Flutterby™! From 2004-10-01 to 2004-10-28

For those of you who couldn't stand to sit through the tedium, here's a transcript of tonight's presidential "debate". I'm a little shy of half-way through it, don't know if I'm going to make it all the way, but as of right now I understand Bush supporters a little bit better, and think I'm going to have to vote for Michael Badnarik.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics ]

Wes Felter on Podcasting:

Sorry Adam, Dave, Doc, and Dan, but I hate podcasting. It's a total waste of my time to listen to something when I could read it.

Spurred on by Mark's efforts, I sat down today to record an audio blog. I've got a whole bunch of ideas flying around, but for some reason, despite borrowing a really sweet mic from a friend, I still had some unreasonable ticks and noise on the track. So I'll just write my points here:

1. The point of audio blogs is to help fill that space where I've got an otherwise unused sense. To replace NPR and George Noory when I'm in the car. The innovation here is not that people are putting audio content on the web, that's been going on for as long as I've had net access (anyone remember IUMA?), it's the automation in transferring new content to portable players.
2. I don't know how long that time is, and, as Wes points out, listening is not my most efficient way to absorb information, so don't expect me to listen through an hour and a half of "wait, this web page is here somewhere" and "uhmmm". That's fine for now, but once I get a few sites that have content, I'm only going to listen to a fraction of your entry. How about taking those 30 minutes and making me a 5 minute spot with a little editing.
3. Just because you can lay a music track down to cover the empty spaces, doesn't mean you should.
4. I don't care if you think it's geeky, Ogg is a good idea because not only are the files smaller and better sounding, it's not patent encumbered.

There, now you don't have to sit through half an hour of Dan thinking he's some sort of producer type person.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Interactive Drama Music Weblogs Coyote Grits Invention and Design Aviation Space & Astronomy Automobiles ]

There are a few people who get free rides in terms of publicity on Flutterby. Debra Hyde is one of them. So we'll just quote her directly:

Please forgive the mass mailing of my good news, but I hope you'll help me celebrate the inclusion of my short "filler" film in the Cinekink film festival. I've posted the news at my weblog, www.pursedlips.com, but if you'd prefer a .txt version of the press release, right click: http://arts.journurl.com/users/debrahyde/HappyTears.txt

So if you're in New York City from October 21^st through the 24^th, check it out.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Movies Current Events New York ]

Yesterday, Charlene and I met up with some folks I'd run into on the Tandem@Hobbes mailing list to do a bike ride from Crissy Field, across the Golden Gate Bridge, down through Sausalito, then around Richardson Bay and out to Tiburon, catching the Blue and Gold Fleet ferry back to San Francisco.

Of course it was the folks who showed up early who ended up being the ones who rode the original route as planned. It was interesting to ride with other people. The first issue was that compared to two people on a tandem, solo riders on mountain bikes are slow. In fact, when we cut loose on the bike path north from Sausalito we were keeping up with the fastest of the road bikes; Charlene's knee bothers her after 20 miles or so, which has kept us from the long rides, but she's getting stronger, so over a few miles we're actually regularly cruising over 20 MPH, occasionally creeping more towards the 25 side of that when we can get a mile or two without stop signs or wayward kids and pets.

And Charlene's brother and his wife have decided to sell their tricked out, less than 500 miles, road tandem. He's my height, she's about Charlene's height, so this is a bike we could probably grow into, put together by people who are serious road bikers. They've offered it to Charlene first, at a fantastic price. With drop bars and skinny tires I see much higher cruising speeds in our future.

In Sausalito there was a mime with a macau running through a routine with passers-by. I didn't see a place to make a donation; couldn't tell if he was doing it for the exposure (which, alas, failed, because I've forgotten his name) or if the chamber of commerce is paying for free street theater.

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area Theater & Plays Clowns Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem Sausalito ]

This weekend's hike featured this mild-mannered red-tail, of course I flubbed the focus on the full-frame shot when he took off from the pole and soared over us, but he kept in range for quite a while while he circled in a thermal, before finally disappearing off into the sky.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

Back in April I proposed a little bit of software and hardware to remind you of the last speed limit sign you passed was. Roland Piquepaille does his usual condensation of a New Scientist article that talks about cars reading road signs. It sounds like the system described is much more complex than what I was thinking of, including more interaction with the driver than I think is necessary.

