renyming and other miscellany

If a.) you read this blog on a recurring basis (unlikely) and b.) you pay attention to the man behind the curtain (more unlikely), you might notice that the green profile box on the right has changed. The big deal is that I finally dumped the annoying old "atul666" nym, after mulling it over for quite a while. I recently realized I could just change the display nym, without having to figure out how to switch Blogger accounts or anything ugly like that. So it's done, and something similar has been done on the Flickr side of the house too. Its replacement is a bit, well, generic, and at some point I may tweak it again to make it more distinctive, just in case someone ever needs to refer to me by name.

The profile image has changed too. The new photo is of a Cyclotram, a fictional but very swoopy mole machine from the 1951 SF movie "Unknown World" (and this humble blog's namesake, obviously). I've wanted to use it here in some capacity, and since I was tweaking my profile anyway, I figured I'd just make it my new profile image. Although it comes out smaller than I'd prefer this way. And now there isn't a splash of yellow-orange in the upper right corner like there was with Evil Bendy.

Another item on my TODO list has been to move with the times and update this blog to a New Blogger template. I've held off so far because I've tweaked my current template rather extensively and don't want to lose my precious, precious changes. So what I just decided to do was create a shiny new New Blogger blog and tweak it to look as much like this humble blog as I can. Once I'm happy with the result, I'll do the upgrade on the "real" blog here and use the template from the test blog. So you probably aren't interested in looking at the test blog, and I don't intend for it to ever be very interesting, but it lives over at "cyclotram beta" in case anyone's curious.

A second experiment has a more uncertain future. I've long thought that the chronological view of things that Blogger gives you isn't the most useful format sometimes. In my case, it would often be more helpful to have posts displayed on a map instead. I've attempted to create just such a map via Google Maps, known simply as the cyclotram map, but it's still not quite what I have in mind. Maintaining it is a pain, and I still haven't added all my old posts to it yet. And, more importantly, it's all backwards. By which I mean, it's a map with points plotted on it, most of which target posts here. When what I'd really like is to have the posts themselves geotagged individually, and then be able to generate a map based on that geotag data. Blogger In Draft has a geotag feature that doesn't quite work yet, and maybe an auto-generated map will be doable once they've got the geotag thing sorted out. In the meantime, enjoy the tedious gruntwork version of the map for this blog. And if you don't see an entry for somewhere that you know I've covered already, I can only say that I'll get to it later, maybe, if I feel like it at some point. I mean, I guess you could always mail me and complain and see if that helps, but I'll probably just think it's weird if someone does that.

misc. assortedness

The first two photos (above) are new, and the next two are old. Hmm. I'm not sure I detect a lot of improvement over the last year. I guess there's always next year, unless I get sick of flower photos by then.

And now for something completely different. I haven't done one of these assorted-stuff-from-the-interwebs posts for a while, and there may be a good reason for that. But it escapes me at the moment, so here's a new one. I'm kind of out of practice with these, though, so if it's something less than a broad spectrum of uniformly fascinating items, well... At least it didn't cost you anything, other than those few seconds of your life that you spent here that you'll never get back. Sorry about that.

• Flickr's page full of all public photos tagged 'echidna'. It's like Cute Overload, except really spiny.


• Somewhat less spiny, and more colorful: crocheted echidnas. Kewl.


• And from the real Cute Overload, yet another cute kitten. Awwwwww....


• Meanwhile, the koalas are in trouble.


• The Galapagos Islands are in trouble too, including the tortoises.


• Thatch, Portland's shiny new 60's-retro Tiki bar, is now open for business. The piece doesn't mention it, but I'm told they've got a bunch of doodads salvaged from the late, semi-lamented Jasmine Tree, the place I wrote about a while back.


• Like many of you, I've never seriously considered owning an octopus. If you're still on the fence, here's another reason it might not be a bright idea.


• The Bad Astronomer asks the age-old question: "Do phone psychics know it’s you before you call them?"


