Sophont

MEMRI: Latest News : "Iran's Sahar 1 TV station is currently airing a weekly series titled 'For You, Palestine,' or 'Zahra's Blue Eyes.' The series premiered on December 13, and is set in Israel and the West Bank. It broadcasts every Monday, and was filmed in Persian but subsequently dubbed into Arabic. The story follows an Israeli candidate for Prime Minister, Yitzhak Cohen, who is also the military commander of the West Bank. The opening sequence of the show contains graphic scenes of surgery, and images of a Palestinian girl in a hospital whose eyes have been removed, with bandages covering the sockets. In Episode 1, Yitzhak Cohen lectures at a medical conference on the advances being made by Israeli medicine regarding organ transplants. Later in the episode, Israelis disguised as UN workers visit a Palestinian school, ostensibly to examine the children's eyes for diseases, but in reality to select which children's eyes to steal to be used ...

A.E.Brain : "We - and by that I mean those baby-eating bloodthirsty barbarians in the Australian military - have plans for dealing with natural disasters. We - and by that I mean us Evil Warmongering Boffins that support the military - even develop simulations and models to help the guys in uniform plan what to do. Unlike some SHM readers, we don't have a direct line to God, so we don't know when and where such catastrophes will occur. The same resources that could support an armoured infantry company operating round Mosul would also be useful for relieving natural disasters, and more importantly, there are plans so to use them. We can walk and chew gum at the same time, provided we don't over-commit ourselves. That's why we have so few troops in Iraq, and resisted the strong pressure from the USA pre-war to commit more in the post-war phase. The US understood this, and didn't make a fuss about us keeping a Strategic Reserve. More importantly, we don't j...

TBIFOC : "Thank goodness 3-Com bought them out and put a stop to their nefarious schemes."

The Seattle Times : "Today, Russell does consulting from a lab in the basement of his Bellevue home to keep in the game and supplement a modest pension from Battelle. A wooden box on a shelf contains a set of faintly scored glass plates, each about the size of a 3- by 5-inch notecard. They are precursors of the DVD; each contains a digital recording of a television show taken off the air in 1974 to prove that his idea for optical digital recording worked. The plates, a collection of paperwork and a small trophy from Battelle are basically all he has to show for his work on a technology that changed how the world buys and stores music, movies and software. 'I didn't really expect I was going to make a lot of money, because I recognized early on it was going to take a big company to put this all together and get it out on the market, because it was a revolutionary thing,' Russell said, 'and you don't just do revolutionary things of that order without eno...

WB11.com : "The Yule Log, video of a blazing fireplace accompanied by holiday music, was a holiday tradition on Channel 11 from 1966 to 1989. During its hiatus, the many letters and phone calls to Channel 11 requesting its return attested to its undying popularity. The Yule Log has won its time period for WPIX in New York's overnight Nielsen Station Index ratings each year since its return to television. The Yule Log was the creation of the late Fred Thrower, General Manager of WPIX from 1953 to 1975. 'I thought about all the cave dwellers in New York, all the apartments that don't have fireplaces,' he remembered in a 1988 interview. 'I thought this might be a wonderful way...to let people hear real good Christmas carols and to have their own fireplaces burning.'"

Tech Central Station : "The United Nations is the pre-eminent trade association for people involved in the business of government power. Actually, it is more focused than that. The United Nations is the trade association for the world's executive branches -- the place where executive branches come together to promote their individual interests to one another, and to promote the expansion of executive authority in general. This point is often missed by UN critics who dismiss the organization as nothing more than the world's greatest debating society. These critics confuse being voluntary with being powerless. Organizations like The American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, the International Tobacco Growers' Association are all voluntary -- but certainly not powerless. Once it is understood that the United Nations is a trade association for the promotion of executive authority, its behavior becomes almost rational. The trade association extends profe...

Tip of the Day - Tip of the Day Blog : "Don't work off Floppies in Word People who are new to computers have a tendency to store their data files, including Word documents, on floppy disks. They think this is safer, in case the hard disk has a problem. This may have been true in the early days of hard disks, but there are a number of reasons not to use floppy disks to store your documents:    * It is much slower loading and saving documents.    * Floppy disks are more prone to disk errors than hard disks.    * It is too easy to misplace a floppy disk. The biggest reason to not work on floppies has to do with how Word handles its temporary 'scratchpad' files. Microsoft designed Word to stash critical parts of the document in 'temp files' on disk instead of trusting them to RAM. There are a couple of temp files opened in the %temp% folder when Word starts, and there are two or more opened where the document file is located. If your document file is ...

Technocrat.net : "Recent tests found no evidence of X-ray scanner damage to digital camera media cards or to the images they hold. The tests of scanner models currently in use in the U.S. transportation industry were jointly conducted by the International Imaging Industry Association (I3A), the leading global association for the imaging industry; SanDisk Corporation, a manufacturer of digital media cards; and the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA). These findings mean that digital cameras and their image storage media can travel safely in either checked or carry-on bags, which will be reassuring to holiday travelers. And though they were not explicitly tested, it is likely that images on camera-phones will be safe in either situation as well. More care is needed for cameras with film, however, as the X-ray scanners for both checked and carry-on luggage can fog both developed and undeveloped film."

