ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
--Phil Agre
Is there a spare investigator in the House? Or in the newsroom?
Why haven't we been hearing about Halliburton's
illegal
oil drilling in Iran? They're working through a nominally-foreign
subsidiary, but the relevant executive order specifically states that
No U.S. person may approve or facilitate the entry into or performance of transactions or contracts with Iran by a foreign subsidiary of a U.S. firm that the U.S. person is precluded from performing directly. Similarly, no U.S. person may facilitate such transactions by unaffiliated foreign persons.Even if we accept Vice President Cheney's word that he's no longer involved with Halliburton, he was chief executive officer starting in 1995, the year that executive order was signed. And in 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999.
Halliburton won't even notice a $500,000 fine, but how does ten years in jail look, Mr. Cheney? This makes Spiro Agnew's crimes look like small potatoes. [via Ethel the Blog.]
What a
space
station looks like from above. Not an Astounding
cover painting, an actual photo, taken by humans, of a human artifact.
In memoriam,
Claude
Shannon, without whom you wouldn't be reading this here:
Shannon coined the term bit, and defined information in
mathematical terms.
Rebecca Blood thinks aloud about
truth
and harm:
When we tell our truth, perhaps the best we can hope for is that it is a loving truth, an accurate truth, kindly told. When our truth overlaps with someone else's it can be uncomfortable for the other. We can only apologize for causing them hurt and hope that they have learned to know us well enough to trust our intentions. We can work harder to see the truth that really is. There may be excellent reasons for not telling a story, but once we have determined that we should, we must do it as well as we can.
Starting with politics, Marylaine Block discusses the
power
of names, for good and bad. She urges the Democrats to stop
letting the Republicans label everything, then observes that
by saying "He's so forgetful he wouldn't remember to change his socks unless it was on his calendar," we not only forgive him, we give ourselves one possible solution to the problem.
Sometimes the trick is to notice that something has been named, and could be renamed. Block reiterates that
But we also need to re-examine the names other people have assigned to things, because if we've allowed somebody else to name a situation, we've guaranteed that the game will be played on their turf by their rules.
Disney has built a
shining
theme park on a hill. Intended as a safer version of
Jerusalem, with nobody fighting over control of the landscape,
it has attracted its own share of controversy. So far, though,
nobody seems interested in bombing the people movers. This may
have to suffice for utopia, plastic style.
A
404 message
from a Web server that would like to care, only it's so
depressed....
[via NTK, of course]
Another delightful
Jon
Carroll column:
We now have a faith-based presidency. We need to have faith that we have a president. We have a person in the White House who is called the president, but it is hard to imagine him doing the job.
Steven Pinker's discussion of the past, present, and future of
irregular
verbs, from the archaic "cleft" to the recent creation
"snuck," is both lucid and optimistic: he points out that
while most English verbs are regular
The ten commonest verbs in English (be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, and get) are all irregular, and about 70% of the time we use a verb, it is an irregular verb.
John Brockman asked a lot of people to name
"the most important
invention
of the last two thousand years." The predictable votes came in for
the printing press, the contraceptive pill, computers,
and the scientific
method. The interesting surprises include mirrors and hay.
[via Memepool]
Once in a while, a plane breaking the sound barrier
produces a
visible
cloud at the same time as the sonic boom.
Jim Alchin, Microsoft's head honcho for Windows, has
attacked
open source and Linux as "un-American" and a threat to innovation.
Most of the responses have either pointed out how ugly the term
"un-American" is, or suggested that Alchin overstated his company's
position. I suspect, though, that the key point in Alchin's
statement is
There is always something enamoring about thinking you can get something for free.Microsoft should know: this is the strategy they used against Netscape, and it worked.
Via The Register, the
customs
form filed at Honolulu Airport by the returning Apollo 11 crew on
24 July 1969: Under "Any other conditions on board which may lead
to the spread of disease," the form reads "TO BE DETERMINED."
Instead of putting antibiotics in animal feed, we might be
able to protect the animals, and humans who eat them or their
milk, from deadly bacteria by feeding them
friendly
strains of bacteria. This
probiotic approach is cheap and doesn't promote antibiotic
resistance.
Broccoli is
beginning
to worry Matthew Engel, since he overheard someone say that
"Broccoli has lost 80% of its nutritional value." Worse,
it's not just broccoli: the trace minerals are disappearing
from most of our vegetables, possibly because of selective
breeding for everything except nutrition, or because fertilizers
promote growth, not copper and magnesium content.
Reacting to a list put together by superstring theorists,
physicist N. David Mermin offers
ten
questions he would like to ask a scientist a century from now.
He hopes none of them will get him laughed at; the first is
"What are the names of the major branches of science?"
[via Ethel
the Blog]
A new petition argues that
repealing the estate tax would enrich the heirs of America's millionaires and billionaires while hurting families who struggle to make ends meet.This is a truth universally acknowledged, except by the Republican leadership--but they may be surprised to hear it from George Soros and Bill Gates Sr. Warren Buffett, the fourth richest man in America, declined to sign the petition because it doesn't go far enough in defending the estate tax.
Oh wow! Using modern imaging techniques, scientists at
Brigham Young University expect to be able to read the
charred
remnants of a library from Herculaneum. The papyri were
excavated in the 18th century, but so far unreadable: they include
the lost works of Aristotle, poems by Simonedes, Sappho, and Alcaeus,
and a large amount of otherwise unknown Roman literature.
A technical
paper on the work will be presented in April.
This is either a touching show of faith, or a gauntlet thrown down:
Ed Koch
challenges
Bush and Cheney to bring a RICO suit against the big oil
companies, and the OPEC nations, for unlawful price-fixing.
President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are familiar with the oil companies, from which they made their fortunes before the election. They now are no longer beholden to such companies, but to the citizens of America.They can show their independence and love of country by ordering such a lawsuit forthwith.
[This link should be good until 15 February]
Copyright 2001 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
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