Owner: Carson's Post URL:http://carsonspost.wordpress.com Join Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2007 09:36:18 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Two guys talking about politics and society, a generation apart. Site statistics:Click here
The “New” Carson’s Post 2007-08-10 02:15:34 We are very proud of our little blog, and are happy with how it has grown. The past month in particular has been amazing as this site has grown in content, readers, but most importantly, discussion. So, having thought about it and concluded this is a project well worth continuing and expanding, we are moving on Monday off the Wordpress server to our new site, Carson
sPost.com.
I started this site in November as I wanted to figure out &ldquo
;what this blogging this was all about&rdquo
;, improve my writing and have a focus point when reading the news or about politics. It was all pretty small potatoes until my father, Tony Carson, decided to share the site with me, and this project really expanded.
If you receive our Feedburner RSS feed or email service, this will follow the transition to the new site. Also, this Wordpress site should automatically redirect to the new site. There might be problems with the Wordpress native RSS feed, and for individual pages. I wish there was som
Tiddlywiki and blissful simplicity 2007-08-09 02:56:45 There is power in simplicity, like many my favorite toy growing up was Lego. With enough Lego and imagination you could build anything, and have fun doing it. I get a kick out of reading Tiddlywiki discovery posts, when someone “gets it”. There is a Eureka Moment when the the power of this simple sheet of HTML code hits the writer. When they discover it’s like Lego, and the possibilities start to open up.
I have three Tiddlywikis, and will probably start a fourth. I have one that acts as a dayplanner and brain dump, a modified version of MonkeyGTD 2.1a that I call TiddlySnip Palace. It sits on my desktop and I dump interesting things in it using the TiddlySnip Firefox extension. When my Snipped content is in the Tiddlywiki, I can turn it into a ToDo process, or add a reminder to it, or an address. I can link it to other processes or things that I have dumped. It is like a mashup between Google Calendar and Google Notebook.
My most impressive Tiddlywi
The Maltese Falcon: ego trip or revolution on the seas. 2007-08-09 01:33:09
The build of superyachts like Maltese Falcon
are founded in many things, ego included. These big projects are often also “pet projects” of their wealthy owners. That said, Maltese Falcon is very interesting as a project, and could have an some spin-off into mainstream commercial shipping.
In the 1970s the Dynarig that the ‘Falcon uses was dreamed up somewhere in Germany as a solution to the oil crisis. The problem with the modern sailboat rig is that it is too cluttered for a cargo ship, there are too many loose lines and sails - it takes too much skill and crew. The traditional square rig can contain the sails in easy to use panels but cannot go to weather. An efficiently trimmed traditional ship can barely make 60 degrees off the wind, where as the more modern sloop rigs can still sail at 30 degrees. The Dynarig improves on each of these by having square rigs on free-standing masts.
This is a simplification of how Dynarig system works: traditional square sail Read more:revolution
Newspaper’s Bloggers: Journalists on Wordpress? 2007-08-08 16:36:45 Media blog Publishing 2.0 looks at the recent attempts by traditional newspapers to create New Media presence though the use of blogs. The problem is, at what point does a newspaper column end and a blog being? Is it the Wordpress
software?
Washington Post’s newly launched hyperlocal site, LoudounExtra.com, is anchored by a strong blogger, and the site maintains a list of local bloggers. Sites like the Houston Chronicle have had a lot of success with setting up high-quality freelance blogs — this is not “citizen journalism” or reader blogging (as the Chronicle calls them — but they’re not readers anymore when they’re writing!) or (even worse) “user-generated content.”
These are freelance journalists, who happen to be doing it in their spare time and who happen to be using blogging software.
The word “blog” has way too much baggage — it’s too often equated with opinion. But a blog is just a content management system, and you can use it to publish shrill opi Read more:Newspaper
Zimbabwe: sugar deflating? 2007-08-08 16:01:24 Tom Freeman, blogging at Freemania, has a look at Zimbabwe
’s desperate inflation in his post “Mugabeconomics”.
