Is the email age ending? I got an account on Facebook recently, but I still haven’t figured out why. Of course, I’m kind of anti-social by nature.
Don’t Hold Your Breath
“anonymous.space” has some questions over at Space Politics for the Senate to ask NASA:
1) Given the Space Shuttle
Don’t Hold Your Breath
“anonymous.space” has some questions over at Space Politics for the Senate to ask NASA:
1) Given the Space Shuttle
Don’t Hold Your Breath
“anonymous.space” has some questions over at Space Politics for the Senate to ask NASA:
1) Given the Space Shuttle
The Biofuel Scam
This is depressing.
Police Work Won the War
In Iraq, databases of DNA, fingerprints and iris scans have been collected from entire city populations. They brought in ballistics and other forensics experts. They train troops in staying alive and police in evidence handling. They conduct IED clearing operations. They analyze the IEDs. They analyze, profile, they catch in the act sometimes via UAV and roll up the cell.
Then they do it again when the cells evolve to foil the latest counters.
A New Unified Theory?
And from an unlikely source:
Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.
Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi’s work as “fabulous”. “It is one of the most compelling unification models I’ve seen in many, many years,” he says.
“Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years,” Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.
Not just unusual because he’s a surfer, but also because he seems a little old to do something like this, which is supposedly more likely from a younger mind.
Life Imitates Art
So, Kathleen Willey writes a book
A commenter (anonymous, other than a first name) shows up and implies that she’s lying about her book manuscript being stolen (i.e., slandering her and besmirching her character). I challenged the commenter to go actually follow the link, and read the interview. (S)he said that (s)he had done both.
Funny thing, though. It turns out that when I initially put up the post, I pasted in the wrong link, linking to this instead, a piece by Stuart Taylor on the academic rot of political correctness.
In other words, the commenter lied–if (s)he had actually followed the link and read it, as (s)he claimed, (s)he would have complained about it not being the Willey interview, as Tom (who was apparently the first person to actually follow the link) did.
In other words, a Clinton defender shows up, slanders a Clinton accuser, and prevaricates in the process (while ironically complaining about my lack of “courteous discourse”). Just like the book says. Maybe she can add a new chapter in the next printing.
[Update at 4 PM EST]
This seems pertinent. Brent Bozell talks about the media’s whitewash of Hillary.
[Update about 5 PM EST]
If Hillary is the Democratic nominee, I will certainly vote for her. But I continue to find it hard to believe that my party truly craves that long nightmare of d
Good News On Phishing?
I’ve seen a spate of phishing attempts in my email lately, for institutions such as “Pacific Capital BanCorp,” with a fake URL to gather in my data (assuming that I have an account there). I’ll get half a dozen in a row, each with a different domain, such as “2dfe.com.” Does this mean that they’re having to create new domains and sites quickly before groups like Anti-phishing.org shut them down? I know that I report them the minute I see them. Of course, it’s harder to deal with the ones in China, which apparently just took over first place in this kind of thing from the US, according to Anti-phishing.org
By the way, it sure would be nice if Thunderbird had a feature for forwarding a group of emails to a single address, rather than having to do them individually.
[Update a minute or so later]
Hmmm…actually there is. If you highlight a block of messages, and hit “Forward,” it attaches them all to the forwarded message. Cool.
Irrationality
Peter Berkowitz writes about Bush hatred, and so-called progressives stated pride in it:
Bush hatred is not a rational response to actual Bush perfidy. Rather, Bush hatred compels its progressive victims–who pride themselves on their sophistication and sensitivity to nuance–to reduce complicated events and multilayered issues to simple matters of good and evil. Like all hatred in politics, Bush hatred blinds to the other sides of the argument, and constrains the hater to see a monster instead of a political opponent.
Some people, based on posts like the previous one, have mindlessly called me a “Clinton hater.” Not just me, but anyone who points out that they are both corrupt liars. But there’s no passion in such a statement–it’s just a clinical factual description. If I state that Ted Bundy, or Charles Manson, or (for that matter) OJ Simpson are murderers, does it mean that I hate them? I don’t. I’m simply making a factual statement.
I’ve noted in the past that I’m often foolishly accused by people of being a Bush lover, simply because I’m not a Bush hater. And I’m also often accused of being a Clinton hater, simply because I (unlike, generally, the accusers) am not someone who loves him beyond all reason. From my perspective, I’m simply rationally evaluating both men based on the record. George W. Bush has many flaws, but doesn’t deserve the vituperation that is heaped on him. Bill Clinton isn’t evil, but he is a profoundly corrupt, narcissistic man.
I don’t hate the Clintons–I just don’t want them to regain political power. Of course, I’m just not that into hate, period, for the reasons that Berkowitz describes–it’s an emotion that clouds reason and judgment. I don’t even hate Osama bin Laden. I wish him dead, but not because I hate him. I simply, dispassionately think the world better off without him, and those like him.
But of course, the word “hate,” like “racist,” has lost most of its intellectual currency as a result of overuse and abuse by the left. So it’s all the more interesting that the same people take such pride in their admitted (and irrational) hatred of George Bush.