War Room - Salon.com... I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man,' Carter told NBC News' Brian Williams. 'I live in the South, and I've seen the South come a long way, and I've seen the rest of the country that share the South's attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African Americans. And that racism inclination still exists. And I think it's bubbled up to the surface because of the belief of many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It's an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply....
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Jimmy Carter
Climate change deniers: fame is its own reward
This professor of denial can't even answer his own questions on climate change| George Monbiot
... There is nothing unusual about Professor Plimer. Most of the prominent climate change deniers who are not employed solely by the fossil fuel industry have a similar profile: men whose professional careers are about to end or have ended already. Attacking climate science looks like a guaranteed formula for achieving the public recognition they have either lost or never possessed. Such people will keep emerging for as long as the media are credulous enough to take them seriously...
Monday, September 14, 2009
Tech churn: The Franklin Planner and Google Calendar
In the too brief glory days of the Palm, between the Palm III and the Vx, my wife used a Palm III and the Palm Desktop.
Then Palm added color and died.
I fought on to the bloody end, but Emily was wiser. She returned to the Franklin Planners we’d started using in 1994, when life got too messy for Letts of London.
Alas, we live now in the tech churn days of regency – when the old is gone and the young are unready. Change unwanted is upon us and the change we want is not yet ready.
Franklin’s business market has fallen to the BlackBerry and Exchange Server, and their home market is tempted by cheaper solutions, and – painfully – iPhones. Their web site is decrepit, their offerings increasingly disorganized. They appear to be going the way of the wrist watch.
So goes the aged, but the replacements are unready. We’re not going to run Exchange Server at home, and Apple’s calendaring products are, to put it diplomatically, hideous failures. Google’s alternatives are the best of the lot, by which I mean they are barely acceptable if you’re an uber-geek.
Which I am, so we have a solution. In two weeks Emily’s cursed BlackBerry Pearl contract concludes, she’ll get my iPhone 3G, and I’ll get the new contract 3GS*. She’ll likely complement her gCal/Calendar.app pair with a wall calendar and a wire bound notebook.
The Franklin Planner will move into history, but I bet she’ll miss it – especially when Google-Apple wars blow our calendaring out of the water.
Tech churn means that it will be ten years before it’s all somewhat seamless again.
* Yes, I get my new phone off her contract and she gets my aging 3G. Sorry. In the words of Sméagol … “My preciousssss”. [1]
Update 9/26/09: I lied. Emily, you see, reads my blog. She got the new phone in a lovely black blue case, and she was quite delighted. After playing with the fully prepped and loaded 3GS for a few minutes she went into deep future shock. She has a new appreciation for Apple's Satanic genius.
Pooping prions - this is more than interesting
Study Gives Insight Into Spread of Chronic Wasting Disease - NYTimes.comSo what's the chance that this is the only instance of fecal-oral Prion disease in all of history?
... Researchers are reporting that they have solved a longstanding mystery about the rapid spread of a fatal brain infection in deer, elk and moose in the Midwest and West.
The infectious agent, which leads to chronic wasting disease, is spread in the feces of infected animals long before they become ill, according to a study published online Wednesday by the journal Nature. The agent is retained in the soil, where it, along with plants, is eaten by other animals, which then become infected.
The finding explains the extremely high rates of transmission among deer, said the study’s lead author, Dr. Stanley B. Prusiner, director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of California, San Francisco.
First identified in deer in Colorado in 1967, the disease is now found throughout 14 states and 2 Canadian provinces. It leads to emaciation, staggering and death.
Unlike other animals, Dr. Prusiner said, deer give off the infectious agent, a form of protein called a prion, from lymph tissue in their intestinal linings up to a year before they develop the disease. By contrast, cattle that develop a related disease, mad cow, do not easily shed prions into the environment but accumulate them in their brains and spinal tissues.
There is no evidence to date that humans who hunt, kill and eat deer have developed chronic wasting disease. Nor does the prion that causes it pass naturally to other animal species in the wild....
... In captive herds, up to 90 percent of animals develop the disease, Dr. Prusiner said. In wild herds, a third of animals can be infected...
... prions tended to bind to clay in soil and to persist indefinitely. When deer graze on infected dirt, prions that are tightly bound to clay will persist for long periods in their intestinal regions. So there is no chance chronic wasting disease will be eradicated, he said. Outside the laboratory, nothing can inactivate prions bound to soil. They are also impervious to radiation.
Global finance and parasites
- Without real reform we can expect that banks will continue to pick investor's pockets -- including the pockets of their own shareholders.
- There'll be a mega-Recession every 7 to 10 years and we'll read more about 19th century "cycles".
- Traditional "value investing" will become a chump's game.
- Investors will look to well regulated markets in Europe and Canada, forsaking London and the United States.
Surprise - physicians are big Obama supporters
Poll Finds Most Doctors Support Public Option : NPRThis is only "surprising" if you think the AMA, which more or less supports insurance reform, represents physicians.
... a new survey finds some surprising results: A large majority of doctors say there should be a public option.
When polled, "nearly three-quarters of physicians supported some form of a public option, either alone or in combination with private insurance options," says Dr. Salomeh Keyhani. She and Dr. Alex Federman, both internists and researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, conducted a random survey, by mail and by phone, of 2,130 doctors. They surveyed them from June right up to early September.
