Beautiful story in today's Washington Post, about an exiled Iraqi Jew in New York, Mr. Latif Jiji, who makes his own wine from grapes growing all around his townhouse. It makes me want to do that, someday (and the weather in Los Angeles would be close to perfect).
There was a little earthquake tonight - a 4.5 apparently - nothing to write home about. But we felt it around 1 am. We were in the kitchen, finishing up our glasses of Ridge ATP Sullivan Zinfandel 2005. Things kind of shook for a brief moment. No tremors, just a bang! and it was gone. Probably a plate releasing some energy - it turned out the quake centered around Northridge (lots of pent-up seismic energy there...). So it wasn't as big as the last earthquake I experienced, some time ago in Baños, down in Ecuador.
I don't know whether this is creepy or hilarious or both? And who the hell is filming this? A guard? The warden? The detail that kills is the cheap blue plastic hair clip in the "girlfriend's" hair...
One can search the unclaimed persons database at the LA County Coroner website. The search will return pictures - it seems like a good idea, but at the same time it is extremely disturbing.
This is a picture of the "art gallery" in Vegas flood control tunnels. Strange and intriguing stuff by CNET's Daniel Terdiman. I don't see how this article has anything to do with technology, but it sure is cool!
You need help! It's your shield, it's your whatever... Rudy knows a creep when he hears one...
And tomorrow: Argentina meets Brazil. This is a dream match. Lionel Messi, Carlos Tevez, Hernan Crespo (possibly) and Juan Roman Riquelme against a young Auriverde squad featuring the amazing Robinho. WOW. Oh and let me commit that to the hard drive: 3-2 Argentina.
From the Seattle Times:
And of course, the inevitable mention of Darwin Awards special prize nominee Larry Walters, who just wanted to have a beer or two while watching the sunset.
BEND, Ore. — Last weekend, Bend gas station owner Kent Couch settled down in his lawn chair with some drinks and snacks — and a parachute.
Attached to the lawn chair were 105 balloons of various colors, each 4 feet around. Bundled together, the balloons rise three stories high.
Couch carried a global positioning system device, a two-way radio, a digital camcorder and a cell phone. He also had instruments to measure his altitude and speed and about four plastic bags holding five gallons of water each to act as a ballast — he could turn a spigot, release water and rise.
Destination: Idaho.
Nearly nine hours later, Couch was short of Idaho. But he was 193 miles from home, in a farmer's field near Union, having crossed much of Oregon at 11,000 feet and higher.
Couch, 47, is the latest American to emulate Larry Walters — who in 1982 rose three miles above Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by balloons.This is awe-inspiring. Congratulations Mr. Very-aptly-named Couch. (I did not know that the great Larry Walters committed suicide - kind of sad - perhaps, like many, he could not handle fame.)
Walters surprised an airline pilot, who radioed the control tower that he had just passed a guy in a lawn chair with a gun. The weapon was to shoot balloons and descend. Walters paid a $1,500 penalty for violating air traffic rules. Eleven years later, he committed suicide at age 44.
Apparently the public relations officer at the Roswell base just died. He left behind him a sworn affidavit regarding the very strange events at the Roswell AFB. From the Daily Mail:
Last week, the text was released and asserts that the weather balloon claim was a cover story, and that the real object had been recovered by the military and stored in a hangar. He described seeing not just the craft, but alien bodies.
And finally this:Haut then tells how Colonel Blanchard took him to 'Building 84' - one of the hangars at Roswell - and showed him the craft itself. He describes a metallic egg-shaped object around 12-15ft in length and around 6ft wide. He said he saw no windows, wings, tail, landing gear or any other feature.
He saw two bodies on the floor, partially covered by a tarpaulin. They are described in his statement as about 4ft tall, with disproportionately large heads. Towards the end of the affidavit, Haut concludes: "I am convinced that what I personally observed was some kind of craft and its crew from outer space."
Another military witness who claimed to know that the Roswell incident involved the crash of an alien spacecraft is Colonel Philip J. Corso, a former Pentagon official who claimed his job was to pass technology from the craft recovered at Roswell to American companies.
He claims that discoveries such as Kevlar body armour, stealth technology, night vision goggles, lasers and the integrated circuit chip all have their roots in alien technology from the Roswell crash.
Hmmm. Let's forget about Kevlar and lasers for a moment and let's try to concentrate on basic physics. And this is where the following post by Charles Stross comes in handy - read the whole post, it kind of puts the whole 'boldly go where no one has gone before' routine into stark perspective...
