RelentlesslyOptimistic

Frankenfrog? Frog Server? Blogs for frogs?

From Hack A Day, not for the squeamish.

"Experiments in Galvanism is the culmination of studio and gallery experiments in which a miniature computer is implanted into the dead body of a frog...The computer stores a website that enables users to trigger physical movement in the corpse: the resulting movement can be seen in gallery, and through a live streaming webcamera."

Steve Dietz says in an amusing essay entitled "Token of Such Things" in the exhibition catalog:

"One of my favorite images from the history of the future is from 1746 when Jean-Antoine Nollet, the Abbot of the Grand Convent of the Carthusians in Paris, tested the then controversial theory that electricity operated over distances, instantaneously. Early one morning, 200 monks formed a line over two kilometers long. Between each monk was an almost nine-meter [27ft] wire. Nollet used a Leyden Jar – a proto-battery – to initiate a current that caused the monks to start “swearing, contorting, or otherwise reacting simultaneously to the shock.” Success."`

I thought the tin foil hats were to protect the wearer from alien mind control

Apparently there are some aliens who appear on the Prophet Yaweh's mental command!

'Prophet' summons UFO for camera. Ramon Watkins, also known as "Prophet Yahweh" agreed to meet with a reporter and camera crew of KTNV at a location of their choice and time. What they witnessed, and captured on camera, stunned the reporter and crew.

Prophet Yahweh's site says that he "has resurrected the lost, ancient art of summoning UFOs and actual spaceships on command. Over 1,500 sightings have appeared to him since 1979." You can pay for access to videos on his site, or see other videos here.

From Monkeyfilter

We were invited into Iraq AND Afgahanistan

From Metafilter, this link to the transcript of a White House Press Briefing
exchange. A commenter pointed to the similarity to the Soviet Union, which also claimed to have been invited into Afghanistan.

Q    The other day -- in fact, this week, you said that we, the United States, is in Afghanistan and Iraq by invitation.  Would you like to correct that incredible distortion of American history --

MR. McCLELLAN:  No, we are -- that's where we currently --

Q    -- in view of your credibility is already mired?  How can you say that?

MR. McCLELLAN:  Helen, I think everyone in this room knows that you're taking that comment out of context.  There are two democratically-elected governments in Iraq and --

Q    We're we invited into Iraq?

MR. McCLELLAN:  There are two democratically-elected governments now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we are there at their invitation. They are sovereign governments, and we are there today --

Q    You mean if they had asked us out, that we would have left?

MR. McCLELLAN:  No, Helen, I'm talking about today.  We are there at their invitation.  They are sovereign governments --

Q    I'm talking about today, too.

MR. McCLELLAN:  -- and we are doing all we can to train and equip their security forces so that they can provide for their own security as they move forward on a free and democratic future.

Q    Did we invade those countries?

MR. McCLELLAN:  Go ahead, Steve.

Amazon image hacking

You'd think it would be difficult to do much with the product images Amazon uses. It is, but in Abusing Amazon images you can see how Nat Gertler deciphered the coding used in their image urls to specify many more options than you would believe. Fun, fascinating, and admirable patience.

The next "logical" step in the war against terrarism

For those who comfort themselves with the thought that there's no chance of a US attack on Iran or Syria because our military is stretched too thin, consider this: Majikthise : Neo-CONPLAN 8022.

We've already seen the Bush Administration's delusional thinking of easy victory in Iraq, and Seymour Hersh has reported on even greater delusions about Iran. We've also seen that there are no boundaries, no level of despicable behavior below which they will not stoop. Is it out of the question that they would consider a premptive nuclear attack a viable "solution?"

Photo via Majikthise' comments, from the Federation of American Scientists Nuclear Weapon Effects Calculator.

The State of Torture report

Jeanne at Body and Soul points out Slate's The Torture Feature, a kind of "State of Torture" report. It introduces the "torture debate" by saying that "Many Americans feel uneasy about the idea of torturing prisoners; others accept that desperate times may call for desperate security measures."

The article goes provides an excellent primer on the legalities involved - what rules that the US has said it will follow and the ones that it won't, and how the US has done at complying with its own rules (three guesses). It reviews the chain of command, the reports that the military has produced, and a taxanomy of torture.

The feature's conclusion should have been the lead - in it the authors finally begin to to touch upon the whys of the choices made, and to address the costs of those choices on the US and the detainees on whom torture and murder has been practiced.

"These policies were deliberately designed to carve out exceptions to international rules regarding prisoners of war that the United States had once championed and led the world to embrace..."

