We’re so screwed. Bob Shrum just said Democrats will hold the House and Senate.
Archives for October 2010
Parting the Land from the Waters…
There’s a couple of cool posts on terraforming appeared in io9 recently, telling me all sorts of things I did not know.
Part I: “How to Wreck A Planet in 3000 Years”:
… The term “terraforming” was invented by author Jack Williamson in his 1942 short story “Collision Orbit,” published in Astounding Science Fiction. In the intervening decades, its literal meaning (“Earth forming”) has shifted. It still commonly refers to the speculative act of altering non-Earth planets to make them habitable by humans. But anything that drastically changes geography to suit human interests can be called terraforming, even if it happens here on Earth. If only we all had the same interests…
Part II: “The Law of Unintended Consequences”:
Humans can rearrange the shape of our planet almost as easily as the furniture in your living room (or the deck chairs on the Titanic). Of course, it doesn’t always work out as planned…
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The earliest artificial islands are Neolithic in origin. Scots were building crannógs 5,000 years ago. These small islands were built up with timber, stone and earth until a stable, round structure suitable for building a house upon was formed. 20th and 21st-century artificial islands are much larger. They can be tourist destinations (Montreal’s Île Notre-Dame), urban neighborhoods (San Francisco’s Treasure Island), industrial centers (Seattle’s Harbor Island), or even entire provinces (Flevoland in the Netherlands)…
(Before the CEO took advantage of 9/11 security theatre to shut it down, there was an observatory on the 60th floor of the Hancock Tower, the tallest building in Boston. One of the exhibits was an old-fashioned tabletop diorama showing how Boston looked at the time of the Revolutionary War… and in the center of the much-larger Boston Harbor, there was a tiny lucite brick about the size of a matchbox. That brick, of course, represented the Hancock Tower. A certain percentage of visitors would predictably freak out when the canned voice droning on about Paul Revere and Evacuation Day did the big reveal.)
Best of all, to my biology-biased mind, is the post on “How Salmonella Terraforms Your Intestines“: “The bowels are a difficult place to live. It’s damp and crowded and the landlord keeps trying to kick you out. Find out how salmonella uses the body’s immune response to transform the inside of your body into someplace liveable….” You’re gonna have to click through to read the Firefly joke in context.
Whitman Follies
You have to admire Gloria Allred after seeing the one-two she delivered to Meg Whitman. Allred represents Whitman’s undocumented immigrant housekeeper, and when she dropped her first bomb, she held back a crucial piece of evidence, a 2003 letter from the Social Security Administration with a hand-written annotation by Whitman’s husband. It’s the handwriting that’s the killer detail that refutes a nasty insinuation of lying by Whitman:
Responding to a reporter’s question, Whitman said she would be willing to undergo a polygraph test to prove her truthfulness.
She said Diaz Santillan regularly picked up her family’s mail and left it on a counter island in her house, suggesting that the housekeeper might intentionally have withheld the letter from Whitman and her husband.
Whitman does get one thing right:
“I think Latinos are really smart,” Whitman said. “I think they will see this for exactly what it is.”
Also, too: I didn’t know that Allred’s protest against the all-male Beverly Hills Friars Club included a walk by her through the steamroom carrying a ruler and singing “Is That All There Is?”.
Arianna’s Little People
Even though the Huffington Post can hire Howard Fineman, they can’t pay Mayhill Fowler, the woman who wrote the “cling to your guns” story. The Huffington side of the story is that Fowler was a freelancer who pitched a couple of stories that they didn’t bite on, just like many other freelancers.
Perhaps Huffington is right in this instance. Still, it’s more than a little distasteful that she’s completely unwilling to play pay bloggers at the same time that she’s happy to shell out the kind of salary that a hack like Fineman demands. But maybe I’m just letting my disgust for Arianna Huffington and her Hollywood tabloid get in the way. I’ve never understood the appeal of her or her site, and the fact that it gets so much traffic looks like yet another indicator of national stupidity.
For example, the banner there at the moment is “Feds Sue Fox News“. If you bother to read the story under the huge red headline, the substance is that one reporter has filed a discrimination claim that the EEOC (“the Feds”) picked up. The headline and play of that piece is essentially a lie, yet 4,500 people have commented on it.