Last Wednesday, Zimbabwe issued a new $200,000 note. You could buy a kilo of sugar with it.
According to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, monthly inflation was 37.8% in February, 50.5% in March and 100.7% in April – an annual equivalent of nearly 619,000%. After that, they inexplicably stopped publishing the figures.
On the risible assumptions that these official numbers are accurate and that inflation hasn’t risen further since April, the new note should today be able to buy 887 grams of sugar. This time next week, 750 g. The week after, 635 g.
Iraq: lots of opinions, but not enough questions. 2007-08-08 15:37:57 It isn’t hard to find an opinion in the media on what is happening in Iraq
, but it is hard to find a description. Robert Dreyfuss takes on the mainstream media in Nieman’s Watchdog’s regular “Ask This” feature.
The conventional wisdom is that Iraqis can’t get their act together; that Iraqi politicians are hopeless squabbling, fratricidal hate-mongers; and that there’s really no use trying understand what passes for Iraqi politics. The narrative continues like this: that Iraq’s civil war is hundreds of years old, with Sunnis and Shia killing each other since the dawn of Islam;.that Iraq isn’t really even a country, since its borders were arbitrarily drawn up by a cigar-smoking Winston Churchill in the 1920s; and that there is no chance that Iraq will meet the 18 so-called “benchmarks” that were enacted by Congress earlier this year because it’s impossible that Iraqis will ever forge a consensus that can hold their country together.
But is Read more:questions
Oz to boycott China until the starting gun 2007-08-07 12:29:23 You don’t expect a nation whose pedigree came from penal scrolls to know a lot about diplomacy but this seems a little over the top: Australia to go to Olympics at last minute.
The Aussies are only worried about the impact of the air and the food and the water on their athletes, everything else, it is presumed, is adequate.
But staying away until the last possible moment isn’t what you’d call a vote of confidence in the host country. And it hardly captures the spirit of the Games where camaraderie is said to be as important as medals, more so to most who have no chance of medalling.
But to a country who knows a lot about camaraderie and socializing, measured usually in litres not medals, this seems to be a highly xeonphobic reaction to a nation where, after all, 1.3 people not only live but now thrive.
The dainty tummies and lungs of the Aussies should learn to compete for three weeks and the Aussie organizers should learn to grow up. If the country isn’t up to Read more:China
Bush should continue treating global warming as he has, with distain 2007-08-07 12:09:46 With his remaining days in office, should Bush continue to ignore global warming, as he has throughout his presidency, or should he make a final halting step to address the problem?
He has decided on the latter by calling for a September summit on climate change. But what can talk from the Bush Administration be expected to accomplish? He not only came late to the game, he came reluctantly and in a bad mood.
First, he passed on Kyoto saying it was too expensive and would harm the US economy. And, anyway, if the rising powers of China and India wouldn’t be forced to comply, why should the emitter of 25% of the world’s greenhouse gasses?
Setting an example, a positive example, was apparently never a consideration.
Then there was the Markel-inspired EU summit on the environment which, apparently, ended with a lecture that Bush finally understood. Gases were a very real concern.
So, finally, he acted, but in a typically Republican way without standards, without regulations an
Carbon footprint and the zero sum game 2007-08-07 11:34:52 So, what’s your carbon footprint? How much are you contributing to greenhouse gas emissions? Would you trade with others to stay carbon-neutral? Would buy-offs ease your guilt?
It’s early times, but there is a new trend to becoming a zero-sum contributor of greenhouse gases (”carbon neutral”). That means when you exceed your personal target you purchase carbon off-sets, you invest in any project that reduces greenhouse gas emissions, thus the zero sum.
This editorial in the Christian Science Monitor entitled Guilt relief in global warming is a useful start in understanding the concept.
