American Banking's Shameful Double Standard

Says it all. What is the recourse of the average taxpayer against blatant corruption and theft by government and the banking industry?

Banks won't disclose how they're spending bailout money

Here's my favorite quote:

Heine, the New York Mellon Corp. spokesman who said he wouldn't share spending specifics, added: "I just would prefer if you wouldn't say that we're not going to discuss those details."

Link

Drug firms block cheap medicine

As if we needed yet another reason to despise big business, drug companies use various legal (though maybe not ethical) measures to keep profits high by preventing the introduction of generics in Europe. At least the European Commission sounds like they're willing to go after them if they break the law in the process; in the U.S., we just shovel more money at them through Medicare Part D and call it progress.

Cars Sliding Down Icy Hill

Winter is here. Sigh.

Fed Refuses to Disclose Recipients of $2 Trillion

Think about that headline for a moment. Remember we're a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Not for the rich. Not for the politicians. For the people. The Federal Reserve has no right to withhold how they gave away two trillion dollars. Outrage, anyone?

Proof of time travel?

A Swiss watch is found in a 400-year-old tomb. Reality is weird sometimes.

EPA makes it harder to build coal plants

The Environmental Protection Agency has blocked a coal plant in Utah, starting a rulemaking process that will likely result in greater carbon dioxide emission regulations. Hopefully, this will help prevent the environmental disaster that was proposed for construction outside Frackville. While the mislabeled "coal to clean fuel" plant has been dying a slow death for many years, hopefully increased regulation of CO2 emissions will kill the thing once and for all.

Strange Portal Connects Earth to Sun

No, really. Every eight minutes, magnetic portals open up and connect the Earth to the sun. Weird.

Alice Cooper - House of Blues, Atlantic City - Nov. 1, 2008

Great show, as always. While the setlist hasn't varied much in the past few years, Alice is still a fantastic performer (at age 60, no less).

While we waited to enter the House of Blues, we were, of course, searched. The huge guy in front of us was told he couldn't enter with the chain attached to his wallet, so he tore it off and handed it to the woman. Heh. While they searched people thoroughly, they didn't bother to take our tickets, and everyone just shuffled in. Weird.

Opening act was Z02 out of Brooklyn, NY. Their sound was alright, though they were much too, I don't know, Hannah Montana-ish to be opening for Alice Cooper. They didn't even start playing until 45 minutes after the doors opened, so we knew it was going to be a long night. And then the drunk woman next to me spilled her beer on the back of my pants. Sigh. I always seem to get stuck next to idiots.

Alice made it worthwhile, though, and even played two songs off the new album (Along Came A Spider), along with a number of hits. Setlist (I think this is correct):

• It's Hot Tonight
• No More Mr. Nice Guy
• Under My Wheels
• I'm Eighteen
• Is It My Body?
• Woman Of Mass Distraction
• Lost In America
• Feed My Frankenstein
• Be My Lover
• (In Touch With Your) Feminine Side
• Dirty Diamonds
• Vengeance Is Mine
• Halo Of Flies
• Welcome To My Nightmare
• Cold Ethyl
• Only Women Bleed
• Steven
• Dead Babies
• Ballad Of Dwight Fry
• Devils Food/I Love The Dead
• School's Out

Encore:

• Billion Dollar Babies
• Poison
• Elected

Fascist America?

Think about how reality has changed in the last seven years. Our civil liberties are quietly eroded, under the guise of keeping us safe from the invisible terrorist threat, while we're happily distracted by Britney and Paris. This is getting past tinfoil hat territory; the collapse of America is actually happening while we look the other way. This article, written over a year ago, is chilling in its implications.

The Rich Are Staging a Coup

Read it. Spread the word.

John McCain Kicks Librarian Out of Town Hall Event

This is evidently the state of free speech in the United States...

McCain = Bush = Loss of Freedom.

Add your voice to ONE

Bruce Springsteen - Hershey, PA - Aug. 19, 2008

Great show. Beautiful summer evening. Bad seats. Expensive beer. Cool t-shirt. Setlist:

• Summertime Blues
• Radio Nowhere
• Out in the Street
• Spirit in the Night
• Promised Land
• (sign collection):
  
  • Boom Boom (John Lee Hooker cover)
  • Darlington County
  • Waitin on a Sunny Day
  • Reason To Believe
• Prove It All Night
• No Surrender
• Because the Night
• She's The One
• Living In The Future
• Mary's Place
• Workin On The Highway
• Part Man Part Monkey
• The Rising
• Last To Die
• Long Walk Home
• Badlands

Encore:

• Thunder Road
• Jungleland
• Seven Nights to Rock
• Born To Run
• Rosalita
• Tenth Avenue Freeze Out
• American Land
• Gloria

The last great rock-n-roll album

There has not been a great rock and roll album since 1987's The Joshua Tree.

There, I said it.

