blivet 2.0

“Are too!” “Am not!” “Liar!” “No you are!” “Facist!” “Pinko!” (unison) “Mom!”
No matter your political stripes, this 30 May transcript of Chomsky and Bennet which aired on CNN’s American Morning has points for your position. [via mark] Me, I’m just passing along one of the higher points of the ‘war of words.’ First the intro:

“PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: They are two best selling authors with two very different takes on terrorism. In his book, “9-11,” Noam Chomsky accuses the United States of being a terrorist state. He says the war in Afghanistan is wrong, states that in recent history, America has committed acts of terrorism, and maintains that America’s foreign policy is hypocritical.

In Bill Bennett’s “Why We Fight,” he says the war on terror is morally just. He maintains that democracy and human rights are America’s noblest exports, and that we must be prepared to respond to anti-American critics. Talk about a war of words.”

(…)”CHOMSKY: First of all, the World Court condemned the United States for what it called “the unlawful use of force and violation of treaties.”

BENNETT: Which is not terrorism.

CHOMSKY: That’s international terrorism.

BENNETT: No, it is not.

CHOMSKY: Yes, it is exactly international terrorism.

BENNETT: No, it is not, sir.”

Museum returns sacred samples. Remains of last Tasmanian Aborigine to be put to rest. [garret]

“Truganini was believed to have led resistance to white settlement but was later used as a pawn by the colonial authorities in the 1830s to persuade those Aborigines left alive after the Black War to give themselves up for placement in settlements.

She survived the harsh life in the concentration camp style settlements and gained iconic status. But when she died in 1876 her final wishes were defied and her body was exhumed by scientists curious to examine the last “full-blooded” Aborigine. Most of her remains were displayed in the Tasmanian Museum in Hobart.”

Rest in peace Truganini. You and your community.

Second day of 105°+F. Whew.
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Weather delays shuttle launch. 7:49 PM ET (2349 GMT)
“Threatening weather forced NASA shuttle managers to scrub Thursday’s night scheduled launch of Endeavour by one day.” Nuts. I hope Susan gets to see the launch. I hope Dave does too, but he lives much closer.

Wow, I’ve never had a 19″ display before. 1600×1200 is pretty sweet, though I have chosen to stay at 1280×1024 unless I can get a video card upgrade so I can have millions er, (it is windows machine) ‘True Color’.
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A final ‘it’s all about me’ note: my new work computer arrived late today. A dual G4 tower was out of the question (oh well) but the 2.2 gig P4 (all the PCs here are IBMs) is pretty nice compared to the middle range PII I have been using for the last two and a half years. As an example, on the new machine Photoshop takes about 5 seconds to start instead of slightly less than 50 seconds. Multiply that times, well, everything because Win2K turned into a sluggish pig pretty quickly after it was installed. ArcView and ArcGIS execute fast as well, but there is a network latency bottleneck with the servers where the data resides and the CPU won’t fix that. Hopefully now I should have the CPU wating on me more often than the reverse. Now if the big monitor will just show up tomorrow.

Susan has some great pictures taken while she was Touring Kennedy Space Center today.

Faces from the Ice Age. [garret and Jenny] This is very cool.

Adventure is my middle name
Another hot day digging square holes in the ground with extremely straight walls and flat floors in the desert. That title is not meant to be sarcastic either (I never can be sure how this stuff comes across). Ian is finally asleep. More later, hopefully, after some grub.
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Though I have nothing coherent to add to the conversation, I have been enjoying reading what Dave Rogers has had to say the past several days.

John passed his Doctoral prelims!
There is a tremendous relief around the Homestead.

“Not an experience I’d care to repeat, though. You know the dream where you realize you’re standing in front of the class in your underwear? It’s kind of like that. And remember the other dream where you suddenly realize that you have to take a final exam, but for some reason or other you totally forgot about the class until now? It’s kind of like that, too.” [View from an Iowa Homestead]

Martin is back from vacation. (I noticed, but forgot to note this yesterday.)

‘Mondays’ after a three-day weekend are always tough.
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Radio UserLand version 8.0.8 is out. How to Upgrade. [Jake]

Looks like the outage cleared.

21 KYA?
Ah, the smell of new grant applications in the morning, it smells like possible research funding. An entry of 21,000 years ago, eh? Well, we’ll need to dig to test this, on this continent, and in Siberia as well. Word processors are being deployed as I write this. [journal link via Got Caliche?]