• Some mildly funky cloud images from Venus Express.


• Portlanders: Karl Rove is lying about us. Yes, I'm shocked too.

mildly therapeutic edition

This blog is typically not the most personal of personal blogs. That's by design; the only thing less interesting than reading about me is writing about me, therefore I don't, usually. Right now I don't have anything more to add beyond what was in the previous post, and I'm not at home to tinker with the ol' Sun box right now, but I'm still feeling kind of rattled, and blogging itself can be a nice distraction. I haven't done one of these "misc. items" posts in a long time, and I haven't been inclined to, but it feels like it's time.

First, the photos are just some pics I took when I wandered out on my lunch hour. Nothing all that special, but it's fresh material, not just stuff from the archives. So whatever.

Anyway, here are the misc. items for the day:

• In somewhat the same vein as my photos, a couple of cool pics of yesterday's morning fog, over at Sellwood Street.
• Russ at Portland Metblogs has ridden the tram, and here's his report. The cool kids can call 'em the "twinkies" all they like, but to me they'll always be crucial bits of male anatomy. When you see the tram cars, there's usually just one, hanging in midair all by itself, its partner nowhere to be seen. So my wife's named one of them "Lance" (Armstrong), and I recently decided the other is named "Tom" (Green), in honor of two prominent mono-testicled minor celebrities. If they hurry up with the naming business, they might still be able to get one or the other guy to show up for the dedication, since neither one really has much of a career at the moment.
• A fascinating post about Col. Summers Park, in inner SE Portland.
• A cool sunrise-over-downtown photo at Amanda Fritz's blog, via ZehnKatzen Times.
• At Stumptown Confidential, two posts about the 50's potboiler film Portland Exposé, with plenty of vintage stills. I'm a big fan of really crappy old movies, and this baby's #2 in my Netflix queue right now, so it's very likely I'll post about it in the near future.
• A short film about downtown's Union Bank of California Tower.
• You probably haven't been wondering why I've been silent on the demise of Gerald Ford. Well, Jon Swift has chimed in already, and I have nothing to add. In your heart, you just know he's right.
• Japan's greatest hits of 2006, courtesy of Pink Tentacle.
• The Brew Site has Part VII of the ongoing "50 Beers to Drink Before You Die" series.
• Meanwhile, Loaded Orygun discusses our fair city's recent micro-distilling boom. Mmmmm.... Liquor....
• Elsewhere in the universe, Pat Robertson is at it again. You really can't make this stuff up.
• Even more photos of echidnas: rockclimbing (sort of), meditating, being surprisingly furry, looking depressed, making friends, charging, lurking in the underbrush, reading the future in a pile of woodchips, going out on a limb.
• And a happy 3rd birthday to the Spirit rover. At least it isn't in the hospital on its birthday.

collected tidbits, 11/28

I've been neglecting my RSS-reading-and-aggregating duties for far too long. Sorry about that. Here's the latest in my occasional series of tidbits found on the interwebs:

• The very latest fascinating post over at Cafe Unknown, full of local history and trolleys and bygone bridges and such. I try to do a reasonably thorough job when I cover local history and oddities and related topics, but I'm a total piker compared to the Cafe Unknown guy.
  
• The Champagne of Blogs posse visited the Oaks Bottom pub recently, and they had the good sense to take plenty of food photos. In particular, they have a beautiful photo of a nice plate of totchos. Totchos? You know, like nachos, but made with tater tots. Mmmmm.... Tater tots..... Mmmm.... beeeeer....
  
• Also, this year's Holiday Ale Festival is nearly upon us. When you see the tree going up in Pioneer Courthouse Square, you can be sure that roasty sudsy tipsy holiday goodness is never far behind. Mmmmm... beeeer....
  
• The Guilty Carnivore has a great piece bashing the soulless, corporate Chipotle Mexican Grill. I mean, some of my best friends are accountants, seriously, but they don't know jack about how to run a good restaurant.
  
