Mini Ice Age Coming?

Maybe, if the flux density value from the Sun doesn't go up. [Link]

The Canadian Space Agency’s radio telescope has been reporting Flux Density Values so low they will mean a mini ice age if they continue.

Like the number of sunspots, the Flux Density Values reflect the Sun’s magnetic activity, which affects the rate at which the Sun radiates energy and warmth. CSA project director Ken Tapping calls the radio telescope that supplies NASA and the rest of the world with daily values of the Sun’s magnetic activity a “stethoscope on the Sun”. In this case, however, it is the “doctor” whose health is directly affected by the readings.

This is because when the magnetic activity is low, the Sun is dimmer, and puts out less radiant warmth. If the Sun goes into dim mode, as it has in the past, the Earth gets much colder.

Tapping, who was originally from Kent, says that “Typically as you go through the ten or eleven year solar activity cycle you see the numbers go up or down. The lowest number is 64 or 68. The numbers 71 or 72 are very low, but they usually start to go up. We are at the end of a cycle, but the numbers still haven’t gone up. We have been joking around coffee that we may be seeing the Sun about to shut down.” (To date Tapping has been far more concerned about global warming.)

The TSA has a blog

The TSA has a blog but you have to remove your shoes and can have no more than 3oz of liquid (in a sealed container) when reading their blog. [Link]

Wow! The number of comments on our blog has been amazing. Many of the posts during the last 24 hours are exactly the types of questions we hope to answer and the conversations we hope to begin with the traveling public. Some have been downright mean and cranky but that’s okay too. For most people, this is the first chance to reach out directly to TSA and tell us about your experiences and we very much want to hear from you.

Frankly we’ve been overwhelmed with the number of response we’ve received, more than 700 comments at last count, and comments are still pouring in. Several of you have suggested a format change to go from a laundry list of: shoes, cranky officers, idiotic rules, you guys sure try hard…, stream of consciousness diatribes to a more logical way of collecting and hopefully shedding light on many of the things that passengers want to know.

Well we’ve heard the comments and we’re making the move. Later this afternoon you will find several common questions or topic areas that have been raised and are on the front of all our minds like shoes, ID requirements, liquids an others. This list will evolve as this blog does and we’ll be posting answers, thoughts and comments on each of these topics on these pages.

Having a dialog is the first step towards turning security theater into actual security.
Yeah, I know nothing will change, but I can dream.

China ensuring good weather for Olympics

They will control the weather. [Link]

Meteorologists in China say that that if necessary they will modify the weather on August 8 so it doesn't rain on the 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremonies. From the Los Angeles Times: Training with the Olympics in mind, the meteorologists have been practicing their "rain mitigation" techniques since 2006. They have had a couple of dry runs, so to speak -- a China-Africa summit and a panda festival in Sichuan province, among others.

The bureau of weather modification was established in the 1980s and is now believed to be the largest in the world. It has a reserve army of 37,000 people -- most of them sort of weekend warriors who are called to duty during unusual droughts. The bureau has 30 aircraft, 4,000 rocket launchers and 7,000 antiaircraft guns, said Wang Guohe, director of weather modification for the Chinese Academy of Meteorology.

Whenever I think of controlling the weather, I think of two things: General Hospital's Ice Princess Saga and the X-Men's Storm.

Case Closed

Looks like Stepahnie Brown finally got her case in the Batcave. [Link]

Project Girl Wonder has led to a number of shout-outs in comics in the year and a half since it began. We’ve had Rip Hunter wonder “No Trophy = Stephanie?” on his board of time-travel conundrums. We’ve had Tim remark in his inner monologue that she never had a memorial in the cave. We’ve even seen a future Bat Cave in Action Comics with a Stephanie memorial in it.

Batman #673 means so, so much more than any of these. Because, in two panels, we were told everything that mattered: that inside Batman’s heart, Stephanie was Robin, the same as Dick and Jason and Tim — her gender made no difference at all to that. That her loss is felt as keenly as those other losses Batman has been shaped by.

In those two panels, in that one gesture of Batman contemplating the Robins he’s lost in front of the symbol of those losses, that line of suits in cases, the glass ceiling keeping girls out of the red and green and gold costume at Batman’s side finally cracked and fell.

About time.

Comic Book Storyboards

From Boston Diaries [Link]

I had seen how comic books are written, thanks to an oversized (nearly poster sized) Superman special comic book, and it looked more like a screenplay than a comic book (oddly enough, most movies, or at least those made by Messrs. Lucas and Spielberg, go through a storyboard phase which looks more like a comic book than a screenplay). So all these years, I kind of assumed that's how comic books are written.

One big comic from the past few years which did this was DC's 52, a weekly series with four writers working together who handed their scripts off to Keith Giffen, who did breakdowns for each issue so even with different artists on each issue the look and feel was consistent. Here are the breakdowns for each issue. [Link]

The Marvel Method is a bit different. It has the writer writing a plot and handing that to the artist, who then draws the issue and gives it back to the writer to finish the dialog. All Marvel books used to be done that way, but it's apparently not as ubiquitous as it once was.

Previously mentioned before here is the Comic Book Script Archive which has a pile of actual comic scripts in many different formats.

The new Worf?

A new addition to the new Star Trek film. [Link]

Shooting a major bridge scene today. Kirk facing down the big bad over the monitor, just like Shatner did Khan in Star Trek II. The conversation ends, and Kirk orders the newest addition to the crew - Lt. Imran Hooth - to get a team ready to beam down. Imran Hooth, if the name didn’t tip you off, is a turbanned Muslim security officer.

If he wears a turban, isn't he more likely to be a Sikh?

New Hampshire voters, you were played for suckers

From the New Hampshire Union Leader on Hillary Clinton. [Link]

COURTING VOTERS in Iowa and New Hampshire, last August Sen. Hillary Clinton signed a pledge not to "campaign or participate" in the Michigan or Florida Democratic primaries. She participated in both primaries and is campaigning in Florida. Which proves, again, that Hillary Clinton is a liar.

Clinton kept her name on the Michigan ballot when others removed theirs, she campaigned this past weekend in Florida, and she is pushing to seat Michigan and Florida delegates at the Democratic National Convention. The party stripped those states of delegates as punishment for moving up their primary dates.

"I will try to persuade my delegates to seat the delegates from Michigan and Florida," Clinton said last week, after the New Hampshire primaries and Iowa caucuses were safely over.

Ouch.

New artificial bases added to DNA

This is huge. Two new bases for DNA have been added to the standard 4 for all life known. Who knows what could be done with it? [Link]

Two artificial DNA "letters" that are accurately and efficiently replicated by a natural enzyme have been created by US researchers. Adding the two artificial building blocks to the four that naturally comprise DNA could allow wildly different kinds of genetic engineering, they say.

Eventually, the researchers say, they may be able to add them into the genetic code of living organisms.

The diversity of life on earth evolved using genetic code made from arrangements of four genetic "bases", sometimes described as letters. They are divided into two pairs, which bond together from opposite strands of a DNA molecule to form the rungs of its characteristic double-helix shape.

The unnatural but functional new base pair is the fruit of nearly a decade of research by chemical biologist Floyd Romesberg, at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, US.

Joe Quesada on Colbert Report

Joe Quesada appeared on The Colbert Report to announce three things.

1. Captain America returns (but Steven can keep his shield)
2. Secret Invasion (Skrulls among us) and
3. Colbert is still running for President in the Marvel Universe.

A new geologic epoch?

We shape the world more than natural processes now. [Link]

Have humans changed our planet Earth so much in the past 200 years that we are now living in a new geological age? A group of geologists believes this is the case. They have formally proposed designating a new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene, which would encompass the past 200 years or so of geologic history. The action is appropriate, they say, because during the past 2 centuries, human activity has caused most of the major changes in Earth's topography and climate.

