slacker's posts
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From: WebCite query result 1
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As presidential rhetoric goes, this was hardly a match for “Ich bin ein Berliner,’’ still less another “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’’ But as a specimen of presidential narcissism, it is hard to beat. Obama couldn’t be troubled to visit Berlin to commemorate a momentous milestone in the history of human liberty. But he was glad to explain to those who were there why reflections on that milestone should inspire appreciation for the self-made “destiny’’ of his own rise to power.
“Few would have foreseen,’’ declared the president, “that a united Germany would be led by a woman from [the former East German state of] Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent. But human destiny is what human beings make of it.’’
The first President Bush, taught from childhood to shun what his mother called “The Great I Am,’’ regularly instructed his speechwriters not to include too many “I’s’’ in his prepared remarks. Reagan maintained that there was no limit to what someone could achieve if he didn’t mind who got the credit . George Washington, one of the most accomplished men of his day, said with characteristic modesty on becoming president that he was “peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.’’
Obama, on the other hand, positively revels in The Great I Am.
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Some observers think that Rivera has lost a little zip on his cut fastball as the postseason has progressed, but his career postseason ERA is now 0.76. That's not quite as pristine as John Blutarsky's Faber College GPA, but the Yankees will never complain.
From: 2009 World Series: Little manager decisions make big difference in Game 2 - MLB playoffs - ESPN 1
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Don't know who Craig Newmark is? You're on a first-name basis with him already, as he's the founder of Craigslist
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Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is
It is difficult, from the ground up, to tell if any of these new tactics have an impact. The partnership with the Iraqis is tentative at best. The social services don't pan out. The troops continue to patrol in humvees, as before; they are blown up by IEDs, as before. The counterinsurgency manual gathers dust on the battalion commander's desk, then disappears. But somehow ... it works. A year later, the neighborhood is markedly quieter — but it's hard to say why.
Afghanistan, Petraeus has noted, is different from Iraq. It is much poorer, vastly illiterate, governmentally incoherent and spectacularly corrupt — and its President, Hamid Karzai, shows no signs of the growth in office that Iraq's Nouri al-Maliki achieved (another mystery)
From: Klein on the Iraq Surge: What Lessons for Afghanistan? - TIME 1
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The film is so full of bad movie science that NASA screens it for potential managers, testing candidates on how many scientific inaccuracies as they can find. If you can find 168 issues, you get an A.
From: Cinematic Visions of the Apocalypse - Photo Essays - TIME 1
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"nanobristles" inspired by the surface of sea urchins. Harvard materials scientist Joanna Aizenberg makes them out of resin. Each strand is about 100 nanometers in diameter, or 1000 times thinner than a human hair. Eventually, this stunning example of biomimicry could lead to a new kind of glue or drug delivery system. From Technology Review:
From: Nanodreadlocks inspired by sea urchins - Boing Boing 1
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The witness, who asked not to be identified, said Major Hasan wheeled on Sergeant Munley as she rounded the corner of a building and shot her. Then Major Hasan turned his back and started putting another magazine into his semiautomatic pistol.
the initial story of how she and the accused gunman went down in an exchange of gunfire now appears to be inaccurate.
KILLEEN, Tex. — Sgt. Kimberly D. Munley has been applauded as a hero across the nation for shooting down Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan during the bloody rampage at Fort Hood last week. The account of heroism, given by the authorities, attracted the attention of newspapers, the networks and television talk shows.
Another officer, Senior Sgt. Mark Todd, 42, said in an interview Thursday that he fired the shots that brought down the gunman after Sergeant Munley was seriously wounded.
Sergeant Todd then rounded another corner of the building, found Major Hasan fumbling with his weapon and shot him, the witness said.
From: Second Officer Says He Brought Fort Hood Gunman Down - NYTimes.com 1
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First, it was the "death" of Major Hasan, not corrected for many hours. Then, for days, the story of how a white female cop brought down the shooter, even as she was receiving serious wounds. Yet I noticed just hours after the attack that scattered eyewitnesses, via the Web and Twitter, were saying that the killer re-loaded after Kimberly Munley went down.
Some of those witnesses said they yelled at the second cop to shoot Hasan--which he did, and then went up and kicked his gun away. Yet for days the media rarely questioned the military's "official" story of Munley as savior. The New York Times was one of many who put Munley on the front page and declared, on Nov. 7, that she was the person who nailed Hasan. Its headline: "She ran to gunfire, and ended it." It said flatly that she "brought down the gunman."
