This really belongs on Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. The United States has been airdropping food over Afghanistan. The food comes in a plastic-wrapped square yellow container. Guess what else comes in yellow? That’s right, unexploded cluster bombs. So now, the United States is broadcasting warnings over radio trying to teach illiterate Afghanis the difference between a yellow can-shaped cluster bomb and a yellow square-shaped food parcel with the warning to “Please, please exercise caution when approaching unidentified yellow objects in areas that have been recently bombed.”

Makes about as much sense as the Pentagon’s repeated claims that they are not at war with the Afghanistan people. Okay, fine, then why the hell are they dropping cluster bombs, which kill indiscriminately by design?

Source:

U.S. Warns Afghans of Yellow Cluster Bomblets. Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters, October 29, 2001.

Gamespot has a detailed review of Civilization III. I was really hyped about the game until I got to this part,

Also, as the game neared completion, Firaxis decided not to ship with multiplayer support. It has suggested that multiplayer features might be added later, but if you’re looking for a multiplayer grand-strategy game, then Civilization III isn’t the place to look for the time being.

Ugh. I can’t believe they shipped this game without multiplayer, especially after Firaxis’ Jeff Briggs had told Gamespy, “Don’t worry, there will be multiplayer capability over a LAN and Internet.”

I’ll stick with Civ2 until they get that bug worked out.

This really belongs on Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. The United States has been airdropping food over Afghanistan. The food comes in a plastic-wrapped square yellow container. Guess what else comes in yellow? That’s right, unexploded cluster bombs. So now, the United States is broadcasting warnings over radio trying to teach illiterate Afghanis the difference between a yellow can-shaped cluster bomb and a yellow square-shaped food parcel with the warning to “Please, please exercise caution when approaching unidentified yellow objects in areas that have been recently bombed.”

Makes about as much sense as the Pentagon’s repeated claims that they are not at war with the Afghanistan people. Okay, fine, then why the hell are they dropping cluster bombs, which kill indiscriminately by design?

The Independent (London) has a good summary of what should be obvious to anyone reading between the lines of the various statements made by the Pentagon about that much-hyped Ranger raid into Afghanistan — it was almost a disaster.

Lisa and I were talking about this on Friday, concluding that U.S. military policy often seems predicated on the assumption that American will always facing idiots and morons in the field (presumably, Pentagon bureacrats using what they known as models for opposing forces).

For example, the United States over the last few weeks has received yet another lesson about the limitations of air power, and yet the Pentagon is still going forward with 3,000 new Joint Strike Fighter jets at a price take of almost $70 million a piece before the inevitable cost over-runs.

Source:

Lockheed Wins $200B Jet Fighter Contract. Fox News, October 27, 2001.

I live about halfway between Chicago and Detroit, but unfortunately because I’m still in Michigan, Fox and CBS always serve up Detroit Lions games if that pathetic excuse for a football team happens to be playing. On the other hand although their games aren’t very fun to watch, there has to be something to an organization that has taken losing to such a high art.

The Detroit Lions are to football what the Los Angeles Clippers are to basketball. It’s kind of like those tabloid psychics — even if they are complete frauds with no special talent whatsoever, you have to believe that sheer chance would occasionally produce some accurate insight or a good team.

But alas, even when the Lions occasionally made the playoffs, they did so with the worst looking playoff teams I’ve ever seen (and usually got blown away in the first round, indicative of the fact that they really didn’t belong there in the first place).

After a typical loss yesterday to the Cincinnati Bengals, the big question in Detroit now is whether or not an 0-16 season is possible. The San Diego Chargers came very close last year, and perhaps the Lions saw that as a challenge they need to rise to meet.

There are only a couple ways the Lions could avert such a disaster. The team is moving to a new stadium next year and is currently in a dispute with the owners of its current stadium, the Pontiac Silverdome, over financial terms of its old lease. As a result the Silverdome owners have refused to allow the Lions to practice in the stadium. Detroit News sports columnist Joe Falls suggests the Silverdome could go a step further and do everyone a favor by refusing to allow the Lions to play their games in the stadium as well.

The other possibility is the very last game of the season against the Dallas Cowboys. Detroit News columnist Mike O’Hara oddly claims that Dallas game is the Lions “only sure victory on the schedule.”

Earth to O’Hara: the Cowboys have actually won two games (that’s two more than the Lions, if you’re keeping track).

As for me, I’m rooting for them to go 0-16. If the team is going to be mediocre for years on end, they might as well try to excel at that. A 2-14 record would be ho hum, but 0-16 — that would be a real accomplishment.

I’m not sure why, but John Edward, the psychic featured on the SciFi channel’s “Crossing Over with John Edward” is someone who I can’t watch without experiencing intense feelings of disgust. So I was not surprised at all when his publicity people announced yesterday that Edward would attempt to contact the dead victims of the World Trade Center attack. In fact, I’m definitely not psychic, but back in September I told my wife that Edward would inevitably try to pull just such a stunt.

Today, though, the show’s distributors called off the planned show citing what it called “a reaction that none of us expected.” Huh? I thought this guy was supposed to be a psychic.

You should have seen it coming, John.

Via ArsTechnica comes an interesting paper (PDF) from Seth Lloyd attempting to estimate the maximum number of bits that could possibly be stored in the universe. The answer? Either 10^90 bits if you don’t take gravity into account, and 10^120 if you do take gravity into account.

Don’t worry though, I’m sure at some point Redmond is going to release an OS that will require an upgrade to the universe.