] 'Bring them on!" President Bush challenged the early
] Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. ... Almost
] every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with
] bravado about how he is "winning" in Iraq. "Our strategy
] is succeeding," he boasted to the National Guard
] convention on Tuesday.
]
] But, according to the US military's leading strategists
] and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already
] lost.

[ There's not even a single key quote to meme here. Every single paragraph is damning. Ret. Gen. Odom led the NSA, Ret. Gen. Hoare headed Cent. Com., Jeffrey Record and W. Andrew Terrill are professors of strategy at two US war collges.

These aren't armchair pundits like we are... they know a few things, and they bring up failures on a ton of fronts. Go read it. -k]

Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | Far graver than Vietnam

] Deaf children thrown together in a school in Nicaragua
] without any type of formal instruction invented their own
] sign language -- a sophisticated system that has evolved
] and grown, researchers reported on Friday.

This is tots def interesting.

Deaf Kids in Nicaragua Give Birth to New Language

RomanPoet has an interesting request:

As many of you know, modern color copiers/Photoshop detect currency and refuse to scan/open such images. There has been some work in reverse-engineering what algorithms are used to determine what is currency. I am very much interested in expanding this work towards the end of creating false positives. [Think like a T-shirt that when worn would make you difficult to photograph, or artists discreetly embedding such watermarks inside photos that they dont want photoshopp'ed, etc.]

Consider this a call for any comments/knowledge relating to this issue.

Also see: http://www.wildspark.com/eurionize/
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000497.html

Photoshop Currency Detection

] Of all of the different views that have now come to be
] associated with the neoconservatives, the strangest one
] to me was the confidence that the United States could
] transform Iraq into a Western-style democracy, and go
] on from there to democratize the broader Middle East. It
] struck me as strange precisely because these same
] neoconservatives had spent much of the past generation
] warning about the dangers of ambitious social
] engineering, and how social planners could never control
] behavior or deal with unanticipated consequences. If the
] United States cannot eliminate poverty or raise test scores
] in Washington, dc, how does it expect to bring democracy
] to a part of the world that has stubbornly resisted it and is
] virulently anti-American to boot?

This is apparently the key essay in which Fukuyama nailed the
administration to the wall on Iraq. The lay reader is a little out
of context here as its clearly an ongoing argument that he has
been having with them for years, and its steeped in the jargon
of foreign policy analysis, but I caught on quickly enough.

His arguments are clear-cut, complete, and free from the
emotional attacks of typical punditry. I also happen to agree
with him, mostly, and I don't usually agree with Fukuyama.

His suggestion that we construct a formal federal department
of nation building is both pragmatic and extremely unsettling.

Hammers tend to find nails.

Vanity is as much a sin as Avarice.

Fukuyama: The Neoconservative Moment

] There's been a big discussion - especially since Iraq
] about whether America is an empire or not.
] Certainly we're involved in a lot of countries, and we
] have a kind of imperial reach, and people see us that
] way. But Americans are really not comfortable with this.
] They don't like the idea of ruling other people, and
] they're not in it for the long haul. They have no desire,
] like the British did in India, to rule in perpetuity. One
] of the big problems is that we are subject, as a
] democracy, to momentary enthusiasms for undertaking
] projects of various sorts. But a lot of times we don't
] have the staying power to see them through to the end.

Johns Hopkins Magazine - Fukuyama interview

] "I think that anybody that thinks that you can hold
] elections in the Sunni Triangle by the end of January is
] really smoking something," military historian Frank
] Fukuyama said.

Damn, Fukuyama throws down!

CNN.com - Report finds Iraq prospects bleak - Sep 17, 2004

] This spectacular blue marble image is the
] most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to
] date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations,
] scientists and visualizers stitched together months of
] observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and
] clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square
] kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet. These images
] are freely available to educators, scientists, museums,
] and the public.

EO News: NASA Olympics Blue Marble Release; February 6, 2002

The picture of the day archive at the Earth Observatory is very interesting. This page includes two images of New York City taken on September 12th, 2001.

9/11 from space

] Welcome to the Cities Collection of images. This
] collection hosts the best views of cities around the
] globe as photographed by astronauts while in orbit.

This horribly designed website has a collection of pictures of world cities taken from space. There is a cool picture of Atlanta taken with the tail of the space shuttle in the shot, but denser cities like San Francisco look more interesting from these heights.

NASA Cities Collection

The purpose of NASA's Earth Observatory is to provide a freely-accessible publication on the Internet where the public can obtain new satellite imagery and scientific information about our home planet.

NASA Earth Observatory