...

Top Gear, responsible driving, and global warming

For BBC Top Gear watchers, the hamster is in the hospital after crashing during a British land speed record attempt. If you don't know Top Gear, you should go to youtube and watch some pirated clips from the show. Probably the best TV show on cars ever made, and really quite funny. Some of their previous controversies are outlined here.

In an effort to not be seen as a mindless "petrolhead" let me also mention California's suit against automakers for releasing greenhouse gases. Hmmmm...suing the US government for not improving fuel economy standards would make more sense, but I suppose that is a losing strategy.

Doesn't sound too good, brain damage and all.

What does second-hand cigarette smoke and global warming have it common?

Some of the same folks bankrolling the "scientific" opposition to them. What a strange world!

Brazil in the news

Okay, we can't say the rain forests are regrowing, nor that they aren't being destroyed, but they are being destroyed less quickly than before! Still 17,000 square kilometers per year. Good thing we don't need that forest to stop global warming. Oh, we do?

Rio, city of sex? Perhaps if this City of Sex is built on the Copacabana. Sex pods, artwork, swinger clubs, the Roman Catholic Church. Yup it's all in there.

Zoroastrians in the New York Times

One of the things that I love about the Times is that once and a while you get an article on a story that you probably know exists, but that you haven't really thought through completely. Sure, the number of Parsis must be declining these days, but you can read all about it here.

First hybrid vehicle that really makes sense to me

A Mini with electric motors at each wheel. 65-80mpg, plug-in capable, 640hp! I do worry what all of that extra weight (especially the unsprung electric motors at the wheels!) will do to handling. And what the cost of such a car would be. But here at last is some of the promise of a hybrid automobile, a real departure from the norm.

How risky is it to serve in the US military in Iraq?

Less dangerous than being young, male, and African-American in Philadelphia.

Today's good guy: Wal-Mart!

Who would have ever guessed? Wal-Mart is launching a plan to try to sell 100 million compact fluorescent lightbulbs to its customers. This sort of scale distribution could have a quite measurable energy-use reduction nationwide! (Horrible confession: I have a stack of CFLs that I haven't installed yet. I know, I know, but I just haven't gotten to it.)

When all else fails, crackdown on "crime" online

Zimbabwe plans to use Chinese technology to monitor telecommunications. It does seem to be the refuge of failed dictatorships and nascent ones perhaps as well...

Havre, MT and the war on terror

That Amtrak stop has become the base for the "northern patrol" of the Border Patrol. But the real story is how there is now a zone a hundred miles deep inside the US border where the constitution doesn't apply. Probably cause? Not needed. ID? Needed. Remember when this nation criticized the former Soviet Union for requiring internal visas? Passports required to travel and all. We now have the same phenomena within our country.

Global warming in easy units

Spring is arriving 6-8 days on average earlier than it did 30 years ago and Autumn about 3 days later. I think those are more striking figures than the 1-2 degrees of temperature change. We have a week's work of change at the beginning of the summer and 1/2 a week at the end.

The continuing struggle of science & education against theocrats & ignorance

Lawrence Krauss has a decent, albeit brief editorial in the New York Times after the Kansas School Board skewed back towards reality. I'm not sure in what forum his disagreement over "scientifically inappropriate attempts by some scientists to discredit the religious faith of others" appeared. Will have to take a look. Though I can see tactically why scientists might feel that, I think that it is hypocritical to argue for a reasoned, scientific approach in all matters other than other people's theology. The logical holes are there along with the incoherence of major religions, their ahistoricality, and their pernicious nature in practice (and perhaps in theory). I see little benefit in doing this, but little harm either. Deeply-held beliefs, whether sensible or not, are not likely to be changed by simple logic.

Just the other day, we see an evolving piece of the religious attack on reason and science. Due to a "clerical" (hmmm...that has two meanings...) error, evolutionary biology has disappeared from a federal list of university majors approved for federal student grants. Yup, follow the link and you can still (8/25/06) see the missing line, a blank line, for 26.1303. What a coincidence.

What college athletics are all about

Cash!!!!

Interesting little bit in the NYT on Devon Avenue

When I lived in Chicago I thought of it mostly as a place to find good Indian food. The article discusses how this Pakistani-American neighborhood differs from the terrorism incubators similar neighborhoods in England have become.

Low-end Ferraris

Having been thinking about Magnum, PI recently (don't ask!)...I just came across this excellent history of Ferrari's low-end mid-engined cars. You can ask me about my Maserati experiences. :)

Internationalist republicans, Abe Ribicoff, Lowell Weicker, and the CT senate race

It will nice to see no more of Joe Lieberman and his Forbes buddies. A compromised and desperate Lieberman indeed.

For the hottest day in Minneapolis...

Let's read HST's classic, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved." Enjoy!

Cycling and drugs

The "winner" of the Tour de France might not be so for long. What a mess!

The Lebanon online

Is a portal that seems to allow one to send information on Hizbollah to Israeli intelligence! It's a site called "All 4 Lebanon." Similar language has appeared on air-dropped pamphlets.

Public opinion now and during the Second War

I had no idea, but FDR conducted secret polling of the American public during the war. What does it show? People knew what the war was about, setbacks had little affect on their views, and support was high. Compare and contrast... It's also interesting seeing that the public correctly saw Stalingrad and the other coincident events as the turning point. I hadn't realized that it was obvious at the time.

For some reason these two articles worked well together

Okay, maybe it seems weird, but here goes:

• How Jell-O(R) killed the dinosaurs.
• Body parts found in nude dancer's apartment.
• And I'm going to go ahead and add in one additional link. Hypoxic devices may be restricted in sports.

The iPod's iOddities

I think we've all heard about the iPod-connected vibrator.

Business week has a whole batch of odd iPod accessories. Actually, some aren't terribly odd in my opinion.

Other interesting/odd items include the Tune Buckle, Goatse.cx skin, and there are probably plenty of others to find, but I need to get back to work.

How easy is it to steal a bike in NYC?

A blowtorch would have been a bit too much I guess.

James Fetzer interview in the City Pages

If you don't know him, he's the UMD professor and local master of conspiracy theories. He is sort of the unofficial dean of the Minnesota conspiracy theory folks (okay, guys, as there aren't too many gals into that particular business) and a compelling argument for the humorlessness of public access television.

On the conspiracy theory news front, as long as we're there, I just finished reading The Letters of Wanda Tinasky. If you remember, she's the "bag lady" who wrote the Pychonesque letters to the editor of various papers around (the California) Fort Bragg area while Pychon himself was in the area researching Vineland. Anyway...the whole story sounds so much better in theory than when actually read, the letters are rather pedestrian and remind me more of the weird letters to Savage Love or Creative Loafing than anything Pychon would author. Anyhow...just my random thoughts to send you off to google.

Al Gore's presidential moment

Okay, truth be told, he's had several presidential moments and we all know that's a few more than the current occupier of the oval office. Still, what to say about An Inconvenient Truth? I saw the movie over the weekend and came away with a string of opinions and a fear that someone would note that I had driven to the movie theater rather than walked...

• The science looked accurate. Scientists in the relevent field agree with a few minor caveats. Still, it's an interesting experience to hear a politician get facts straight.
• The animated bear and frog are just ridiculous.
• Not a bad powerpoint (or Keynote) presentation. I suspect that the interns/staff has a lot to do with it.
• Apple advertising! (Thanks Anne for the thought.) If this movie gets the US working towards lowering carbon emissions, someday Apple will use it in an ad.
• The bear and frog? Drop them in the director's cut.
• The whole human interest bit with Gore's son, hit by a car, reeked of cheap manipulation. The story of his sister (who died as a smoker of lung cancer while the family farm grew tobacco) was much more effective.
• There's a decent review of what's happening here from the New Haven Advocate.
• And the NYT talking about geoengineering "solutions" to ameliorate the global climate change.

Katrina waste and corruption

"Breathtaking" says the article. Just wait until we're evacuating Florida from the rising ocean waters.

The Egg of Columbus

Oddly enough I had never heard this story before.

Who's really screwing America?

A little exerpt from The Nation. I like the non-obvious nature of some of these listings. Dan Brown and Dick Cheney together at last.

Better Everest news...

Dan Mazur, guide to two paying clients, gave up their summit chances to save an abandoned climber left by his guide company, the day before, to die.

Uptown criminals are no match for superheroes!

Way to go, Galactic Pizza! Their pies are really good as well! Their CSA pizzas in the summer can be pretty impressive, depending on what's fresh in the gardens at the time.

Emergency frog rescue

One of the more interesting, and utterly cool, examples of "emergency" science. Rescuing frog species ahead of a lethal fungus infection. And bringing them back to the states in carry-on baggage...

EU complicit in the CIA prisoner torture network

BBC

Retuers

"Turning the corner"

Or not exactly. Iraq is in worse shape than ever:

• Record numbers of murdered coming into the morgue.
• In addition to revenge murders of civilians by US soldiers, we have random artillery fire killing civilians.
• Fifty people kidnapped all at once. The disappeared almost always turn up as dead bodies.
• As the third deadline for naming ministers passes, the militias continue to pull people out of cars and kill them.
• See what a day in Iraq is like three years after the war began. Freedom? Democracy?
• See what's up on the economic front. Electrical power is near pre-war, embargo, levels. A lot of money has been spent (or wasted) with little gain.
• More on Haditha, location of the most public massacre of Iraqi civilians. It's not My Mai (Song My), but shows the same US military failures. Massacres of civilians in futile jestures of revenge.

$1000 per month rent in NYC

Though not in Manhattan...

Cthulu Chick Tract

Do you remember those hilarious little Chick Tracts? The ones telling you that you needn't pack sweaters for the afterlife? It seems inevitable, now that the stars are right, that the Cthulu Chick Tract is now available. I want to be eaten first!

Silly patents

At Patently Silly dot com. The cordless jump rope (why bother?) and the "cylindrical object" (rock) skipping on water are my current favorites. Another beautiful demonstration of (some) failures of the patent system.

Marianne Faithfull as Ophelia?