Interestingly, the Christian of the Science Monitor takes on ‘guilt’ as a principal motivator and likens it to earlier times:
Using offsets has been criticized as an easy way to relieve “carbon guilt” without making changes in one’s daily use of fossil fuels that would reduce emissions directly. Offsets are likened to indulgences the Roman Catholic c Read more:Carbon
Vista a big fat flop, and a Linux opportunity 2007-08-13 04:10:20 We waited years for it, and Vista
has finally arrived. I have not used the new Microsoft OS, but by all accounts Windows Vista is pretty disappointing. It is so bad that a Dell IT strategist was not only attending the recent annual Linux
World conference, but actually addressing it.
“To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just have to work on it.”
Ouch! The ears in Redmond must have been burning as Cole Crawford addressed the conference. Microsoft must be losing a little bit of sleep now that Dell is offering the option of having the fairly user friendly “Ubuntu” version of Linux preinstalled on some of their units.
He said Linux is a lot more secure than Windows as it has no registry, since everything is a file, which needs permissions to execute. There is also no such thing as a DLL, which Crawford described as the second most evil thing in Windows behind ActiveX.
Linux is good enough today to run as a corporate
China’s High-Tech Plan to Track People 2007-08-12 13:25:44 All Chinese citizens are required to carry national identity cards with very simple computer chips embedded, providing little more than the citizen’s name and date of birth. Since imperial times, a principal technique of social control has been for local government agencies to keep detailed records on every resident.
The system worked as long as most people spent their entire lives in their hometowns. But as ever more Chinese move in search of work, the system has eroded. This has made it easier for criminals and dissidents alike to hide from police, and it has raised questions about whether dissatisfied migrant workers could organize political protests without the knowledge of police.
What to do? Turn to computers. And, as this New York Times article entitled China
Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track
People explains, the test city will be the southern city of Shenzhen.
Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, re
Afghanistan: how the ‘good’ war went bad 2007-08-12 12:59:58
Though Afghanistan
experienced a period of relative calm after the fall of the Taliban, parts of the country have since become more dangerous. Larger circles on the map show which provinces have had the most terrorist attacks since 2002. The New York Times has the story How the &lsquo
;Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad.
Critical Mass: where the bicycle rules 2007-08-12 12:40:17 On the last Friday of each month in San Francisco, the cyclists of Critical Mass embark on an unrehearsed crosstown jaunt that — for a few hours — transforms the urban landscape.
And, of course, those stuck in their cars are pissed at the anarchy.
But it is the future, it has to be, more people must be allowed to bike through cities without the fear of death. That means either new infrastructure or change to existing infrastructure, but current transportation patterns in North American cities, where the gas-guzzling vehicles rule, is not sustainable.
But there doesn’t yet seemed to be a model. Montreal has, apparently, set a target where cyclists are never more than a kilometre from a bike path; other cities have effective bike routes and trails, some of them pretty scenic. But is there a model that will encourage automobile drivers to park their cars on the edge of town and bike in? Haven’t heard of it.
But it will happen because it has to and city planners are Read more:bicycle
Afghanistan — flailing about in body armour 2007-08-12 12:20:01 Afghanistan is a depressing story because so little is being done to help the actual people.
Trying to find some good news out of that war-torn country is next to impossible. All the anecdotal tales about individuals and families tend to say the same thing: there is no economic progress, there is no hope.
This BBC article entitled Aid failings ‘hit Afghan progress’ is typical of many: not enough money is being invested in the country and too little of it is getting through to the people who need it. In fact, “too much of the money earmarked for aid to Afghanistan actually goes straight back to donor countries.”
The amount of money promised per head for Afghanistan was far lower than in other recent post-conflict countries, and too little of it has gone into increasing the capacity of the Afghan government to run things for itself.
In a report more than a year ago, the World Bank warned of the dangers of an ‘aid juggernaut’, a parallel world operating Read more:Afghanistan
, mdash
Get the Iraqis to start rebuilding Iraq now 2007-08-12 11:45:37 All the ’surge’ is doing in Iraq
is delaying the inevitable. If and when the US leaves, the country will fall apart. Can there be any doubt about that?
