Making it happen, keeping it "real" - 12 March 2008

Today was a significantly calmer day today, so I think progress is being made, now that the residents are getting used to having the nice projector and Wii.

Onward to newslike stuff. And unlike some, we won’t be letting our significant other sit on the toilet for two years before calling for medical help, but instead bringing you the freshest news as fast as possible. Including the man in Thailand who murdered the people singing karaoake next door to him.

A city police chief who was investigating whether the United Kingdom was cooperating with the Central Intelligence Agency to transport terror suspects in secret was found dead. No details yet on cause of death or suspicion of foul play.

According to a report from ABC the report that says there was no connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda is only available on request, rather than wide dissemination to all those who should have it. In other war news, a GPS-guided artillery round made a debut in Afghanistan. Named Excalibur, it is apparently lighter and more accurate than predecessors. On top of all of this, OpinionJournal is still pushing to keep as many troops as possible in Iraq, for fear that removing them will cause the country to collapse or receive a countersurge of insurgents. That doesn’t say a whole lot about the confidence they have of the situation in Iraq. Perhaps the money would be better spent elsewhere, perhaps on providing solar lamps that would allow for light in the dark to many? It would cost about one month’s war expenditures to provide one billion of those lamps.

The Washington Monthly has one purpose with their latest issue - No Torture. No Exceptions. I wish more people, those in the houses of government, and those expected to carry out the torture of other human beings, would follow this line. Unfortunately, members of the House of Representatives were unable to override Mr. Bush's veto of a bill that would restrict interrogation methods. So it’s still okay to torture in this country, according to our elected leaders.

As with all sorts of scandal, the New York Times has a look at the prostitute that Gov. Eliot Spitzer is alleged to have visited. nebris provides full pictures of those cropped for the Times Article, along with a comment about the attractiveness of the person. Adding insult to injury, Laura Schlessinger blames the Governor's wife for why he allegedly went out to prostitutes - appeantly she didn’t make him feel manly enough. Think Schlessinger believes in the “Surrendered Wife”, or is she just looking for an easy target? Amid all of this material, Governor Spitzer resigned his position. If it was a hit, then the Governor’s enemies got what they wanted.

With regard to candidates in the general election happening in November, Jonah Goldberg questions Obama and liberal patriotism because of an apparent unwillingness to say the word, favoring something like “unity” instead. Perhaps it’s because conservatives have long insisted that they are the sole guardians of the word patriot and its meaning, and they rarely use the word except when using it to trash their opponents. As it is being done now.

The Daily Standard provides a look at what the election looks like from the United Kingdom - a pretty interesting play, with unique actors and storylines.It only happens once every four years, so the pageantry must be pretty good this time around. For the geeks inclined, though, the political candidates in first edition AD&D. Good luck beating them if you should find them in the Tomb of Horrors.

And in the opinion columns, Thomas Sowell compares the costs of incarceration versus the alternatives, and concludes that locking people away for long periods of time is an effective deterrent to crime rates. Which, perhaps, for the classes of crime he’s thinking of, is correct. I’m not sure that’s so for a lot of the crimes that currently carry jail terms that might be better suited to fines, and crimes that might be better fought by decriminalizing the items in question. Might help drop the crime rate even further if a major source or two of funding for criminal activity suddenly dries up.

Our ethics and technology department is jaw-dropping at a program that would e-mail people's GMail usernames and passwords to the program's creator, under the auspices of being an archiver for GMail. It was found out because the author left his own GMail username and password in the source code. That’s a serious ethical lapse. Something concerning, but not necessarily deliberately evil, is a pacemaker/defibrilator that is hackable and can be programmed to deliver fatal jolts of electricity. Mind you, it took quite the equipment and proximity to do it, but it is possible, and should probably be looked at in the case that future devices also want to be reprogrammable without surgery. On the Web, Intel has a new research project that makes mashups even easier than before. Mashing up is a great idea - I wonder how many content providers will want to know how their content is being reused. And since these tools are for all skill levels from n00b to h4xx0r, there might be a lot more mashing-up being done from the popular sites. Can they take the stress? We're about to push into zettabytes of information, so being able to scale up is definitely something to think about.

For the Potterheads, Deathly Hallows will be two movies. Which is probably what should have been done with all of them, but then again, I’m staring at the gap between books and movies and wondering how anyone’s going to build a bridge to get the two reunited again.

Finally stumbling into the news of the weird, "I will punch every bee... no, snake, in the face!" All to save my kitten. The article does not mention whether said kitten was actually saved, though. Beyond that, there’s a different kitten that survived a trans-Atlantic journey in a crate, and the giant wall of snow in Canada.

