] Grieving Iraqis accused U.S. forces Thursday of killing
] dozens of wedding guests in a desert airstrike, but the
] U.S. military insisted it had killed about 40 foreign
] guerrilla fighters, not civilians.

[ So far I've seen as many stories on one side as the other, but this is one to keep an eye on. The all important hearts-and-minds battle is pretty close to lost already, but this isn't going to help. If it's not true, there needs to be some solid proof in a hurry, because it's going to play true in the middle east regardless. -k]

Iraqis Blame U.S. for Wedding Attack, Despite Denial

[ Yase. That's all i can say... -k]

D.H.S: the Series

] President Bush said on Wednesday he would not release
] strategic oil stocks to curb record gasoline prices while
] he was waging war on terror and accused Democrats of
] playing politics on energy.

[ No one else plays politics with energy, of course. 5 seconds later he started whining about his energy bill and about how drilling up the forests in alaska would make this problem go away. [short term short term short term thinking]. of course, saying, effectively, that gas prices are dems' fault for blocking the energy bill is totall fine. disagreeing is undermining the war on terror. -k]

Bush Invokes 'War on Terror' in Energy Debate

Amusing op-ed piece from the New York Times. It takes the spin (as I read it) that so many anti-war folks have staked their reputation on there being no WMD in Iraq, that they're deliberately downplaying the gallon of Sarin that was detonated a few days ago.

] You never saw such a rush to dismiss this as not news. U.N.
] weapons inspectors whose reputations rest on denial of Saddam's
] W.M.D. pooh-poohed the report.
. . .
] In this rush to misjudgment, we can see an example of the "Four
] Noes" that have become the defeatists' platform.
] The first "no" is no stockpiles of W.M.D., used to justify the
] war, were found. With the qualifier "so far" left out, the
] absence of evidence is taken to be evidence of absence.

Heh.

[ I've seen a lot of that indeed. I'm reserving judgement until i know more.

I won't change my mind that the pre-war intelligence still wasn't as compelling as the administration would have you believe, and even if we find 50 nukes in a warehouse, i don't think that what intelligence we had indicated that. Of course, the point is moot, because if we find 50 nukes, then the war is justified ex post facto, i suppose.

In the meantime, this isn't 50 nukes. It's one artillery round. If a report comes out that this sarin was made last year, then yeah, that's something. If we find a whole bunch more of them, then that's something too, i guess, but I'm not gonna change my mind over one lonely shell.

In total i think this single object probably neither proves nor disproves either side, but it's definitely something to keep watch on. -k]

Sarin? What Sarin?

] "We are not talking retarded people here," the clinic
] spokesman said. The two "were simply unaware, after eight
] years of marriage, of the physical requirements necessary
] to procreate."

[ Ok, how sheltered do you need to be to miss out on this knowledge. I mean, on top of that, wouldn't biology... you know, instinct, take over at some point. I guess they sleep in separate beds and don't talk about things like desire or certain physical alterations that may accompany it? Some kinda marriage.

Fuck it, I think the clinician is wrong... these people *are* retarded... in the strictest sense of the word. Their stupid families retarded them by not telling them things. So much so that some seriously fundamental human bahaviors were totally blocked. If I were them, i'd be on the phone with mom and dad right now like "HEY, WHAT THE FUCK!?"

I'm holding back the rant I want to make, but suffice it to say that i don't approve of fundamentalist bullshit or 'protecting' kids by telling them nothing, ever. This would be funny if it wasn't so sad. -k]

FOXNews.com - German Couple Finds Out Stork Isn't Real

] Interestingly enough, the technology that underlies the
] Junk Mail filter began its life as an information
] retrieval system, developed in the Apple labs to help
] users who managed thousands or millions of large
] documents find the one they were looking for easily. In
] order to do that, this technology had to allow users to
] perform a search by topic.