Sure, there have been notable albums - Elephant by The White Stripes, or Robert Plant's Mighty Rearranger, maybe. But has there been anything truly memorable - an entire album where you just went "wow"? And no, I don't count Nirvana - quick, name me five great Nirvana songs. How about three? I'm not trolling here, but I'd really like to know if anyone can recommend a great rock and roll album in the last 20 years. Even U2's later efforts prompt a "meh" reaction, and I'm a huge U2 fan.

So, prove me wrong.

Glass wing butterflies

Very pretty.

How your Senator voted on the FISA Amendments Act

Just so we're clear on who we need to vote out of office....

More at EFF: Senate Joins House in Caving to White House Immunity Demands

artist's block

I have artist's block. What's worse, I'm practicing avoidance in order to, well, avoid dealing with it. That's not working so well. I'm told (by the venerable Joe Kubert, no less) that the best way to deal with artist's block is to get to work. Sigh.

Freedom of the Associated Press

The Associated Press now wants you to pay a fee to post an excerpt (as little as five words) of an AP article in your blog. So much for fair use, freedom of the press, and all of that nonsense. Via Boing Boing.

Great folk podcast about Pete Seeger

The Smithsonian has a podcast about Folkways Records. There's a great one about Pete Seeger that I'm currently listening to. You can really hear the influence Seeger had on Bob Dylan. Links: iTunes MP3

Lou Reed - Electric Factory - Philadelphia PA - April 19, 2008

Through one of those simple twists of fate, I was heading to Philly for the weekend and found out Lou Reed was playing at the Electric Factory. Now, I'm a huge fan of Lou for many years and haven't seen him in concert since 1986, I think, so of course I had to go. We arrived early and headed to a local diner for something to eat; when we returned, the line was across the front of the building and down the block; it was general admission, so we thought we'd be back a ways when we got in, but we got right to the front (first row in front of the stage! It seems Lou's aging audience prefers seats to proximity these days - poor bastards).

Around 8:40 PM Lou takes the stage, greeting us with "Hello, Cleveland," which got a laugh. The band started with "Mad," from the Ecstasy album. Throughout the song, Lou was the conductor, telling the bass player to bring it up, the lead guitar to bring it down -- it was nice to watch a veteran rocker (as Rolling Stone dubbed him so many years ago) fine-tuning his show. A surprise was the great Steve Hunter (who played on Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies, Welcome to my Nightmare, and The Alice Cooper Show) on lead guitar. He and Lou played off each other all evening, and it was truly a joy to hear.

Next up was the Velvet Underground classic "Sweet Jane." And it rocked.

Lou introduced the next song by saying it was about divorce, "something most of you won't have to deal with" (note: most quotes are paraphrased, as my memory's not what it once was). He then launched into "Baton Rouge," haunting with its refrain "so helpless."

He said the next song was from the movie Juno, and launched into "I'm Set Free." Later he corrects himself about the Juno reference.

"Ecstasy" followed, with Lou drumming his chest to get started. It was evident that this was a song he enjoyed playing.

Following came his explanation that he got it wrong, and this song was from Juno; the keyboard player began singing "I'm Sticking With You."

A few songs later, Lou introduced Laurie Anderson on electric violin, and began playing "Talking Book." About halfway through the song, he got a little miffed with the audience, who were talking a bit too much for his taste (and mine too, especially the drunk women next to me), and he asked the audience "Do you want to keep talking or do you want me to finish this song?" He finished it, though he and Laurie seemed to share a disappointed look at the end. Perhaps they wanted to do more with the song, but the audience wanted to move on...

Next up were "Halloween Parade," from New York, followed by a song introduced with "This is a song you probably don't know," then launching into "Video Violence" from the 1986 album Mistrial. And yes, Lou, I knew the song, anyway.

After "Guardian Angel," the closing song was "Magic and Loss," which was a treat. I've always loved the line "there's a little magic in everything, and some loss to even things out." For an encore, we got "Perfect Day," and it was.

Full set list (as listed on the Lou Reed forum here; the comment from moderndance is me, btw):

• Mad
• Sweet Jane
• Baton Rouge
• I'm Set Free
• Ecstasy
• I'm Sticking With You
• Power of the Heart (is this new? anyone know?)
• I Wanna Know (The Pit and the Pendulum)
• Talking Book
• Halloween Parade
• Video Violence
• Guardian Angel
• Magic and Loss

Encore:

• Perfect Day

And will someone please explain to me what the guy playing, as Lou put it, "electronics, the computer, and who knows what else" was doing with the Apple MacBook? Was he using Garage Band or something?

Earth in crisis, warns NASA's top climate scientist

What if there were a global warming crisis and the fossil fuels industry tried to hide it? Speculate no more, as a NASA scientist says that's exactly the case. How about that? Are you still so sure we need another coal plant in Schuylkill County?

Via Digg.

Asia - Kirby Center, Wilkes-Barre PA, April 4, 2008

Asia rocked the Kirby Center in Wilkes-Barre last Friday evening and it was fantastic. This is the original lineup, including the legendary Steve Howe (of Yes) on guitar, Carl Palmer (of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer) on drums, Geoff Downes (of Yes and the Buggles) on keyboards, and John Wetton (of King Crimson) on bass and vocals.