Now, let's say we want to deliver our canned monkey to Proxima Centauri within its own lifetime. We're sending them on a one-way trip, so a 42 year flight time isn't unreasonable. (Their job is to supervise the machinery as it unpacks itself and begins to brew up a bunch of new colonists using an artificial uterus. Okay?) This means they need to achieve a mean cruise speed of 10% of the speed of light. They then need to decelerate at the other end. At 10% of c relativistic effects are minor — there's going to be time dilation, but it'll be on the order of hours or days over the duration of the 42-year voyage. So we need to accelerate our astronaut to 30,000,000 metres per second, and decelerate them at the other end. Cheating and using Newton's laws of motion, the kinetic energy acquired by acceleration is 9 x 101718 Joules in round numbers for the entire trip. NB: This assumes that the propulsion system in use is 100% efficient at converting energy into momentum, that there are no losses from friction with the interstellar medium, and that the propulsion source is external — that is, there's no need to take reaction mass along en route. So this is a lower bound on the energy cost of transporting our Mercury-capsule sized expedition to Proxima Centauri in less than a lifetime. Joules, so we can call it 2 x 10
To put this figure in perspective, the total conversion of one kilogram of mass into energy yields 9 x 1016 Joules. (Which one of my sources informs me, is about equivalent to 21.6 megatons in thermonuclear explosive yield). So we require the equivalent energy output to 400 megatons of nuclear armageddon in order to move a capsule of about the gross weight of a fully loaded Volvo V70 automobile to Proxima Centauri in less than a human lifetime. That's the same as the yield of the entire US Minuteman III ICBM force.
I guess that is why I seriously doubt there are aliens out there who can actually visit us. Remember the Fermi paradox - if they exist, where are they? - well, here's a possible answer, they do exist and very much like us, they are stuck on their own little piece of rock.
From Sunday's WaPo: "Research Links Lead Exposure, Criminal Activity"
Although one should be mindful of naive environmental determinism, this sounds really, really intriguing.
The article opens by saying that Dr. Nevin's research undermines Rudy Giuliani's claim that he singlehandedly cleaned up New York. That might or might not be so - in the end the putative accomplishments of Giuliani are inconsequential. This research kicks ass: Dr. Nevin correlated the rise and fall of crime with exposure to lead. He found similar trends in 9 other countries, over a century. I can't wait to hear Stephen Leavitt's opinion on this.
Check out this article in the LA Times, dealing with Fred Thompson's go-go years as a big time Washington lobbyist :
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-thompson7jul07,0,54260.story.
Hilarious. Sheds light on Fred's core principles - or lack thereof. This will not play out very well with the Christianists. I kind of like Thompson on some level - the guy is a complete opportunist, never met a client he wouldn't bill, loves a good, hearty meal (esp. when he doesn't have to pick up the tab), and well, plays older, tough guys in silly movies and TV shows. Not to mention that he initially thought Nixon was innocent. Oh yeah, and he used his PAC money to pay his son fat 'consulting fees.'
And that guy is the Republican Party's last, best hope for 2008?
Check out the Romneys. They are so wholesome. Ann is particularly cool: she marvels at the fact that had it not been for Mitt's presidential campaign she'd never have set foot in 'some of the Southern States...' And all these Republican activists who are 'amazing' because they 'really care.' She truly speaks like the country club society lady she is: her disdain for the political activists is both completely genuine and refreshingly unselfconscious. The whole production is so weirdly off it is hilarious. Like that shot of the Romney men playing hoops. And don't forget: Mitt's all time favorite book is... Battlefield Earth, by Lafayette Ron Hubbard (yes, that L.R.Hubbard).
I'm telling you, this crop of Republican candidates is a comedic masterpiece. After the balding tough guy who loves stiletto heels so much he can't stop himself from wearing them, we've got the Romneys who are, well - how to say that delicately? - whiter than white bread?
Growing up in Paris I used to listen to a lot of Marvin Gaye. What's Going On in particular. I must have been 10 or 12 when I came across the tape at a music store. I know I must have been that young because the movie White Nights came out in 1985. In the high-concept cold war movie - James Bond meets Nutcracker in Hollywood parlance - there was a passing allusion to What's Going On. In an establishing shot in Gregory Hines character's shabby apartment, one could catch a glimpse of the album's cover, pinned on the grey, dreary, wall. I noticed it right away. I remember thinking that perhaps Marvin Gaye was much more famous and significant than I originally suspected.
The music itself was very intriguing - I kept listening and listening late into the night on my walkman, trying to figure out what exactly was he singing about. Make me wanna holler - what could that mean? The deep bass, the vocal harmonies, the orchestra, the soulful horns, the layers of lyrics. Completely enthralling.