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design Software Engineering Current Events Archival ]

Every couple years, it seems, I have the need to build some bookshelves. Sometimes they are built-ins and sometimes they are free-standing. No matter what, they always begin with my measuring the space for the shelves and the items to be placed in it. Then I try to sketch it out on paper and guesstimate wood widths and such. This time, however, I'm building the shelves for someone else and I'd really like to make a nice CAD style drawing of the shelves. But after a precursory google of the 'net, I can't find a CAD package designed just for shelves. Why doesn't such a beast exist?

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

Rutan's team wins the X-Prize.

[ related topics: Aviation Space & Astronomy Current Events Cool Technology ]

A correspondent forwards an article about a Pennsylvania case that, among other things, is asking questions about whether a person can consent to abuse. There's a lot of "he said-she said" going on in it, the waters are very muddied, but I'll keep my eyes open about future developments in the case.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law Current Events ]

If you've been following the soap opera, you'll know that the Amazon job in Seattle didn't work out. And in the week and a half that I was getting positive vibes, I strung out a few other contacts, and I'm back to square one on the job search.

Continued in the comments...

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

To those of you who responded to my brash notions that I can redefine the world with offers of testing my picture management software, I'd like a little feedback so that I can prioritize. My goal here is to ship something as fast as possible, and to do that I need to find a few people whose needs I can hit quickly. So, if you'd do me a favor and answer these questions here and then email me contact info (danlyke@flutterby.com), I'll try to get something that's somewhat usable and from which we can migrate data to future versions as quickly as possible. This will not initially be software for novices, and while I'll do my best to make damned sure you don't lose any data, everything else may crash, and releases may be measured in hours. Please answer these questions even if that caveat scares you.

• What's your current system for holding your photos? For instance, I use the Flutterby code to organize my images, on each of my computers I have an "images" directory, under that there are a series of directories, most of which are of the form "aaaa####", where "aaaa" is some identification of the source of the image (which camera, or "pcd" for PhotoCD scans) and "####" is a sequential number. In those directories are the files as they come off the camera, ie: "img_1234.jpg", with alternate sizes as "img_1234.sm.jpg" (and "sm" gets replaced with "md" and "lg"), although sometimes thumbnails exist as "img_1234.thm", especially where the original file isn't a JPEG. These files exist over at least 4 different machines, often redundantly, sometimes some machines (like the colo server and my laptop) only have smaller versions or crops (usually denoted "img_1234_crop.jpg") of the images.
• Do you have a common naming scheme for thumbnails, crops and other transformations from the original image?
• Are these images from digital camera sources, or scans?
• Do you have a GPS device?
• Windows or Linux? (not worrying about Mac yet, I'll get there)
• If Linux, what's your desktop environment, KDE, Gnome, or something else? And do you have any databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL running?
• Do you have or are you comfortable installing relatively recent versions of Python and GTK? (I'll offer some handholding on these, but I'm not yet to building self-contained Windows executables).
• If you have a database running, do you expect to use this software in a multi-user environment? If so, describe it.

Still making no promises, and if I get the right offer to do something else I'll drop this, but we're re-structuring so that we can live cheaply and have a really tight grip on household finances, and if I can get a few other people who are willing to sit through some really horrid iterations, tell me when things suck, but who might find value in this software, maybe we can go somewhere.

And if you work with a hosting provider of some sort, either flat web hosting, photo sharing, "social networking", or even free email, let's talk. The hypertext editing features mean that sharing albums is going to be pretty high on the list, and because of the security issues I've talked about with the snippet manager, this means that there'll be room for some strategic relationships with web services providers who can offer portions of the publishing and sharing infrastructure.

[ related topics: Photography Microsoft Open Source Software Engineering Macintosh Maps and Mapping Databases Archival Python ]

Okay, design question: I've got a class which abstracts out most of the database operations, and because I'm concerned about speed and multi-userness, I'm trying to commit() only when necessary. I'm torn between remembering to commit() at the high levels (and what happens when things are called in different configurations?) versus trying to have my classes assume a certain granularity of operation. Anyone run into good rants on the topic?

[ related topics: Software Engineering Databases ]

Reminder to North Bay folks: Michael Klapholz tonight at Yet Wah in San Rafael, 9:30 'til. $5 cover. Kickin' acoustic guitar.