First impressions: Steve Howe looked like my college poetry professor, which is to say, old (sorry, Harry). I mean really old. But boy can that man play guitar - throughout Roundabout (yes, the classic Yes song!), he was simply a joy to watch. The man has fingers like a spider, and he made playing some complicated sequences look effortless. If only he didn't dress like an elderly man, including those grey dress pants and shiny striped shirt...

Back to the age thing, they all looked fairly old, which I think my mind had a hard time wrapping itself around. The cognitive dissonance was disconcerting for a while (and still is, to some degree).

Carl Palmer was simply incredible, probably the second-greatest drum solo I've ever seen (the first being Neil Peart, of course).

Other highlights included In the Court of the Crimson King followed by the Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star which, while an unusual combination, was a great moment in rock and roll. I'm a big fan of King Crimson, so to see their signature song live was a thrill (though I would have preferred 21st Century Schizoid Man). The Buggles tune is a classic that I've listened to a lot recently.

Oh, they played some Asia songs too, including some great sounding tracks (Never Again, Extraordinary Life) from the new CD, Phoenix (I picked up a copy on the way out, which shows how much I liked the new stuff). Heat of the Moment was, of course, great to hear live, aided by the band encouraging the audience to sing along. And Don't Cry was the first encore; it's one of those songs that just makes you feel young. Setlist, as found here (seems right according to my recollection):

• Daylight
• Only Time Will Tell
• Wildest Dreams
• Never Again
• Roundabout
• Time Again
• Bolero from Cutting it Fine (Geoff Downes keyboard solo)
• Clap (Steve Howe acoustic solo)
• The Smile Has Left Your Eyes (acoustic)
• Ride Easy (acoustic)
• Voice of America (John Wetton acoustic solo)
• Open Your Eyes

(Intermission)

• Fanfare For The Common Man
• Without You
• An Extraordinary Life
• In the Court of the Crimson King
• Video Killed The Radio Star
• The Heat Goes On, w/Carl Palmer drum solo
• Heat of the Moment

Encore:

• Don't Cry
• Sole Survivor

World Water Day

Today is World Water Day, as designated by the United Nations. There's a good article on the ONE blog about creating safe drinking water.

Who knew that LCARS was based on Windows?

Mr. Data encounters an error. Heh.

Flash: Animator vs. animation

While this has made the rounds, it's a fun animation, especially if you're a Flash geek. Enjoy.

Nad shots

Yes, there's a website for just about everything.

Get Alice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

There's a MySpace group dedicated to getting Alice Cooper into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Stopping junk mail is good for the environment

Save time every day that you waste dealing with junk mail. Here's how to get off mailing lists, simplify your life, and stop wearing out your shredder. Link

Some local links

• Shenandoah Fish and Game Club Association
• Centralia's Mine Fire History
• Popalis Family History - Some interesting reading about Shenandoah
• Sweet Home Schuylkill County - funny stuff
  

Where Kurt Vonnegut got his ideas

Link.

Balance

Here's a wonderful interview about life/work balance.

Of course, to put it simpler, from Psalm 90:

Teach us to number our days aright,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Fox News whisteblowers

What kind of world are we living in? Fox fires reporters because they refused to be quiet after discovering that an engineered growth hormone given to milk cows was linked to potential health problems. Fox is afraid that the corporate giant will sue them and drop advertising. My favorite line from this clip is that "falsifying news isn't actually against the law." Huh?

(via Reddit)

Happy new year

Now, enough of the pedantic and pedestrian. It's a new year - let's tell it like it is.

Analog vs. digital

My wife got me a good old-fashioned record player for Christmas (well, not old-fashioned, I guess, since I can evidently plug my iPod into it, but anyway...). I played a 45 I had of Patti Smith covering Lou Reed's Perfect Day. There's something about the sound an album produces - it's fuller, more there somehow. I then played the LP of Springsteen's Seeger Sessions (on 180 gram vinyl, a fat, heavy record) - at first it seemed like a different recording than the version I've listened to many times on CD. It's the same recording as the CD, but it seemed like Bruce was in the room.

No more Netscape

As reported all over the place, Netscape Navigator, the browser that made the web the Web, is kaput as of February 2008. I used Netscape until around the time AOL bought the company and started making a mess of things. These days, Firefox is my preferred browser, though I find myself using Safari a lot because it's just so fast. The last several versions of Navigator were really skinned versions of Firefox anyway, with a more confusing interface. It's a shame what happens when corporate interests get involved that have no idea what to do with a product.

Merry Christmas

May the spirit of this holiday season fill your heart, and may you find your way safely home.

It's the Great Old Pumpkin

Just finished watching the classic It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and it reminded me of the short story podcast on Escape Pod called The Great Old Pumpkin. It's a wonderful twist on the legend. Enjoy and have a Happy Halloween.

