Happy New Year, everyone - 1 January 2008

We’re back! And we had a marvelous time. There was much merriment and mirth made, and many movies viewed. Good ones, too. All in all, a fabulous time, and I managed to get leftovers to help feed me. I think this following year is going to be an excellent one. When I have time, I’ll do the whole retrospective thing, but walking through your own journal takes a little time.

Additionally, back in Florida, and playing the University of Florida, like they did in the 2003 Outback Bowl, the alma mater’s padded rugby squad was victorious! Yay, bowl win! And for looking like the Michigan team that we knew you were this year. Nice send-off for Lloyd, too.

In international news, Iran has stated its civilian nuclear reactor will begin operation at some point in the middle of this coming year.

The Sunday Telegraph has chosen Gen. David Petraeus as their Person of the Year. The general does deserve praise for the way he’s managed to hold down violence in Iraq and produce something that at least looks like progress. Even with the Iraqi army starting to slowly look more like something that can keep peace, there’s always the possibility that things will come undone soon after they appear finally finished. Matthew Paris, in The Times, suggests that the populace is already ready to have a catastrophe happen to them, out of a misguided need for atonement for our mistakes. If you want to atone for mistakes, fix the problem, rather than praying for some great punishment.

The Recording Industry Association is hopelessly behind the times - they continue to contend that "ripping" a legally purchased CD to a computer is an illegal act, in addition to running scare tactics and attempting to impose gigantic fines and penalties on those who fight back.

A co-chair of Veterans for Rudy thinks that all Muslims are bad, and that they should be "sent back to their caves". Isn’t it nice to see issues with gray areas being forced into black and white contexts?

JedReport at Kos feels there's a mainstream media blackout against John Edwards, with Hillary and Obama taking just about every spare inch of space they can in the Democratic candidate race.

Yet another reason to proofread all things before publishing - a graduating police academy class in Idaho had a slogan "Don't suffer from PTSD, go out and cause it". Lesson learned, the academy will now vet all slogans before publishing.

Hey, remember in March when Circuit City laid off 3,400 and then let some previous employees compete for the new, lower-paying jobs? Well, as it turns out, the executives for the company got retention bonuses of $1 million or more. This sequence has been done before. Hasn’t there been anything in the books that forbids this kind of mass firing and then rehiring for lower wages?

Anarctica has life. It's just all hiding under the ice, in lake systems that could be rich with microbes. With the ice to insulate above, there’s a good chance things are warm enough to support life. In medical science, a flexible surgery robot is being developed to do complex procedures less invasively. The tool could also be used for diagnostics, and everybody can keep their scarring down with that.

Listmania time - Scientific American's The Year in Robots and Top 25 Science stories of 2007, Popular Science’s Guide to 2008 in Science. There were also the Golden Duke Awards, for the most atrocious liars, cheats, and scoundrels of 2007.

Potter creatrix hints there might be more Potterverse stuff.

Last for tonight, want some free college education? Have a look at Open CourseWare Initiatives across major universities, where you can get materials from courses and entire courses themselves on-line for no cost. No credit necessarily comes with it, but you still get the knowledge.

I, however, am definitely going to go to sleep. Felicitations of the new year to all of you. G’night.

Welcome to the newest year - 02 January 2008

Most years, it takes me a bit to start writing the right year on the correspondence, but when credit card bills come running, you write the right year on and make sure of it. Hopefully everyone’s new year has gotten off to an excellent start.

Thus, hitting the ground running and then some, here’s 21 things to do with your coffee grounds after you've made coffee with them. Pick-me-up and then some nice environmental things, too. Might be important to do so - 2007 was a year of record-setting weather.

Elections in Pakistan will be delayed a month, according to the official line from Musharraf’s government. Threats of violence have already been lodged if the elections do not happen on their original schedule of January 8. New footage available at AlterNet suggests that Bhutto's death was indeed by shooting, rather than the skull fracture of the government's official statements. If verified, then the next question is why the government of Pakistan is feeding fiction to the people right around an election with regard to a popular opposition figure.

