As I Become More Mature

(That title is a euphemism for having one foot in geezerhood), I don’t need an alarm unless I need to get up very early after getting to bed late. I generally wake up pretty early anyway. And when I do need some external assistance, the plaintive little “beep, beep” of my watch is generally sufficient.

But when I was younger, I definitely could have used one of these: Behold, the world’s ten most annoying alarm clocks.

The Wreck Of The Patrick Fitzgerald

“…Words and music by Scooter Libby. From a true story about a D.C. trainwreck and the half-cocked engineer who failed to brake in time.”

A great description of (see comment #33) the current state of the l’affaire Plame/Wilson, based on the latest reporting from Byron York. It looks like Libby is going to force the trial to be about what Fitzgerald was originally hired to investigate–who gave Plame’s affiliation to the press? I have a hunch that the press and the Dems won’t be happy with the outcome (as the man once said, they can’t handle the truth).

Worst. Fitzmas. Ever.

And Tom Maguire has further thoughts.

Weird Comment Spam

I’ve been getting several comments on ancient posts for the last few days along these lines:

Ive pretty much been doing nothing to speak of. My lifes been bland these days. I havent been up to much. I feel like a void.

They’re all variations on the same theme, and they’re spam in the sense that they have nothing to do with the post subject, but they don’t have a URL they’re advertising, so I can’t blacklist them. Each one has a different IP address. All I can do is delete them individually, and shrug. If I got flooded with them, it would be a royal PITA to deal with. Does anyone have any theories as to the purpose of these? Are they just testing to see how spammable I am before actually hitting me with a payload?

[Update late Monday morning]

Maybe it was test runs. I just got this one, with a blacklistable URL this time:

I haven\’t gotten anything done for a while, but whatever. I can\’t be bothered with anything , but what can I say? Maybe tomorrow. More or less nothing seems worth doing. Thanks for shared info!

The only thing is that this time it was a ping, rather than a comment.

Not Getting It

Via Glenn, I find a new group blog about the future. But I found this post pretty disappointing, and I’m hoping that it’s not indicative of a more general cluelessness:

According to Cambridge University biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, the first person to live to 1,000 years of age has already been born. True or not, this idea is frightening to me mainly because the average person today starts to get pretty frail right around sixty, so unless we manage to improve the quality of life for the elderly along with their lifespan, we youngsters are doomed to some 900 years of infeebled misery. While I’m sure that at some point the necessity for some kind of physical rejuvenation process would breed the requisite ingenuity to devise one, I’m still not convinced that several decades, if not centuries, of torture would be worth it.

He can’t have actually read much of what De Grey wrote, if he believes that the intent, or likely outcome, is to “provide nine centuries of torture.” The whole point is to defeat senescence, not merely to keep frail bodies alive. Note also the commenter who is already bored with life at age fifty seven.

As I wrote in a letter to the editor of The Economist back in the late eighties, if your idea of life is to come home from work with a six pack in front of the television, then three score and ten is plenty (and perhaps even too long). But if you’re a Leonardo or Leonarda da Vinci, several centuries could be all too short. We will have to come to terms with the reality that many won’t want to live forever, and become more societally accepting, at some point, of the right to end it, lest we do in fact be sentencing people to centuries of “torture” (mental, perhaps, if not physical).

Shoddy

I wasn’t sure whether to categorize this as space, or media criticism. Jeff Foust reviews what sounds like kind of a mess of an article about NASA’s space exploration plans at Rolling Stone. Don’t these people have fact checkers? If I were a journalist working in a subject area unfamiliar to me, I’d run the piece past some people who might be expected to know what they’re talking about, and I’d be embarrassed to get so much wrong in print.

But that’s just me. I guess they don’t mind being viewed as foolish by those more knowledgable.

Culture Clash

Co-blogger Sam finishes up his tour of SpaceX. The discussion is less about rockets than about corporate cultures and marketing messages. There certainly seems to be a lot of momentum finally building in the media and the business community for the new space age.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!