Probably not a wise choice. One reviewer commented, "not convincingly virginal." Thanks Leni!

The EU finds that the sharing of personal airline passenger information with the US is illegal

Maybe this will strengthen the resolve of the US Supreme Court to also find such abuses illegal. We can hope, can't we?

Not exactly peak oil, but perhaps peak HIV infections

Technical details on the AT&T/NSA spy gear

Follow the little links...

Edmund Hillary on the ethics of climbers ignoring the dying

About 40 climbers (mostly paying clients of guides) ignored a dying fellow climber on Everest.

US ABMs in Europe?

In Poland and the Czech Republic? It's definitely a post-cold war setup despite some of the Russian objections.

Searching for Jimmy Hoffa

And not under the end zone of Giants' Stadium.

Words that matter: Truthiness?

It's as current as the regime in Washington, more recognizable than "double-speak" and less risque than "bullshit." Truthiness.

I especially liked the line "Speak truthiness to power" as an explanation of Colin Powell's failure as SoS.

An odd lack of bird flu

In returning European migratory birds.

Bush challenges to the rule of law

Bush has claimed that he is above more than 750 laws. That they do not apply to him. ''There is no question that this administration has been involved in a very carefully thought-out, systematic process of expanding presidential power at the expense of the other branches of government," Cooper [Phillip Cooper, a Portland State University law professor who has studied the executive power claims Bush made during his first term] said. ''This is really big, very expansive, and very significant."

And more than 3500 Americans were illegally spied on last year by the FBI following the contention of Bush that domestic spying laws could be completely ignored. I really think his best chance in the long term is to resign and let Cheney give him a pardon. Unless Cheney is forced to resign first...

Get past the difficult (and less than exciting) title

..."The Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal" and you'll find an elegant (if overly simplistic) essay on the roots of the Dubya Conservative take on the cold war and a contrasting liberal version of the cold war. The author argues that that liberal cold war vision of America building democracy at home and as an example overseas can be used in the post-9/11 world by a democratic party interested in regaining power.

Zhou Tiehai: China's answer to Thomas Kincaide

Well, sort of. Zhou has underlings do his actual painting, but his satire on the art scene is being purchased by "serious" art collectors. Kincaide's brilliant parody of art is bought by suburbanites with no appreciation of the irony of their purchase.

Crocodile vs. Chainsaw

No photo available. Crocodile and chainsaw operator are fine. Chainsaw is toast.

Darfur & Biafra

Been thinking about the big rally being held this Sunday, April 30th at the State Capital. "What did you do to try to stop the Darfur Genocide?" Been thinking about Biafra in light of what is happening now (and heck, for years now) in the Sudan. Got a book on the Biafran War a few days ago. Hadn't thought about it in quite some time. Anyway...there's not a lot of good material (at least that I could find quickly) on Biafra online, but you can try these to start:

• Wikipedia if you didn't remember where Biafra was.
• eXile web magazine's offbeat homage to Carl Gustaf von Rosen---hero of Biafra and general aviation saint of Africa.
• Frederick Forsyth got his start as a journalist in Biafra. His book remains the classic telling of the story.
• The Nation of Biafra, in exile.

Another take on Darfur, from two years ago.

Best of the Twin Cities

Best local website. Cursor.

See all of the listings online.

A special thrill was seeing Outsiders and Others be selected as best Art Gallery. My little ones have had their art hung there and they just held a most excellent sale and silent auction there last Saturday. Darn it, it looks like I wasn't the high bidder though...

Peak Oil

The Economist has an interesting piece arguing that Peak Oil is quite a ways away. I thought one of the more interesting bits was the estimate of the prices at which alternate fuel technologies would be cost compeditive. Biodiesel was the highest priced option at $80 per barrel (oil equivalent). We're just about there.

University branding

I'd been thinking about writing something similar, but without any hint of irony.

Build your own Iraqi police/death squad

It's pretty cheap, and the cool mullahs are doing it. Guns, uniforms, bulletproofed cars. All available for cash transactions.

Standing room only airlines

As seat pitches decline again on many airlines, my 6' 6" body is bound to face more abuse from the airlines. But standing on flights?

A pyramid in Bosnia?

Well, I have to admit I was initially excited about this possibility. A buried pyramid in Bosnia? Built perhaps 1200 years ago? There was a bunch of uncritical news coverage:

• Yahoo.
  
• MSNBC.
  
• Sydney Morning Herald.
  
• The BBC.
  

• "This is total nonsense. It’s impossible. There was no high culture in this region at that time capable of building something on this scale,â€? said Professor Enver Imamovic, a respected archeologist from Sarajevo.
  
• “They should not be allowed to destroy genuine sites in the pursuit of these delusions,â€? Garrett Fagan, a professor at Penn State University, said. “It’s as if someone were given permission to bulldoze Stonehenge to find secret chambers of lost ancient wisdom underneath.â€?
  
• "In most countries of Europe those with wacky theories about “hidden mysteriesâ€? on presumed archaeological sites are free to propound them but not to undertake excavation, which by its very nature destroys much of what it uncovers; let alone excavation by those unqualified in terms of training and experience."
  
• This blog is claimed to be a running commentary on the claims, but my language ability limits what I can get out of it.
  

• "The Maya are creatures of the light. And the cosmic expressed through sacred codes in geometry, color, musical notes and alphabet."
  
• "Maya is a key Hindu philosophical term meaning “creation of the worldâ€? and “the world of illusionâ€?. In Sanskrit “Mayaâ€? is connected with the concepts of “greatâ€? “measureâ€? â€?mindâ€? and “motherâ€?. For this reason, it may not surprise us to learn that Maya was the name of Buddha’s mother. The Veda tell us that Maya was the name of a great astronomer and architect."
  
• "And the Galaxy can be described as a vast unending flow of energy… in which sets of numbers are pulsating and radiating."
  
• "The Maya were informed about the Cosmos. Wherever they went they carried this information with them. Throughout the planets they were able to establish a two-way flow of galactic information."
  
• "When the “heavens openâ€? and cosmic energy is allowed to flow throughout our tiny Planet, will we be raised to a higher level by the vibrations… to overcome the age of darkness which has been oppressing us?"
  

Computer upgrades...

Don't go to the big box store! This link is a funny cartoon, but has sound, so don't do it at work...

The United States of Prison

In 1980 there were 1,118,097 on probation; 183,988 in jail; 319,598 in prison; and 220,438 on parole.

In 2004 there were 4,151,125 on probation; 713,990 in jail; 1,421,911; in prison; and 765,355 on parole.

The numbers of people on parole, in jail, in prison and on parole are all more than 3 times what they were, while the population has increased less than 30% over the same 24 year time period (from roughly 228 million people in 1980 to 293 million in 2004).

Condi leaks classified information

The junior Pentagon official who did the same was sentenced to twelve years in prison. What fate for Ms Rice?

Hard drive historical pricing

The commercial history of desktop computer hard drives on one page. The first hard drive I had was a 5MB Radio Shack castoff (when the 20MB drives became available from Corvus.) My first PC hard drive was an 80MB (when 40MB drives were more common). It was an MFM drive as the RLL interfaces (which gave about a factor of 1.5 in storage space) at that time were flakey. The last drive I bought was a 250GB in a firewire enclosure.

Bush, the nuclear blunders

It's clear now how the Iraq distraction has harmed us in the pursuit of bin Laden, with North Korea's nuclear weapons, and now with the standoff with Iran. The US is immeaurably weaker today than when Bush decided to launch a war of aggression with Iraq.

Lost Japanese soldier from World War 2 turns up...

...in the Ukraine? Interestingly enough, he was only declared dead in 2000.

Own up to a drug conviction and no student aid for you!

I guess the department was right. It is an argument for drug legalization. 190,000 students have told the truth and been denied financial aid.

DEA agent shoots himself in foot

...while demonstrating gun safety to kids. Now he's suing the DEA for making him a target of laughter by leaking the video to the web. Just to help the laughter at this idiot continue, you can download the video here. Or watch it online here. Read more about it here in Snopes's urban legend department (NB: It's a true tale, not an urban legend.).

On the flip side of memoir...

Colton Simpson is looking at prison for life, in part for the details in his memoir of jewelry thefts. "During a jewelry heist in 1986, he grabbed a $30,000 ring and shot a man who grabbed him from behind. He remembers the incident in his books: 'Yeah, some good citizen turned a simple theft into an armed robbery with attempted-murder charges. Gonna cost the citizens of the state a pile of money. Got himself put in a wheelchair. Stupid people complicating my life.' " Yep, sounds like a quality individual.

Iceland is the broadbandest country in the world

The top countries for fast internet connections are all around 25% broadband connection. That seems like an interesting level. For about 1/4 of households, a fast connection is worth the money and available. I'd guess the available fraction of people in Iceland would be very high. Small country with the population concentrated in the city. But we get the same fraction elsewhere too.

Interesting thoughts on the medical prayer study

Faith-based medicine in the NYT.

How Ronald Reagan invented gangsta rap

By illegally funding the Contras through cocaine imports into the US which funded the labels and on and on...
It's a beautiful figure. The interconnectedness of politics, drugs, and rap.

Lied to again by the felon-in-chief

Two days after the secret intelligence team reported to the White House that those nasty Iraqi trailers had nothing to do with bioweaponry, Dubya announced "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." It was not only incorrect, it was a bald-faced lie, known at that point to be incorrect. The lies that got the US into the war continued in (mostly failed) attempts at justifying the growing debacle.

Vampire killing kit?

For sale on ebay.

There are some more modern ones for auction as well.

April is National Poetry Month & Math Awareness Month!

Comining the two...Fibonacci Poems!

A day in Iraq

From the BBC reporters there. Start at the bottom (early in the morning) and work up the page towards the latest headlines.

Scott McClellan

Scott McClellan fully and truly skewered in Vanity Fair. "Press Secretary Scott McClellan's mangled sentences, flat-footed evasions, and genial befuddlement have made him the butt of a thousand blogs, as well as of an increasingly savage press corps."

"Every day, he's pulped, pummeled, spit upon for speaking White House untruths—or for not speaking them well enough.