• Goddamn that rat bastard Dan Saltzman. On top of everything else, now I can't wave my numchuks around in public parks anymore. Anywhere. In the entire city. We have tons of off-leash dog areas; why aren't there any designated areas for those of us who don't have dogs but want to be irresponsible anyway? I hereby propose a citywide system of Amateur Ninja Zones (clearly marked, of course), where the city just isn't legally responsible for anything people in the zones do to themselves or one another. Poke yourself in the eye with your own ninja star? You saw the entrance signs saying "Caution: Amateur Ninjas! Enter at own risk!", so you've got nobody to blame but yourself. People can be stupid to their hearts' content, and the city has no liability when the inevitable happens. Everybody wins!
  
• Also at the Mercury, plenty of photos of cute cats, complete with fun captions.
  
• From Pink Tentacle, covering all sorts of weird stuff from Japan, a rather scary mall security robot, and a gallery of dekotora, or decorated trucks, which are sort of Japan's answer to the lowrider.
  
• Less weird but cool in a transit-geek sort of way is the "dual mode vehicle", which can run on rails like a train, or on the street like a bus. This might be a great answer to all the nonsense the city of Portland is preparing to do with the downtown transit mall in the next few years.
  
• Finally, an amusing cartoon about matrix transforms. Thanks, xkcd!
  

Today's thrilling echidna roundup:

• A baby echidna at a wildlife rehab center.
  
• Three Zaglossus (long-beaked echidna) pages at Wikispecies, for Z. attenboroughi, Z. bartoni, and Z. bruijni.
  
• A bit at TheWebsiteOfEverything about Z. bruijni.
  
• On Flickr, echidnas digging, ignoring tourists, showing hedgehogs who's the boss, snacking, waddling in the underbrush, and playing "cute puggle".
  
• Elsewhere, more echidnas all rolled up, sharing a meal, sitting in the middle of dinner, visiting (unwillingly) with tourists, and sucking ants out of a PVC pipe
  
• A cool robo-echidna made out of spark plugs. Where do I buy mine?
  

...wherein I repent, but not just yet...

A chair under the Fremont Bridge. This chunk of land kind of looks like a city park, but it's owned by the Oregon Department of Transportation, and they don't much care for pedestrians. The place is covered with signs ordering you not to step off the sidewalk under any circumstances, because if you do, you're probably one of those icky homeless people who live under bridges or something, or at the very least you've violated the Law, and therefore it's off to Guantanamo for you, buster.

I actually stepped off the sidewalk a bit so I could take a few photos, although I was legal (I think) when I took this one. Ultra-candid admissions like this are one reason I use a pseudonym when trolling the interwebs.

I'm usually extremely lenient if people want to use photos of mine (in the rare cases where this happens), since I don't plan on making any money off of 'em anyway. But if you want to use this photo for your latest shoegazing indierock album cover, I'm going to need a cut of the proceeds. Thanks.



A discarded "nonpartisan" voters' guide in a trash bin on Lovejoy near one of the streetcar stops. By taking this photo, I got into a long conversation with an older gent who regaled me with tales of crooked politics in Philadelphia. For the first 5 minutes, it's great to find someone else who understands the Electoral College, and after that it's kind of tiresome.



Speaking of politics, here's another great reason to remember to vote in November.



The Fremont Bridge from the new Riverscape development, on Naito Pkwy north of the bridge, between 14th & 18th Avenues.

I've always wished I'd been in town in 1973, when the bridge was built. Seems the whole huge central span was constructed off-site and then barged in and installed as a unit. Call me an engineering geek if you like, but I really would've liked to have seen that.



The pedestrian path at Riverscape, and some of the townhouses. The area actually had a slightly bleak and empty feel to it, but maybe that's just because it's extremely new, and the path doesn't actually connect to anything to the north or south. It almost connects with another greenway segment that's part of the Fremont office complex just south of the bridge; the two pieces are separated by about a block or so of vacant lot, which I think is owned by the city as part of the "Big Pipe" project.



