Google, living up to their lesser known slogan of “Do no evil – but if you have to tell everyone”, has published a list of nearly all government requests they received between July 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009. Government agencies around the world approach Google to remove content or reveal information about users, and this page lists the number of requests per country.
An analysis of Barak Obama’s State of the Union Address delivered on 27 January 2010 reveals some interesting core messages, the most significant of which being that the economy is growing stronger. Click on the image below for a higher resolution version.
This visualisation was based on a transcript of the address released by the Office of the Press Secretary, and was created using the Many Eyes application developed by the IBM Visual Communication Lab.
Meet Cymothoa exigua, a nasty little parasitic crustacean that has evolved a particularly ingenious way of making himself comfortable in his host. The parasite enters his host, the spotted rose snapper, through its gills, and proceeds to suck blood from the fish’s tongue until the organ atrophies and drops off. The clever little bastard then becomes the fish’s tongue, grabbing on to the stub of the original tongue and behaving just like the real thing. The parasite feeds off the fish’s blood and mucus, apparently without harming its host. Charming.
Great article on vintage-style phreaking in Rolling Stone. The article includes this alleged exploit:
Last year, during the presidential campaign, Weigman heard a YouTube video of Mitt Romney’s son Matt dialing his dad. Weigman listened closely to the touch tones, deciphered the candidate’s cellphone number — and then made a call of his own. “Mitt Romney!” he said. “What’s going on, dude? Running for president?” Weigman says Romney told him to shove the phone up his ass, and hung up.
Well, well, well. Mitt Romney has a thing for phones up his ass. Who knew?
From the New York Times:
The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.
Justice must be done, and seen to be done. Time for the Obama administration to step up and move beyond crisis management and damage control.
The fine art of doublespeak is alive and well, and skilfully practised by Spanish EU Commissioner Joaquin Almunia. Redefining the idea of democracy and the rights of EU citizens to make their own decisions, the Commissioner formulated this gem:
I think matters which are as complex as a constitution or similar must be discussed in the systems available to democracy, or rather, in parliaments.
To paraphrase: plain old democracy is fine and well, but to get the full benefit of real democracy you need to let others decide for you.
The Commissioner added:
It doesn’t seem to me that this procedure is the best example of democracy because referendums, in order for them to genuinely be something which citizens feel comfortable with and not pressured, they must be presented with very clear and simple questions.
In other words, European Union citizens can only be relied upon to make decisions when these are:
- something a child could understand; and
- of no consequence.
Why, oh why, do we keep on electing these people, and why do we allow them to treat us like idiots?
The crazy certainly runs deep in America’s home-grown religions. Not only the classics like Scientology and Heaven’s Gate, but also Nation of Islam:
[Nation of Islam minister] Elijah Muhammad taught his followers about a Mother Plane or Wheel, a UFO that was seen and described in the visions of the prophet Ezekiel in the Book of Ezekiel, in the Hebrew Bible.
The crazy is passed down from generation to generation, from Elijah Muhammed to Louis Farrakhan:
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad told us of a giant Mother Plane that is made like the universe, spheres within spheres. White people call them unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Ezekiel, in the Old Testament, saw a wheel that looked like a cloud by day but a pillar of fire by night. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said that that wheel was built on the island of Nippon, which is now called Japan, by some of the Original scientists. [...] The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said these planes were used to set up mountains on the earth. [...] How do you raise a mountain, and what is the purpose of a mountain? Have you ever tried to balance a tire? You use weights to keep the tire balanced. That’s how the earth is balanced, with mountain ranges.
Legend has it that Elijah Muhammed did in fact not die, but escaped a deadly plot and now resides aboard this very Mother Plane. Good times.
Ballard identified himself as a libertarian. “I’m all for free sex, alcohol and would liberalize the drug laws if some way could be found to protect adolescents,” he once told The Independent.
From the July 2009 edition of Reason.
Don’t know whether to laugh or cry when confronted by creationist nonsense? Neither, apparently, do palaeontologists. From Yahoo News: Paleontologists brought to tears, laughter by Creation Museum. And on the sixth day, God created creationist fools?