Woman takes hammer to Comcast

Are you sick of the inept, illiterate, uncaring, and incompetent fools that big business puts in front of you, under the guise of "customer service," to block you from dealing with their shenanigans while the corporate executives stuff their pockets with your cash and don't deliver? So was 75-year-old Mona "The Hammer" Shaw. Priceless.

Alice snubbed again

This is almost turning into an all Alice Cooper blog lately. Anyway, once again, Alice was left out of the nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. There is no justice sometimes.

Alice Cooper review

The Times-Leader reviews the Alice Cooper Kirby Center show. The reviewer also blogs about it.

Alice Cooper setlist - Wilkes-Barre, PA, Sept. 18, 2007

Fantastic show at the Kirby Center. Here's the setlist, though there might be some out of order. If you have any corrections, drop a note in the comments.

• It's Hot Tonight
  
• No More Mr Nice Guy
• Under My Wheels
• I'm Eighteen
• Is It My Body?
• Woman Of Mass Distraction
• Lost In America
• Feed My Frankenstein
• Be My Lover
• Raped And Freezin'
• Dirty Diamonds
  
• Muscle Of Love
• Desperado
• Halo Of Flies (inc.Drum Solo)
• Welcome To My Nightmare
• Cold Ethyl
• Only Women Bleed
• Steven
• Dead Babies
• Ballad Of Dwight Fry
• Medley: Devils Food - Killer - I Love The Dead
• School's Out

Encore:

• Billion Dollar Babies
• Poison
• Elected

No coal-to-oil in Schuylkill County

A letter I just wrote to the Pottsville Republican, in response to their insipid editorial. I doubt they'll publish it, but we'll see:

Editor,

I'm writing in response to your editorial supporting the coal-to-oil plant. Maybe you haven't been paying attention, but the people of Schuylkill County have spoken: we do not want this impending environmental disaster in our backyards. Sure, we all want alternative energy sources, but not ones that seriously worsen the effects of global warming.

There's no need to rehash the multiple environmental issues this plant will create - that information is readily available on the website of Schuylkill Taxpayers Opposed to Pollution at www.ultradirtyfuels.com. The effects of global warming are all over the news - maybe you've heard of the little hurricane that flooded New Orleans or those melting polar ice caps. Do you think the thousands of tons of carbon dioxide that the plant will emit will help that problem or push it further towards the edge?

You can deny the science all you want, but the effects of global warming are so blatant it's practically a shout. To pretend this plant actually helps the environment by clearing away waste coal is so disingenuous as to be laughable. I fail to see what part of this you fail to understand. The only thing that remains unclear is whether you have the journalistic integrity to print an opposing view.

Daryl Davis
Ringtown, PA

State of comics

There's an interesting essay on Salon called Comics fans, grow up!, excerpted from a book by Douglas Wolk. The author argues that comics readers continue to look for acceptance from the general public despite actually already receiving it, as evidenced by the strong showing of graphic novels in recent years and, presumably, the Hollywood success of Spider-Man, X-Men, etc., and the rise of Comic-Con. I don't know that, other than the big movies, comics themselves are on the mainstream radar as much as might be hoped for. Sales are still a fraction of previous heydays, and you still can't find many comics outside of specialty shops (ah, but for the return of the spinner rack!). Now, comics characters are big - in movies, cartoons, video games, etc. But the books are still a ways off from selling in the millions every month. How Marvel and DC failed to capitalize on the movie successes is a little perplexing.

Star with a comet's tail

NASA has a wonderful image of a star named Mira (after the Latin for "wonderful") with a tail 13 light-years long:


Full story (via Boing Boing)

Vista Prevents Users Playing High-Def Content

As mentioned previously, Microsoft Vista's DRM issues are finally getting some semi-mainstream attention (if you can call a computer mag mainstream, but it is PC World...). At the same time, there are protests at the BBC [via /.] over content that's only playable in a Microsoft OS. Between DRM and vendor lock-in, big business will do what it can to get as much of your money as they can grab. Again, I believe in paying for your content, but media companies seem to want to skirt fair-use and make you pay for your legally purchased content over and over.

Women in Art

Rush and Stevie Nicks, Montage Mountain, June 29/30, 2007

Two concerts this weekend - Rush and Stevie Nicks. Rush was the better show, though Stevie Nicks had some great moments (Rhianna, Landslide, If Anyone Falls). We arrived at Rush a little late, due to terrible traffic, so I missed the first song, which was Limelight. Of all the songs to miss! That one's gonna haunt me.