With the publication of an interview with Sgt. Mark Todd, the actual cop who gunned down the killer at Fort Hood -- following its account of an unnamed eyewitness last night -- the New York Times finally underlined what some of us noticed from nearly the start: the media fell hook, line and sinker once again for a military account of what happened during the tragedy.
What else will turn out false about Fort Hood claims from military, e.g. the "Allahu Akbar" shouts by Hasan? Was there any reason that the military deliberately boosted Munley and slighted Todd?
Yes, Munley is a hero for facing the bullets. And, no, this isn't another Jessica Lynch case, but it does have some disturbing similarities. Fool me once this past week, blame the military. Fool me twice, blame the media. What happens next?
From: Greg Mitchell: Media Fail: Kimberly Munley Did Not Bring Down Fort Hood Killer 1
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"I always had the sense," McGovern told me, "that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force -- it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn't want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child....They didn't want the general public to know what their weapons had done -- at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn't want the material out because...we were sorry for our sins."
More recently, McGovern declared that Americans should have seen the damage wrought by the bomb. "The main reason it was classified was...because of the horror, the devastation," he said. Because the footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hidden for so long, the atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the deeper recesses of American awareness, as a costly nuclear arms race, and nuclear proliferation, accelerated.
suppressing film footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was even more significant, as this country rushed into the nuclear age with its citizens having neither a true understanding of the effects of the bomb on human beings, nor why the atomic attacks drew condemnation around the world
The following month, McGovern was abruptly ordered to return to the U.S. He hauled the 90,000 feet of color footage, on dozens of reels in huge footlockers, to the Pentagon and turned it over to General Orvil Anderson. Locked up and declared top secret, it did not see the light of day for more than 30 years. McGovern would be charged with watching over it. Sussan would become obsessed with finding it and getting it aired. Fearful that his film might get "buried," McGovern stayed on at the Pentagon as an aide to Gen. Anderson, who was fascinated by the footage and had no qualms about showing it to the American people. "He was that kind of man, he didn't give a damn what people thought," McGovern told me. "He just wanted the story told."
This at last pushed public television into the void. What was then called National Educational Television (NET) agreed to show the documentary on August 3, 1970, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of dropping the bomb.
one morning in the summer of 1968, Erik Barnouw, author of landmark histories of film and broadcasting, opened his mail to discover a clipping from a Tokyo newspaper sent by a friend. It indicated that the U.S. had finally shipped to Japan a copy of black and white newsreel footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese had negotiated with the State Department for its return.
Barnouw learned in 1968 that the original nitrate film had been quietly turned over to the National Archives, so he went to take a look.
Attempting to create a subtle, quiet, even poetic, black and white film, he and his associates cut it from 160 to 16 minutes, with a montage of human effects clustered near the end for impact.
Eventually 200,000 Japanese citizens contributed half a million dollars and Iwakura was able to buy the film. He then traveled around Japan filming survivors who had posed for Sussan and McGovern in 1946. Iwakura quickly completed a documentary called Prophecy and in late spring 1982 arranged for a New York premiere.
Activists managed to track down hundreds of pictures in archives and private collections and published them in a popular book. In 1979 they mounted an exhibit at the United Nations in New York. There, by chance, Iwakura met Sussan, who told him about the U.S. military footage. Iwakura made a few calls and found that the color footage, recently declassified, might be at the National Archives. A trip to Washington, D.C. verified this. He found eighty reels of film, labeled #342 USAF, with the reels numbered 11000 to 11079.
In the mid-1970s, Japanese antinuclear activists, led by a Tokyo teacher named Tsutomu Iwakura, discovered that few pictures of the aftermath of the atomic bombings existed in their country.
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es, we think Apple’s buttonless approach is sexy, stupid, and limiting. Look at it this way. If you have a Magic Mouse and I have an OOMouse and we compete in any FPS, RTS, MMO, or OpenOffice.org Calc-off, you are going to be utterly obliterated. OBLITERATED. It won’t even be close. So, if you want sleek and superficial style, by all means, go ahead and buy a Magic Mouse. We don’t mind. But if you want raw power, flexibility, and speed, speed, speed, you will do much better with an OOMouse .