Perhaps not quite the legend David Carradine wanted to leave behind…
What bollocks Eurosceptics like UKIP come up with to rationalise their xenophobic beliefs. According to a UKIP report, “Brussels [is] making 8 UK laws every day”. Actually, this is based on 2,754 pieces of legislation introduced by “Brussels” in 2009, consisting of directives, regulations, Commission decisions and “legislative instruments”. Most of which will probably never be implemented by the British government, or at most used as the basis for British laws.
Apparently, UKIP members are still fighting the Second World War, and “Brussels” does sound a lot like “Berlin”. However, the European Commission does not make laws for member countries. They report on which policies will best serve the interests of member countries and the EU as a whole, and members of the European Parliament subsequently vote on these to establish directives. Adopted EU directives and guidelines then have to be integrated into national legislation.
Unless Spanish waiters and French bartenders inherently scare the living daylights out of you, the system does make sense. Ambiguous legislation drives up the cost of doing business across European borders, and in many cases will reward as business acumen in one country what might be punishable as fraud in another. National tax breaks and loopholes would result in a race to attract multinational corporations, leaving smaller local enterprises to carry the regional tax burden.
The bean counters at UKIP then shudder at the cost of all of this:
EU Commissioner Gunther Verheugen estimated in 2006 that the cost of EU regulation on economies Europe wide was around £581bn, equal to the total economy of a medium-sized European nation.
What they fail to mention is the benefit of doing business within the EU to the collective economies of all member countries. When a British company supplies products or services in France or Germany, the taxable income flows back to the UK, creating a regional benefit. Unless, of course, the company in question makes use of any of the available offshore investment opportunities to avoid paying tax on its profits. Tax avoidance opportunities created under… British laws.
Oh dear.
So did the great man foresee a better way to allow music lovers to indulge their passion? In Frank’s own words, from The Real Frank Zappa Book:
We propose to acquire the rights to digitally duplicate and store THE BEST of every record company’s difficult-to-move Quality Catalog Items [Q.C.I.], store them in a central processing location, and have them accessible by phone or cable TV, directly patchable into the user’s home taping appliances, with the option of direct digital-to-digital transfer to F-1 (SONY consumer level digital tape encoder), Beta Hi-Fi, or ordinary analog cassette (requiring the installation of a rentable D-A converter in the phone itself . . . the main chip is about $12).All accounting for royalty payments, billing to the customer, etc. would be automatic, built into the initial software for the system.
The consumer has the option of subscribing to one or more Interest Categories, charged at a monthly rate, without regard for the quantity of music he or she decides to tape.
Providing material in such quantity at a reduced cost could actually diminish the desire to duplicate and store it, since it would be available any time day or night.
Monthly listings could be provided by catalog, reducing the on-line storage requirements of the computer. The entire service would be accessed by phone, even if the local reception is via TV cable.
This certainly sounds very similar to the business model of the Internet music business…
Now here’s an outlaw whose end simply begs to be made into a Takashi Miike movie: Big Nose George Parrot. Jailed for killing a Wyoming deputy sheriff and a Union Pacific detective, Parrot was sentenced to death. Not content with waiting for the authorities to do the job, a lynch mob numbering around 200 people snatched Parrot from jail and he was promptly hung from a telegraph pole. In a series of increasingly suspect medical studies, Parrot’s body suffered the following indignities:
- The top of his skull was sawn off.
- The piece of skull was presented to medical assistant Lilian Heath, then 15 years old.
- Heath used the cap as an ashtray, pen holder and doorstop.
- Skin from Parrot’s thighs and chest was removed.
- Together with his nipples, the skin was tanned and made into a pair of shoes and a medical bag.
- The dismembered body was stored in a whiskey barrel for about a year.
- Parrot was finally buried in the yard behind the office of one of the doctors who mutilated him.
Read more on Wikipedia.
What do you get when you accidentally watch the 1999 version of Beowulf, starring Christopher Lambert, instead of the more recent Robert Zemeckis production? Well, grab several dozen cinematic clichés from recent successes like Lord of the Rings and classics like Conan the Barbarian, mix in the spirit of a young Rutger Hauer, season with a horribly violated adaptation of a classic work of fiction, and serve up to bored teenagers too young to know any better and sure to be mesmerized by the shiny CGI. Ooh, sparkly, sparkly…
Rather buy the more recent version from Amazon.
