« April 2003 | Main | June 2003 »
This news story is very encouraging.
[T]he oldest man in Germany, turned 110 on Tuesday saying the only exercise he ever believed in was walking to the corner shop to buy beer and cigars.
"If I had known I was going to live this long I would have taken better care of myself," he said.
Yeah, like driving to get the beer and cigars instead of doing all that walking.
Now, with this handy validator, you can rest assured that your site is buzzword compliant and on the radar screen, even as paradigms are shifting all around you.
UPDATE: Here's how I scored. Not bad if I do say so myself.
Since the Nigerian scam spam keeps coming, why not get in on the action. Here’s a tempting junket, the 3rd annual Nigerian E-Mail Conference hosted at the beautiful five star Abuja Sheraton Hotel.
Registration is easy: just send your bank account numbers and the organizers will transfer the appropriate funds. Don't miss this chance. They'll be "Looking forward to your favourably reply."
Forget the Greenbush line, and the widening of Route 3. This is the solution to traffic on the South Shore. No more traffic jams around the Spacely Sprocket factory either.
I missed this article from the NYTimes last week about photologs. Speaking of which, I’ve posted some new photos here.
A Starbucks manager somewhere in South Carolina started this controversy by trying to confiscate the camera of a customer who was taking pictures in the store, apparently against a company policy. Larry Lessig featured the story (including a link to a photographer’s rights page) and now a site has popped up for posting photos taken inside Starbucks. After all this, it turns out that there is no company policy against taking photos in Starbucks.
But it is interesting to see just how many Starbucks there are out there. Who drinks all that coffee? (Hers's one possibiity.)
I just got back from Spain and there were stores in Madrid and Barcelona. There are photos on the above site taken in Starbucks in Japan and China. The company site lists stores in Bahrain, Malaysia, Austria, Greece, Israel, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand and Mexico, among many others. None in France, curiously. Maybe Tom Friedman should update his theory to no two countries with a Starbucks have gone to war with each other (although both China and Taiwan each have franchises.)
Here's what a page linking to this one says about me:
I ran that through the translator at Altavista and this is what it said...
- [ English ] wave loyal retainer? A little more than? Shadow?
Is that good? Who knows, but I'm sure it's better then those wacky Indymedia links I was getting a while back.
Here's an interesting attempt to break the light speed limit reported in The Economist:
Parts of a light wave can be accelerated beyond this speed by passing the wave through a vial of energetic potassium atoms. On the face of it, this contradicts Einstein's special theory of relativity. So, rather than saying as Einstein did that nothing can be faster than the speed of light in a vacuum (abbreviated as c), physicists now prefer a more precise version: information cannot travel faster than c.
Ultimately, Einstein wins out, but Tony S at Technically Speaking (a great new blog) thinks that eventually Einstein will end up like Ptolemy who's earth-centered universe was also long considered the conventional wisdom.
Others have looked at light's speed as being less than inviolate, including Joao Magueijo who's Variant Speed of Light theory is explained in his book, Faster Than the Speed of Light. It's an interesting book, although Magueijo comes off as a real jerk. His theory, conceived in the throes of a hangover, challenges inflation as an explanation for the behavior in the early universe.
A better science book in the stores now is Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order, by Steven Strogatz. I didn't completely get the connection between the different kinds of synchronized behaviors he described, although each in itself was interesting. The chapter on circadian rhythms and sleep disorders was worth the price of the book alone.
Results are in for the weekend elections in Spain. It had been suggested that President Aznar’s support for the war in Iraq would hurt conservative candidates, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. The conservative Popular Party took local elections in Burgos, Granada and Madrid, beating socialist challengers.
Although Aznar was not up for reelection, the local elections were seen as a referendum on the president’s support for the Iraq war. Even in Catalonia (near the French border), where anti-war, anti-US and anti-Bush graffiti is everywhere, the conservatives held their ground, even gaining in Barcelona.
Scientists say that personality changes over time. The Berkeley study indicating that people change over the years will be in the May issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. (My wife wants to know about the trendline for grouchiness.)
