Monthly Archive for October, 2005

Small US units lure Taliban into losing battles | csmonitor.com 0 cmts

What its like on the ground in Afghanistan – Discussing military tactics for capturing and killing Taliban fighters. An interesting read.

What’s a Modern Girl to Do? – New York Times 0 cmts

Maureen Dowd wonders about the lasting effects of the women’s lib movement and the plight of the modern day woman: “Maybe we should have known that the story of women’s progress would be more of a zigzag than a superhighway, that the triumph of feminism would last a nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years.”

Sun

Oct

2005

Banned at the schoolhouse door: pint-size ghosts and goblins | csmonitor.com 0 cmts

Schools across the country are banishing Halloween celebrations for a variety of reasons, including “political correctness” agitators who think the holiday is unfair to poor students, but mostly, it appears, due to strongly religious parents who object to the “satanic” roots of the holiday and choose to (or threaten to) keep their children home from school.

Sat

Oct

2005

Danny Hillis has finished work on the second prototype of the Clock of the Long Now 0 cmts

Danny Hillis has finished work on the second prototype of the Clock of the Long Now. Standing nine feet tall, this functioning clock provides a close approximation of the current plans for the full-size 60 foot version that will eventually reside in a mountain cave in Nevada. Hillis is still exploring many different ideas for how to construct the clock and what types of displays it will contain (how do we map our notion of hours, or centuries?) I plan to make the trek to visit the clock when it is finished, and I expect that the end result will be equally beautiful to this prototype, but very different.

Bounces of colour 0 cmts

Bouncie balls down a SF street For a commercial for their new Bravia line of LCD televisions Sony dumped a *quarter of a million* rubber bouncy balls onto the streets of hilly San Francisco and filmed the result from 23 different angles. The result, with no computer enhangement, is truly surreal. It seems like ads can be more creative in general in Europe, perhaps because there are fewer of them (at least in the UK, I believe) and perhaps because they can be longer. Watch the ad and view photos on Sony’s site or on Flickr.

Leaktastic 0 cmts

Interesting to note that Fitzgerald’s investigation of the Plame leak has so far cost well shy of $1 million, while Ken Starr’s investigation of Whitewater ended up costing at least $40 million. Other interesting tidbits: Libby is *confirmed* to have been one of the leakers (PDF, para. 14), and it is also pretty clear that he *knew* Valerie Wilson was a covert operative. Not sure why the TV news/spin shows can’t figure this stuff out, apparently they don’t know how to read. Also not sure what ever happened to Bush’s promise to fire any leakers.

Fri

Oct

2005

Meanwhile Barry Obama publishes his own podcasts 0 cmts

Meanwhile, Barry Obama publishes his own podcasts and syndicates them through iTunes!

Dennis Hastert’s new “unfiltered” blog 0 cmts

Dennis Hastert’s new “unfiltered” blog sounds like its been written by a PR flunkie, but maybe he just talks like that.

Mon

Oct

2005

Firefox market share 0 cmts

If this random study someone linked to on Slashdot is to be believed, usage of Internet Explorer in the last year has stayed constant and Firefox’s growth comes at the expense of AOL, Mozilla, and Netscape. Which is pretty disappointing, if you ask me.

Sat

Oct

2005