Japanese Flash craziness. Hooray!
Popularity: 6% [?]
Archive for February, 2005
The press have never been known to give John Gilmore an easy ride. He looks like a nut, he talks like a nut… if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s a very wealthy man, they wouldn’t give him the time of day. Fortunately, John’s been lucky enough to make a dollar or two by being incredibly intelligent in the right place at the right time (being incredibly intelligent in the wrong place at the wrong time only adds to someone’s status as nutter). Now, breaking with tradition, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have given him a fair hearing, covering his refusal to show identification for travel within his own country. “I used to laugh at countries that had internal passports,” says Gilmore. “And it’s happened here and people don’t even seem to know about it.” They’ll know that, and many things more, if they took the trouble to listen to John Gilmore.
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Wi-Fi Networking News has an interesting article revealing that Hugo Gernsback (one of the most important figures in science fiction, publisher of Amazing Stories, and for whom the Hugo Awards are named) was also an amateur radio hacker.
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Remember when a dollar was a dollar, a pound a pound, when when were men and women were women? Now, remember when a kilogram was a kilogram? You may soon have to, because the basic definition of a kilogram might be about to change.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Non-profit Media Matters for America have found that Fox News have “consistently” been editing Associated Press reports published on the Fox News website to reflect White House terminology and double-speak. The pro-Bush conservative bias shown by Fox has long been general knowledge, but the network’s role as deliberate White House propaganda tool has remained under dispute. So consider this question answered.
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From the Guardian: “The attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, warned less than two weeks before the invasion of Iraq that military action could be ruled illegal. [...] The Guardian can also disclose that in her letter of resignation in protest against the war, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, deputy legal adviser at the Foreign Office, described the planned invasion of Iraq as a ‘crime of aggression’.”
Popularity: 6% [?]
Hungarian graphic artist Istvan Orosz creates startlingly complex works with more than a nod to Escher. His anamorphic works especially are mind-boggling, as can be seen here (Quicktime required for the video clips, but worth it). [Found via Giornale Nuovo.]
Popularity: 7% [?]
Another choice item from the Belgian health front: “More salmonella cases are recorded in Belgium than in any other European country, according to the health minister.” That’s in excess of 20,000 cases of salmonella and campylobacter infection in 2003 alone.
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Japanese warning signs are great, as this collection clearly shows. But should you really be entertained while in any situation requiring a warning sign?
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The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art are running an exhibition highlighting the artistic development of several leading cartoonists. For most it’s been a long journey honing their skills and talents, clearly not a question of simply being born great!
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From the Washington Post:
The insurgency in Iraq continues to baffle the U.S. military and intelligence communities, and the U.S. occupation has become a potent recruiting tool for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, top U.S. national security officials told Congress yesterday.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee that he has trouble believing any of the estimates of the number of insurgents because it is so difficult to track them.
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According to a recently published survey (who conducted the survey isn’t quite clear from the Expatica report), 4,000 patients die in Belgian hospitals annually from infections caused by unhygenic conditions. Every year 115,503 infections are reported (presumably this is an average, or the figure for a single year). A whopping 5.7 percent of Belgian hospital patients contract infections, a very scary thought for anyone requiring hospitalisation. Despite the obviously sensationalist and unscientific appearance of these numbers, this remains a serious indictment of the Belgian health system.
Popularity: 11% [?]
“If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.”—Bil Gates, 1991. Just say “no” to software patents.
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Research findings recently published by the Belgian National Institute for Statistics reveal that nearly 9% of Belgians over the age of 15 experiment with cannabis. Most of these users are men, and the majority are between the ages of 15 and 34.
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“Howard Dean, once a grass-roots outsider, rode to an easy victory on Saturday to become the chairman of the Democratic National Committee with support from hundreds of party insiders and operatives he carefully cultivated during an uphill two-month campaign,” opines the New York Times. The times, to paraphrase Dylan, they might be a’changing. Now at last Howard Dean has the opportunity to put his money where his mouth is and do some early spring cleaning in American politics.
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