At the Mountains of Madness, or There and Back Again

Both Hobbit films and At the Mountains of Madness. [Link]

Guillermo del Toro is bringing H.P. Lovecraft's At The Mountains Of Madness to the big screen in 2010, although it sounds like he'll be juggling duties on that film while trying to make two simultaneous The Hobbit feature films. After working with a vampire, a fairy tale, a red-skinned demon, and a hobbit, he'll be bringing us shoggoths, and it's about damn time. He also wants to stay true to the original source material which he describes as "a National Geographic special on a crew that disappeared in an exploration mission."

I want to see that.

Time Lapse Build of LEGO Millenium Falcon

The super enormous, 5000+ piece set is the largest so far from LEGO. [Link]



Amazing.

Doc Savage Experiment Gone Awry?

Some cars in a 5 block radius of the Empire State Building are mysteriously dying. [Link]

No one is sure what’s causing it, but all roads appear to lead to the looming giant in our midst - specifically, its Art Deco mast and 203-foot-long, antenna-laden spire.

“We get about 10 to 15 cars stuck near there every day,” said Isaac Leviev, manager of Citywide Towing, the AAA’s exclusive roadside assistance provider from 42nd St. to the Battery. “You pull the car four or five blocks to the west or east and the car starts right up.”

Motorists like Russell Valeev, 25, learn about it the hard way.

“The lights work, the horn works, everything. But it won’t start,” Valeev, a driver for Golden Touch Transportation said one recent evening as he sat in his 2005 Ford van with the hood propped open on E. 35th St., between Lexington and Park Aves. “It’s my job. No money.”

I blame Doc Savage.

LEGO turns 50

I love LEGO. Since I was three years old, I have had LEGO. It has been the one constant toy I grew up with. Today is the 50th anniversary of LEGO. [Link]

LEGO turns 50 today by the company's own reckoning, as it's the anniversary of the patent approval for the famous little pegged bricks. They sent out some celebratory information, including this timeline of major advances in LEGO technology over the years.
...
LEGO Timeline [pdf] [BBG]

LEGO set 497 Galaxy Explorer was one of my favorite kits. I made many spaceships with it.

All you ever wanted to know about Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla, the original Mad Scientist. [Link]

When you hear the name Nikola Tesla, chances are you think of the Tesla coil or the 80s metal hair band. Tesla was the first real mad scientist of the twentieth century: Not only did he invent that coil and alternating-current electricity (which you're probably using right now to read this), but he also researched death rays, time-travel, and peering at memories stored inside the human brain. Studio 360 explored the history of Tesla over the weekend, and we've got the highlights, along with some other tidbits about the madman who ate only foods whose volume he could measure precisely, and who tried to build an electrical superweapon.

The word "Canadian" as new racial slur

This is weird. Canadian is becoming popular as a derogatory term for Blacks in the South. [Link]

The bigger mystery is how "Canadian" came to be code for black. An online directory of racial slurs defines Canadian as a "masked replacement" for black.

Last August, a blogger in Cincinnati going by the name CincyBlurg reported that a black friend from the southeastern U.S. had recently discovered that she was being called a Canadian. "She told me a story of when she was working in a shop in the South and she overheard some of her customers complaining that they were always waited on by a Canadian at that place. She didn't understand what they were talking about and assumed they must be talking about someone else," the blogger wrote.

"After this happened several times with different patrons, she mentioned it to one of her co-workers. He told her that ‘Canadian' was the new derogatory term that racist Southerners were using to describe persons they would have previously referred to [with the N-word.]"

A similar case in Kansas City was reported last year on a Listserv, or electronic mailing list, used by linguistics experts. A University of Kansas linguist said that a waitress friend reported that "fellow workers used to use a name for inner-city families that were known to not leave a tip: Canadians. ‘Hey, we have a table of Canadians.... They're all yours.' "

Sad.

Gagarin not the first Cosmonaut

Three previous attempted flights end to the deaths of three Cosmonauts before Yuri Gagarin flew. [Link]

As 40 years have passed since Gagarin’s flight, new sensational details of this event were disclosed: Gagarin was not the first man to fly to space. Three Soviet pilots died in attempts to conquer space before Gagarin's famous space flight, Mikhail Rudenko, senior engineer-experimenter with Experimental Design Office 456 (located in Khimki, in the Moscow region) said on Thursday. According to Rudenko, spacecraft with pilots Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov at the controls were launched from the Kapustin Yar cosmodrome (in the Astrakhan region) in 1957, 1958 and 1959. "All three pilots died during the flights, and their names were never officially published," Rudenko said. He explained that all these pilots took part in so-called sub- orbital flights, i.e., their goal was not to orbit around the earth, which Gagarin later did, but make a parabola-shaped flight. "The cosmonauts were to reach space heights in the highest point of such an orbit and then return to the Earth," Rudenko said. According to his information, Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov were regular test pilots, who had not had any special training, Interfax reports. "Obviously, after such a serious of tragic launches, the project managers decided to cardinally change the program and approach the training of cosmonauts much more seriously in order to create a cosmonaut detachment," Rudenko said.

If you use an air quality detector, the terrorists have already won

Having an air quality detector, geiger counter, asbestos detector could send you to jail in NYC if you don't get a permit from the NYPD. This makes perfect sense, you could use them to, uh, to, think of the children, uh, I got nothing. [Link]

Damn you, Osama bin Laden! Here's another rotten thing you've done to us: After 9/11, untold thousands of New Yorkers bought machines that detect traces of biological, chemical, and radiological weapons. But a lot of these machines didn't work right, and when they registered false alarms, the police had to spend millions of dollars chasing bad leads and throwing the public into a state of raw panic.

OK, none of that has actually happened. But Richard Falkenrath, the NYPD's deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, knows that it's just a matter of time. That's why he and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have asked the City Council to pass a law requiring anyone who wants to own such detectors to get a permit from the police first. And it's not just devices to detect weaponized anthrax that they want the power to control, but those that detect everything from industrial pollutants to asbestos in shoddy apartments. Want to test for pollution in low-income neighborhoods with high rates of childhood asthma? Gotta ask the cops for permission. Why? So you "will not lead to excessive false alarms and unwarranted anxiety," the first draft of the law states.

I blame George Bush.

Cease-and-desist letters can be copyrighted

This is bogus. [Link]

It's long been believed that cease-and-desist letters that have no new creative expression and are merely boilerplates are likely not covered by copyright. On top of that, preventing someone from copying a cease-and-desist letter or posting it on their own website seems like a pretty severe First Amendment violation. The group Public Citizen hit back against this law firm's claims, but surprisingly, a judge has now agreed that you can copyright cease-and-desist letters (thanks to Eric Goldman for emailing over the link). The news was announced in a press release by the lawyer in question, who claims this means he can now sue anytime someone posts one of his cease-and-desist letters.

Ok, so it can be copyrighted, but that doesn't mean the content is completely unavailable. You could still perform fair use actions with the material.

[UPDATE] From Sean:

It's not quite cut-n-dry as that. It's just a bunch of lawyers playing the system to fish for information.

Comic Reader Demographics

Interesting numbers from Occasional Superheroine. [Link]

The portrait that it painted of the average mainstream comic book reader is as follows:

Male, 20-25, video-game player, disposable income, "techie," single.

What is the breakdown of male versus female readership?

More than 90% of the readers of mainstream superhero comics are male.

This doesn't match up with my experience when I go to my local comic store (not as often since I went to mail order DCBS). At Tate's Comics, there are always women, and it seems about ~25%, but maybe they are an outlier? Other stores I have been to have had much more stereotypical demographics, right down to Comic Book Guy being behind the counter.

