Saturday, October 13

Giant Atmospheric Waves Over Iowa 

Undular bores: "Typical waves measure 5 miles from peak to peak and race across the sky at 10 to 50 mph. 'Yes, you could chase them in your car—although I wouldn't recommend it.' The waves don't always travel along established roadways." (NASA )

10/13/2007 12:13:00 AM   •  

Wednesday, October 10

The Most Important Future Military Technologies 

"...[W]hat are we getting for our money? That $75 billion budget covers a vast array of projects, from perfecting new weapon systems like the Joint Strike Fighter plane to studying pure physics. Focusing on the research side of R&D, Discover looked at four key areas where the military is placing its bets: hypersonic vehicles, laser technology, using information technology and neuroscience to combine human and machine on the battlefield, and employing sociology and psychobiology to combat terrorism."

10/10/2007 11:06:00 PM   •  

Happy Birthday, Monk 

(That's Thelonius...)

10/10/2007 11:04:00 PM   •  

The future of the past tense 

Mathematical model for language evolution advances: "Writing this week in the journal Nature, Erez Lieberman, Jean-Baptiste Michel, and colleagues in Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, led by Martin A. Nowak, conceive of linguistic development as an essentially evolutionary scheme: Just as genes and organisms undergo natural selection, words -- specifically, irregular verbs that do not take an '-ed' ending in the past tense -- are subject to powerful pressure to 'regularize' as the language develops."

I heard an interview with one of the investigators today on NPR. Utterly fascinating. Irregular past tenses persist proportionally to how common the words are. Uncommon irregular past tenses, like 'stank', are predicted to disappear sooner. In around five hundred years, the investigators predict, we will be saying 'it stinked' instead. In most languages, the past tenses of the most frequently used verbs — to be, to do, to go, to take, etc. — have remained irregular and will probably continue to do so. A related phenomenon is that other common words are very resistant to change, so, for example, the word for the number 'two' is very similar to that in other languages descended from proto-Indo-European, while less common words diverge more. The interviewer asked the simplest but surely the most profound question, to which the investigator being interviewed conceded they indeed have no answer — why do languages change at all?

10/10/2007 10:59:00 PM   •  

ACLU: FISA Flood of 2007: 

"Two bills were introduced yesterday to fix the disastrous Protect America Act that was rushed through Congress in August, rubberstamping the administration's warrantless wiretapping program. Both were efforts to fix FISA, but we must make it clear that only the FISA Modernization Bill does the job. The RESTORE Act caves in to Bush’s fear-mongering in a major way by allowing for program or basket “warrants,” which aren't really warrants at all. They're the modern-day equivalent of allowing government agents to sit in our living rooms, recording our personal conversations. Only they're more frightening, because the government now has the capacity to monitor us remotely and without our knowledge, and to save the information in a secret database forever. It’s no surprise that the Bush Administration is again using the threat of terror to bully Congress into giving them more power than it needs to keep us safe. To counter these misrepresentations, your representative needs to hear that America can be both safe and free by passing a FISA Modernization bill that protects our Constitutional rights. Please, call your representative right now. Tell him or her to support the FISA Modernization Act instead of the RESTORE Act." (ACLU)

10/10/2007 07:47:00 AM   •  

Super Quick Launch toolbar for free 

"...[Y]ou probably have numerous key applications that you use on a regular basis. In fact, you may even have them on your Quick Launch taskbar. But what if you could categorize them? Or make sub-folders that opened when you clicked on them? Here's how to do it...

10/10/2007 12:32:00 AM   •  

Monday, October 8

National Do Not Call Registry: time to re-up? 

I haven't kept track, but someone just told me it has been five years since the Do Not Call registry was introduced. Registrations expire at the five-year point, so if you were an early adopter you might want to go back and re-register.

There's also been a rumor going around that telemarketers are about to get a database of cellphone numbers. This site claims this is not true, as federal law prohibits using automated dialers (the telemarketing industry standard) to call cell phone numbers or any other phone number where the owner is charged for receiving the call. Thus, you do not have to register your mobile number with the Do Not Call registry. You can register it if you are ultra-paranoid. However, if you are among the most ultra-paranoid, registering it might concern you, since you would be broadcasting the existence of your mobile number, I suppose, much as we have all learned not to click on the 'remove my email address' link in a spam mail message.

