] The effort to defy Bush and bridle the law's powers lost
] by 210-210, with a majority needed to prevail. The
] amendment appeared on its way to victory as the roll
] call's normal 15-minute time limit expired, but GOP
] leaders kept the vote open for 23 more minutes as they
] persuaded about 10 Republicans who initially supported
] the provision to change their votes.
]
] "Shame, shame, shame," Democrats chanted as the minutes
] passed and votes were switched. The tactic was
] reminiscent of last year's House passage of the Medicare
] overhaul measure, when GOP leaders held the vote open for
] an extra three hours until they got the votes they
] needed.
]
] "You win some, and some get stolen," Rep. C.L. Butch
] Otter, R-Idaho, a sponsor of the defeated provision and
] one of Congress' more conservative members, told a
] reporter.

[ So damn shady. -k]

Yahoo! News - Bush Wins; House Leaves Patriot Act As Is

] Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who heads the
] committee, told reporters that assessments that Iraq had
] chemical and biological weapons and could make a nuclear
] weapon by the end of the decade were wrong.
]
]
] "As the report will show, they were also unreasonable and
] largely unsupported by the available intelligence," he
] said.

Yep, so much for those WMD's. So now that we've got close to 900 dead and over 5000 wounded to protect the world from something that never existed, can we please get the hell out of the goddamn desert?

Yahoo! News - Report: CIA Gave False Info on Iraq

] Should science tell the truth? You'd think that question
] would need no answer. But in the vortex known as
] Washington, DC, the obvious too often gets bent.

[ Good (short) article by Mr. Lessig regarding some of the political and social aspects of nano research... worth a read. -k]

Wired 12.07: VIEW

d000de, this is fux0ring l33t!!!

[ AH, New York. -k]

PartyBike Seven-Person Bike

] But the chairman of the new federal Election Assistance
] Commission complained Thursday that he was rebuffed when
] he wrote to Ridge seeking to discuss election security
] issues, including how to handle rescheduling the election
] if it were to be disrupted by an attack.

Oh yeah... This inspires confidence. "Hey, you're going to get attacked!" "What can you tell me?" "Sorry, I'm too busy to talk to you. You're the one who's going to be attacked."
WTF?

Yahoo! News - Ridge Warns of Election Terror Plot

] "There is an opportunity here because the
] oligonucleotides contain a lot of information which can
] be used to track and monitor what is being done with
] them."

A very interesting article on EE Times on the Bill Joy tip.

EE Times -Experts worry that synthetic biology may spawn biohackers

not good old scotty! :(

[ that fucking blows -k]

James Doohan, 'Trek's' Scotty, has Alzheimer's

] Oprah's Book Club may help sell millions of books to
] Americans, and slam poetry may have engendered a youthful
] new breed of wordsmith, but the nation is still caught in
] a tide of indifference when it comes to literature. That
] is the sobering profile of a new survey to be released
] today by the National Endowment for the Arts, which
] describes a precipitous downward trend in book
] consumption by Americans and a particular decline in the
] reading of fiction, poetry and drama.

[ Lots of good statistics to chew on here and lots of discussion to be had... i hope everyone will read this.

I for one, know, categorically, that i read more now than i ever have in the past, even during school (where i was, granted, a physics & CS student). I read constantly and not a day goes by that i don't read for at least an hour. And I'm not talking about reading memo's at work... I read blogs and memes, aritcles and journals, and then i go home and read books, sometimes fine literture, but more often science fiction, or interesting non-fiction related to philosophy or computing or biology or physics.

It may be that my peer group and I are vastly different from the norm, but even among avid readers, i believe there's been a shift in the kind of materials they pursue. I think more people are driven to be "productive" with their time, even their "free time", and have demphasized fiction in general, or feel that they'd prefer to recieve their fictions in the form of movies, TV shows or video games (which get more immersive every cycle). Doing a quick mental survey of my closest friends, i'm confident that most of them spend a great deal more of their reading time on non-fiction, magazines and technical books than they do on fiction.

The more interesting, and harder, questions to answer are those regarding the level of civic involvement, or engagement with culture and society, that follows this trend. Are we cynical from reading blogs and news feeds all day, without the buffer of literary engagements of the very topics we still face? What are the consequences of focusing on "reality" over fiction, if that's what's happening?

I certainly have argued in favor of fiction many times in the past and i continue to hold strongly to that stand. I think a good novel can often convey more information, and in a more meaningful way, than a nonfiction work covering the same conceptual bases. Not always, but often enough to make it worthwhile. Addtionally, I strongly believe in not addressing everything in a purely pragmatic sense, and feel that escapism, in moderation, is every bit as important as ticking off accomplishments. The best literature, of course, is the kind that lets you do both simultaneously, and perhaps that's the real danger... missing out on the experience of being both enlightened and entertained.

In the end of course, it's all about choices... I prefer books, and my connection to them is as much experiential as it is functional... I still like the feel of the paper and the choice of type, size, weight, design and so on. I'll be interested to see other, similar anlyses, particularly ones which investigate the amount of non-fiction reading and levels of "new media" investment.

-k

p.s. anyone find it interesting/disturbing that religious texts jumped? i wonder what qualifies too, incidentally... does my copy of The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama (which i admit isn't religious, but certainly qualifies as spiritual) count, or only my bible?]

Fewer Noses Stuck in Books in America, Survey Finds

] Someday in the future, once people have stopped giggling
] about how all telephones once were wired to the wall,
] they'll still have trouble containing their laughter
] about laptop computers.

[ Certainly not a new idea at all, and i know lots of people have discussed this stuff at length, from the simple act of having your ~/ on a USB flash drive, all the way to complex schemes like this one, still, it's a promising line of research and i think one which proves to be very interesting... -k]

Virtual project may one day let your work jump from computer to computer without interruption

] X Prize contender Burt Rutan says his team has solved a
] control problem that threw its spacecraft off course
] during a historic flight last month and that the next
] time the ship flies it will be to capture the $10 million
] space jackpot.

Wired News: SpaceShipOne Back on Course