J,J, Abrams and cast interview on Star Trek

Sounds good. I'm glad they're minimizing green screen shots to have more actual sets. [Link]

The greatest challenge faced when they first decided to take on the movie

J.J. Abrams: This may not be a fair answer, but there were two greatest challenges: the first was getting a handle on the vision of the future. The fact that most of the tech that we use in our everyday lives seems modeled after -- and actually more advanced than -- TOS, made it tricky to find a way to make our movie's world far more advanced than where we currently are, and yet also consistent with the original show.

Regional Pizza Styles

A bigger list than I thought there would be. [Link]

3 Hours of MTV from 1983

Wow. I used to watch MTV all the time, Back in my day MTV actually played music. Three hours of MTV with commercials from 1983. Mark Goodman is the featured VJ. I always liked Martha Quinn or Alan Hunter better. All three are now on Siius radio on the 80's channel. [Link]

Books that make you dumb

A chart of which are the most popular books at colleges, by SAT score. [Link]

1. Get a friend of yours to download, using Facebook, the ten most popular books at every college (manually -- as not to violate Facebook's ToS). These ten books are indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college.
2. Download the average SAT/ACT score for students attending every college.
3. Presto! We have a correlation between books and dumbitude (smartitude too)!

   Books <=> Colleges <=> Average SAT Scores

4. Plot the average SAT of each book, discarding books with too few samples to have a reliable average.
5. Post the results on your website, pondering what the Internet will think of it.

Yes, I'm aware correlation ≠ causation. The results are awesome regardless of direction of causality.
You can stop sending me email about this distinction. Thanks.

Awesome.

Next Day Smuggling, Guaranteed

Smugglers are using fake trucks, FedEx and Border Patrol to carry their goods. [Link]

Savvy criminals are using some of the country's most credible logos, including FedEx, Wal-Mart, DirecTV and the U.S. Border Patrol, to create fake trucks to smuggle drugs, money and illegal aliens across the border, according to a report by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Ingenious. And making a fake van is not illegal. I would think it would be copyright infringement though, which would be a civil matter, not criminal.

When collaboration go wrong

Interesting article about how what ends up on the comic page is not always what the writer wrote. [Link]

Now here's my theory (and I could be totally wrong): McFarlane really wanted to end with a full-page shot of Batman, but it wasn't in Mike Barr's script. He's only got 22 pages to work with, so in order to make space for his pin-up shot he decides to move some other panels around. Maybe he draws the pages out of order, I don't know. But he gets in trouble and has to cram two pages worth of script into one page - and that one page just happens to be the most important page in the whole book. I could be totally off-base, but I would lay money that Barr's Year Two script didn't call for a pin-up page at the end and it was all McFarlane's doing. And as a result, what could have been a classic Batman comic is... not.

Lots more examples there.

Motorcycle Airbag

Cool. Corsair could have used this on at least one occasion. [Link]

More than 10 years in the making, the Dainese D-Air Racing system is a new type of rider protection technology that uses a series of accelerometers and electronically operated rate gyros to deploy an airbag mounted in the aerodynamic hump of a leather racing suit when things go wrong on the racetrack. Taking only 40 milliseconds to trigger, the system provides protection for the neck, shoulder and collarbone, cushioning the falling rider before they hit the ground.

Salvaged Russian Sub

Fascinating pictures of salvaged, sunken Russian submarine the Kursk. [Link]

K-141 Kursk was a Russian nuclear cruise missile submarine which was lost with all hands when it sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000. It was named after the Russian city Kursk, around which the largest tank battle in military history, the Battle of Kursk, took place in 1943.

The Kursk sailed out to sea to perform an exercise of firing dummy torpedoes at Pyotr Velikiy, a Kirov class battlecruiser. On August 12, 2000 at 11:28 local time (07:28 UTC), the missiles were fired, but an explosion occurred soon after on Kursk. The only credible report to-date is that this was due to the failure and explosion of one of Kursk’s new/developmental torpedoes. The chemical explosion blasted with the force of 100-250 kg of TNT and registered 2.2 on the Richter scale [1]. The submarine sank to a depth of 108 metres, approximately 135km (85 miles) off Severomorsk, at 69°40′N, 37°35′E. A second explosion 135 seconds after the initial event measured between 3.5 and 4.4 on the Richter scale, equivalent to 3-7 tons of TNT [2]. Either this explosion or the earlier one propelled large pieces of debris far back through the submarine.

Kursk was eventually raised from her grave by a Dutch team using the barge Giant 4, and 115 of the 118 dead were recovered and laid to rest in Russia. Russian officials have strenuously denied claims that the sub was carrying nuclear warheads. When the boat was raised by a salvage operation in 2001 there were considerable fears moving the wreck could trigger explosions.

One reason the UN is a joke

Just one? Yes. [Link]

The 2001 Durban conference on racism turned into such an anti-Semitic rantfest from Muslim nations that the United States and Israel walked out in protest. The decision to leave created a storm of criticism here against the Bush administration, especially when Canada decided to stick around and scold the participants instead of leaving. Next year, the Canadians won't even bother to appear, calling Durban II a "circus" (via CapQ reader Blaise MacLean):

Canada has withdrawn its support for a UN anti-racism conference slated to take place in South Africa next year, the federal government announced Wednesday.

The so-called Durban II conference "has gone completely off the rails" and Canada wants no part of it, said Jason Kenney, secretary of state for multiculturalism and Canadian identity.

"Canada is interested in combating racism, not promoting it," Kenney told The Canadian Press. "We'll attend any conference that is opposed to racism and intolerance, not those that actually promote racism and intolerance.

When you've pissed off the Canadians, you know it's serious.

AT&T offers free wifi hotspot access to broadband subscribers

Pretty cool. I wonder if we qualify? [Link]

AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) today announced that more than 10 million AT&T broadband subscribers will soon have free unlimited access to the company’s nationwide Wi-Fi network, the largest Wi-Fi network in the United States. The offer delivers an annual saving of $60 for AT&T broadband customers, and an annual saving of nearly $240 compared with AT&T Wi-Fi costs for consumers who do not have an AT&T broadband plan.

The enhancement plays directly into the company’s efforts to increase the value of broadband by adding more ways for consumers to stay connected to their worlds. The move also reflects the growing popularity of wireless-enabled devices — from the iPhone to PDAs — as reports claim that more than one-third of Internet users have logged on using a wireless connection from home, at work or someplace else — showing an increase in on-the-go connections¹.

“Consumers today expect and demand a premier broadband experience — including a consistent, reliable connection no matter where they are,” said Rick Welday, chief marketing officer, AT&T Consumer. “And that’s exactly what we’re focused on. Our priority is to keep our customers connected. Period. Extending our Wi-Fi network supports this effort — and doing so for free combines even greater value with greater connectivity.”

The free Wi-Fi offer will be available to new and existing customers who subscribe to any of AT&T’s broadband services with downstream speeds of up to 1.5 Mbps, 3.0 Mbps, or 6.0 Mbps. Free Wi-Fi access was initially provided to the company’s higher-speed broadband customers last year.

AT&T offers wireless Internet connectivity at more than 10,000 U.S. locations, including retail stores, restaurants and airports from coast to coast.

More than you ever wanted to know about retcons

Retcon. With detailed examples from Websnark. [Link]

Retconning comes from "retroactive continuity," meaning "taking the continuity of your storyline and retroactively changing part of it so things didn't happen the way they happened," and there are many ways to do it. Let's talk about them together, shall we?

First off, let's talk about what all these things have in common. All of these changes underscore some Alteration Of What The Fans Know. And the fans are the only relevant part of retconning -- casual or first time readers don't care. You could just start your series over completely wiping out everything that happened (see below) in issue one of your new series, and a completely new reader won't give a damn about it when he reads issue two. The only people who give a damn about the history of your story are the people who have already emotionally invested in your story. They're the ones who bring baggage with them. They're the ones who have followed the story for some time -- maybe even years or decades -- and they're the ones you have to convince when you go ahead and make changes to "what they thought they knew."