So why not try something entirely new. Now. Why not employ the Iraqis
to rebuild there shattered country right now.
Here’s how.
Background
The US has spent over $500 billion so far in Iraq. That works out to around $2 billion per week but does not include the costs of all the necessary replacement of capital, like bullets, AK-47s, helicopters, planes, etc. And, of course, medical costs will demand big, big bucks well into the future.
Reports indicate that the war’s finally tally will surpass $1 trillion.
And there’s the Pottery Barn factor: ‘you broke it, you buy it.’ In Iraq, the US is morally on the hook for the cost of rebuilding what it has destroyed.
So here is Plan B
Put a sum of money into a ‘pot’, say $200 billion (which is no more than two years on the ground in Iraq). Tripl
How the Democrats can control Congress for a generation 2007-08-11 13:25:06 It has to happen anyway, eventually, so the Democrats
should do it now: create a government-run healthcare system that will cover all Americans with no increase in taxes.
That’s a heresy, of course. Ever since Ronald Reagan convinced Americans that government was the problem, the American people have been taught to hate their government, and the big winners have been the unregulated corporations.
But those days are numbered.
With globalization proliferating and global warming an increasing menace, corporate regulations will have to be strengthened and augmented to conform to more stringent international standards. So government in the US, inevitably, must play a much bigger role in the future than it has in the laissez-faire past.
So, to anticipate the future, the Democrats should break the inertia now and, as a party, create an ideal healthcare system that the country desperately needs and can afford. Yes, the party should do the work because it is too big and too complex and Read more:Congress
“How we won the mainstream;” what utter rubbish 2007-08-11 12:15:19 In this bit of self-congratulating delusion, Susan Gardiner and Markos aka Kos Moulitsas wax poetic in an article entitled How We Won the Mainstream but it might just as well have been called How We Ignore Reality.
The reality is that while the Democrats toy with appeasing the populous with halting steps towards healthcare and feeble steps in dealing with an illegal war they helped to create, the country is fading ever further from its ideals.
Take two issues, as examples:
• Impeachment. There can be no reasonable doubt that the Bush Administration has agglomerated irrational and illegal powers to the presidency at the expense of other levels of government. Nor can it be denied that he deliberated manipulated truth to gain public approval for a war that was only ever about oil. With his conduct in office, Bush has so sullied the presidency that without the redress and reckoning of impeachment, the imbalances he has created will hereafter become the standard.
• Loss of freedom Read more:ldquo
, rdquo
, rubbish
The inane logic of the market 2007-08-11 11:32:56 We are encouraged to look on the faceless gurus of the marketplace as if they have the authority of the Delphic Oracle.
Here, from an article in the Globe and Mail entitled Apple unveils redesigned iMac is an example of their laudatory insight and sagacious pronouncements:
The success of the IPod, Apple’s retail stores and the company’s switch to Intel-based computer chips have all helped propel the Macintosh maker’s computer sales and profits to record levels. In recent quarters, Apple’s sales have been growing three times faster than the rest of the PC industry.
“The IMac has been very successful for us and we want to make it even better,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in announcing the new products.
Shares of Apple fell 22 cents to $135.03 Tuesday.
Taliban, another word for dementia 2007-08-11 11:03:54
Think about it. The Taliban
say they may release two ill female hostages (who had been doing relief work in Afghanistan) in order to show good relations with South Korea. This, of course, comes after the Taliban had executed two others.
What can be done with a people with this degree of dementia
? I mean, how can we understand a people who distort logic to this sick degree?
Facebook, college and the vetting process 2007-08-15 14:39:34
Your kid is finally going to college. So what’s the first thing you do? Head to Facebook
.
Across the country college administrators said they are getting more pleas than ever from Facebook frazzled parents.
“They call based on the information that they see on Facebook and they say that their son or their daughter can’t possibly live with that person,” said Deb DiCaprio, Marist College’s dean of students.
Syracuse University has formulated a response to such a request.
“Our response to that is, we do not move students. We do not discriminate at all,” said Syracuse University housing director Robin Berkowtiz-Smith.