The Rush setlist (courtesy cygweb):

• Limelight
• Digital Man
  
• Entre Nous
  
• Mission
  
• Freewill
• The Main Monkey Business
• The Larger Bowl
  
• Secret Touch
• Circumstances
  
• Between The Wheels
• Dreamline

Intermission

• Far Cry
• Workin’ Them Angels
• Armor And Sword
  
• Spindrift
• The Way The Wind Blows
• Subdivisions
• Natural Science
• Witch Hunt
  
• Malignant Narcissism
• Drum Solo
• Hope
• Summertime Blues
• The Spirit of Radio
• Tom Sawyer
  

Encore:

• One Little Victory
• A Passage to Bangkok
  
• YYZ

Stevie Nicks was chatty, with lengthy intros at a few spots (it was, after all, a retrospective tour, she reminded us, in support of her Crystal Visions release). Here's an approximate setlist:

• Stand Back
• Enchanted
• If Anyone Falls
• Rhiannon
• Dreams
• Sorcerer
• Gold Dust Woman
• I Need To Know (yes, the Tom Petty song)
  
• Landslide
• How Still My Love
• Edge of Seventeen

Encore:

• Rock and Roll
• Beauty and the Beast (not sure on this one, so if you were there and have a correction, drop it in the comments)
  

Top tips for the lazy environmentalist

Top tips. Also, stop ridiculous CO2-spewing projects like coal-to-oil.

Vista and content protection

If you're a tech geek like me and you haven't read A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection (also known as the Vista suicide note paper), you should (or, if you read far too much and want an easier method of absorbing it, again like me, Cory Doctorow, of Boing Boing fame, released it as a podcast).

I'd like to make clear that I despise piracy - you should pay for your content when required, despite how you feel about the RIAA or whatever moral justification you might come up with. Content creators deserve to get paid when they follow a distribution model that expects payment.

But Windows Vista appears to expend inordinate overhead to prevent copying, even if copyright law specifically allows for it under fair use provisions. And since pirates inevitably find ways around DRM protections fairly quickly anyway, the net effect is denying non-technical home users their fair-use rights, while adding ridiculous CPU overhead to the operating system's normal operations (if I want excessive CPU usage, I'll install Norton or McAfee; sigh).

Get out your tinfoil hats

I don't know why this isn't stop-the-presses, we-interrupt-this-program, our-top-story-tonight news - maybe it's the whole X-Files feel of it. Anyway, honey bees are disappearing and nobody knows why. Maybe it's cell phone frequencies zapping their little brains. Maybe aliens are abducting bees for the honey farms on Tralfamadore. Maybe it's simply a beehole in the space-time continuum. So speculate away. Where are Scully and Mulder when we need them?

So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut has passed on. He has been my favorite writer for many years and a huge influence. I'm actually currently reading God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, a novel that reminded me why I love his work so much. In the book,our protagonist, Eliot Rosewater, is a man born into affluence who prefers helping common people as opposed to living in wretched excess, and he's the one people consider insane. Imagine that.

This is really sad news. The man brought us such classics about the human condition:

• Slaughterhouse Five: The novel everyone first mentions when they talk about Vonnegut, and yet not his best work, IMHO.


• Breakfast of Champions: Absolutely one of his best. At the end, Vonnegut himself enters the story and reveals to his character that he, as the writer, controls the character's destiny. I still remember the scene, as the character runs after Vonnegut, yelling "Make me young."


• Cat's Cradle


• Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!
  


• Timequake: Pure concept. Absolutely wonderful.


• Deadeye Dick


• Galapagos


• Sirens of Titan


• Palm Sunday

And so many others. Sigh. First Hunter Thompson, and now Kurt Vonnegut.

God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut.

Geography of religion

This is an interesting animation showing a geographical history of religion for the last five-thousand years. Note that it's a spatial representation; it might be interesting to determine a way to show the same data with the numbers represented (I guess some kind of an area diagram plotted over time, but I don't know if you can show the two views simultaneously; I'm thinking something along the lines of Tufte's famous chart showing Napolean's march into Russia in the War of 1812). Anyway, interesting presentation.

Alex Toth Model Sheets

The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive has some nice Alex Toth Model Sheets, including Herculoids and some things I haven't seen before. Toth had a very crisp, clean style, which I guess made him a natural for animation design. Via Boing Boing.

How Long Does It Take To Catch A Computer Virus?

About eight seconds, according to this article.

Vis digg.

"Which SF writer are you" meme

A meme I stumbled across thanks to Boing Boing determines which SF writer you are. I was hoping for Heinlein, or maybe Burroughs. Guess I'll need to look into this guy:

I am: Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs) A quiet and underrated master of "hard science" fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Alice Cooper still not inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Van Halen, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, R.E.M., the Ronettes and Patti Smith. But no Alice Cooper. Sigh. He's gonna be so pissed.

Link (via Digg).

Social Security billions could go to illegal aliens

Via Digg: About to become law is an agreement allowing illegal aliens to get Social Security benefits after only 18 months of employment in the U.S., further burdening a system on the brink of collapse. U.S. citizens must show 10 years, or 40 quarters of job history, to collect benefits.

read more | digg story

Season of giving

Christmas is the season of giving. Don't forget to give to the less fortunate. How much should you give (NY Times online; registration required)? Here's some options, or you can always try Charity Navigator:

• United Nations Friends of the World Food Program
• The Salvation Army
  

How many gallons in a dinosaur?

Did you know that you get 460 gallons of gasoline from a tyrannosaur? Now you do.

Mathematically-challenged Verizon CSRs

This link goes to a fairly funny (though long) exchange between a customer and a Verizon customer service rep over a pricing issue. The customer also started a blog about the whole incident.