Most doctors — 63 percent — say they favor giving patients a choice that would include both public and private insurance. That's the position of President Obama and of many congressional Democrats. In addition, another 10 percent of doctors say they favor a public option only; they'd like to see a single-payer health care system. Together, the two groups add up to 73 percent...
Montreal style rent-a-bike coming to Minneapolis?
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYLYyAvrEH4LqFO8XrPC5H6N5-meCCP41xIio0ideaI-bKvbhiPLAsx0bSRdiyrOhoTZh-pFMyTGI32ppr21Q3mPqF_uj6sv0-b_P2KYS3a135WygKTnQZHQ8JrgLBqCb2AQ/s320/RentABike.jpg)
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Birthers, Deathers and Truthers - the reason behind the madness
Friday, September 11, 2009
Pawlenty's humorous political move - opting out of health care
If he were, this bit of inside humor would finish him ...
Pawlenty: It's "A Viable Option" To Invoke State Sovereignty, Keep Minnesota Out of Health Care Reform | TPMDCPawlenty would be commuting by helicopter if he ever did anything so stupid, but it's not going to happen.Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN), a possible presidential candidate in 2012, is now indicating that he could invoke state sovereignty and prevent his home state of Minnesota from participating in a federal health care reform effort if one passes, Minnesota Public Radio reports.
"Depending on what the federal government comes out with here, asserting the 10th Amendment may be a viable option," Pawlenty said, when asked about it by a caller on a Republican Governors Association conference call. "But we don't know the details. As one of the other callers said, we can't get the President to outline what he does or doesn't support in any detail. So we'll have to see, I would have to say that it's a possibility."
Pawlenty made it clear that he and other Republican governors will be more assertive about the 10th Amendment: "I think we can see hopefully see a resurgence in claims and maybe even bring up lawsuits if need be."
The same view -- properly called nullification, a doctrine dating back to the pre-Civil War days in the South -- had previously been expressed by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
The Speech
Why do I think he'll win?Dear Democratic Senators:I'm going to do this. Oppose me and I'll take you with me to the grave. Stick with me and you might live.
Monday, September 07, 2009
The good side of the Wiki - search
Sunday, September 06, 2009
Death of email part XI: forwarded emails with big red phishing warnings
For reasons that aren't worth trying to describe, I've used an email redirector for some of these accounts. This is forwarding at the domain level, not forwarding from an email account.
This used to work pretty well, but when I tested it on a new account two problems appeared:
- It was filtered to Google spam.
- A BIG RED PHISHING warning appeared when I opened the email.
This is a great example of the tech churn meme I wrote of yesterday. Email is in a troubled state as it painfully moves from the old world of the naive net to the new world of authenticated messaging [2].
This redirect mechanism is clearly not going to work, perhaps because the redirecting domain has been used by spammers in forged email headers [3].
Ouch. This is definitely a problem. I have some workaround ideas, but this will be a bugger to test since Google doesn't talk much about what it's doing.
--
[1] Free edition. If google drops the price on their small business product I'd upgrade to get some customer support options.
[2] One reason people like facebook messaging is that it's deeply authenticated.
[3] The curse of old, private, domains. Mine is very old. There's no defense against such forgery. See also two 2006 posts about a related problem (this isn't new)
Saturday, September 05, 2009
Google storage isn't so free any more ...
Friday, September 04, 2009
Baseball parent communication: is it getting easier?
1910 (2)
- Letter
- Handout (person present)
- Home phone (both parents)
- Work phone (father)
- Home phone (father) + answering machine
- Home phone (mother) + answering machine
- Work phone (mother) + answering machine
- Home email (father)
- Home email (mother)
- Work email (father)
- Work email (mother)
- Mobile phone (m/f) + answering machine
- Web page
- Blog with feed
- Facebook page
- Google group or similar
- Google Voice
- SMS
- MMS
- Instant Messaging (multiple variants)
- Other email (m/f)
- and many more ...
Yeah, right.
Writing as a kid baseball coach, I'm guessing 1950 was probably the heyday of parental communication. Back then phone trees more or less worked and families were forced to more or less live in the same space. This year it was damned near impossible -- perhaps due to the profusion of communication channels, the increasingly failure of email (spam, message loss, account turnover) the disruption of employment changes (phone changes, lost mobile phone, etc), the failure of the feed reader, and the virus infestations that have disabled many XP-based home computers.
We tried to use a blog (so web access + feed) supplemented with email and, when pressed, a phone call (inevitably to a voice mail that seemed to be rarely checked). It didn't really work, but I"m not sure what would.
When it comes to communication, we're in full throttle tech churn. There's no common, standard communication channel that reaches a diverse group of people. We had one parent on Twitter, a few that checked their email somewhat reliably, perhaps 1-2 who would visit the web page, and several that were fairly unreachable.
I'm betting that we've reached an apotheosis of communication of communication dysfunction. Communication is important, and, sooner or later, people are going to figure out that we need fewer, better, options.
Alas, I suspect we won't get back to the highpoint of the 1950s for decades to come ...
Armstrong admits moon landing faked!!
Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked | Aug 31, 2009
Apollo 11 mission commander and famed astronaut Neil Armstrong shocked reporters at a press conference Monday, announcing he had been convinced that his historic first step on the moon was part of an elaborate hoax orchestrated by the United States government...The best part is that apparently some people read this Onion spoof as fact. A delicious hit. (Sorry for the late post on this, I was on holiday when it was published. Just glad I got to read it.)