silveradept | Jan. 16th, 2008

Today was a fun and fantastic day, with tea, reading, and work, among other things. Did dishes, fixed a button on my khakis that had popped off when it snagged on the dryer door (this is after fighting the thread, poking myself with the needle a couple times, and getting generally frustrated with myself. Do they make sewing needles for people with big, clumsy hands?), cooked, talked, and otherwise wound myself up and down as needed.

Before we get started with the news, it’s possible the story about the twins getting married may have just been an anecdote rather than an actual account. We regret having passed off rumor and conjecture as actual facts, and hope that someone smacks the appropriate people who started the chain.

And before the usual newscast, the awarding of pastry and the title of Worst Candidate in the World to Mr. Mike Huckabee. If there was any doubt about his unfitness for the office of President, let the following remove it. Mr. Huckabee has said on the record that he wants to change the Constitution to line up with "God's standards". As the Slacktivist notes, unlike Dr. King's message which blended justice from the prophets and the Constitution, Mr. Huckabee's message clearly intends to replace the Constitution with his Biblical interpretation. That’s way out of bounds. If that’s Mr. Huckabee’s honest intent and message, every voter in this country should kick him to the curb. You don’t screw with the First Amendment. Period.

Now, let’s go. Mr. Bush starts this year with the worst approval rating of his term in office, among other indicators of no confidence.

Back in Michigan, it appears that Mitt Romney is the winner of the Michigan Republican primary, further making the Republican race split in weird ways. On the Democratic side, Senator Clinton battles the "none of the above" option. Despite having their delegates removed for moving up their primary, if enough of Michigan’s voters vote for “uncommitted”, those delegates would be able to attend the convention and exercise influence. Considering Clinton is also the only big-ticket candidate on the Michigan ballot, that’s an attractive option. As of the time of this writing, the Senator had more votes than “uncommitted”.

Internationally, the United States is selling smart bombs and other munitions to Saudi Arabia. Because they’re a valued ally with a Wahabism problem, rather than a fundamentalist sponsor of terror like Iran.

Warning, warning. Designs for the nanoscale caution symbol, for those occasions when the hazard is too small to see and might end up turning you into grey goo. The RFID chips that were being discussed yesterday may have their own hazards. Some studies link microchip implants to cancerous growths, some of which are lethal.

Speaking of the future, new currency for space travelers. Considering the origin, it’s no wonder the quatloo there is called a quid.

Something that will make fans of snappy comments overdubbing bad movies happy - CinematicTitanic picks up where MST3K left off, with new awful movies and commentary, through an on-line distribution system free of DRM. Those of us on Comcast’s Internet servers, however, may find it a bit harder to get those episodes if the complaint filed about Comcast filtering BitTorrent traffic has documented actual Comcast practice. Of course, if the practice of digital watermarking takes off, music that we collect may end up spying on us and bolstering the cases of the *AA cabals against file-sharing.

College students want to be thinner. This is a near-obsession among those with normal weight, about half-and-half with underweight women, and curiously, the study neglects the percentages of the overweight, but instead says that they don’t want to lose enough to get them down to healthy weight. The societal peg, then, is to either get underweight or close to it as the “correct” weight for someone to have. I still find the treatment of the overweight curious, considering that in the article, it talks about the societal pressures that the overweight take. Yet it seems that the message put across is “You’re not trying hard enough to get healthy.” Is it me reading into things?

The Beauty Brains have a sad fact for us Humes - even products that claim they aren't tested on animals have probably been tested on animals, in the sense that the components of the finished products have probably undergone an animal test before being assembled into the finalized product. While having synthetic materials and/or systems that could accurately reflect the effects of each product would be wonderful, right now, it just isn’t happening. Perhaps, in the future, cloning and other technologies will make it possible.

For now, we’ll have to be content with the fact that cloned animals are considered safe to eat by the United States Food and Drug Administration, which makes sense, assuming that the original was not diseased or deficient, and the process doesn’t engage disease or activate deficiencies. Further along the line of biology, Christopher Kent suggests that the usage of prescription drugs is deadlier than the usage of recreational drugs, citing complications and deaths from those who are even taking medications as directed.

There’s something dissonant about the titling of Hookers for Jesus, but after a little digging and reading of the founder's testimonial to the evils of prostitution and her finding of Jeezis, it makes a little bit more sense. We’ll pair up this appeal with a paper about the economics of prostitution, available, with a couple commentaries, through Technoccult. One makes mention that a large part of "tricks" turned are protection tricks or "don't arrest me" tricks, and that in places where things are legal, the situation is much better for condom usage, good treatment, and avoidance of disease. The other commentary is about how pimps can actually be a useful resource for prostitutes, minus the whole abuse thing.

Our technology department presents a useful item for any subway rider - a portable subway strap. In Japan, where the item is being produced, however, it is more useful for showing that the hands are not groping women on the trains. More visual material may come from the "Hi-Vision" standard being developed in Japan by the NHK, which is a standard using 33.2 million pixels, which would make for some awesome clarity and picture definition.

Last for tonight, in honor of the primaries tonight, let's play caption contest. And then, historical speeches captured in MP3 format, by a lot of famous persons, politicians, and dignitaries through time. Finally, Dalek security measures.