"The real legacy of American interrogation practices, post-9/11, is that practices and justifications that should have been reserved for the worst of the worst (assuming we could know who they are) began to be used indiscriminately...The effect has been to turn America from the world's leader on many issues of international human-rights law into the world's tyrant."

"Absolute rules are favored in wartime because they work. There are few slopes more slippery than that the one from small war crimes to large ones; any wartime action, however heinous, can always be justified by some perceived necessity."

 

Supporters of torture are not, in the end, interested in whether it works. From top to bottom I believe that torturers are interested in punishment. They want to take out the pain and anger of our victimization on 9-11 on the bodies of those who have been unfortunate enough to fall into their hands, be they innocent or guilty.

That's part of why the practice of torture hasn't been successfully limited to those people and those places it was "authorized." As soon as it became an acceptable way of treating some prisoners in some places, it became an acceptable punishment that anyone with enough anger and fear felt justified in using.

Now that the justifications are in place, they begin to be used in more places, against more enemies, for more reasons, and our souls blacken with the evil we allow. How long until we begin to justify the same treatment against enemies within, and how long until it becomes acceptable for anyone to decide and administer the punishment they determine is justified?

The blogger's burden

With wealth and power come responsibility. We all know that the celebrity and riches from blogging impose duties of their own.  We also know that it takes time to uncover the gems in that mad sandy desert that is the internet, and still more time to craft them into the kind of precious jewels of insight that vaulted us to the top of the blogospherical heap. And we know that the demands of blogging pull us away from those parties we have to attend and keep us from those people with whom we must be seen.

Admit it: isn't the price sometimes just too high? Don't you sometimes wish you could tell Paris to bugger off? Don't you wish that you could just shrug your shoulders and let the world suffer along without your insights and solutions? Don't you wish, sometimes, that you'd never left those glamorous times last March when you could spend the whole weekend in the same dirty t-shirt and boxers, drinking cheap wine, shaking the toast crumbs from your keyboard and creating great posts? Man, that was blogging!

Now there's help.

In the cutthroat world of online writing, every blogger is only as good as the last update.

You have a life.

AutoBlogger helps you live it.™

AutoBlogger - Blog Different(ly)

*Do not remove this notice under penalty of law. Some content above may be automatically generated.

Via Rox Populi

NewsTrust: Independent News Ratings

The old days when you could trust the media to be somewhat objective are about as mythical as many other visions of those better days in the past. Still, the extreme and hidden biases of many media outlets today does seem worse than even a decade ago.

NewsTrust is an ambitious effort to create a volunteer-based rating service that will use defined metrics to score stories on fairness, accuracy and credibility.

The service hasn't launched yet, but so far it appears they're doing everything right. They have an impressive staff and group of advisers, and in three months have done surveys that cross the political spectrum, tested the concept and usability of their service and developed and tested their news review tool.

"In today's rapidly changing media landscape, it is becoming harder to tell truth from fiction. Increasingly, sloppy journalism is treated as legitimate news, opinions are presented as facts, and misinformation spreads throughout our news media, threatening the foundation of democracy.

A non-profit venture...is now working on a practical solution to those issues...NewsTrust...aims to bring together experienced journalists and volunteer reviewers to rate news stories and their sources according to rigorous editorial standards"

Via Good Morning Silicon Valley

Surrealvertising

jwz - black lung is sexy!

An ad highlighting the ecological benefits of coal mining, with model miners in mini-skirts accompanied by "I owe my soul to the company store."

GE - Imagination at work.

Was Your Meat Smarter Than Your Pet?

ABC News: Was Your Meat Smarter Than Your Pet?
This study will give meat-eaters pause and vegetarians new ammo - domesticated farm animals are smarter than we think. Pigs are smarter than dogs, sheep recognize faces, and cows form lifelong friendships. At a minimum this strengthens arguments against some of the most inhumane factory-farming practices.

One sheep who got a reward every time she recognized a human face correctly on a video screen scored a perfect 50 out of 50.

Hamlet the pig is a computer wiz. He gets a reward every time he uses a joystick designed for a chimp to move a cursor into a blue area on a computer monitor. A Jack Russell terrier couldn't achieve such a task after a year of trying.

...chickens can be taught to run the thermostat of the chicken coop...

Cows have been known to form lifelong friendships, and one recent study found that they actually show excitement when they've learned something new...

If farm animals are intelligent creatures, should we all be vegetarians?

"We should eat less meat," said Jane Goodall, who pioneered research on chimpanzees. "I stopped eating meat as soon as I began to really think about it," she said. "People actually don't think about it."

