Explanation please

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Walter pointed me to this Newsweek page by way of this blog post pointing to that blog post.

I suppose the Newsweek link will change, so here's what it looks like now. The snag of Newsweek's cover thumbnails in those other blogs is for real, as can be seen in the snag of the whole page below if you click on it (note the URL in the address bar):


It would be interesting to know Newsweek's rationale for the different covers. Maybe it has more to do with foreign readers not knowing of Annie Liebovitz and less to do with glossing over bad news for American readers. In any event, the difference in edition covers looks really bad, and it raises the question of what other differences exist between US and foreign editions.

I'm dropping that question, though, because the time I allotted to answering it has expired.

Cigarettes, Global Warming, Propaganda and Slime

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As I type, Drudge and NewsMax are reporting that Al Gore, addressing the UN, claimed that cigarette smoking is a "significant contributor to global warming!" Really!

Somehow I just don't think Gore actually said that, but we'll see. On the other hand, it doesn't surprise me very much to see this kind of thing in Drudge and NewsMax.

Who knows where the links below will lead down the road, so here's where they lead now (my emphasis):

Drudge:

GORE: CIGARETTE SMOKING 'SIGNIFICANT' CONTRIBUTOR TO GLOBAL WARMING
Fri Sep 29 2006 09:04:05 ET

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore warned hundreds of U.N. diplomats and staff on Thursday evening about the perils of climate change, claiming: Cigarette smoking is a "significant contributor to global warming!"

Gore, who was introduced by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, said the world faces a "full-scale climate emergency that threatens the future of civilization on earth."

Gore showed computer-generated projections of ocean water rushing in to submerge the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, parts of China, India and other nations, should ice shelves in Antarctica or Greenland melt and slip into the sea.

"The planet itself will do nicely, thank you very much what is at risk is human civilization," Gore said. After a series of Q& A with the audience, which had little to do with global warming and more about his political future, Annan bid "adios" to Gore.

Then, Gore had his staff opened a stack of cardboard boxes to begin selling his new book, "An Inconvenient Truth, The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It," $19.95, to the U.N. diplomats.

Developing...

NewsMax:

Gore Warns U.N. on Climate Change

Stewart Stogel
Friday, Sept. 29, 2006

UNITED NATIONS -- Self-proclaimed "global warming warrior" Al Gore came to U.N. headquarters Thursday to lecture on the "perils" of climate change.

The former vice president and U.S. senator spent

[update]

Catholic Muslim

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BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Space tourist in Earth touchdown

However, the first female Muslim space tourist insisted that 'this 10 days has been magnificent for me'.

I don't know Anousheh Ansari, but it seems to me that she's about as much a muslim as I am a catholic. While seemingly sufficient for some people, that my grandmother was a catholic, that I was baptized and had my first communion as a kid, and that I was raised around catholics in a mostly catholic country isn't remotely enough to make me a catholic.

Pasting Ansari with the label of "muslim" stands out because, if anything, she seems to avoid the subject. Not that I looked all that hard, but the closest thing I've seen to any sort of self-characterization by her with respect to religion was a USA Today article containing an aside that Ansari calls herself a "liberal Muslim".

Whatever the meaning of "liberal muslim", the label seems safe enough. In the present context, though, "liberal Muslim" and "Muslim" probably mean two entirely different things.

I think Anousheh Ansari is a thoroughly modern, fully secular human being who thinks she's got to tread lightly. In her shoes I, too, might leave people to their illusions.

CS Monitor: The war on SOME drugs: Ambushed in Jamundi

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The war on drugs: Ambushed in Jamundi | csmonitor.com

"Three thousand Americans a year die from Colombian drugs," says US Ambassador to Colombia William Wood. "That's like suffering a World Trade Towers attack every year."

No, it's not!

Mr. Ambassador, you cannot be as completely stupid a man as one who would believe that bullshit. Come on!

There is no similarity, none at all, between 3000 or so innocents killed in a major act of terrorism, and the similar number of people you claim, who die essentially at their own hand.

Plan Colombia has cost the US $4.7 billion, of which 75-80 percent has gone to the security forces.

Ridiculous.

War on Fundamentalism

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War on fundamentalism



I don't know who wrote it, but I second this emotion.

And if you are incapable of accepting the simple message of tolerance then yes, you are immoral, you are evil, you are a fundamentalist. You are at war with the world, you are at war with humanity, you are at war with God, you are at war with messages in the sacred texts of your religion.

