Gray Watson's Blog -- May 2005

Blogging is a useful way for me to record my thoughts and digital travels every so often. Hope you enjoy my digital stream of consciousness.

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May 26, 2005

Joke: A squad of American soldiers was patrolling along the Iraqi border when they passed the first an injured Iraqi soldier and then an injured American soldier both groaning in the ditch beside the road. They ran first to the American soldier and asked him what had happened. "Well," he groans, "I was walking down this road, armed to the teeth. I came across this heavily armed Iraqi rebel. I aimed my rifle and shouted, ``Saddam Hussein is an unprincipled, lying piece of trash!'' He looked me right in the eye and screamed back, ``George Bush is an unprincipled, lying piece of trash!'' We were still standing there shaking hands when the truck hit us."
Just thought of a cool idea for dating. We all have single friends who we like and who are looking for that Mr. or Ms. Right. Instead of the person who is in the market registering, their friends would register. What is interesting about this is that the friends could then get rated for how true they were or for the level of "quality" of their single friends. Buyer/seller ratings would not do well with a dating service if you were rating the poor bastard who is looking for someone but it might do well second hand. You might also do a degres-of-separation thing and have friend X link to friend Y so you can share some of their rating and help the viral nature of the product.

May 25, 2005

Samsung has announced sold state hard disks of 16gb and less.
The SSD has a power consumption rate less than five percent of today's hard disk drives (HDDs), enabling next generation mobile PCs to extend their battery life by more than 10 percent. The NAND-based SSD weighs less than half that of a comparably sized HDD. Free of moving parts, the Samsung SSD memory has minimal noise and heat emission. Moreover, it is a highly reliable storage media that endures exceptionally well in environments with extreme temperatures and humidity, making it suited for industrial and military applications. The SSD's performance rate exceeds that of a comparably sized HDD by more than 150 percent. The storage disk reads data at 57 MegaBytes per second (MBps) and writes it at 32MBps.
Fascinating presentation on the latest Cell architecture. Cell is a system architecture joint venture between Sony, Toshiba, and IBM. It was designed to handle the next generation of gaming and has extreme computer power with massive floating point capacity. I bet the geeks will get a Linux port out there fast. It also has multiple operating system virtual partitions, very cool sounding multiple threaded skills, and I'm sure it's architecture (or something similar) will be standard on computers in 5 years.
The Mars rover Opportunity has been stuck in a sand dune for 3 weeks.
Traction is difficult in the ripple-shaped dune of windblown dust and sand Opportunity drove into on April 26. Since it began trying to get out, the rover has advanced only 11 inches. Without the slippage caused by the rover's wheels spinning in the soft sand, Opportunity could have driven 157 feet. "If Opportunity gets free, its next task will be examining the site to give the rover team a better understanding of how this ripple differs from dozens Opportunity easily crossed," said Jim Erickson. He is project manager for the Mars Exploration Rover Project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
NASA officially announced yesterday that Voyager I has left the solar system by crossing the termination shock in December of 2004. Here's the register article.
Officials say Voyager 1 crossed what is known as the termination shock around December 16 of last year to enter the heliosheath- a place unlike any ever visited in the solar system. The boundary crossed in December marks a point where charged particles constantly emitted from the Sun called the solar wind slow down from hundreds of miles per second to subsonic speeds. This is due to pressure from the interstellar wind, or the gas blowing between stars likely resulting from ancient nearby supernovae.
Give.org seems to be a good site to check out charitable organizations. Their reports show where money goes, their administrative costs, executive salaries, and other information. I'm in the market for a child sponsorship charity for my 6 year old son to participate with.
This looks like a cool site to buy logos from. Their base rate is US$25 via paypal. You give them your domain name and a description of the site and they come back with the logo. I'm trying it out for mailnull.com.
Interesting look behind the scenes at the OpenBSD hackathon 2005 as they fix the OpenBSD idle loop. OpenBSD is the secure version of the *BSD family (FreeBSD, NetBSD). I use it for my firewall. All of the code gets audited for security ramifications probably more than most "secure" commercial software.
Ok, so we fix the race, we're up from 14 MB/sec to 50 MB/sec. Better... but there are still issues... Now what? Hmm... the APM code appears to affect us in the idle loop! if we don't call it as often, performance goes up.. Marco and Toby start experimenting with calling APM only every N times, with the idea to put in a knob. I hate knobs.