John Redmore, who runs an organic farm in England, disagrees.
"We've been eating meat since we've managed to stand on hind legs," he said. "A natural part of being human is to eat meat."
It's natural to eat animals even if they're smart, he added.

"Yeah, they'd eat us," Redmore said.

If someone could prove to you that [torture] worked, would you be in favor of it?

Jeanne at Body and Soul on rendition:

I would never have expected to be appalled by a piece titled "Against Rendition"  -- even in the Weekly Standard -- but then I would never have expected anyone to make the argument that extraordinary rendition is bad not because torture is wrong, and doing it second-hand is no moral improvement on doing it yourself, but because we can do it so much better than foreigners.

We're Americans. We shouldn't leave important work to the unreliable servants.

I always suspected this: Traffic Expands to Fill Available Road Space

jwz points to this CultureChange.org policy paper on the traffic congestion:

Traffic Expands to Fill Available Road Space
Traffic congestion is now a fact of everyday life for most North Americans. The U.S. General Accounting Office estimates that traffic congestion costs the country over $100 billion a year in lost productivity alone. In Ontario, Canada, the figure is over $2 billion.

Traditional attempts at congestion mitigation have followed a pathological paradigm whereby new and upgraded roads are built to meet forecasted future traffic demands. This "predict and provide" scenario has invariably led to the generation of new traffic and hence further congestion. Governments are stuck in a vicious cycle of trying to "build their way out of congestion."

Their solution won't be easily adopted, though:

The best solution to effect an immediate improvement to our transportation system is to encourage congestion. Much of North America's "congestion crisis" is comprised of discretionary traffic, which in turn is generated because of readily available and extensive road systems.
For example, an estimated 40 percent of the car trips on U.S. interstate highways during peak hours are non-work related. Thus, by reducing the capacity capability of our road system, less "latent demand" is actualized in the form of new car trips as drivers are forced to reconsider their travel habits.

Torture=necessary tool, underwear photos=violation of the Geneva Conventions

BBC NEWS reported that the Sun tabloid newspaper in Britain published photos of Saddam Hussein in his prison cell in his underwear. The U.S. response? "The US said the photos appeared to breach Geneva Convention rules on the humane treatment of prisoners of war." Agitprop pointed out the stunning irony of the US quote.

"Fear Factor: Shitting Your Pants Edition"

Bill Maher's New Rules are available on line. This is excerpted from the latest show:

New Rule: The people in America who are most in favor of the Iraq war must now go there and fight it. The Army missed its recruiting goal by 42% last month. More people joined the Michael Jackson Fan Club.

Now, last week, a Baptist minister in North Carolina told nine members of his congregation that unless they renounced their 2004 vote for John Kerry, they had to leave his church. Well, if we're that certain these days that George Bush is always that right about everything, then going to Iraq to fulfill the glorious leader's vision would seem the least one could do. And, hey, if it makes it any easier for you, just think of it as a reality show: "Fear Factor: Shitting Your Pants Edition." "Survivor: Sunni Triangle." Or maybe it's a video game, "Grand Theft Allah."

Now, I know you're thinking, but, Bill, I already do my part with the "Support Our Troops" magnet I have on my Chevy Tahoe. How much more can one man give? Well, here's an intriguing economic indicator. It's been over a year since they graduated, but neither of the Bush twins has been able to find work. Why don't they sign up? Do they hate America or just freedom in general?

But mostly, we have to send Mr. And Mrs. Britney Spears. Because Britney once said, "We should trust our president in every decision that he makes, and we should just support that and be faithful in what happens."

In summation, you cannot advocate for something you wouldn't do yourself. For example, I'm for fuel efficiency, which is why I drive a hybrid car and always take an electric private plane. I'm for legalizing marijuana, and so I smoke a ton of it.

And I'm for gay marriage, which is - oh, well, you get the points!

Via Daily Kos. Photo captured in the wild by Xtcian.

 

Pot, Meet Kettle

Roxanne at Rox Populi pointed out the astounding irony (and is the title's source, too):

"People lost their lives. People are dead," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, referring to at least 15 people who died in protests in Afghanistan following the Koran disclosures. "People need to be very careful about what they say, just as they need to be careful about what they do."

She also noted that the Columbia Journalism Review has pointed out that all that Newsweek has retracted is "that it no longer stands by its claim that allegations of Koran desecration appear in a forthcoming report from U.S. Southern Command."

Do you suppose that Rumsfeld actually doesn't understand the comparison between the consequences of his actions and lies and the action of Newsweek? It's hard to imagine, but seeing him in action it's believable that he truly could be that narcissistic.