Bluegrass Gospel Project http://yfrog.com/4aewdqj
January 2010
Bluegrass Gospel Project http://yfrog.com/33jx3zj
every New Years I resolve to make more music. Will I this time?
Jazz trio at church, First Night Burlington http://yfrog.com/4iwljwj
#10yearsago I was in a little house in the woods and let friends shave my head at midnight
December 2009
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The rallying cry now from Republicans is that we shouldn’t try the Christmas bomber in civilian court — that, instead, he should be tried in a military tribunal, declared an enemy combatant. I mean, what’s the value of a military tribunal here, other than trying to make political hay out of this case? Really, what’s the justice, anti-terrorist, counterterrorist value on this?
You really think this kid can’t be convicted? You really think we don’t have enough evidence beyond the — beyond the, I don’t know, 300 or so eyewitnesses who were on the plane? The fact that we have the weapon that he tried to use? The fact that he confessed? You think that’s not enough to get this kid convicted?
You have that little faith in our criminal justice system? That little faith in the rule of law? You don’t believe that a supermax federal American prison is capable of holding this kid? You think it might be cool, instead, to martyr this kid as some impressive soldier, instead of some idiot confused rich kid who couldn’t even handle blowing up his own junk with a bomb that was secreted in his own underpants?
” —Rachel Maddow rips apart Cheney, GOP attack machine - Daily Kos TV (beta)bundling up in fleece for another walk in the snowy woods with the old dog
It’s already Blue Moon New Year in the Philippines: http://www.flickr.com/photos/k0re/4230860423/
“The plane was late taking off due to the new pat-down and bag-examine rules. I was patted down (the pat-down wouldn’t have found any explosives I’d hidden in my inner thigh, where the idiot on the Amsterdam-Detroit flight hid his, because the man was too polite to check there) and my backpack was opened and looked into (it has many compartments that weren’t opened or checked, and the man would have missed a syringe if I had had one, like the aforementioned idiot had). I wondered for whose benefit the pat-down and baggage rummage was, and decided it was to make everyone feel safer without actually being inconvenienced in the way you’d have to be if you wanted to make sure no-one actually brought something dangerous onto the plane.”
—Neil Gaiman’s Journal: How I got to Boston
“For some years after 9/11, passengers were forbidden to get up and use the lavatory on the Washington-New York shuttle. Zero tolerance! I suppose it must eventually have occurred to somebody that this ban would not deter a person who was willing to die, so the rule was scrapped. But now the principle has been revisited for international flights. For many years after the explosion of the TWA plane over Long Island (a disaster that was later found to have nothing at all to do with international religious nihilism), you could not board an aircraft without being asked whether you had packed your own bags and had them under your control at all times. These two questions are the very ones to which a would-be hijacker or bomber would honestly and logically have to answer “yes.” But answering “yes” to both was a condition of being allowed on the plane! Eventually, that heroic piece of stupidity was dropped as well. But now fresh idiocies are in store. Nothing in your lap during final approach. Do you feel safer? If you were a suicide-killer, would you feel thwarted or deterred?”
—The truth about airplane security measures. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine
“The ultra-brief/ultra-intense light Guo uses is produced by a femtosecond laser, which produces pulses lasting only a few quadrillionths of a second. A femtosecond is to a second what a second is to about 32 million years. During its brief burst, Guo’s laser unleashes as much power as the entire electric grid of North America does, all focused onto a spot the size of a needlepoint. The intense blast forces the surface of the metal to form nanostructures—pits, globules, and strands that response incoming light in different ways depending on the way the laser pulse sculpted the structures.”
—Researchers Create Gold Aluminum, Black Platinum, Blue Silver : University of Rochester News
We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion http://bit.ly/7d5GR6
Checking my RSS feed on a beautiful clear sunny Xmas morning, puppy napping beside me
“If you can’t find licensing information, contact the seller and ask for details. Or, just go elsewhere. If details about where and how a typeface can be used are hard to find, that’s the type seller’s problem. Maybe in bygone years, when foundries sold to fewer design professionals, squirreling this information away within legalese, or within a clunky site, was acceptable. But now, licensing nuance should be easy like Sunday morning.”
—Nice Web Type – Where to get web fonts
“The romantic image of an über-programmer is someone who fires up Emacs, types like a machine gun, and delivers a flawless final product from scratch. A more accurate image would be someone who stares quietly into space for a few minutes and then says “Hmm. I think I’ve seen something like this before.”
—Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity — The Endeavour
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One day the engineering team was clustered in the snack room looking at the soda machine. The sign said, “Soda now 50 cents.” The uproar began. Engineers started complaining about the price of the soda. Someone noticed that instead of the informal reimbursement system for dinners when they were working late, there was now a formal expense report system. Some had already been irritated when “professional” managers had been hired over their teams with reportedly more stock than the early engineers had. Lots of email was exchanged about “how things were changing for the worse.” A few engineers went to the see the CEO.
But the damage had been done. The most talented and senior engineers looked up from their desks and noticed the company was no longer the one they loved. It had changed. And not in a way they were happy with.
The best engineers quietly put the word out that they were available, and in less than month the best and the brightest began to drift away.
” —The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free « Steve Blank