“Ladies and Gentlemen, Coalition forces killed al-Qaida terrorist leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi and one of his key lieutenants, spiritual advisor Sheik Abd-Al-Rahman, yesterday, June 7, at 6:15 p.m. in an air strike against an identified, isolated safe house.

“Tips and intelligence from Iraqi senior leaders from his network led forces to al-Zarqawi and some of his associates who were conducting a meeting approximately eight kilometers north of Baqubah when the air strike was launched.

This is good news.

[ Agreed, we didn't like that guy. Good timing for the pres too, as it happens, but that's no reason to rain on parades. -k]

Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, Killed Dead

[ One of the things i like best about Gmaps is just cruising around in satellite mode and seeing what I can (and can't) see.

Like here, something really big on fire somewhere inside the Democratic Republic of Congo. It makes me wonder when the image was captured. What's burning? Why? Whose stories are tied up in this brief snapshot of time? We can clearly see a 15 mile long streamer of smoke, but know almost nothing about it. -k]

Google Maps is the Best (A Random Slice of Time)

We built and sail 1/144 scale Radio-Controlled Model Warships from WWI and WWII which are armed with Co2 powered cannon and armoured in thin balsa. These vessels engage each other in combat on ponds across Australia, endeavoring to punch holes in each others hull with their cannon until one of the vessels sinks or flees.

This is awesome and I want to do it.

Australian Battle group

California is one step closer to joining a national movement that would change the way that the Electoral College works without amending the U.S. Constitution.

AB 2948 by Assemblymember Tom Umberg, Chair of the Assembly Elections Committee is a simple bill that would have California join in an interstate compact with other states to award our electoral votes to the Presidential candidate who won the national popular vote.

[ I like this. It seems like a decent way to handle the situation. I have some concern over the fact that some states could be effectively forced to adopt the plan as long as enough other states do so, but not much concern.

Fundamentally, I've always been displeased with the all or nothing nature of the electoral system used by most states. This feels like a workable alternative.

Now, does anyone want to run some numbers on the likelihood of this becoming the reality? It requires enough states to sign on to comprise a majority of electors. California has 55 of the 270 needed. Where are the other 215 likely to come from? How likely is it, really?

The ratio of electoral weight vs. population weight is very interesting. If you plot it, you notice that the 15 most populous states all have a lower than 1.0 ratio. They weigh proportionally less than they would in a direct voting situation. On the other hand, I calculated Wyoming to have a 3.18 multiplier. (Georgians, you're at 0.96, whereas NY, CA and TX all sit at 0.85 - that's 26% of the population having 22% of the voting power.)

The only useful opposition I can think of, then, to a more direct method is that small states will be reduced. Ultimately this isn't a convincing argument for me, because while representation (a la Congress) ought to enable small states to compete, I think electing a president shouldn't be about states, but about people. ]

California Assembly Passes Electoral College Reform - California Progress Report

Willy Wonka could have powered his Great Glass Elevator on hydrogen produced from his chocolate factory.
Microbiologist Lynne Mackaskie and her colleagues at the University of Birmingham in the UK have powered a fuel cell by feeding sugar-loving bacteria chocolate-factory waste. "We wanted to see if we tipped chocolate into one end, could we get electricity out at the other?" she says

Just one more thing to love chocolate for, right? I knew I should have kept my initial science major instead of my english one. I too could experiment with chocolate for a living!

Seriously though, found this very interesting.

~Heathyr

[ It's interesting more for the broad implications than the actual experiment. I'm sure recycling 100% of chocolate waste couldn't generate enough electricity to make a meaningful contribution to our power needs. But, if you can make a general purpose bacterium (or set of bacteria) that can produce useful byproducts while eating, say, normal garbage, then we've got something. -k]

New Scientist Tech - Technology - Chocolate generates electrical power

If we speak of the fear of emancipation from the fear-regime, we put the whole situation into a single phrase; fear regarding ourselves now taking the place of the ancient fear of the enemy.

...

We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built — unless, indeed, we which for dangerous reactions against commonwealths, fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood.

...