Sounds good to me. I'm not into wearing symbols, but so does this:

Wear this symbol on your person. It is not a religious symbol. It does not replace Christianity or Islam. It does not conflict with any valid message in Christianity or Islam. There is no agenda behind this symbol. The purpose of this symbol is one single solitary message: I reject you, fundamentalist. And I embrace my fellow human being, regardless of religion. The belief in multiple paths to God does not reduce the majesty of your religion. It does not nullify it. It does not supplement it either. It merely underlines a message already existing in your religion. There are cultural differences in the paths to God. But none of them counteract the basic truths we all believe in, regardless of culture.

The way I see it, if people of the book really believe what they say about their god being omnipotent, then who are they to limit that god's power to be all things to all people?

Land of the Free, Home of the Brave � Blog Archive � The Great Debate: Heads vs. Feds

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Land of the Free, Home of the Brave � Blog Archive � The Great Debate: Heads vs. Feds

What she said!

Her description of this "debate" reminds me of the Timothy Leary - G. Gordon Liddy road show, not a debate as much as bullshit for entertainment.

A Fantasy

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Bolivia Reaches for a Slice of the Coast That Got Away - New York Times

One of my fantasies is that nations start acting with unilateral good will and in each others' interests in order to cultivate and cement friendliness. Along those lines, Bolivia would ceremoniously hurl the detestable bayonet statue into the bottom of Lake Titicaca, and Chile would reciprocate by giving Bolivia a relatively small swath of land for access to the sea, and the two nations would lead the world in promotion of oceanic sustainability.

There would be ceremonies, declarations, treaties and celebrations in favor of friendly relations forever.

On second thought, they might want to keep that sculpture, but change it so that the bayonet is shown being thrust into the throats of nationalistic ideologues and those who would use such arguments to bolster dominance.

Well, it is just fantasy. Sorry.

Update: I tried to find a picture of the monument with the bayonet, the one the Times says bears the words “What once was ours, will be ours once more”, but I didn't find one. Along the way, though, I found this picture by Tim Hilliard showing the Titicaca naval base and a sign that says: The sea is ours by right. Recovering it is a duty. I am not respectful of beligerent sentiments like that. They are counterproductive at best.

Going With a Flow

So I saw that Kurt Cobb was back from vacation with an interesting post about the Romans and their long view. One of Kurt's commenters quibbled a bit and concluded by offering up his own post about Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion at EnergyBulletin. I enjoyed Kurt's piece but agreed with his other commenter about Tainter and complexity. (Tainter paper).

I'm not a fan of OTEC, but I decided to go look at the post at EnergyBulletin, then followed their link to The Oil Drum to look at some commentary. Commentary immediately went off-topic but held my interest anyway. One of the commenters along the way offhandedly referred to an article, Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War.

Well, the title was certainly intriguing, but I wasn't familiar with the author or the website. Thought I'd try to find out a little bit about both before actually reading the article. To make a long and entertaining (but you probably had to be there) story short, the author, Keith Henson, has had some run-ins with the scientologists, has testified before congress, and is an electrical engineer with some other claims to fame.

When I googled the title of Henson's paper I wound up looking at a Wikipedia article on memetics which included two links to the paper, one at Kuro5in and the other at The Mankind Quarterly. As I did a little checking on each of those (enough to conclude that they're both done by smart people and probably worth reading), I landed on a now defunct parody site, Adequacy.org (Archive)(Wikipedia), that gave me some exposure to smart mischievous people who like to troll post apparently for the hell of it. Some of it made me smile.

OK, time to go read the paper at Kuro5in. (Mankind Quarterly is a subscription only journal of anthropology, and this paper is not one of their free samples.) Make that tomorrow. I had too much fun today checking out the background and writing this post, and now it's way past my bedtime.

Question 7

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Home | Regulate Marijuana in Nevada

I wish these people all the success in the world on November 7, even though I have a quibble with one of their FAQs:

If Question 7 passes, won’t the feds just come in and shut it down?

It is within Nevada’s power to pass this law. Back when Nevada’s medical marijuana initiative was on the ballot, federal authorities threatened to shut it down if it passed. It’s been in effect now for over five years, and these threats never materialized. In an age when the federal government cannot manage to inspect even five percent of containers coming into this country or adequately respond to a hurricane, one would hope they have better things to do than prosecute Nevadans who are abiding by state law.

Not that it affects my support for their effort, but if Question 7 passes in Nevada, prohibitionists will almost certainly find a way to squash it.

OneWebDay

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BBC NEWS | Technology | Global web celebrations under way

The organisers are planning to create what they hope will be the largest global online photo collaboration.