Multitasking, wastes time 2007-08-15 14:36:10
In another blow to women, it turns out that multi-tasking not only wastes time, it may be harmful.
In a scientific study (reported here Does Multitasking Save Time?), students were asked to do two tasks at once while their brains were examined using an MRI. Turns out our brains aren’t built for multitasking.
“Essentially it slows us down,” says Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Rene Marois who conducted the study. “We do one task and then after that we switch to the other.”
It’s like an information traffic jam in your head. And it can be life-threatening, especially if you’re driving 60 miles an hour while talking on the phone.
“One second of inattention can kill. And studies have shown talking on a cell phone while driving impairs your driving more than having had two drinks,” Hallowell says.
There is more on this at ABC’s 20/20 at 10 PM on Friday.
Boing Boing: Fish that feed on dead skin cells are a nice spa treatment 2007-08-15 14:21:34
According to this article, beauty-seekers in Southern China (and other parts of the world) are soaking themselves in pools filled with a type of small fish that eat human skin:
Garra Rufa, a type of small tropical fish, also nicknamed Chinchin Yu, nibble fish or simply doctor fish, are put in hot springs. As they can live and swim freely in at least 43-degree-hot waters, they are naturally used for the treatment of skin diseases in such spas. When placed in the spa, these fish can feed themselves on the dead cells
of the human body, since they only consume such cells, leaving the healthy skin of the human body to grow. The whole process is reportedly free of pain. It won’t hurt and the bather might feel a pleasant tingling on his or her skin.
Read more:Boing
, Boing Boing
Middle-age men most miserable 2007-08-15 14:12:24
In a UK survey, Middle-age most miserable for men, men in their late 30s and early 40s are the least satisfied members of society, even more dissatisfied than teenagers and the elderly.
In a scale of 1-10, “men, who rated their youthful happiness as 7.3, plunged into an early mid-life crisis with those aged 35-44 reporting satisfaction levels at 6.8″ — the lowest of all groups.
That may be news of a sort, that men go through a mid-life crisis, but isn’t it greater news that of all age groups, even the most miserable, these men, are still satisfied almost 70% of the time?
Even teenagers, perceived as enraged and miserable, seemed relatively blissed-out in Britain where the average score was 7.3.
But, hang-on, how much sense does this survey make?
Men and women regarded their retirement years as the happiest period of their lives, with women over 65 scoring 7.65 and men of the same age at 7.8 on the scale.
Clearly, these are statistics of expectation.
Health research — a diminishing commitment 2007-08-15 13:53:19
The investment in the health of a nation should not lose out to the prosecution of foreign wars. Yet that seems to be what has been happening in the US under the Bush Administration.
This article at Huffington Post traces the investment in scientific research over the past number of years and explains its impact on the health and longevity of Americans.
Today, Americans will live on average 30 years longer than they did a century ago. This is due to the triumph of public health interventions such as sanitation, improvements in hygiene and nutrition, clean water supplies, measures to reduce infant and maternal mortality, safety regulations, and advances from scientific research including vaccinations, antibiotics, and new technology to effectively diagnose, treat and prevent diseases.
But that investment has been diminished under the Bush Administration with attendant threats:
Alarmingly, the effects of significant decreases in funding for biomedical research are coming at a ti Read more:Health
, mdash
Persian Leopard — magnificence with a snarl 2007-08-15 12:56:12
One of Budapest Zoo’s rare Persian
leopard cubs (Panthera pardus saxicolor) practices it’s snarl during the first public appearance of the triplet cubs, Bella, Bara and Bahar in Budapest, Hungary, Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2007. The triplets were born on June 19. (AP Photo/Bela Szandelszky)
Read more:mdash
, Leopard
Tiny wind engines cool computers 2007-08-15 12:40:54
An “ionic wind” may help cool computer chips which are increasingly more densely packed with transistors, the basic building blocks of microprocessors.