The "Fountain for a Rose" in O'Bryant Square. I risked life and limb for you, my Gentle Reader(s), and walked through the square rather than skirting the edge. You may be surprised to hear this, but I didn't see a single discarded syringe, nor did I see anyone who looked likely to discard a syringe in the near future. Maybe that's because it isn't dark yet, or it's the wrong day of the week, or the square's supposed legions of druggies all saw me coming and all hid somewhere. Or maybe the place just gets an undeserved bad rap from people who haven't been there in years.

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Updated 1/18/2011: I snipped the first couple of paragraphs off of this post, which didn't add anything and referred to an allegedly "weighty" post I supposedly had in the works and never quite got around to writing. Here they are, for posterity or whatever, mostly because they help explain the title of this post:

It was unsubtly brought to my attention that my recent posts have featured far too many "dull" photos of flowers and fruit and plants generally. This is probably true, quite honestly. Certainly it's true that this blog hasn't been very dialup-user-friendly of late. I promise, the next post will be about a weighty topic, with no graphics whatsoever. More than likely it'll be about North Korea, and perhaps I'll even explain exactly how the current situation ought to be solved, if I figure that out between now and then.

But that post isn't quite ready to go yet, and I'm not quite ready to get on the wagon just yet, so here are a few more photos. No plants, though.

wellness, perchance

I still have that damn cold, but I've heard that alcohol is a great antiseptic, and I'm currently experimenting, trying to figure out what the required dosage might be, using the participant-observer methodology. In the meantime, it's been (mildly) interesting exploring what it's like to be a stupid person. In the event that I survive, I'd like to thank the nice folks at Girardet and Bendistillery.

So I've got a few more links to dump. If this turns out to be a posthumous post, or the last post before they shipped me off to the State Home for the Extra-Special, well, this probably isn't much of an epitaph. Oh, well. I tried. Honest.

• Whomp Power has yet another take on the Great Hops Apocalypse of 2006.
  
• It's like a bird, but made out of butter. Mmmmm.... butter.....
  
• BBSpot asks Which OS are you?. I turned out to be PalmOS, same as Snabulus. Which isn't so bad; I wrote a few k3wl Palm apps back in the day, and it's good to have the occasional reminder to not assume an int is at least 32 bits, plus coding for a Palm (the last time I did it, anyway) is like coding for a Mac circa 1986, so it's like deja vu all over again.
  
• BBSpot also asks what programming language I am, and I am C++, which is basically true, except for the occasional Java foray, and the too-occasional longing gaze at Ruby. Oh, and Objective-C is niiiice too.
  
• Speaking of Objective-C, AAPL is tweaking the language for MacOSX 10.5. They ain't sayin' just how just yet, but here are some clues.
  
• What, you haven't already given up on Orson Scott Card? Masochist...
  
• More evidence that the Daily Show is just as useful, or just as useless, as the traditional evening news.
  
• NEC has a shiny new chip that supposedly can play HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs. Wake me up when that hits the market. Until then, I'm boycotting both, just to teach the bastards a lesson about the usefulness of industry standards.
  
• Turns out that being an unlawful combatant has a bright side: You get to have all sorts of fun drugs. On the other hand, if Dubya commits the country to another stupid war based on some random assclown's bad acid trip, I will be very, very unhappy.
  
• At least we're fortunate that our Glorious Leader is an artistic soul at heart. Here's his rendition of John Lennon's Imagine.
  
• A bit of nautical fun with spare change up in the San Juans.
  
• A bit on Web 2.0 security risks.
  
• New near-IR pics of the asteroid, er, dwarf planet Ceres.
  
• The very latest from the eternal cult of Amiga.
  
• And the latest coolness from Saturn, in case you aren't sick of all that coolness just yet.
  
• Meanwhile, in Japan, it's giant jellyfish season again.
  
• A few not-so-recent Guardian pieces about difficult British topics: food, dogs, and the Boer War.
  
