What do you do if you’re stuck in a Third World country where corrupt officials have left your nation on the verge of famine? Of course, you go hunting for vampires. That’s what’s happened in Malawi where mass hysteria about alleged vampire attacks has led to full-scale vigilantism. The stories range from the typical lone…
December, 2002
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I haven’t seen Star Trek: Nemesis nor do I plan to until it comes to TNN or some other third tier cable channel. What I’ve heard, overall, is that if you liked Star Trek: Insurrection, you’ll like Nemesis. Of course IMO Insurrection was worse than even the most excrable ST:TNG episode . . . The…
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One of the things I like about weblogs is watching people like Henry Hanks just get all over an issue that isn’t being widely noticed in the mainstream media. In this case it’s a completely bogus claim about presidential succession that is being promoted by politicians who apparently can memorize Democratic Party talking points but…
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At this point it seems certain that Trent Lott will be forced to relinquish the Senate Majority Leader and, with any luck, he’ll follow through on his private threats and quit the Senate altogether. Some Republicans seem to think that would be a disaster, because Democrats would likely persuade at least one Republican Senator to…
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Creative Commons finally launched its licenses so people now have a range of choices other than the extremes of putting something in the public domain or asserting complete copyright control over something. For example, people are regularly writing to ask me to use (sometimes even to quote) things that I have written. As long as…
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Seth Dillingham announced an upgrade to the Conversant code that would speed things up, and he wasn’t kidding. For a number of reasons, this site’s home page is one of the slowest on any of my sites. Before the change, this page would sometimes take 6 to 7 seconds to load. After the change, it…
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A couple days ago, Seth Dillingham posted about his initial experience with Snapfish — a company that takes your film negatives, develops them, sends you the negatives and prints, and then posts high-res versions of the photos online that you can download for a small fee. Seth’s posting piqued my interest and soon I tracked…
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Like a lot of people, I used to be an admirer of Paul Krugman. Even where I disagreed with his books and articles, he generally wrote from a level-headed, principled position and was not prone to distorting the position of his opponents. All of that changed, however, when Krugman started writing a regular column for…
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Via Boing! Boing! comes this clip (25.1 mb Quicktime) from the Jon Stewart Show that nicely segments a speech by Strom Thurmond back in 1948 with Trent Lott’s comments about Thurmond late last week.
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Duncan Smeed recently posted on his weblog about the 1996 explosion of an Ariane 5 rocket. The Ariane 5, a European rocket, self-destructed just 39 seconds after launch after onboard computers detected that the rocket was breaking up. Coincidentally, the Ariane 5 rocket just had another odd failure, plunging straight into the Atlantic Ocean just…