[ related topics: Music Bay Area Michael Klapholz ]

If you see Kerry as a jump to the left, and Bush as step to the ri-i-i-ight, you might want to check out Mock The Vote (Flash and audio)

[ related topics: Politics Music Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

I've enjoyed the stories of tandem bike riding in these pages, but a new question arises: Do human-powered vehicles have anything to match Viberider?

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Invention and Design Bicycling - Tandem ]

Interesting bug of the moment (described as non-techically as possible so I don't alienate both of my remaining non-geek readers): In my map browser, I trap the "mouse move" event, and if the cursor is over a thumbnail, I start a timer. If I haven't seen another "mouse move" in a short time (two seconds or so), I pop up a larger view of the image (which then goes away if you move the mouse or do anything else).

If the right combination of overlapping windows occurs, you can move the mouse cursor off of the map window on to another application, but with the timer still counting down and the window no longer registering mouse motion, two seconds later that larger image pops up over... say... my editor. Confused the hell out of me the first time I saw it.

Konqueror exhibits the same bug.

I'm not sure if I'm going to fix it, 'cause it's kinda cool in a surrealist sort of way.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Software Engineering ]

I ended up in the car yesterday during the latest presidential "debate". Ow, that was painful. Doesn't either side care about gaining votes, or are both of 'em just digging themselves in hard with their entrenched base? At any rate, it's good to know that some presidential hopefuls who'd actually make a difference tried to make it, but, alas, Michael Badnarik (Libertarian) and David Cobb (Green Party) were arrested, presumably while trying to enter the debate hall. Badnarik was trying to serve papers complaining that the CPD and Arizona State University had made substantial illegal campaign contributions to the Republican and Democrat parties.

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian Current Events ]

Every time I see this sign I can't help thinking "Take off every 'zig' for great justice! All your children are belong to us!"

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography Bay Area Current Events Law Enforcement ]

Saturday morning things fell into place, so after dealing with assorted issues around here we finally got out of the house circa 10:30, and, after dealing with traffic in Berkeley for a loooong time (why don't I just go through the city?) ended up in Cayucos about 4:00. Cayucos is a little town on the coast where the shoreline flattens out a bit, south of the 90 or so miles of mountains plunging straight to the sea that is Big Sur.

So we wandered out on the pier and watched folks surfing, then wandered through town. Stopped to take pictures of a few butterflies that were bothering some flowers, got into a conversation with the woman who ran the candy shop about the egrets coming in at sunset to nest in the large tree in the back. Had dinner at Hoppe's so we could sit in the back garden and watch them arrive. It was, indeed, pretty darned incredible to see all of those bright white birds perched against the green tree in the twilight. No pictures, alas, but one heck of a way to dine. And we got a few of the butterflies:

On Sunday we pedaled south to Morro Bay, a small town on an inlet sheltered by that huge rock you can see in the first picture above. The major attraction of the town is a largely unremarkable tourist district, with a few exceptions: The rock itself, of course, not legal to climb because of peregrine falcon nesting, or somesuch; The Shell Shop, an incredible blend of bygone aesthetic tastes coupled with a boatload of really gorgeous shells; and we ran into the slalom event of the World Championships of Skateboard Racing, which sucked us in to probably almost four hours of watching some amazing skills. At the bottom of the course they're probably clearing close to 4 cones a second, and the english and motion on the boards was mindblowing. No pictures, 'cause I forgot the camera, but a gorgeous pedal along Route 1 both ways, and a really fun stop in the middle.

[ related topics: Butterflies Photography Dan's Life California Culture Sports Birds Bicycling - Tandem ]

One more picture for good luck, this is a spider web we stumbled across in Cayucas that we thought was worth a couple of bits.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

Life near the Alpine Visitor Center in Rocky Mountain National Park is cold and relatively low pressure oxygen is hard to use for an outta shape 46yo. That Visitor Center closed today at 4:30pm for the season and we were quite lucky the weather allowed us to travel the road at all. Sticking to lower altitudes for the rest of the week, as hypoxia isn't treating me well. Ann notices it, but is in great shape. Alexandra is 7 and was later seen running down a trail at 9k, so I assume she's okay.

Life is good!

