I don't know whether
Enron owns the GOP,
but the Texas Republican party is demanding that they cease and desist
from using an elephant to say so. [via
Red Rock
Eaters; I guess this is Enron day.]
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
I don't know whether
Enron owns the GOP,
but the Texas Republican party is demanding that they cease and desist
from using an elephant to say so. [via
Red Rock
Eaters; I guess this is Enron day.]
One more piece of the jigsaw: the
extensive
correspondence between George W. Bush and Kenneth Lay when Bush was governor of
Texas has been released under Texas's open records law. Most of the letters are
from Bush to Lay, urging him to support legislation that would help Enron; others
include Lay's thank-you note for a gift, and Bush's handwritten note thanking Lay
for sending him a newspaper clipping. Enron didn't get everything Lay asked for,
but it wasn't because Bush didn't try.
This is relevant largely because Dubya has claimed, suddenly, that the man he called "Kenny Boy" was only the most casual of acquaintances. [No, this isn't a Bush/Lay/Enron log--but I'm not going to ignore the story, either.]
Okay, this one I like:
Which Gashlycrumb
Tiny Are You?"
Jonathan Turley discusses the
sentence
first, verdict afterwards" approach of the US Justice Department, in the
case of Lotfi Raissi:
Raissi was accused of training Hani Hanjour, who is believed to have piloted the airplane into the Pentagon. Extradition should have been a perfunctory matter given the clarity of his alleged involvement and the accommodating stance of English courts. In its appearances before British Judge Timothy Workman, the U.S. government assured the court that there was a "web of circumstantial evidence" revealing Raissi as a co-conspirator and an Al Qaeda operative. Workman held six hearings to try to induce the U.S. government to support its claims with this evidence. Finally, the U.S. admitted that it had no such evidence
Cutting pieces off meteorites, and trading them with other museums or
private collectors, is routine to museums--but the
Willamette
Meteorite is sacred to the Clackamas people, who are upset that the
American Museum of Natural History
sliced a piece off the top, and traded it for a bit of Mars. The piece
traded away has since been cut into smaller pieces, and sold.
Unlike curators of art or fossils, where great value is placed on the integrity of objects, meteorite curators at major museums participate in the trading game, giving samples of their collection to private collectors in exchange for newly discovered rocks."In meteoritics, it's long been a tradition to trade pieces of specimens," said Dr. Michael J. Novacek, provost of science at the American Museum of Natural History. Scientists routinely cut meteorites apart for scientific study exchange and send pieces back and forth for different laboratories to analyze.
Trading pieces of the museum's meteorites with private collectors allows the museum to acquire new, rare meteorites, Dr. Novacek said. "It ultimately had a scientific purpose," he said.
Signs of progress: a weekly
magazine
by and for women is being published in Kabul, with government approval.
The New York
Times Magazine has a good overview of
stolen passports,
how they're detected, and the amount of confusion among the people who are
be tracking these things: Belgium's list of stolen
Italian passports has three times as many numbers as the American list, and the Italians
refuse to comment. There are 16 kinds of US passport in use right now. Multiply that by
200+ countries that legitimately issue passports, many of which don't care--because the
fraudulent or stolen passports aren't being used to get into Belgium or Albania--and the
amazing thing is that anyone ever gets stopped at a border crossing.
It turns out there are three kinds of
light-sensing cells
in the mammal retina, not two. In addition to the well-known rods and cones,
for vision, ganglia containing a light-sensitive pigment called melanopsin keep
the body's clock synchronized.
New York State is
suing Network Associates,
the company that owns McAfee software, for attempting to restrict reviews of their
products.
For several years, the company has informed users that they are prohibited from publishing "product reviews" or "benchmark tests" without the company's permission. These restrictions appear on the software diskettes, as well as the company's web site, from which consumers download software.[via Electrolite]The Attorney General's suit alleges that such clauses -- legally known as "restrictive covenants" -- are illegal, and that they harm the public by censoring discussions of a product's flaws and defects. For instance, the suit describes an instance in which Network Associates demanded a retraction of a negative review published in the online and print magazine Network World -- citing a clause on Network Associates' web site that prohibited product reviews without the company's consent....
Spitzer's suit also alleges that the clauses infringe upon consumers' and the media's freedom of speech and fair use rights under copyright law. It contends that by informing software users that the speech restrictions are justified under existing "rules and regulations" -- even though no such rules or regulations really exist -- the company also committed an unlawful deceptive practice.
If it goes into production,
this spyplane
will make a wonderful unidentified flying object: a darting, hovering disk, 4.5 meters
across.
The Guardian's headline will do for this:
New
Enron Scandal Link to Bush. Dubya's people are now claiming that it's
pure chance that two of the people recommended by his biggest contributor
were appointed to a panel making policy that affected that contributor.
Whitewater, nothing: this is Bush's Watergate.
The
Lords of the Republic,
with epithets, from George I to George III.
The 2 Micron All Star Survey has created
a portrait
of the Milky Way, as it might appear from outside.
The
ice cap on
Mount Kilimanjaro is melting. At the current rate, it will be completely
gone in 12 years. Much Tanzanian agriculture depends on the rivers that flow
from the ice, but the Tanzanian government calls the reports "Western
propaganda." [via Red
Rock Eaters]
We may be building better mousetraps, but nature is
building
better mice. Not only are they increasingly resistant to poisons, they're
getting smarter: "No matter how good our poisons are, if the mice won't take
the bait, we can't kill them."
Parents may not
have to urge children to eat their spinach much longer: almost
everyone likes bacon.
A Japanese team claims--to a newspaper, not yet in a peer-reviewed journal--to
be the first to transfer a plant gene into an animal, creating lower-fat pigs.
More on the
"small world/six degrees" thing: a
project at Columbia
University is recruiting participants for an email version.
Emil Mottola and
Pawel Mazur have proposed an
alternative to
black holes, a state they call a "gravastar" that, they claim, takes
quantum gravity into account and avoids singularities. Distinguishing
between a gravastar and a black hole observationally would be difficult
at best, however.
If you have the math (I don't), the
paper is available
on the physics preprint server. From the abstract (ellipses to avoid wrestling
with math in plain HTML):
A new kind of static, spherically symmetric solution to Einstein's equations is described... The new solution has no singularities, no event horizons, and a globally defined timelike Killing field.[Thanks to Cally Soukup for this one.]
Copyright 2002 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page or my online journal.