That phrase, by the by, which is a lie. Retconning doesn't change 'what they thought they knew.' Retconning intentionally takes what they knew and made it wrong. It is a contradiction of your fans' expectations and a complete alteration of the context your stories are told in.

Lots more there.

Area 51 given new name

Homey Airport. Really. [Link]

“Homey Airport” now appears as the official name for a certain air base near a certain dry lake bed in Nevada, according to reports in the Web site of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, as well as the Daily Aviator blog and others. New editions of flight planning software and civilian aviators’ GPS gear lists the name and the official designation “KXTA” — which online wags have speculated stands for “extraterrestrial airport.” (The “k” designation indicates only that the field is in the U.S., according to the Federal Aviation Administration.)

Capt. Jessica Martin, a spokeswoman for Nellis Air Force Base, which sits 85 miles south of Homey Airport and is responsible for the airspace and any ground facilities, said that “we already know about the designation, but it doesn’t have any effect on operations at the base.”

Martin said she didn’t know the origin of the name “Homey Airport.”

I guess the aliens find it "homey".

Virgin Galactic unveils SpaceShipTwo

Cool looking. [Link]

Virgin Galactic has unveiled a SpaceShipTwo (SS2) design, created by Scaled Composites, that harks back to the NASA/USAF Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar glider of the 1960s, while Scaled's carrier aircraft, White Knight II (WK2) has been given a twin-fuselage configuration.

To be launched on a Lockheed Martin Titan III rocket, Dyna-Soar was for hypersonic flight research but the programme was cancelled before the first vehicle was completed. Some of its subsystems were used in later X-15 flight research and Dyna-Soar became a testbed for advanced technologies that contributed to projects, including the Space Shuttle.

Virgin Galactic's commercial operations will now start from New Mexico's Spaceport America in 2010 and not from Mojave air and space port in California, as originally planned, but the WK2, SS2 launch system will be test flown by Scaled at the Californian port.

At its 23 January press conference at the American Museum of Natural History in New York city Virgin Galactic described SS2 as using the same basic technology, construction and design as its predecessor SpaceShipOne (SS1), as 100% composite and twice as large as the $10 million X-Prize winning vehicle, SS1.

It will also be used for smaller, low orbit satellite launches.

Heath Ledger found dead

Apparently of a drug overdose. [Link]

Heath Ledger, who plays the Joker in the upcoming Batman movie The Dark Knight, was found dead on Jan. 22 in a Manhattan residence in a possible drug-related death, police told the Associated Press. He was 28.

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne told the AP that Ledger had an appointment for a massage at the Manhattan apartment believed to be his home. The housekeeper who went to let Ledger know the masseuse was there found him dead at 3:26 p.m.

CNN puts foot in mouth

According to CNN, black females vote based entirely on racial or gender line. [Link]

The story states: "For these women, a unique, and most unexpected dilemma, presents itself: Should they vote their race, or should they vote their gender?" Read the story

An e-mailer named Tiffany responded sarcastically: "Duh, I'm a black woman and here I am at the voting booth. Duh, since I'm illiterate I'll pull down the lever for someone. Hm... Well, he black so I may vote for him... oh wait she a woman I may vote for her... What Ise gon' do? Oh lordy!"

And what about white men?

"Since Edwards no longer officially exists, as a white male I face the same choice - either I vote my race (Clinton) or my gender (Obama). Or I could just pick the candidate based on who I think would be best," wrote Michael.

Perhaps they should listen to Dr. King:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
-- Martin Luther King Jr.

Assorted list of piercing mishaps

With these, I'm surprised anyone ever gets a piercing. [Link]

Hadi HI, Quah HM, Maw A. A missing tongue stud: an unusual appendicular foreign body. Int Surg. 2006 Mar-Apr;91(2):87-9.

Mmm...appendicitis.

---

Das G, Rawal N, Bolton LM. The case of the missing "Prince Albert". Obstet Gynecol. 2005 May;105(5 Pt 2):1273-5.

Okay, can someone attempt to explain to me the appeal of sticking a needle in my twig? Is it really that cool being able to pee out of two holes? Is the sex really that much better? People are so weird.

---

Atac MS. Impacted earring clip visible on panoramic radiograph. Dentomaxillofac Radiol. 2006 Jan;35(1):36-7.

Oh, I left an earring in, and then failed to notice while my ear grew around it until it disappeared. Silly me.

More at the link.

What causes the "Pioneer effect"?

Cool. [Link]

Strange things are happening to our robotic space explorers. Also known as the "Pioneer effect" (the unexpected and sudden alterations to Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 trajectories measured as they continue their journey into the outer solar system), similar anomalies are being seen in flybys by modern space probes. Earth flybys by Galileo, Rosetta, NEAR and Cassini have all experienced a sudden boost in speed. After cancelling out all possible explanations, including leakage of fuel and velocity measurement error, a new study suggests the answer may lie in a bizarre characteristic of universal physics…

Planetary flybys are an essential aid to interplanetary missions to gain energy as they accelerate on their merry way to their destination. Gravity assists are accurately calculated by mission scientists so the time of arrival can be calculated down to the minute. Considering most missions take years to complete, this degree of accuracy is amazing, but essential.

So, when Galileo completed gravity assist past Earth on December 8, 1990, to speed it toward Jupiter, you can imagine NASA's surprise to find that Galileo had accelerated suddenly, and for no apparent reason. This small boost was tiny, but through the use of the Deep Space Network, extremely accurate measurements of the speeding craft could be made. Galileo had accelerated 3.9 mm/s.

This isn't an isolated case. During Earth flybys by the space probes NEAR, Cassini-Huygens and Rosetta, all experienced a unexplained boosts of 13 mm/s, 0.11 mm/s and 2 mm/s respectively. Once technical faults, observational errors, radiation pressure, magnetic instabilities and electrical charge build-up could be ruled out, focus is beginning to turn to more exotic explanations.

This could easily be worked into a scifi story.

Memento mori

The Victorians used to take elaborately posed portraits of dead family members (generally appearing asleep) to remember them by. [Link]

[A] Colorado nonprofit organization is reviving a Victorian custom about which I had been largely ignorant, namely the custom of taking photographs of recently deceased loved ones as mementos. Indeed, the photographs were known as "memento mori." The group, called Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, takes carefully posed photographs that are truly astonishing. Although the concept may sound morbid, the results are not (although I really, really wish the website would get rid of the sappy music; it detracts from the power of the images rather than enhancing it). Although before I might actually have thought it rather morbid to record such images, now I"m not so sure. After perusing the images above, for instance, you could take a look at some of the Victorian-era memento mori images. What struck me the most about these images were two things. First, they were mostly children. Whether this is due to a greater tendency of parents to want to memorialize a child who died or whether it was due to the appalling infant mortality rate 150 years ago, I don't know, although my guess would be both, but with a greater contribution from the latter.

I find the whole thing disturbing.

Female Circumcision on rise in Indonesia

A nasty tradition. [Link]

Afterward, the girl’s genital area is swabbed with the antiseptic Betadine. She is then helped back into her underwear and returned to a waiting area, where she’s given a small, celebratory gift — some fruit or a donated piece of clothing — and offered a cup of milk for refreshment. She has now joined a quiet majority in Indonesia, where, according to a 2003 study by the Population Council, an international research group, 96 percent of families surveyed reported that their daughters had undergone some form of circumcision by the time they reached 14.

And here are the supposed benefits

According to Lukman Hakim, the foundation’s chairman of social services, there are three “benefits” to circumcising girls.

“One, it will stabilize her libido,” he said through an interpreter. “Two, it will make a woman look more beautiful in the eyes of her husband. And three, it will balance her psychology.”

Right. It's not the women in Muslim countries who are obsessed with sex though, is it?

