Monthly Archive for September, 2005

Salon offers a perfect review of Serenity that encapsulates what is so great about the show and how the movie relates. An especially good read for those who saw some of the series and found it only tolerable.

Other nations upset US won’t relinquish control of “the net” to UN – Far as I can tell, the Department of Commerce hasn’t done *anything* that could be considered discriminatory or otherwise bad in their managment of the DNS infrastructure and the root servers. This talk by developing countries about being shafted when it comes to IP addresses is a joke. There are name registries per region, DNS has a common-carrier status, and there has not been any shortage of IPs, including netblocks being reallocated (i.e. revoked from people who have way too many) as needed. And if a point comes when the DNS system somehow gets untenable, nothing stops other countries from taking the (at this point, stupid) step of creating and using an alternative DNS structure. This is just silly political posturing by people who I would trust far less, at this point, to manage this thing competently and keep politics out of it.

A disturbing story of how Utah police stormed a legal rave party in Salt Lake City with no warning. The comparison made is to other high-energy events with large crowds and potential drug use, like NASCAR races and other types of concerts. It sounds like the concert organizers did everything right here, including hiring security to maintain order and search patrons, having ambulance crews at the party, and having representatives from DanceSafe on hand to verify that things were going well. At any large-scale gathering there will be some drug use, perhaps a bit of violence, people getting drunk, people being disorderly. So why storm a rave with helicopters, tear gas, and guns drawn when you wouldn’t do the same for any other event? The answer is probably a simple one — they don’t like those kinds of parties in Utah.

Understanding the scale of Hurricane Katrina – This neat interactive map thingy from the Boston Globe gives some sense of proportion for those of us who don’t know how big things are around New Orleans. In this overlay, which only serves to demonstrate size, not predict what would happen in a flood of the Boston area, Wellesly and Harvard are under water, but Brandeis is just barely spared. Too bad about Brookline, though, I’ll miss eating at Zaftig’s.

Two residents at Brigham and Women’s don’t like the medical inaccuracies of House and Grey’s Anatomy. They discuss the initial rise of medical shows, when every script was vetted by the AMA and doctors were portrayed as dispassionate superheroes focused solely on the patients’ needs, rather than having problems of their own. I agree the pendulum has dramatically swung to the point where on some of these shows the patients are barely relevent. Of course I disagree with their yearning to return to a time of self-censorship, but I do understand their broader point. One thing they did not bring up but that I wonder about is whether people perceptions of doctors as the kind of emotionally messed up (read: human) people portrayed on Grey’s and elsewhere is partially responsible (in addition to many other factors, of course) for the dramatic rise in malpractice lawsuits.