It is so bad, and so constantly public—every misspoken word, every stutter, every repetition, repeated mercilessly across the information universe—that he can only hope that it's gotten bad enough for him to get a sympathy vote."

Wow!

9000 year old dentistry

For 1500 years, people in the area of modern-day Pakistan drilled out decaying tooth material, probably using the drills and skills of beadmaking. Very cool!

Patent craziness

Wow! The mug with an artificial horizon is kinda cool, but, yeah, they're all crazy. Patent reform really soon now, please!

The Taliban college experience in Pensacola

An unaccredited college for the looniest of the loons. Get expelled for "making eye babies!" That is, looking at a member of the opposite sex.

Not sure of the original goal of the website...

...but it's pretty amusing. A bunch of quotes. Are they from the Unabomber's Manifesto? Or Al Gore's Earth in the Balance? Makes me think Ted wasn't that much of a nut. Was that the goal?

The pirate fishing fleets

It's a visit to the bizarre world of decaying Chinese ships, Russian resupply, and desperate lives. All aimed at stripping the ocean of its valuables.

I haven't kept up with Hitchens that well since he left the Nation

But I definitely enjoyed his spirited defense of Denmark, the free press, and democracy. And I think we can safely ignore his praise of the Iraq War. I am impressed that he's remained steadfast in his opinions, hmmm..., despite evidence that they're wrong?

The most encouraging article (well, informal essay) on free speech that I've seen in a very long time

"General: 'Mr. Arkin, do you consider yourself a journalist or an American.' I took a drink of water as my blood boiled. Me: 'Well General, because I am an American, I cherish the fact that I can call you a f***ing idiot for asking the question.'" There are more thoughtful bit as well...

Nature & Encyclopedia Britannica

The Nature study which compared the Wikipedia and Britannica is criticized by the latter party. It's an interesting business, was looking at the pdf's from both organizations attacking and defending the study (follow links at the Beeb site to find this bits). No conclusions from me exactly, but there certainly looked like an intellectual divide as much as anything else. See what you think.

Avian flu

The City Pages here locally has an excellent article on the bird flu which is clearer than anything I had previously read about the real risks and issues with the H5N1 virus. Important reading I think.

Further consequences of the Patriot Act

You need to report to the government if you take your chicken to the vet. Huh? This is smaller, less intrusive government? And it's weird!

ETA calls it quits

The Basque separtist freedom fighters/terrorists have called a permanent ceasefire. The Islamist bombings in Madrid have essentially made future ETA bombing campaigns untenable. Over eight hundred people have been killed by ETA over the four decades of its operation.

Child "bride" in Afghanistan

One of the more painful stories that I have ever read. Married off at age four, beaten, starved, scalded, abused for years. Finally escaped.

Outsourcing to North Korea?

Ick! South Korean firms are moving some manufacturing across the DMZ to employ North Korean workers who officially get 1/10th to 1/20th the salary of South Koreans, but the money goes to the North Korean government, not the workers. And the factory owners want to have the products labeled as made in South Korea.

Welcome to the brain of the Don

The Donald Rumsfeld that is. Plastic has an excellent resume of web links from his halcyon days in the Nixon and Ford administrations to leading two failed wars (see what sort of freedom and democracy has brought to Afghanistan?) for Dubya.

Read his own words, justifying what has been accomplished in the past three years in Iraq. Believe any of it? Like Rummy's $50 billion dollar and 5 week estimates of the war costs and length? And what's up with his comparisons of very and sundries with Hitler? Do we really fear that a 1000 year Venezualan Reich is right around the corner? Or is he projecting a bit?

Going back to the resume, we have to reflect on his successful running of the Office of Economic Opportunity under Nixon and his back-room efforts to help get the US out of the Vietnam War. For that he was shuffled off to be NATO ambassador. Then triumph as chief of staff and defense secretary under Ford, fighting against the whole nastiness of detante. Off to the private sector until Dubya decides to bring the Nixon crowd all back to the White House. The epic Shinseki-Rumsfeld fight seems now to be a footnote in the story, but certainly marked part of the White House team's decent into unreality.

Afghanistan. Iraq. Some investigations into what Rumsfeld has wrought.

In a war based on lies...

...we have the "largest air assault since the beginning of the Gulf War Part 2" a so-called Operation Swarmer. We're still being lied to. This was merely a propaganda operation timed to coincide with additional bad news from Iraq and with the 3rd anniversary of the start of US offensive operations. Even Time magazine concludes "not a shot was fired, or a leader nabbed."

The debt

Well, it now stands at about $27,000 for each person in the country. Or about 65.7% of the GDP. Over $8 trillion. What's going to happen when the Baby Boomers retire? It's rather a mess that those spend and borrow (not tax) Republicans have gotten us into financially.

Aviation leak on a possible two-stage-to-orbit military spaceplane

One would need to take it all with a grain of salt, but the chronology would make some sense. Might this also be Aurora?

File an FOIA request to see if you've been illegally spied on

Do read the FAQ and all before doing anything with this. And be aware that the NSA isn't likely to respond, but the FBI might.

A roll of 100 stamps and some wasted time

Just about breakeven without accounting for time used. Or the domain name...

Car popularity by how long it sits on the lot

Okay, I admit it, one of my most stereotypically guy traits is a unhealthy interest in cars. No, no, no, I didn't mean like Rachel in V. I mean, in reading car magazines and the like. A Maserati? What sort of insanity is that. I've deliberately not had a car section in my blog also, but here's an entry that would fall into that, if I had such a category.

Cars that sell right off the delivery truck, and cars that sit for 302 days on average! (A crossfire sounds like a mechanical problem with an engine rather than something one might want to own IMHO.) Some surprises, common Honda Civics sell off of the lot very quickly while the very cool Mazda RX-8 takes months to sell. Interesting little article.

Barnard Park music

Ah, news from near where I grew up. Beautiful Barnard Park in Hartford, CT. Drugs, prostitutes, and now a proposal to use classical music to reduce crime. Play Bach and soothe the inner beast. Beethoven and reduce the need for ultraviolence. There's also the beginnings of a discussion of this on plastic.com.

Nuclear power redux

NPR devoted an hour recently to nuclear power, though it wasted some of that time with a cold fusion bit. Got to have that "on one side" and "on the other" thing going.

I'm certainly in favor of sensible ways of cutting back greenhouse gases which would include nuclear power, but a British panel looking into this concluded that building new plants would not yield a significant carbon dioxide benefit to outweigh its risks. It's an interesting argument---the risks included not only the obvious, and vexing, long-term waste problem but also the rigid hierarchical power-distribution structure from nuclear power at a time when micro-generation seems to be increasing.

Peanut butter appears to have not been deadly

The boyfriend eats peanut butter on toast, kisses gal, she dies of allergic reaction story appears to be in error.

Mine safety violation penalties? Being reduced.

With the mining deaths in the news, you might think that the government would follow up on mine safety. Or make companies pay the fines they've been assesed. You'd be wrong. In the interests of corporate subsidy, fines for violations of the law are being reduced and not collected. Makes sense to me. If the mine owners continue to contribute to the GOP, heck, they can have Iraqi slave labor working in the mines before long. Ooops! Did I give them any ideas?

The Seante is looking into it. Well, some senators are questioning it anyway.

Bill of Rights

Wow! 20% of surveyed Americans thought pet ownership was enshrined in the 1st Ammendment. Only one of the one thousand respondants could name all five liberties listed there. No wonder we're losing them.

• Freedom of/from religion
• Freedom of the press
• Freedom of speech
• Freedom of assembly
• Right to court process

Let's see...yup, all of them are under concerted attack.

Breaking the last undeciphered Nazi German naval coded transmissions

They aren't especially significant transmissions, but there still something quite cool with finally deciphering these M4 Enigma transmissions. Let me also note, that since I went through a phase a year or two ago when I did quite a bit of reading on the U-Boat operations during World War II, that the "knife-edge" of victory over the German submarines is a myth.

Even when the Germans were winning, they were barely able to sink ships faster than they were being built, and they never were intercepting more than a percent or so of the ships bound for England. Clay Blair's two volumes (Hunters (1939-1942) and are certainly the definitive works on the Battle of the Atlantic. No knife-edge. No near thing. The U-Boats were suicidal operations by 1942 and even when they were most successful, were a small effect. There never were enough submarines to have a serious effect on British transport. And with the radar and cipher advantages, and by 1942 with the US also in the war, the contest was extremely uneven.

"By the time I get to South Dakota"

The already famous "Molly Saves the Day" blog entry for the women of South Dakota. And much of the rest of the country pretty soon now.

As Gore Vidal pointed out, there was more to Timothy McVeigh than met the eye

Though parts of the story here seem off-topic, it is worthwhile to note how many oddities remain in the OKC bombing story. Though some parts are being declassified.

Brundibar on stage in New Haven

Maurice Sendak stage design for the Yale Rep Theater's version of the Czech opera best known for the all-child production at Theresiendtadt.

Falklands 2.0

The Argentinian sabre-rattling is starting to get British attention. Isles Malvinas may once again be a useful distraction for the Argentine government faced with domestic problems.

Today's Iraq update

There are no, as in zero, nip, nada, Iraqi battalions are ready to do anything without US support.

Wait a seond! There is something they can do! They can act as death squads and kill up to 900 people per month (July figure). Bodies found with cigarette burns, and mutilated with power tools. These guys went to a cruder torture school than the US torturers. Maybe to the School of the Americas?

Want a different perspective? You can read the defense department's "Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq" for lots of statistics. No comments in there about the near civil war situation, the death squads, or the growing power of the mullahs.

Remember the Freedom Tower? 1776 feet of pure freedom in lower Manhattan. Well, you may have to submit to iris scans and thumbprints. Additionally, the building seems to exempt from inspections. So, freedom means no privacy and being above the law?

A new threat to freedom!

Morrissey? Interviewed by the FBI and British intelligence? "Hang the DJ!"

Meanwhile, we have Iranian mullahs explaining how the US blew up some religious buildings in a country we invaded because we lied and said that they were involved in blowing up some buildings here.