• One great fringe benefit of having OSDL in town is that we figure in people's naming schemes. The latest example: Portland 1.0 is supposed to be the Grand Unification of GNOME and KDE. So we'll see how that turns out in RL, but I like the name, anyway.
  
• Some fun with Google code search.
  
• Looks like Hans Reiser may be an evil murdering scumbag. Don't give the guy any sympathy just because you like his filesystem, any more than you'd give OJ extra sympathy because of what he did on the football field.
  
• I know lots of guys who will drool themselves silly over this. You know who you are, so I won't name names.
  
• And I knew all along that those rubber duck derby events were a terrible idea.
  
• And last but not least, today's crop of cute semi-cuddly-wuddly echidnas: catching some rays, strolling on the beach, nibbling on some ants, also eating ants, avoiding people, hanging out with the French, and eating ants. Oh, and waddling about on video, of course.
  

tuesday miscellany

This latest passel-o-links post is at least mildly organized; the links are arranged into a few broad categories, including one solely about echidnas. It's not a classification scheme your average librarian would be happy with, but hey. It's what I came up with, and rearranging all the links now would be way too much work. So enjoy, or not...

Sci+Tech

• Slashdot on (maybe) high-temperature Bose-Einstein condensates.
  
• The Panda's Thumb wonders about all that cutting-edge Intelligent Design research that's supposedly going on.
  
• That's the problem, though: The fundies can never quite decide if ID is supposed to pretend to be science, or whether it's the heart of their culture war they're waging against the rest of us.
  
• This year's Nobel in Physics has been awarded for research into the cosmic microwave background, a remnant of the big bang. The creationists would be outraged, if only they understood a single word of this stuff.
  
• I've already mentioned the first pics from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, so that's not news, but here's a side-by-side comparison of pics of the same crater taken by MRO, and by Mars Global Surveyor, which until now was the keenest eye in the Martian sky. Wow. Just... wow. That HiRISE is some kind of camera, that's all I can say.
  
• Like having nightmares? Check out this gigantic deep-sea isopod. Clearly, Tokyo is doomed.
  
• At Pharyngula, PZ lists the top ten reasons religion is like porn. My favorite items:

  
  5. You want to wash up after shaking hands with any of its leaders
  4. The costumes are outrageous, the performances silly, the plots unbelievable
  

  
  
• Some related research, which ought to make a lot of people (especially guys) happy.
  

Politics

• The latest alarming signs of the times at Cosmic Variance.
  
• Tom Tomorrow looks on the bright side.
  
• Kip Hawley is an idiot.
  
• See also Wikipedia on Security theater.
  

Local

• alt.portland introduces a valuable new public service, a guide to gas stations in/near downtown. Sure, sure, gas is evil, we all know that, but sometimes it's a necessary evil, and a scarce one at that.
  
• Happy new (water) year!. It hasn't rained yet, and we're a full couple of days into the new water year, so I expect the local news to start screaming about a drought any day now. They usually do.
  
• This year's crop of GABF medal winners from Oregon. Mmmm.... Beeeerrrr...
  
• The latest "address nerd" post over at ZehnKatzen times, with a rare example of one of the city's old-style street signs. I know I've seen others like that around, but I can't recall where, or when. I may have to try this Pizza Baron place he mentions. I'm a sucker for old-style 70's-80's pizza parlors, and they've nearly vanished from the earth. More than once I've driven all the way out to Hood River for a Pietro's fix, which is an unreasonably long way to go for pizza done the old-school way.
  
• Up in Yakima, WA, a horrible, horrible fire has destroyed 4% of the US hop harvest. Nooooooooo!!!!!!
  
• It's that time of year again: the HP Lovecraft Film Festival, at the Hollywood Theater this Friday thru Sunday.
  

Echidnas

• Accounts from someone who's looking after an orphaned baby echidna (they're called "puggles"). Seems that orphan puggles need to be fed a concoction known as "I Can't Believe It's Not Echidna Milk".
  
