Plastic has an article called A Circle Jerk Of L33t 8ull5h1t, which is about the increasing tendency of a portion of the computing culture to use an extremely abbreviated shorthand typing language to communicate electronically. To some, like the author of o my fkng gd, this is an abhorrent bastardization of the English language. That’s almost an oxymoron, though, isn’t it? English is probably one of the least consistent, bastardized languages already. Where do you think ‘quake, shake, quiver,... [More]

Bush Vs. World On Int’l Treaty On Women’s Rights on Plastic covers a Washington Post article, Senate Panel to Defy Bush, Vote on Women’s Treaty.

“Bush doesn’t really stand alone in his opposition … even though his own State Department supports this treaty. He also has the company of “Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar”; and domestic allies including Attorney General John Ashcroft, Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America, the Heritage... [More]”

And for more than just the usual reasons of getting your mail delivered through the evil empire. This time, they’re deleting your mail without warning as ZDNet point out in Microsoft begins to clean out Hotmail “[a]s part of a series of new storage policies aimed at driving more people toward its paid services”.

So, in addition to Microsoft changing their privacy policy every couple of weeks by adding some extra vendor-sharing checkboxes to their preferences, then selecting them as ‘on’ by... [More]

The invitations to Marco and Kathy’s wedding have been sent on schedule. The Hochzeit site has been improved and a new theme “Hochzeit” has been added (and selected as the default for that part of the site).

AlterNet has an interview with Gore Vidal called The Last Defender of the American Republic?. The interview covers the publication of his latest book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated and explains the reasoning behind his stance of anti-imperialism and answers the notion that “[s]ome might take that to be a suggestion that America had it coming on September 11.” The answer is logical. The people don’t deserve it, but the government certainly brought it on us. The answer... [More]

Page 130 − “It was not until the instant of this experience that I understood what he had meant by the ‘wordless truth’. It happened, yet I cannot describe it.” − Chenoeh

Page 162 − “[The military] believe that by risking death they pay the price of any violent behavior against enemies of their own choosing. They have the invader mentality. [They] don’t believe [themselves] responsible for anything done against aliens.” − Leto II

Page 196 − “The mind imposes this framework which it calls... [More]”

Page 123 − “At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new... [More]”

Page 68 − “All of us are descendants of people who did nasty things, Rabbi. Remember, it is the victors who breed. … victory is sometimes acheived at a moral price. … Barbarism is not even the proper word for some of the evil things our ancestors did.” − Jessica, Jewish Wild Reverend Mother

Page 78 − “Rules are often an excuse to ignore compassion” − Odrade

Page 103 − “Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so... [More]”

GM’s Billion-Dollar Bet on Wired.com is about GM’s bold plans for a fuel-cell vehicle by 2010, long before other major rivals expect to be forced by oil shortages to change their fleet. In short, GM sees opportunity in fuel-cells because it allows them to design a car that requires far less tooling, less design and fewer moving parts than the internal combustion dinosaurs we think are advanced now.

The car itself will be quite different from cars today simply because the move to fuel cells... [More]

The “Corporate Ethics” Red Herring by Matt Vidal on CounterPunch examines in more depth the fallacy of free market capitalism in use today throughout the world, but most fanatically in the U.S. The President’s (and most other legislator’s) pinning of the blame for the latest huge corporate scandals on select individuals is a simplistic interpretation at best, and a deliberately disengenuous one at worst. “This classic bourgeois response—an obsessive focus on individuals and personal... [More]”

…world crashes into sun. Mark Morford of the SF Gate announced in Britain Gets Quietly Stoned… that Britain has indeed joined most of the rest of Europe in that they will no longer “waste all that time and all those resources and moneys on busting casual potheads for no reason”. Of course, his immediate take on it is that it just points up the increasingly puritan, wrongheaded drug policies of the U.S.

The U.S. drug war has more and more the markings of something that the administration is... [More]

Check out the Bass Harbor, Maine 2002 album. Gary hasn’t contributed his pictures yet, but I wanted get an album for a vacation finished in less than a week from the end of the trip itself. I’m sure he’ll have pictures to contribute later, but these are my pictures (and journals) for now. As always, there’s a calendar for easy browsing and a Print Preview if you just want to look at the whole album (just click the print button in the bottom right on the screen that comes up).

Kath and Marco’s wedding will of course be enhanced by online functionality. There’s an online guest list, with real-time updates of registered guests (whether yea or nay). You can search that list, or use the handy search tool to find people and R.S.V.P. yourself. The hand-crafted (digitally) invitations are also online for you to look at.

Bush acting as imperial president on SeattlePI is an editorial from Helen Thomas, one of the most experienced members of the White House Press Corps. This is the reaction of someone who’s seen a lot of Presidents and senators come and go and she’s scared by the direction we’re headed. It’s not just one thing, but the combination of policies that express an evil intent that isn’t what the U.S. should be. Most of the power in the U.S. is consolidating in the executive branch and “[t]he imperial... [More]”

Ars Technica has a Satellite Radio Review. It discusses availability, content, and pricing. There are currently two providers in the market, XM Radio and Sirius. The technology behind it is quite involved, with XM Radio supporting a “100,000 Sq. Ft. broadcasting facility in Washington DC”. The whole enterprise is enormously expensive:

“Sirius radio operates three birds all at Geo-Sync orbit as well. When you add up the cost for digital audio storage, encoders, multiplexers, modems, satellite... [More]”

You may start to hear more about this phenomenon called ‘warchalking’ sooner of later. With the increase in wireless internet access, users with a lot of extra bandwidth are wondering how to let others know what sort of access is available in the area. Enter warchalking. Business Week has the article A Wireless End Run Around ISPs discussing how this trend started, some symbols to recognize and possible future usage or problems.