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Archival ]

Oklahoma Republican Senate candidate warns of lesbianism in the schools. Republican Tom Coburn

...says a campaign worker from Coalgate told him that "lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that's happened to us?"

Whoah. That's really hot! Yeah, "how is it that that's happened to us" indeed, and what can we do to recreate the experience elsewhere?

More to the point, what sort of political party would still be supporting someone with that loose a grasp on reality?

(Meta: woohoo! The topic picker nailed it first try!)

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics moron Current Events ]

Yahoo Story about using a wired brain to control a computer. Just a few (11?) years ago, this thought (although via ESP) was a running joke on a Compuserve forum, and about 5 years ago, a favorite April Fools gag. Now it is working in the lab.. kinda. Impressive.

[ related topics: Current Events Work, productivity and environment Sports Community ]

Mark D. Rasch says "You Need a Robolawyer" to deal with click-through licensing agreements. I would love a facility that could keep track of what I have and haven't agreed to on a given machine, tell me what's different in the agreement that I'm currently reading, and be able to tell me how my computer is and isn't tainted.

Microsoft could take the lead on this by MD5 signing clauses in their license agreements. They could even sub-license these agreements to other vendors.

[ related topics: Microsoft Law Cryptography ]

Every once in a while, someone summarizes a point so well that I just can't pull parts, so apologies, but I'm going to quote one of John Robb's entries today about the Bush approach to terrorism in its entirety:

This statement sums up the rogue regime approach of the Bush administration. BUSH: Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban.

In this statement, Bush demonstrates that he fundamentally doesn't understand decentralized guerrillas. If the scorecard on victory is the elimination of rogue regimes, we will lose (and badly).

[ related topics: Quotes Politics ]

Over at Brainwagon, MarkV's latest audio blog entry asks some questions about functional programming. Python is the only new language I've set myself to recently (C# doesn't count becuse it didn't really cause any shifts in my thinking patterns), and I'm really enjoying how I'm approaching problems differently now because of what it does differently from Perl and C++. I need more of that.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Invention and Design Software Engineering Python ]

IBM Open Sources REXX. I suppose it'd be an overshare to mention that at one point I was involved in writing a Mandelbrot set generator in REXX?

[ related topics: Dan's Life Cool Technology ]

Asha and I took our honeymoon this Summer. We left on June 21st and came back on September 18th. I'd like to oblige Dan with some pics from our hike on the Colorado Trail, but we didn't carry the digital camera and I haven't scanned the prints yet.

After the first 270 miles of our hike, we zig-zagged across Utah to see Canyonlands NP, Arches NP, Newspaper Rock, Capitol Reef NP, Grand Escalante, Bryce NP, and Zion NP before getting to her parents' place in St. George, UT. Later, we visted and hit the geographic highpoints in New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Mississippi(during Hurricane Ivan).

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

Over at PC World, Tom Spring asks "Google Desktop Search: Security Threat?". No, Windows is the security threat, Google Desktop Search merely exposes the issues with trying to graft multiple users onto a single user system.

[ related topics: Microsoft moron ]

MIT Technology review gives an overview of Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick's claims that the analysis techniques of the famous "hockey stick" graph of global warming were flawed.

A while back I wrote some Principal Component Analysis routines for protein expression analysis software that Phil was playing with. Say you've got several thousand samples taken over some time period. PCA lets you take the difference in the samples in that space of thousands of dimensions and find the "vectors of most energy", giving you a way to start looking at large correlations across that space in fewer dimensions.

I've talked with a couple of people who've known what the technique is, probably known the math better than I, and yet who start asking questions which show that they clearly don't understand using it for data set analysis: "How many dimensions did you reduce the data to?" and the like. I don't want to cast unwarranted stones at Mann, Bradley, Hughes and those who've built on their work, but it is extremely important to be able to understand what the tool is doing, and not just assume that some abstract notion of what the tool is doing means it's sufficient for your purposes.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Bioinformatics Work, productivity and environment Mathematics ]

Went down to Fresno Friday afternoon to pick up our new toy, a few month old Cannondale tandem with skinny tires, disk brakes, and "brifters" that we bought from Charlene's brother. Back in high school I had amassed a fund for a bicycle. One of the shops I was frequenting had one of the first mountain bikes. I decided on a road bike, later left the road bike behind, and since then I've been mountain biking and started to wonder what it was that had attracted me to the skinny tires.