• An article about echidnas, with lots of photos.
  
• And still, nobody can answer the eternal question "Why did the echidna cross the road?".
  
• Four more photos of echidnas.
  
• Ok, just one more
  

Random Coolness & Weirdness

• Another four reasons to love Oktoberfest.
  
• How to make your own Discworld cake. This is obviously the most excellent cake ever.
  
• Less edibly, here's the latest advance in breakfast junk food technology: Jimmy Dean Chocolate Chip Pancakes & Sausage on a Stick. Glurrrghh.....
  
• Treehugger tries a foray into math via heirloom tomatoes. I can't make head or tail of what they're getting at, and I detect a strong smell of bogosity.
  

...wherein I seek my lost relevance...

Another day, another semi-random link dump. I seem to have fallen into a blogging rut: When I'm not posting amusing riffs on misc. news items I've run across, I'm posting riffs that try to be amusing but fail miserably. As I've mentioned before, I often feel guilty that I don't cover weighty political topics more often. We live in in the midst of a global crisis, no, crises, and nobody can afford to take things lightly, but I do anyway. I shouldn't, but I do. I try to justify it by saying I live by the old H.L. Mencken quote:

The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by such learned dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe--that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power, and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

While we're talking about Mencken, I'd like to recommend his essay "Gamalielese", if you can find it. I don't see it on the net anywhere, so I suppose it's still under copyright. Search your local library. It reminds us that Dubya wasn't the first brain-damaged wingnut to occupy the White House, although Warren G. Harding was merely stupid and corrupt, and he didn't actually go around starting wars in every corner of the globe and then bungling them. In lieu of the actual essay, perhaps you'll enjoy this post about ol' Warren G.. In a similar spirit, you might also enjoy James Thurber's take on Admiral Byrd exploring the south pole and claiming large chunks of Antarctica for the grateful US taxpayer, but that may be even harder to find. (And again, nothing on the net anywhere.)

On an unrelated-but-serious note, the photo is of the never-used cooling towers for the cancelled Satsop nuclear complex, part of the ill-fated WPPSS (pronounced "whoops") project. If you're driving to the Olympic Peninsula, you can see them near the town of Elma, on US 12 between Aberdeen and Centralia. I realize they were never used, and there's nothing radioactive about them, but I still get a case of the creeps every time I see them.

So anyway, I don't really have anything original to contribute on the political front right now, but I've interspersed a few serious-ish items amongst all the frivolity, just to break up the rhythm a little. So without further ado, let the links commence:

• Happy birthday, Bilbo & Frodo.
  
• Every day, a new haiku about beer. Finally, poetry that doesn't make me cringe.
  
• Today's cute echidna.
  
• Audio clips and quotes from Tron, the best SF movie ever. Don't even try arguing the point with me. Sure, the plot's corny, but Metropolis is much, much cornier and far less coherent, and everybody forgives it because the visuals are so great.
  
• Tron may have to give up the crown soon, though. Turkish Star Wars 2 is on its way. With genuine CGI and everything, apparently.
  
• Local businesspeople don't think the downtown retail environment is doing very well. Funny how the same urbanist types who freak out whenever a business opens in the 'burbs don't bat an eye while their beloved Pearl skims off the top end of the retail trade downtown.
  
• OTOH our local craft brewing industry just had a great first half of '06. I'm happy to say I've done my part to help out with those numbers. Mmmm.... beeeer....
  
• The very latest in local Republican sleaze.
  
• The Guardian informs us that, like the Northwest, the UK has its share of bike Nazis and creepy nuclear bungling.
  
• Friday's cephalopod pic from Pharyngula.
  
• Microsoft is thinking about a free web-based version of MS Works. I didn't realize there even still was such a thing as MS Works, but then, it's been about 10 years since I've bought a PC with Windows on it, so maybe I'm just not up on this stuff. On one hand, I think MS considers Works their cheap-n-crappy alternative for home users who can't afford MS Office. On the other, I seem to recall that it does most of what an average home or office user might need to do, without all the dancing paper clips and cryptic toolbars full of esoteric options and whatnot. Still, what you really want is OpenOffice.
  
