Month: August 2005
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What Twisted Sadist?
Holy cow. Chris Mooney wrote an article in April about the devastating consequences of a Category 5 earthquake in New Orleans! Here’s his update to that story Why prescience sucks . Mooney’s personal weblog (as far as I can see) covers the lunacies of mainstream science reporting. His recent book, Republican War on Science tries…
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Iraq, Not New Orleans
Will Bunch on how the Bush administration gutted the budget for disaster preparations in New Orleans. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA. Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent…
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Mozbackup
Mozbackup , a program for backing up mozilla/firefox/thunderbird settings. Haven’t tried, but will. More here. Amazingly, nobody seems to have written a program to sync Thunderbird/Sunbird with PocketPC/Pocket Outlook. I’m reading a lot more about that. New military medals Is it legal to post political signs on the freeway? Freewayblogger answers: O! Again, the rules…
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Catholics on Dilawar
DAVID TOWNSEND on the striking parallels between the crucifixion of Christ and the torture of Dilawar: The guards hearing Jesus of Nazareth scream out “Eli, Eli,” supposed he was calling for Elias, not clearly understanding his native tongue. They decided to see if Elias would come to rescue him and took sadistic delight that Elias…
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Artifacts from an Earlier Time
From Kimbrew McLeod’s Freedom of Expression book on copyright “Records like It Takes a Nation of Millions and 3 Feet High and Rising,” Public Enemy’s Harry Allen observes, “they’re kind of like artifacts from an earlier time that couldn’t exist today. They’re just financially untenable, unworkable records. We would have to sell them for, I…
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Kristen Hersh goes to Tipjars!
Another reason Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses/50 foot wave is the coolest musician around. She’s gone over to free mp3’s and now has a blog
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Server Problems?
I am really having hardware problems with my web server. It has been on its last legs for 6 months now. I keep meaning to transition to a newer machine, but haven’t had the chance. Maybe there will be a few days of being offline this week. (Luckily, the backups are secure!). Actually at the…
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The Real Apollo 13
After watching Apollo 13 for the gazillionth time, I finally went on the Internet and read up some more. Here’s a great longish 3 page article that sheds new light on the complexity of the rescue mission. Here are a few points I found interesting: Unlike the film, the real crew didn’t figure out that…
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Ethan Casey and this Internet thing
Gosh, it’s really hard to be a knowledgable blogger these days. Looking over my email address book, I realize I had totally lost track of a first class travel writer Ethan Casey. Well, travel writer is not the label for him. If I remember correctly, he wrote first person pieces with observations about culture and…
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It’s Official: Penalty for Prolonged Torture is Demotion
Torture gains ground when official condemnation of it is less than absolute. (Amnesty International). In case you missed it, as of last week, the sentences and verdicts from the Afgani torture cases have been delivered. In El Paso/Fort Bliss last week, here’s what the sentence was for Willie Brand was (according to the Houston Chronicle).…
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Podcasting Software
podcasting software. The original podcasting software I used (ipodder) worked like crap. I need an upgrade! Update: I ended up going with RSS Radio. It’s a very user friendly software, though the free version only lets you watch 5 feeds at a time. (The upgrade costs $15).
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Gems from Michael
I am still trying to recover from yesterday’s post (actually just a link) to Michael Blowhard’s list of links. I had read several of these essays before (although not with the utmost attention) and I had the chance to read new essays and revisit old ones. I’ve been wonderfully entertained and feel compelled to share…
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4.8 Percent
Silly me. I posted this already, then forgot to hit the submit button. JAD MOUAWAD writes about the impact of high energy prices on Americans: As a direct share of the gross domestic product, oil accounted for 8.5 percent of the economy in 1980. As energy conservation measures took hold, and as Americans grew wealthier,…
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Speechless
This post more than any other I have ever come across has left me speechless. In a good way. A very good way.
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XML & Vanity Wikipedia Articles
Sophie, an open-source toolkit for creating multimedia books. More information here. Here’s a long PDF description. (All this is the next generation of the tk3 format). This project doesn’t have a lot of mindshare yet, but that could change. Uche Ogbuji on Python and XML . Dirtsimple says that python is not java Wikipedia on…
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Art Resource Center
A few months ago I compiled a list of resources for finding public domain paintings. The best source of high quality public domain paintings seems to be Art Resource Center. Just fantastic. Here’s some beautiful nudes by Guillaume Seignac, a French painter who died in 1924. (and very little exists on the web about this…