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Two years after the first in a series of anthrax exposures we’re still waiting for the smallpox vaccine program to get going for first responders. And, there hasn’t been much discussion of cipro stockpiling by health officials. Maybe we no longer see bioterror as a domestic threat.
Andrew Sullivan weighs in on the Plame/Wilson incident. He says, and I agree:
Bottom line: if some idiot or crook at the White House did this for petty reasons, he/she should be fired and be subject to prosecution.
But he notes that the details are murky. That's why there should be an investigation. It's a politically charged situation, and there's been plenty of rushing to judgment so far. And there are also questions about the motivation for why the information was leaked.
The most reasonable explanation I've heard came from Howard Fineman who, in a radio interview said that he thought the motive for the leaks was to show that Wilson had an a cozy relationship with the CIA through his wife, and that his opinions were not completely independent.
If that's the case, it was more a stupid move than a malicious one. But still, it seems to me, a criminal offense, even if the leaker didn't see the implications at the outset.
Two developments in gene research: A gene has been found for Lou Gehrig's Disease. Another one has been found for human language. "It is not the actual gene for speech but a mutation that codes for a protein that enables the brain’s language circuitry to function."
The blackout that put Italy in the dark this weekend was caused, apparently, by a tree that blew down.
[S]ome energy experts say the incident, which follows a string of major power failures in Europe and the US in recent months, reflects the general lack of investment in emergency resources following widespread privatisation of the industry
This is a problem that needs to be fixed.
This is one of many interesting developments in solid state non-volitile memory. Instant-on PCs and mini-iPods are just around the corner.
Here's the blogroll for the Blogger Conference at Harvard next weekend. It looks like the attendees will be coming from far and wide, but so far no media representatives from the local area. That's a little surprising.
An article in Time looks into the pre-war cat and mouse game between inspectors and Iraqi weapons scientists. What were they hiding if there were no WMD? Imaginary WMD.
Check out the new site design at Technically Speaking.
Remember the story in this morning's Globe about the gorilla that escaped from the Franklin Park Zoo last week? Check tomorrow's paper for what happened today. Apparently he escaped again, injured a 2 year old, and is off in the woods behind White Stadium with zoo keepers in hot pursuit.
Someone will have some explaining to do.
UPDATE: Here's more.
Power is out in much of Italy and they are blaming France, where most of the country's electricity comes from. The blackout has affected more people than last Summer's outage in the US.
Over 30.000 people were stuck on electric trains overnight, and scores of people were stranded in Rome, where they gathered for an all night cultural festival
As with other recent outages in New York and London, terrorism was quickly ruled out as a cause.
Could this be our version of the Kelly affair? I hope not.
The Pope named 30 new Cardinals this morning, but Sean O'Malley, thought to be on the short list, wasn't one of them.
John Donnelly writes about how AIDS in Africa is taking a toll, even at high levels of government. Battling the stigma of the disease is made harder by those well known victims who won't admit they are infected.
In the Ideas section, Matthew Miller asks Bill Bennett and Milton Friedman about the luck factor and how much or our success in life is determined by it. It was a clever idea for an article, notwithstanding the irony of asking Bennett to talk about the roll of the dice. But apart from some reasonable proposals, the article falls apart for a reason Friedman points out. Everything: genes, initiative, geography, character, parents' wealth, at some level it all comes down to luck. What else is there.
And Charlie Radin weighs in with a depressing story about how both the Israelis and Palestinians are growing accustomed to the status quo.
From the folks who brought you List-o-matic, here's a new CSS tool for cross browser layout called the Layout-o-matic.
This is really cool. (link from Lisa Williams)
Eugene Volokh looks at the legality of treating protesters differently based on message. The short answer is you can't do it.
The isuse came up after the ACLU sued over the Secret Service practice of establishing free protest zones at a greater distance for anti-Bush protesters than Bush supporters.
The Times magazine has an article on a temporarily retired Florida spammer.
It will be interesting to see what Congress does with anti-spam laws in the wake of the Do Not Call List reversals. Will the new anti-spam laws be opt-in, similar to a national "Do Not Spam" list, or opt-out with genuine and working "remove from list" links. The public wants the former, but business prefers the latter.
But it might not matter. Spammers have one big advantage over telemarkerters when it comes to American regulation. It's just as cheap to send a million email solicitations from Kuala Lumpur than it is to send them from North Miami.
Massachusetts is moving away from using Microsoft products in state government computer systems, adopting instead open source software, including Linux.
State Administration and Finance Secretary Eric Kriss said Thursday that the decision, adopted at a meeting of state information officers, was made on "technical grounds" and had nothing to do with Attorney General Thomas Reilly's pursuit of Microsoft.
Okay. I'll buy that.