Web users are being asked to tag their pictures with OneWebDay and upload them to photo-sharing sites Webshots and Flickr, to create global photo albums.

Well, OK, here's my contribution.

The organisers are also encouraging people to post entries to their blogs on Friday which reflect on how the web has changed their lives.

Well, OK, let's see... I didn't have a personal domain, web page or blog before Sir Tim and his colleagues came around with their good ideas, so I credit them and the Web with putting me in contact with some good people I'd never have known otherwise. I also, though, spend a lot of time using the computer, whereas in times past I might have spent that time interacting with people more directly. Who knows?

I'm sure others will go into such things as how the Web has had an impact on political life. Aside from things like Howard Dean leading the race for the Democratic presidential nomination early on largely as a result of Web activism, now we have fundie jihadi's using the Web for their purposes. Ayatollah Khomeini became HMFIC of Iran without the Web, so maybe the jihadis would be where they are today without it, but the Web seems to have had a significant impact on radical jihadi operations. (The embrace of the Web by 7th-century-minded people seems ironic to me.)

I used to have some hope that the Web would lead to a complex interconnectedness from which might emerge a sort of global consciousness, a global brain along the lines described by Howard Bloom and others, that would somehow help humanity's lagging evolution to catch up with present conditions to which we seem so maladapted. More recently, though, I've come to think Cas Sunstein is right when he worries about increased polarization as a function of the Daily Me. "The imagined world of innumerable, diverse editions of the "Daily Me" is the furthest thing from a utopian dream, and it would create serious problems from the democratic point of view." Maybe the global brain will suffer a form of schizophrenia (before getting better, one hopes).

The Web has given me new tools at work. I'm pretty sure I was the first engineer at work to publish a report on the intranet, rather than on paper, some years ago. I keep a little web site on my employer's intranet where I keep job-related reference material, reports and so on. I also have a fledgling online forum for people at other companies involved in my line of work, and searching the Web is a useful tool in my job from time to time.

I guess the Web is like any other tool, available for good or evil. Like a gun, I'd much rather have it than not.

Scientific American: Fiddling While the Planet Burns

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Scientific American: Fiddling While the Planet Burns

Will the Wall Street Journal's editorial writers accept a challenge to learn the truth about the science of global climate change?

I don't believe for a second that the Wall Street Journal's editorial board are ignorant here. I think they are, at best, in amazing denial, at worst, liars.

The WSJ's adoration of Bjorn Lomborg, and later their coverage blackout of Lomborg's censure by the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty (not one syllable in the WSJ) cost them my subscription some time back.

Reporters for the Wall Street Journal routinely distance themselves from the editorial page. Many of the paper's own reporters laugh or cringe at the anti-scientific posture of the editorials, and advise the rest of us simply not to read them. Nevertheless, the consequences of those editorials are significant. The Wall Street Journal is the most widely read business paper in the world. Its influence is extensive. Yet it gets a free pass on editorial irresponsibility.

As a neighbor to the paper at Columbia University, the Earth Institute has repeatedly invited the editorial team to meet with leading climate scientists. I've offered to organize such a meeting in any way that the editorial board would like. On many occasions, the news editors have eagerly accepted, but the editorial writers have remained safe in their splendid isolation.

Let me make the invitation once again. Many of the world's leading climate scientists are prepared to meet with the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, and to include in that meeting any climate-skeptic scientists that that the Journal editorial board would like to invite. The board owes it to the rest of us to make the effort to their own "open-minded search for scientific knowledge." If only for the sake of their own sweltering hometown, it's time they accept the invitation.

Good luck.

The Volokh Conspiracy - The ONDCP on Marijuana (Ads):

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The Volokh Conspiracy - The ONDCP on Marijuana (Ads):

What he, and most of the commenters, said.

I wish people would stop refering to the so-called War On Drugs as such, and instead heap scorn on this idiocy by referring to it more accurately as the War On Some Drugs.

Distributed Backups and Monty Hall

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Mozy Blog: Probability is Fun

So I was wandering around looking at stuff having to do with distributed backup storage. One of the solutions available that seems highly regarded is Mozy. I don't know much about Mozy yet, such as where they actually store your stuff, but I looked at their blog and found this Monty Hall post.

Since the Monty Hall problem twisted my brain pretty severely back when Marilyn Vos Savant raised hell with it in Parade Magazine a dozen or more years ago, and this is about the best explanation I've seen, here it is.

