Saturday, January 5, 02002
Any Northern Virginia readers out there should know that you now have a choice of energy suppliers.
Looks like Pepco has some nice cheap green offerings, whereas all I could find by way of my current supplier's products were surge protecters and backup generators.
I'll probably wait for the market to mature a little before switching over. I haven't been spammed by any of the alternative suppliers yet, and only a handful of the suppliers have web sites. Hopefully someone else out there will have even cheaper green power.
Posted at 06:26 PM EST [Link][Comment]
Friday, January 4, 02002
No need to go to Alabama to get poisoned by Papa Corp.
Right here in Northern Virginia, the Potomac is filled with shit from ninety million chickens trapped in various factory farms along the Potomac.
Here's more info on factory farm pollution in Virginia via the NRDC.
Poultry.org also some good primers on the environmental and labor issues surrounding chickens.
And last but not least, the United Poultry Concerns covers more issues involving domestic fowl than you probably knew existed.
And I mean way, way more.
Posted at 12:11 AM EST [Link][Comment]
Thursday, January 3, 02002
NEC's ResearchIndex kicks butt.
These automatic testing articles in particular are going to be sucking up a lot of my hacking time in the near future.
Posted at 05:09 PM EST [Link][Comment]
Anthrax-scanthrax. The religious fringe was using biological weapons in this country at least seventeen years ago.
In 1984, followers of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh spiked salad bars at 10 restaurants in town with salmonella and sickened about 750 people.
The cult members had hoped to incapacitate so many voters that their own candidates in the county elections would win.
Posted at 01:12 PM EST [Link][Comment]
Wednesday, January 2, 02002
These folks should be thoroughly heckled.
Here's a good quote from the ALA book burning page:
Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.
How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? It's almost a religion, albeit one of the nether regions.
And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they're accessible to others is unquestioned, or it's not America.
—Dwight David Eisenhower
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mrs Cheney.
Posted at 01:28 PM EST [Link][Comment]
Karma and Comments make a comeback.
Posted at 12:39 AM EST [Link][Comment]
Tuesday, January 1, 02002
I'm going to be poking around under the hood a little bit, so things may look worse than usual for a couple days. Whenever I change the sidebars, I end up having to regenerate all the Greymatter files, and that's getting to be a pretty lengthy process. I'm hoping that by porting some stuff to server side includes I should be able to update the site a lot more easily. Wish me luck...
Posted at 11:47 PM EST [Link]
Turns out that Monsanto, our good neighbors that have given us such wonders as StarLink and the Terminator gene, has been posioning an Alabama town for the past forty years :
In 1966, Monsanto managers discovered that fish submerged in that creek turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as if dunked into boiling water. They told no one. In 1969, they found fish in another creek with 7,500 times the legal PCB levels. They decided "there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges.
...
"It was like dunking the fish in battery acid," recalled George Murphy, who was one of Ferguson's graduate students at the time and is now chairman of Middle Tennessee State University's biology department.
"I've never seen anything like it in my life," said Mack Finley, another former Ferguson grad student, now an aquatic biologist at Austin Peay State University. "Their skin would literally slough off, like a blood blister on the bottom of your foot."
Here's another take on the story from the sweet Mindfully site.
If Monsanto's been keeping info like this hidden for forty years, what horrors do they know about with regards to their genetically modified products ? Are we going to have to wait until 2040 to hear some PR flunky tell us the company shouldn't be judged by modern standards for the actions it carried out around 2000 ?
Posted at 01:33 PM EST [Link]
I found my new Red Cross blood donor card in the mail when I got back to Virginia.
For what it's worth I'm a CMV Hero. Wow, I don't even remember fullfilling my quest....
(Sorry, way too much Dark Alliance the past couple days....)
Posted at 10:19 AM EST [Link]
Monday, December 31, 02001
Forget about improved airport security. Screeners don't even need a high school diploma.
Like I'm going to put my life in someone's hands who couldn't even pass a GED. What a joke.
Posted at 03:05 PM EST [Link]
via BoingBoing: Jules Vernes book Invasion of the Sea has been translated into English, complete with Sterling blurb. I'll probably pick it up just to be able to compare it to Kim Stanley Robinson.
(BTW, I though Red Mars really wasn't very good, especially the last 40 pages or so which just dragged on forever, but now I'm reading The Wild Shore, and it's at least as good as The Gold Coast.)
I've also started reading Henry Petroski's book To Engineer Is Human. It looks like he will be using the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse as one of the main examples in the book. It was the biggest building collapse in history of the US back in 1982 when the book was written. It killed 114 people.
Posted at 12:18 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, December 30, 02001
Slow technology wants to design technology that encourages moments of reflection and mental rest by being slow.
It would be interesting if the Play Research people cross pollinated with the Wearcam folks at some point.....
Posted at 11:34 AM EST [Link]