May 24, 2005

Article from the BBC about how a USA Senate report says that the US government knew about oil kickbacks to Iraq. That in certain circumstances it even facilitated US company's selling Iraqi oil. I can find no corroboration of this story and I cannot find a mention of the report on the Senate website.
The new report focuses on both the $228m Saddam Hussein's regime is estimated to have made through illegal surcharges on the oil-for-food programme, and on the $8bn it made through sanctions-busting oil sales to Turkey, Syria, Egypt and Jordan. US oversight was weak on both fronts, the report says - and sometimes amounted to facilitation of the illicit trades.
The destruction of the Amazon rain-forest is accelerating according to figures released by the Brazilian government. 6,000 square kilometers of forest were chopped down between August 2003 and August 2004.
Responding to the figures, the government points out that it has increased satellite surveillance of threatened areas and created some of the largest environmental reserves in Brazilian history; but so far there is little to show for it. The broader fear among environmentalists is that a shrinking Amazon will soon become a net polluter of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide as its absorbing properties are reduced and more and more felled trees are burned.
Amusing piece about the sexuality of the Whiptail Lizard which talks to those people who are anti-evolution and anti-gay. The Whiptail are all female species which reproduce asexually by self-cloning. The eggs do not need to be fertilized -- they are parthenogenic. There is a book about Whiptails and some more links: whiptail lizards, whiptail lizards.
What is so wonderful about these creatures is that not only are they homosexual by behavior, but that homosexual behavior actually enhances their reproductive capacity, and not only that, but that it is fairly well inescapable that they evolved to be this way. The fact that they routinely reproduce through virgin birth, I suppose, is the icing on the cake.
Trump has weighed in on the Ground Zero plans in NYC. He is supporting the Twin Towers II design by Kenneth Gardner which mirrors the old building closely but making them taller, much stronger, with much improved fire safety systems. Gotta admit that it would be the best "f*ck you" to the terrorists.
At a widely reported news conference in the city, he claimed that if the Freedom Tower was ever built, it would mean that "the terrorists have won". Instead, Mr Trump is backing a plan by engineer Ken Gardner, which looks remarkably similar to the old Twin Towers - only one story higher, and with better fire-fighting systems. Mr Trump said he had received thousands of letters from New Yorkers backing his favored proposals. He insisted that the plans were what most Americans saw as an appropriate response to the attacks of 11 September 2001.
Nice reference on how to properly grilling food.