Silva et al., Native American Mitochondrial Diversity of Native Americans Supports a Single Early Entry of Founder Populations into America. Am. J. Hum. Genet., 71:000, 2002.

“There is general agreement that the Native American founder populations migrated from Asia into America through Beringia sometime during the Pleistocene, but the hypotheses concerning the ages and the number of these migrations and the size of the ancestral populations are surrounded by controversy. DNA sequence variations of several regions of the genome of Native Americans, especially in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region, have been studied as a tool to help answer these questions. (…) The high degree of similarity in the nucleotide diversity and time of differentiation (i.e., ~21,000 years before present) of these four haplogroups support a common origin for these sequences and suggest that the populations who harbor them may also have a common history. Additional evidence supports the idea that this age of differentiation coincides with the process of colonization of the New World and supports the hypothesis of a single and early entry of the ancestral Asian population into the Americas.”

Thank you Jonathon for tipping me off to Mark’s writings concerning addiction. As always, it starts with the first step.

Later: [Partial response to an email I received today]: “Think about what you’re writing and implying before you hit ’send’. I did not post the link about addiction out of some prurient interest, but because I have an addiction problem too. I am fortunate that I found help, on 14 May, 1984 in fact. But that date doesn’t make me ‘better’ or more accomplished than anyone else because I really have only 24 hours. Today is all any of us doing this have. As far as I’m concerned, the more people who write about such things, the better. There are too many secrets we keep when we are sick. When we begin to get well, our own recovery should not be one of them. I am an alcoholic. It does not shame me any more, perhaps because I am a recovering alcoholic. I also point to Mark’s recovery because he is a helluva lot better writer than I am.”

Monday 27 May

“AKMA’s blog in progress - forgiveness, version 1.0″ [mark at wood s lot]
Whether you are Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Follower of the light, none of the above or none of your damn business, it is all the same. You have to let go to get on with your life.

Today is also Julie Hawkins’ Birthday! [ViewFromTheHeart] Happy Birthday Julie!

Happy Birthday Craig! [via a heads-up from garret] Craig, I would opt for ‘reflect and laugh’, with much more of the latter. I would skip the final one you mention and continue counting.

“A coupla months in the laboratory can save a coupla hours in the library.” Westheimer’s Discovery. [Quotes of the Day]

Sunday 26 May

Booklist:
Spotted in this week’s Science ˜ From Certainty to Uncertainty: The Story of Science and Ideas in the Twentieth Century by F. David Peat. Tangential observation: This probably happened some time ago, but I see that FatBrain.com is now Barnes&Noble.com Professional, Technical & Business Bookstore.

I’ll just make it a three-day blog and not worry about page flips until Tuesday.

Memorial Day [United States]

• The Origins of Memorial Day [Veteran’s Administration]

  “Three years after the Civil War ended, on May 5, 1868, the head of an organization of former Union soldiers and sailors - the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) - established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. Maj. Gen. John A. Logan declared it should be May 30. The first large observance was held that year at Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The cemetery already held the remains of 20,000 Union dead and several hundred Confederate dead.

  The ceremonies centered around the mourning-draped veranda of the Arlington mansion, once the home of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Gen. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant and other Washington officials presided. After speeches, children from the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Orphan Home and members of the GAR made their way through the cemetery, strewing flowers on both Union and Confederate graves, reciting prayers and singing hymns.” (more)

• History of Memorial Day [History Channel]
• U.S. Memorial Day History and Information on U.S. War Memorials [usmemorialday.org]
• “kim komando: websites honoring the war dead, for memorial day weekend.” [garret]

Saturday 25 May
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The Social Life of Paper: Why do we pile documents instead of filing them? [via Got Caliche?]

“Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd argues that “knowledge workers” use the physical space of the desktop to hold “ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use.” The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: many people use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to “recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay” when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains. The idea that paper facilitates a highly specialized cognitive and social process is a far cry from the way we have historically thought about the stuff.” [more at gladwell dot com]

The messy desk I understand, what about the messy floor, shelves, and any and all horizontal surfaces? I must be very complex.

Flippancy aside, this article ranges through the Dewey Decimal system, the invention of the vertical file, spatial cognition and organization, the industrial revolution, Air Traffic Controllers… There is kind of a James Burke feel to it. A good read.

Previously Unknown Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse Identified.

