The Sheild is still Too Cool. What more can I say?

According to this story the identity of the person known as “Deep Throat”, a term coined by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post during the Nixon Impeachment times, has been revealed as 91-year old W. Mark Felt, the FBI’s number 2 man during the early 1970’s.

The question today is, does anyone really care today?

I’m currently watching the first few minutes of the rather poorly reviewed Just Visiting on WE, and I’m busting a gut. Alas, a full determination will have to save ’til later.

What are you currently reading?

Anything you’re read recently that really blew you away?

Ideas, lookin’ for ideas…

Update: Oh, sorry, forgot: I’m currenly in the middle of “Decipher” by Stel Pavlou which is actually pretty good once I got all the characters straight in my head.

Watching a rapid fabrication machine in action is like watching paint dry - if you could actually see the molecular chemistry taking place. It’s a really wondrous technology. A new center is forming at Saddleback College here in Orange County to make this technology more available to start-ups (OCRegister - free registration req’d):

Many university researchers are studying all the whiz-bang uses for this computer technology. But few companies understand how they can use it to be competitive in the rapidly changing global marketplace. And those who figure it out can’t find trained technicians.

The National Science Foundation is funding the Advanced Technology Center at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo to bridge the gap. The effort should boost the local economy by helping start-up companies develop cutting- edge products cheaper and faster and training workers for high-paying jobs.

Currently, machines and computers representing the latest technology are spread around campus while the building to house the center is remodeled. Everything should be consolidated in one location by July 1, says Ken Patton, dean of Business Science, Workforce and Economic Development and lead researcher on the NSF project.

This seems to go hand-in-hand with this latest post from Virginia Postrel:

Gershenfeld’s experience with students and workshops from Ghana to South Boston confirms von Hippel’s central point: In many cases, people want things they can’t currently get and, given the tools to make them, will create new inventions. “The killer app for personal fabrication is fulfilling individual desires rather than meeting mass-market needs,” he writes. (For more info, see his website here.) I admire Gershenfeld’s enthusiasm, but he overstates the case for making stuff yourself. I already have the equipment and (rusty) skills to fabricate my own skirts, and by making them myself I could get exactly the right fabric and fit. But I don’t. Making stuff yourself can be fun and satisfying, but it can also be time-consuming and frustrating. The theoretical question is who has the scarce knowledge. User innovation taps unique or unarticulated desires, but specialization allows expertise and gains from trade.

I’m not sure if Virginia quite “gets it” here. I’m something of a MacGyver/Hank Hill type myself. But, at this stage in my life, I prefer to just “job-out” the creation of my visions. The problem, of course, is finding people to fulfill your vision faithfully and competently. For me, it’s frequently easier just to do it myself.

But, I think the impact on society goes well beyond that. It’s about capitalizing on the creative talents of those who wouldn’t normally be inclined to follow through from imagination-to-market by traditional paths. All of this is just pie-in-the-sky at this point; we are still far from Xerox’s highly touted “On Demand Publishing” ideal, and that’s just print on paper. But it’s coming.

Something this good just can’t happen easily:

The much-heralded project called Google Print would provide free online copies of out-of-copyright books and newer books still protected by copyrights, making them searchable with snippets of text available online. But Google’s (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) utopian project has hit a few bumps in the five months since it was announced, and Google is in the rare position of having to defend itself.

The idea made a lot of sense given Google’s search expertise, its incredible stash of technology resources and its stated mission to organize the world’s information. Google Print also complemented efforts within the company to develop perfect machine language translation, which means that some day a scanned book will theoretically be readable in any language, anywhere in the world.

Sounds great, but a serious criticism of the project emerged last week from academic publishers. In a six page letter, a group of publishers admonished the Mountain View, Calif.-based company for scanning copyrighted books without detailing their plans, leading to a possible “systematic infringement of copyright on a massive scale.”

Sometime ago, I can’t get through the mess in the archives to find it, I wrote some kind of nonsense about some small unimportant thing that went wrong with my computer; I spent an inordinate amount of time fixing it, but was satisfied with the the result, so I forgot about it. Here we go again. I don’t know if it’s worth it this time, I’ve been sitting here trying to correct typing mistakes for the past 20 minutes, giggling about them, and trying to eat a port chip sandwich without choking on it.(OK, just one example. PORH CHOP, folks, PORK CHOP.) Nurse & chief inquisitor Jenny is asleep in the next room, and when she finds out about this post there’s gonna be hell to pay!!

