September 2005 Archives

A group of angry ex-models is bashing the SuicideGirls alt-porn empire, saying its embrace of the tattoo and nipple-ring set hides a world of exploitation and male domination.

The women are spreading their allegations through the blogosphere, raising the hackles of the SuicideGirls company, which has until now enjoyed a reputation as porn even feminists can love. It offers burlesque tours, clothes and DVDs in addition to a sprawling online library of naked punk and goth women.

"The recent accusations are a little upsetting," said "Missy," the co-founder of SuicideGirls. "We think they're all pretty much unfounded."

Wired News: SuicideGirls Gone AWOL

The numbers are straightforward. In the past 50 years, air temperatures across the Arctic Ocean have climbed by as much as 5.4 degrees F�huge by climate standards. This has had an unsurprising effect on the ice. Ordinarily, the ice sheet expands and shrinks with the changing seasons, dwindling to its smallest size in late September. Even then, however, it used to measure about 2.7 million sq. mi., roughly the size of the contiguous U.S. Not anymore. On the last day of summer this year, the ice measured just 2.05 million sq. mi.�a loss of area twice the size of Texas. That continues a four-year trend of dwindling ice, reducing the sheet to perhaps the smallest size ever recorded in the 100 years measurements have been taken.

TIME.com: The Artic Meltdown Speeds Up -- Page 1

Welcome to Florida, but avoid arguments or thanks to a new law you run the risk of getting shot, according to an ad campaign launched by a gun-control group.

The campaign coincides with a state law that enters into effect authorizing gun owners to shoot anyone in a public area who they believe threaten their safety.

The law, supported by the National Rifle Association (NRA), was approved by the state legislature in April. Governor
Jeb Bushdescribed it as a "good, common sense, anti-crime issue" when he signed it into law.

Attention: testy visitors risk being shot in Florida - Yahoo! News

Heheh. Awesome.

ThinkGeek :: Geeky Wrapping Paper

After years of toiling and desperation, our engineers at ThinkGeek Gift Labs(TM) have finally invented something so unique and innovative, it perplexes even the brightest minds as to how global society might be impacted. We'll explain it to you but if your brain explodes, we warned you. You see, we have taken the flesh of a tree, mixed it up with some water and other patented goos.

Wouldn't it be neat, they ask, if we could nab bin Laden via teleportation? In "Star Trek," the characters traveled between spaceship and planet by having their bodies dematerialized, then "beamed" to another locale -- hence, the characters' familiar request to the ship's engineer: "Beam me up, Scotty."

That's teleportation.

Although many physicists think such ideas are claptrap, it would be ideal if the United States could teleport U.S. soldiers into "a cave, tap bin Laden on the shoulder, and say: 'Hey, let's go,' " said Ranney Adams, spokesperson for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base in the Southern California desert. "But we're not there (yet)."

Not for want of trying, though. Last year, the Air Force spent $25,000 on a report, titled "Teleportation Physics Study," to examine possible ways to teleport humans and objects through space.

Military examines 'beaming up' data, people / Critics say its extreme computing, energy needs keep teleportation unlikely for now

Since there is no content, there is no "controversy'' to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrated?

"The proponents of intelligent design use an ingenious ploy that works something like this," writes Tufts philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, and author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea. "First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach."

To date, scientists have held back with regard to engaging the proponents of "intelligent design" on the battlefield of scientific discourse, reasoning being that by simply having a discussion, the ID crowd gains a respectable platform for their views.

Edge 166

From the Canadian Psych Association, no less...

CJP - June 2005 - Flashback: Psychiatric Experimentation With LSD in Historical Perspective

In the popular mind, d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) research in psychiatry has long been associated with the CIA-funded experiments conducted by Ewen Cameron at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, Quebec. Despite this reputation, a host of medical researchers in the post�€“World War II era explored LSD for its potential therapeutic value. Some of the most widespread trials in the Western world occurred in Saskatchewan, under the direction of psychiatrists Humphry Osmond (in Weyburn) and Abram Hoffer (in Saskatoon). These medical researchers were first drawn to LSD because of its ability to produce a �€œmodel psychosis.�€� Their experiments with the drug that Osmond was to famously describe as a �€œpsychedelic�€� led them to hypothesize and promote the biochemical nature of schizophrenia.

... and have a web browser opened to this page ....

A unique website for people desperate to disconnect themselves from unwanted telephone conversations. The site features a selection of audio clips ranging from, ringing cell phones, barking dogs to crying babies to someone crashing into a fence, to be played in the background for people on the other end of the line.

When You Absolutely, Positively Have to Get Off the Phone SorryGottaGo.com - Helps End Unending Phone Conversations

OK, so this is pretty nerdy. However, if you really need to make some accurate calculations, you might want it. Me, I know Pi to two decimal places. It's been pretty good for me so far.