Our art department offers up a chandelier with monitors on the ends. Perfect for one’s cyberpunk media mogul or surveillance wannabe. For laughing, goraning, or otherwise making remark at the poor use of image manipulation programs, Photoshop Disasters looks at stuff that actually made it into print. Oh, and there’s also aliens in miniature.

Science wants us to see eye to eye with the origins of the ocular orb. Okay, bad pun. Don’t let it get to you. Read about a potential vaccine to lower blood pressure, okay? I wonder what the blood donation guidelines will be like if that medicine gets through trials and becomes popular. In a different breakthrough, penicillin may become effective again, now that scientists have found out what makes certain bacteria resistant. Well, effective enough, until another resistance mutation happens, right? Last out of this department, the push-up is still a pretty good indicator of how fit someone is.

Because every entry needs either a laugh or a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Jack Thompson continues to make outlandish statements, and then hide behind his "figuratively speaking" clause. I doubt that Jack will remain on the bar. Now it’s a matter of when they finally hand down the verdict.

Last for tonight, there’s that “tell me to blog about something I don’t normally blog about” thing going around. I’d be reasonably game for that, but you might have to wait a while where I can squeeze something like that in. Until then, enjoy a short video of a clock whose display is an Etch-A-Sketch. Which is impressive. Although, watching it try to redraw the seconds would be interesting.

Anyway, bed and all that.

Hissatsu! Part One - 13 March 2008

Beware the special attacks, especially if they’re the kind that get telegraphed long before they arrive. Got the Holy-Grail-type of Wii games yesterday, which makes it all the more vitally important that good behavior be enforced this upcoming week.

If you haven’t heard it on the news channel, no worries - it never appeared there. But, as a service, LiveJournal will no longer be offering a free, no-ad account level. It has become either advertisement or payment. For which I can only recommend that everyone invest in advertisement-blocking software for their computers, if they haven’t already. That the official channels were not used, and the advisory board’s recommendations were trampled on really does give one pause as to whether the LJ service is worth continuing to use.

My professional self gets one in early by saying, Well, at least he returned it.

In the news, a kidnapped Archbishop of the Chaldean church has turned up dead. Which may show the signs of what could happen in the area once the United States presence leaves. With regard to interrogations, the CIA said “Oops. We destroyed our tapes.” The Department of Defense, however, did not, and are currently rounding up some so that methods can be reviewed. It’s not a complete archive, but it might actually galvanize some Congresscritters to vote and override a bill that restricts interrogation methods.

The dollar's continued fall has savers turning to other currencies, like the euro, for transacting business. Hrm. If the United States suddenly starts becoming “powerful” only in military exercises, and not economically or politically, what will that do to the country and the warhawks...

Poland's ex-prime minster is sour on electronic voting, because he considers giving a democratic method to the unwashed, screen-staring masses not taking the act of voting seriously, and being too easily swayed. I’d probably adapt the Metatron’s joke in Dogma to the situation here, just replace “sex” with “voting”.

Domestically, and fairly close to home, residents of a mobile home community in Pierce County have had the land underneath their houses sold to make way for big-box stores. Because they don’t own the land which the house sits on, these things happen disturbingly often to residents in communities like these. And it’s not necessarily that likely that another area can be found that will take all of them in.

Also needing new homes are 800 dogs that were living on the property of one Arizona home. The house was a mess (well, 800 dogs and 82 parrots, too), but the dogs seemed to be in decent condition. They also were breeding, however, which is how I suspect that 800 figure was achieved. “This is Bob Barker, reminding you to help control the pet population. Have your pets spayed or neutered.”

With regard to election people, bradhicks wonders if John McCain is too stupid to know when he's being bribed, or too willing to listen to his own puffed-up ego and sycophants to effectively notice when he’s being suckered. If that’s the case, it might explain why Senator McCain hasn’t distanced himself from Rod Parsley, who speaks in the same language that "jihadists" do, only he wants christians to wage war against Islam. Parsley endorsed McCain, certainly, but McCain can only hurt himself by letting Parsley stand anywhere near him.

Jack Kevorkian, a longtime advocate for assisted suicide, will be running for a Congressional seat. If the populace is considering someone who wants to be pro-life and is over 70, they should probably also consider someone who is pro-quality of life and approaching 80. I don’t give him the proverbial snowball’s chance of winning, but he’s well within his rights to try.