The Hero Initiative

The Hero Initiative (formerly ACTOR) is a not-for-profit organization that helps veteran comics professionals who have fallen on hard times.

Ask election victors to help fight poverty

Another of my letters to the editor published in the Republican and Herald. For more info on how you can help fight global poverty, please visit www.one.org. Now. Make with the clickey.

Sending a signal back in time

If only you could. Of course, if it were possible, why hasn't your future self sent you a message to prevent some stupid thing you've done (in last week's The Office, Jim, using pilfered stationary, sent Dwight a fax from "Dwight's future self" alerting him to a potential catastrophe; hilarity ensued).

Via Slashdot (where else do you get good geek news about reverse causality?).

No one was precisely sure where it had come from. Everyone knew precisely where it hit. It struck a marine who was peering out of the first vehicle’s gun turret. He collapsed.

With Skill, Prayer, and Fury (from the New York Times)

Stealing of an election?

The mysterious voting machine bugs that somehow always seem to favor Republicans.

Kerry misspeaks; Republicans freak

Sigh. So Kerry botches a joke. Republicans start saying "Ooh, look! No respect for our troops! See what will happen if you let them nasty Democrats in office?!" It's absolutely mind-boggling that the GOP will exploit the smallest thing to divert attention from a failed Iraq policy, an incompetent president, a corrupt congress, and the rest of their myriad failings. If anyone is gullible enough to change their vote based on Kerry's bad joke, well, I guess that would explain how we got into this mess.

Clearing the plate

I've been compiling links I've been meaning to blog about, so in order to clear the plate, here's all of them, with snarky comments:

A Life Worth Living - See, every now and again you need to remember what's important. It's not the job, though the job is an important vehicle to attain other goals. It's not about having more stuff than everyone else, either, though more and more people seem to believe that. It's faith, family, and happiness. It's living a good life. It's behaving with honor. It's doing good things for other people (quote I read today, likely paraphrased because of my memory, but anyway: The best way to forget about your problems is to help somebody else with theirs. Cool.). Anyway, this is a pretty good essay.

Cover the Uninsured week: There are currently over 46 million uninsured Americans, roughly one in six. You or I take going to the doctor for granted. Parents, there are public health programs for your children. Everyone else, find out what you can do.

Medical Guesswork: The proportion of medicine that actually works is 20-25%. Glad to see those increasing health care costs are being well spent.

Egg cooked via cell phone: If this is true, it's kinda scary. Like, way scary.

Social Security comic books from the 1950s and 60s: Scroll down a little. Cool.

What Would It Take: An essay by Chuck Gutenson asks how Christians can support the Bush administration. Interesting reading.

Lobbying has gotten out of hand. By the numbers.

Wikipedia's Timeline of fictional future events: This is just cool, in an SF geek kinda way.

10 ways to avoid outrageous hospital overcharges: Just like it says; good to know.

No, I don't remember where I got all of these links, so no linky credits. Sorry.

Blanket censorship

Blankets is a wonderful graphic novel that I just finished reading by an artist-writer named Craig Thompson. Someone in Missouri is trying to get it removed from a public library because they think it's pornographic. It is, of course, not even close, but the letter from the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund says it much more eloquently than I'm going to try to. Anyway, buy a copy and donate it to your local library.

• Blankets by Craig Thompson

Letter to the editor

The Pottsville Republican printed my letter opposing the coal-to-oil plant near Frackville today. If you want to send a link to your friends, use this short link:

http://tinyurl.com/qbkp9

If you want to help stop this plant, the next meeting of the STOP group is:
Monday, Sept. 18, 7 PM
Mahanoy Area High School, Mahanoy City
Directions: http://www.mabears.net/Main%20Page/contactus.htm

Steely Dan - Scranton, PA - August 20, 2006

Really a fantastic show. Someone was kind enough to post a setlist on alt.music.steely-dan:

• Turtle Talk intro
• Boddhisattva
• Time Out of Mind
• Aja
• I Got the News
• Hey 19
• Pixeleen
• Josie
• Chain Lightning
• Green Earrings
• Dirty Work
  
• -Band Intros-
  
• Show Biz Kids
  
• Do It Again
  
• Peg
  
• Don't Take me Alive
  
• Kid Charlemagne
  

ENCORES:

• FM
• My Old School
• Turtle Talk (?) reprise or Last Tango in Paris (?)
  

Sadly, nothing from Morph the Cat.

Scranton Times-Tribune review

More government madness

This may turn into a blog about everything that's wrong with the US government (I wonder how long until I hear Homeland Security knocking on my door?).

Anyway, today's tale of government excess involves a federal program providing legal aid for the poor, paid for with taxpayer dollars, that turns away half its applicants due to lack of resources, yet still manages to find money for lavishly furnished offices, pricey meals, foreign travel, and chauffeur-driven rides. All on your dime.

Via the Huffington Post.

