Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem
"White Horse"
is about the
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem
"White Horse"
is about the
breed of barbariansand their "weapons of crass destruction."
who didn’t come through the gates
but grew up inside
The Guardian
has posted a correction, stating that the article linked here misconstrued a quote,
and has been removed. The
US invasion of Iraq
really was
about the oil. Leading pseudocon hawk Paul Wolfowitz, who recently admitted that
the whole "weapons of mass destruction" thing was just the story they'd find easiest
to sell, has told a Singapore audience that "The most important difference between North
Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims
on a sea of oil."
How about that vaunted idea of taking responsibility for your actions, Mr. Wolfowitz?
The University
of Calgary's computer science department is offering a course in
computer viruses
and malware that includes instruction in how to write viruses. Perhaps in
response to criticism, the course description attacks people who believe that
it is desirable, or even possible, to teach virus detection and prevention
without teaching virus writing.
The true naivete of this approach is shown by the claims of safety:
* No removable media will be taken out of the laboratory once it is brought in so there is no risk of viruses leaving on a floppy or removable hard disk.All these precautions are completely useless if the students learn anything during the course. [via the Risks Digest]
* No "wireless access" point will be used within the laboratory so nothing can "leak" out through the air.
* No "wired" access to the computers in the laboratory will exist. Although the computers in the laboratory will be networked together, it will be impossible for a virus to leave the laboratory as no wired connection will exist to outside computers.
* When the course ends - the computers used will be completely cleaned by having all removable media destroyed and all hard disks completely scrubbed down to the BIOS.
Taking the dairy farmer
out of the milking
process produces more milk and healthier cows, with less work. The
milking is done by computerized equipment, when and as the cows decide
they need to be milked.
"My cattle are more relaxed and are giving milk up to four and five times a day, instead of having to wait with heavy udders to be milked.The farmer quoted is happy because he no longer has to get up at 5 a.m."The yield is up and they are going into calf more easily, which is a sign that they are happy and content."
Tests of new drugs
funded by the companies that make the medicine are
four times as likely
to produce positive results as those funded by other sources. One reason for
the bias is that those tests are less likely to compare the new medicine with the
current best treatment.
The response from an industry representative doesn't so much miss the point as turn it inside out. He says that because it costs so much to develop a new drug, the companies can't afford to risk biasing the results. It's precisely because both the development costs and the potential profits are so high that companies have an incentive to make their products look better than they are.
US troops have
left the
Iraqi town of Hit after protests turned violent. The protesters were, and still are,
angry about searches of people's homes, and about the lack of essential services.
Tucked in at the bottom of the story is the note that the US has also raided the Palestinian embassy in Baghdad, taking away 18 of 23 employees, because a staffer had an "unauthorized weapon". It's all very well to note that this doesn't violate diplomatic immunity because the Palestinian Authority isn't actually the government of a nation, but this is at least poor timing, assuming Bush actually wants to do more than look good next week, when he's supposedly attending a Mideast peace summit. [Registration required; they've never emailed me.]
A new
kind of
galaxy has been discovered. These Ultra Compact Dwarfs contains tens
of millions of stars, in a very small area.
This may be part of the answer to where all the stars are.
In order to explain the number of large galaxies observed in clusters, cosmologists always predict many more dwarf galaxies than are actually seen.The UCDs could solve the problem. "We think the UCDs were once larger objects," [Steve] Phillipps explains. Then, something stripped them down into their current configuration.
"We believe that the gravitational fields of larger galaxies in the cluster robbed some dwarf galaxies of their outer stars, leaving just the central nucleus, which is what we see as a UCD," he says.
Molly Ivins
points out that the varying ways in which we're
losing
the peace in Iraq, at a probable cost of $20 billion a year to the US taxpayer.
Since I am in the happy position of having predicted a short, easy war and the peace from hell, I think I'm looking like a genius prognosticator about now.I can't figure out why the Republicans are happy about this.
Sure, it was a great photo-op on the aircraft carrier, but if you think the American people won't notice $20 billion a year because of some nice pictures, you have sadly underestimated the common sense of this nation. I realize that what we see depends on where we stand, but there is a substantial body of emerging fact here, none of it encouraging for optimists.
The
reference
kilogram is shrinking, so scientists are trying to come up with a definition
that isn't linked to a physical object. The difference isn't much--a loss of 50
micrograms in more than a century--but it's a problem, especially since nobody
knows why it's happening.
The change is detectable because there are 80 copies of the reference kilogram, some of which were originally issued to entities that no longer exist, including Bavaria and the Dutch East Indies. [Thanks to Andy for the link; NY Times link, usual disclaimer applies, try annoying/annoying]
I think I need
to spend more time staring at this
periodic
spiral of the elements. [Thanks, Michael.]
To quote Gene Russianoff,
"Hallelujah!" The NY State Supreme Court has
ordered the
MTA to rescind the recent subway and railroad fare increase on the grounds
that the required public hearings beforehand were a fraud. The MTA plans
to appeal, but we actually won
something! Memo to self: call my state senator's office and say thank you.
The MTA has two weeks to implement the decision, if they don't get it overturned by a higher court. The city and state comptrollers are both urging the MTA not to appeal: the basis for this lawsuit is their investigations of the MTA finances. (Despite the name, the NY State Supreme Court is (one of the places) where lawsuits start, not the state's top court.
A spammer has been
arrested and
indicted on felony identity theft charges, for using stolen credit cards
to buy the accounts he sent the spam from. I don't know if the
New York legislature was thinking of spammers when they passed that law, but
our Attorney General is right: if the charges are valid, this is definitely
a case of criminal identity theft.
Among the people he's accused of impersonating are some of his own relatives. [via piranha]
This is just cool:
crested auklets
create an odor reminiscent of tangerines, and use it to communicate.
The exact messages are still unknown, as is how they generate the scent.
Comparative
DNA studies show that orchids are part of the
Asparagales
family, with asparagus, onions, daffodils, and yucca. The same analysis makes
orchids, as a group, at least 90 million years old.
Orchids have long been difficult to classify, because they've lost many of the flower parts that are normally used to trace relationships. Orchid seeds and pollen are unusually delicate and rarely fossilize.
Here in eastern North America, we think we have stable geology.
It's an illusion, as it would be anywhere. The
Old Man
of the Mountain is gone from his mountain.
I hadn't realized that--like Plymouth Rock--the Old Man of the Mountain had been glued in place for almost a century.
There is something
fundamentally broken with
this
concept.
Copyright 2003 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page or my online journal.