"I don't think the report is true, but these crises work for those who want to make fights between people." Kulam Dastagir, 28, a bird seller in Afghanistan
Week out of Focus: Washington, Iraq and Al Qaeda
Topic: War on Terrorism
2:09 pm EDT, Jul 18, 2007
Stratfor dissects the story.
It was a week in which everyone focused on the war, but not one that made a whole lot of sense -- at least on the surface.
... The issue, as always, is how good the gut is.
... Precisely what do we mean when we say al Qaeda?
... When the US government speaks about thousands of al Qaeda fighters, the vision is that the camps are filled with these thousands of men with the skill level of the 9/11 attackers. It is a scary vision, which the administration has pushed since 9/11, but it isn't true.
131 - US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs « strange maps
Topic: Local Information
2:08 pm EDT, Jul 18, 2007
If only she was as beautiful as Switzerland...
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a convenient way of measuring and comparing the size of national economies. Annual GDP represents the market value of all goods and services produced within a country in a year. Put differently:
GDP = consumption investment government spending (exports – imports)
Although the economies of countries like China and India are growing at an incredible rate, the US remains the nation with the highest GDP in the world – and by far: US GDP is projected to be $13,22 trillion (or $13.220 billion) in 2007, according to this source. That’s almost as much as the economies of the next four (Japan, Germany, China, UK) combined.
The creator of this map has had the interesting idea to break down that gigantic US GDP into the GDPs of individual states, and compare those to other countries’ GDP. What follows, is this slightly misleading map – misleading, because the economies both of the US states and of the countries they are compared with are not weighted for their respective populations.
Pakistan, for example, has a GDP that’s slightly higher than Israel’s – but Pakistan has a population of about 170 million, while Israel is only 7 million people strong. The US states those economies are compared with (Arkansas and Oregon, respectively) are much closer to each other in population: 2,7 million and 3,4 million.
And yet, wile a per capita GDP might give a good indication of the average wealth of citizens, a ranking of the economies on this map does serve two interesting purposes: it shows the size of US states’ economies relative to each other (California is the biggest, Wyoming the smallest), and it links those sizes with foreign economies (which are therefore also ranked: Mexico’s and Russia’s economies are about equal size, Ireland’s is twice as big as New Zealand’s). Here’s a run-down of the 50 states, plus DC:
Ship of fools: Johann Hari sets sail with America's swashbuckling neocons - Independent Online Edition
Topic: Politics and Law
2:04 pm EDT, Jul 18, 2007
The Iraq war has been an amazing success, global warming is just a myth – and as for Guantanamo Bay, it's practically a holiday camp... The annual cruise organised by the 'National Review', mouthpiece of right-wing America, is a parallel universe populated by straight-talking, gun-toting, God-fearing Republicans.
Someone let a reporter onto the National Review's cruise. I don't understand why people who are this stupid are able to be that powerful.
RE: Damn Interesting » Reanimated Rodents and The Meaning of Life
Topic: Science
3:43 pm EDT, Jul 17, 2007
terratogen wrote: The basic procedure worked like this:
1. Obtain desired number of Golden Hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus).
2. Place in ice bath at temperature -5°C.
3. Leave hapless rodents to cool until hearts have stopped beating, respiration has ceased, animals are frozen rigid and are-– by any conventional definition of life– no longer alive.
4. After 60-90 minutes, remove hamsters from ice bath.
5. If required, cut sections of one or more control animals to determine degree of freezing. Please note– animals thus examined should not be used in subsequent reanimation attempts.
6. Warm the hearts of the frozen hamsters until they start up again, followed by gentle re-warming of the rest of the animal(s) until miraculous recovery occurs.
7. Determine number of survivors.
Serves 5.
I want to put that list on random people's refrigerators.
An interesting read.
This article isn't too clear, but I seriously doubt they successfully reanimated a truly frozen hampster. If the water inside the hampster freezes, it breaks the cell membranes, creating hampster mush. A simple example involves placing fresh strawberries in a zip lock bag and then freezing them. Take the frozen berries out, allow them to thaw a bit, and you've got an awesome spread for toast.
Cryonicists have fluids that they have successfully injected into people that enable them to freeze those people without destroying their cells. Their hope is that through some as yet uninvented technology those people's memories can be restored, either into a machine, or a vat grown body, or maybe the original body could be restored around them with nanotechnology. Its a long shot, but death is certain. In my view, any option which is less certain than death may be worth a shot. However, I have yet to bite the bullet and buy the requisite life insurance policies. Its not cheap. Most of my friends think I'm crazy for contemplating this.
The resolve of our great website is being tested. But make no mistake, we will show the world that we will pass the test.
Rattle and I are deleting a lot of spam from MemeStreams. A lot. Sometimes, as you may have seen, there are accounts that get created that we have trouble deciding whether or not to delete. We're doing too much of this, and the spammers are cutting the line too closely. Its time to raise the bar.
As you may know, links that get posted to MemeStreams by people with low reputations have nofollow tags that tell search engines not to add any value to those links. I discovered this evening that there was a location where links would not receive a nofollow tag. I patched it. I've also created a new script that will add all low reputation users to robots.txt. Search engines should not index them at all.
Hopefully this will reduce the attractiveness of this site as a place to post spam.
Japan Quake Causes Nuke Plant Leak, Fire - Forbes.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
1:25 am EDT, Jul 17, 2007
The quake triggered a fire in an electrical transformer and also caused a leak of radioactive water at the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear power plant, the world's largest in terms of electricity output....
About 315 gallons of water apparently spilled from a tank at one of the plant's seven reactors and entered a pipe that flushed it into the sea, said Jun Oshima, an executive at Tokyo Electric Power Co.
It is hard enough to run the hurdles posed by a bicameral system where, unlike many countries around the world, each House has an absolute veto on the other. It is, I believe, indefensible to give a single individual, who has no conceivable claim to greater legitimacy than the collective House and Senate, the power to set aside their expressed political judgment.
Oh, give me a break. THIS is EXACTLY the same as all the Republican bitching about filibusters from two years ago. The U.S. President has always had the power to veto laws for whatever reason. Thats hows things have always worked. And now all of a sudden its some great affront to Democracy when it means you don't get your way?! You're damn right it's counter-majoritarian! The fact that either party gets 51% of the vote, particularly in a single election, is not, in fact, carte blanche to ram through your partisan agenda. These checks and balances exist to prevent that very thing, and in recent years they have worked exactly as they should. You can override a veto. If the government isn't getting things done its because the parties are too busy following the radicals at their fringes than working together on reasonable solutions that have broad support.
The Apple iPhone’s Safari web browser has a special feature that allows the user to dial any phone number displayed on a web page simply by tapping the number. SPI Labs has discovered that this feature can be exploited by attackers to perform various attacks, including:
* Redirecting phone calls placed by the user to different phone numbers of the attacker’s choosing * Tracking phone calls placed by the user * Manipulating the phone to place a call without the user accepting the confirmation dialog * Placing the phone into an infinite loop of attempting calls, through which the only escape is to turn off the phone * Preventing the phone from dialing
Four teams of researchers from universities in the U.S., Canada, Poland and the United Kingdom begin competing today in Portland, Oregon, to win a prize for the best open-source voting system. The three-day University Voting System Competition, which ends July 18th, is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