Black box voting update

Palm Beach County voting machines have had their error logs examined. Votes cast ahead of the election, powered off many times during the election day, and plenty of other headaches. Let's see, there are trillions of petro- and military-dollars at stake, would people make an attempt to defraud the American public and alter the election?

Unigoogle words

Use google to search and you find only one website. How often does that happen? You can try "jonenpaar" as a unigoogle term. Others?

The Nation on the Torino Olympics?

Well, I cared about the biathalon and the cross-country skiing, though not really skeleton (scary as it looks). Otherwise I think the Nation did a good job highlighting the horror that was the television coverage of the games and the bizarre spectacles that have eclipses even the curling competition. Who indeed came up with the Bode Miller concept? Fired, I trust.

Minneapolis condo madness

Not even talking about the crazy new condo developments downtown, but this good City Pages article looks at the cost of the condo conversions of relatively inexpensive appartments into pricey condos.

Bikers drown out fundamentalist protesters at military funerals

So, these fundamentalist Christians from Westboro Baptist Church are going to the funerals of American victims of the Iraq War to harass the mourners. Why, you ask? Because the deaths are God's punishment on America for "tolerating" homosexuality. Huh? Okay, stay with me now, so bikers come out and run their engines and show their support for the victims and their families by drowning out the offensive Baptists. Got it? Yeah, it's weird. Read all about it in the Army Times this week.

In secret, previously declassified documents are being reclassified

It's a pretty bizarre back-attack on Bill Clinton's 1995 declassification order. That was supposed to speed the declassification of materials that had no need to remain secret.

Documents that have been reclassified range from bizarre to embarassing:

• "The CIA's assessment on 12 October 1950 that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was 'not probable in 1950' - two weeks before Chinese troops crossed into Korea."
• "A 1962 telegram from the then US ambassador to Yugoslavia containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on China's nuclear weapons program."
• "A 1948 memorandum on a CIA scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain to drop propaganda leaflets."

If you made a copy of them while they were public, you may now be in violation of the Espionage Act. Heck, pretty soon owning a copy of the Constitution is likely to be illegal, so a coverup of CIA misdeeds of 60 years ago may be the least of our troubles.

Bush PR campaign costs taxpayers $1.6B

In addition to the cost of lunatic policies, Bush has been charging us for propaganda to support his policies. $1.6 Billion dollars worth of legally questionable propaganda. Some bits seem sensible enough, boater warnings and National Park paperwork, but there are also partisan campaigns to sell the regimes war in Iraq, gutting of environmental laws, and Medicare fiddlings.

UN asks for Gitmo to be closed

Due to torture, inhuman operating conditions, and an abusive use of power. You can read the report here. And see the news articles here (Yahoo News).

The US regime refuses to consider this. And claims that the torture and abuse is, in fact, humane. And that the torture center houses "dangerous terrorists." Well, if so, they could be charged with crimes and their cases put before a judge and jury.

Looking further at who is actually in detention at Guantanamo Bay reveals an interesting story. Most of these people were Arabs arrested in Pakistan (for reward monies) and are not accused of hostilities toward the US. Though after four years of torture and confinement, it's hard to not imagine them wanting some payback now. Only eight of 132 studied are even accused of planning or being involved with potential terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan. Many are just accused by one other person of having some association with the Taliban.

"If you think of the people down there, these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield. They're terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama bin Laden's] bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th 9/11 hijacker." -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lying on June 27, 2005

Look at prisoner #032 for a case study. Someone who is not one of the "most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth" as Rummy put it, and is neither an enemy nor a combatant.

The "important" prisoners disappeared into CIA custody, and are not in Cuba. They've been ferried in and out of various torture centers in Eastern Europe and the Middle East instead.

Theology for evil and for not being ignorant (two separate links)

These folks might be promising you $1000 if you prove, to their satisfaction, not yours, that the Earth goes around the Sun.

And many churches are addressing the validity of Darwin without "deliberately embracing ignorance." Three cheers for them. "A faith that requires you to close your mind in order to believe is not much of a faith at all." More here on evolution Sunday.

Lawrence would have done better in Iraq

Wait a second! He did do a lot better in three days than the US administration did in three years. Peter O'Toole, where are you?

You know how sometimes you go click on a link...

...and, presto, there it is. And it's really quite strange. And you scroll down, and it gets stranger. And it reminds you that Joy Division was a really long time ago, though I suppose not as long ago as Hank Williams. Senior. So, you click on the mp3s and listen while, oh my god!, the music plays and you read of Tuva and stolen passports. Then you look around on the site, reviews of Captain Beefheart in a Tuvan style. Feynman pretty much has to be to blame for making Tuva hip again. Kyzyl! The throat singing is amazing stuff, but covering the Rolling Stones? They just did the halftime show at some Bowling match or other. And got censored. Painted black. Black as black. The link already!

Music for today, tomorrow, and last Tuesday.

Sample lyrics from KAMGALANYR KUZHU-DAA BAR (We have protection force.):

Yenisei river's banks are full of natural richness, our amazing country has protection force.

Yenisei runs and kicks his banks by his waves, if an enemy invades we have a lot of power to destroy him.

In taiga there is a lot of gold and other richness, in the north and south we have brother countries.

In the south and north parts of taiga there are a lot of minerals and furs, -- we have the powerful USSR giving a happy life to us.


KALDAK-KHAMAR

music - trad arr. A. Kuvezin

lyrics - Salchak Toka

"The name of a mountain pass through Tannu-Ola range at the south part of Tuva. In 1933-1934 the road from Kyzyl (capital) to region on Mongolian border was built; and on this pass for one year people were digging using only simple tools like picks, spades, hand-trolleys and enthusiasm. Now it is road of state importance connecting Siberia, Tuva and Mongolia. The lyrics written by first General Secretary of Communist Party of then-independent state of "Tannu Touva". Salchak Toka, leader of the Government and also one of the great writers of classic Tuvan literature - a Soviet Union State Prizewinner. This song about wish and striving to dig out Kaldak-Khamar pass, to build a smooth road and to rush by an iron devil-car like a kite."

Alberto's world

"President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale." - Alberto Gonzales." As long as Lincoln illegally intercepted emails, it must be okay. Wait a sec...

And, notice that the GOP did not have Gonzales under oath! Seems like the only way to avoid perjury from our Attorney General.

Iraq war hoax

Lawrence Wilkerson is so far the highest ranking former member of the Bush intelligence team at the time of the Iraq War planning to speak out. "A hoax on the American people."

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: It makes me feel terrible. I've said in other places that it was-- constitutes the lowest point in my professional life. My participation in that presentation at the UN constitutes the lowest point in my professional life.

I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council. How do you think that makes me feel? Thirty-one years in the United States Army and I more or less end my career with that kind of a blot on my record? That's not a very comforting thing.

DAVID BRANCACCIO [interviewer]: A hoax? That's quite a word.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, let's face it, it was.

Roadside memorials

Proliferating and being regulated. I'll have to post some photos I have of interesting and odd ones from Pennsylvania and Argentina.

Zimbabwe clothing spat

Traditional costume = public indecency.

Arsonist tale from Northeast Minneapolis

Near Lowry and Central? Sully's bar? Anne, do you know the guy?

Google fight!

I guess it works as a judge of truth as well. And "cosmic rays" beat out the singular. And it looks as though it'll be a good year.

"Beaver" on Wikipedia

No, no, no! It's safe for work. We're talking about the rodent here.

Take a look at this, since fixed, entry on the second largest rodent. I especially liked the "citation needed" bit.

An excellent bit on myths of Challenger (20 years on)

The myths article appears here. And the top level 20th anniversary stories are here.

So, I was walking home from school, we had had exams that day and I was finished for the day. When I got home my mother had heard it on the radio. I remember the next day watching the footage again and again in school and noticing when someone decided to add the explosion sound to the tape. It wasn't delayed at all. You saw the explosion and heard the bang. I remember that faking of the news video almost as much as the whole tragedy at NASA sort of thing. Columbia bothered me a lot more---probably by being closer to NASA and the space program at that later date, and also understanding it as the end of the era. (Or maybe of the error of the shuttle.)

Best companies to work for...

Some interesting choices in there...

Katrina tales from the White House

are being hidden by the White House. Figure they don't look all that good to the public?

The outsourcing of torture

European governments knew about the CIA's torture flights. These were criminal acts violating European human rights laws. Consequences to be determined later... EU governments have been reluctant to release information to the investigator.

Ford "restructuring"

Looks like the St. Paul, MN plant dodged the bullet. Maybe Ford could sell cars that people would be excited about, say the European Focus ST (compare to the US one here), or bringing back the RS models, rather than the Excursions, Expeditions, and Explorers clogging our suburbs (and sometimes wallowing through our cities).

Halliburton provides contaminated water, and hides it

And a bunch of folks got sick. Who exactly is aiding the "enemy" again?

Earwax removal

Me, I often have quite a bit of ear wax buildup though I do clean my ears on a daily basis. (Was that too much information?) Anyhow, this Canadian Medical Journal article details the emergency removal of earwax with a supersoaker loanded by a local four year old. It was "an off-label use" of the device. Not generally recommended, but something to add to your emergency medicine knowledge...

A weird Japanese phenomena

People, perhaps as many as a million (1% of the population), shut themselves into their room for years on end.

Ashkenazi origin

From DNA testing.

Continuing on the car theme...

Take a look at Top Gear's comparison of racing the NSX on a game machine and in real life.

And comparing modern road cars to race cars of the past.

Great videos. And why doesn't the US have either good car magazines or video magazines like the Brits? Check out Evo, Car, or Top Gear and compare them to the waste of paper that is the US auto magazine industry.

The automatic braking fiasco

Well, it turned out that the much-publicized test failure of the Mercedes automatic brake system was rigged. It wasn't a test at all.

The anti-Kyoto assembly

Though Condie looks to be skipping it due to the Ariel Sharon illness.

An interesting (and hopefully spreading) challenge to realtors

Though I personally liked my realtor (buyer's agent), the whole realty scheme seems like an anachronism. Here's an attempt at a solution.

