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Back in the holding pattern - 23 May 2007
May. 24th, 2007 12:40 amWell, no word from anybody yet, but I sent word to my financiers to plan as if I get them. Which I hopefully will. I mean, it’ll be easier for them than having to get a hold of me later. Hopefully they can summon the requisite beings to do the interview thing with. I didn’t exactly do a lot of productive things with my life today, which is a benefit of being graduated, but it makes for boring blog-talk. (Althoguh, if my daily life was such that it was interesting fodder, I’d probably want a break here and there to just do nothing and be boring. Catch-22, I think.) So, quickly forward to the link list, so that you can be in awe of other people’s lives and not be totally bored by mine.
A professor managed to land himself on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security terrorism watch list. To deal with it, he started to let the FBI know when he was traveling to avoid the problems. That worked so well, he documented his entire life on the Internet, figuring that the easiest way to avoid being labeled as a terrorist or brought into trouble was to have all of his life available for anyone to see. Mind you, he gets hits from U.S. Government web sites - apparently, people are checking up on him, just in case he really does deserve to be on the watch list.
Going back in time a little bit, The Progressive came to the same conclusion that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
przxqgl did about the latest directive - Bush Anoints Himself as the Insurer of Constitutional government in Emergency. I think it hinges on the interpretation of what Federal Government means in this context. If it means the whole thing, legislative and judicial included, then yes, this is a proclamation of dictatorship in case of emergency, likely for situations that don’t require martial law. But if Federal Government really means the executive agencies and bureaucracies under the direct command of the President, then this is an attempt to make sure that those agencies have plans for their continuance. That would make much more sense as an E.O., but I suspect that plenty of people are watching, waiting for the declaration of Dictator-for-Lifeness.
There’s going to be one of those pirate-y type movies released soon. So in that regard, Gadling offers up Real-life pirate hangouts - the places to go if you want the authentic experience of being boarded and possibly killed, and at the very least robbed of all your possessions.
The Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal offers a revelation that should make sense to anyone who’s studied some part of psychology - journalists embedded in with military troops tend to see the troops in favorable terms, especially since those troops are often making sure the journalists survive to write their stories. Back home, Historiblogography offers his/her take on the Republican primary in Race You to the Bottom. Which seems to be the place a lot of people want to go these days. However, I would like to point out the slant on the following headline - Suicide Blasts OK to some U.S. Muslims - definitely intended to make peopel think there are hordes of Muslims just waiting to blow themselves up for God. Now, if you actually read the article, it turns out that only thirteen percent said suicide bombings of civilians to defend Islam would be justifiable, at least rarely. Even in the strongest sentiment category, a mere two percent said it could be justified often. So, the headline says “They’re going to blow us all up! Turn in your Muslim neighbor today!” and the article says “More than eighty percent of those Muslims surveyed said suicide bombing could never be justified.”
A bizarre story of paternity - a woman slept with two identical twins on the same day - and one of them got her pregnant. Neither one wants to pay child support, and it's not easy to tell which one is the father. As it ends up turning out, one of them is ruled to be the father - but they may never know who really got her pregnant. Giving one back for maternity oddities, it’s finally been confirmed that in 2001, a shark gave birth by parthenogenesis, surprising a lot of scientists when it happened.
The following drink does not sound appealing. It might be, but it doesn’t feel like one. The Constant Comment Cosmo mixed tea and alcohol together as the main ingredients, with others along for the ride. I don’t have any idea whether it tastes any good, but I’m not sure I want to test it. Oh, and after all that health-related stuff I posted, a man in China lives to be 100, smoking and drinking the whole way there. Which is why we deal in probabilities and risks, because there are always people who will beat the odds. With the way the world is changing, though, some scientists are worried that climate changes could spark epidemics of disease as the conditions for the breeding and transmission of diseases change.
Quick blurbs from the odd file - a gentleman in a wheelchair, driving it on the road, was arrested for having blood alcohol more than 10 times over the legal limit. Technically, though, he can’t be charged with drunk driving. Put there will be charges applied. Speaking of driving around, the best tourists in the world are the Japanese, followed by the Americans, and then the Swiss. At the other end, the French led the list of “worst tourists”. And then, talking about police incidents, a nine-year-old girl used her younger brother to get passersby call the police over having to clean her room. Inventive child - I suspect she’ll be quite the handful for her parents, if she hasn’t been already. We can only hope that those who really do need passers-by to call the police will be able to get that to happen.
An opinion column in the Christian Science Monitor takes a page from the Zen playbook in wanting to be able to carve time out in one's life to do... nothing at all. With the digital time-saving taskmasters and the ability to be connected everywhere, the ability to just sit and do nothing.
A useful gadget for people who want to view the world as spiders and crawlers do, or to optimize their pages for those audiences, SeeBot offers to render a web page, using Lynx, to show what the web looks like without all the fancy wizmos (and what it looked like in a much earlier time...) A bigger thing, intending to be more useful to troops in the Middle East, is the Army's attempts to build a hybrid off-roader that can run both silently and green. Probably more on the silent part than the green. Although IEDs will probably still be a problem, regardless of how much heat the vehicle gives off. And then, causing some of us to wonder just how much google intends to stand by the idea of “Don’t Be Evil”, an ambition of Google and other companies is to know you so well it can recommend what to do on your day off, or which job offer you should take. That’s definitely a lot of personalization present, and at the moment, it’s optional to give over that kind of data. I wonder whether that will start becoming required data at some point. Or, if work started by Harvard and Princeton scientists turns out to have fruit, our own bodies, used as biocomputers, might provide all that data for us. As usual, however, the press release contains very little about the actual work, only mentioning which publication it will be published in.
