Extinct means the same as living in Italy? (Source.)
Bears have been extinct in Switzerland for more than 100 years until one was spotted last week that is believed to have migrated into the country from neighbouring Italy.
To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Extinct means the same as living in Italy? (Source.)
Bears have been extinct in Switzerland for more than 100 years until one was spotted last week that is believed to have migrated into the country from neighbouring Italy.
Headline:
Reports: Blood screening helps West Nile fight
Perhaps it’s only helping West Nile by providing financial or logistical support, but we need to stomp out blood screening now if we’re ever to conquer its friend West Nile.
Instant messaging: A threat to you and your kids?
It’s hard to imagine anything online as “old-fashioned” just yet. Nevertheless, that’s how young teens today apparently view the concept of e-mail.
Recent research shows most teenagers between ages 12 and 17 prefer “instant messaging,” or IM, to e-mail in getting their message across. They cite IM’s immediacy and its constant connection, especially to friends, as the reasons they prefer it to e-mail.
Unfortunately, the same things that make IM appealing to teens also draw another crowd: malicious programmers, spam merchants and online predators. These sinister characters don’t use IM to keep in touch with each other; they use it to keep in touch with your kids.
Scarier still, most parents don’t know it.
Which “parents” are those? Oh, yeah, the ones who get their “news” from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (which could also be known as the Pre-Contemporary,-Ubiquitous-Technological-Advance).
Environmental damage seen from shuttle
No word on whether the eagle-eyed spotters can see:
Because those astronauts’ eyes are especially sharp, you know.
(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)
If you’re going to the sold-out scrimmage at Lambeau Field tonight, be advised that WISN is reporting that:
If you cannot make the game, rest assured it will be on television this evening.
For a scrimmage.
Well, not just a srimmage. A Packers scrimmage.
At Q and O, inadvertently suggests a slogan for the Democrats when he says:
I wouldn’t trust the Democratic Party with national security, for instance, any farther than I could comfortably spit a rat.
The Democrats: You can trust as with national security as you can uncomfortably spit a rat.
I missed this last autumn when it appeared in the Washington Post as an advertisement funded by one man, but here is:
In today’s America, ask a growing number of high school and college students; their teachers and professors; the self-anointed media elite and/or hard working men and women of all ethnicities, the question, “What is a Republican?”, and you’ll be told “… a rich, greedy, egotistical individual, motivated only by money and the desire to accumulate more and more of it, at the expense of the environment … the working poor … .and all whom they exploit…”
I am a Republican … I am none of those things… and I don’t know any Republicans who are.
Read the litany of what Republicans are. It’s our equivalent of Gordon Sinclair.
(This story has been confirmed by Snopes.)
Matt Blunt Endorses School Choice
New at Draft Matt Blunt 2008!
As a member of the quality community in good standing (or ill repute, if you’re a developer), I wouldn’t get too excited about this headline: Unprecedented Shuttle Repair a Success:
A spacewalking astronaut gently pulled two potentially dangerous strips of protruding filler from Discovery’s tile belly with his gloved hand Wednesday, successfully completing an unprecedented emergency repair.
Well, the procedure was completed. As to its success or failure, I reserve judgment until that bird’s on the ground in the minimum number pieces are required for the astronauts’ survival.
For your St. Louis Who?s:
Starting at center, Trent Whitfield!
Starting at left wing, Jeff Hoggan!
Starting at right wing, Aaron Downey!
Starting on defense, Eric Brewer!
Starting on defense, Jeff Woywitka!
And starting in goal, Patrick Lalime!
Coach Mike Kitchen and the rest of the Blues remind you…..
Jeez, who are these guys?
Are Earth ice ages created by stars?:
It might sound preposterous, like astrology, to suggest that galactic events help determine when North America is or isn’t buried under immense sheets of ice taller than skyscrapers.
But new research suggests that the coming and going of major ice ages might result partly from our solar system’s passage through immense, snakelike clouds of exploding stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
Resembling the curved contrails of a whirling Fourth of July pinwheel, the Milky Way’s spiral arms are clouds of stars rich in supernovas, or exploding stars. Supernovas emit showers of charged particles called cosmic rays.
