I'd forgotten how good Steely Dan sounds. Aja is love.
I'd forgotten how good Steely Dan sounds. Aja is love.
The US will test 700-tonne explosive in Nevada this June. I can see this being a tourist draw: "come to Vegas, see the mushroom cloud".
A topic close to my heart - essay in the times on the merits (or otherwise) of museums. Also discussed on barbelith.
Here's a hilarious pen-portrait of 6 months in St. Petersburg. Better still, it leads on to this essay on getting drunk in Russia. There is allegedly an associated blog, but right now it's being squatted by old Mr. 404.
Why did I ever stop reading robot wisdom?
Free Will Astrology: a beautiful assortment of mind hacks. I'm ashamed at my own unwillingness to rant excitedly about it, because I'm held back by my suspicion of astrology and other magic. I'm certainly ashamed to be reducing it to mere 'mind hacks', and about how close I came to not mentioning it.
Make shy people less nervous in crowded situations: give them blinkers.
Post-Mortem on HavenCo (the most interesting content is in the items linked at the top of that page). Basically, looks like it fell apart because it was being run by idealistic amateurs who weren't professional enough to be taken seriously. Maybe somebody else could pull off the same concept successfully in the future, maybe not.
New Roman-themed MMORPG withcruxifiction as a punishment for rule-breaking. Are they trying to encourage the scammers?
The online exhibitions from the British Museum have so much more information than the little labels in the museum itself.
It's tempting to put up a link to every other post on Crooked Timber, but usually I restrain myself. This discussion of the changing pace of change is too good to miss, though.
The Iraqi government is going in for curfews in a big way. I'd be interested to read more about the impact of these curfews on citizens of Iraq. Think about how it would affect your life, or about how much trouble it has caused in Palestine, and it's obvious that it'll be causing people a lot of hassle.
Looks like Loukas finished that corpwatch report - go him!
More use of aerial bombings in Iraq - just like Seymour Hersh predicted
Another 85 people executed in Baghdad - the scale of these killings seems to have shot up over the past few weeks
First the UK and now the US has been doing this: making allegations that Iran is trying to destablise Iraq, and then admitting that they don't have any actual evidence
Russian memes make even less sense than English ones: превед медведу!
Moving towards a withdrawal timeline: Bush talks about "the goal of having the Iraqis control more territory than the coalition by the end of 2006"
Very pro-Runescape article from the BBC, on that same Brunel study.
Sean's Russia Blog on the difference between Russkii (ethnically/culturally Russian) and Rossiiskii (part of the Russian nation)
New UN report on water. For some reason the full report is only being made available to the media - what on earth is UNESCO thinking there?
Light relief: "A Sudanese man has been forced to take a goat as his "wife", after he was caught having sex with the animal". [BBC]
Looks like Babelfish has finally stopped translating 'Putin' as 'fishings'. Instead, they've turned the name of Vladislav Surov, a senior member of Putin's administration, into 'marmots'
Discussion of a new book on Putin. 'Putin: His Ideology'. Also an english-language review from 'Russia Profile'. Author's LJ, and the website he runs
Somebody is making a documentary video on sweatshops/gold farmers, including interviews. He's working on more, as part of his PhD
Komosomolskaya Pravda does an introduction to blogs. Picks out some Russian-language blogs, and for some reason also Madonna's blog (available not just in Russian, but Chinese and Polish too!). Another-kashin accurately tags the article 'long and ridiculous'
Political fudging of casualty counts in Iraq - the Washington Post says that Iraqi politicians are pressuring the health ministry and baghdad morgue into under-counting killings. This, thinks the WaPo, is how we got casualty figures varying from 1300 down to 379 for reprisals after the Samarra bombing. The implication is that this is some kind of collusion between the Interior Ministry (run by SCIRI) and the Health Ministry (which is under Sadr's influence). Some reporting on the politics of the Baghdad morgue, which sounds like a heavily politicised place.
Humanitarian aid and the military: $60 of US humanitarian aid after the Pakistan earthquake is coming out of the War on Terror budget (according to Rumsfeld's testimony to the Senate Appropriations committee. WTF?
Why on earth is Alan Duncan tabling questions about gas imports from Russia?