What I’m mad about tonight though is the simplleat part of a computer, the thing that whould never fail, that one thing of perfection, the mouse! Now the durn thing is cowering over in the corner sniveling and shivering under the pork chop plate I threw at it, and I am about to go over and stomp the loiving (living, not loving) daylights out of the darned lthing. These things have only two finctions in life. They have an X axis and a Y axis, and they are supposed to run in those directions when the thing is moved that way. What in the heck is so hard about that? No one shoulfdhave to fire or kill louses - mouses - for being incompetent! Why, it’s no harder than getting the right lette3r on the slcreen when it isw typed! You don’t see keyboards always getting fired do you?

I’m gonna finish my sandwafch and go kill that dang mouse, then I can get my work done.

If you’ve seen the demo of Ionatron’s directed energy vehicle, blowing up IEDs in it’s path, well before it’s in the blast zone, I’m sure you’ll agree it’s quite amazing. But is it too good to be true?

Company executives at Ionatron, Inc. in Tuscon, AZ say they’re working on laser-induced plasma channel (LIPC) weapons that use uses femtosecond lasers to carve conductive channels of ionized oxygen in the air. The idea is that Ionatron’s weapon will then use these channels to send man-made lighting bolts up to 800 meters away to disable or kill people and vehicles. DefenseTech.org reports that the company has received $12 million in appropriations.

Investigations by DefenseTech.org and the New York Post, however, are raising questions about Ionatron. New York Post Business columnist Christopher Byron has alleged questionable award practices at the Congressional level and even potential technology ownership issues involving Raytheon and/or HSV Technologies. DefenseTech.org lays out what is currently known about the situation, and reports that Ionatron executives refused to comment on the contents of his story or on Byron’s more detailed allegations.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Looking for the text of a famous speech? Or just a lover of great elocution? You want American Rhetoric. Rationalize rhetoric and it speaks to your mind; personify her and she speaks to your soul.

A thoroughbred in Australia has tested positive for cocaine.

This from Steven Edwards at the NYDN:

Bold statements about the need to save the world’s trees poured into the United Nations last week at a massive conference called the Forum on Forests.

And yet the world body produces so many reports daily it is known as the globe’s most prodigious paper factory.

Which wouldn’t be so bad if someone were getting some benefit from all the printed words.

Alas, most of the reports go unread, their shelf life being just a few days as they pass from racks marked “today’s documents,” to “recent documents,” and finally to giant plastic bins for recycling.

The UN conservatively estimates 700 million pages stream off its printing presses every year. Critics say the total is closer to 2 billion.

This from Gary Wolf at Wired:

Fortunately, this advice was mostly ignored. According to the engineers, use of elevators in the early phase of the evacuation, along with the decision to not stay put, saved roughly 2,500 lives. This disobedience had nothing to do with panic. The report documents how evacuees stopped to help the injured and assist the mobility-impaired, even to give emotional comfort. Not panic but what disaster experts call reasoned flight ruled the day.

In fact, the people inside the towers were better informed and far more knowledgeable than emergency operators far from the scene. While walking down the stairs, they answered their cell phones and glanced at their BlackBerries, learning from friends that there had been a terrorist attack and that the Pentagon had also been hit. News of what was happening passed by word of mouth, and fellow workers pressed hesitating colleagues to continue their exit.

We know that US borders are porous, that major targets are largely undefended, and that the multicolor threat alert scheme known affectionately as “the rainbow of doom” is a national joke. Anybody who has been paying attention probably suspects that if we rely on orders from above to protect us, we’ll be in terrible shape. But in a networked era, we have increasing opportunities to help ourselves. This is the real source of homeland security: not authoritarian schemes of surveillance and punishment, but multichannel networks of advice, information, and mutual aid.

Remain vigilant

Via InstaPundit

You would think that admitting Ligaya Lagman, whose son was killed last year in Afghanistan, into American Gold Star Mothers would be a simple matter. Public sentiment is certainly with her. But, as these two conflicting AP reports (here and here) show, it ain’t that simple:

“We can’t go changing the rules every time we turn around,” said Herd, the national president. “When we have problems within our organization with people not abiding by the rules, we just get it straightened out, we don’t change the rules.”