As far as I can tell, the Huffington Post is the Drudge Report for liberals, with a side helping of Star or the National Inquirer for celebutard gossip. Yeah, they pay a few reporters who got White House press credentials, but so does Fox News. If they’re the future of media, which I doubt anyone under 50 who isn’t bamboozled by Arianna Huffington believes, we’re in big trouble.
This Year’s “Geniuses”
None of the more-qualified front pagers here seem to have mentioned the 2010 MacArthur Fellows, the list of whom was released earlier this week. I am not ashamed to admit that I can’t begin to understand an “Optical Physicist working at the intersection of fundamental photonics and nanofabrication engineering to design silicon-based photonic circuits that are paving the way for practical optical computing devices” (Michal Lipson), or to judge whether a “Quantum Astrophysicist linking optics, condensed matter, and quantum mechanics in research that enhances our ability to detect and quantify gravitational radiation” (Nergis Mavalvala) is worthy of an being part of this august fellowship. (Although the short videos on each Fellow’s biographical webpage are mostly informative.)
But, hey, David Simon! — of Homicide: Life on the Street, and The Wire, and now Treme. And Annette Gordon-Reed is writing a sequel to The Hemingses of Monticello, which I can’t wait to read…
Anybody care to speculate as to the merits and potentials of this year’s honorees?
Not Getting It
The government wants to add two new rules to offshore oil drilling. One says that offshore oil rigs need to have a spill contingency plan and practice it, and the other is about bore hole cement, maintenance and blowout protectors. Here’s the response from industry shills:
“We cannot have an approval process that creates unpredictable delays that could place at risk the flow of domestic energy in our country,” […]
“While the ongoing important investigations into the Gulf accident are necessary and may lead to new safety measures, requiring industry to navigate a tangled web of new regulations will only lead to increased uncertainty for businesses and consumers and less investment in America’s vast resources in the Gulf”[…]
Imagine if an airline said something like that after, say, the new crew rest rules that came about after last year’s Colgan Air crash in Buffalo.
I think these fuckers need some more regulating.
Early Morning Open Thread: Good Night, Good Dog
From commentor Folkbum:
Margaret Jane — Maggie — was our snow dog, our solid-white Great Pyrenees, whom we rescued from the Great Pyrenees rescue of Greater Chicago. (http://www.gpcgc.org/rescue.htm) She was a stray, found with another Pyr and a Pyr-golden mix that summer running loose in southern Illinois. She was skinny and shy and sweet as could be; when we sat with her at the rescue kennel, she just plopped her head in our laps and hunkered down. She came to live with us in September of 2003.
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She quickly got her coat and her weight back — 75 lbs but she looked much bigger with her puffy white fur. And it also didn’t take long to realize she’d be a handful. That fall, we found that Maggie wanted to go with us whenever we left the house. At first it was kind of cute. But then she started clawing and chewing at the doors and windows. In February of 2004, she jumped through a window trying to follow my wife to work. Luckily, she couldn’t get out of the fenced back yard.
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She was finally diagnosed with a pretty severe case of separation anxiety. She was an absolute sweetheart otherwise–calm, friendly, willing to sit and be petted for hours by anyone at all with the time. Until we tried to leave her alone in the house. We knew that we couldn’t send her back to the rescue, because she was unadoptable in that condition. We persevered, because she was young and vibrant and had a lot of life yet to live.
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Years of behavioral and drug therapy finally led us to a reasonable, but difficult, routine. Anti-depression meds twice a day, plus a dose of tranquilizer every time she needed to be crated when we left the house, made her life and ours mostly bearable.
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And Maggie was still a sweetheart. The neighbor girls begged us to let them take her on walks. She was the darling of the farmer’s market for being so white, so big, so calm. The vet was always grateful to have a dog who didn’t complain about any of the prodding, poking, pushing, and pinching required at her annual checkups. The workers at the kennel where we boarded her loved her, loved playing with her, petting her, having her around.
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Early Morning Open Thread: Good Night, Good DogPost + Comments (44)