Theorists have proposed that when our solar system passes through a spiral arm, the cosmic rays fall to Earth and knock electrons off atoms in the atmosphere, making them electrically charged, or ionized. Since opposite electrical charges attract each other, the positively charged ionized particles attract the negatively charged portion of water vapor, thus forming large droplets in the form of low-lying clouds.
In turn, the clouds cool the climate and trigger an ice age — or so theorists suggest.
Burning fossil fuels might be our only hope! We should run our cars overnight. We should also exterminate and bury entire species to ensure our future generations have fossil fuel to burn.
Or we could admit that our understanding of the universe and its component parts have great glaring omissions, and realize that humanity acts in its best interest given its best knowledge at the time it acts….
Nah. BIG OIL! BIG PHARMA! (Anything but BIG LAWYERS! BIG IDIOTS-DEMANDING-PUBLIC-POLICY AND BIG GOVERNMENT!)
I bought this book last autumn at a clearance book store for $5.00 because 1.) I have a fond memory of an old Scholastic copy of Ben Bova’s Escape and 2.) I have a fond college-era memory of Cyberbooks. So I opened this book as a break from the suspense I’d been reading lately, and….
I was underwhelmed.
Sure, I see that this is Book 1 of the Asteroid Wars, which unfortunately means that there’s some greater arc that the book will set up and that some plot lines will be unresolved at the end of the book, unfortunately. When my brother was in the Marines, he gave me all of his basic training reading material before he shipped off to Hawaii. This reading material comprised numerous books one or one and two of a trilogy, but never a book three….unless it was to a separate trilogy with no preceding books to set the plot up. So I have some experience with this sort of thing. Besides, every trilogy or whatnot begins with Book 1. So I got in on a ground floor opportunity here.
The premise: As the world runs over the “greenhouse cliff” (the Precipice), a space industrialist bucks cutthroat competition and overregulation to use a fusion drive to go to the Asteroid Belt to claim resources that can help the Earth alleviate its disaster.
Sounds kinda stock, with a topical interest whose political ramifications made me put down the book after a couple of pages once before. But I soldiered on this time, friends, For you.
Unfortunately, to accommodate its arc (and its past, which I will hint at now and later), the book spends the first half (200+ pages) on the political and corporate wrangling leading to the funding and the initial reaction to the prospect of the mission. Major yawn, and it was only through discipline that I really made it through. After the midpoint of the book, when the industrialist and his plucky pilots and capable geologist steal his ship to go to the Asteroid Belt without the approval of the government, the pacing picks up, and we’re in a rollicking science fiction book instead of some sort of corporate drama set tomorrow. Lester Del Rey, who was clawing his way out of his grave to beat Ben Bova, settled back to rest.
Unfortunately, after 180 pages of a good science fiction story buttressed by 250 pages of corporate wrangling. I found the end unsatisfying because of the extensive lengths Bova went to make the villain available for future novels in the series.
And while researching the book for this report (read: Clicking around on Amazon on related links), I discovered that the industrialist, Dan Randolph, is the subject of a long-running series of novels by Ben Bova. So perhaps I’m not privy to the nature of that series, nor of the significance of this book in that particular pantheon. Perhaps if I had bought the last ten years’ worth of Bova work, I’d be satisfied with the book and would recognize its position in the constellation, and admire its beauty as part of the whole.
But I’m too steeped in the world of suspense series, where the books are discrete units that build upon one another, and although later books might refer to earlier works in the series, one doesn’t have to read earlier books to understand the significance, and the current book does not have cliffhangers and hooks into the next or the next several for resolution.
So this novel got better as it went on to the new reader, but I don’t expect to buy the remainder of the series nor of the preceding series unless I can get them for a buck or less each sometime after I’ve diminished my stack of to-read books.
Of course, we know about this, but I see fit to remind everyone that the United States Census Bureau, designed to enumerate people in the various states and districts, has expanded its mission to collect a wealth of information, including:
You see, this has not so much to do with counting citizens to determine how to reapportion congressional representation; no, it’s intrusive nature is designed to provide data on whom the government could serve with more wealth-redistribution programs. And don’t worry, the Census Bureau assures you that it won’t use your information for anything other than the aggregation of population trends. Until such time as it changes its rules, of course.
One cannot find irony in a wasteful, intrusive federal program designed to provide statistics to support and encourage further wasteful, intrusive federal programs; it’s the profligate consistency that is the hobgoblin of bureacratic minds.