May 23, 2005

Interesting piece where they take the colors in the national flags of various countries and use them to demonstrate various statistics. Red: In favor of the war in Iraq. While: Against the war in Iraq. Blue: Don't know where Iraq is.
Good piece by Thomas L. Friedman entitled Outrage and Silence talking about how the Islamic groups have violent protests about the Koran desecration by military interrogators but nothing is said about the suicide bombers that have killed 400 Iraqi Muslims the past month.
Religiously, if you want to know how the Sunni Arab world views a Shiite's being elected leader of Iraq, for the first time ever, think about how whites in Alabama would have felt about a black governor's being installed there in 1920. Some Sunnis do not think Shiites are authentic Muslims, and are indifferent to their brutalization.
A new wind map compiled by researchers at Stanford University shows wind speeds at more than 8,000 sites around the world. Here's the home page of the study at Stanford. If 20% of the sites were developed, it would satisfy the current global energy consumption of 14 terrawatts.
Of the regions that are well-marked by the map, North America and parts of Northern Europe both have a high number of ideal spots for setting up wind turbines. To date, Northern Europe -- and Denmark in particular -- has made the best use of that potential. Approximately 20 percent of Denmark's energy consumption is fulfilled by wind power, according to the Danish Wind Industry Association.
I thought I recorded this earlier but I guess not. Check out the resolution of this giga-pixel digital camera. They have built this billion pixel camera and are going around the country taking pictures of America. Very cool.
A final zoom to about 0.05% of the original area. Note the individual leaves at the extreme left of this image and the sharpness of the logo on the left sleeve of the shirt. The logo text, the person's lips, ear lobe, and the smaller instances of "bunching" in the shirt all exhibit clear definition in the 1/4" to 1/2" range. Consider this when viewing the full image at the top of the screen.
Amusing site called overheard in New York where people write in funny and bizarre things they heard about town.
(On the B1 bus) Woman #1: Are you Jewish? Woman #2: Do I look Jewish? No, I'm not Jewish. I wear pants.
Interesting news report that the Ocean Power Delivery company has won a US$10m contract to build 3 750-kilowatt wave power units for generating energy from wave action. They plan on buying 30 additional units if the initial test is successful. The units use the up-down and side-to-side bending motion at the joints to pump hydraulic fluid through generators.
The first, three-generator phase of the wave farm would produce 2.25 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply 1,500 Portuguese homes. Norsk Hydro said producing that much energy in a conventional fossil fuel plant would emit 6,000 tons of climate-damaging carbon dioxide.
Very cool page about very cool tools. Readers write in with the tools that they love from staplers to urethane-adhesive.
The Straptite appears to be the exact same tool formerly known as the Bandit, a tool I've used forever. This thing works very well indeed; it makes extremely heavy-duty straps. It has long been considered essential emergency equipment by blue water sailors -- for splinting broken spars on long voyages.
Memo is leaked from Britain which states the US pressed for military action to take down Saddam with little to no intelligence that Iraq had WMD. Gasp!
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The National Security Council had no patience with the U.N. route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

May 20, 2005

Very cool looking autonomous helicopter designed my Boeing and Frontier Systems.
"The A160 will blow the doors off the competition," he said. "It's got vertical takeoff and landing capability, range, endurance-and you can even fly it off a ship." No current production aircraft, manned or unmanned, can do all those tasks. The A160's unmanned aerial vehicle competition includes Northrop Grumman's Firescout and General Atomics' Predator.
Interesting sounding technology involving compressed bitmap index technology. With it you can search compressed bitmaps without expanding.
Disturbing article from former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter talks about Iran and Iraq.
It is amazing people are walking away from this one. The US cooked the election in Iraq. For three days after the election the Shia were saying "we" had 60 percent of the vote. The election was flawed to begin with. I was not a big supporter of having a so called democratic election under martial law where 300,000 troops were securing the scene. I don't think anyone would endorse elections under those conditions. Yet they did manage to vote. Anyone with a brain on their shoulders would know that if you have an open election, the Shia would win.
Boy the spy planes available to the US military are very cool.
Though made with off-the-shelf products, the Wasp is nothing like remote-control planes sold at hobby shops. Its wings, which span 13 inches (33 centimeters), carry 4.25 ounces (120 grams) of lithium-ion batteries. The whole rest of the plane including video cameras front and back adds just 1.75 ounces (50 grams) to the total takeoff weight. It is launched by hand. In 2002, a rudimentary Wasp set an endurance record for micro air vehicles of 1 hour and 47 minutes. It has since been outfitted with an autopilot feature that uses the Global Positioning System.
This is old news but here's the details about the Pat Robertson quote that liberal judges were more dangerous to the US than terrorists. Boy are the Conservatives organized. It would be interested to be a fly on the wall during the planning sessions. "Ok, you guys hit the UN on the Oil for Food. That will draw attention away from the Iraq mess. Now. We'll pull the Nuclear Option in the Senate. And you guys start attacking the judges. Ok. Break!"
I think they are destroying the fabric that holds our nation together. There is an assault on marriage. There's an assault on human sexuality, as [U.S. Supreme Court] Judge [Antonin] Scalia said, they've taken sides in the culture war. And on top of that, if we have a democracy, the democratic processes should be that we can elect representatives who will share our point of view and vote those things into law.
Interesting collection of articles from Prof. Jeffrey D. Sachs on the war in Iraq.
The crucial question regarding Iraq is not whether the motives for war were disguised, but why. The argument that Iraq posed a grave and imminent threat was absurd to anybody not under the spell of round-the-clock White House and 10 Downing Street spin. But the actual reasons for launching the war remain obscure. The plot thickened with the release last month of the US Congressional investigation into September 11. It seems increasingly likely that Iraq was attacked because Saudi Arabia was deeply implicated in the terrorist attacks.