• Mars Express has taken some new pics of the notorious non-face on Mars. The Bad Astronomer marks the occasion by making fun of that Hoagland asshat. I've been rolling my eyes at Hoagland since his "alien spaceship in Saturn's B ring" days (what ever happened with that, btw?), and it just never gets old. The BA story's been linked to by Slashdot and Fark, and now by me as well, so Phil's pretty much hit the trifecta here. (Ha, I kid! What is this 'Fark' of which he speaks? I bet there's no such thing.)
  
• Jesus appears to the faithful in ever-more-mysterious ways.
  
• Well, nothing else is working, so maybe this will save the world. It's worth a try, anyway.
  
• From World-o-Crap: Batman vs. the Nazis. They just don't make movie serials like they used to.
  
• Preemptive Karma and Empire Burlesque cover Dubya's recent "Third Awakening" creepiness.
  
• But there's plenty of religious ickiness to go around: Two more PK bits, covering Der Pope and Ahmadinejad (and the fundies who fear him).
  
• And a deeply scary and unsurprising WashPost story about bungling and cronyism in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Ideology and blind loyalty win out over basic competence. Film at 11.
  
• Willie Nelson getting busted for possession is another "film at 11" item, but check out the photo of his stash. Dang. I never touch the stuff, myself, but even I'm impressed. Free Willie!
  
• Grandpa Simpson, I mean, Bojack wonders who Storm Large is. It's one thing not to be hip to that noise the young'uns are jiving to these days. I fall squarely in that category myself. And I never saw a single episode of Supernova. But not even knowing who Storm is? That's just... unpatriotic.
  
• Olbermann is at it again. When's he going to learn how to cravenly suck up to power, the way real journalists do?
  
• Suddenly, the wingnuts love the International Criminal Court. Some of the time.
  
• The latest mission update for the DSCOVR (nee Triana) probe: Still gathering dust in a warehouse.
  
• On YouTube, a snippet of the famous "Turkey Drop" WKRP episode. But be warned, the period hairstyles are most alarming.
  
• Another movie I'm afraid to see. Radioactive carnivorous flying brains are one thing, but red state true believers are another thing entirely. Yikes!
  
• SCO hit a new 52-week low today. $2.01. That's still overpriced by about $6, but it's a good start.
  
• Karen Armstrong has a piece in the Guardian about anti-Islamic prejudice. Sure is too bad that "religion of peace" (as in any religion) is an oxymoron. And that comes on top of being false, and anti-rational. I try to take a pragmatic position here: if it's false but Mostly Harmless, I'll let it pass without serious criticism. But when people devote their lives to murdering one another to appease some imaginary Bronze Age desert boogeyman in the sky, well, I just sort of have to draw the line.
  
• And yes, it is possible for a religion to be Mostly Harmless. Fundies tend to have a cow about pagans and call them all sorts of ugly names, but if you add up the body count over the last 2000 years, the Christians hold an insurmountable lead. As far as I can tell, the worst offense our fair city's local pagan community has to answer for is some truly dreadful amateur poetry.
  
• Lately I've been waking up to Lebanese coffee from Cafe Najjar in Beirut. I found a packet of their vacuum-packed, ground coffee at a stall in Pike Place Market last time I was in Seattle. I've used up nearly the whole packet, and so far the coffee doesn't appear to contain any WMDs. If you're shocked by that, or you think I'm being brave or foolhardy by "risking it all" here, well, I feel sorry for you. Truly. It's your loss, not mine. The other ground coffee in the house right now is French Market Coffee from New Orleans.
  
• A few Flickr links that're about to spill off the 200-photo limit, while I dither over whether to buy the "premium" account: [1] [2] [3] [4].
  