[Link]

Ex-radical muslim, Ed Husain tells us about his experience from Saudi-Arabia (ht: Interested-Participant):

Within seconds the Saudi driver had sped off with the man's wife in his car and, months later, there was still no clue as to her whereabouts. We had heard stories of the abduction of women from taxis by sex-deprived Saudi youths.

Why had the veil and segregation not prevented such behaviour? My Saudi acquaintances, many of them university graduates, argued strongly that, on the contrary, it was the veil and other social norms that were responsible for such widespread sexual frustration among Saudi youth.

At work the British Council introduced free internet access for educational purposes. Within days the students had downloaded the most obscene pornography from sites banned in Saudi Arabia, but easily accessed via the British Council's satellite connection. Segregation of the sexes, made worse by the veil, had spawned a culture of pent-up sexual frustration that expressed itself in the unhealthiest ways.

Using Bluetooth technology on mobile phones, strangers sent pornographic clips to one another. Many of the clips were recordings of homosexual acts between Saudis and many featured young Saudis in orgies in Lebanon and Egypt. The obsession with sex in Saudi Arabia had reached worrying levels: rape and abuse of both sexes occurred frequently, some cases even reaching the usually censored national press.

[Link]

A woman is covered from head to toe just to hide her 'awra,' which is the Islamic vocabulary for the part of body that arouses sexual desire in a man, or the 'shame' of her. Thus, sexual organs are shameful parts of a body! It is a great insult to a woman to depict her entire body as shameful. It is also a great insult to all men. Why? Because, this gives the impression that men are like beasts that are on the street, just on the lookout there for women to prowl on for sex. This is completely nonsense. While living in an infidel country, I have watched millions of kufur women dressed in very decent as well as not so decent dresses. However, never have I seen a single man jump on a woman in the street to copulate with her, despite her mode of dressing being aphrodisiac or in plain word 'sexy.' The Islamic concept of sex is based on Bedouin Arab culture, that is barbaric and uncivilized, to say the least, when compared to today's world. This is because sex is so a 'dirty' word and it is so 'severely' restricted in Islam that as a inquisitive person I became extremely interested in it and devoured any written material that dealt with sex in Islam. To my surprise, I found that so little information is available, although there are tons and tons of books on Tafseer, ahadith Sharia, fiqh and the list goes on for all other branches of Islamic studies. Therefore, I had to write from scratch without much help from Islamic/other sources. Another big surprise for me was that the restrictions on sex for men in Islam are just superficial. There are countless loopholes in Islamic rules, so much so that it is possible for a Muslim man, whether married or not, to have uninterruptible supply of sex if he so desires. But he must know the rules of the game very well, if not, then he may fall into a great torment. There are many secrets and untold provisions for sex in Islam that very few Mullahs will tell.

It's all about power and who has that power and who doesn't.

Full Star Trek teaser trailer

Looks cool in the non phonecam capture version. [Link]

Marathon runner runs down burglar

Woman enter her house and finds a burglar. She chases him many blocks until he gets winded. [Link]

A seven-block-long chase had just begun. Lighthouse Point police corroborated Foster's version of events, and without endorsing her gutsy conduct, said she had evidently been up to the challenge.

"Luckily, it turned out OK," said police Commander Mike Oh, a spokesman for the Lighthouse Point department.

As related by Foster, the intruder began to climb the 6-foot-high wooden fence in the yard, when she "grabbed him by the neck, ripped him off the fence.. threw him to the ground, and put my knee to his chest."

The two struggled for a few minutes, Foster in her white tennis skirt, before the burglar dropped the bag and started running again.

"Go ahead and run," the former yacht detailer said she yelled. "You're not going to get away from me. I've been running for 40 years."

Police said the burglar headed north on Lighthouse Drive into the city of Deerfield Beach and then turned right on Southeast 14th Street, before he got tired and started walking. Foster followed behind and flagged down a motorist, who called police.

"I outran the kid," said Foster. "He had no cardiovascular system."

Gregory St. Germain, 24, was arrested by Lighthouse Point police and charged with burglary to an occupied dwelling, battery, possession of stolen property and grand theft. Police said Foster recovered all of her property, including what Foster said was a gold identification bracelet given to her as a teenager by a boyfriend as a Christmas present.

I used to live on 14th St.

A Night at the Theater

Sarah and I just came back from the theater (Ooh, look at us, we're cultured). We saw Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers. It is playing at the Tamarac Theatre of Performing Arts. We had a great time. The story was good, the acting was good.
One of Sarah's coworkers played Bella. We saw her perform in a play reading a year or two ago.
The grandmother is, in many ways, the spitting image image of my own grandmother. My grandmother is much warmer, but there is a definite resemblance in personality which had me laughing throughout the play.

A good reason not to key a Marine's car

The judge may have been a Marine. [Link]

A few weeks ago, there was considerable buzz around the blogosphere about a Chicago lawyer who didn't care for the military. He saw a car with Marine Corps license plates (not official ones, but "vanity" plates the owner, one Sergeant Mike McNulty, had paid for, and the proceeds go towards the Navy And Marine Corps Scholarship fund, which benefits children of fallen sailors and Marines) and decided to strike a blow for freedom and justice and peace by "keying" the car. The owner spotted him and, remarkably enough, did NOT beat the living shit out of him (and beating the shit out of a lawyer like this one is a very difficult task; there is so much shit, it could take hours to beat it all out). Instead, he had the man arrested for vandalism.

The lawyer thought he had a good defensive strategy: offer to pay for the damages, or at least a part of them, and stall the proceedings until the Marine in question was re-deployed on active duty and could not stick around for the trial.

Nice plan, didn't work.

Noted attorney and asshole Jay R. Grodner (Google bait) had his day in court this past week. In the courtroom, he found a lot -- a LOT -- of current and former military there.

But far more troublesome for asshole Jay Grodner than the two dozen military behind him was one Marine in front of him.

Judge William O'Malley wasn't born on the bench. In the 1960's, he was known as Lance Corporal William O'Malley, and is known to still wear a Marine Corps pin on his lapel.

Visible proof of improvement in Iraq

Very visible proof in graphs and maps. [Link]

Don't be a hater

Who hates who? [Link]

In 2004, the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies (ANES) survey asked about 1,200 American adults to give their thermometer scores of various groups. People in this survey who called themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" did have a fairly low opinion of liberals -- they gave them an average thermometer score of 39. The score that liberals give conservatives: 38. Looking only at people who said they are "extremely conservative" or "extremely liberal," the right gave the left a score of 27; the left gives the right an icy 23. So much for the liberal tolerance edge.

Some might argue that this is simply a reflection of the current political climate, which is influenced by strong feelings about the current occupants of the White House. And sure enough, those on the extreme left give President Bush an average temperature of 15 and Vice President Cheney a 16. Sixty percent of this group gives both men the absolute lowest score: zero.

To put this into perspective, note that even Saddam Hussein (when he was still among the living) got an average score of eight from Americans. The data tell us that, for six in ten on the hard left in America today, literally nobody in the entire world can be worse than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

This doesn't sound very tolerant to me -- nor especially rational, for that matter. To be fair, though, let's roll back to a time when the far right was accused of temporary insanity: the late Clinton years, when right-wing pundits practically proclaimed the end of Western civilization each night on cable television because President Clinton had been exposed as a perjurious adulterer.

In 1998, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were hardly popular among conservatives. Still, in the 1998 ANES survey, Messrs. Clinton and Gore both received a perfectly-respectable average temperature of 45 from those who called themselves extremely conservative. While 28% of the far right gave Clinton a temperature of zero, Gore got a zero from just 10%. The bottom line is that there is simply no comparison between the current hatred the extreme left has for Messrs. Bush and Cheney, and the hostility the extreme right had for Messrs. Clinton and Gore in the late 1990s.