When we got this beast home yesterday, took it out Butterfied Gap Road, and cranked it up to speed, it all became clear. It's raining here in Marin this morning, but I think this afternoon we're still going to crank over White's Hill and head out into the San Geronimo valley to give it a shakeout.

But that's not why I started this entry... We drove down on Friday evening, and on the way caught one of the late cotton fields:

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Bicycling - Tandem ]

To those of you doing your own weblog audio shows ("podcasting") who are concerned about bandwidth bills: If you wish for me to start using Bit Torrent or another peer to peer download system to help alleviate your throughput stress, you'd better make a strong commitment to not land me in legal trouble if I automate downloads from your sources. This means properly securing rights for any music you play. Thank you.

It's raining cats and dogs out here in Marin, but we just took the new tandem out to the place we're moving in to (did I mention we're moving out to Lagunitas?), eight and a half miles each way, over White's Hill in the middle. We've been happy with the previously mentioned KHS Tandemania Sport, but we've been worried about rim brakes in the rainy season, so when the opportunity to get this one came up we jumped on it. And the rain today just fired us up: "that's what it's going to be like, better get used to it!"

We're not disappointed. The brakes were solid and predictable both times over the hill and for one emergency stop (light changed at just the wrong moment...), we were confident enough with pad heating issues that we could keep the speed down (which was especially nice when it's raining so hard that it's difficult to see through your glasses), I need to do a little fine tuning of the drive train, but except for lugging the trailer and the racks to go grocery shopping (or maybe going off-road) it's going to be hard to go back to the old one.

Oh, and don't think you'll save money by buying new pickups and magnets and just switching your bike computer...

[ related topics: Dan's Life Bay Area Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem Dan's Life - Tandem Toys ]

Going through my own crisis of needing change right now and the only technology industry that still looks interesting is entertainment. Signed up for Everquest, Final Fantasy Etc Etc to see the current state of the industry (more on that later) but came across this little gem which reminded me of some ideas Dan and I had going back and forth for Mercator Insula. Dam! chalk another one up for it should of been me.....

http://www.mapleglobal.com/index.aspx

[ related topics: Erotic Games Coyote Grits ]

The recent turn to the subject of parenting in last week's thread about young lesbianism scare-mongering reminded me of a new spark I had on the old idea of Parent Licensing.

Every so often the half-joke resurfaces that "we should sterilize everybody at birth and require parents to get a license before they can have children (by having the process reversed)". Seriously considered, this idea raises all kinds of Orwellian questions - and rightfully so. Who gets to be the gatekeeper, deciding which individuals are worthy enough to procreate? Then it struck me...

Ostensibly, the purpose behind the creation of the institution of marriage was to provide a stable home environment for the rearing of children - parents who had committed to being there for their offspring. Why not then make the reverse procedure automatic upon obtaining a spouse? Or maybe even after a short waiting period - to keep people from getting hitched for a week so they can have a kid. Nobody (nor organization) sitting in judgement over the prospective parents, just a stated and accepted promise of establishing a family environment.

Obviously it's not perfect, but then neither is life. The biggest issue I see is that marriage is not yet available to all, and that the government has too much control over that aspect of our society. In the pipe dream known as The World According To Shawn freedom to marry would be coupled with the Procreation Promise.

What do others think?

[ related topics: Children and growing up Privacy Sociology Civil Liberties Marriage ]

When I got my Sony F828, I also got a wide angle lens with it. In this series in St. Louis, I used it too often, but I have to admit it's a great toy and makes some neat things possible. I need to crop these, but here they are 'raw'. Oh.. and Nancy met my other half of the family (Mom and Sis and Ryan) and I met her parents and some more friends of hers (and now mine as well).

[ related topics: Photography Sociology ]

If you need a little mind-stretching this evening, how about thinking about a WikiMUD?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Content Management ]

Three Medford Oregon school teachers thrown out of a Bush Rally for wearing "Protect our civil liberties" T-shirts (thanks to Medley):

The women got past the first and second checkpoints and were allowed into the Jackson County fairgrounds, but were asked to leave and then escorted out of the event by campaign officials who allegedly told them their T-shirts were "obscene."