Pi to 1,000,000 places

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923
078164062862089986280348253421170679821480865132823066470938446095
505822317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303
819644288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091456485669234
603486104543266482133936072602491412737245870066063155881748815209
209628292540917153643678925903600113305305488204665213841469519415
116094330572703657595919530921861173819326117931051185480744623799
627495673518857527248912279381830119491298336733624406566430860213
949463952247371907021798609437027705392171762931767523846748184676
694051320005681271452635608277857713427577896091736371787214684409
012249534301465495853710507922796892589235420199561121290219608640
344181598136297747713099605187072113499999983729780499510597317328
160963185950244594553469083026425223082533446850352619311881710100
031378387528865875332083814206171776691473035982534904287554687311
595628638823537875937519577818577805321712268066130019278766111959
092164201989380952572010654858632788659361533818279682303019520353
018529689957736225994138912497217752834791315155748572424541506959
508295331168617278558890750983817546374649393192550604009277016711
390098488240128583616035637076601047101819429555961989467678374494
482553797747268471040475346462080466842590694912933136770289891521
047521620569660240580381501935112533824300355876402474964732639141
992726042699227967823547816360093417216412199245863150302861829745
557067498385054945885869269956909272107975093029553211653449872027
559602364806654991198818347977535663698074265425278625518184175746
728909777727938000... etc....

Nice looking house. I'm sure I could find a few things to do.

My Boring Ass Life � A Peek Into My Boring-Ass Life

Ever since I started 'My Boring-Ass Life', I've gotten a lot of requests for a complete layout of my house. Naturally, for many reasons, this is kinda out of the question. However, from time to time, I figure it'd be nice to share little pieces of where I live, by way of some badly-framed photos.

A neat new look at the weapons coming in Quake 4. Unrfortunately, it's more of the same-old same-old. And the weapons have gotten uglier too, and harder to tell apart from each other.

GameSpy: The Weapons of QUAKE 4

We slip behind Strogg defenses for a look at concept art, rendered models and inside info on Quake 4's arsenal.

In just a few weeks (or so we hope), the Quake series will return to a PC near you with the release of Quake 4. The single-player campaign picks up where Quake 2 left off, with human forces about to launch a counter-attack on the planet Stroggos, and so the game's arsenal features a mix of human and Strogg weaponry, many returning from previous Quake titles.

ArenaNet has announced that the qualifying season for the first Guild Wars World Championship will begin this week. In preparation, the Guild Wars Ladder will be reset at 12:00 am PDT (7:00 am GMT) on October 1 to start the first ladder season. This inaugural season will last three months and will culminate in regional playoffs among top-ranked guilds in each of America, Europe, and Korea, followed by the global Guild Wars World Championship, a live event to be held early next year. ArenaNet will be making a formal announcement on Thursday with further details.

Prior to the October 1 ladder reset, they will be updating Guild Wars with a comprehensive set of skill balance changes to refresh the competitive landscape.

Guild Wars - Welcome to the Guild Wars Website!

This is neat. A list of MacGuffin examples from various films and TV shows.

What's a MacGuffin/McGuffin, you ask? Well ... It's something really important...

A MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin or Maguffin) is a plot device that motivates the characters and advances the story, particularly one whose importance is accepted completely by the story's characters, yet from the audience's perspective it might be minimally explained or may test their suspension of disbelief if it is scrutinized. The device, usually an object, is common in films, especially thrillers.

MacGuffin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pepper Hamilton attorney Eric Rothschild opened the proceedings, telling the judge the school board ignored scientific knowledge and the advice of its high school science department to put the policy in effect.

He said several board members wanted to teach creationism; on an overhead projector, he showed some documents and a news clip to support his claims.

Among the documents were Nilsen's notes from two board retreats that showed board member Alan Bonsell had brought up discussions about creationism.

Rothschild also presented a draft of the board's policy, on which Baksa listed creationism instead of intelligent design.

York Dispatch - York Today

'Intelligent Design' Court Battle Begins

The opening day of a landmark trial over whether a school district should require students to hear about "intelligent design" felt a lot like a science lecture.

Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, the first witness called Monday by lawyers suing the Dover Area School District for exposing its students to the controversial theory, sprinkled his testimony with references to DNA, red blood cells and viruses, and he occasionally referred to complex charts on a projection screen.

Miller, who was the only witness Monday, sharply criticized intelligent design and questioned the work that went into it by one of its leading proponents, Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, who will be a key witness for the district.

The statement read to Dover students states in part, "Because Darwin's theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered." Miller said the words are "tremendously damaging," falsely undermining the scientific status of evolution.

"What that tells students is that science can't be relied upon and certainly is not the kind of profession you want to go into," he said.

[Gene Weingarten] just finished reading the No. 1 national best-selling advice book in America: Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About, by Kevin Trudeau. I think I can safely say it is not a "good book," though I admit my standards may be a little high. I am defining a "good book" as one that is not actively trying to kill you.

Trudeau argues that most doctors are idiots, puppets of the evil pharmaceuticals industry. Together they are engaged in a shocking conspiracy with the FDA and FTC to keep you ignorant about simple, inexpensive natural cures that exist for virtually all diseases and that could keep you alive well past 100. It's all a fraud, says Trudeau, whose expertise appears to be that he, himself, has been convicted of fraud. (Don't look to the book for details about this last item. It involved a credit-card scam.)It's Enough to Make You Sick

China set new regulations on Internet news content on Sunday, widening a campaign of controls it has imposed on other Web sites, such as discussion groups.

"The state bans the spreading of any news with content that is against national security and public interest," the official Xinhua news agency said in announcing the new rules, which took effect immediately.

The news agency did not detail the rules, but said Internet news sites must "be directed toward serving the people and socialism and insist on correct guidance of public opinion for maintaining national and public interests."

China sets new rules on Internet news

Pity the poor Neanderthals, who had the misfortune of being discovered at the time Darwin was evoking the outrage of his contemporaries by suggesting that humans, apes, and gorillas have a common ancestry.