Does this refute the stereotype that right-wingers are "haters" while left-wingers are not? Liberals will say that the comparison is unfair, because Mr. Bush is so much worse than Mr. Clinton ever was. Yes, Mr. Clinton may have been imperfect, but Mr. Bush -- whom people on the far left routinely compare to Hitler -- is evil. This of course destroys the liberal stereotype even more eloquently than the data. The very essence of intolerance is to dehumanize the people with whom you disagree by asserting that they are not just wrong, but wicked.

This certainly feeds into the stereotype that Conservatives think Liberals are wrong and Liberals think Conservatives are Evil.

Can't we all just get along?

Replacing the Lunar base with Asteroid missions

This makes sense. I would love to see us back on the moon, but I think we could do more with less money. [Link]

Some of the most influential leaders of the space community are quietly working to offer the next U.S. president an alternative to President Bush's "vision for space exploration"--one that would delete a lunar base and move instead toward manned missions to asteroids along with a renewed emphasis on Earth environmental spacecraft.

Top U.S. planetary scientists, several astronauts and former NASA division directors will meet privately at Stanford University on Feb. 12-13 to define these sweeping changes to the NASA/Bush administration Vision for Space Exploration (VSE).

Abandoning the Bush lunar base concept in favor of manned asteroid landings could also lead to much earlier manned flights to Mars orbit, where astronauts could land on the moons Phobos or Deimos.

Their goals for a new array of missions also include sending astronauts to Lagrangian points, 1 million mi. from Earth, where the Earth's and Sun's gravity cancel each other out and spacecraft such as replacements for the Hubble Space Telescope could be parked and serviced much like Hubble.

The "alternate vision" the group plans to offer would urge far greater private-sector incentives to make ambitious human spaceflight plans a reality.

A reason to like Obama

A real answer is given. [Link]

Obama began by recalling a moment in Tuesday night's debate when he and his rivals were asked to name their biggest weakness. Obama answered first, saying he has a messy desk and needs help managing paperwork - something his opponents have since used to suggest he's not up to managing the country. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards said his biggest weakness is that he has a powerful response to seeing pain in others, and Clinton said she gets impatient to bring change to America.

"Because I'm an ordinary person, I thought that they meant, 'What's your biggest weakness?'" Obama said to laughter from a packed house at Rancho High School. "If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. And then I could have said, 'Well, ya know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don't want to be helped. It's terrible.'"

He seems more like a real person and less the product of a focus group. A cynic would say he just fakes it better. I don't know if I'm feeling that cynical right now.

Contact Lens Display

I can't wait. [Link]

Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights. Previously the Virtual Retina display (VRD) was invented at the University of Washington in the Human Interface Technology Lab in 1991.

Advances in printable electronics will make these systems very powerful and affordable in the future. Carbon nanotubes placed onto plastic are at 300 Mhz or the speed of a Intel Pentium 2.

"Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside," said Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering. "This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it's extremely promising."

These would be great for Augmented Reality.

Why The Hero's Journey Sucks

Pretty good assessment. [Link]

We've been somewhat shocked to see so many people defending Joseph Campbell in the comments on our hero's journey post. Hey, we got stoned and read The Hero With A Thousand Faces in college, just like everybody else, and we thought it was super deep. All those primal archetypes and spiritual patterns were totally hardwired into the joint checking account of our collective unconscious. But that didn't mean we wanted to watch a thousand movies and read ten thousand books based on Campbell's dime-store anthropology. Here are some reasons why Campbell should go back on the shelf.

It does seem, at least for genre films, that the Hero's Journey is overused. It has become less guidance and more checklist. Much like the standard three act structure of scriptwriting. It has it's detractors as well.

Use the tools, follow the rules and know when to ignore both.

"Real" Superheroes

Wow. I love comics and superheroes, but I don't think I could do this. [Link]

BY MOST OBSERVERS' RECKONING, between 150 and 200 real-life superheroes, or "Reals" as some call themselves, operate in the United States, with another 50 or so donning the cowl internationally. These crusaders range in age from 15 to 50 and patrol cities from Indianapolis to Cambridgeshire, England. They create heroic identities with names like Black Arrow, Green Scorpion, and Mr. Silent, and wear bright Superman spandex or black ninja suits. Almost all share two traits in common: a love of comic books and a desire to improve their communities.

It's rare to find more than a few superheroes operating in the same area, so as with all hobbies, a community has sprung up online. In February, a burly, black-and-green-clad New Jersey-based Real named Tothian started Heroes Network, a website he says functions "like the UN for the real-life superhero community."

I worry about the dark side to all this. One has already had a DUI while in costume and there has been discussions about carrying shotguns. If they want to do this, they really need to stick to the silver age ideal rather than 90's bloodlust.

Pharmacorruption?

One third of antidepressant studies published. [Link]

A new study—"the most thorough to date," writes the New York Times—shows that about a third of the studies for some of the market's most successful antidepressants (Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor) were never published because they didn't have favorable results. "While 94 percent of the positive studies found their way into print, just 14 percent of those with disappointing or uncertain results did." The implication is that the makers of these drugs intentionally misled consumers and the federal government on their effectiveness.

Vytorin not effective? [Link]

A clinical trial of Zetia, a popularly prescribed cholesterol-lowering drug, "failed to show that the drug has any medical benefits." In fact, fatty plaques grew almost twice as fast in patients who took Zetia along with Zocor in a combo product called Vytorin. However, "patients who are taking Vytorin or Zetia should talk to their doctors if they are concerned and not discontinue taking the medicines on their own."

New Enterprise

Pretty cool. [Link]

Nicely detailed and evokes the original as well as the movie era. What we can see here looks fairly similar to a version of the Enterprise built on Scifi-meshes.com by Gabriel Koerner [Link]

Trying to explain the new Spider-Man status quo

Funny. [Link]

Detecting Oceans on other planets

Cool. [Link]

Imagine if astronomers could tell the difference between Earth-like extrasolar planets just by seeing the reflected light from their oceans? That sounds like science fiction, but a team of researchers have proposed that it's really possible to detect the shape of the light curve glinting off an extrasolar planet and know if it has oceans.

This ground-breaking (water splashing?) idea was written in a recent journal article by D.M. Williams and E. Gaidos, entitled Detecting the Glint of Starlight on the Oceans of Distant Planets published January, 2008 in the Arxiv prepress e-Print archive.

Most sci-fi that has dealt with discovery of new worlds has generally had no real idea what was in the target solar system unless a physical probe has gone there first. With this and other techniques along with future telescopes with much higher resolving power, we'll see the destination in some detail long before we ever go there.

Scientific Sleuths

Cool idea. What scientist would make a good detective for a story, sort of like how Steve Allen wrote of himself solving murders. [Link]

Yeah, there's a swashbuckling Nikola Tesla book or two, and Einstein turns up in a few places, but that's not really the same thing. We need some good ideas for mystery novels in which improbable scientists turn to solving crimes.

So, a question for the audience:

What famous scientist should be featured as a detective in a mystery novel?

Remember, part of the fun of the genre is in having the amateur detective turn out to be as improbable as possible (I mean, there's a whole series of mysteries with Groucho Marx as the detective...). Richard Feynman would be an OK choice, but he makes much too much sense, as he's already a larger-than-life figure. Stephen Hawking would be much better.

My Choices:

• Leonardo Da Vinci The Original Renaissance Man
  
• Benjamin Franklin The First American, solving crimes with connections to Freemasonry in the Colonies or England at the Hellfire Club, or in France during the Revolutionary War
  
• Steve Wozniak Apple Computers (an engineer, not a scientist, but still interesting) He's really smart and quirky. Steve travels to your town and people start dropping like flies. It's Murder, she wrote for a new generation.
  
• Kernighan and Ritchie The C Programming Language, Murder at Bell Labs, with them as team detectives, with clues found in a user account on an early Unix system.
  