If you’re concerned about your privacy, don’t worry. You don’t have to fill it out if you get one. Title 13 Section 221 explains the opt-out procedure:
(a) Whoever, being over eighteen years of age, refuses or
willfully neglects, when requested by the Secretary, or by any
other authorized officer or employee of the Department of Commerce
or bureau or agency thereof acting under the instructions of the
Secretary or authorized officer, to answer, to the best of his
knowledge, any of the questions on any schedule submitted to him in
connection with any census or survey provided for by subchapters I,
II, IV, and V of chapter 5 of this title, applying to himself or to
the family to which he belongs or is related, or to the farm or
farms of which he or his family is the occupant, shall be fined not
more than $100.
There you have it. Describe your plumbing, in detail, on demand or face the criminal sanction, comrade citizen.
(Added to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)
Spectator’s Hockey Trade Rumours
Because your first thought, too, might be Valerie Plame to Calgary?
The Milwaukee Public Museum’s savior knows the solution to problems with the cultural institutions in southeastern Wisconsin: Not enough government:
As he prepares to take over the Milwaukee Public Museum, outgoing Waukesha County Executive Dan Finley called Monday for the creation of a regional cultural district that would oversee the museum, Boerner Botanical Gardens and other financially troubled attractions.
“Every one of them is struggling,” Finley said. “We’ve got to come up with a way to support them because we can’t afford to lose any one of them.”
Because what smaller bureaucracies cannot handle, larger ones can.
Finley did not specify how such a district would be financed, but said: “This is not about suggesting a new tax.”
Because adding administrative apparatus, office costs, and salaries–not to mention public relations, advertising, and perks–is going to, what, come out of the pooled resources of the nearly bankrupt individual entities?
Give me a break. It is all about new taxes spread throughout a wider area to fund perks for Finley and his ilk and to increase their visibility within the power circles of the community. When you see how he’s turned around the museum–with extra taxes and extra costs–think what he can do as governor. He probably is.
UPDATE: Owen of Boots and Sabers agrees with my sentiment.
In California, a child has hit another with a rock. As it is in California, common sense does not figure into what happens next:
Until the afternoon of April 29, 11-year-old Maribel Cuevas’ only connection with law enforcement was involvement in a mentoring program sponsored by the Police Activities League.
But that day a rock she says slipped from her hand struck Elijah Vang, 8, in the forehead. A 911 call led to Maribel being arrested by Fresno police officers, handcuffed and taken to Juvenile Hall, where she stayed for five days before a judge released her on the condition she wear an electronic ankle bracelet.
On Wednesday, Maribel is scheduled to go on trial in Juvenile Court on felony assault charges. Authorities say the rock-throwing incident was too serious to be treated lightly.
Fortunately, Californians don’t hang children for being children. Yet.
Headline of the day:
Money will fund riverfront development plan
How much more can the St. Louis Post-Dispatch insult its reader?
Denver-area coordinators charged with fighting terrorism want to buy a military armored vehicle – a Vietnam-era troop carrier to move police through gunfire and heavy contamination at the scene of a mass- casualty chemical, biological or nuclear attack.
They’re also good for pit bull search-and-destroy missions.
For those of you whom have doubted LASIK surgery, wherein someone peels your eye open like a grape and sucks out some portion of the inside for your betterment, we offer this heartening story of a plucky survivor: He wins $7.25M in botched eye surgery suit:
A former Wall Street broker won a $7.25 million civil suit after a botched laser eye surgery that he says left his vision permanently damaged.
The award, handed down by a jury in Manhattan Supreme Court, is believed to be the biggest so far in cases involving LASIK surgery.
Mark Schiffer, a 32-year-old Yale graduate, said the shoddy care he got from Dr. Mark Speaker and the TLC Laser Eye Center in October 2000 forced him to ditch his Wall Street career and take a job with his dad’s security firm, according to his lawyer, Todd Krouner.
Botched? It ruined his life to the point that:
Mark Schiffer, WG’01, has been named chief financial officer of Safe Banking Systems. Prior to joining SBS, Schiffer worked for Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman Sachs.
Yeah, thanks, brother, for raising the cost of eye surgery and all surgery for the rest of us.
(Link seen on Overlawyered.)