Mrs. Lagman may not be a citizen. But she has been a legal resident here for over twenty years. But most importantly, her son, Army Staff Sgt. Anthony Lagman, gave everything in the service of America. This should be a no-brainer.

Then again, one has to wonder why Mrs. Lagman would even want to be part of such a stick-up-the-ass organization.

…could be, “The bird flu?”

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US health authorities are taking urgent precautions against a ‘flu pandemic’ that experts warned could erupt at any time and claim tens of thousands of lives.

Top health officials here warned that the United States was ill-prepared to counter a pandemic which could come from a mutation of the bird flu H5N1 that has badly hit Asia.

Their warnings came as European researchers are also warned this week that hundreds of millions could die around the globe if a mutated bird flu, helped by jet travel and open borders, emerges and sweeps the world.

I read a lot, and a lot of Science Fiction, and these days there’s just enough fact thrown into the mix just to keep you on your toes. The super volcanoe that’s just waiting to blow under Yellowstone. The fact that the sun, bringer of warm breezes and maybe an occaissional sunburn, is a giant freaking series of nuclear explosions going off in our very immediate galactic neighborhood has fueled more than one writer’s head. And lets not forget about Global Warming least we offend those who pray at the alter of environmentalism. All fuel and fodder for the science fiction author who wants to add a little oomph to the story to “keep it real dawg, a’ight.” (??? Randy?)

But ya know, it’s always the weird stuff that really gets us, not the sexy cool stuff. Bird Flu. We could possibly be devasted by Bird Flu.

Because of places I’ve worked and exercises I’ve participated in, I know a bit about the spread of diseases. Back in the stone age I had to physically pick a slide up off a projector and replace it with the next one in a smooth and “professional” manner. God help me, I used to be proud of this skill. But I’ve sat through more disaster preparedness (natural and created) briefings than I care to imagine and the first folks to get sick in cases like this are the transporters; Airline crews and truckers and frequent flyers. Folks who come into contact with a LOT of other folks every day. Yes…they transport the disease as well but they also get sick first so guess what? Lots of stuff that we depend on to move from point A to point B doesn’t move because the timing is just so that they’re getting REAL sick just as the rest of us are starting to think, “My God I feel like I’ve been ate by a bear and shite down a hole.” Stuff stops moving just as we’re starting to need lots of stuff. It would make life interesting.

Bird Flu? Doesn’t seem right does it? I’m thinkin’ I’d prefer a meteor or a series of continent shifting earthquakes or a super x-ray fueled gravity pulse from the surface of Mars. Bird Flu sounds so cheezy. No, Asian Avian Flu doesn’t make it any better.

It seems the “gentlemen’s agreement” reached by the alleged “gentlemen” of the US Senate does not hold water. In fact, instead of leaking like a sieve, it apparently elicits waterfalls on its own!

On Thursday evening, just days after a group of Senate “moderate centrists” patted themselves on their backs, (breaking at least five arms in the process) congratulating themselves profusely for having saved the empire union from certain destruction by elimination of blusters filibusters, Senate Democrats totally surprised the entire world by breaking the agreement and blocking a cloture vote on” Mr. Nice”, John Bolton, the President’s pick to kick ass represent the US at the UN - or something like that! While Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was receiving medical assistance in the cloakroom (or was it bathroom?) for having passed out in shock over the event, Majority minority leader “Dingy” Harry reid was grabbing every microphone in the corridor, while his associates and acolytes rounded up all the TV camers so he could gloat assure all of the rest of us that this was not really a filibuster.

Mr. Bolton will now have to go back to the end of the line to await his turn, and recess may be over by then, so he may not get to play at all.

Sorry for all the strikeouts, Nurse (sister) Jenny kept hitting me on the hand with a ruler.

(Part the last of my dream adventure movie epic, about the wagon-train party that no one has ever heard about.)

The fast-moving horseback party followed the river south, as snow continued falling. In two days they were on the shores of Lake Tahoe, working their way around the western shore to another small creek, which led them over the summit, and down along the Rubicon River, out of the snow, although not entirely out of danger in the rough country. The eastern slope is a steep palisade, the western slope more gradual, but rough, cut with steep-banked creeks. They reached the safety of Sutter’s Fort early in December, while the main party still struggled along the promising creek route. They came at last to an alpine valley with a small ice-water lake at the foot of a canyon leading up to the last and highest mountain pass.