Advocates of a free internet have been creating their own... [More]

The Great Florida Ex-Con Game… by Gregory Palast, originally published in Harper’s Magazine, reopens the supposedly settled and recounted case of the 2000 U.S. Presidential election. With all of the talk of President Bush’s financial history and his run-ins with the SEC, which he deems “old news” (Bush: It’s Old News… in the New York Newsday), perhaps this examination of some of the tactics used in Florida will also be consigned to history. There are some interesting bits in here, though,... [More]

All Too Flat is hosting a unique search service called Google Mirror. Everything on the page is reversed, including the results page, if you get any. You have to type in your search result backwards too. You have to try it see how trippy it is to use a web page backwards. After a while, you’ll start to be able to read it just fine. Or not.

This article, on Ars Technica was incredibly positive about “Universal Music, the largest of the world’s big five record labels, [releasing] about 1,000 of its hard-to-find back catalog albums through its online music subscription subsidiary, EMusic.com”. They refer to an article on SFGate that first broke the news, Universal Music provides alternative to file sharing…

For those of you that are into music and are having trouble finding good-quality music on Gnutella, this looks like a viable,... [More]

A Guide To Metric Time… seen on Slashdot in Isn’t it Time for Metric Time? discusses a proposed system for converting to base-ten time. As if the U.S. doesn’t have enough problems converting to metric measurement, except curiously for soda containers, here comes a new proposal sure not to be adopted.

“Metric Time (MT) is an attempt to create a decimalized time system for our modern base-10 using world. This is a neglected part of the Metric System (or SI) which has created a whole measuring... [More]”

US To UN: We Won’t See You In Court on Plastic mentions recent U.S. moves to pull out of U.N. peacekeeping missions if their soldiers are not granted immunity from prosecution. The expressed reason is to avoid “politically motivated prosecutions of its officials or soldiers.” The real reason is probably the oft-mentioned ‘sometimes war just isn’t pretty’ mantra.

The express purpose of the ICC is a noble enough goal:

“…to help put an end to the past century’s cycle of impunity for the most... [More]”

Serious Lego is dedicated to inventions using the “Lego Mindstorms” robot-building kits. This person, JP Brown has built the most incredible creatures using just Legos and the Mindstorms kits. One of the more impressive ones is the CubeSolver, which uses a WebCam and custom color-recognition software written in C++ and VB5 that solves a standard 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube by itself!

There are a lot of other models on this site, including K9, a dog that plays fetch, HanoiSolver, a robot that solves the... [More]

Serious LegoAndrew Lipson has a site of Lego sculptures, of which some are Mathematical Lego (TM) Sculptures. It’s pretty stunning what people do with Legos out there, and there are a lot of fan sites. Henry Lim’s Lego Sculptures has a Stegosaurus that stands about 5 feet high. Another guy, Eric Harshbarger, built a desk out of legos. A lot of these guys use the tools and community found at LDraw, where you can find CAD-like tools for designing LEGO structure without the bricks.

It becomes increasingly obvious that the current state of the U.S. economy is so bad largely because the sensibilities of the average U.S. citizen, though previously thought infinitely malleable, have finally been stretched to the breaking point. Even satire and comedic places of refuge that ordinarily hide their opinions behind jokes are applying a thinner veneer to their feelings these days.

Two articles by some oft-quoted (at least here) satire sites come extremely close to simply... [More]

There’s a lot of it about these days, as top administrations officials fall, predictably, under the mildly scrutinous eye of a vaguely interested press. There’s plenty of it from two different directions: one is spreading it around about attacking Iraq, which is apparently a gateway to Hell, and the other is spreading more rumors of terrorist attacks that never happen and/or are completely made up, with no facts to support them, but which a pretty large part of the American populace still lends... [More]

Received through email.

A friend told me the following story about a former Enron accountant who gave up his CPA position to become a farmer. The first thing he decided to do was to buy a mule.

He dickers with a local farmer at the general store, and they agree that the local will sell the accountant a mule for $100. The Enron accountant gives the man $100 cash, and the man agrees to deliver the mule the next day.

Next morning, the man shows up at the Enron accountant’s place without the... [More]

They Might Be Giants has a web site promoting their new album, No!, The First Album for the Whole Family. It has 30 seconds of each track on the album, 4 of which are accompanied by very cute little joyful games to play along with the music. The robot one is my favorite. Pass the mouse over the little ones and they wave their flags; click on them and they take off and land with parachutes. Click on the big robot to make him do stuff; his armpits shoot off fireworks. The No! one is pretty good... [More]

The Register has Corporates! Give your PCs to Africa, a drive by Computer Aid International to get corporations to donate their “end-of-life PCs” to a good cause.

“In the West, organisations consign millions of usable PCs to the scrap heap each year. … End-of-life PCs are worthless to most companies − but invaluable to school children. Companies have written down the value of their redundant computers to nil, and all they see is a headache in getting rid of their old kit. We can take care of... [More]”

AIDS Will Cut Life Expectancy Below 40 In 11 African Countries is a discussion on Plastic about the article Africans ‘faced with extinction’… on the National Post (Canada). One comment in the discussion, But How Many Of Them Actually Have AIDS??? points out that the World Health Organization’s definition of AIDS is the “Bangui definition”, which can often diagnose AIDS where it is probably, in fact, Dysentary, Turburculosis, Malaria, generalized Kaposi sarcoma or cryptococcal meningitis.
... [More]

Opera Software has a recent press announcement, Opera strikes accord with Macromedia…, which announces that future Macromedia products for the MacOS will use the embedded Opera engine to render pages.

“Opera will deliver a full-featured, embeddable version of its desktop browser to be integrated into a wide range of Macromedia Web development products. … Opera and Macromedia will work together to develop and maintain an application programming interface (API) for an embedded browser on the... [More]”