Bio-Willie!

As the first news item I wanted to pass along for the new year...Willie Nelson is promoting biodiesel. BioWillie Diesel in fact. And a good starting place for those of you who wonder what the heck biodiesel is. Cheers!

Back to the J. Edgar Hoover era

As it appears that nearly every US "security" agency has been involved with spying on Americans. Activist groups targetted included environmental groups, animal cruelty (prevention) groups, Greenpeace... It sort of makes sense since we know that Greenpeace was involved with the OKC bombing, and PETA funding the WTC attacks. No wait, someone else was involved in those...

Though Dubya can't understand what the law is...

...we are quite a bit smarter. Here it is. It's a federal crime, punishable by up to five years in prison to order surveillance without court approval. The President is claiming to be above the law. This is not supposed to be the case in a country ruled by law. Follow some of the fumblings here.

Maybe they weren't so dangerous after all?

Remember those "Most-Wanted" Iraqis? They're being released.

To get through common voice mail systems...

Save some time.

I hesitate to post this...

...since several of my friends who are religious will take this link as a statement of my thoughts on the subject. However, let me make the link to Harris's atheist manifesto with the proviso that some of his backing evidence as to how religious nations are more violent, etc. is not completely solid. The notion of the lack of sensibility for the label "atheist", likening it to the terms "non-astrologer" or "non-alchemist" is especially interesting, and, in my experience, novel.

The Bush regime still has trouble telling lobbyists from journalists

As a Oil Industry shill goes to the Climate Change conference as a journalist. Credentialed by the Washington Times.

Wikipedia entry on Seigenthaler revisited

Looks as though it was a practical joke on a coworker. They didn't know that anyone treated the wikipedia's accuracy seriously.

Minnesota school program

Although it appears that only 4% of students take advantage of it, high school students in the state can take free college classes. Interesting program...hadn't known about it before.

"Cyber Monday"

This appears to be a new made-up phrase, probably created by those who wish to hype internet sales. A marketing ploy.

"Cyber Monday" : All results from the past week.

Contrast it with:

"Black Friday" : With links going back to 1993. Such as this one.

A rerun of the 1924 Everest expedition clothing

Helping to dispell the myth that Mallory and Irvine were rank amateurs.

An odd job with, perhaps, no training

Balloon wrangling for the Thanksgiving Day parade.

Iraqi ER

Reported on in the Guardian.

Last witness to the Christmas truce passed away

At age 109. The Christmas unofficial truce is so often mentioned in connection with the fundamental humanity of conscripted troops. I wonder if such gestures can make it through the modern military programming?

Paisley = demon?

Who would have guessed?

A new discovery for me: Slate magazine "explainer" column

History of closed sessions in the Senate.

How to set (French) cars on fire.

Do fighter planes (US supplied F-16s in particular) come with a warranty?

And, the question we've all been asking after hearing about Scooter Libby's letter to Judith Miller: Do aspens turn color in clusters?

Dismantling the Albanian Air Force

To museums, the scrapyard, and maybe even to serve as bars.

A vignette of wartime London

Piccadilly.

This year's official DuVernois Halloween entry

Vampire Watermelons!!! "People have little fear of the vampire melons because of the creatures' lack of teeth." And other acts of supernatural nature.

Corruption index

I would have said Finland to Nigeria, except this year it's Iceland to Chad. The surveys are interesting to take a look at by themselves as well.

Rosa Parks

The Nation's Obit is the simplest and most straightforward one out there that I've seen. There's also a tantalizing mention, in the comments, about the Highlander Folk School within whose tradition and teachings Rosa Parks acted.

The best Katrina conspiracy page

All the other conspiracies must take a back seat to the word of the Captain. Hyperdimensional physics? Weather terrorism? It's here for your enjoyment.

Price of gold

The environmental price that is.

Antibacterial soaps

I think we all knew it was a dangerous and misguided product, but the FDA's review panel now agrees.

Big, bomb-proof trucks

I almost titled this entry "new SUVs now available for suburbia" but decided that I genuinely wanted a non-humorous look at these vehicles. Such trucks have been around for years, starting from South African anti-landmine trucks, in use for demining. They continue in that role. As IED protection in Iraq, they're going to be only of temporary utility. Hamas moved to truly large IEDs to defeat Israeli Merkava tanks, and if these trucks become more common in Iraq, the resistance will just up the bomb size correspondingly.

Fruitcake listings

Nope, it's not that time of year yet to swap the (semi-)food-like item called fruitcake. Instead, we have some great theological excursions into the weird. Jesus as an alien love child? Sounds almost plausible, though we can talk about the ahistorisity of Christ at some other point. But the giant M statue to celebrate Mary's defeat of Communism? That's just strange.

Thanks Jill for the link. Ammunition being used...

Nobel counts

How different schools count Nobel Prize winners for their advertising. This jumped out to me due to the University of Chicago connection. As a grad student there, the Chicago Nobels were mentioned many a time.

The Arctic treasure race

The New York Times has an excellent article on the current economic interest in the Arctic. Much of this interest is due to the loss of Arctic pack ice which makes access in the far north much easier. The environmental implications are discussed a bit as well.

Hudson, Wisconsin

Not quite as lurid as Jordan, Minnesota, but if Big Black were still around, there probably would be a song. The City Pages' article is called Sins of the Father. It's a good summation of the story so far.

More news: (10/7) Bishop apologizes..

The British Iranian problem

The long-rumored connection between the Iranian-trained Hezbollah and the Shia fighters in Southern Iraq is made public. As the article notes, Iranian-British relations are at a pretty low point anyway.

The Tobacco Subsidy

Will smoking kill a billion people over the next century? Well, we can see the extent of math in the media in this article... Nothing more subtle than 10*100 here.

The Ulcer Prize

Nobel Prize for discovery of the bacteria that causes most ulcers. I remember when the accepted wisdom changed for ulcers, from "lifestyle" to "bacteria."

The army of the USA

Doesn't seem to be prosecuting reservists who do not show up to go to Iraq.

Today's scare story

Though the risk is very real, it's not clear what reaction the "150M possible deaths from bird flu" should or will elicit. Fear that converts into positive action? Blind fear of an additional threat in the world? (Lock up the cat, pull the shades, and hide under the SUV.) Or just a dismissive glance? (If the Club of Rome got their predictions wrong...)

Osama's air force captured!

By the Pakistani military.

Continuing on religion...

Though perhaps not with the best thought-through correlation-causation standards ever seen...a study shows the correlation higher religious rates with increased rates of homicide, child pregnancy, abortion, and STD infection rates. The author discusses the results online. "By dysfunctional the author means that the 'prosperous democracy' is unable to convert its wealth into raising the living standard for the populace." By that standard, the US is shocking inept at converting historically unprecidented wealth into the betterment of its citizens.

"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors." - Thomas Jefferson

Project Censored

Always one of the most important links of the year. The end of open government, the civilian deaths in Iraq, the Diebolding of the election, 1984 cameras, and the purpose of "Homeland Security." Makes you feel proud to be an American.

Superdome carnage? Myth.

Murder and rape of children? Myth. I think we can pretty easily understand the reason for the fake stories, but it remains critically important for us to read the truth and mentally cross-off the stories intended to produce hatred of the poor.

Katrina and US Navy dolphins?

I'm not completely (or even half) convinced of this story...but anyway...there's a claim that the US navy may have lost (in the misplaced sense) up to 36 armed dolphins during Katrina. If you see a dolphin with a harpoon gun, run away!

True urban legends?

That is, urban legends which sounds as though they are false, but turn out to actually, honest, be true. Even if they did happen to a friend of a friend...

• Sending in a photograph of money after being caught by a photo-radar unit.

• Person who has personalized license plate "No Plate" gets lots of parking citations.

• Anti-seat belt advocate killed in car crash.

• A lightbulb has remained lit since 1901.

• A deer tongue up the wazoo?

• A Byrd's album was accidentally released without a title. And the similar tale of how ELO's first album didn't get a US title.

• Map Point has some weird directions in it.

• TV personality Soupy Sales (yep, it was another era) asked for kids to send him cash from their parents' wallets.

• Lyrics to the Star Trek theme.
  

How the practice of bringing commercial drugs to market has failed

Who would have guessed? A profit motive? The only motive?

How Curious George escaped the Nazis!

Interesting little article in the Times.

Tunes of late

What has Mike been listening to lately? What music has he been enjoying? Well, in a fit of U2 bashing, I listened to Negativland and their take on I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (see also, the Letter U and the Numeral 2) along with U2's Boy and War. Putting those old cassettes on the stereo reminded me of how low-fi cassettes are/were and also that U2 didn't suck initially. They may never have been good musicians, but the band that put out War and Boy was a quality act.

Swell Maps, what should I say about Swell Maps? Been listening to Jane in Occupied Europe all morning today. (Discography of Swell Maps, from Nikki Sudden's webpages.) Good quality stuff. The CDs are back in print...

The Clash and Duran Duran in the same magazine...

If you missed some of the great post-punk acts, there are two indepensible resources for you. (Well, there are probably more than that, but who is counting?) Trouser Press zine and their published guides, which are now available online, and Rip it Up and Start Again (Guardian review, PR from the publisher, order it from amazon.co.uk (find your own link), or wait for the US edition which is rumored to have sections deleted from it) which is an amazing piece of journalism.

Should I praise the Mila Vocal Ensemble again? They'll be back on Praire Home Companion pretty soon and appeared on stage with Garrison at the St. Paul Labor Day Picnic. Will post an update when the PHC appearance is confirmed.

I should also put in a pitch for CD Baby. It's a resource for distributing independent CDs inexpensively. Good stuff, good folks, deserving of our business. They have audio samples for most tracks.

Also visit Rogaria, home of the Orkerstar Bez Ime.

Schoenberg Concerto for Cello has been sort of an intriguing classical highlight recently. It's very different from the serialism you would expect from him. Catchy somehow.

