Just minarets?

I wasn't able to find, in the short time it was worth, the wording of the Swiss proposal to ban the minaret, but I gather it specified minarets and not steeples or other intrusive religious power structures.

To the extent the measure was specific to the islamic symbol, I would not have supported it because of the discriminatory nature of the ban.

Want to ban minarets? I'd be all in favor, but only if you ban steeples, too.

in reference to: Swiss voters 'back ban on building of minarets' - Times Online (view on Google Sidewiki)

"The American people," Senator McConnell?

> "The American people are asking us to stop
> this bill and we're going to do anything and
> everything we can to prevent this measure from
> becoming law," [Senator McConnell] said.

No, Senator McConnell, "the American people" are most certainly NOT asking any such thing of you.

What's being asked of you, and not by "the American people," is to preserve present arrangements. The ones asking it of you are 1) special interests making big money from the status quo and 2) ideologues, along with followers manipulated into believing in death panels.

"The American people." Whenever I hear or read that phrase it sets off my bullshit alarm.

in reference to:

""The American people are asking us to stop this bill and we're going to do anything and everything we can to prevent this measure from becoming law," he said."
- BBC News - US healthcare bill passes first Senate hurdle in vote (view on Google Sidewiki)

Incomplete

The topic of human overpopulation being taboo, this article in incomplete. If prominent projections come true, the world will add two Chinas worth of people in the next few decades. All the while, people everywhere wish to raise their standards of living. In the meantime, we've already depleted vast ocean areas of important species of fish, created vast ocean dead zones, raised the temperature and acidity of the oceans, melted the snows of Kilimanjaro and freshwater glaciers the world over. And so on and on and on...

Articles like this one report selected facts but don't really educate or inform.

in reference to: Earth needs users' guide to protect it from people | Green Business | Reuters (view on Google Sidewiki)

Loose Lips in High Places...

What happened, Senator Feinstein? Was it a simple mistake? How about an explanation?

The attack followed the statement in Congress on Friday by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the pilotless aircraft take off from a base inside Pakistan.

“As I understand, these are flown out of a Pakistani base,” Ms. Feinstein said during a hearing attended by the director of U.S. national intelligence, Admiral Dennis C. Blair. In his testimony, Admiral Blair said that the drone attacks had achieved their goal. “Al Qaeda today is less capable and effective than it was a year ago,” he said.

The drone attacks, especially in the last six months, have increased anti-American sentiment in Pakistan to very high levels. Ms. Feinstein’s acknowledgment that the flights have the tacit support of the Pakistani government is likely to further inflame the protests over the flights. Her statement was prominently covered the Pakistani press Saturday morning.

Link

Damn!

Fat Fucking Chance!

NATO commander: Afghanistan drug raids imminent - Yahoo! News:

'Activities and actions will occur soon that will be helpful,' Craddock told reporters.

Fat fucking chance, unless you are candid about to whom the actions will be helpful.

Freedom of Information Act

Freedom of Information Act:

MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES

SUBJECT: Freedom of Information Act

"In the face of doubt, openness prevails."

Sounds good to me.

Change.org

Change.org

Change.org Criminal Justice

End Federal Raids on Medical Marijuana Dispensaries

Dear President Obama,

I am writing to you, via the facilities of change.org, in support of the notion you espoused during the campaign, of ending federal raids on medical marijuana facilities. Please see to it that these raids end.

These raids are part of a federal program that does not work, and I will hold you, too, to your pledge to end programs that do not work. The program I refer to is the so-called War on Drugs, which is better described as a War on Some Drugs.

I am continually amazed at the stupidity represented by our national drugs policy. Our policies do not serve national interests - they serve special interests. Our drug policies are anti-democratic, authoritarian and wasteful. Our drug policies create scofflaws. Our drug policies create and exacerbate problems in and for other countries.

National drugs policy is just about the stupidest goddamned thing I've ever seen. Please stop the waste and the intrusions into people's lives. Please end medical marijuana raids.

Sincerely,

Steve Sturgill in Phoenix

MLK

.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Nice Pictures

My best wishes and congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Obama. I hope that those who say Mr. Obama has the makings of a great president are right, and I think they might well be.

I have a feeling that Mrs. Obama will make a fine First Lady.

Nice pictures.

LEAP - Press Releases › Congress Threatens El Paso Over Drug Legalization Debate

LEAP - Press Releases › Congress Threatens El Paso Over Drug Legalization Debate

An El Paso City Council resolution was amended to include the words, "supporting an honest, open, national debate on ending the prohibition on narcotics."

The resolution was vetoed by the Mayor, whose excuse was concern over the loss of Federal funds.

The Mayor and Council received a letter from Congressman Silvestre Reyes, and another letter from a group of Texas state representatives, as stated in the LEAP post linked above. I don't know if I would have read a threat into these letters, but in the language of the politician maybe a threat was exactly the intent.

What stands out to me is the text of the letter to the Mayor and Council of El Paso by Texas State Representatives Pickett, Quintanilla, Moody, Chavez and Marquez. Whether or not the letter conveys a threat, it certainly conveys stupidity. How in the world these Texas State Representatives got from

supporting an honest, open, national debate on ending the prohibition on narcotics

to

ask[ing] the federal government to legalize narcotics ... says "we give up and we don't care"

is beyond me.