The fossilized bones of Neanderthals were first excavated in the middle of the 19th century. The bones were undeniably human, but distinctly different than those of modern men and women. The stocky limbs and heavy, slanted brows suggested a gorilla-like ancestor that no one warmly welcomed to the human family tree.

In The Outline of History, published in 1920, H.G. Wells promoted the view that a dim racial remembrance of the Neanderthals may survive in folklore stories of ogres. He assumed that the first modern humans did not interbreed with Neanderthals, and attributed this separateness to the Neanderthal's "extreme hairiness," "ugliness," and "repulsive strangeness."

Science Musings by Chet Raymo

A Paris-based media watchdog has set its sights on helping anonymous bloggers avoid Internet censors in countries like Iran and China.

Reporters Without Borders, an organization better known for tracking the abuse and murder of journalists, has turned its attention to online protesters with its "Handbook for Blogger and Cyber-Dissedents."

The French government is providing partial funding for the project which includes technical advice on how to remain anonymous online. The handbook explains how to set up and make the most of a blog, how to get free search engine publicity, and how to establish a bolg's credibility through observing basic ethical and journalistic principles.

Technology News: Blog News: Handbook Educates Bloggers on Achieving Anonymity Online

A new battle over teaching about man's origins in U.S. schools goes to court for the first time next week, pitting Christian conservatives against educators and scientists in a trial viewed as the biggest test of the issue since the late 1980s.

Eleven parents of students at a Pennsylvania high school are suing over the school district's decision to include "intelligent design" -- an alternative to evolution that involves a God-like creator -- in the curriculum of ninth-grade biology classes.

The parents and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) say the policy of the Dover Area School District in south-central Pennsylvania violates the constitutional separation of church and state, which forbids teaching religion in public schools.

New evolution spat in U.S. schools goes to court

I hate getting spammed by SPAMIS. Looks like a newsletter, but it's just crazy anti-micro$oft gripes.

Not that anti-micro$oft gripes are all bad. I just like to find them on my own, thank you very much.

SPAM against SPAM

Microsoft-bashing has always being a favourite pastime for many geeks so I wasn't surprised when I got anti-Microsoft spam in my inbox. Whats was surprising was that it was send by a group called SPAMIS - Strategic Partnership Against Microsoft Illegal Spam.

And here I thought this was going to get all religious on me. Nice warped comix.

PBF archive

By PAUL WILLIAM ROBERTS

All the television pictures from New Orleans of water with people and houses under it certainly captured the world's attention. What the world attended to, however, wasn't so much the feeble efforts to relieve the city as the startling and unfamiliar sight of, as one of my Iraqi e-pen pals puts it, "so much terrible poverty in a country so much rich."

The Globe and Mail: The flagging empire

A Chinese cosmetics company is using skin harvested from the corpses of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe, an investigation by the Guardian has discovered.

Agents for the firm have told would-be customers it is developing collagen for lip and wrinkle treatments from skin taken from prisoners after they have been shot. The agents say some of the company's products have been exported to the UK, and that the use of skin from condemned convicts is "traditional" and nothing to "make such a big fuss about".

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The beauty products from the skin of executed Chinese prisoners

Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution.

They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply.

After about 45 minutes, "I told them I needed to take a break," she recalled. "My mouth was dry."

That encounter and others like it provided the impetus for a training session here in August. Dr. Durkee and scores of other volunteers and staff members from the museum and elsewhere crowded into a meeting room to hear advice from the museum director, Warren D. Allmon, on ways to deal with visitors who reject settled precepts of science on religious grounds.

Anne's Anti-Quackery & Science Blog: Science museums live by the rules of science

False. Sorting out who should have done what, and when, to head off the disaster in New Orleans produced by Hurricane Katrina will undoubtedly take a very long time (and the issue may never ultimately be resolved). A preliminary timeline doesn't seem to support the sequence of events claimed in the article quoted.

In fact, Governo Blanco had already declared a state of emergency for the state of Louisiana on the 26th of August.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Hurricane Katrina (Blame Blanco)

Telltale Games announced today that Bone, an adventure game based on Jeff Smith's popular comic book series, is now available for purchase at their website, with a demo also available for download. The demo contains the full content of the first episode, which you can unlock for $19.99. There is another episode scheduled for release early next year.

IGN: Bone Adventure Game Available Now

A new study concludes that rising sea temperatures have been accompanied by a significant global increase in the most destructive hurricanes, adding fuel to an international debate over whether global warming contributed to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina.

The study, published today in the journal Science, is the second in six weeks to draw this conclusion, but other climatologists dispute the findings and argue that a recent spate of severe storms reflects nothing more than normal weather variability.

Severe Hurricanes Increasing, Study Finds

We get so fixated on which version of the Pledge of Allegiance that we want to strong-arm children into reciting that every time the argument over its wording winds up in court, we blow our chance to teach kids everything they need to know about America.

We're about to do it again. A California judge put the pledge back in the news and back on its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, ruling the words "under God" are unconstitutional. The ruling only affects a few school districts in California for now, but that's enough for politicians to condemn judges and pass resolutions (as a unanimous U.S. Senate did a few years back) demonstrating just how little they understand what the flag stands for.

We could start by pointing out to school kids how the "one nation" part of the pledge becomes meaningless every time we talk about the "under God" part, which causes all kinds of divisions. Mostly among people who have no idea where the pledge came from or who wrote it.

