Environment

I gave it little direct thought, but for years my instinctual assumption was that the line at the bottom of emails,

Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.

...was a suggestion that you make sure you knew who was around your printer - ie, the "environment" - before choosing to print out the email. Like an ATM warning - make sure you trust the people around you before making a new copy of this email, which could then be carried off. It just sounded like those other pompous footers, like

NOTICE: If received in error, please destroy and notify sender. Sender does not intend to waive confidentiality or privilege. Use of this email is prohibited when received in error.

I don't know why the other obvious - correct - meaning of the message escaped me!

Ambient

Warren Ellis, on Twitter, on Twitter:

ambient post-geographic conversation (accent on "ambient") or world nonsequitur delivery system, take your pick...

I like the first one.

Decentralize

His "when I was a kid" schtick is irritating at times, sure, but Dave is often onto something:

What we used to call blogging is now just bullshit about recycled bullshit about recycled bullshit and on and on. Who bit who in the ass, never mind anything new or hard to comprehend, cause that's not what we do. We aggregate eyeballs and clickthroughs and CPMs and god knows what else. 

Back in the old days before any of you were blogging, we (the olde skool bloggers) used to write about them watching us watching them watch us watch them.  

It's happening again... 

Nothing wrong with it, it's human nature. 

But it's time to decentralize again.  

Head for the hills. 

If I could only remember where they are!

I'm providing no original thought in this post - just enjoying it!

McSame

Image from Kos.

Black Holes In Our Discourse

An embarrassingly bad opening four paragraphs in a NY Times article about two men who claim that the Large Hadron Collider will create a black hole when it's completed and turned on later this year:

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

"Maybe the universe?" A black hole will swallow the universe? Do you know what these words mean, Dennis?

"Some checking?" Yeah, scientists pursed just a few lines of "checking" during the process of designing the LHC.

There's an interesting story in all this, but this version seems like it was written for InTouch.



I do like the ending, though.

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

Bad Guys

Atrios:

You get the sense that Bush and Cheney told Maliki that he had to "kill all the bad guys" and so Maliki said, "Sure, I'll go kill all the bad guys."

Most Common Thing

The AP quotes Hillary Clinton::

"But the most common thing that people say to me ... is 'Don't give up, keep going. We're with you.' And I feel really good about that because that's what I intend to do," she told reporters on Tuesday.

Really? The "most common thing that people say" to you is to stay in the race?

Disemvowelling

From a new Q&A on BoingBoing's comment moderation policy, a technique I've never heard of before: disemvowelling:

Q. All the vowels have disappeared from a paragraph I wrote! What's going on?

A. We did it. Someone (a moderator, one of the Boingers) was expressing displeasure at your remarks. The technique is called disemvowelling. It deprecates but does not delete the remark. With work, the disemvowelled text should still be readable.

That Covers It

Fake Steve Jobs has officially stopped reading Foucault's Pendulum:

For a while I thought it was just me. But then I realized of course it's not me. I mean does that even make sense? Clearly the problem is the book. And I'm not just talking about the typeface. It's also the words themselves and the way they are arranged into sentences.

Apparently, he's "very busy finishing the v2 iPhone," so that's cool.

Plants

The Editors consider our challenge:

People, listen: reducing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere?  Obtaining all the energy we need directly from sunlight?  These are the kinds of insurmountable engineering challenges overcome every day by plants.  Plants.  And not just those clever trees or those cunning shrubberies, mind you - single-celled algae-type bullshit figured out workable solutions to these questions several billion years ago.  Call me speciesist (kingdomist?), but I’ve never found the flora to be particularly deep thinkers.  I suspect we can probably do as well if not better, but we might have to cease our incessent whining and excuse-making for a while.  Oh, and stop spending billions of dollars a week so that Friends of Dubya don’t have to admit that they fucked the dog.

Paul Holds the Mirror

Fascinating to see this article in Time Magazine: Why Ron Paul Scares the GOP:

The real significance of the [Ron] Paul campaign is not the ubiquitous bumper stickers and lawn signs or the online fund-raising records ($6 million in one day, plus another $4 million, hilariously, on Guy Fawkes Day) but the mirror Paul held up to the modern Republican Party. When his fellow candidates denounced big government, Paul was there to remind them that President Bush and the G.O.P. Congress had shattered spending records and exploded the deficit. When they hailed freedom, Paul asked why they all supported the Patriot Act and other expansions of executive power. And when they called themselves conservatives, Paul asked what was so conservative about sending thousands of young Americans to try to transform the Middle East.

Get a Grip

Phil Plait, at Bad Astronomy Blog:

Now far be it for me to make fun of someone’s religion… but if your religion is telling you Doctor Who is evil, you’re doing it wrong.

Staten Smokin'

Terrifying study on smoking in NYC:



It seems that the sample size must be unusually small, but it's still pretty freaky.

Also, leave it to the NY Post to include this kind of metaphor:

City officials are trying to understand why Staten Island women are more willing to turn their babies' umbilical cords into hookahs.

>1

(from OVERCOMPENSATING)

Boogah!

Is this useful?:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Attorney General Michael Mukasey has been taken aback by the scope and variety of potential terrorism threats facing the United States, he told reporters Friday at an informal meeting in his office.


Attorney General Michael Mukasey receives terrorism updates during national security briefings.

"I'm surprised by how surprised I am," said Mukasey, who as a federal judge presided over terrorism-related trials in New York.

"It's surprising how varied [the threat] is, how many directions it comes from, how geographically spread out it is," he said.

Mukasey issued no warnings, made no pronouncements and offered no suggestion of increased danger or newly detected plots.

He would not discuss specifics of potential threats, which remain secret.

kthxbai!

Oh, check that - I see. He continues:

The attorney general used the occasion to once again urge congressional passage of a measure to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. An initial update, termed the Protect America Act, expired last month.

"I never thought I'd see that [expiration] happen," Mukasey said. "The danger doesn't fade."

He also referred to the terrorism updates he receives in early morning national security briefings.

"The people I hear about every morning, their fatwas do not have an expiration date," Mukasey said.

Despicable.

Yet I take hope that they are still scrambling against this:

The House has refused to bow to administration pressure to pass a version of the law that exempts telecommunications giants from legal action for taking part in the government's program to eavesdrop without a warrant when one of the parties is inside the United States.

Critics said the program violated the law, and phone and Internet companies face as many as 40 lawsuits related to their participation.

Tide Is Turning

More and more critiques appearing.

Gawker:

"Stuff White People Like" is a retrofitted Sinbad routine. It's the internet equivalent of Michael Scott re-telling a Chris Rock joke.

YTMND - NEW POKEMON! MOBUIS STRIP!!!

Klein bottle uses Divide By Zero!

I See

Joy of Tech, on why Monster Cables are so much pricier.

Friday Noonan

There is truly no more ignorant voice on the internet than Mark Noonan:

The flaw in the UN is that it includes within it nations with completely opposite points of view.

Oh, Dear

Devotees nailed to cross - World Faith- msnbc.com:

"After being nailed to the cross, I feel so refreshed, like all my sins are washed away," Mamangon said. "I will continue this until my son Alex is cured."