Our national drug policy is the stupidest goddamn thing I've ever seen.

Clarence Page: Our Drug War Next Door

Clarence Page: Our Drug War Next Door:

When you step back and take a broad look at Mexico's growing carnage, it's easy to see why El Paso's city leaders think legalization doesn't look so bad. Mexico's drug problem is not the drugs. It is the illegality of the drugs.

Legalization is not the perfect solution. But treating currently illegal drugs in the way we treat liquor and other legal addictive substances would provide regulation, tax revenue and funds for rehabilitation programs. Most satisfying, it would wipe a lot of smiles off the current drug lords' faces.

Yes. What he said.

Our national drug policy is the stupidest goddamn thing I've ever seen.

TinEye Reverse Image Search

TinEye Reverse Image Search

Well, I'm impressed.

Yesterday I read about TinEye on Cool Tools. This afternoon I found that my wife had forwarded to me an email she received, which contained this picture.



I thought the picture was funny, remembered the piece in Cool Tools, went back to the reader and clicked the TinEye link. After signing up for the service, I took a screen shot of the picture and uploaded it. In about a second they came back with 30 or 40 matches, which can be sorted various ways.

You can either upload an image or provide a URL to a picture already on the Internet.

They have a feature that allows you to toggle between the version of the picture you uploaded (or linked) and the versions they found on the Internet, so that you can do a flip flip comparison of picture quality. I'm not sure how valid that is given that all the images are presented in one size, whereas the pixel counts and aspect ratios vary. The result I got was that the screenshot version I uploaded was better than any of the larger-pixel-count versions they found. Maybe that's because I told SnagIt to make a high-quality jpeg file rather than standard.

If they don't make a match, the answer why is presented right there, which says that it's probably because they have only indexed 1.1 billion photos so far. Seems like a billion is such a small number nowadays...

In the privacy statement they say they don't add any pictures you upload for comparison to any index, and I guess they don't keep it. I didn't really care, but that's good. Of course, merchants are not supposed to keep your credit card's security number either.

Interesting site. I hope they succeed. I wonder what their business model will be. Photographer's copyright protection maybe?

Inaugural Invitation

It's a commemorative invitation, not an event ticket, but it's still pretty cool.



Heavy card stock, embossed emblem, but mostly it's the name Obama that makes it memorable.

I think I'll keep it.

Ten Minute Minchin Storm Poem

YouTube

Pick five, any five

What Matters Most to You?:

The National Academies want to develop websites, podcasts, and printed information featuring the topics in science, engineering, and medicine that concern you the most, and that you’d like to understand better. Please take a few moments to let us know what you think.

The survey takes only 2 minutes. Your opinion counts!

Brain Boosting FAQ: What You Must Know

Brain Boosting FAQ: What You Must Know

Polls suggest that as many as one in five scientists already take brain-boosting drugs -- usually the stimulants Ritalin, Adderall, or Provigil.

And there's nothing wrong with that, suggest the authors of a provocative editorial in this week's issue of the science journal Nature.

"We call for a presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs," they write. The editorial also calls for further research into the risks and benefits of using drugs in this way.

It's a prominent list of authors:
...

I'm no scientist, but I am my own ethicist, so I went to my doctor a couple of months ago and asked him for a prescription for Provigil, which I wanted in order to check out the anti-sleepiness effect and the cognitive boost. Mostly the latter. He said No, it wasn't indicated, and he was cautions about the possibility of severe side effects, as small as the odds may be.

"Get more sleep," he told me. Yeah, I know, but that's just not working out. Not enough time in the day to do the things I want to do.

Oh, well...

Is it cheating or unnatural to use brain-boosting drugs?

Yes, say critics such as Leon R. Kass, MD, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics. It is cheating. But even worse, it's unnatural.

"One major trouble with biotechical (especially mental) 'improvers' is that they produce changes in us by disrupting the normal character of human being-at-work-in-the-world ... which, when find and full, constitutes human flourishing," Kass wrote in 2003. "With biotechnical interventions that skip the realm of intelligible meaning, we cannot really own the transformations nor experience them as genuinely ours."

This loss, Kass argues, subtracts from our humanity.

Bullshit, Dr. Kass. Bullshit.

KopBusters- Barry Cooper goes undercover to expose Odessa Police :: Dallas Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog

KopBusters- Barry Cooper goes undercover to expose Odessa Police :: Dallas Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog

Good for Barry Cooper! More power to Barry Cooper!

I think I'll show some support. It'll have to be later, though, because his shopping site is down due to high traffic as I type. I hope it's due to many new supporters surfing to Cooper's web site, not because of some authoritarian schmuck's denial of service attack.

More.