Harvard Gazette : "The slim, bearded, 51-year-old former mayor explained himself thus: 'What really moves me to do things that other people consider original is my passion to teach.' He has long been known for theatrical displays to gain people's attention and, then, to make them think. Mockus, the only son of a Lithuanian artist, burst onto the Colombian political scene in 1993 when, faced with a rowdy auditorium of the school of arts' students, he dropped his pants and mooned them to gain quiet. The gesture, he said at the time, should be understood 'as a part of the resources which an artist can use.' He resigned as rector, the top job of Colombian National University, and soon decided to run for mayor. The fact that he was seen as an unusual leader gave the new mayor the opportunity to try extraordinary things, such as hiring 420 mimes to control traffic in Bogotá's chaotic and dangerous streets. He launched a 'Night for Women' and ask...

www.theage.com.au : "Evening visitors would see a show enacting the history of Brazil, with semi-naked Indians, shaven-headed Catholic priests and Portuguese soldiers, who on closer inspection during a preview appeared to be women wearing false moustaches. The island would also be open 24 hours and would have a late-night techno nightclub. Mr Au admitted that one of the greatest challenges to the project had been dealing with German bureaucracy. 'There is a bamboo tower in the middle of the island. We were asked for its measurements. We have been building bamboo towers for thousands of years but have never previously measured them,' he said. As well as teak deckchairs, the island would also offer yoga and samba lessons aimed at Berlin's affluent elderly. ....The theme park, called Tropical Islands, is being built inside a 107-metre-high, 368-metre-long hall, which was originally used to house zeppelins and is next to the site of a former Russian military ai...

FOXNews.com : ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Gov. Bill Richardson's (search) office is calling for an investigation into how a man was forced to pay child support for a child that didn't exist. Steve Barreras was hauled into court, peppered with threats and paid out $20,000 in child support. Then his ex-wife was ordered to produce the child in court. So last week Viola Trevino picked up a 2-year-old girl and her grandmother off the street and promised them a trip to see Santa Claus. Instead, she allegedly took the girl into court and said she was her daughter. The elaborate ruse stretched over five years and involved fake DNA evidence, a forged Social Security number and birth and baptismal certificates. State District Judge Linda Vanzi ruled the child did not exist."

After hours of questioning of the People's witnesses (Ms. Ramos and the police officer who actually arrested Barlow), the People rested and the defense got an opportunity to call some witnesses. It ended up calling three. The first was another airport police officer, whose testimony was meant to show that screeners were somehow hoping or being encouraged to look for drugs (contrary to Federal precedent which demanded that they look only for weapons and explosives), but it didn't seem to have that effect. The second witness was a surprise witness who led to great shock and drama in the courtroom. The surprise witness in question was a former aviation screener who worked for a foreign military during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. I didn't understand, or didn't remember, which country's military the witness said he worked for, and apparently the Federal government lawyer didn't either, because she stood up and started admonishing him that he shouldn...

Tampabay : "Before you wear your cool yellow LiveStrong wristband at the hospital, think twice. Several area hospitals are putting the brakes on Lance Armstrong's cancer organization fundraising bracelets. It's not cold-hearted backlash, but rather a safety precaution. Patients wear colored bracelets to identify safety needs, said Lisa Johnson, vice president of patient services for Morton Plant Mease Health Care. Yellow stands for 'do not resuscitate.' 'It could be confusing, particularly in the situation of a code or a cardiac arrest where people have to think very quickly,' Johnson said. 'We wouldn't want to mistake a Lance Armstrong bracelet and not resuscitate someone we're supposed to.' ......The hospitals, all associated with BayCare Health Systems, use the same color codes. Purple means the patient is at risk of falling down; red means the patient has allergies; and white is an identification bracelet. Tampa General Ho...

Brink's Home Security - Tips : jaynote: yes, this really is on the Brinks website. This is a very bad, very stupid idea, and if I ever was considering using Brinks, this would have made me go with their competition. "Make Your Mark Permanently mark your valuables to make it easier for the police to return them to you if they are stolen. Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers with a state abbreviation work best. Keep a record of marked objects. "

CNN.com - Whale sings lonely song - Dec 8, 2004 : "LONDON, England (Reuters) -- A lone whale, with a voice unlike any other, has been wandering the Pacific for the past 12 years, American marine biologists said Wednesday. Using signals recorded by the U.S. Navy to track submarines, they traced the movement of whales in the Northern Pacific and found that a lone whale singing at a frequency of around 52 hertz has cruised the ocean since 1992. Its calls, despite being clearly those of a baleen, do not match those of any known species of whale, which usually call at frequencies of between 15 and 20 hertz. The mammal does not follow the migration patterns of any other species either, according to team leader Mary Anne Daher. The calls of the whale, which roams the ocean every autumn and winter, have deepened slightly as a result of aging, but are still recognizable. The study by scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, appears in the New ...

Current Chaos Manor mail It's said that when Bismarck was prime minister of Prussia and not too occupied with other matters like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, he made a few changes in the Prussian school system. One was that all schools found themselves with retired army drill sergeants looking after discipline. Certainly Prussia, and soon the German Empire, had the best disciplined school students and the best educated population in Europe.