Violence has already erupted in Kenya, with a church destroyed and fifty killed in riots over the disputed election of Mwai Kibaki. The election did not meet some international observer’s standards of democratic election, and the rioting opposition claims the result was rigged. Just what we needed, right? More instability and violence in the world. Iraq is hoping to avoid a large violent incident this year. I have no idea if they’ll actually achieve it. Tony Blankley thinks that the continued progress will give America it's first victory in the hearts and minds of Americans when it comes to the GWOT, and will justify the costs and the rationale of having gone to war. Casualties have gone down. Maybe it’s because the unmanned aircraft are doing a lot more of the lifting.

In American politics, the Iowa caucus will be occurring tomorrow, and the New Hampshire primary election soon afterward. Now that it’s finally in their sights, Lawrence Lindsey offers advice to those voting in primaries on selecting a candidate, by asking and finding the answers to three questions he considers sufficiently important that transcend partisan ideology. In addition, there's more rumoring that Michael Bloomberg will enter the Presidential race as an independent.

Economic opinions are being weighed in today - Brian Carney snarls that the decision to make more energy-efficient lightbulbs standard in a few years is basically giving lightbulb makers extra profits while hiding behind the energy savings benefits. Thomas Sowell thinks that the best way for the federal government to solve the current economic situation is to do nothing, a view not shared by presidential candidates, who are practicing “Santa Claus Politics”, in his opinion.

One of the resident vegetarians on the list suggests a Zen Habits post, for those thinking about joining the ranks. How to Become a Vegetarian, the Easy Way offers gradual transitions into vegetarian cooking, and tips and hints on how to maintain a healthy balance while going veggie.

My techie side says “Nice” to a desk modification designed to declutter your desk by putting most of the equipment on the other side of the desktop. Very clean, very neat, wouldn’t work for me because I lean back and would bang things.

The following link discusses alternative sexual practice, equipment malfunction, and life in the medical profession. If any of those is squicky to you, skip on over this paragraph. An ER doctor discusses a call he got from a rather confused urologist when the defective male chastity device the ER doctor had removed a couple weeks ago was on the urologist's instrument trays. Apparently the cleaning crew had mistaken it for one of the urologist’s actual tools.

Taking things out to their satirically logical conclusion, NewsTarget has a press release about how the RIAA has declared that remembering a song in one's brain is a violation of appropriate copyright law, because the brain is a recording device and makes unauthorized copies of the songs it hears, even if they are incomplete or incorrect.

Here’s a blurb with just enough ambiguity to make both sides of the conflict possibly be right - a mother and her children were escorted off a Fort Worth bus for reading her Bible, apparently too loudly. The mother claims she was discriminated against over religion, but the company says that the woman was reading too loud and was bothering the other passengers and/or the driver. But, of course, there’s not enough detail to tell whether it really is a case of one or the other.

A little less ambiguity comes from the continuing struggle of the University of Oregon to be able not to disclose the names of students the RIAA wants to subpoena for file-sharing. The Ducks want the RIAA to actually prove their case before they do anything regarding the disclosure of private information. Very refreshing, very nice, even if it does eventually fail. We’re hoping for great successes, though.

The Slacktivist take a bit of a reminiscence and proves one of the things that I’ve learned about the universe - throwaway ideas are often winners. The Slacktivist’s throwaway involved a blog before there were blogs, and a thing written pseudonymously many years ago that started to propagate, and then started re-crossing the Slacktivist's path later on. Much like how I keep hitting my head on things

The last thing for tonight, however, is a production of things that have too much time, and that are great in their 8-but wonder. Namely - Tecmo Super Bowl simulates the NFL's wild card playoff weekend. With correct teams and almost completely correct players. If this is a continuing series, it’ll be interesting to see how well Tecmo Bowl predicts.

( Postscript - Privilege? )

Time for me to go to bed. Work tomorrow and all that. Totally ruins your nightlife.