Mar 22, 2008

Annals of Depravity (cont'd) 

Pregnant mother, tortured, dies in Ill. (Yahoo! News)

12:56 AM   •  

Mar 21, 2008

Naked-eye Gamma Ray Burst... 

...from 7.5 billion light years away: "A powerful gamma ray burst detected March 19th by NASA's Swift satellite has shattered the record for the most distant object that could be seen with the naked eye." (NASA Science News)

7:06 PM   •  

Onomastic Sobriquets in the Food and Beverage Industry 

Clever restaurant and café names: A Paper Presented by
Lynn C. Hattendorf Westney (Associate Professor at The University of Illinois at Chicago)at the 35th Annual Meeting of the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, Quebec 2001. (Dinersoft via kottke)

6:40 PM   •  

"Ethical but slightly deceptive"? 

Salon shows how to read WSJ for free: "In his Salon Machinist blog, Farhad Manjoo shows how to read any article in the Wall Street Journal online (one of the few online papers that charges money for a subscription) for free. As a bonus, he includes an explanation about why this is ethical (though he admits it's 'slightly deceptive').

Remember that the Journal is set up to disarm its pay gate if it thinks you're coming from Google News or Digg. In order to get free access, then, you've got to convince the Journal that you've clicked on a link on one of those sites. How to do that?

The technical name for this is 'referer spoofing' (with the misspelling). Spoofing is an easy thing to pull off in Firefox -- all you've got to do is download this add-on, refspoof.

When you've installed that app, you'll see a new toolbar.

Now follow these steps:

* Go to WSJ.com.

* In the refspoof toolbar's 'spoof:' field, type 'digg.com.'

* Also in the refspoof toolbar, click the R icon, and select 'static referrer.'

* That's it. Click around the site; the WSJ thinks each click is coming from Digg. The WSJ is now yours for free!" [via boing boing]

6:32 PM   •  

Kiddie psychopaths? 

English furor: "Gary Pugh, the director of forensic sciences for the British police has sparked controversy after he suggested that children as young as five who display 'future offending traits' should be placed on a DNA database so they are more likely to be picked up if they commit crime in the future.

Pugh is almost certainly talking about children who have what are known as 'callous-unemotional' traits, described somewhat less politically correctly as 'kiddie psychopathy'.

These have indeed been found to weakly predict future antisocial behaviour, but the picture is more complex than it seems and, as we'll see, they aren't a good basis on which to base future crime fighting efforts." (Mind Hacks)

6:13 PM   •  

Mar 20, 2008

Rainbow iceberg in the Antarctic 

"Resembling a strange creature from the deep, this rare marbled iceberg was spotted in the waters of the Antarctic by a Norwegian sailor." (Telegraph.UK)

7:16 PM   •  

"...the closest many people will ever get to seeing what large parts of a dinosaur actually looked like, in the flesh..." 

"Using tiny brushes and chisels, workers picking at a big greenish-black rock in the basement of North Dakota's state museum are meticulously uncovering something amazing: a nearly complete dinosaur, skin and all.

Unlike almost every other dinosaur fossil ever found, the Edmontosaurus named Dakota, a duckbilled dinosaur unearthed in southwestern North Dakota in 2004, is covered by fossilized skin that is hard as iron. It's among just a few mummified dinosaurs in the world, say the researchers who are slowly freeing it from a 65-million-year-old rock tomb. (Discovery News)

6:11 PM   •  

Finality over Fairness 

The Supreme Court denies right of appeal to a condemned man who may well be innocent, clearing the way for his execution. (He is an African American, of course, convicted of murdering a white police officer.) Most of the non-police eyewitnesses on whose testimony his murder conviction was based have recanted, some filing sworn affidavits saying they were coerced into giving the evidence which corroborated his guilt. One of the remaining witnesses is the principal alternative suspect, and there is considerable sworn testimony implicating him. Yet the Supreme Court is denying Troy Davis further appeals on procedural grounds, because the evidence of police coercion was not introduced soon enough. You can send a letter to the Georgia Board of Pardon and Paroles advocating for fair treatment for Davis, or download a petition from this advocacy site. (Amnesty International)

