floccinaucinihilipilificate

Chinese scientists of the Academy of Meteorological Sciences, are sounding the alarm over the rising temperatures on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau . Over the last 30-years, as temperatures have risen at a steady clip of 0.42 degrees Celsius every year, the plateau has been losing an average of 131.4 square kilometres annually. The loss of more of the glaciers is causing temperatures to soar to record highs in China, resulting in thousands of deaths, droughts, floods and major economic losses. The plateau glaciers are also the mountainous source for some of the mighty rivers of China -- the Yellow, Yangtze, the Indus and other rivers -- which provide water to hundreds of millions of Chinese. As the glaciers disappear, scientists are warning that these rivers, some of the longest in the world, may also dry up, and are predicting major disasters by the end of this century. That's global warming for you. Will the Chinese react to this warning with good sense? I'm holding out h...

New York Times is carrying an op-ed by James Bamford, a journalist who writes about US intelligence agencies, which argues that Bush is not above the law. On August 17, 2006, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the US District Court in Detroit, ruled in a case brought by the ACLU, that Bush had "undisputedly violated" the US constitution, statutory law and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, in authorizing the tapping of phones and email of Americans without warrant. The problem of course, was there was no consequence. Nothing happened. There was no mea culpa from Bush. Justice wasn't served. Justice didn't even do a little jiggle in response. It was all conveniently ignored. As a result, a huge disservice was done to Americans and America. The powers that were in Congress last year, the Republicans, in effect, sanctioned the abuse of America by one of their own by their inaction. So what does this all mean? Well, Judge Taylor commented that, “there are no ...

LiveLeak.com

The Beast is an interesting anti-war movie. It tells the story of a small band of Mujahadeen fighters hunting a Russian tank in Afghanistan during the Russian occupation. The tank, initially part of a larger tank group, had just erupted in a small Afghanistan village, hunting Mujahadeen fighters. The result is a decimated village, with few survivors, and hardly any Mujahadeen casualties. When the village fighters return to view the aftermath, they vow revenge, and set out across the desert in pursuit of the tank -- the one in question, that strays from the others in its group. In the tank, the commander, Daskal (played by George Dzundza), slowly descends into madness. He trusts no one, not even his crew. The tank driver, Koverchenko (played by Jason Patric), reads Daskal like a book, and knows what is coming can't be good. When Daskal turns on his crew, Koverchenko finds himself abandoned -- left for dead, chained against a rock in the desert. Here...

On June 24, 1982, on British Airways flight 009 , the pilot came on the plane's speakers to announce, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get it under control. I trust you are not in too much distress." An understatement to be sure. What followed is not what you would expect. There was no panic on board. Everyone remained calm. The flight attendants moved some passengers around so they could be sitting beside someone. With no engines, there was only one predictable outcome for the flight which was 10,000 km over the sea, on its way to New Zealand. The engine had caught fire and died, then the plane went into freefall -- a freefall that would last about 30-minutes before hitting water. With no future in sight, a miracle occurred. To save the passengers from oxygen starvation, the captain dropped the plane 6,000ft in one minute -- and the engines came alive. ...

My wife and I went out a couple of weekends ago, when we first had a little accumulation of snow. Worried that we may not get much more this winter, we took the cameras to record the snowfall. It's a good thing there weren't too many people out at the local park we were at, cause we were being just silly. Check out more from the shoot at my Webshots gallery .

The situation in Iraq is one that demands more blood before there's resolution. Resolution will not come from a clear and decisive victory, rather, it will come from sheer exhaustion. There has to come a time eventually, when people will just grow tired to killing each other, and the killing will stop. We're at a fork on the path to end the strife. On road leads to more US troop deployment, the other to complete withdrawal from the region. The road to more US troop deployment is the one that the Bush Administration seems to have accepted. Bush has declared that Congress be damn, he's the decision maker, and no matter what Congress does with what legislation, as the commander-in-chief, he's going to send more GIs into the quagmire. To complicate matters, the Pentagon has recently increased its military presence in the Persian Gulf by sending more warships and fighter jets – and Bush has authorized the ground troops to engage Syrians and Iranians in Iraq who are lending...