[ This is an ok article in itself, but I'm more interested in the fact that it tells me apple put vector document mapping, cluster analysis and latent semantic analysis into an API, which presumably i, as a developer, can use. This is a hobby interest of mine, so this discovery definitely demands further investigation. If only i didn't have this silly job I could investigate now (then, i'd also be poor, so...). -k]

MacDevCenter.com: The Fight Against Spam, Part 2

] Essentially, Mac browsers (including Safari, Mozilla, and
] Firefox) are all designed to launch the Help Viewer
] program when the help: protocol is invoked in a web link.
] Unfortunately, the Help Viewer program, in turn, is able
] to run scripts. What this means is that a malicious user
] can set up a page with an automatic redirect that runs a
] dangerous script. More details for the tech-minded can be
] found on this MacNN thread. And if you want a terrifying
] (but harmless) example of this, go to
] http://bronosky.com/pub/AppleScript.htm. It will launch
] Terminal and run a harmless du command

[ damn. that sucks. -k]

mamamusings: serious os x 10.3 security problem

Fuck Texas.

[ for so many reasons. -k]

Mentally ill killer executed

[ I believe, as Ryan says, that this *will* be the defining issue of our lives. Arguably, people my age (25) will get another 40-60 years, at least, of lifetime. The peak production tipping point is probably, according to what I've been reading today, no more than 15 years off. That means that we'll all be right around 40 when the shit hits the fan. We'll be suburbanites with 1.75 kids and a dog, and a house in the burbs, 20 miles of bumper to bumper traffic away from our jobs. Our kids may be just old enough to say "Hey, thanks for fucking up so bad... you too grams and gramps... good job."

I'm not entirely convinced that's the outcome we're going to see though. The signs point to, at least, an uncomfortable, probably painful few decades, as we adjust our lifestyles to one in which energy is less plentiful. As I read this article, I began to think of the ways in which my lifestlye is inefficient... of the things I could be doing to curb my usage. For one, I could turn my computer off. It runs, now, 24/7 and pulls probably 200-250 watts, which is around 1750 kWh/year, or somewhere around $200 a year, just for one machine (and we have a few, of course). Certainly, there are lots of things we could (and should) all do to limit our energy uses, but in the big picture, people are assholes and won't do that too much until the economic realities force them to. So, solutions then...

From all that i've been reading, historically, and today, the most touted "alternatives" under heavy development these days are probably a minimal help, if any. Hydrogen is still a viable container format, *if* we can get the electricity needed to produce it from a non-fossil source, since, as noted, H2 is a net loser in real energy terms.

I'll start rambling here, but I've come to think that more than likely the next breakthrough in energy production (or savings) will be the work of a materials scientist. I don't see wind, tidal, hydro or geothermal cutting it, for a variety of reasons (though many are environmental, which may get backseated when the knife's to our collective necks). Atomic may work, but more efficient means of acquiring the raw materials will be neccessary if that's gonna happen. Currently, solar power is in the same boat... it's inefficiencies make it expensive ($0.35 - $0.50 / kWh amortized... something in that range I think) and it's production is both energy consumptive and envrionmentally problematic. Still, I think we have a better chance of coming up with cheaper advanced materials for solar cells than we do of overcoming the hurdles in any of the other possibilities. Plus, solar cuts out the middleman, so to speak, which makes it attractive, to me at least. People could be self-sufficient, or we could work out a nice distributed power grid like the hyper-optimists over at Wired are always yammering about. (High temp superconductors could eliminate the 5-10% transmission losses in the grid, or provide non-chemical "battery" technologies... nice stuff, also to be found by a matsci).

I did some napkin calculations and I think I've decided that an overall system of around 33% efficiency (including cell and storage) could support a 2 kWh/day lifestyle, even in not-so-sunny places, with about 200 sq. feet of exposed cells, which seems not unreasonable.

I'm done rambling. Thoughts? Am I retarded? -k]

Observations and the State of Affairs - Peak Oil

] Overnight Hip-Hop success? Firstly, let me congratulate
] you on parlaying a fascination with vice, three gunshot
] wounds, and a history of felonies into a career. You know
] as I do that one must not only represent, but one must
] represent with style. Style is not just gold teeth, gold
] chains, gold rims and gold car antennas, my friend. Style
] is also gold-plated Versace flatware.
]
] The late-night recording sessions are draining, G. To
] keep pace and deliver more phat raps about whores and
] liquor, you're going to need sustenance. That sustenance
] is cake. And cake, my G, is best served with a
] gold-plated Versace cake server. What your entourage does
] with the remaining 74 cutlery pieces is unimportant. What
] matters is getting your cake on with class.
]
] Please, someone, purchase my recently acquired
] gold-plated Versace flatware set.

Beau-ti-ful

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