The last bit from today is - today was the Defenstration of Praague. That’s one way of expressing your displeasure with the officials in charge of the government. Might make for a good way of “asking for a redress of grievances”. Plus, defenestration is just a nice word to be able to use.
A professor managed to land himself on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security terrorism watch list. To deal with it, he started to let the FBI know when he was traveling to avoid the problems. That worked so well, he documented his entire life on the Internet, figuring that the easiest way to avoid being labeled as a terrorist or brought into trouble was to have all of his life available for anyone to see. Mind you, he gets hits from U.S. Government web sites - apparently, people are checking up on him, just in case he really does deserve to be on the watch list.
Going back in time a little bit, The Progressive came to the same conclusion that
przxqgl did about the latest directive - Bush Anoints Himself as the Insurer of Constitutional government in Emergency. I think it hinges on the interpretation of what Federal Government means in this context. If it means the whole thing, legislative and judicial included, then yes, this is a proclamation of dictatorship in case of emergency, likely for situations that don’t require martial law. But if Federal Government really means the executive agencies and bureaucracies under the direct command of the President, then this is an attempt to make sure that those agencies have plans for their continuance. That would make much more sense as an E.O., but I suspect that plenty of people are watching, waiting for the declaration of Dictator-for-Lifeness.There’s going to be one of those pirate-y type movies released soon. So in that regard, Gadling offers up Real-life pirate hangouts - the places to go if you want the authentic experience of being boarded and possibly killed, and at the very least robbed of all your possessions.
The Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal offers a revelation that should make sense to anyone who’s studied some part of psychology - journalists embedded in with military troops tend to see the troops in favorable terms, especially since those troops are often making sure the journalists survive to write their stories. Back home, Historiblogography offers his/her take on the Republican primary in Race You to the Bottom. Which seems to be the place a lot of people want to go these days. However, I would like to point out the slant on the following headline - Suicide Blasts OK to some U.S. Muslims - definitely intended to make peopel think there are hordes of Muslims just waiting to blow themselves up for God. Now, if you actually read the article, it turns out that only thirteen percent said suicide bombings of civilians to defend Islam would be justifiable, at least rarely. Even in the strongest sentiment category, a mere two percent said it could be justified often. So, the headline says “They’re going to blow us all up! Turn in your Muslim neighbor today!” and the article says “More than eighty percent of those Muslims surveyed said suicide bombing could never be justified.”
A bizarre story of paternity - a woman slept with two identical twins on the same day - and one of them got her pregnant. Neither one wants to pay child support, and it's not easy to tell which one is the father. As it ends up turning out, one of them is ruled to be the father - but they may never know who really got her pregnant. Giving one back for maternity oddities, it’s finally been confirmed that in 2001, a shark gave birth by parthenogenesis, surprising a lot of scientists when it happened.
The following drink does not sound appealing. It might be, but it doesn’t feel like one. The Constant Comment Cosmo mixed tea and alcohol together as the main ingredients, with others along for the ride. I don’t have any idea whether it tastes any good, but I’m not sure I want to test it. Oh, and after all that health-related stuff I posted, a man in China lives to be 100, smoking and drinking the whole way there. Which is why we deal in probabilities and risks, because there are always people who will beat the odds. With the way the world is changing, though, some scientists are worried that climate changes could spark epidemics of disease as the conditions for the breeding and transmission of diseases change.
Quick blurbs from the odd file - a gentleman in a wheelchair, driving it on the road, was arrested for having blood alcohol more than 10 times over the legal limit. Technically, though, he can’t be charged with drunk driving. Put there will be charges applied. Speaking of driving around, the best tourists in the world are the Japanese, followed by the Americans, and then the Swiss. At the other end, the French led the list of “worst tourists”. And then, talking about police incidents, a nine-year-old girl used her younger brother to get passersby call the police over having to clean her room. Inventive child - I suspect she’ll be quite the handful for her parents, if she hasn’t been already. We can only hope that those who really do need passers-by to call the police will be able to get that to happen.
An opinion column in the Christian Science Monitor takes a page from the Zen playbook in wanting to be able to carve time out in one's life to do... nothing at all. With the digital time-saving taskmasters and the ability to be connected everywhere, the ability to just sit and do nothing.
A useful gadget for people who want to view the world as spiders and crawlers do, or to optimize their pages for those audiences, SeeBot offers to render a web page, using Lynx, to show what the web looks like without all the fancy wizmos (and what it looked like in a much earlier time...) A bigger thing, intending to be more useful to troops in the Middle East, is the Army's attempts to build a hybrid off-roader that can run both silently and green. Probably more on the silent part than the green. Although IEDs will probably still be a problem, regardless of how much heat the vehicle gives off. And then, causing some of us to wonder just how much google intends to stand by the idea of “Don’t Be Evil”, an ambition of Google and other companies is to know you so well it can recommend what to do on your day off, or which job offer you should take. That’s definitely a lot of personalization present, and at the moment, it’s optional to give over that kind of data. I wonder whether that will start becoming required data at some point. Or, if work started by Harvard and Princeton scientists turns out to have fruit, our own bodies, used as biocomputers, might provide all that data for us. As usual, however, the press release contains very little about the actual work, only mentioning which publication it will be published in.
The last bit from today is - today was the Defenstration of Praague. That’s one way of expressing your displeasure with the officials in charge of the government. Might make for a good way of “asking for a redress of grievances”. Plus, defenestration is just a nice word to be able to use.