May 19, 2005

Another frightening article about the collapse of the US housing market.
In the "Jumbo" category, nearly 50% of new mortgages in the United States are "IO" -- interest only. Nearly 90% are ARMs -- adjustable rate mortgages. Everyone seems to be speculating in real estate. Everyone wants to own property, but no one wants to pay for it. And everyone seems to like the new abbreviations. There is even a rising trend towards "neg-am" mortgages -- where the amortization schedule actually walks backward and the principal grows larger. Neg-Am mortgages are popular now... they will probably become even more popular -- until the homeowner walks backward into a ditch.
So it is Star Wars time again. Theaters opened at midnight early this morning. Last night I turned on the TV and there were 3 separate Star Wars related programs on at the same time. I hadn't realized that Lucas is worth something like US$3 billion. One of the history of the movies and one about weapons but introduced by R2D2 and C3PO. A copy of Revenge of the Sith has already been published to bittorrent.

May 18, 2005

Fascinating article from Britain about the right to life. It was so very much different from the US struggle that for a couple of seconds I couldn't even properly parse the first couple of paragraphs.
Philip Sales, representing Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, told the court today that if a right to ANH was established, patients would be able to demand other life-prolonging treatments. He told the panel of three judges headed by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Phillips: "A general right, as identified by the judge [in the High Court], for an individual patient to require life-prolonging medical treatment has very serious implications for the functioning of the NHS.
The Firefox browser's market share continues to grow. Mozilla based browsers now account for close to 10% of the market.
Our data shows that Firefox's usage share continues to grow, climbing to nearly 7 percent as of April 29, 2005. Since early Nov. 2004, Firefox's usage share on the web has more than doubled. Given its current growth patterns, Firefox is still within range of reaching 10 percent market share in the U.S. in 2005. In some countries, such as Germany, Firefox has already well exceeded that figure (nearly 23 percent), while in others, such as Japan, Firefox is stuck in the low single digits.
Good piece by the Boston Globe about the state of the gay marriage debate on the 1 year anniversary in Massachusetts. Here's some interesting poll numbers done by the globe of 760 US adults.
Michael Dell just invested US$100 million in Red Hat through his private investment firm. Interesting move. I wonder if it is just an investment or if Dell is going to make some sort of play for RH. Maybe Dell sees Microsquat continuing to weaken and forecasts good RH growth.
George Galloway is my new hero. He delivered a scathing rebuke to the administration as they were trying to pull the wool over people's eyes during the Oil for Food testimony in the Senate. Why can't the Dems do this? Here's the full transcript of his opening statement. Some more commentary on his speech.
"If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth."
Interesting piece about how the so called "Al-Qaeda kingpin" captured this week was really a low level terrorist.
Bush called him a top general and a major facilitator and chief planner for the Al- Qaeda network. Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, said he was a very important figure. Yet the backslapping in Washington and Islamabad has astonished European terrorism experts, who point out that the Libyan was neither on the FBIs most wanted list, nor on that of the State Department rewards for justice programme.

May 17, 2005

The submarine USS San Francisco that ran into an undersea mountain near Guam back on January 10th wasn't using the correct navigation charts. They were traveling at flank speed, above 30 knots, 525 feet below the surface when they grounded, killing one crew member and injuring scores more. I guess all of the charts on submarines are digital these days.
"Other charts in San Francisco's possession did, however, clearly display a navigation hazard in the vicinity of the grounding," it said. "San Francisco's navigation team failed to review those charts adequately and transfer pertinent data to the chart being used for navigation, as relevant directives and the ships own procedures required. "If San Francisco's leaders and watchteams had complied with requisite procedures and exercised prudent navigation practices, the grounding would most likely have been avoided. Even if not wholly avoided, however, the grounding would not have been as severe and loss of life may be been prevented."