State of the Union

We used to live in a country where you were free to criticize the government (and let's face it, the Bush White House has been making that a lot easier). It seems lately that, whenever you make a slight remark against said government, you're a danger to national security. In Connecticut, Democratic voters rejected Senator Lieberman in the primary, thereby expressing voter dissatisfaction with the Iraq war by deposing a politician who has come out in support of the war. The immediate spin? Mr. Cheney says it will "break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task." So much for the democratic process.

And in New Hampshire, an activist member of a group whose main goal is to get people to move to New Hampshire (terrorists! fear, uncertainty, doubt! Actually, they view it as a state that is not overly dependent on the government, and a culture of individual responsibility, among other things) decided to go to the local IRS office with a flyer that asked the IRS employees to quit their jobs. Fairly harmless activism, right? Well, Homeland Security arrests him. Maximum security. No visitors. Take that, freedom of speech.

I would hope the press is all over this. Via Boing Boing.

Farhenheit 451

Just finished reading this. I wonder if it's not as much about censorship as it is about information overload, the threat of Big Brother, and Political Correctness. It's amazing how a novel written about 50 years ago can be so prophetic and relevant.

Aargh

You ever feel that you spend so much time living that you forget to live? [Insert laundry list here.]

Tales from the Public Domain

Tales from the Public Domain is a comic book (download - or purchase at Amazon) released under a Creative Commons license that looks at copyright law. Some of the frightening effects of our overly-litigious society and how they affect documentary filmmakers can also be seen at Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain's Moving Image contest.

$200 billion broadband scandal; exploiting foreign workers

• $200 billion broadband scandal. Evidently, telecom companies promised that they'd wire America in exchange for some financial incentives from the US government. They didn't deliver, but they profited greatly. (via digg)


• Companies are posting ads looking for "H-1B visa holders only." See, it's easier to exploit imported employees. This is why we need to increase our quotas for H-1B visas. Sigh.
  

Ian Hunter - Taj Mahal, Atlantic City - May 13, 2006 setlist

Great show. We were third row center. Ian opened up for Dave Mason (of Traffic), though we didn't stay for Dave Mason.

• Once Bitten Twice Shy
• Death of a Nation
• Knees of My Heart
• Wash Us Away
• I Wish I was Your Mother
• American Spy
• Resurrection Mary
• Michael Picasso
• Central Park and West
• All the Young Dudes
• Roll Away the Stone

Review here.

Adobe releases Spry framework for Ajax

Adobe has released a free (BSD license) JavaScript framework called Spry for doing some of that there fancy asynchronous JavaScript stuff. I've downloaded it but haven't got a chance to see how it works yet. It's interesting to see Adobe doing some dynamic stuff that doesn't rely on Flash.

Matrix movie mashup

Neo versus RoboCop. With a little Yoda too. Heh.

Make a difference

The World Food Program operated by the United Nations needs help. Please make a difference and donate today.

The letter W has officially been added to the Swedish language

Keep reading EastHollow, the blog that brings you cutting edge news that matters!

Snow flakes and snow crystals photographs

Simply beautiful.

Quantum Physics Double Slit Experiment

Cool quantum physics video.

Drug company greed

This NY Times article (registration required) takes an interesting look at a cancer drug's ridiculous price spike. These are the kind of things that drive health insurance prices through the roof (well, if insurance even covers it; so many drugs aren't even covered by health insurance anymore. In this case, the drug manufacturer is trying to get insurers to pay their new, inflated prices -- well, of course they want the insurers to pay. Most people can't afford a $500.00 a month prescription). Outrageous. Sigh. Via Imitatio Christi.

Why do malformed URLs redirect to Microsoft?

Click the title to find out why. What can we do about it? Why, this: HTTP.

Bill Frist plays dirty politics

Bill Frist threatens to re-structure the Intelligence Committee in order to block NSA hearings.

Maybe black holes don't exist after all

Which really cramps some science fiction concepts. Link.

George Orwell would be proud

It seems Homeland Security is alerted if you pay too much on your credit card bill. Via Digg.

That way lies madness

Fine Line Revealed Between Creativity and Insanity. I've heard there's a fine line between genius and insanity - I suppose that this follows naturally. Geniuses look at things in different ways, which is one way of defining creativity. The insane also look at things in different ways, but I suppose it's taken to extremes. The creative genius and the archetypical mad scientist -- discuss.

Got a Mac? Good luck on that grant application!

In my day job, one of our challenges is making sure everything works on both Windows and Mac platforms. Now as long as you keep standards in mind and don't get into platform-dependent plug-ins (e.g., Active X), it's not really that hard. Sure, you get weird CSS rendering bugs at times, and JavaScript DOM issues, but for the most part, it's not a big deal, as the really important stuff happens on the server anyway.