In an interview with CNN , Dick Cheney summed up the-giving-the-finger response to Americans and Congress' resolution opposing more US troops for Iraq, with just a few words: "It won't stop us." That about sums up the attitude of the Bush administration's reign over the American empire. Sickening.

BusinessWeek is carrying an article on "the power of retribution, spite, and loathing in the world of business" -- and unfortunately, it's not the lurid Shakespearean stuff you'd really enjoy reading -- it is a business magazine after all -- but there is enough examples of how payback is dished out in the c-suite -- enough to make those of us cubicle warriors rub our hands in glee. Ahh ... revenge ... getting even, or seeing just retribution being meted to the deserved gives us such satisfaction. It is biologically wired into us to feel real good when someone who has done us wrong, gets what's coming to them. It is a response to perceived injustices -- whether purposeful, or indirect. At the executive level, emotional responses are just as common as they are around the office, in the classroom, on the factory floor or in the playground. It doesn't matter how mature we are, the response to perceived injustices is universal. While we no longer go for the ...

It's official -- the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) have moved the Doomsday Clock to five minutes to midnight, declaring that we now "stand at the brink of a second nuclear age" -- as evidenced by North Korea's nuclear weapons test, Iran's nuclear ambitions, the US renewed interest in the military utility of nuclear weapons, and the existence of large nuclear arsenal in the US and Russia. For the first time, the BAS have also concluded that, "the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons." The course of the clock however can change, but "will depend on humanity’s ability to think in new ways about how to cooperate to achieve common goals." The BAS calls on everyone to engage in dialogue to bring action towards the fight against nuclear proliferation and the climate change. Specifically, the BAS sites major progress in the following areas would make the world a safer place: The US and Russia re...

A couple of miners in some forsaken small town discover some white goo bubbling out of the ground. Being the experimental sort, they immediately stick their fingers in it and take it straight to their mouths for a taste. Turns out the stuff actually tastes pretty good, and once you get a taste for it, you crave more and more and more. It turns out that the stuff also does something weird with people's brains -- mind control -- making people who've taken the stuff wanting to see others do likewise so the whole world can be taken over by the stuff . In short order, the miners who discovered the stuff , make a hostile takeover of Chocolate Chip Charlie's business, hire a marketing genius to sell their wonder-goo, and partner with an unethical distributor to get the stuff out to the masses. As America succumbs to the stuff being sold as an ice cream/yogurt alternative, it's up to our heroes who know something is wrong with the stuff to save ...

The Orthodox Christian Church is going crazy over some believers in the twelve gods of ancient Greece, who are trying to stage a ceremony at the Temple of Zeus . The religion got the official recognition from the Greek courts last year and was allowed last year to perform a religious ceremony at the Temple of Hephaestus. This week, the followers of the Olympians wished to hold a ceremony to pray for international peace. Father Efstathios Kollas of Othordox Christian Church is getting his robes in a knot however. He has described the followers of the Olympic gods as a "handful of miserable resuscitators of a degenerate dead religion who wish to return to the monstrous dark delusions of the past." Am I the only one who sees the irony here?

Burma 's military government has enlisted the Buddhist monks in the country to systematically wipe out Christianity specifically -- all other religions, and any ethnicity that exist in the country today. The Burmese government is seeking uniformity in the population. Everyone must speak Burmese and practice the Buddhist religion. Looks like the country is in dire need of a Chinese invasion.

In the fall of 2006, the US quietly released an unclassified document summarizing their national space policy [PDF]. In the document, the Bush Administration provides some directional statements which alarmingly points to their goal of un-tethering the military to utilize space as a platform for national security activities. The United States is committed to the exploration and use of outer space by all nations for peaceful purposes, and for the benefit of all humanity. Consistent with this principle, "peaceful purposes" allow U.S. defense and intelligence-related activities in pursuit of national interests; The United States considers space systems to have the rights of passage through and operations in space without interference. Consistent with this principle, the United States will view purposeful interference with its space systems as an infringement on its rights; The United States considers space capabilities -- including the ground and space segments and supportin...