Let me illustrate my idea more concretely. There is nothing to make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should toil and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once for all are such, and we can stand it. But that so many men, by mere accidents of birth and opportunity, should have a life of nothing else but toil and pain and hardness and inferiority imposed upon them, should have no vacation, while others natively no more deserving never get any taste of this campaigning life at all, — this is capable of arousing indignation in reflective minds. It may end by seeming shameful to all of us that some of us have nothing but campaigning, and others nothing but unmanly ease. If now — and this is my idea — there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.

... It is but a question of time, of skilful propogandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities.

The conceptions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion, and universal responsibility, which universal military duty is now teaching European nations, will remain a permanent acquisition when the last ammunition has been used in the fireworks that celebrate the final peace.

Interesting. I'll have to give this more thought. My initial feeling is that it's logical, but impossible.

William James: The Moral Equivalent of War

OLBERMANN: Wrong answer. When you are that wrong, when you are defending Nazi war criminals and pinning their crimes on Americans and you get caught doing so twice, you‘re supposed to say I‘m sorry, I was wrong, and then you‘re supposed to shut up for a long time. Instead, FOX washed its transcript of O‘Reilly‘s remarks Tuesday. Its Web site claims O‘Reilly said in Normandy, when, as you heard, in fact, he said in Malmedy.

The rewriting of past reporting worthy of George Orwell has now carried over into such online transcription services as Burell‘s and Factiva. Whatever did or did not happen later in supposed or actual retribution, the victims at Malmedy were Americans, gunned down while surrendering by Nazis in 1944 and again Tuesday night and Wednesday night by a false patriot who would rather be loud than right.

Wow. That's fabulous. I'm getting to really like Olbermann, and I wish I got MSNBC so i could watch his show.

Countdown with Keith Olbermann

Wife 1.0 is a great program, but very high-maintenance. Consider buying additional software to improve the performance of Wife 1.0. I recommend Flowers 3.1 and Diamonds 2K. Do not, under any circumstances, install Secretary with Short Skirt 3.3. This is not a supported application for Wife 1.0 and is likely to cause irreversible damage to the operating system.

yeah, it's silly and crude, but i'm hung over and dense this morning.

Girlfriend 6.0 vs. Wife 1.0

Mary Greenberg of Lake Bluff, who has a son at Libertyville High School, argued the district is overstepping its bounds.

"I don't think they need to police what students are doing online," she said. "That's my job."

Associate Superintendent Prentiss Lea rebuffed that criticism.

"The concept that searching a blog site is an invasion of privacy is almost an oxymoron," he said. "It is called the World Wide Web."

This is either a poorly done article or Lea is a doofus. The two comments are unconnected. The parent didn't say it was an invasion of privacy. She said it was outside the schools purview. Those are two different things entirely.

I happen to agree with the parent. Illegal is one thing, but even then, the school should stay out of it. If someone's seriously writing about blowing up the school or something on a blog, it should be reported to the POLICE, not the superintendent. Though, I think that's bad enough, since some people will take everything seriously even when it's not intended to be.

Furthermore, it disturbs me that Lea doesn't get the problem here. Why do school administrators forget what it's like to be a teenager? It's not hard enough, so now, on top of all the other shit, you have to worry about every single thing you say on your blog? That's ridiculous and offensive. Who decides what's "inappropriate"? We know the answer of course, and it's total bullshit.

Not that any high school kids read this, but I have a message : Don't put up with that shit. Rise up in the cafeteria and stab them with your plastic forks.* Your parents can certainly exercise the right to define what you do in your free time, but the school should fuck right off in that regard.

* The line, of course, is from Pump Up The Volume which, in 1990, treated this issue pretty well, I think, thematically anyway. Talk Hard.

School District to Monitor Student Blogs - Yahoo! News

adam wrote:

So we're toast, right?

I mean, that's pretty much the pervasive global assumption these days: The 19th century belonged to England, the 20th century belonged to America, and the 21st century will belong to China. Tell your kids to study Mandarin.

I'm second to none in worrying about U.S. education and industry meeting the challenge of a rising China and India. But after a year traveling all over America talking to educators and innovators, I am not yet ready to cede the 21st century to China. No, not yet.

You see, my grandma back in Minnesota had a saying that went like this: "Never cede a century to a country that censors Google."

I'd sure enjoy reading this, but I'm not a times select member. Oh well.

RE: A Million Manhattan Projects - New York Times