The US Government contracted out some web sites and the developer came back with applications that will only work on Windows. As a blogger cited in the Washington Post article points out, this is the same government that went after Microsoft for monopolistic practices and is now kind of forcing a Microsoft-only solution on people. Sigh. They say the apps will be Mac compatible in about a year. via Digg

Songs that make you feel young

• No Surrender - Bruce Springsteen
• Find Your Way Back - Jefferson Starship
• Ride a White Swan - T. Rex

Schuylkill Taxpayers Opposed to Pollution

A local grass roots appears to have sprung up to stop the Gilberton Coal-to-Clean-Fuels and Power Project (see previous post). They have a website at ultradirtyfuels.com (in direct response to the corporate ultracleanfuels.com sponsored by the corporations behind the controversial plant).

Gilberton Coal-to-Clean-Fuels and Power Project

The US Department of Energy is seeking comments on a draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Gilberton Coal-to-Clean-Fuels and Power Project, which would construct a plant to produce clean hydrocarbon liquids, electricity, and steam from anthracite coal waste. Comments can be made at two public meetings:

• Jan. 9, 2006 at 7:00 PM at Shenandoah Valley Senior High School, Shenandoah
• Jan. 10, 2006 at 7:00 PM at DHH Lengel Middle School, Pottsville

Information sessions at both places from 4:00 PM to 6:30 PM preceding the public hearings.

You can also submit written comments by Feb. 8, 2006. Full details here.

From the Environmental Consequences section of the draft EIS: "Trace emissions of other pollutants would include mercury, beryllium, sulfuric acid mist, hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, benzene, arsenic, and various heavy metals." Now, while they will scrub the emissions to reduce the amount of these elements that gets sent into the atmosphere, further on in the paragraph it reads "a high percentage of hazardous air pollutants and trace elements in the synthesis gas would be removed, but no estimates of the proposed facilities' emissions of these pollutants are currently available." I interpret that "as we can remove 99% of x, but we don't know what x is." So therefore, they can't really say how much of each of these hazardous materials will be released. They do go on to say that the EPA allows a max of less than 10 tons for any single hazardous air pollutant (e.g., mercury) and less than 25 tons total of all hazardous air pollutants in a rolling 12-month period. So I guess we can infer that they think it will be less than the maximums allowed, but that isn't even guaranteed, based on this statement (page 4-9): "Part of the purpose of the proposed project is to generate environmental data, including hazardous air pollutant measurements, from the operation of the integrated technologies at a sufficiently large scale to allow industries and utilities to assess the project's potential for commercial application." So I guess we're guinea pigs.

Then there's that little Global Warming thing. From the EIS, page 4-11: "The proposed facilities would increase global CO2 emissions by about 832,000 tons per year, which is about 0.003% of global CO2 emissions of 26,713 million tons resulting from fossil fuel combustion in the year 2000." While 0.003% doesn't sound like much, to think that one little plant in Schuylkill County will be adding 832,000 tons of CO2 emissions is a little ... alarming.

Based on their analysis of the effects to the local water supply, it doesn't sound bad (other than reducing the flow of water to the Mahanoy Creek by about 43%, but they say since no one drinks from the Creek, that doesn't really matter).

There are probably some more interesting insights that can be made by reading the entire EIS. I encourage people to post comments here.

I'm all for looking for alternative energy production methods, but it seems we're just swapping in another non-renewable energy source here (anthracite waste). Public funding is far better spent on researching and implementing renewable resources that do not contribute the environmental hazards that burning fossil fuels do -- let's look at solar collectors and wind farms and quit relying on fossil fuels. I'd much rather have a wind farm in my back yard than five more smokestacks spewing unknown quantities of pollutants.

College newspaper advisor canned for letting students use Macs

You see, allowing students to use Macs doesn't prepare them for the real world. Okaaay. Link. via Digg.

The Future of HTML

IBM's developerWorks has an interesting article on the future of HTML, mentioning HTML 5, a proposed progression to the HTML standard that is backwards-compatible with HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 (I can sense you nodding off already). They also touch on Web Forms 2.0, which would extend current forms implementations to include built-in client-side validation (so you don't have to write custom JavaScript for required fields, or validating an e-mail address). There seems to be a lot of interest in what the web is transforming into, after Google showcased what you can do with AJAX to create a more compelling user experience. So what's the best approach to a more engaging and useful web - AJAX, Flash, the next generation of HTML or XHTML, or a combination of all these things?

Mom's Cancer

Mom's Cancer is a graphic novel about a family dealing with their mother's struggle with cancer. Highly recommended reading for anyone dealing with the anguish and struggle that cancer introduces into a family's life. Author's website is here.

How does your workplace hold up?

The Job Tracker database allows you to look up some interesting info on companies, including if they export jobs, endanger workers' health, or violate workers' rights under the National Labor Relations Act.

Schuylkill County from the air

Before Google Maps and NASA's World Wind let you peer at your house via satellite photos, we had to settle for looking at Schuylkill County from an airplane.

Papers Please

Deborah Davis refused to show her ID to a security guard who demanded to see everyone's ID on a public bus. After all, this is America, right? We can move about in public without the fear of the authorities demanding "your papers, please." But Deborah got arrested. For not showing her papers.

We're all a little antsy from the threat of terrorism, but we shouldn't let that serve as an excuse to create Big Brother.