Dr. Heidi Cullen of the Weather Channel has come out with hash criticism of her peers in the weather business, on her blog. Cullen suggested that climate change skeptics who are meteorologists should lose their seal of approval from the American Meteorological Society because they are denouncing a scientific fact -- that the rapid climate change we've been experiencing in recent times, is a direct result of human activities on the planet. Meteorologists are in the powerful position of being in everyone's living rooms on the issue of climate change, and using that position to evangelize a political position is irresponsible. Not surprisingly, there are many who are now willing to lynch Cullen. Just check out her blog. It's puerile that what was a quiet scientific debate in the past decades, has turned into a public battle in recent times. Scientific progress on issues usually have dispute, as evidence is gathered, analyzed, interpreted and published. The process open...

Wired is running a story on how Google edged out Yahoo in the search game, and now has nearly 70% of the search advertising market, while Yahoo continues to lose ground and now sits under 25%. Back in 2002, when Google was only a fledgling giant, and two years before it went public, Yahoo made an offer to buy Google -- for $3 billion. Google refused to sell. Yahoo's CEO, Terry Semel, wasn't about to offer the entire valuation of Yahoo to get Google, as his staff was advising. That would have been a merger. Instead, Semel decided he was going to buy competing technology and go against Google and trash them at their game. As history now tells us, Yahoo didn't quite make it, and today, Google is a giant, valued at $147 billion. The story is a great read.

Alexander Manu of the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) and the Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity, gave a talk titled, The Imagination Challenge: Strategic Foresight and Innovation in the Global Economy at the UofT Rotman School of Management this evening. The talk was informative, thought provoking and entertaining. Synopsis: Companies constantly present technological developments -- new materials, new mechanisms, and new ways to enhance existing products and services. Yet these seldom lead to truly new ideas. Why? Humans are all born with imaginative instincts, but in the interest of efficient and predictable productivity, institutions such as schools and businesses routinely hinder those impulses. The most innovative products and services, author Alexander Manu argues, arise out of behaviours of play -- the ability to imagine, without limits, the question "What if ...?" Manu was pushing his latest book, The Imagination Challenge . As suggested by the ...

HD DVD discs, in a format war with Blu-ray discs, has just taken a hit from the pirates. A copy of the HD DVD version of Serenity, has hit the BitTorrent network -- all 19GBs of it. HD DVD was developed for greater capacity and higher resolution movies, but also to enforce studio control on how content is viewed by their customers. DRM protects the audio and video content of HD DVD discs, and the studios are looking to develop region encoding for dics -- the make it so that discs purchased in North America for instance, won't play on players in Europe. It's all about control. Enter muslix64 and BackupHDDVD, which provides a process to decrypt HD DVD encryption, as long as the decryption keys are available. After muslix64 posted the BackupHDDVD utility on Dec. 26, last year, it only took a few weeks before ways of obtaining HD DVD keys were being revealed. So, it should come as no surprise that someone has ripped an HD DVD movie and made it available via BitTorrent. I ...

Every wanted to just take your pants off on the subway and ride the car just in your underwear? Me neither. But there are some people who will go for such a thing. Improv Everywhere organized just such an event recently, in NY City, on the 6 line subway. The event is an annual event that has been running since 2002, and while breaking no laws, the partici pants regularly get busted for going public in just their underwear, boxers, or whatever. Why they do it? Because.

Scott Aaronson , a postdoc at the University of Waterloo, teaches a class on the history of quantum computing -- starting from time of Democritus -- or so the course title claims. He has made his lecture notes available online, and lecture 9 provides an interesting perspective on quantum mechanics, that most of us who took QM, may not have encountered previously. I don't know about you, but if you were like me and had the joy of studying QM, you may have been thrilled to have been part of that fine class of students who could boast about being in QM, while at the same time, secretly harbouring doubts -- maybe the whole thing was just a joke physicists were playing on the world. Aaronson sets out the make it all clear to the masses -- well, mathematicians and computer scientists anyway -- by doing something quite unremarkable -- something I've always wondered about. Do you remember how you were taught science? You were taught it the way it was historically developed -- inc...