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アップルがテクノロジの複雑さを隠蔽するのを好むのに対して、オープンソースでは、高度な機能や透明性を提供するために複雑さを露出する。こうした2つの対極的なアプローチがあると指摘する。
OpenOfficeMouseがオープンソースコミュニティの典型的なプロダクトに思える。多いことは良いことだと仮定していて、プレスリリースは機能紹介に満ちている
ジョークでなければ狂気の沙汰だという反応が各方面から飛んできたが、OOMouseの開発者たちは、そのことを かなり意外に思い、そして少し残念がっている ようだ
From: 18ボタンマウスが象徴するOSSデザイン − ＠IT 2
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As the articles in this month’s Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise make clear, scientists actually seem to be becoming less certain about how exercise affects bone.
many scientists now think that that process doesn’t apply to bones. “If you stretch bone cells” in a Petri dish, says Alexander G. Robling, an assistant professor in the department of anatomy and cell biology at Indiana University School of Medicine and the author of an article in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, “you have to stretch them so far to get a response that the bone would break.”
So he and many other researchers now maintain that bone receives the message to strengthen itself in response to exercise by a different means. He says that during certain types of exercise, the bone bends, but this doesn’t stretch cells; it squeezes fluids from one part of the bone matrix to another. The extra fluid inspires the cells bathed with it to respond by adding denser bone.
the current state-of-the-science message about exercise and bone building may be that, silly as it sounds, the best exercise is to simply jump up and down, for as long as the downstairs neighbor will tolerate. “Jumping is great, if your bones are strong enough to begin with,” Dr. Barry says.
If hopping seems an undignified exercise regimen, bear in mind that it has one additional benefit: It tends to aid in balance, which may be as important as bone strength in keeping fractures at bay.
From: Phys Ed: The Best Exercises for Healthy Bones - Well Blog - NYTimes.com 1
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Meanwhile, lack of health insurance kills about 45,000 Americans a year , according to a Harvard study released in September. So which is the greater danger to our homeland security, the Taliban or our dysfunctional insurance system?
splurge on herself
From: Op-Ed Columnist - America’s Defining Choice - NYTimes.com 1
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Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future.
A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
From: Essay - The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate - NYTimes.com 1
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Barnes and Noble's nook is quickly supplanting Amazon's Kindle as the must-have e-reader.
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UPDATED: After last week's record-setting premiere, ABC's "V" was destined to drop in the ratings for episode two.
yet it was pretty steep.
The second "V" hour was seen by 10.7 million viewers and drew a 3.8 rating among adults 18-49, down 27% from last week. That's the largest fall from a premiere we've seen for a scripted show this season.
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"Star Trek" fans know there were, in effect, a couple pilots for the original series. The first, "The Cage," was rejected by NBC for being "too cerebral" (ah, some things never change). The second, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," replaced the actor who played James T. Kirk with William Shatner and was more action driven. That pilot had an alternate version which was mostly lost and has never aired. Apparently, a film collector in Germany acquired the print and "recently brought it to the attention" of CBS/Paramount. CBS is now releasing this version on Blu-ray Dec. 15.
Presented in three parts with 1970s-style act breaks, the alternative pilot offers an entirely different version of Captain James T. Kirk's opening monologue, music that contrasts from the famous opening theme and an extended action sequence.
From: Never-before-aired 'Star Trek' pilot to be released--The Live Feed | THR 1
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The company behind the mining effort, Infochimps , is trying to demonstrate and promote its data aggregation service while offering up some useful information to interested parties.
The other links the ID strings between Twitter’s Search API and the standard Twitter API. The two APIs issue different ID numbers to users, which makes it annoying, if not impossible, for developers to link data across both services to one user.
Ownership and privacy aside, Infochimps is offering the “tokens” data set broken out by month for free, and $9,500 for a version broken out by hour. The “ID/API mapping” data set is being offered for $6,000.
From: Is Infochimps’ Aggregated Data a Boon to Researchers or a Privacy Nightmare? 1
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Over the past few weeks, we've heard more and more about 2012 when, according to some, the world will end . Responding to all that talk with a healthy dose of skepticism, scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have launched a Web page to dispel the myths surrounding the momentous occasion.
On an FAQ page called, " 2012: Beginning of the End or Why the World Won't End? " NASA wrote that much like the Y2K scare a decade ago, the end of the world won't come in 2012.
From: NASA launches Web resource for 2012 predictions | Cutting Edge - CNET News 1