Shore enough: Comedian Pauly Shore banking on a comeback.
“Shore, who began his stand-up career at age 17, is plotting a comedy comeback, which audiences can experience when he performs today through Sunday at New York-New York’s Cabaret Theatre.” [Las Vegas SUN]

Just when you thought it was safe, Pauly Shore reappears. Go Away!

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So willya go ahead and go to the beach already?
Falling Coconuts Kill More People Than Shark Attacks.

“Falling coconuts kill 150 people worldwide each year, 15 times the number of fatalities attributable to sharks,” said George Burgess, Director of the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File and a noted shark researcher.” [UniSci]

Dave has got me going with today’s Times Shadow.

“(…) Okay, imagine that the universe of all possible emotional responses is that rubber sheet. (It’s complicated somewhat by the fact that the human being exhibiting the emotional response is also going to be on the sheet, but stay with me here.) Imagine that a picture containing information that has great “mass” (or, emotional content) is place on that sheet, and it deforms as it did for the ball bearing. Now imagine that one of the dimensions of that sheet is time. The information distorts the universe of all possible emotional responses in both the past and the future. The further away on the timeline, the smaller the distortion, the closer, the greater.

Add to this our observer, with a conscious bias to follow that curve of emotional response, and it seems reasonable that a modest effect can be seen “before” the observation has occurred.” [Time Out of Mind]

Dave, this is starting to get really interesting.

This has got to feel great.
John is done with the written portion of his prelimary examination! Now that the first 80% is out of the way, he just has the remaining 80% left to go. Go John!

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I can think of nothing better.

“And they shall beat their swords into guitars..”

˜Blues for Peace [via mark, who was infected by garret and Craig, who was the genus]

GLOBALIZATION

“The popularity of hamburgers is a manifestation of magical thinking. Eating them (or for that matter wearing baseball caps backwards, a custom that has reached the remotest regions of the globe) will bring the easy abundant life that is man’s inalienable birthright.” [more at New Statesman via Got Caliche?]

Human sprawl covering the planet.

The UN Environment Programme Global Environment Outlook-3 (GEO-3) is Out.
This so took wind out of my sails this morning… [blivet radio]

“Unspoilt land totalling an area larger than North America is likely to be damaged by human activity in the next 30 years, according to a new UN assessment of global environmental decline launched on Wednesday.

By the year 2032, more than 70 per cent of the Earth’s land surface is likely to be “destroyed, fragmented or disturbed” by cities, roads, mines and other infrastructure of human civilisation. This would be an increase from about 50 per cent today, says the Global Environment Outlook-3 (GEO-3), published by the UN Environment Programme.” [more]

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It is also worth mentioning that Ian is seven months old today, he was born on October 21 of last year. A lot of parents told us, “they grow up so fast.” What an understatement.

Happy Birthday Audrey!

Later: If you are so inclined, drop her an email at ahrager at lvcablemodem.com. I think she would be pleasantly surprised. (I’m assuming you will know how to make that addy work, I don’t want to consciously add to the spam load she recieves from site scrapers)

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All I can say about some of the searches that appear in my referer logs is that there must be a lot of disappointed people that come here looking for porn. Come to think of it, I guess the dog and cat don’t have any clothes on.

Steven Jay Gould links at Portage. (You might need to scroll up, that link drops you in at the bottom of the day’s postings. The SJG links are at the top of the entries for the day.) [Leuschke via wood s lot]

Frank Wright, recently retired longtime curator of history at the Nevada State Museum and Historical Society of Las Vegas, is one of seven individuals or agencies statewide to be honored for their contributions to historic preservation. Wright was honored for “promoting Southern Nevada history and its resources.” [via Got Caliche?]

Stephen Jay Gould, Biologist and Theorist on Evolution, Dies at 60. [garret]
Thanks for everything, Dr. Gould. As an aside, I see an expanding vaccum, especially now, after the deaths of both Carl Sagan and Gould. Who will speak for science in the popular press?

“Dr. Gould achieved a fame unprecedented among modern evolutionary biologists. The closest thing to a household name in the field, he became part of mainstream iconography when he was depicted in cartoon form on “The Simpsons.” (…)

Dr. Gould was born on Sept. 10, 1941 in Queens, the son of Leonard Gould, a court stenographer, and Eleanor Gould, an artist and entrepreneur. Dr. Gould took his first steps toward a career in paleontology as a 5-year-old when he visited the American Museum of Natural History with his father.

“I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me,” he once wrote.” [more]

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