Or Pyongyang Calling. Pyongyang, Pyongyang. Pyongyang woman on the avenue. I love Pyongyang in June, how about you?.. By the Pyongyang Dolls...
Via Salon.com. Apparently, all the bands there were started by the Dear Leader, and he probably wrote and produced all the records too. Not too mention the video clips. Kim Jong Il rocks.
My B-day, at the In-N-Out on Sepulveda, watching the heavies land on runway 24R. Only in LA.
Double-double with fries, before and after... And Donny is right, they are good burgers...
The heavies are landing...
We'll see. The lawyers come to work at 8 AM eastern.
One last for the hell of it...
What the hell is this? I wonder. Hmmm. Let's google it.
Update: Actually, this series of letters and numbers is the hexadecimal decryption key for HD-DVDs. Someone posted it earlier on Digg.com (or rather, linked to a story/site online which cited that key). The people operating Digg started to delete the entries containing the hex key, for both legal and commercial reasons. Digg users, who are by and large techno-libertarians (if not consciously, at least in practice), found ways to alert the whole blogosphere. The story spilled over to Slashdot (the precursor to digg.com - almost made irrelevant by digg until today at least). As a result of this online revolt, the hex key has been made de facto public domain (check out the hit count on google, and it even has a myspace page now). Digg relented and stopped blocking the posts mentioning the decryption key (and Kevin Rose, the founder, wrote a defiant post on digg.com 's blog). There are now 280,000 instances of the key on the internet. The cost of serving DMCA notices to all the hosting websites (including Google) will be so enormous that the usual enforcement through intimidation won't work. Beyond the PR disaster for media conglomerates, the story will inevitably surface on mainstream news outlets - thus letting everybody know about the encryption scheme and its trivial crack. Not so good.
This is a classic example of technology revolutionizing conditions of productions and upending entrenched social forms. Very heady stuff.
In short, this May 1st might very well mark the old media's Haymarket riot. This is the beginning of the end for DRM.
The LA Times has a great (and funny) article about the guys who wave arrow shaped ad signs by the side of the streets in SoCal. These "human directionals" - as they are called in adspeak - are among the most bizarre things one can see while driving around. One might argue it's one of the newest and most sinister forms of the rampant commercialization of the public space, yet another post-modern form of exploitation invented in California, and/or the latest in corporate -sponsored, hypernarcissistic subcultural practice vying for eyeballs on Youtube.
My quest is over. I've finally found the legendary Australian fingerlime (microcitrus australasica)!!! When you bite, the tiny, round vesicles of pulp have the same texture as caviar, and taste like a super fresh and acid lime. Incredible. I was lucky enough to find a couple of seedlings. They now rest in fresh soil and big clay pots, under the unforgiving Southern Californian sun. Hopefully they'll yield fruits within the next 12 months. Yowza!
I also tried the limequat (citrus fortunella), which nearly knocked me out.
This is all thanks to Dr. Kahn, who is the Principal Museum Scientist and curator of the University of California Riverside citrus collection (you can find more info there). The LA Times has a nice story about her and the citrus experiment station.
That is a tragic and incredibly powerful story (from AP):
"JERUSALEM (AP) - Liviu Librescu survived the Nazi Holocaust. He died trying to keep a gunman from shooting his students in a killing spree at Virginia Tech - a heroic feat later recounted in e-mails from students to his wife.
Librescu, an aeronautics engineer and teacher at the school for 20 years, saved the lives of several students by using his body to barricade a classroom door before he was gunned down in Monday's massacre, which coincided with Holocaust Remembrance Day. His son, Joe Librescu, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that his mother received e-mails from students shortly after learning of her husband's death.
"My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee," Joe Librescu said in a telephone interview from his home outside of Tel Aviv. "Students started opening windows and jumping out."
I think that qualifies as heroism.
Godspeed to you Prof. Librescu.
I mean what the hell!!!??? Another horrible orientalist article by the NYTimes. Please. A bunch of monks singing in Latin (which, by the way, indicates that these particular monks belong to the ultra-reactionary side of the Catholic Church).It's set up like a freaking Pagnol piece. "Men of another age." The wonderful traditions. The heritage. The cute locals. Blah blah blah. Who cares? Why waste the ink and/or the bandwidth on such contrived and atmospheric articles? I mean how doest that tell us anything of substance about contemporary France? Nothing. 40% of French don't believe in anything. Another 30% or so declare themselves agnostic. 20% attend religious services regularly (that is, more than 4 times a year or so).
Yet another drive-by article that reveals more about America's obsession with identity and authenticity and old stones.
Addition: there's even worse - two for the price of one.
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