It wasn't Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. The Pledge of Allegiance was composed in 1892 by a Baptist minister and socialist named Francis Bellamy. The original pledge written by him read: "I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

The words "my flag" were changed to "the flag of the United States of America" in the 1920s. Congress added the words "under God" in 1954, when the greatest threat to the United States was the "godless" Soviet Union.

One nation (not always), under God (since 1954)

In a ruling Wednesday that reverberated all the way to U.S. Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts' Senate confirmation hearings, U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton breathed fresh life into a Sacramento atheist's campaign to ban the pledge from schools because it contains the phrase "under God."

For now, the ruling only applies to a handful of Sacramento area school districts, but it rekindled the kind of response that took place three years ago, when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals surprised the country by declaring the pledge unconstitutional because it amounted to government-endorsed religion. The Supreme Court eventually scrapped that ruling on procedural grounds, but Michael Newdow, the atheist and lawyer behind the previous and current pledge challenges, is hoping Karlton's decision is the first step toward a return to the high court.

KRT Wire | 09/14/2005 | Reciting Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional, judge rules

In Saudi Arabia, Sharia law has been used to prevent women from driving. In Nigeria an Islamic court sentenced a 31-year-old mother to death for having sex outside of marriage; human rights groups fought successfully for her acquittal. Malaysian women need a note from their fathers or husbands before they are allowed to travel. According to the BBC, most of the 1,800 women behind bars in Pakistan are there for offenses deemed crimes under Islamic law.

In 1991, the Ontario government passed the Ontario Arbitration Act, which allowed Jews and Christians to take civil and marital cases before religious arbitration. Rabbis could then adjudicate fights over inheritances and priests over disputes between parishes. Muslim groups in Ontario, quite understandably, wanted the same rights.
Ontario had thus backed itself into a corner. It was forced to either undo the Arbitration Act or give Muslims the same latitude as Jewish and Christian mediators.

Canadian women fought the law, and won

Pretty prophetic. I'm just waiting for the earthquake in L.A. now....

Louisiana's Wetlands @ National Geographic Magazine

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn't�€”yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.

True. (hee hee)

Captions accompanying television news broadcasts have to convey information about often complex topics in relatively few words, a situation which can sometimes produce inadvertently humorous ambiguity.

The screen shot displayed above, presumably captured from a Sky News (Ireland) broadcast, uses a text caption in conjunction with a video clip of President Bush to convey that the President had declared Hurricane Katrina to be "one of the worst disasters to hit the U.S." Without the video context however, the caption could be read as labeling President Bush "one of the worst disasters ever to hit the U.S.," especially given the lack of quotation marks to offset the phrase and indicate it was a paraphrase of his words rather than the news agency's descriptor.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Photo Gallery (Worst Disaster)

Nearly everyone who has ever watched television is the western world is at least passingly familiar with Gilligan's Island. The series about seven castaways on an uncharted island ran on CBS for three years in the mid-1960s and has since become one of the most popular syndicated shows of all time and a mainstay of American popular culture. We revel in dissecting the show's minutiae, pondering such questions as "Why did the Howells bring suitcases full of money on a three-hour tour?" and "How come
Gilligan wears the same clothes every day, but they never get dirty or torn?" The subject of one of the more enduring trivia questions over the years has been "What was Gilligan's full name?" Was 'Gilligan' his first name or his last name? And what was his full name?

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Radio & TV (Willy Gilligan?)

True...

Whenever disaster strikes a large, long-established city, inevitably one will find earlier references to that city in popular culture that seem arch, funny, or inappropriate in retrospect. Once example of such occurred by coincidence the week after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in August 2005.

On 8 September 2005, while New Orleans was still struggling to evacuate all of its residents in the wake of flooding produced by Hurricane Katrina the previous week, the CBS daytime game show The Price Is Right offered contestants a now-unthinkable showcase prize....

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Politics (The Price Is Right)

A Louisiana police chief has admitted that he ordered his officers to block a bridge over the Mississippi river and force escaping evacuees back into the chaos and danger of New Orleans. Witnesses said the officers fired their guns above the heads of the terrified people to drive them back and "protect" their own suburbs.

Two paramedics who were attending a conference in the city and then stayed to help those affected by the hurricane, said the officers told them they did not want their community "becoming another New Orleans".

The desperate evacuees were forced to trudge back into the city they had just left. "It was a real eye-opener," Larry Bradshaw, 49, a paramedic from San Francisco, told The Independent on Sunday. "I believe it was racism. It was callousness, it was cruelty."

Independent Online Edition > Americas : app1

Toxic chemicals in the New Orleans flood waters will make the city unsafe for full human habitation for a decade, a US government official has told The Independent on Sunday. And, he added, the Bush administration is covering up the danger.

In an exclusive interview, Hugh Kaufman, an expert on toxic waste and responses to environmental disasters at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said the way the polluted water was being pumped out was increasing the danger to health.

The pollution was far worse than had been admitted, he said, because his agency was failing to take enough samples and was refusing to make public the results of those it had analysed. "Inept political hacks" running the clean-up will imperil the health of low-income migrant workers by getting them to do the work.

Independent Online Edition > Americas : app2

The essential American soul," D. H. Lawrence once wrote, "is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted." To judge by a handful of notable foreign films opening this season, it still hasn't.

In these films, that soul is also self-aggrandizing, self-satisfied, self-assured (self is its favorite word), as well as adolescent. Eager to leave skeletons in closets and bodies in graves, this hard, isolate soul has a problem with history and when push comes to shove - as it does so often - it is willing to add to the body count.