6:06 PM   •  

Mission Accomplished Dept. (cont'd) 

Seven out of 10 Iraqis want foreign forces to leave: poll: "More than two-thirds of Iraqis believe US-led coalition forces should leave, according to a poll conducted for British television ahead of the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion." (The Raw Story)

5:56 PM   •  

E. J. Dionne Jr. : 

"Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.

The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard." (Washington Post op-ed)

Whether it is a 'bailout' or not has become as much as a charged buzzword as whether it was an 'invasion' or not, whether it is an 'amnesty', or whether we are in favor of 'choice'. Whichever side of the debate one is on, one should decry the mind-numbing use of buzzwords to replace nuanced discourse.

5:54 PM   •  

Happy Ostara 

It is the vernal equinox for all my readers in the northern hemisphere (both of you?) and the autumnal equinox in the southern hemisphere (anyone following FmH from south of the equator?). The earth's axis is perpendicular to its orbital plane and the north and south poles are equal distances from the sun today, so that day and night are of equal length (equi-nox) It is the pagan festival of Ostara in the north and, if there are pagans south of the equator, Mabon, observances which reflect the sense of balance inherent in this astronomical event.

"The name Ostara goes back to Jacob Grimm, who, in his Deutsche Mythologie, speculated about an ancient German goddess Ostara, after whom the Easter festival (German: Ostern) could have been named. Grimm's main source is De temporum ratione by the Venerable Bede. Bede had put forward the thesis that the Anglo-Saxon name for the month of April, Eostur-monath, was named after a goddess Eostre.

...In the book Eight Sabbats for Witches by Janet and Stewart Farrar, the festival Ostara is characterized by the rejoining of the Mother Goddess and her lover-consort-son, who spent the winter months in death. Other variations include the young God regaining strength in his youth after being born at Yule, and the Goddess returning to her Maiden aspect." (Wikipedia )

This year, we have the added exact coincidence of the full moon with the equinox. The sun and moon are, symmetrically, opposite each other, the axis of the earth and the solar-lunar axis orthogonal, and thus the coincidence with Easter, which the early Church grafted onto the pagan equinoctal observance (while removing the nod to the Goddess). Easter, and the equinox, of course, celebrate rebirth and the promise of renewal as well as balance. These are embodied in the symbol of the egg, smooth, round and full of potential ready to burst forth. Rumor has it that on the equinox you can balance an egg, pointy side up. Do it at midnight, when the moon is as close to overhead as it will get at your latitude and the tidal forces are balanced.

And with sadness, at this change of the seasons, I have to note the passing of the man for all seasons. R.I.P. Paul Scofield.

Labels: holiday

10:49 AM   •  

Mar 19, 2008

Race to the End 

So, in the same 24-hour period, Barack Obama argues for the viability of his candidacy on the basis of the US being a post-racial society (Washington Post); and the Supreme Court strikes down by a 7-2 vote the capital murder conviction of a Louisiana man on the grounds that the prosecution's peremptory jury challenges were blatently racist (New York Times). Oh, and Clarence Thomas writes the dissenting opinion. Could it be that he wants to keep racial bias viable in American society thinking he would not have his job but for affirmative action? [Should I fall on my sword, as Geraldine Ferraro did, for saying that? — FmH]

6:35 PM   •  

Mar 18, 2008

In Tibet, Protestors 'Shot Like Dogs' 

"[Troops] firing 'indiscriminately' intro groups of people protesting Chinese rule." (ABC)

9:18 PM   •  

Calls Mount for Olympic Ceremony Boycott 

Moves to punish China for its handling of Tibetan protests gain momentum:

"France's outspoken foreign minister, former humanitarian campaigner Bernard Kouchner, said the idea 'is interesting.'