May 16, 2005

I read today that a female Indy driver named Danica Patrick was going to be starting this year's Indy 500 in 4th position. My first reaction was the I bet she is cute and I win a cookie. Then a friend showed me this article from the NY Times over the weekend about Laleh Seddigh, this Iranian car racer who also looks attractive. So why does that happen more often then naught? Does the sports world really hold back the women who don't look like Danica, Laleh, or golf sensation Michelle Wie (picture)? Maybe it is the sports reporting that naturally gravitates to the attractive women so we don't know that Missy Johnson is sitting in 8th position but looks like my brother? Take a look at this IX to Watch article on ESPN and find and find an up-and-coming female sports star who is not attractive. Maybe it's just that fit people look better -- the aura of athleticism is in itself attractive. Maybe this all goes back to our Darwinian "survival of the fitest" selection criteria. Maybe coaches never spend the time with the ugly athletes, unconsciously putting up barriers to their success.

May 13, 2005

The US State Department withheld data from an annual report on terrorism that showed that there was a sharp increase in the attacks in 2004 (650) -- up from 175 in 2003.
In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice circulated by his staff, Mr Waxman said that even the latest figures may be too low. He said many incidents most Americans would regard as terror attacks were excluded from the data because they did not meet the state department's definition. "The large increases in terrorist attacks reported in 2004 may undermine administration claims of success in the war on terror, but political inconvenience has never been a legitimate basis for withholding facts from the American people," the letter added.
Very worrying story about how Army recruiters are breaking the rules more often to meet quotas.
in northern Ohio, another recruiter said the incident hardly surprised him. He has been bending or breaking enlistment rules for months, he said, hiding police records and medical histories of potential recruits. His commanders have encouraged such deception, he said, because they know there is no other way to meet the Army's stiff recruitment quotas.
A cool article from Wired about the New Power Generation. I guess I fit the bill with my hybrid car and my solar panels.
Now come the first stirrings of what may be the most telling sign of this shift from hardcore to hybrid: people who are both middle of the road and off the grid. Across the US some 185,000 households have switched from the local power company to their own homegrown, renewable energy. The fastest-growing segment of this population - their ranks are doubling each year - isn't doing a full Kaczynski.
Wow. Powerful story about religion in the Deep South from the BBC no less. Shows that after we push aside the political crap, the Religious Right versus the Liberal Left, that people do good things and that religion -- that belief in duty and morals -- should often be credited.
A couple of highly motivated evangelical Christians have built a personal relationship unthinkable in even the recent past and are now significantly improving the lives of mainly black 16 and 17-year-old murderers and rapists -- people the rest of the nation is happy to lock up and forget.
Standard & Poor's has lowered the debt ratings of GM and Ford to 'junk' status which means that they are more likely to default on their debt.
Last month, GM reported a net loss of $1.1bn in the first three months of 2005, largely due to flagging sales and the rising cost of employee healthcare. Rival Ford also reported a 40% drop in first-quarter net profits, to $1.21bn, citing falling US sales and rising prices for raw materials. S&P cut GM and General Motors Acceptance Corp's long-term credit ratings to 'BB', the second-highest junk rating.
Pressure is coming up on Walmart. Most of their workforce earns less than US$19,000 -- can you imagine that? Walmart wages are $9.68 versus $12 at Sam's Club, $16 at Costco, or $12.28 of all retail workers.
A new group of Wal-Mart critics ran a full-page advertisement on April 20 contending that the company's low pay had forced tens of thousands of its workers to resort to food stamps and Medicaid, costing taxpayers billions of dollars. On April 26, as part of a campaign called "Love Mom, Not Wal-Mart," five members of Congress joined women's advocates and labor leaders to assail the company for not paying its female employees more.