In their new films, directors like Wim Wenders, Lars von Trier and David Cronenberg are holding up fun-house mirrors to America, creating reflections that are alternately quixotic and grotesque, and at times wincingly true. In Mr. Wenders's "Don't Come Knocking," Sam Shepard plays an over-the-hill movie actor, a boy with a face full of wrinkles, who suddenly goes searching for a past he ditched long ago. In Mr. Cronenberg's latest, "A History of Violence," Viggo Mortensen plays a small-town American paterfamilias, equal parts Marlboro Man and Terminator, whose past comes searching for him in turn. Meanwhile, in "Manderlay," the second film in Mr. von Trier's trilogy about America following "Dogville" - and like that cinematic screed, shot entirely on a soundstage - the country's history of slavery is repeated, this time as farce and in blackface.

A Nice Place to Film, but Heavens, Not to Live - New York Times

Samsung yesterday announced three new technologies targeted at the expanding, multi-faceted mobile application industry.

At a press conference held in Seoul, Dr. Chang-Gyu Hwang, Samsung's semiconductor business president and CEO, introduced a 16 GB NAND flash memory, a 7.2 Megapixel CMOS image sensor for high-end digital pictures, and fusion semiconductors for next-generation smartphones and PDAs , MP3 music players and subscriber identity module card applications.

"Consumers are looking for ever smaller, more stylish mobile devices," said Hwang. "This poses a challenge for the semiconductor industry to create chips that meet the high-performance, high-density and minimum space requirements but don't become a power drain."

Technology News: Data Storage : Samsung Delivers 16 GB NAND Flash

Astronomers have detected the most distant explosion ever witnessed in the heavens. It was a flash so powerful that they could observe the faint light as it came in from almost the edge of the known universe. The discovery of this burst opens a new view into the frontiers of space.
The U.S. space agency's Swift satellite was routinely scouring the cosmos for exploding stars on September 4 when it spotted what scientists have since realized is the most distant such burst on record.
In astronomy, distance means time. The further something is away, the longer its light has been traveling to get to us. So the star blast is also the most ancient ever observed.

VOA News - Scientists Observe Most Distant Cosmic Explosion Ever Recorded

The Pentagon has drafted a revised doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons that envisions commanders requesting presidential approval to use them to preempt an attack by a nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction. The draft also includes the option of using nuclear arms to destroy known enemy stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

The document, written by the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs staff but not yet finally approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, would update rules and procedures governing use of nuclear weapons to reflect a preemption strategy first announced by the Bush White House in December 2002. The strategy was outlined in more detail at the time in classified national security directives.

Pentagon Revises Nuclear Strike Plan

It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington. The president's chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the question of the president's early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed.

How Bush Blew It - Newsweek Hurricane Katrina Coverage - MSNBC.com

Seeking to end months of debate, Premier Dalton McGuinty now says "there will be no sharia law in Ontario" -- an announcement that should quell a growing public-relations crisis concerning the use of Islamic law, but which also exposes Queen's Park to attacks from other religions.

Following widespread condemnation of a plan that would formally allow the tenets of sharia to be used in resolving family disputes, the Premier said he'll make the boundaries between church and state clearer by banning faith-based arbitrations.

Ontario explicitly gave the green light to such practices in its 1991 Arbitration Act. But as early as this fall, new Ontario laws may put a stop to religion-based settlements in matters such as child-custody disputes or inheritances.

The Globe and Mail: McGuinty government rules out use of sharia law

Ang Lee's tale of homosexual love between two cowboys in the conservative West of the 1960s won the Venice Film Festival's top award Saturday.

"Brokeback Mountain," starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, topped 19 other films, including favorite "Good Night, and Good Luck," George Clooney's black-and-white movie set in the McCarthy era.

Receiving the Golden Lion, Lee described his movie as a "great American love story" that is "unique and so universal."

Chicago Tribune | Gay cowboy film tops in Venice

Great, so say goodbye to those precious America's Funniest Home Videos of kids falling over and cracking their skulls.

And what will become of the laughtrack? Hasn't anyone considered the laughtrack's feelings?

Strange New Products: ThudGuard Baby Helmets

The new headgear has a "stretchy circumference band" that allows for growth, and is made out of ultra-lightweight foam material to minimize pressure on developing neck muscles. There are also ventilation holes that allow heat to escape.

Wow. A sexy chair for sexy adults. A perfect addition to the foyer, or the back porch...

A Sacred Exploration into the Kama Sutra

This elegant furniture design, inspired by the female form, was created to enhance the sacred sexual positions of the Kama Sutra. The Tantra Chair gently guides and changes your pelvic angles during lovemaking creating amazing new sensations and unparalleled comfort.

The Tantra Chair is designed to enhance the lovemaking experience. We wanted to create a work of art that would revolutionize the approach to lovemaking and bring back the spirituality through tantric sex that was prevalent in ancient cultures - The Kama Sutra sexual positions.

Internet giant Yahoo has been accused of supplying information to China which led to the jailing of a journalist for "divulging state secrets".

Reporters Without Borders said Yahoo's Hong Kong arm helped China link Shi Tao's e-mail account and computer to a message containing the information.

The media watchdog accused Yahoo of becoming a "police informant" in order to further its business ambitions.

BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Yahoo 'helped jail China writer'

This takes the cake. People unable to get chemotherapy because Bush wanted a photo-op -- and then passed on it.