Kouchner said he wants to discuss it with other foreign ministers from the 27-nation European Union next week. His comments opened a crack in what until now had been solid opposition to a full boycott, a stance that Kouchner said remains the official government position." (AP )

9:07 PM   •  

The Magic Is Gone 

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." R.I.P. Arthur C. Clarke, 90. The news has emerged in the last half-hour of Clarke's death In Sri Lanka, his adopted home for many years. I predict that most of the obituaries will tag him primarily in two ways, as the 'father of the communications satellite' and the author of 2001. (CNN ) The latter should be much more closely associated with Kubrick, to my way of thinking. True visionary status, however, devolves on Clarke for work like Childhood's End (always my favorite) and The Foundation trilogy [...just destroyed my science fiction cred in a senior moment. Of course the Foundation books were by that other late classic writer, Asimov. — FmH] and the brilliant short story "The Nine Billion Names of God". "Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names -- and they reckon that there are about nine billion of them -- God’s purpose will have been achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won’t be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy." "Then what do they expect us to do? Commit suicide?" "There’s no need for that. When the list’s completed, God steps in and simply winds things up . . . bingo!" "Oh, I get it. When we finish our job, it will be the end of the world." Chuck gave a nervous little laugh. "That’s just what I said to Sam. And do you know what happened? He looked at me in a very queer way, like I’d been stupid in class, and said, ‘It’s nothing as trivial as that’." Which other of Clarke's work do readers cherish?

8:50 PM   •  

Neal Stephenson’s New Novel Remains Shrouded in Mystery 

As an inveterate Stephenson fan, I had been waiting for any breaking news of his next project. I just learned about Anathem last week, and this is about all that is known so far:

"You can now pre-order Neal 'Cryptonomicon' Stephenson's new novel Anathem, due out in September, but as of yet the author has made very few comments about it. Nor has his publisher, William Morrow. All we know comes from the LiveJournal entry of a Google employee who asked the author about it last year when he read at the Google Kirkland campus. She writes, 'It's set on another planet and has aliens and so on. It's really about Platonic mathematics, but he needed the aliens and space opera-ish elements to spice it up a little bit, just like the pirates kept people engaged in the Baroque books.' Plus, we can guess that the title is a mashup of the words anathema and anthem, which is a darn cool coinage." (Technophobiac)

6:30 PM   •  

Mar 16, 2008

Spitzer and America's Perverse Ethics 

Michael Lerner: "The U.S. news media can't get enough of the prostitution scandal that brought down New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, but the same media won't give a minute to a serious debate over the impeachable war crimes of George W. Bush." (Consortium News)

1:31 AM   •  

Suddenly, a Dangerous Turn 

Robert Parry: "Two seemingly disconnected events have created a suddenly dangerous turn regarding the future of U.S. wars in the Middle East.

One was the abrupt resignation of the person who has been the biggest obstacle to a U.S. military strike against Iran, Admiral William Fallon, the chief of Central Command which oversees U.S. military operations in the volatile region.

The second is the ugly direction that the Democratic presidential competition has taken, with Hillary Clinton’s campaign intensifying its harsh rhetoric against Barack Obama, reducing the likelihood that he can win the presidency – and thus raising the odds that the next president will be either John McCain or Sen. Clinton, both hawks on Iran.

Throughout the campaign, Clinton has mocked Obama as inexperienced for his desire to engage in presidential-level diplomacy with Iran and other adversarial states. And she recently judged him as unqualified to serve as Commander in Chief, while declaring that both she and Sen. McCain have crossed that “threshold.”

The cumulative effect of Clinton’s attacks on Obama’s qualifications – combined with her campaign’s efforts to turn many white voters against him as the “black candidate” – has buoyed Republican hopes for November." (Consortium News)

1:28 AM   •