Segway has been tight lipped about how many of the scooters have been sold. Now, thanks to the recall, we know that it's at least 6000. That's more than I would have thought.
Jack Shafer wants to know who ratted to the Iraqi government on John Burns. It’s an important question, but apparently no one in the media is banging down doors to get the answer.
This doesn't sound good. Amazon is endorsing a national internet sales tax. Would eBay also have to factor taxes in it's sales?
The Times has a story on file sharing around the world.
This is an interesting article (pdf) on the weaponization of space and averting a US-China space race..
The United States is extraordinarily dependent on space for its national security. The U.S. military has integrated space technologies into virtually all aspects of military operations, dramatically improving U.S. military power.
A strength and a weakness. Lots of things can threaten our space based equipment. One of the more interesting threats involves parasitic satellites. These are satellites that piggyback on legitimate enemy satellites and then at a later time break off and attach themselves to our GPS or communications satellites. When a dispute arises and hostilities erupt, or as a preemption, a signal is sent and our gear goes down.
Of the 49 sitting members of Congress who have run for President over the last four decades, how many do you think have been elected?
David Brooks writes about tactics, strategy and style vs substance for Democratic candidates.
There's lots of information in this MIT Technology Review article on the PlanetLab project. I can't help wondering if Al Gore is involved..
The movie industry is pushing a "stealing is bad" campaign in schools. By stealing, they mean downloading movies, of course, not looting vaults, robbing banks or stealing savings accounts.
This is an big step in the quest for video books and talking soup can displays.
Sunset, Tuesday.
Sunrise, Wednesday.
Looking for high quality bootleg DVD's? John Dvork says Kuala Lumpur is the place to go.
The quality of the DVD-9s, the brand name of the bootlegs, raises some questions. Are they the work of Asian organized crime, or unofficially secretly sanctioned by the studios to skim some royalty free money from the Asian bootleg market? The fact that they don't seem to have the Macrovision copy protection argues against the latter. But who is the source of the data, which includes outtakes and special features, if not the studios? An interesting mystery.
When Interpreter of Maladies was hailed as the work of a great new writer and she was featured in the New Yorker, I was interested to see what all the fuss was about Jumpa Lahiri.
I read most of the stories in her first collection, and although they were fine, I wasn't greatly impressed, at least not in the context of the wave of praise for the book, which included among other things, a Pulitizer.
But I just finished The Namesake, her first novel, and I can now say that I get it. I really enjoyed the book, and especially, the writing. The descriptive detail is understated and the narrative matter of fact, like one of Chekov's stories. Recommended.
I don't think that AOL wants to publicize this, but Wired is on the case. Users of AOL have been seeing what seemed like official pop-ups asking for personal information. One such attempt notifies users that airline tickets have been paid for using their account and then asks them to enter personal information to view or cancel the purchase.
The problem is Windows Messenger pop-ups, which AOL has tried, apparently unsuccessfully, to block.
Charles Haddad writes, in Business Week, about the Everywhere Internet Audio concept, and suggests that the music industry embrace it and that Apple integrate it into the iPod. The idea of EIA is that there would be no personal storage of music, and that consumers would pay to listen to streaming data on personal devices that are connected to the music industry network.
Right, and the prices would be reasonable. We've already seen what happens when the balance of power shifts to the music industry.
The ingenuity of the engineers responsible for Galileo is an example of NASA at it's best.
The Herald plots the weekend violence. It sounds bad, and it is for those impacted by it, but in comparison to other cities, we're still in pretty good shape.
Here's a short article in a series of very good stories in the NYTimes on file sharing. This one goes into the history of music industry concerns in the face of new technologies, from sound recording to radio to digitization.
Also in today's Globe, Ellen Goodman makes some good points about the changing responsiblities of internet users, pointing out that people who would otherwise not be involved in the legal system are finding themselves being charged as internet criminals.
Good article, despite the fact that she uses the term "Cyber" in the title. (Oh, and she needs a little work on details. A music download service called iPod?!?)
The Boston Globe, in a story on Howard Dean's rise from a priviliged background to be the govenor of Vermont, throws in the story of how, as the Vietnam War raged, the young Dean supplied evidence of a back condition, carried from his Manhattan orthopedist to military doctors who declared him unfit for duty. Then he headed off to Aspen where he poured concrete for spending money, and established a reputation as a "hotdogger" on the slopes.
UPDATE: More on the issue in another Globe story.
Social science project idea: Correlate suicide rates with NPR pledge weeks.
The 1974 movie Earthquake was on the other night and the part at the beginning in which a student seismologist, with a new theory about prediction tried to convince his superiors that an earthquake was coming, reminded me of this prediction by a Japanese astronomer last week.
Well, he was close, and fortunately it wasn't as bad as he predicted.
