silveradept | Yet more useless data

There’s a lot here to get around to, but I think I may still need some amount of recovery sleep before I’m fully up and running again.

My professional self salutes the Cranking Widgets blog for reminding us all that children are naturally curious and will ask questinos until that curiosity is satisfied. They’re not trying to drive us crazy, they just want to know.

NPR remembers George Carlin, and an interviewer for Psychology Today may have the last full interview that George Carlin gave before dying, which started as something for a small blurb and exploded into something much bigger.

In international matters, the United Nations has officially condemned the actions of Robert Mugabe to prevent a fair election taking place in Zimbabwe. Mugabe shows his hand as someone not really worthy of the political position he has. The Wall Street Journal calls for Mugabe to be unseated, not through the democratic elections, but through South Africa and other countries deposing Mugabe and installing Tsvangarai.

Queensland is beginning a voluntary chemical castration program for sex offenders, to be done in conjunction with psychiatric treatment. By undergoing such a voluntary measure, officials hope that the offenders will not reoffend. For some, this may work. For others, they would have to have their bits removed physically before they would stop, and others might still try even without them. If it works as intended, great. And hopefully it stays voluntary.

Virgin Mary breastfeeding Jesus gets re-okayed by Vatican. The Vatican is not my first choice of institutions that would want to reverse the growing trend toward covering natural processes up because people might say, “Look! Nipples!”, but it’s nice to know they’re willing to do so. Maybe we can start getting the statues of Justice uncovered, too? (If they aren’t already so.)

In Iraq, frustrated with the perceived slowness and lack of aircraft from the Air Force for their use, the Army has built an aviation wing to do additional surveillance and air support for the ground-pounders. Battling military branches... I foresee even more spending on the military as the Army tries to make itself into a chameleon branch.

Domestically, Time has an article about how to curb a growing tendency toward binge drinking in youth, even as the amount of people who are drinking underage goes down. One good solution - drink with your children and turn alcohol into something quotidian rather than forbidden. The problem with that is that some states would put a parent on the hook for underage drinking if their kids were drinking at home under supervision, and fine or jail them for it. Or they’ll put the parents in jail for underage drinking, even if they were nowhere near the party at the time.

A nominally "pro-life" candidate allegedly knocked up a woman, refused to marry her, and then gave her money and drove her to an abortion clinic, dropped her off at the clinic, and drove off. He then later denied that he knew she was going to get an abortion. This prompted the woman to come forward and tell her story. Well, his “pro-life” candidacy is shot, the right to life group is not endorsing him because they believe the allegations, and it looks like there will be much campaign dying in fire over the hypocrisy. The General suggests that the candidate try to reframe is as him exercising his God-given control over her body as a last-ditch effort to save the candidacy and possibly get some amount of his base to vote for him.

In Presidential candidate matters, Republicans and CNS News claim that there won't be a horde of 527 political organizations spending money to attack Senator Obama, refuting the primary reason why Senator Obama refused public funding for his campaign. They may say this now, but I wonder what the shakeout on the finances will be - how many organizations will have crafted advertisements of some sort in the end?

Scholars & Rogues offers up a progressive candidate for our times, someone who is farther to the left than either of our current candidates. Did we mention that he’s a Republican?

Opinions begin with James Glassman getting pragmatic about what sort of ideological warfare needs to happen to stop extremists from recruiting new members, putting the sufficient condition at diverting impressionable people away from becoming terrorists, rather than at getting them to want and emulate Western society. A very practical solution, to be sure, and one that both ideological sides could probably get behind. The continued military strategy might still drive a wedge between them, but both of them can at least agree that stemming the flow of terrorists, whether fundamentalist Muslims, Christians, or whatever philosophical stripe, is worthwhile.

Bret Stephens wants the West and others to take care of situations like Darfur, Zimbabwe, and Burma through knocking over the despots, installing their opposition, quelling he backlash, and then leaving. Come in, stomp the place, get the opposition in charge, keep them alive until things settle, go. And hope that you don’t have to do it all over again if the opposition becomes just as bad and ruthless as the originals. Not to mention the stress that would put on an already overtaxed military to keep rushing in and performing these hits on leaders. And does the United States really want more of a reputation for stomping on anyone they don’t like? Not to say that the situations mentioned don’t need to be stopped from continuing, but going the way Stephens suggests may mean that all the problems start looking like nails, because we’ve used the hammer so much already.

Scitech begins with new knowledge that the ice is melting faster, despite a cold winter in the Arctic. This prompts more dire warnings from the people who first brought global warmning to our attention, and more ideas on how to save the planet from the semi-intelligent upright hominids that walk on it. If we need to crunch numbers on how it might shake out, well, there will be about 2 billion PCs in use by 2014, which may be too late, or may be enough to build and activate a big grid network. Last from Science and tech is a way of recovering fingerprints from metals, even if they’ve been wiped off or otherwise cleaned. So long, that is, as the metal object in question hasn’t had the layers of metal corroded by the finger scrapes or abraised off.

In our art section, the rice paddy art is appearing again, as it’s that time of the year for all the colors to come out. At the right angle, look, it’s art! If rice isn’t your preferred medium, take a look at the works of Kogoro Kurata, an ironsmith who likes to build and create tall, gothic-like items.

But at the very end, singled out for scorn, derision, and all those other evil, evil things, James Dobson accuses Barack Obama of distorting the Bible and of a "fruitcake interpretation" of the Constitution, because Senator Obama has actually read both and prefers the Sermon on the Mount to the Levitical Prohibitions, and because the Senator believes that you can’t convince people of the rightness of your cause if you only use arguments that the already-converted will understand and accept. Dobson, who wants the Levitical prohibitions that he likes to still apply while dismissing all the others are having been absolved in the new covenant, also seems to be reading in a part into the Constitution that says that the nation will be governed by his Christian principles, and that all matters of morality are the exclusive province of his Christianity. The speck-plank problem has become astronomical in Dobson’s case, and this only continues to add on to the length of his own beam.

Last for tonight,