And the Cassandra Complex...In Search of Penny Century... Satan, Bugs Bunny, and Me. Other than the discography there isn't much info out there on the web. I suspect that there may not be all that many fans of Moscow, Idaho.

• Interview from 1996.
• And an entry in an Italian history of rock music...
• A random review.
• Metropolis Records bio listing.
  
• Rodney Orpheus has a web page as well.

How do delivery aid

Steal a press pass and drive a Hyundai. Pretty shocking that the organized folks couldn't do what these guys did.

All that is fit to print...

Citypages on the flooding.

Yahoo helps out the Chinese government. To silence free speech.

Osama and Katrina, bookmarks for the Bush program?

A Katrina report from New Orleans on the evacuation

Interesting take on the evacuation...

"...Next morning, Katrina has blown up to a 5. Call for mandatory evacuation. Nagin pulls in every bus he can find, he signs an order allowing him to commandeer any vehicle or property he needs. They have buses running through the streets trying to pick people up. People are showing up at the superdome. This is 24 hours to landfall. Not much time at all, especially when this MONSTER HUGE storm will be affecting New Orleans by that evening and the bridges will have to shut when winds reach 40 mph..."

Being fired

Read some exciting stories about being fired for eating pizza and other tales of woe. Or for a saving lives. Though that one might be too good to be true. Discussion is on plastic.com. A good job to have at the moment is as a funeral director as the estimate for the Katrina+FEMA death toll is now 40,000.

New Orleans ongoing...

Tragedies and utter incompetence still prevail. I meant in NOLA, rather than DC, the latter is obvious.

Bush, as successful in New Orleans as in Falluja.

"Colossal failure..."

Paralysis of the Bush regime.

"W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives. 'I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees,' he told Diane Sawyer."

US efforts met sub-Bangladeshi standards.

"Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. 'The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of all.'"

Palestinian Authority funds frozen in the States

Due to a lawsuit. It seems like an interesting way of holding governments (or the vague similarity of a government in this case) responsible. The article in the Atlantic Monthly (September 2005) on the failures of the PA is especially good.

The tenth anniversary of suck.com!

Never heard of them? Assumed it was a porn site? Nope, Suck was the original daily updated humor and deep thoughts website which had sadly come to a close many years ago now. The legacy runs deep however. I refuse to link to their most famous alumnae (wonkette) and instead offer for you the Rabbit Blog.

Gus Grissom's space suit back in the news

The article has a good amount of the back story if you haven't followed it.

Religion and science in America today

The continuing story of how we define this country. Whose country? Whose ideas? Which freedoms? Which path? The BBC reporting on the growing number of scientists concerned about the anti-science being pushed by the religious leaders of the US. There's so much back material to this. What happens when I mention that I do physics for example. Comments of "I did badly in math" or the like are really the most typical connection. Add in a virulently anti-modernist agenda from the right-wing theocrats-in-waiting, and you have the current situation in the States. (Don't believe that the Intelligent Design and related attacks are a planned afront to rationalism? Read their own "Wedge Plan.")

Does it make sense to quote the "founding fathers?" Of course one could find rival quotation I suppose.

"It is owing to this long interregnum of science, and to no other cause, that we have now to look back through a vast chasm of many hundred years to the respectable characters we call the Ancients. Had the progression of knowledge gone on proportionably with the stock that before existed, that chasm would have been filled up with characters rising superior in knowledge to each other; and those Ancients we now so much admire would have appeared respectably in the background of the scene. But the christian system laid all waste; and if we take our stand about the beginning of the sixteenth century, we look back through that long chasm, to the times of the Ancients, as over a vast sandy desert, in which not a shrub appears to intercept the vision to the fertile hills beyond." - Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

"The clergy, by getting themselves established by law, and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man. They are still so in many countries and even in some of these United States. Even in 1783, we doubted the stability of our recent measures for reducing them to the footing of other useful callings. It now appears that our means were effectual." - Thomas Jefferson, 1800

"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution." - James Madison, 1785

"As I have now given you my reasons for believing that the Bible is not the Word of God, that it is a falsehood, I have a right to ask you your reasons for believing the contrary; but I know you can give me none, except that you were educated to believe the Bible; and as the Turks give the same reason for believing the Koran, it is evident that education makes all the difference, and that reason and truth have nothing to do in the case. You believe in the Bible from the accident of birth, and the Turks believe in the Koran from the same accident, and each calls the other infidel. But leaving the prejudice of education out of the case, the unprejudiced truth is, that all are infidels who believe falsely of God, whether they draw their creed from the Bible, or from the Koran, from the Old Testament, or from the New." [...] "It is often said in the Bible that God spake unto Moses, but how do you know that God spake unto Moses? Because, you will say, the Bible says so. The Koran says, that God spake unto Mahomet, do you believe that too? No. Why not? Because, you will say, you do not believe it; and so because you do, and because you don't is all the reason you can give for believing or disbelieving except that you will say that Mahomet was an impostor. And how do you know Moses was not an impostor?" - Thomas Paine, 1797

Outlawing lip syncing?

Turkmenistan's president bans lip synching. This follows bans on opera, ballet, gold teeth, and restrictions on long hair and beards. Saparmurat Niyazov's cult of personality has always been a bit weird, but seeing lip synching as a threat is sure evidence of deep thinking about the future direction of his nation. All hail Kibo!

The fearless leader has also banned recorded music on TV and at live events. I'm starting to see a trend here! In fact, "radio and television programmes are dominated by performances of his own poems and philosophical writings set to music." Must be a fun country.

Ah yes, there are ongoing efforts to Turkmenify the population. They recently celebrated Melon Day and the fearless leader had a 300 square meter rug commissioned entitled "The 21st century: the epoch of the great Saparmurat Niyazov." That's ego! (Of course, by writing this, I have virutally eliminated the possibility of visiting Turkmenistan without getting to visit a finely crafted prison cell for a couple of days. Darn!) On the other hand, they granted citizenship to 16,000 refugees from neighboring Tajikistan and Uzbekistan so they are at least responsible in that way.

Are there other good Saparmurat Niyazov stories? Post them here!

Looking at the Wikipedia, there's also the closure of libraries and hospitals, replacing doctors with army constripts, building an ice palace in the middle of the desert, the statues of himself, the super-expensive mosque, and banning makeup for TV announcers. Sounds like a lower-rent, maybe somewhat friendlier, version of North Korea.

Oh yeah, and from the opposition website some English language news on Turkmenistan including banning converted LHD vehicles.

The government site is pretty interesting as well. The Visa application form is available online.

Where is Tony Blair?

The English papers have been asking the question. We know that Dubya spends most of his time snorting coke and on vacation in Texas, but the Brits aren't used to their leader disappearing.

Though there is a rumor that Blair is in the Caribbean on holiday, we know better! He's taking some time off in Vancouver, BC to learn how to skate.

Skateboarding that is. Reliable reports indicate that Tony Hawk and Tony Blair are practicing some phat moves in parking lots and the stairs of government buildings across the Hong Kong of the West. The Tonymeister was last seen wearing a "Skateboarding is not a crime" cutoff and demanding that The Urinal's first 7" be played louder.

Downing Street had no comment, but unnamed sources in the government confirmed that the Blairster had indeed taken up a new "recreational activity" and would be training the best experts in the world. Earlier reports that this activity was bicycling were proven wrong when Lance Armstrong showed up in Crawford, TX to ride with Dubya and ask for some political cover. The French have finally proven his performance-enhancing drug use, but we know that just starting to call that certain food item "Freedom Fries" will shut them up.

We now speculate that skateboarding is intended as a second occupation for Bliar. He had noted that he would not stand for PM in the next elections, so what would be a more natural job than as a professional skateboarder? He would be the clear front-runner in the "former leader of a nation" skate class/category.

"Operation Whalers?"

Where do they get these names? Whaler is the current let's-kill-some-Taliban-supporters operation in Afghanistan. Remember that war?

While Rome burned...

Bicycling. On vacation. Hiding.

$220 Million to build a bridge to an island with fifty people!

Taken from a plastic.com discussion of this issue:

"I live in Ketchikan, Alaska, the city which will be getting the now-infamous bridge, and I'd like to tell those of you who have never visited Ketchikan a little bit about the area so you can judge for yourselves what a flagrant and shameless waste the bridge project is.



To start with, a short list of facts.

• Ketchikan is located in the extreme southeast corner of the state of Alaska, on an island just off a narrow strip of coastal land which belongs to the USA, bordered on the interior by the Canadian province of British Columbia.
• The City of Ketchikan has about 8,000 residents, as mentioned above, but it is probably more accurate to include the people living outside the city limits in the Ketchikan Gateway Borough, another 5,000 or 6,000 people who share schools, library services, post offices and a number of other infrastructure services with the city and generally consider themselves to live in Ketchikan.
• Virtually everyone who lives in either the city of Ketchikan or the Ketchikan Gateway Borough live along a long narrow strip of coastal land along the southwest edge of Revillagigedo Island for two reasons: (a) because of our climate and terrain, very little land here is suitable for building, and (b) virtually all of the rest of the land around us belongs to either the US Forest Service, the State of Alaska, or Alaska Native corporations that represent the interests of their tribal shareholders.
• Ketchikan is located in the Tongass National Forest, the US portion of a vast coastal rain forest that spreads over hundreds of miles and thousands of islands of varying sizes.

Having established a bit about the location of the bridge, let's look at a map of the road systems that it will connect. Notice how, apart from the airport, there's no road system on Gravina Island for this bridge to connect to. That's because the only development on Gravina Island to date consists mainly of (a) the airport, (b) about 30-40 homes and cabins scattered along the shoreline, accessible only by boat. Return for a moment to the Google map above and click the "Hybrid" button to overlay a satellite image of the area on top of the street map. Notice all of the small bodies of water on the portion of Gravina Island where the bridge will connect. That's muskeg, a common terrain type here in the north — treacherous soft bog, particularly unsuited for development or road construction. Here in Ketchikan we receive about 160 inches of rain per year. Ground that is level is practically never dry, and ground that is dry is practically never level. Ground that's already soft and boggy to start with is just a disaster to try and build on; it can swallow houses, roads, anything you try to put on it.