Tom Friedman has good news and bad news. The good news is that Iraq is not Vietnam. He finds the silent majority of Iraqis want for their country, the same things that the US wants.
We both want the same thing for Iraq — that it not become Iran, that it not become Saddam, but that it become a decent, modern-looking Iraqi alternative.
The bad news is that the war isn't over. He notes that the two Republican Guard divisions that melted away as we approached Baghdad have yet to be defeated, and as a good part of the source of the attacks against US interests, have to be dealt with. But not by us, by the Iraqis.
It's a good column, a balanced appraisal, and a contrast to much of the partisan doom and gloom being pedaled elsewhere.
Some industry watchers are predicting the end of video rental stores. I don't agree, at least for the short term. Here are some of the reasons cited by business writer Michael Brush in an article on MSNBC for the demise of Blockbuster, et al.
Regularly downloading movies over the Internet to watch on wide-screen TVs at home.
The movie industry will resist digitizing movies for download for the obvious reasons. And how long will it take to download a couple of movies for the evening? Too long.
Paying $20 monthly fees to rent "unlimited" movies that arrive and return by mail.
I don't think this market has much potenntial for growth. Most people want instant gratification. Those that use these services will probably continue to do so, but the rest of us couldn't bother.
Selecting from large film menus offered by cable companies in viewing formats that are just as convenient as DVDs and VHS tapes.
The negative psychological effect of giving even more money to the cable company will doom this for the majority of people.
Buying DVD movie discs that "self-destruct" 48 hours after they're opened
One word: Divx.
I'm not saying change will never come to the rental industry. But there are factors, mostly human, that are as important as the technological advances cited by Brush.
Elvis Costello explained to the BBC today why his new album North, isn’t a collection of protest songs. The astonished interviewer asked him why - since he wrote songs about Thatcher and the Falkland Islands - didn’t he unload on Bush and Blair.
His answer was that the present situation was a complicated one and that it couldn’t be distilled into a three-minute song. He was also concerned that writing a simple, anthemic anti-war song would imply support for oppressive regimes. The interviewer seemed to have no idea what he was talking about.
It sounds like Elvis read Lileks’ column from yesterday.
Here's what the afternoon rush hour looks like in central North Carolina this afternoon.
Link via a hurricane blogger, Tobacco Road Fogey.
Motorola is already at work on dual wi-fi/GSM phones. For one thing, the higher speed wi-fi connection will allow for faster transmit/recieve times, tripling battery time on the phone. This will also allow the wireless companies to sell high bandwidth data access through cellphones, at least in areas with dense enough wi-fi coverage. In the dead spots, there will still be coverage through GPRS, but it will be much slower.
I understand that Isabel is big news for the mid-atlantic, but why is it the leading story in Boston? Enough, already. It's going to miss us.
James at AFOL points us to two interesting resources; the Pseudodictionary and the Urban Dictionary.
He also has a link to 40ozMaltLiquor.com. That in itself gets him a place on the roll.
Is Dean getting too focused on internet promotion? Jeff Jarvis spots Dean campaign comment-spam, which resulted in the loss of the candidate's blogging merit badge.
William Safire writes about what he thinks congress should do about the FCC's plan for media deregulation. He paints opposition to the plan as a libertarian battle against media consolidation, and he implies Bush is playing up to Big Media as insurance against bad publicity. Interesting arguments. But libertarians for increased regulation? That might be new one.
The measurement of weight, using the kilogram as the base unit is defined by a peice of platinum-iridium stored in a vault near Paris. I didn't know that.
According to this Physics Web article, scientists, or rather metrologists want to change that.
All the other units are related to atomic or fundamental constants, such as the speed of light or the charge on an electron, and metrologists now agree that they must redefine the kilogram.
Researchers have proposed two ways to redefine the unit of mass: one is based on the Planck constant, and the other relies on measurements of the Avogadro constant - the number of atoms or molecules in one mole of a substance.
I wonder if they can calculate how many atoms make up a smoot.
What do spammers do when they get kicked off of their ISP? They check in to a hotel that has broadband access. Still, it shouldn't be too hard to track them down, unless they pay cash.
The wireless industry is looking at it's reliance on the electircal grid after this summer's blackout shut down most cell service providers. It's about time.
The movie industry is outraged that advanced copies of films are turning up on the internet. Where do they come from? This NYT article says it looks like the movie industry insiders are the culprits.
According to a new study published by AT&T Labs, the prime source of unauthorized copies of new movies on file-sharing networks appears to be movie industry insiders, not consumers.
Next, someone should try to figure out how those live concert bootlegs recorded direct from the board are getting out.
Daniel Drezner has good advice for new, and old bloggers. (link from Instapundit)