Nice soundbite: Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy
Yet more on the abolition of parliament bill - is this gaining momentum, or am I just paying more attention?
Still trying to put together a summary of corruption issues in Iraq. I'm lost, I tell you, lost!
For some time now I've been meaning to write about the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill - which of course means I never will. So here's somebody who is
Oh, dear, I've just gone and bought a ticket forWhitby. I wonder how that's going to work out
No luck on finding a wiki that can cope with my text files. You wouldn't expect it to be this hard, would you. Best so far: twiki allegedly stores its data in flat files, so it should be easy to adjust my own files to their format. This Phpwiki plugin list includes one to create a page with a bit of php. So I guess that could work.
But aargh! I find it hard to believe that nobody else has been throwing themselves at exactly the same problems. Grrr...
Hoder suggests that part of Iran is declared an international zone under UN governance, and enrichment happens there. Neat idea, never going to happen.
OK, OK, I'm giving into the ETech bug and following from afar. Things that look fun:
playsh, something between a MOO and an environment for network programming. playsh as in 'playful shell'. Second Life as a means of prototyping things
old quote from Steve Jobs: 'a computer is a bicycle for the mind'
enough for now. no doubt more tomorrow; there's something of the junkie in me.
Rumsfeld should be nailed for this - claiming that the media is exaggerating the number of civilian deaths in Iraq. Admittedly the Bush administration is in that area where you can't imagine them reacting sensibly to a reasoned argument. But perhaps an optimist would read that as being a reason why we need to talk at them constantly, maybe eventually grind some facts into them.
Badness in Central Asia: an Uzbek opposition politician jailed, NGOs persecuted, packing up and leaving.
David Howarth is being very, very good on civil liberties at the moment. IF it wasn't enough to be almost the only person fighting against the "Abolition of Parliament Bill", he's also kicking up a fuss about people being put on a DNA database without their consent
I have no idea what's really going on with the government-militia battles in Waziristan, but I don't believe the Western media's spin that it's all about the War on Terror
An LA Times column wonders about the Jagex abuse report system;
"But don't worry, Mom," he assures me. If anyone does anything "offensive" during the game, he says, the game people knock you offline and ban you from playing. Great! And just who, exactly, are these new parent police from the game industry?
RuneScape helps you work? I don't believe it!
Chinese military spending up 14.7% this year - 18th successive increase, putting it at $35.3 billion officially. The real rate is probably something like 3 times that, and second only to the US worldwide.
But if the official budget is only a fraction of the real one, isn't it possible that this isn't giving more money to the military, just being more transparant about what they are getting
The UN is going to move staff to countries with cheap labour. The only thing I don't understand is why this is news, or rather why it hasn't already happened. It's a worldwide organisation - there is no reason whatsoever for it to be based primarily in New York and Geneva, which are close to being the most expensive cities in the world
Jeremy Greenstock just said something I'd not really twigged, but is totally true: "Iran has no real friends".
Iran was all but the only story on Newsnight and Channel 4 news last night. Unusually with TV news, I came out having learnt at least something.
As with Iraq, there's a problem in the ambiguity of US aims.The US adminsitration wants to give $75m to fund 'democracy promotion' in Iran - which is a way of saying that they don't like the regime no matter what. That kind of gesture pleases the right, but encourages Iran to keep developing nuclear programs. Would you give in to US demands if you thought they'd treat you just as badly afterwards?
Iran's nuclear negotiator criticises US pundits not just as Zionists, but as 'Zionist Orientalists'. Go team Said!
How would the practicalities of bombing nuclear facilities work out?
I don't really understand why Ahmedinajad has said so many anti-Israeli things - does he really need that much conservative political support?
Pundits touring the news: Patrick Clawson, Ray Takeyh, Ali Ansari, Reuel marc gerecht (PNAC),
Meanwhile, here's Glen's take on it - but there isn't much there.
Bonus waiting-for-the-apocalypse quote from a young iranian: "'I really hope the Mahdi comes back soon, my patience is running out'
Oh, well, here we go again - another Etech, Doubt I'll be paying much attention this time round, grumpy sod that I am
I can socialise when sober and happy. I can socialise when miserable and drunk. I just can't socialise when I'm sober and miserable. Does that count as a problem?
well bugger me if it ain't a sideblog!