Five of the six major cellular carriers (excluding Verizon) were supposed to be establishing an opt-in wireless 411 directory (Google Search ) in 2006. (Did this happen? I have Verizon service, so I would not have heard if customers were being invited to opt in.) This may be the source of the alarm that the telemarketers would be getting your mobile number.

10/08/2007 06:11:00 PM   •  

Ladbrokes on Nobel 

Who'll win hte 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature? Current betting odds from Ladbrokes.

10/08/2007 09:48:00 AM   •  

Sunday, October 7

Shifting Targets 

Seymour Hirsh writes in The New Yorker, with his usual access to inside sources, of the administration's plans for Iran.

Now that the Bushies have redefined the war in Iraq as a strategic struggle with Iran, the position that we have to confront the Iranians has taken firm hold of the administration. Longstanding battle plans against Iran have been redrawn this summer, no longer centered on broadranging bombing attacks against suspected nuclear centers but on surgical strikes on Revolutionary Guard centers which the administration now claims have been the source of attacks against Americans in Iraq. Hersh says this reflects both the administration conclusion that they cannot get away with another WMD argument and the recognition that Iran has been the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

Cheney is behind this desperate push to bring military action to Iran, disregarding the fact that Republican prospects for 2008 are crashing and burning wholesale. Hersh's sources report an increased tampo of attack planning, largely by people without any experience with Iran, and caution that, as usual, the administration has not thought through the likely Iranian reaction. Hersh quotes the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski as predicting that Iran will intensify its conflict with its neighbors, drawing Pakistan in and keeping the US embroiled in a decades'-long regional war.

A justification for attacking Iran based on its supplying weapons for Iraqi insurgent attacks against the US, as we heard, e.g., in Petraeus' recent assertions, ignores several facts. The provenance of the terrorist weaponry in Iraq is far from clear. And Iranian-supplied armaments may well have been given to Iran's Shiite allies in southern Iraq years ago when they were fighting Saddam. And despite the enormous presence of Iranians inside Iraq, direct evidence of their role in military training of Iraqis is lacking. Iraqi politicians routinely invoke outside interference to evade responsibility for their own failures. CIA sources have told Hersh that the intelligence about who is doing what "is so thin that nobody even wants his name on it." [But lack of intelligence has never been a problem for this administration before, has it?]

The problem with a surgical bombing strike campaign, however, is that it only makes sense if the intelligence behind it is good. If significant targets are not hit quickly, it will escalate. The Israelis, alarmed that the US is abandoning its targeting of Iranian nuclear facilities, may press for such a broadening. especially if Iran's proxy Hezbollah responds. Israel is not impressed by evidence that Iran is years away from being able to deliver a nuclear attack. Once they have mastered the nuclear fuel cycle and have the requisite materials, the possibilities of passing materials to terrorist groups or of unleashing a dirty bomb materialize. Recent changes of leadership in our allies (and erstwhile allies) in Western Europe may also factor into the shape of the American attack.

10/07/2007 10:09:00 PM   •  

Blogger Play 

This site plays a neverending stream of photos being posted to Blogger weblogs. If you have alot of screen territory and bandwidth, keeping it up and running somewhere in a corner of your visual field will give you a subliminal taste of the weblogging zeitgeist in realtime. However, I think you'll soon get bored. It is amazing how banal most of the images are.

If you do find something arresting, you can click an image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click “show info” to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the poster. [Google/Blogger warns us that, despite their best algorithmic efforts, an occasional image that is NSFW may slip through.]

10/07/2007 09:58:00 AM   •  

Not There 

"Todd Haynes’s Dylan film isn’t about Dylan. That’s what’s going to be so difficult for people to understand. That’s what’s going to make I’m Not There so trying for the really diehard Dylanists. That’s what might upset the non-Dylanists, who may find it hard to figure out why he bothered to make it at all. And that’s why it took Haynes so long to get it made. Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan and moving to the next, shedding his artistic skin to stay alive. The twist is that to not be about Dylan can also be said to be true to the subject Dylan." (New York Times Magazine)

I'm dying to see this, I guess because I'm neither a non-Dylanist or a diehard.

10/07/2007 09:50:00 AM   •