February 2008
Over the past decade, this country has squandered... →
January 2008
“Cass Martin lived for a few years and in that time he learned that the world is...”
– All The Kings Men (1946) - Robert Penn Warren
PBS Frontline Video About Wired Teens →
Freshwater is the resource most strained by... →
The Yellow River supplied the water to launch Chinese civilization. Chinese scientists first recorded zero flow in the lower reaches of the Yellow River in 1972, and between then and 1999, the river ran dry for a portion of all but six years. By the mid-1990s, the average length of dry riverbed had expanded to 700 kilometers, up from 130 kilometers in the 1970s. In 1997, the lower reaches of the...
An important step has been taken in the quest to... →
“Understanding how you construct organisms artificially is an important first step. But scientists still need to understand what effect altering the DNA sequence of an organism - such as bacteria - will have upon their behaviour.” - Dr Jason Chin
Lovin’ Spoonfull - A traditional blues song...
WatchThe New Bush Coinage
Opium fields spread across Iraq as farmers try to... →
The growing and smuggling of opium will be difficult to stop in Iraq because much of the country is controlled by criminalised militias. American successes in Iraq over the past year have been largely through encouraging the development of a 70,000-strong Sunni Arab militia, many of whose members are former insurgents linked to protection rackets, kidnapping and crime.
The U.S.-led coalition dropped 1,447 bombs on Iraq... →
“We’re facing the risk of a systemic financial crisis. It’s not just subprime...”
– Nouriel Roubini, an economist at the Stern School of Business at New York University and chairman of the research firm RGE Monitor, in the New York Times.
The DoD is flirting with the idea of medicating... →
Nearly 40 percent of soldiers, a third of Marines and half of National Guard members are presenting with serious mental health issues. And over 6,250 American veterans took their own lives in 2005 alone — that works out to a little more than 17 suicides every day.
“Computers are technologies of liberation, but they’re also technologies of...”
– Nicholas Carr interviewed by Wired Magazine.
WatchEnamoured by Bioshock until my son said it sucked. Here’s why.
“We hate these people.”
– A Kenyan farmer from the Kalenjin tribe about farmers from the long-dominant Kikuyu tribe.
JANUARY 11, 2008, is the six-year anniversary of... →
On January 11, the ACLU is calling on everyone opposed to torture and indefinite detention to WEAR ORANGE to symbolize their sadness and disgust with the national shame that is Guantánamo Bay.
“They’re living in the tropics… They’ve got everything they could...”
– Dick Cheney describing conditions at Guantánamo
Microsoft promises to make Office work again →
This is the dialogue box that Microsoft left out: “I am a sentient human being. I can assess risk. I can spell ‘responsibility’ and even, occasionally, assume it. I really, really want/need to open this old Word document. So go ahead, make my day. OK?”
Seeking God in the Brain →
Neuroscientist David Linden argues that if an“intelligent designer” had assembled the brain, it would surely have done an elegant, impeccable job, but the more we learn about the brain, the more clearly we see that it is an ad hoc concatenation of structures designed for unrelated functions— a sort of Rube Goldberg contraption. Though the brain somehow manages to function rather...