Ezra Klein: Man of the People

Remember when Clinton's high-priced haircut allegedly (which is to say "didn't, but the right said it did") choked up traffic at LAX? Well Bush, fresh from beating Ronald Reagan's two-term record for most days spent on vacation, has easily assumed first place in the "Massive Inconveniences Caused By Presidential Whim" category as well:

The Naval Medical Center in San Diego's Balboa Park was shut down to accommodate a visit by President George W. Bush Aug. 30, RAW STORY has learned, forcing patients to cancel chemotherapy treatments and hundreds of scheduled patient visits.

California�s gay and lesbian community is reacting with fury to Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger�s announcement late Wednesday afternoon that he plans to veto legislation, headed for his desk, which would have legalized same-sex marriage in the nation�s largest state.

Schwarzenegger made his intentions known barely 24 hours after the state�s Assembly passed the bill, initiated by San Francisco Democratic Assemblyman Mark Leno, a gay man, which would have made California the first state in America to enact gay marriage without a court order.

The Senate had passed the bill last week, and it was just Schwarzenegger�s signature away from becoming law.

Activists are already planning protests.

Arnold Says No to Gay Marriage

"This film is based on a true story," insists the opening credits, the better to stamp this unusual marriage of exorcism thriller and courtroom drama with the seal of seriousness. The claim loses some of its credibility, however, as the secular story is visited by dark forces, nocturnal hauntings, divine intervention and one abrupt shock that feels lifted right out of "The Omen" and its ilk.

"Inspired by" is a more accurate description. The real-life case, which marked the last time the Catholic Church officially recognized a case of demonic possession and sanctioned an exorcism rite, involved a girl named Anneliese Michel in Germany. It ended in her death in 1976 and her parents and priests were put on trial for negligent manslaughter.

'Exorcism of Emily Rose' strays far from the 'true story'

The three top jobs at the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Bush went to political cronies with no apparent experience coping with catastrophes, the Daily News has learned.

Even if Bush were to fire embattled and suddenly invisible FEMA Director Michael Brown over his handling of Hurricane Katrina, the bureaucrat immediately below him is no disaster professional, either.

While Brown ran horse shows in his last private-sector job, FEMA's No. 2 man, deputy director and chief of staff Patrick Rhode, was an advance man for the Bush-Cheney campaign and White House. He also did short stints at the Commerce Department and Small Business Administration.

New York Daily News - World & National Report - FEMA packed with W's pals

Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.

Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.

On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.

Salt Lake Tribune - Utah

This is from their website, folks:

Hurricane Katrina: Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?

Acess to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.

The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

American Red Cross

The Red Cross has been meeting the needs of thousands of New Orleans residents in some 90 shelters throughout the state of Louisiana and elsewhere since before landfall. All told, the Red Cross is today operating 149 shelters for almost 93,000 residents.

The Red Cross shares the nation's anguish over the worsening situation inside the city. We will continue to work under the direction of the military, state and local authorities and to focus all our efforts on our lifesaving mission of feeding and sheltering.

The Red Cross does not conduct search and rescue operations. We are an organization of civilian volunteers and cannot get relief aid into any location until the local authorities say it is safe and provide us with security and access.

The original plan was to evacuate all the residents of New Orleans to safe places outside the city. With the hurricane bearing down, the city government decided to open a shelter of last resort in the Superdome downtown. We applaud this decision and believe it saved a significant number of lives.

As the remaining people are evacuated from New Orleans, the most appropriate role for the Red Cross is to provide a safe place for people to stay and to see that their emergency needs are met. We are fully staffed and equipped to handle these individuals once they are evacuated.

Back to Top

A great centralized location for all your Huxley soma quotes:

"..there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon..."

Soma in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932)

A little cultural myopia is evident there. To return Bangladesh's gift of $1 million, for example, could be seen as generosity greeted with smug rejection. If a country wishes to give, and the amount is within reason, the response should be gratitude, not a putdown.

America is the fallen giant. It's OK to ask for a hand up. And it's more than OK to offer it.

Democrat & Chronicle: Editorials

Really cewl blog from a guy in a New Orleans datacenter. Great pictures, webcam, etc....

The Interdictor

Sometime around midnight, a squad of 82nd Airborne guys accompanied by a US Marshall busted into our Data Center with their M4-A1s to investigate the lights and movement. Personally, I know they were just bored -- there's no way they honestly thought there was some kind of threat up here just yards away from several huge military and police presences. Anyway, they came up and demanded to account for us all. That means they told Donny, who was still up, to come wake up Crys and me in the side closet room type area where we sleep. I could hear Donny telling them that I was exSpecial Forces as he came to get me.

Who is Ralph Wiggum?

Ralph Wiggum, is the unintentional class clown of Springfield Elementary. He is the son of Chief Wiggum, the equally absent-minded, bumbling police officer, and has a reputation for saying things both irrelevent and unintelligent. He is known to have a crush on Lisa, and has an imaginary leprechaun friend who occasionally tells him to start fires.

The Simpsons Archive: The Ralph Wiggum File

Some background for those of you who don't listen to the CBC (i.e. ALL of you). The Corp is in the middle of an interesting exercise to pick Canada's 50 most essential songs. For the last couple of months they've been bringing in groups of music experts (and Leah McClaren) to debate which tunes should be added to the list.

This rigorous analytical approach has resulted in a list which excludes songs released after 2000 - ignoring one of the most fruitful five year periods in Canadian music - and includes Rise Up by the Parachute Club and Echo Beach by Martha and the Muffins.