You know what's really disturbing about this? That the other viable option in this election is probably as bad, as back in the '90s John Ashcroft criticized John Kerry for his stances against civil liberties, and the Kerry Campaign goes even further:

John Kerry stands by his vote for the Patriot Act. In fact, he authored most of the money laundering provisions in the law.

While I haven't gotten quite as disgusted with Kerry as Larry is, I believe that this is an election between shades of awful, and as some of the Bush supporters blather about some of his alleged "strengths" I'm almost ready to say "fuck it, give him another four years and that way they won't be able to blame the resulting disaster on the Democrats". Almost, but not quite.

[ related topics: Politics History Civil Liberties Clothing ]

Okay, a quick break from overpopulation and horny teenage lesbians: Charlene's working on a paper, and one of the points we're looking at making may revolve around regional spellings (not pronunciation) of "chitterlings" versus "chitlins". Any of y'all have suggestions on this? I remember seeing "chitterlings" on signs in Chattanooga, but I'd like a slightly better sample than my biased memory.

[ related topics: Language Food Chattanooga ]

Aaigh. Charlene and I just finished voting. Well, actually, she's still working on it. Hours of reading and making sure and sorting through the bullshit and... Occasionally I begrudge my legislators the dollars I spend on 'em, but imagine doing that day in day out every day. No wonder they suck at it, I'd go freakin' nuts.

[ related topics: Politics Dan's Life ]

LED porn

[ related topics: Humor Erotic ]

Saying "...I am quite sad, and feel used at a deep level", Diane mentions the death of Game NeverEnding. I don't know the details of this (although I'd love to read more, hint, hint), but I can extrapolate a bit to my own experiences of computer gaming: If I'm creating a persona in a virtual world, that character is subject to the whims and economics that control the virtual world. But even more so than that, at some point the returns are just that I'm getting better at playing that particular game, not that I'm building general purpose skills.

This is why I've lost interest in building games, and why I believe that most "social software" that tries to own the environment will fail. Badly.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games Nature and environment Software Engineering Economics Social Software ]

Hmmmm... Search Google for a "cool essay title", first hit (screen dump) is "Default Title Here".

[ related topics: Writing ]

Interested in finding out why The Line of Beauty, recent winner of the British Man Booker prize is so controversial? Not willing to spend 18 pounds to find out? You're in luck! The Guardian thoughtfully provides a condensation for your perusal.

[ related topics: Books red neck culture ]

Are you a Republican feeling alienated and isolated? Then call now, real Live Girls are standing by...

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture WTC/Pentagon attacks ]

The Iceland Phallological Museum.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Nature and environment Art & Culture ]

According to Space.com, a man from Oregon was trying out his new Toshiba flat-screen TV when he accidently triggered COSPAS-SARSAT the international network of Search and Rescue satellites, used to find shipwrecked sailors and downed airplanes. FCC is investigating wether this is a flaw with just one TV set, or a systemic problem with the whole model run. This might give AAA a run for its money.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Invention and Design Aviation Space & Astronomy Television ]

This one should probably just go over on Weird Ass Shit, but we're packing today for the move, and I'm plumb worn out. So, in the "not his day" department: robber foiled by professional "extreme fighter".

"I just know that I've been training for a long time and more than most people. And especially more than someone who's a crook and probably doesn't train," said Radach, who is 6 feet tall and 185 pounds.

[ related topics: Current Events Machinery Trains ]

Woohoo! This administration is trying to take us back to the cold war, saying 'the Russians did it" in reference to the missing explosives at Al-Qaqaa. Only David Kay says that that's extremely unlikely:

I must say, I find it hard to believe that a convoy of 40 to 60 trucks left that facility prior to or during the war, and we didn't spot it on satellite or UAV. That is, because it is the main road to Baghdad from the south, was a road that was constantly under surveillance. I also don't find it hard to believe that looters could carry it off in the dead of night or during the day and not use the road network.

And locals report widespread looting.

[ related topics: Politics War ]

The NTSB has blamed the copilot for the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in November, 2001, concluding that he overstressed the tail on the Airbus A300. I'm a little shakey, but I thought the A300-600 was fly-by-wire, so why did that interface allow for overstressing the airframe with control movements?

[ related topics: User Interface Aviation ]