The Ultimate Rubber Band Gun

The Disintegrator. [Link]

Lasagna Cat

Very Cool. Live action adaptations of Garfield strips followed by an ironic music video that counterpoints the strip. [Link]

Watching these I was reminded of Silent Garfield where all of Garfield's dialog is removed. [Link]

Watch the Government with OpenCongress

From Boing Boing. [Link]

Register an account with OpenCongress using your e-mail address and you'll receive a profile page -- "My OpenCongress" -- that provides a personalized view of all the information you want about the laws being made in Washington. Users can track any bill, senator, representative, or issue area on the site, simply by clicking "track this" at the top of any page. Back on your profile, you'll have assembled a one-stop platform of everything you're watching in Congress, with a continually-updated stream of their latest actions.

Sounds interesting, but I would probably be more annoyed watching the government "work" than being ignorant about day to day affairs.

Tom Cruise Indoctrination Video

From WFMU. [Link]

This video's been passed around privately by reporters and writers investigating Cruise's ties with Scientology. Most reporters have been wary of taking on the Scientologists, because they have a history of both litigation, and the harassment of critics. The publication of Andrew Morton's biography of Tom Cruise, which claims he is the second most powerful person in the cult, has seems to have opened the floodgates. Several indoctrination videos were available on Google Video, on Sunday, and showcased on Gawker, before being removed by the person who had originally posted them. Yesterday, for a few hours, the clip of Tom Cruise discussing his beliefs as a Scientologist appeared on Youtube, and was republished by Radar and Defamer. That video is no longer available, most likely after the Church of Scientology sent in a copyright infringement notice. Gawker is now hosting a copy of the video; it's newsworthy; and we will not be removing it.

Go watch it.

More on Scientology here. [Link]

When a pulp sci-fi writer is heard saying "The way to make a million dollars is to start a religion" and he creates a religion that involves space aliens you'd think more people would notice. I guess not.

Herbal Supplement Capsules

Ewww. [Link]

This personal testimony about health supplements from winstonthorne on today's earlier post is too good—and disturbing—to leave buried in comments:

One of my friends actually stuffs capsules for a living for a company making an herbal "sexual stimulant" - she literally sits there on her living room floor watching TV, smoking cigarettes, and talking on the phone while handling (with either bare unwashed hands or many-times-reused gloves) the powder and the capsules themselves. It pays well, and her boss gets away with this because there's no FDA control on herbal supplements AT ALL. God only knows what's in those pills.

The Houses of Clinton and Bush

Let's say Hillary gets the nomination and wins. Lets further say she gets reelected. This would mean we would have either a Bush or Clinton in the White House for 28 years straight. Do we want that? Is that good for Democracy or America?

Maybe we should have Chelsea and one of the Bush nephews (or daughters) get married. We can thus join House Atreides and House Harkonnen bringing peace to the galaxy once more.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate: [Link]

What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama—yet again—a central part of our own politics?
What do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlor? You have to be able to forget, first, what happened to those who complained, or who told the truth, last time.

Suing to prevent Obama supporters being able to vote in Nevada. [Link]

As this link shows, the Clinton campaign is supporting, if not actually inciting, a Nevada State Teachers Association lawsuit against the Culinary Workers Union. The reason? The Culinary Workers Union has arranged for its members to caucus in their workplaces, to cast their votes in the hotels and casinos that support that state's economy instead of taking time off to get to polling places -- at the risk of getting fired.

That lawsuit was filed right after the Culinary Workers Union endorsed Obama.

Gosh. What a coincidence. It's an unfair disadvantage, the teachers union lawsuit says -- they are supporting Hillary -- to let all those maids and bellboys vote while they are on the job.

The caucus is on the 19th. It's a Saturday. I guess the teachers are going to be -- really busy compared to those maids and bellboys?

Manipulating the Michigan ballot. [Link]

“What happened in Michigan is not very different from what used to happen in the old Soviet Union,” Riegle said. “The Clinton machine manipulated the ballot. They don’t care how they win, only that they do. It’s wrong and people need to know that.”

Riegle said the Democratic candidates had an understanding, after Michigan defied the party and tried to become the first state to hold a primary, that none of them would compete in Michigan. Obama and Edwards honored the agreement, but Clinton did not and put her name on the ballot, he said.

...

Besides Clinton, candidates Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel are also on the Democratic ballot. Backers of other candidates have been told to vote Uncommitted. Write-in votes will not be counted. If Uncommitted wins 15% of the vote in a congressional district, delegates will be chosen later to represent other candidates such as Obama and Edwards, Riegle said.

No more dynasties. [Link]

I admire her a lot and think she could be a great president, but here's the speech line that killed any enthusiasm for that scenario (from memory): "It took a Clinton to clean up after the first Bush and it looks like it'll take another Clinton to clean up after the second one.").

That line just drove home the whole dynasty shtick that I've grown so weary of. If it's bad for backward countries to elect spouses and kids of former rulers, then why is it such a good deal here?

I mean, are we that bereft of talent that we must regurgitate entire administrations? Look at what the "steady hands" of Bush 41 (Powell, Rice, Cheney, Wolfowitz) got us with Bush 43.

All this tells me is that politics doesn't matter much today in the everyday lives of Americans. We're just dogs going back to our own vomit. Instead of the Big Man, we submit to the Big Family. Same mediocre deal, because they second-timers rule with a sense of entitlement. We saw it with W.'s supremely arrogant crowd and I suspect we'd see it with all the Clintonites back in power: tons of "we know best."

Yes, no more dynasties, on either side.

GM investing in Ethanol

I think this is going to hit critical mass soon. [Link]

Today at the North American International Auto Show, GM announced it has taken a non-controlling equity interest in biology-based renewable energy firm Coskata Inc. The greater-Chicago-based company simultaneously announced that it has developed a proprietary process for converting renewable carbon-rich materials ranging from cornstalks and woodchips to old tires and city trash into clean-burning ethanol at a cost of roughly $1/gallon. A pilot operation will be up and running at Coskata's R&D headquarters in Warrenville, IL by the end of January, 2008, and a 40,000-gallon commercial demonstration facility under construction at an as yet undisclosed location will go online by the end of the year. General Motors will purchase much of the ethanol produced by this plant for use in the test vehicles at its Milford, MI proving ground. And plans are in the works for a 100-million-gallon/year facility to be up and running by 2011.

GM's interest is primarily in making ethanol more widely available to increase the popularity of the many models it sells with flex-fuel capability (by 2012, half of GM's North American production will be flex-fuel capable). The company is also investing extensively in university research and in other firms pursuing different methods of cellulosic ethanol production. GM research suggests that by 2030, one-third of transportation fuel needs can be met by biofuels.

$1 per gallon for ethanol is great, particularly since it seems to not require diverting food production to work.

How does the Coskata system work? Like most other cellulosic ethanol conversion processes currently under development, it enlists specialist microorganisms to do much of the work, but rather than using them to break down starches and complex carbohydrates into sugars that can be fermented and distilled, these carefully selected and bred anaerobic (hate oxygen) bacteria assemble ethanol molecules when fed a diet of carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas better known as syngas (the stuff that many towns once used to illuminate their gas streetlamps). The syngas is produced by first superheating the carbon-rich waste materials to 1000 degrees C (1832F). This "gasification" process breaks the long carbon chains into tiny bits in a reaction that actually releases energy after an initial input of energy to reach that temperature. The next step is a scrubber that removes detritus (like steel from tire carcasses and the like) and delivers syngas to the bioreactor. After the designer bugs have feasted on this syngas and water buffet, the ethanol they sweat out passes, along with the water, into an ethanol recovery gizmo that consumes 50 percent less energy than a typical distilling process would. The vaporized low-proof ethanol/water gas is passed through tubes made of a special hydrophilic (loves water) coating that separates the steam, leaving a 99.7-percent pure stream of ethanol coming out the other end while the water gets recycled.