This heresy, friends, will not stand.

Pregnant Without Intercourse: The OTHER 50 Tracks

An Australian federal court ruled that Sharman Networks must install filters in its Kazaa file-sharing application to prevent users from infringing on copyrights.

Justice Murray Wilcox gave Sharman two months to modify Kazaa to keep users from swapping music files and other copyright material. Record companies will now be able to seek damages in a separate hearing, although Sharman said it plans to appeal the ruling.

The recording industry has sought to close down Kazaa since at least 2002, when it displaced Napster as the most popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing service on the Internet.

RED HERRING | Kazaa Loses Case Down Under

The long-awaited iTunes music phone from Motorola Inc. and Apple Computer Inc. will be introduced Wednesday and could be in stores later this week.

Motorola's new phone, which will operate on the Cingular Wireless network, will be "the next generation of Swiss Army Knife cell phones," said Mitch Mitchell, an A.T. Kearney vice president, combining functions of Apple's iPod music player with voice, messaging and other cell phone features.

Other mobile phone-makers, including Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung, have introduced music phones or plan to do so soon, but Motorola's version--based on Apple's pioneering and popular iTunes format--has generated the most interest.

Chicago Tribune | Motorola's iTunes phone finally here

In a stunning, historic decision, the California Legislature on Tuesday night became the first statehouse in the nation to approve same-sex marriage legislation.

The Assembly's 41-35 vote -- the one-vote majority needed to pass the bill -- forces Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, on the eve of a divisive November special election, into the awkward role of being the first U.S. governor to decide if gays can marry.

The bill would rewrite the state's definition of marriage as between "two persons,'' instead of as a union between ``a man and a woman.'' Schwarzenegger has 30 days to sign or veto the bill. If he takes no action, the bill would also become law, and California would become the second state behind Massachusetts to legally sanction same-sex marriage and the first to do so through legislation, not a court order.

MercuryNews.com | 09/07/2005 | Historic OK for gay vows

When NASA's Deep Impact projectile hit Comet Tempel 1, it produced a giant plume of gas and dust far richer than expected in carbon compounds, reinforcing the view that comets may have contributed the chemical raw materials that produced life on Earth.

Scientists said Tuesday they do not know how typical Tempel 1 is, but they expect eventually to put together the first-ever complete profile of the substances that comets may have brought to Earth 4.5 million years ago.

'Impact' Comet Is Rich in Carbon

Awww, Little Buddy....

Television Article | Reuters.com

Bob Denver, who bumbled and stumbled his way to television stardom as goofy castaway Gilligan in the 1960s comedy "Gilligan's Island," has died of complications from cancer, his agent said on Tuesday.

Denver, 70, also known as beatnik Maynard G. Krebs in "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," died on Friday at the Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, his agent Mike Eisenstadt said.

"Gilligan's Island" aired from 1964 to 1967, and became one of TV's most enduring comedies in reruns with a tale of seven people who were lost at sea and stranded on a deserted island.

The CBS network aired 98 episodes before it canceled the show, but "Gilligan's Island" became a huge hit in reruns during the 1970s. It still airs on TV some 40 years later.

Gilligan, the first mate on a tourist boat that ran aground and stranded wealthy Thurston Howell III (Jim Backus), his wife, Lovey (Natalile Schafer) and others playful characters, was a lovable and silly character. He always put the castaways in a jam before the Skipper (Alan Hale Jr.) would come to his rescue.

Kanye West's outspoken criticism of President Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina has become one of the most controversial statements by a popular musician since Sinead O'Connor tore up a picture of the pope on "Saturday Night Live" in 1992.

Like that incident, in which the Irish singer actually was making a complicated critique of the Catholic Church based on the teachings of the Rastafarian religion, the Chicago-born rapper's unscripted comments on live TV were no ill-considered outburst -- and they can't be understood divorced from the context of West's work.

A week after being hailed as "the smartest man in pop music" on the cover of Time magazine, and four days after the release of his second album "Late Registration," which is expected to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart tomorrow with sales of nearly a million copies, West appeared beside comedian Mike Myers as one of several entertainers who urged Americans to donate to relief efforts during a telethon broadcast live on NBC and its affiliated networks Friday night.

A flood of words

Over at the blog of my soon-to-be employer, they've got a great discussion of the ideological ramifications of Katrina, both for big government liberalism and small government conservatism. Bush, of course, has been this strange mixture of government growth and administrative incompetence, almost as if he's running a kamikaze mission to prove the Republican case against government. But conservatives, generally, are all for the private market and individual charity. If Bush really was so uncomfortable with government involvement, he could still do a bang-up job relying on his church/industry connections to create a parallel and powerful rescue effort. The government could take care of the basics, but the private and theological spheres could provide much of the material, cash, and space. In doing, Bush would help discredit Big Government and legitimize the conservative philosophy.

He hasn't. And that he's hasn't demonstrates his basic absence of a driving ideology. He's neither able to effectively deploy government or call on his friends outside of it. He's just incompetent, as I said before, a small man in a big office. He speaks the language of small government conservatism because it gets him elected, pushes big government solutions because they prove easiest, but is so separated and uninterested in the whole enterprise that the result is a wreck of incoherence and unexpected outcomes. So when something like Katrina comes around, he's neither creative enough to deal with it in an innovative way or competent enough to deal with it in the old way. So he just doesn't really deal with it.