Geraldine Ferraro resigned her position with the Clinton campaign over the remarks she made about Barack Obama’s success. As Mr. Olbermann pointed out, by letting Ferraro resign rather than dismissing her, the Clinton campaign lets her remarks stand with some sort of weight, which is not the image that Senator Clinton wants to project if she wants to be elected, regardless as to whether she believes it or not.

Representative Sally Kern continues to stand by her discriminatory remarks, insisting that they are not hate speech, but still believing in the Homosexual Agenda and saying that she professes Christian love toward homosexuals. Queerty wonders if a large part of her anti-homosexual rhetoric might be based on her own son being homosexual. If she thinks that biology has nothing to do with homosexuality, and that she obviously wasn’t supporting any sort of decision to become homosexual, then obviously there must have been recruiters or people in the schooling system that turned her son into a homosexual. It’s sad to see that kind of construction going on to avoid acceptance.

Also inspiring several Whiskey Tango Foxtrots is a new charge in Albany, New York, bus-riding while black. Without a search warrant, the cops rounded up, sedated, strip-searched, and held a man on suspicion that he was carrying drugs in his body, and then billed him for the hospital procedures done to him. All he was charged with was“ resisting arrest”, and that charge was thrown out.

In the wake of on-campus shootings in other states, Arizona is considering a bill that would permit guns on school grounds. It’s being touted as a way of being able to react to those shooters faster, but it could also create more of those shooters or guns being drawn and used in situations where they aren’t needed. Truth be told, despite their massive media attention, most kids go to school every day without there being a shooting. I just don’t see the value of having guns in schools where they can be used.

There’s also a big WTF in regard to a mother who threw her children, and then herself, off an overpass. Luckily, the traffic was moving slowly enough that all three people survived the fall. The story behind this incident, though, speaks to neglect that was caught, several times, but the children were returned to their mother after each of the incidents, probably in hopes that things would work out. At some point, somewhere before something like this, either the protective services or the mother has to realize that this isn’t working out and to release the children to go somewhere where things are normal and healthy, even if only long enough for Mom to get back on her feet and be able to provide a stable lifestyle for the kids.

Perhaps the most frightening of all of these, though, is 60 Minutes' account of a gigantic free clinic normally suited to the depths of the Amazon taking care of the uninsured and underinsured in Tennessee. The people there sat out in the parking lot overnight just to make sure they could get in and see the clinicians. And more than 400 were turned away when they finally closed up.

Weird news for today - a child was suspended for buying Skittles from a classmate, after the school adopted a “no candy sales” policy. While I agree that candy probably shouldn’t be in school that much, suspension like that seems a bit over the top. Luckily, there isn’t any permanent damage, like people blinded by trying to find an image of Mary in the sun. There’s also the world's oldest animation and nanowires seem to prefer Deep Purple for growth. Still weird, but “Awww” inducing, a dolphin led beached wales off the sandbar and back out to sea.

Getting play on the writing and artistic side of my friends list is Robin Hobb's rant that blogging is an antithetical measure to creative writing. The general response among the friends list is that blogging, like TV-watching or letter-writing, can be a distraction and a time suck, but those who know how to manage their time well will be able to write, even while they blog. And for some of us, our blogging is a writing exercise, regardless of how good we actually are at our presentation and format.

In technology news, a neckband that receives nerve signals can be used to make voiceless telephone calls. Thinking appropriate words and/or phonemes will allow the wearer to transmit their thoughts into a spoken word call. Which could give voice to a lot of mute people who can or can’t use other methods of communication. If the technology refined to semi-realtime processing, that would be a very interesting idea. I can imagine the wave of the future being able to talk one conversation and think another. Wouldn’t that be “Extreme multi-tasking” or something?

A new virus infection method to be aware of - a link to an FTP site, where one then downloads a malicious program. Mind you, the telltale double-extension is still there, which should flag most people’s caution, but there are probably plenty of people who still blindly click links.

Paying a flat fee for all-you-can-download music may not be that far off. Which would be great - pay a small fee, have peace of mind about getting frivolously sued by an organization just trying to find people who will settle. And with video content being the biggest consumer of Internet bandwidth, a license to watch may not be that far behind.

In science (SCIENCE!) - a cup of black tea could yield the makings of an anthrax cure. But only if taken without milk. It may not matter, though, if James Lovelock's predictions about the planet are going to come true.

Our Arts department says Tim Burton's making Alice in Wonderland. Will it be a head-trip?

The Happiness Project contributed the Required List, asking how mindfully do we live?

Last for tonight, just to show us all how many ideas really go into the creation of a product or service, some of the rejected ideas for product tie ins to the Star Wars franchise. For the ones that work, there are several thrown by the wayside.