At times, the only open passage along the creek was actually in the water, which was hard on the oxen’s feet. By the time they reached the lake, there was two feet of snow on the ground, and time for another hard choice; a decision to leave six of the wagons at the lake, slaughter the worst-off of the oxen for food, and cache everything but food and essentials. Three of the young men, Moses Schallenberger, Allan Montgomery and Joseph Foster would build a rough cabin and winter over, guarding the wagons and property at the lake, and living from what they could hunt. The rest of the party pooled the remaining ox teams and five wagons and moved on, up into the canyon towards the crest of the Sierra Nevada, up a slope so steep they had to empty out the contents and carry everything by hand, doubling the ox teams and pulling up the wagons one by one. A sheer vertical ledge halfway up the rocky slope blocked their way. A desperate search revealed a small defile, just wide enough to lead the oxen and horses up it, single file. The teams were re-yoked at the top, and hoisted up the empty wagons by ropes and chains, while men pushed from below, and the women and children labored up the narrow footpath, carrying armfuls of precious supplies. By dint of much exhausting labor, they reached the summit on November 25th, and struggled on through the snow, while the three volunteers returned to the lake. They hastily built a small cabin, twelve by fourteen feet square, roofed with ox-hides, and settled in for the winter, not knowing that the winter would be very much harsher than back east.

The main party struggled on; although they were over the pass, and gradually heading downhill, they were still in the high mountains. With snow falling, cutting a trail and keeping the wagons moving was a brutally laborious job. A week, ten days of it was all that exhausted men and ox teams could handle. They set up a cold camp on the South Fork of the Yuba River, and made a last, calculated gamble on survival for all. They would build another cabin, make arbors of branches and the canvas wagon tops, and butcher the remaining oxen. The women and children would stay, with two men to protect them, while the remaining husbands and fathers would take the few horses, and as little food as possible, and continue on to Sutter’s Fort, returning as soon as possible with supplies and team animals. So they made the bitter decision before changing weather, and diminishing food supplies forced worse circumstances upon them. Before the men rode away, the wife of Martin Murphy’s oldest son gave birth to a daughter, who was named Elizabeth Yuba Murphy. It was nearly two months before a rescue party was able to return to the survival camp on the Yuba River, just in the nick of time, for the women and children were down to eating boiled hides.

Meanwhile, twenty miles east, the snow had piled up level to the roof of the little cabin by the ice-water lake. The three young men realized that the game they had counted on being able to hunt had all retreated below the snow, far down the mountains. What they had left would not be able to feed them through the winter. From hickory wagon bows and rawhide, Montgomery and Foster contrived three sets of snowshoes, and packed up what they could carry. In one day, they had climbed to the top of the pass, but the snowshoes were clumsy things and the snow was soft, and young Schallenberger— only 18 at the time— was not as strong as the other two. Agonizing leg cramps left him unable to take more than a few steps. Continuing on was impossible for him, survival at the cabin impossible for three. He returned alone, living for the next three months on the food supplies they had not been able to carry, and trapping coyotes and foxes. Fox was almost edible, coyote meat quite vile, but he kept the frozen coyotes anyway, lest the supply of foxes ever run out. When the rescue party came to the winter camp in late February, one of them, Dennis Martin continued on snowshoes over the pass, hoping to find young Schallenberger still alive. With a hard crust to the snow, the two of them had an easier time of it, and caught up to the main party on the Lower Bear River.

Two years later, the little cabin in which he spent most of the winter would shelter families from the Donner party who were caught by winter at about the same time of year, in the same place. A fractious, bitterly split party would meet a ghastly and protracted disaster… and yet, everyone has heard of them, and the pass through the Sierra Nevada, that the Stephens party discovered and labored successfully to bring wagons over, while increasing their strength by two born on the journey… is named for the group who lost half their number to starvation in its’ shadow.

End of my stardom hell, I’m just gettin’ started.

Via The Headmistress.

So…Carrie Underwood is the 2005 American Idol.

So…what happened on Lost? Yeah-yeah, I know there’s an oncore showing Saturday Night, we’re busy. Give people, don’t be like that.