Ezra Klein: Ideological Casualties

Even Republicans were criticizing Bush and his administration for the sluggish relief effort. "I think it puts into question all of the Homeland Security and Northern Command planning for the last four years, because if we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?" said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

1010wins.com

True.

It's difficult to draw any substantiated conclusions from these photographs' captions. Although they were both carried by many news outlets, they were taken by two different photographers and came from two different services, Associated Press (AP) and Getty Images via Agence France-Presse (AFP). These services may have different stylistic standards for how they caption photographs, or the dissimilar wordings may have been due to nothing more than the preferences of different photographers and editors, or the difference might be the coincidental result of a desire to avoid repetitive wording (similar photographs from the same news services variously describe the depicted actions as "looting," "raiding," "taking," "finding," and "making off"). The viewer also isn't privy to the contexts in which the photographs were taken — it's possible that in one case the photographer actually saw his subject exiting an unattended grocery store with an armful of goods, while in the other case the photographer came upon his subjects with supplies in hand and could only make assumptions about how they obtained them.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Photo Gallery (Loot Loops)

Scientists said Wednesday that they had determined the precise order of the 3 billion bits of genetic code that carry the instructions for making a chimpanzee, mankind's closest cousin.

The fresh unraveling of chimpanzee DNA allows an unprecedented gene-to-gene comparison with the human genome, mapped in 2001, and makes plain the evolutionary processes through which chimps and humans arose from a common ancestor about 6 million years ago.

By placing the two codes alongside each other, scientists identified all 40 million molecular changes that separate the two species and pinpointed the mere 250,000 that seem most responsible for the differences.

HoustonChronicle.com - Chimp DNA decoded, compared with human's

Rock 'n' roll pioneer Fats Domino was among the thousands of New Orleans residents plucked from rising floodwaters, his daughter said Thursday.

Karen Domino White, who lives in New Jersey, identified her father in a picture taken Monday night by a New Orleans Times-Picayune photographer.

The photograph shows Domino -- the singer behind the 1950s hits "Ain't That a Shame" and "Blueberry Hill" -- being helped off a boat near his home in the city's Lower 9th Ward.

CNN.com - Fats Domino found OK in New Orleans - Sep 1, 2005

Spike Lee and George Clooney used the Venice Film Festival to attack the once iconic areas of popular culture in America: Hollywood and television news.

Lee, the world's foremost black director who made films such as She's Gotta Have It and Malcolm X, said that cinema-goers were weary of the "same, formulaic, tired, tired, tired stuff", such as sequels and remakes of television shows like The Dukes of Hazzard. He said: "If Hollywood continues to make films like these, the audiences will continue to dwindle."

Clooney, who has just directed Good Night and Good Luck, which is about CBS television news in the 1950s, said he grew up with three network broadcasts, all professional operations that allowed him to judge what was going on in politics and in Vietnam.

Now, with the onset of cable television and "130 different channels", the quality of news was "fractured", with each network, like Fox, playing to audiences with "specific belief patterns". Viewers had to switch channels continually to discover what was going on in the world.

Telegraph | News | You can't trust America's TV news, says Clooney

The California Senate voted on Thursday to allow gay marriage, giving an initial legislative boost to one of the state's most contentious issues.

The Democrat-dominated Senate voted 21-15 in favor of making marriage in California "gender-neutral," thus open to couples of the same sex. All Senate Republicans and one Democrat opposed the measure.

The legislation now advances to the California Assembly, where legislators say the measure will have a more difficult time gaining enough votes for passage. The Assembly killed a gay marriage bill in June.

Calif. Senate votes to legalize gay marriage

"It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

-- Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004.

...

[After 2003], the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain....

Attytood: When the levee breaks

A cameraman for Reuters in Iraq has been ordered by a secret tribunal to be held without charge in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison until his case is reviewed within six months, a U.S. military spokesman said on Wednesday.

But another Reuters cameraman was released after being held for three days by U.S. troops following an incident in which his soundman was shot dead, apparently by American soldiers.

Ali Omar Abrahem al-Mashhadani was arrested by U.S. forces on August 8 after a search of his home in the city of Ramadi. The U.S. military has refused Reuters' requests to disclose why he is being held. He has not been charged.

His brother, who was detained with him and then released, said they were arrested after Marines looked at the images on the journalist's cameras.

My Way News

Well, there you have it, folks....

Bush: U.S. Must Protect Iraq From Terror - Yahoo! News

President Bush on Tuesday answered growing anti-war protests with a fresh reason for American troops to continue fighting in Iraq: protection of the country's vast oil fields that he said would otherwise fall under the control of terrorist extremists.

...

Bush said the Iraqi oil industry, already suffering from sabotage and lost revenues, must not fall under the control of Osama bin Ladenand al-Qaida forces in Iraq led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

"If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks," Bush said. "They'd seize oil fields to fund their ambitions. They could recruit more terrorists by claiming a historic victory over the United States and our coalition."

Just in case you thought Saudi Arabia, or (perish the thought) Iraq was the biggest U.S. source of petroleum, here's some hard stats for you.

Canada better keep the oil flowing, or may find itself the next invasion of the "Axis of Evil".

Crude Oil and Total Petroleum Imports Top 15 Countries

Monthly data on the origins of crude oil imports in June 2005 has been released and it shows that three countries have exported more than 1.5 million barrels per day or more to the United States. Including those three countries, a total of five countries exported over 1.0 million barrels per day of crude oil to the United States (see table below).