Now to check out Mozy some more. So far my backups are primarily periodic disk images and differential updates, with a few files also backed up online using GoDaddy's Online File Folder service. This works fine but it seems Mozy, AllMyData and various others have good ideas, too.

Anticrepuscular Rays

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APOD: 2006 September 17 - Anticrepuscular Rays Over Florida

NASA's "Astronomy Picture of the Day", APOD, is my first stop on the Internet every day. Every selection is worthy. Accompanying explanations are always interesting, thought provoking and linked to other interesting stuff.

For example, the explanation for today's picture of anticrepuscular rays states that the rays appear to converge due to the straight lines of light being projected onto the spherical sky forming great circles.

Hmmm... Something twists my rusty spatial visualization gears. I can't help but think that, while true enough that a plane projected through a spherical shell forms a circle, it's not great circles that we're seeing.

If the earth were flat (and it is pretty flat from our human perspective) we'd see the same thing. The rays would converge just like railroad tracks running off to the horizon.

I'm splitting hairs again, and I could be wrong, but hey, it beat the hell out of moving on to see how many people were killed in Iraq overnight or what religionist pissed off how many others of his ilk, how we've got to get involved in Darfur or what a war with Iran would look like.

Nerd Score

Make that low mid-rank nerd, and I think I agree with the fellow who thought the test actually ranked geekiness. Kind of fun either way.

I would have thought there'd be a question or two to gauge one's interest in sports, but no.

Hat tip Deltoid via Rabbet Run.

Leaked memo

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AP Wire | 09/15/2006 | Leaked memo bolsters image of Kline fostered nationally

Attorney General Phill Kline is frustrated that, as he seeks a second term, the national attention he has received for fighting abortion and championing conservative causes may overshadow his crime-fighting and other activities.

That has come to the forefront since a campaign memo he wrote in August, outlining an aggressive plan to court conservative Christians, was leaked anonymously to reporters. Kline's memo discussed political receptions held after services, directing his staff to get friendly pastors to invite 'money people.'

Hmmm... Making contacts at church. Sounds like my old realtor buddy.

"My position on the life issue is not born out of my faith but out of what I view the role of the government to be - to protect the most innocent and the most vulnerable," Kline said.

Is he blind to the contradiction or just acting that way?

Underprotected: Advocates for Muslim Women Face Constant Danger - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

Police Protection: Advocates for Muslim Women Face Constant Danger - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

What do do?

Those who take a stand for the rights of Muslim women -- by criticizing the practice of forced in marriage, for example -- put themselves at considerable risk in Germany. Murder threats and attacks by conservative Muslims are common, and the police can offer only limited help.

Stupid Judges Contemptible Decisions

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USA v. $124,700 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is not exactly new, but it is highly offensive none-the-less. That a subjective measure such as "preponderance" can justify the taking of substantial valuables absent actual evidence of wrongdoing, and in the face of plausible explanations to the contrary, is disgusting.

I contemptuously dissent. This is the sort of thing that creates scofflaws.

Here is the decision straight from the Court.

The War on Some Drugs is far more expensive than we think.

House votes to outlaw slaughter of horses for human consumption

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House votes to outlaw slaughter of horses for human consumption

Despite the lopsided vote in favor of the measure, some lawmakers mocked GOP leaders for using one of the few days left on Congress' short fall calendar to address horse slaughter.

'With all the pressing political issues that confront our nation ... I do not think this is the issue the American people expect their elected representatives to be considering,' said Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., the House Democratic whip.

This is ridiculous.

Backers of the bill showed photos of stallions that were bloodied when crammed into trailers during transport to the plants. During slaughter, a bolt gun drives a metal rod into the horse's brain to stun it before the animal is hoisted by a leg to have its throat severed.

"It's brutal," said Rep. John Sweeney, R-N.Y., a chief sponsor of the bill. "We need to bring an end to this practice."

Why is it so brutal that it needs the attention of the federal government in the case of horses but not cattle?

I'm in favor of standards of treatment to avoid unneccesary suffering prior to or during slaughter, but there are already animal cruelty laws that could be enforced.

That's not what it's really all about, though, is it?

Good for Melinda Gates

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National Catholic Register:

Another major beneficiary of the Gates Foundation has been International Planned Parenthood Federation, the world’s largest private abortion business.

"Abortion business". I stopped reading right there, having made it past

Melinda Gates is a Catholic who attended high school at Dallas’ all-girls Ursuline Academy. But she’s anything but Catholic in her position on condom use.

and

Not only do condom promotion programs fail where abstinence succeeds against AIDS — but souls as well lives are at stake.

"Abortion business." Right.