Finding a wireless network in Madrid is pretty easy. Yesterday, I started the laptop at a café and was surprised to find a wireless network available.
There was nothing in any of the directories that indicated that I could find free wi-fi access here. In fact this page says that there are more access points in Latvia than Spain. But there it was.
Then this morning, I tried again at another café and there were two networks available. So, of course, I chose the fastest and uploaded some photos. Hopefully the rest of the country is as accessible.
More wandering around Madrid. Stopped by the Contemporary Art Museum. The highpoint was the Picassos.
There is still lots of anti-war and anti-American grafitti in some parts of Madrid. Almost all of it has been washed down, but you can still make out some anti-Bush and anti-Americanisms. But nearby, Planet Hollywood is doing a great business, so it can't be a big deal.
Blogging now from a 1.2euro per hour internet cafe. Hoping to find a wireless place so I can use the more familiar keyboard layout. What a nightlife this place has. And great food too.
In Slate, Jack Shafer says that the best indicator that WMD will be found in Iraq is that Seymour Hersh says they won't. He notes that Hersh has been consistently wrong in his New Yorker blockbuster stories.
This is a sport that I can really get into. A Clash of the Titans drinking contest among some of the greats.
In the semi-finals, Charles "The Battlin' Barfly" Bukowski decimated William "The Souse From the South" Faulkner in 20 rounds. But can he beat Jackie "The Jolly Juicer" Gleason? I don't know, but my money's on the Barfly.
Salam Pax, the blogger from Baghdad is back, kind of. He has emailed out journal excerpts from March 24th on. He catches up on the bombing of Baghdad, confusing media reports, the sandstorm, and civilians chashing Fedyaeen out of the neighborhoods with rocks and sticks, among other things.
There was some doubt as to his authenticity a while back. But apparently he and some friends met with John Burns from the NY Times in Baghdad. Burns was looking for interpreters and they stayed for an interview and conversation. So Burns may be able to confirm the details of the conversation and the mystery of Salam Pax may yet be solved.
Meanwhile, anonymous blogging seems to be catching on. And as this Wired story about a blog by an heiress on the run to avoid an arranged marriage notes, it doesn't matter whether it's real or not if it's engaging reading. This could be a new form of serialized storytelling.
Adrian Walker is helping to build public pressure to reopen a case that he thinks was an embarrassment because it was affected by public pressure.
Apparently, riding a Segway in New York is no bargain. You can't get to where you're going because of all the questions and people who want a ride. I've seen two privately owned Segways on the street, one in New York, near the Apple Store in So Ho, and another in Norwood MA. And at $5000 it's not likely I'll see too many more than that around.
Mexico declared its independence from mother Spain on midnight, the 15th of September, 1810. But it took 11 years before the first Spanish soldiers were told and forced to leave Mexico.
So, why Cinco de Mayo? And why should Americans savor this day? Because 4,000 Mexican soldiers smashed the French and traitor Mexican army of 8,000 at Puebla, Mexico, 100 miles east of Mexico City on the morning of May 5, 1862.
There’s more about the anniversary here.
You can't make this stuff up. When workers at UN restaurants walked out, diplomats and employees looted and pillaged the place.
An employee at a Georgia gun shop was fired after an officer called the owner and told him yhat the employee, a member of the local militia, was named in an FBI bulletin as a possible threat.
Glenn Reynolds sees this as McCarthysim. Maybe he's trying to make a point by comparison to the complaints of antiwar advocates, but that doesn't make it accurate.
The officer who gave a heads up to the gun shop owner didn't tell him what to do about the information, as far as I can tell. In many cases the owner of gun stores delegate important responsibilities to employees. If I owned that store I would like to make informed judgments about who needs supervision and who didn't.
I agree that, in the absence of criminality, the government shouldn't take a position on who is hired or fired at private businesses, even regulated businesses like gun stores. But informing the owner about concerns only puts the ball in the owner's court.
Maybe it could have been handled differently. But the bottom line is that it was a judgment call. Just like the judgment calls not to follow up on the reports of Middle Eastern men taking flight lessons before 911.