Conscientious Objector to ONDCP's "Moral Seriousness"

Hit & Run > John Walters' Well-Kept Secret: 'Our Drug Policy Is a Success' - Reason Magazine

"The good news in drug policy," Walters writes, "is that we know what works, and that is moral seriousness." Moral seriousness on this subject would require taking into account half a million nonviolent drug offenders behind bars, the victims of black market violence, avoidable deaths caused by the unreliable quality and unsanitary practices that prohibition fosters, the risk-premium subsidy to thugs and terrorists, the corruption of law enforcement officials, and the loss of civil liberties resulting from the drug war's perversion of the Constitution. Walters' claim to moral seriousness is therefore hard to take seriously. I'd settle for a little bit of intellectual seriousness from whomever Barack Obama chooses to succeed Walters, but it seems to be incompatible with the job.

Yesterday I happened upon the John Walters piece in the online WSJ that Jacob Sullum responds to above. The claim to moral seriousness by Mr. Walters jumped out at me immediately and filled me with contempt and disrespect.

Our national drug policy is the stupidest goddamn thing I've ever seen.

I am a conscientious objector in the War on Some Drugs.

Appeals court rules no jury trial for strippers

Appeals court rules no jury trial for strippers | Arizona Politics | eastvalleytribune.com

Hmmm... Let's see...

People accused of violating city ordinances ... are not entitled to ... a jury, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled Thursday.

... The judges said the right to trial by jury is not available to everyone.

...

... two sections of the Arizona Constitution guarantee the right of a trial by jury. But he said those provisions are not absolute.

One governs only crimes which were eligible for jury trials when Arizona became a state in 1912. The other covers crimes the Legislature or whoever adopted the law considered "serious," regardless of the punishment available.

...

As to the issue of whether the crime is "serious," Thompson said the general rule of thumb is that no right of a jury trial exists for misdemeanors which have a punishment of no greater than six months in jail. That is the maximum penalty for the charges at issue here.

...

Six months in jail sounds pretty damned serious to me. In any event, if it's not serious, why is all this time and money being tied up in dealing with it. Are there no truly serious issues at hand?

Damned puritans...
.
.
.

Light Echo Mind Warp

NASA's APOD site featured a four-frame animated GIF of this sequence of shots back in 2003. Yesterday, the Boston Globe's Big Shot feed featured a larger, five-frame version at the top of their growing Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar 2008.



What appears to be a spectacular explosion, complete with ejected matter, is actually a "light echo".

(By the way, I snagged the pictures in this post from this HubbleSite news release and included them here for better flow.)

Light echo? What seemed, at first, to be a pretty simple concept, got more complicated the more I thought about it. Eventually I just let it go, but now I think I've got it.

OK, the basic idea of a light echo is pretty simple. Shine a flashlight on something and see the light echo off of it. Look at the night sky and see the sun's light echo off of the moon. Simple, so what was my problem?

The star V838 Mons had been observed producing a tremendous burst of light, like a strobe flashing light in all directions. Once. Think of an old-time flash bulb.



I could easily envision a spherical shell of light expanding outwards from the central source. Obviously, when that thin, expanding shell of light encounters something, it illuminates it for the duration of the original flash, and then the shell moves on. Whatever we see in these dramatic images, we see thanks to the original, central flash of light echoing off of the matter it encounters as its thin, sperical shell expands at the speed of light.

Once I accepted the notion that what we see is not ejecta from an explosion, but rather, illumination of matter that was already there, things got a little bit clearer.

But wait! How could it be that, whereas we'd already seen the original light pass the Earth's position some time back, now we're seeing that same light bounced off of matter surrounding the star from whence said light came?

Well, light that bounced off of something before it reached you had to take a longer path, so it took longer to get here.

Yes, but look at the image. We're seeing light supposedly bounced off a shell of matter surrounding the flash star, which is presumably at the center of the illuminated matter. The distance from Earth to the star is much, much greater than the apparent distance from one edge of the illuminated matter back to the central flash point. How could the expanding shell of light have illuminated that surrounding matter that we see in the images after we've long since seen the original flash from the star? Something didn't seem to make sense to me.

What I had failed to assimilate is the concept illustrated below:



The matter off of which the light from the flash is echoing (the reason we can see it) is actually only coming from a small part of the spherical shell of light from the original flash, the part behind the star that flashed. The distance from edge to edge of the image we see is defined by an almost flat, circular disc within the thickness of the spherical shell (which thickness is the duration of the original flash times the speed of light). The reason it's an almost flat disk is that all of the light in the image had to arrive at the Hubble at about the same time, which means it must have originated at the intersection of the two spheres defined by the flash sphere and the sphere defined by the distance from the Hubble to the back edge of the flash sphere (which is essentially a plain within the tiny piece of that much larger sphere).

Maybe I can draw a picture to illustrate this, but it'll have to be later.

I feel SO much better now that I think I have a decent understanding of this "light echo" business. The picture is not of traveling ejecta, and it is not of interstellar matter surrounding the flash star. The picture is of matter behind the flash star that was illuminated by the original flash. The distance from the flash star to the back surface of the spherical shell of flashed light, and then back to the flash star (on its way to the Hubble), defines the difference in time between the original flash and its echo as seen here on Earth by the Hubble Space Telescope.

I'll have to try to wordsmith this a bit more, but later. Stuff to take care of now.

Amazing stuff.