The minuscule wind engines
could help to take computing power to the next level, scientists believe.
As this BBC article entitled Tiny wind engines cool computers
explains:
In computers and electronics, power equals heat, so we need to find ways to manage the heat generated in more powerful laptops and handheld computers.
Conventional cooling technologies using fans are limited because they can suffer from air-flow problems. As the spinning blades waft air over a chip, the molecules nearest to the chip can get stuck and remain stationary, hindering the cooling effect.
But the new experimental wind engine employs a different strategy.
The prototype, which is attached to a mock computer chip, works by shifting charged particles from one end of the device to the other. As a voltage is applied to the ionic engine, positiv
Saudi Arabia, social progress in the desert? 2007-08-15 12:28:17
Faced with resistance from the conservative official ulema, Saudi
King Abdullah has adopted a strategy of “circumvention” to coerce … reforms – officially toeing the Wahhabi line, but quietly giving more leeway to the private sector.
Interesting times in Saudi Arabia
where The Christian Science Monitor, in an article entitled A tipping point in Saudi Arabia
, tells us that “almost 75 percent of Saudi citizens are under age 30 and youth unemployment is approaching 30 percent – a potential breeding ground for terrorists and regime dissidents.
Current high oil prices are not enough to paper over the economic ravages of the past two decades. “The oil boom is over and will not return,” Abdullah told his subjects. “All of us must get used to a different lifestyle.”
This short article is a useful read.
Read more:progress
Death in the inner city 2007-08-15 11:07:15
* 34% of black children live in poverty, compared with 14% of white children.
* 69% of births to black women occurred out of marriage in 2004, compared with 25% for whites.
* 59% of black fourth-graders score “below basic” on national reading tests, compared with 25% of white fourth-graders.
The cycle of violence in the US, fed by a toxic stew of poverty, family break-downs, the proliferation of guns and more, accounts for a running death toll that has become so common it is barely reported.
The Newark executions, horrific even by inner-city standards (see Death in the inner city), did make the headlines and serves to draw attention to a sad condition that lives and grows in most every US community.
It may be simplistic to point to guns as the main culprit but it can’t be argued that guns aren’t a significantly contributing factor to the mayhem in the inner cities. If authorities are serious about dealing with the constant problem of often gratuitous viol
Cancer and the HACE 1 gene, a heads up 2007-08-14 13:48:58
I have no idea what this means to the future of cancer, but HACE 1 sounds interesting.
This is all the Globe and Mail has on this, from Canadian team discovers gene that turns cancers off
A unique gene that can stop cancerous cells from multiplying into tumours has been discovered by a team of scientists at the B.C. Cancer
Agency in Vancouver.
The team, led by Dr. Poul Sorensen, says the gene has the power to suppress the growth of human tumours in multiple cancers, including breast, lung and liver.
The gene, HACE 1, helps cells fight off stress that, left unchecked, opens the door to formation of multiple tumours.
Dr. Sorensen’s team found cancerous cells form tumours when HACE 1 is inactive, but when additional stress such as radiation is added, tumour growth is rampant.
Kick-starting HACE 1 prevented those cells from forming tumours.
The study appears in the advance online publication of Nature Medicine.
Prostitutes and PTSD 2007-08-20 12:13:22
Who knew?
A 2003 study by California researcher Melissa Farley says about 68 per cent of sex workers surveyed in nine countries, including some from British Columbia, reported post-traumatic stress disorder on the same level as those who served in military combat. And her 2005 study says 100 sex workers interviewed in Vancouver had “an extremely high prevalence of lifetime violence and post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Yet even with this perceived “silent epidemic” that could have potentially fatal consequences (if left untreated, the disorder can lead to suicide or drug and alcohol addictions) there are two major issues concerning the disorder and sex workers:
First, advocates say traditional treatment methods won’t work for women who lack the resources and social support to get better.
Second, there’s a debate about whether it’s sex work itself or Canada’s prostitution laws that put women in danger. There are new laws banning bawdy Read more:Prostitutes
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