May 12, 2005

Scary report on how John Bolton, Bush's nomination to the UN, used NSA "training mission" intercepts to get transcripts of conversations of US Governmental Officials, a clear violation of the law. The NSA is prohibited from spying on American citizens by law but the training missions are off of the books and the transcripts should be destroyed. Instead they were shared with outside agencies. This may seem trivial but it shows that Bolton has no respect for the rules.
In the case of Bolton and other Bush administration hardliners, the material in question was not deleted and was transmitted in raw intercept form to external agencies for clearly political purposes, a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and USSID 18, which only allows such raw training mission intercepts to be transmitted when evidence of criminal activity is uncovered during the training mission.
Wow. Scientists are working on the space sail which has been mentioned in many sci-fi books for years. NASA has invested about $30 million in such technology and people are saying that solar sails could power space missions within a decade.
Because its fuel is free and doesn't have to be stored, a craft with solar sails would not have to slingshot around the moon or other planets for a gravity boost to reach distant destinations, as other craft do. Craft propelled by solar sails could be launched on conventional rockets or released from space stations. In space, the force of sunlight would push the reflective sails, causing the craft to move, said NASA Marshall physicist Les Johnson.
Cool article about artificial retina tests and products make by Second Sight Medical Products. Right now they have a 16 electrodes stimulating the optic nerve but newer versions will be smaller and have 60 electrodes possibly giving patients reading and facial recognition.
The system -- known as the Argus, after the mythological Greek god who had 100 eyes -- works only with patients with degenerated rods and cones, a condition often caused by disease. It will not help people with damaged optic nerves or other types of blindness. "These patients are blind because they don't have the photodetectors," said lead researcher Dr. Mark Humayun, a professor of ophthalmology and biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California. "The implant jump-starts the remaining cells. You're effectively coupling a blind person with a wearable camera."
The Deep Impact comet chasing satellite has spied his quarry. It picked up images of the 4 mile wide Tempel 1 while it was still 39.7 million miles away from the comet, closing at 6.3 miles a second. Here's the wired.com article.
Deep Impact is comprised of two parts, a "flyby" spacecraft and a smaller "impactor." The impactor will be released into the comet's path for a planned high-speed collision on July 4. The crater produced by the impact could range in size from the width of a large house up to the size of a football stadium and from 2 to 14 stories deep. Ice and dust debris will be ejected from the crater, revealing the material beneath.

May 11, 2005

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 103 here in Boston recently installed a wind turbine on their facility about a mile south of downtown Boston on the harbor. Very cool. They put up a 5.4 kilowatt solar array in 2002 and the turbine went up last week or so. Not sure if it is online.
They are still arguing over the site of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor or (ITER). Sounds like they are making some progress but have yet to decide between France and Japan as the location of the fusion plant.
"We see the recent talks as very optimistic and moving the process forward," EU spokesperson Antonia Mochan told New Scientist. "But we've still got a way to go." Indeed, recent comments by French president Jacques Chirac asserting that ITER would almost certainly be built in France inflamed Japanese officials, who vehemently denied they had given up their bid.