Why would you build a bridge to an island with no people and almost no developable land under private ownership? Only a few convincing reasons come to mind:

• You might be motivated to do so if you were the Chairman of the House Transportation Committee and didn't measure success except in terms of dollars delivered to your district.
• You might want a bridge if you wanted to log currently-roadless areas of state and federal timber lands on Gravina Island.
• Or you might want a bridge if you were one of the few property owners with substantial chunks of buildable property on Gravina Island.
• And, though it shames me to say it of my neighbors, you might want a bridge if you saw it as $220 million dollars of federal money that was coming into a community still reeling economically from declines in the timber and commercial fishing industries and rather conflicted about the growth of cruise-ship tourism.

None of which strike me as adequate reasons to ask the rest of the country to pick up the tab for a $220,000,000 bridge.. But I guess that's (one of many reasons) why I'll never be an Alaska Congressman."

Weird patents (phantom car)

At New Scientist. Some interesting back articles there...

South Africa fears for a "failed state" in Zimbabwe

Not that they've been doing too much constructively there in Harare.

Stray elephants in Zimbabwe

At least the elephant population is doing well.

Global warming tipping point?

Though I think the scientific catch-phrase du jour is overused and probably overrated, this article in the Guardian points to an excellent example of where the concept of 'tipping point" comes from. Global warming is melting the Siberian Tundra which hosts a huge stockpile of methane (perhap 70 billion tons, 1/4 of the world's ground-stored methane). The release of the methane (a greenhouse gas) will then speed the heating of the atmosphere.

New web site discovery!

How much is inside?

The same guy has some pranks.

Home page.

Canadian VC winner passes away

Once every six months, I'll promise you, dear reader, something about actual heroes.

But no more often than that!

Top 10 .com flops

Ah yes...I do remember having a candy bar and can of soda delivered to me for free. And the pets.com sock puppet?

Reinvestigating Yuri Gagarin's death

the first man in space died in a poorly understood airplane crash in 1968.

We can see where this is going to end

Iran plans to move ahead with (solid-fueled) ballistic missiles and its nuclear weapons program.

"...where the teletubbies might live, with Barbarella as a frequent houseguest."

The Futuro prefabricated (plastic) house. Spacecraft-shaped house. Playboy pad from the '70s. Web site devoted to them. Thanks Paul!

Go ahead, get a day pass for salon.com

I promise to make it worth your time with the following links...

• RFID tags in PJs?
• Love contracts required before dating coworkers?
• An actual book review for Dianetics?
• Benedict Arnold and Karl Rove?
• Conversations with Hutu men who murdered their neighbors. And enjoyed it. And feel no guilt.
• The continuing crisis with cut and paste news stories out of Iraq and more Abu Ghraid horrors.

Yup, all in salon.com so go ahead and watch some silly advertisement and enjoy...

Slate (and Nation) fest

I used to be pretty consistent in reading Christopher Hitchens in The Nation and now have to admit to reading a bit of his work in Slate as well. In fact, I have a slew of interesting Slate articles to link to here. Can't say I agree with all of them, but there's some good Bosnia and Zimbabwe articles here.

• Hitchens arguing in favor of intervention, from Srebrenica to Bagdad. He loses me somewhere in the middle.
• On the Dutch reaction to the investigation of their troops at Srebrenica.
• Genocide in Sudan and its Islamist origins. Have been reading Bernard Henri Levy's War, Evil, and the End of History which is an amazing work of liberal, internationalist thought barely capable of dealing with the death, destruction, and evil of war in the Sudan, Angola, Sri Lanka, and the list goes on. The section on the Sudan has convinced me that twenty-year genocide will rank as one of the great failures of the Cold War and post-Cold War West. If anyone will even remember the tale.
• Children's drawings of the Darfur Genocide in Sudan, part of the continuing saga. "After all, who remembers the Armenians?" - A. Hitler
• "Cruel to be kind." A request to not provide food aid to the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe.
• An earlier article on food aid distribution in Zimbabwe. Food as a political tool.
• Article from 2002 on Mugabe's "Last Stand." He's doing better than predicted, politically, and making the country a bigger mess than anyone would have guessed.
• A short Mugabe biography from 2000.
• Stanford University hosts an excellent set of web-links for Zimbabwe.
• Continuing with Slate, there's a good book review of Harry Potter and his connections to the current "War on Some Terrorism." See also a summary of Harry Potter coverage.
• And some coverage of the US change of policies with India. There has been shockingly little coverage of this (I don't see any online in The Nation), though it practically destroys the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (the NPT) and reverses the Cold War cold shoulder to India. Then we were the solid supporter of Pakistan against the Soviet-supplied India. That stance never made a lot of sense, the world's largest democracy should have been our more natural friend, rather than a military dictatorship which ran the Taliban and a good fraction of Central Asia's other badies.

Costco (anti-wal-mart) coverage from the NYT

It's a good article on one way of balancing corporate demands with customer and employee friendliness.

25,000 violent deaths of civilians in Iraq

About 1/3 of them due to US military action. More deaths in the second year post-invasion than in the first.

Aristide in exile

An interesting interview by Naomi Klein as the news of UN killings of women and children gradually leak out of Haiti.

We might as well keep hoping that this will bring the little thugs down

Though it hasn't been running above the fold...

Civilian toll in Iraq seems to be about 800 per month

And that appears to include just victims of the insurgents, not the US military. Total Iraqi deaths are not incompatible with that 100,000 number propagated a few months back.

Another try at single-payer?

At the state level. It might even pass in Vermont and California.

Sheep or lemmings?

Suicide sheep in Turkey. 450 dead sheep.

Some London pictures

Okay, since I've left the BBC playing on my computer all day, I might as well put something up here.

Amazing that only two people died in that bus. The other photo is, presumably, a mobile phone picture from the Kings Cross evacuation. (BBC)

Personal photos of the explosions. Also from the BBC.

Burn victim being led away.

Emergency services.

Witness stories.

The bus bombing took place right in front of the British Medical Association headquarters. Patient being treated and blood on the wall of the building. (BBC)

UK flag at half staff over Buckingham Palace.

Blitz pictures. But don't get me started on the fascism thread.

Somalia and Iraq

The "president" of Somalia is leading his followers south through the country to a showdown with the warlords in Moggie. Sounds like a bad plot idea for Mad Max 7, in 3-D.

An LA film-maker finds himself imprisoned, without charges, in Iraq. Due process? Habeas corpus? What's all that liberal talk...

Former Mugabe ally decries "callous" raids

With a little bit of a look into the ruling elite in Zimbabwe.

Gradually the Plame Affair opens up

Karl Rove did it. Is anyone surprised? It's hard to picture the trial that Ted Rall would love to see though. Any action at all this late in the pusch seems unlikely, still, wish-fulfillment is a powerful urge.

What Forbes thinks it costs to live well in the Midwest

$262,000 per year in Minneapolis. That includes a $1.2M house and a $700k vacation house in Ely or Brainerd. Plus two luxury cars, $17k in private school charges, and $1500 in savings. Cheaper than Batman at least (see earlier entries).

"Coalition of the willing" fatalities animations

You can learn quite a bit from this little animation. Well done little bit of data processing.

Other Iraq links for today:
Op-ed, NYT, "Dangerous Incompetence"

Another op-ed piece, "America held hostage"

Report on the ground in Iraq. Fight for an area and then leave it to the insurgents. Sound familar?

Bye, bye freedoms

She was on the correct side of more 5-4 votes than I'd care to contemplate right now. A bit of a surpirse since I figured Rehnquist would step aside first. With the two of them leaving, we can expect a big fight in Congress over whatever lunatics Bush picks. My suspicion is that he'll pick one total lunatic (a la Scalia or Thomas) and one anti-choice "moderate." But Karl might veto a move that looks even slightly like compromise.

Make tens of thousands of dollar threatening to kill a bunny rabbit?

It used to have a June 30th, 2005 deadline. Looks semi-successful, doesn't it?

Ethanol takes six times as much energy to produce as it yields

According to a recent study. Sounds plausible, Brazil gets by with ethanol fueling by using traditional, labor-intensive farming of the sugarcane to make the ethanol.

Google maps

Although we always knew they were cool, the available satellite imagery has dramatically increased lately. Check out some of the following:

The Pentagon.
The White House, note the censored roof of the White House so you can't count the surface to air missiles.
The Abu Ghurayb torture center.
A flock of geese.
Lots more collected here.

Continuing armor problems in Iraq

Rumsfeld doesn't ride in armored Humvees, he takes a better-armored private vehicle. Looks like a good business to get into though, armoring vehicles...

Language difficulties at universities

There's a good, balanced, article in the NYT on problems students have with foreign professors and teaching assistants. Though the largest number of language complaints that I ever had for one of my TAs was for a person who spoke better English than I do (accented differently than my midwestern students were used to I think).

Two additional loss of rights, just in the news today

The SCOTUS ruled that it's just fine for local authorities to sieze your property for commercial development. That's right, if your town or county wants to demolish your house for a shopping mall, it's within their rights. Remember, corporations are more important than people.

And those state's rights loving congress-slugs decided that states (say environmentally friendly ones?) have no right to have a say on where liquified natural gas facilities go. The biggest conventional bombs in the world can be sited by the federal government, read that as wherever the industry wants them since we do know who writes legislation these days...

Zimbabwe. More bad news.

Children pulled out of school after house demolitions and the remains of a demolished mosque.

Kids killed in collapsed buildings. The former food exporter now needs 1.2 million tons of food brought in to prevent starvation.

It seems to be a pre-emptive strike against those who will be most affected by the upcoming hunger. By driving them out into the rural areas, they are likely to be more easily controlled.

Let's do the math...

Norm Coleman gets $45,000+ in campaign contributions. The citizens of St. Paul lose $50M. And the contributor nets $30M. Looks like politics as usual. The taxpayers send their money to multimillionaires who own the politicos. It's a beautiful little self-contained scam repeated many times.