100 Numbers 100 Movies

From Occasional Superheroine. [Link]

Islamic Da Vinci Code

Ancient Islamic texts showing the roots of Islam and the controversy that causes from a set of documents thought lost at the end of World War II.

From The Belmont Club. [Link]

Islam stands at risk of a Da Vinci Code effect, for in Islam, God's self-revelation took the form not of the Exodus, nor the revelation at Mount Sinai, nor the Resurrection, but rather a book, namely the Koran. The Encyclopaedia of Islam (1982) observes, "The closest analogue in Christian belief to the role of the Koran in Muslim belief is not the Bible, but Christ." The Koran alone is the revelatory event in Islam.

What if scholars can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Koran was not dictated by the Archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Mohammad during the 7th century, but rather was redacted by later writers drawing on a variety of extant Christian and Jewish sources? That would be the precise equivalent of proving that the Jesus Christ of the Gospels really was a composite of several individuals, some of whom lived a century or two apart.

There is a lot of pressure to keep these and other documents from ever seeing the light of day.

Good advice on weighing climate information

From Instapundit. [Link]

No matter which line you prefer on the graph, you can’t draw any firm conclusions about the IPCC’s projections — a few years does not a trend make, and the global temperature is just one of the indicators to look at. But the different lines on the graph are certainly evidence of how complicated the climate debate is. If scientists can’t even agree on what has happened in the past, imagine how much more difficult it is to figure out the future. I’m not suggesting that the global warming isn’t real, or that the uncertainties justify inaction — we take out insurance all the time against risks that are uncertain. I’d like to see a carbon tax. But I’d also like to see fewer dogmatists claiming that the scientific debate is over.

Dr. Pielke suggests that more scientists do reality checks on other predictions by the IPCC, and that the IPCC make it easier for its predictions to be tested by specifying in detail what the variables are, who is measuring them, and what to look for in the future. “If weather forecasters, stock brokers, and gamblers can do it, then you can too,” he urges the IPCC in his blog post. Dr. Pielke told me that scientists have been focusing on the predictions for the summer ice melt in the Arctic — which called for less dramatic change than what has actually occurred — but not paying enough attention to other indicators.

“Rather than select among predictions, why not verify them all?” he said. “Seven years is not a lot to allow much to be said, but certainly 10 and 15 years will be. Once predictions are made, they should not be forgotten, but evaluated against experience. This is not skepticism at work, just the good old scientific method.”

Good advice.

Teaching Computer Science

Some very good ideas on practical learning about software development that isn't covered by many schools. [Link]

Deployment is a huge hurdle. It's a challenge even for the best software development teams, and it's incredibly important: if users can't get past the install step, none of the code you've written matters! And yet, as Greg notes, existing software engineering textbooks give this crucial topic only cursory treatment. Along the same lines, a few weeks ago, a younger coworker noted to me in passing that he never learned anything about source control in any of his computer science classes. How could that be? Source control is the very bedrock of software engineering.

If we aren't teaching fundamental software engineering skills like deployment and source control in college today, we're teaching computer science the wrong way. What good is learning to write code in the abstract if you can't work on that code as a team in a controlled environment, and you can't deploy the resulting software? As so many computer science graduates belatedly figure out after landing their first real programming job, it isn't any good at all.

My degree barely enabled me to be employable, particularly since it was in dead computer languages, none of which I have ever used for work. Almost everything
was on the job.
How many bad habits are enshrined in new developers because of the bad practices of their more experienced co-workers? I would imagine quite a few.
I'm sensitive to this now since most of my job revolves around writing installs and updates and source control management.

Kafka would be proud

Canada, a haven for free speech, as long as it's not against Islam. [Link]

CANADA'S KANGAROO COURT: On video. More here.

UPDATE: "Pure, uncompromising brilliance."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Comments from Mark Steyn.

Ms McGovern, a blandly unexceptional bureaucrat, is a classic example of the syndrome. No "vulnerable" Canadian Muslim has been attacked over the cartoons, but the cartoonists had to go into hiding, and a gang of Muslim youths turned up at their children's grade schools, and Muslim rioters around the world threatened death to anyone who published them, and even managed to kill a few folks who had nothing to do with them. Nonetheless, upon receiving a complaint from a Saudi imam trained at an explicitly infidelophobic academy and who's publicly called for the introduction of sharia in Canada, Shirlene McGovern decides that the purely hypothetical backlash to Muslims takes precedence over any actual backlash against anybody else.

Torchwood head writer leave for Law & Order: London

I wonder how that will affect Torchwood? [Link]

Chris Chibnall - head writer and producer for Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood - has been signed up for a 13-episode order of a brand new addition to NBC's Law & Order franchise, Law & Order: London.

From boink-boink to doink-doink.

Early adopters of Blu-ray left out in the cold

If you have any Blu-ray player except the PS3 (imagine that), later this year new disc will not work with the new features coming. [Link]

"One key Blu-ray developer told BetaNews that although he builds discs for studios including Fox and Lionsgate, he did not buy a Blu-ray player for personal use." Regarding current Blu-ray player owners, Blu-ray developers told BetaNews, "They knew what they were getting into."

Representatives at the Blu-ray booth at CES told BetaNews that the PlayStation 3 is currently the only player they would recommend, due to upcoming changes to the platform. But Pioneer, Samsung, Panasonic and Sony have all been selling standalone Blu-ray players to customers.

So here's how it's going to work: current players are Profile 1.0, and can play future hi-def discs but no bonus stuff. Profile 1.1 dics will include additional bonus material that won't play on 1.0 players—these discs will have a "Bonus View" sticker. Come October, Profile 2 capability will come to the market, which includes Internet activity, but only on Profile 2.0 players—these discs will have a "BD Live" sticker.

We still haven't gotten an HDTV, so an HD player doesn't make any sense. But now that the format war looks like it is almost over in Blu-ray's favor, when we are in the market for a new player it looks like it'' be Blu-ray.

SimCity source code released as open source

From Slashdot. [Link]

There's been changes to the original system like a new splash screen, some UI feedback from QA, etc. The plane crash disaster has been removed as a result of 9/11. What is initially released under GPL is the Linux version based on TCL/Tk, adapted for the OLPC (but not yet natively ported to the Sugar user interface and Python), which will also run on any Linux/X11 platform. The OLPC has an officially sanctioned and QA'ed version of SimCity that is actually called SimCity. EA wanted to have the right to approve and QA anything that was shipped with the trademarked name SimCity. But the GPL version will have a different name than SimCity, so people will be allowed to modify and distribute that without having EA QA and approve it. Future versions of SimCity that are included with the OLPC and called SimCity will go through EA for approval, but versions based on the open source Micropolis source code can be distributed anywhere, including the OLPC, under the name Micropolis (or any other name than SimCity).

Cool. I spent a lot of time playing the original and later versions.

Download source code here. [Link]

Recorded Music Compaies: Dead Men Walking

People have been saying for years that the record companies needed to change to survive, but no one listened. Is it too late? [Link]

IN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.

In public, of course, music executives continued to talk a good game: recovery was just around the corner, they argued, and digital downloads would rescue the music business. But the results from 2007 confirm what EMI's focus group showed: that the record industry's main product, the CD, which in 2006 accounted for over 80% of total global sales, is rapidly fading away. In America, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the volume of physical albums sold dropped by 19% in 2007 from the year before—faster than anyone had expected. For the first half of 2007, sales of music on CD and other physical formats fell by 6% in Britain, by 9% in Japan, France and Spain, by 12% in Italy, 14% in Australia and 21% in Canada. (Sales were flat in Germany.) Paid digital downloads grew rapidly, but did not begin to make up for the loss of revenue from CDs. More worryingly for the industry, the growth of digital downloads appears to be slowing.

I haven't bought a CD in some time, I pretty much only do iTunes, but I plan to start looking over at Amazon's mp3 store as well.