May 10, 2005

Interesting piece on the status of the gay marriage in the state of Massachusetts. There is still talk of an amendment to make them illegal again and replace them with civil unions but now that 6000 gay couples have gotten married and "the world hasn't fallen off its axis" many who oppose it are reluctant to undo marriages that have taken place.
Another difference is the composition of the Legislature. Last year, the House speaker, Thomas M. Finneran, a Democrat who opposed gay marriage, led a large group of the legislators who voted 105 to 92 to support the amendment. But Mr. Finneran has left the House, and the new speaker, Salvatore F. DiMasi, a Democrat, supports gay marriage. In addition, in special elections this year, at least three legislators in favor of gay marriage replaced legislators who opposed it, and several more won election to the House last November.
Here's a disgusting story about the political strings attached to US grant money. Brazil is refusing US$40 million in AIDS grants from the US because of the strings attached to the money requiring groups to condemn commercial sex work.
Under the Bush administration policy, even groups whose HIV/AIDS work in other countries has nothing to do with commercial sex workers have to make a written pledge opposing commercial sex work or risk losing federal funding. In addition, the Bush administration might refuse to fund HIV/AIDS groups that do not accept Bush's social agenda on issues such as sexual abstinence and drug use.
Fabulous picture on the right with interesting juxtaposition between a shot of George Bush and a Saudi Prince holding hands next to a story about the Texas house passing a law banning gay unions. This is from an unknown Texas paper and was probably on April 29th or 30th.
Just talking about diving and went looking for information on the Hughes Glomar Explorer. It was a Howard Hughes boat supposedly built to do deep mining in the Pacific but really was a CIA project to try and raise a Soviet nuclear submarine from 17,000 feet depth that sank in 1968.
Global Marine supervised construction of the Glomar Explorer , at a cost in excess of $200 million dollars, and operated it from 1973 to 1975 under contract to the US government. Glomar Explorer went to sea on June 20, 1974, found the sub, and began to bring a portion of it to the surface. The Soviets watched the "deep-sea mining" operation with interest, but did not attempt to thwart it. An accident during the lifting operation caused the fragile hulk to break apart, resulting in the loss of a critical portion of the submarine, its nuclear missiles and crypto codes. However, according to other accounts, material recovered included three nuclear missiles, two nuclear torpedoes, the ship's code machine, and various code books.

May 9, 2005

Cool site which shows a number of different gizmos that you can try to identify.
I didn't know (or had forgotten) that the US military had tried to recruit native Inuit and others from Canada until the Canadian government cut them off.
A Canadian Defense Ministries report said the U.S. claimed that under the 1794 Jay Treaty it had the right to recruit Canadian native inhabitants for its military because aboriginal Canadians held dual U.S.-Canadian citizenship. Alarmed top Canadian officials from the ministries of Justice, Foreign Affairs, and Defense huddled with Privy Council bigwigs and, screwing up their nerve, decided to tell the Americans that Canada didn't like what was going on.
Interesting discussion about the wranglings around the Presidential press conference couple weeks back.
First NBC, which, according to TV industry sources, said it would consider carrying the president's chit-chat with reporters if it started at 8 so the network didn't have to preempt both its 8-9 p.m. sitcom block and "The Apprentice." The White House agreed, and soon the cable news networks were reporting: "Just moments ago we learned that the press conference was moved from 8:30 to 8 due to complications of network programming," as Suzanne Malveaux told Wolf Blitzer on CNN.
Stories like this really piss me off. High-Tech Giants Push for Digital-TV. They are pushing for digital TV like it will create tons of jobs and save our tech sector or something. Basically they are pushing for their own profits only. They want the ability to control content to the end user -- full digital content control. The article talks about how the feds will be able to auction off the old spectrums to make money and they invoke 9/11 to talk about more emergency frequencies. What a steaming pile of crap.
The coalition backs efforts by House Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton, R-Texas, to set a firm transition date of Dec. 31, 2006. Under current law, the digital transition will occur on that date but with the critical caveat that 85 percent of homes be ready to receive digital signals either by owning a digital television or converter box. Barton wants to drop that caveat.
MoveOn has been doing a campaign to produce flash animations combat the push toward privatizing social security. The winning animation is pretty well done although the timing is screwed up on my Linux box at work.
Pretty cool song sampling George Bush singing a combination "Imagine" and "Walk on the Wild Side". That took a lot of work.
Interesting article about farm subsidies.
Take sugar. As numerous commentators have pointed out, Europe ought to be the biggest importer in the world, because it is difficult to grow sugar economically on the continent. In fact, the EU is the biggest exporter in the world (one third of all production), thanks to a cornucopia of subsidies that would be laughed out of court if they were applied to any other industry.
This puts the EU in a poor moral position from which to insist that the US - whose $230 an acre subsidies to its cotton farmers (which were also declared illegal by the WTO) - obeys the law as well. The US is also up to its eyeballs in subsidizing sugar beet, reportedly the most heavily subsidized crop, at an amazing $500 an acre ($1.4bn a year). This is coupled with import restrictions that keep US sugar prices up to four times higher than world prices.

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