David Gracer eats bugs. Not any old crushed, oozy, sidewalk kind of bug, but insects selected just like any other food — for sustenance and taste. He eats them sautéed, filleted and roasted. And he thinks you should eat them, too.

It's called entomophagy.

Man Bites Insect

Are you an expat? Do you travel a lot?

What difference does it make to live somewhere for a time? It's a pretty difficult matter to pin down. There are a lot of people with a vested interest who insist that it makes all the difference. Usually that's the people who've lived in the world as well as the home, and who gain some precious (and often quite material) advantage by insisting that they know the world and its travails better than you, the mere reader, the viewer, the armchair general, the person who has never been there.

But it does make a difference.

Mating by Norman Rush, reviewed by Tim Burke for National Book Critics Circle.

In Retrospect: On Mating & Memory

Task management has never been this easy. Simplicity, however, is not achieved at the expense of powerful features. Download our preview today and start getting more things done with less effort.

Things - task management on the Mac

Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion while uniting millions of people to build a better future.

In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it’s easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that – to help people see themselves in others – through the power of film.

On May 10, 2008 -- Pangea Day -- sites in Cairo, Dharamsala, Kigali, London, New York City, Ramallah, Rio de Janeiro, and Tel Aviv will be videoconferenced live to produce a 4-hour program of powerful films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music.

Pangea Day

Galago is a new search engine software package developed primarily for research into efficient query processing techniques with lots of query features. The system will be available in Fall 2007 under a BSD-like license.

Galago

Issued for Public Comment; Deadline is March 10.

An interagency subcommittee of the White House's National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) issued a draft document today that lists recommended standards to enable government agencies to easily share biometric data. The NSTC Subcommittee on Biometrics and Identity Management is requesting public comments on the draft by March 10.

Biometrics involve identifying individuals by unique characteristics such as fingerprints, faces, irises and palms. Because biometrics are unique and nearly impossible to forge, they help prevent fraud and identity theft. At the same time, they provide a convenient way for consumers to establish and verify their identities. Biometric technologies are increasingly being used to restrict access to secure work areas, to make identity documents such as passports or government IDs more tamper-resistant, and to conduct terrorism-related screening, check for prior criminal history, or assess whether an individual previously violated immigration law, as part of government program eligibility determinations or security risk assessments.

The NSTC Policy for Enabling the Development, Adoption and Use of Biometric Standards established a framework to reach interagency consensus on biometric standards for the federal government. It ensured that federal agencies such as the Departments of State, Justice, Defense and Homeland Security collect and exchange different types of biometric data in specific standardized formats. For example, the use of such standards ensures that biometric data on known or suspected terrorists collected by the Department of Defense in war zones are also useable by Department of Homeland Security’s screening operations at U.S. border crossings. The standards registry* is the result of interagency analysis and deliberation on numerous, often contradictory, standards currently available, and specifies which standards U.S. government agencies should use.

Biometrics Standards Registry for US Government

Tuning one's shower in some hotels may turn into a challenging coordination game with imperfect information. The temperature sensitivity increases with the number of agents, making the problem possibly unlearnable. Because there is in practice a finite number of possible tap positions, identical agents are unlikely to reach even approximately their favorite water temperature. Heterogeneity allows some agents to reach much better temperatures, at the cost of higher risk.

Taking a shower in Youth Hostels: risks and delights of heterogeneity

Post-Cold War US security policy evinces a disturbing paradox: it has been delivering less and less security at ever increasing cost. The reasons reside not in the differences between the Bush and Clinton administration, but in their points of similarity.

Cul de Sac: 9/11 and the Paradox of American Power

New Middle Ages ...

What with this and the Anbar Salvation Council threatening to take up arms against the elected council and refusing to fly the new Iraqi flag and dismissing the entire Parliament as illegitimate and Awakenings leaders declaring that no Iraqi police are allowed in their territory and clashing with them when they do and blaming Shi'ite militias (and not al-Qaeda) for the wave of attacks against them and fighting over territory and threatening to quit if they aren't paid, it really is hard to see why anybody would think that there might be anything troublesome about the relationship between the Awakenings and the Iraqi "state". Nothing to see here but great big gobs of victory folks, please move along.

You ain't from my hood, don't even rep Q.B.

Angelina Jolie brought her star power to Baghdad Thursday ...

Jolie had a 30-minute meeting with the top US commander in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus and Paula Dobriansky, under secretary of state for global affairs, to discuss issues related to displaced people and humanitarian relief.

Her itinerary also included meetings with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Iraqi migration officials, as well as with UN officials, Iraqi employees of the US Embassy in Baghdad and internally displaced people, the embassy said.

Petraeus Meets With Angelina Jolie