Meanwhile, publically-funded "town-hall" meetings are open only to political supporters of the Dubya and the House thinks the biggest issue is protecting the physical flag of the US. Yup, New Zealand is looking better all of the time.

Being a superhero

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad." - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

From Forbes Magazine, the cost of being Batman!

And just how rich are those fictional characters anyway?

Who pays for military gear?

In this case at least, the father of the marine sent to Iraq. A professional, well-equiped army? We do pay more in taxes for our military than all the rest of the world combined... Oh, that's right, that money goes to Boeing, Hughes, and Halliburton, not to equiping the poor kids who volunteer to defend big business from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Citgo gas

I never knew it was a Venezualan concern! An interesting proposed anti-boycott.

Hagel's comments on Bush and the war

"It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq."

Learning a little from Slate

The true blindness of the right's view of Terri Schiavo.

The accuracy of Track and Field measurements.

And how the story of Emmett Till's murder was written.

Read the memos yourself

On the Net:
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/fcolegal020308.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/manning020314.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/meyer020318.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/ods020308.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/ricketts020322.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/straw020325.pdf

And the US blocks a probe of the killings in Uzbekistan

Note also that $18 million in military aid was cut off. Just to be followed by a "different" $21 million in aid. Nothing to see here. No one will notice. It was only a few hundred protesters.

A short review of the press coverage of the Downing Street memos

The Christian Science Monitor does a good job quickly reviewing the media coverage (in the States!) of the Downing Memos.

The FBI's hunt for Deep Throat

Was headed by Deep Throat.

Zimbabwe general strike...

...doesn't seem to be accomplishing anything. The authorities have announced that they will "deal ruthlessly" with any street protests. Oddly enough, the state-controlled media didn't report on the general strike. Funny that.

The Beeb has the best coverage that I know of. Click on the link above and follow links there to quite a bit more coverage, including video and some photos. Including the one to the right.

A cobbler from Harare, and many web visitors, comment on the news.

Zimbabwe's "cleanup" continues...

...with no real resistance. It looks like some sort of enforced ruralization to eliminate the urban poor pockets of opposition to Mugabe. Not quite Pol Pot, but we'll see how those people make up.

I keep being saddened by the Zimbabwe disasters. A country I didn't quite fall in love with when traveling there, but one that I appreciated and hoped the best for.

While the emperor fiddles

We get our climate change. Conservative bastions like the Financial Times see the problem as clearly as the "crazed environmentalists." They identified the main obstacle to action: the White House. And the details of how the Petroleum Institutes editted the US government statements on greenhouse gases.

And sadly, Mugabe's rampage continues

Possibly leaving as many as 200,000 person homeless after burning shantytowns, destroying informal businesses, and continuing to silence opposition. This time there is even CNN coverage.

Syria next?

It worked so well in Iraq, after all.

Planes, trains, and automobiles

After spotting an Amphicar at the gas station on the corner of 47th and Nicollet, I got to thinking about web sites and blogs devoted to spotting interesting transportation objects.

Planes. This site is very clear on plane spotting, and the post-9/11 risks of it.
Trains. I couldn't find one special site, so just chose a representative sample site. Train spotting (distinct from the movie) is worldwide, but does seem to have a particularly European resonance to it.
Cars. Well, the web site is named just right, but it's a little different than just a "spotted" listing.

Let me mention some odd car spottings of mine then...

• That red Amphicar at the gas station in Minneapolis. It was gone yesterday when I drove by though. It was up on blocks, maybe having a tire change or two?
  
• LA. What more do I have to say? A Diablo in traffic in Pasadena. Parallel parking behind a Ferrari F40. Parking my rental car next to a Roadrunner (which was taking up two spots) in the Getty parking lot.
  
• A cream-colored Rolls Royce (darn it, I'm not remembering how old it was? Silver Spur maybe?) parked in Chicago on Broadway with IL license plate "Snob."
  
• Getting a ride from Tegernsee (Ringberg Castle>) to downtown Munchen in an M5 Touring (wagon). At a good clip. (Similar car here and here.)
  
• Seeing and getting to drive a Le Mans-style 1928 (hmmm...maybe plus or minus a year) Bentley Blower at a Minneapolis car show. (See artwork here for similar car.)
  
• Seeing a Cord 812 (Photo here) drive by on Route 66 in New Mexico.
  
• A British Racing Green Lotus Seven, or Caterham Super Seven, shrieking away from a traffic light in Milwaukee. (Recent link and their British home.)
  Posted by duver001 at 8:58 AM

Diesel test

Interesting little test run of the new Mercedes diesels. In Texas of all places, 100,000 miles at speed.

I've had a long-term soft spot for diesel automobiles, back to the old VW Rabbit diesels and the Mercedes 220D and 240Ds. Never have owned one though. Maybe if Audi brings their V6 TDIs to the states after September 2006 (when we get the low sulfur diesel fuel at long last)...

Olympic options

Paris, London, or New York City. The European options seem to be the leaders.

"One buttcheek out in the breeze"

Ask the George Bush simulator a question!

Or see if any of these quotes of his make sense to you.

Battle plans sold to fund canned fruit?

According to the son of Pakistani President A. Khan, the 1965 Indian battle plans were sold for about $450 so that the officer could buy canning equipment for his wife. So weird it might be true.

Solve violence by banning kitchen knives?

Just plain weird. Here's the editorial in the British Medical Journal.

Deep Throat revealed

W. Mark Felt, then the number two man at the FBI, was Deep Throat. The story came out in a rather odd way. The Washington Post was going to posthumously name him, but he revealed himself to the press. The Post confirms the story. Oh well, it would have been too poetic for it to have been Al Haig or Pat Buchanan.

Social Security solution to the "problem"

Well, we completely ignore the real healthcare problem and focus on the fake social security problem... Someone with a lot invested in the Social Security system is offering up his solution. Mild tax increases and small benefit reductions. But I fear logic is being used where it does not apply.

Asia's missing women

For quite some time, population surveys have shown that there are as many as about 100 million missing women in Asia. By missing, we mean that they do not show up as adults. They may have, in recent years, been selectively aborted, or, as has been going on for centuries, killed at or shortly after birth. However, some new work may offer a less hateful explanation of at least some of the missing women.

The continuing Cross Lander story

I had seen articles about these Romanian trucks coming to the US about 3-4 years ago. Course I never saw an actual truck. A little about why this is the case is here. I wish those guys good luck, even without air bags, since my antipathy towards SUVs is directed towards ones that aren't needed. These really do sound like the trucks that people will take off-roads. Anyway...

Bud Foote, RIP

One of my favorite professors from when I was an undergraduate, Bud Foote, has passed away. He taught the relatively infamous English Lit class on Science Fiction and is one of the promoters of Science Fiction within the academy. When he retired he also donated his 8000 volume collection of books and magazines to the university library.

• Obituary in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
  
• His book collection, with other donations/expansions.
  
• A little bit about the donation.
  
• Bud being interviewed on CNN about 2001 as 2001 began.
  
• A good interview by Bud Foote of Kim Stanley Robinson.
  
• Review of his book placing Twain into the history of science fiction writing, and in particular creating the "two-way time travel" motif.
  
• The book, The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century, appears to be available online here in full text.
  
• His other book is a chapbook of poetry.
  
• Haven't found anything online of the Great Speckled Bird articles or music (though he is credited on Pete Seeer's Clearwater).
  

North America originally populated by 70 persons

...who crossed over the land bridge from asia as measured by DNA tracings of modern Native Americans and modern Asian populations.

Too wild for Zurich

Here in the Twin Cities, we've had various Peanuts characters on display around St. Paul. Snoppy, Charlie Brown, Lucy, and did I miss one?

Anyhow, Zurich was going to do the same with a kinda generic bear (unless the bear is deep symbol for numbered bank accounts) with various paint jobs. But, one of the bears was a bit too much. Best part, the "first class service" label on it.

Did Linus have a year of statues as well? Darn it, my memory is fading.

Ahhh, Texas justice

Wonderbar, you can get fined for reporting crimes that the police aren't interested in dealing with. Discuss it on plastic.com.

As there is once again sunlight in Minnesota...

Sunshine may (indirectly) reduce some cancer risks.

Major police action in Zimbabwe

It appears as though street vendors are a serious threat now to Mugabe. 10,000 arrests since Wednesday though sounds even more serious. Look near the end of the article also for what Morgan Tsvangirai has to say. Wonder if Wal-Mart is starting to think about wiping out flea markets, garage (and tag) sales, and ebay as well?

Masoud's killers convicted

Four more of the logistical support people behind Ahmed Shah Masoud's assasination were convicted in Paris. Seems like short sentences for murder.

Masoud would have been the ideal post-Taliban unifier in Afghanistan, and it's hard to not assume that his murder was intimately tied to the 9/11 plot. He would have been the clear US-backed leader to go after Bin Laden and the Taliban after the attacks.

Bush, believe it or not, positively compared himself to FDR

Afer everyone finished laughing, they thought about the old right's fascination with rethinking the Yalta (and Tehran (and Atlantic)) Conference(s) of World War II. I'm not convinced Slate did a strong enough response to this Dubya historical revisionism, but it's a good read. Will the States survive these lunatics? Stay tuned and find out.

Good NYT graphic on How Class Works in America

It's kinda scary where I live on this plot. No further comments.

Good discussion on gay gay-bashing politicos

On Plastic.com. James West, mayor of Spokane, WA has been infamous for his anti-gay initiatives. But guess what? Most recent in a long line...

Article on escaping from disasters

Interesting piece on the "freeze" reflex and how it is unsuccessful in critical situations. The big examples are 9/11 WTC evacuations (much slower than predicted, many people sat around for 30 minutes or more before trying to leave) and the Tenerife air disaster (commercial airliners are supposed to be evacuatable in 90 seconds (even with some exits destroyed and debris inside the plane) but only 60-70 out of 370 escaped in one minute in that disaster).

Thinking about this further, it's probably not that much of a surprise, and on my next airline flight I promise to spend some time thinking about what an evacuation would look like. 90 seconds to get everyone off of the plane?

Try this self-referential quiz

Ouch!