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  Updated 9/14/2013: I was working on an art post about Cobbletale and vaguely remembered I had an ancient 2006 photo of it, and I wondered where I'd used it. Turns out the only place I'd used it was in the "A few Flickr links" item above, where I merely linked to the photos and didn't even bother inlining them. Not sure why I did that; it's possible we still had dialup back then, I'm not entirely sure. In any case, I'm fairly sure that any reasons I may have had then are obsolete now, and I'm going to go ahead & inline those photos, dammit. So here they are, in all their circa-2006 point-n-shoot glory:

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

interwebbage du jour

I'm working valiantly to reduce the RSS backlog I accumlated due to being out of interweb range for several days. Here's some of the more interesting stuff I've come across since yesterday's list:

• OMG ROBOT PONY!!!
• OMG BEER CANNON!!!
• Today's weird Japanese video
• The age of glossy OPML startups is upon us.
• From /. : The Poincare Conjecture saga takes another ugly turn.
• In retrospect, it was inevitable: A New Zealand horror movie about carnivorous sheep.
• The latest research on wine chemistry. The article mentions that it may eventually be possible to create synthetic wine that's never been near a grape, much less a rustic Tuscan village. Take that, yuppie twits! I should note that the equivalent happened in the beer world years ago. We call it "Coors Lite", when we have to.
• SCO's anti-Linux effort takes yet another turn for the worse. Jeez, how many turns for the worse is it going to take, already?
• Today's dinky Linux gizmo. Awwwwww.....
• The Guardian scratches its head about LA for the umpteenth time. Personally, I'm rooting for the pink crown rot virus.
• From Treehugger, another fun thing to do with old shipping containers. Plus yet another piece about green roofs. Oh, and bicycles.
• The experts seem to think they've discovered a slab full of Olmec poetry. Totally unreadable, of course, since we don't actually know the Olmec language. But hey, if it's really poetry that's probably a good thing.
• Seems that the poor US education system has certain advantages after all. Really I ought to be ranting about petty bureaucrats and the abuse of power, but it's just sort of funny. What I really want to know is: Did the customs guy himself know the right answer?
• Yet another reason not to eat sea turtles. It's actually altruism on their part: They're absorbing the heavy metals to help protect their silly two-legged landbound friends. I'm sure that's what's going on.
• Once again, lurid fiction becomes medical reality.
• HumuKonTiki proposes a vast labyrinth of underground tunnels to connect all the world's home tiki bars. May I suggest... a swoopy 50's mole machine, perhaps?
• Got beer? Got a helicopter? Brilliant!
• It's official: Thailand is weird.
• Today's cute echidna.
• The Guardian bravely attempts to include differential equations in a business article, and almost succeeds. Don't hold your breath waiting for USA Today to follow suit.
• George Allen rides again. As usual, Jon Swift has all the ugly details. It all makes sense now. Thank you, Jon!
• The Portland Streetcar is coming to Lake Oswego. It'll be the funnest, most awesome six hour commute you've ever had.

Via RSS - 9/13/06

I'd originally planned to take a vacation from blogging this week, since I had a self-imposed RL work deadline to worry about. But it just sort of hasn't happened. I have been slacking in my RSS-reading duties, and I've been trying to catch up, really really really, when I'm not grinding out Java. Right now I should probably be writing some unit tests, but that can wait for a few minutes.

Without further ado, here's today's edition of "stuff found on the interwebs".

• The latest cool Hubble photo: A photo of the planet Uranus with its moon Ariel, with the moon casting a shadow on the planet. This from beeeelions of miles away. Wow. Admit it, that rocks.
  
• If you haven't seen it yet, here's Keith Olbermann's 9/11 piece. If you're a Dubya groupie (and you haven't already fled this blog in horror), you probably don't want to visit this link. At least if you want to keep on being a Dubya groupie.
  
• A new Hobbit movie? Can it be? I eagerly, eagerly await big-budget Smaug goodness.
  
• New info on how blogspam happens. Cheap Third World labor will be the death of us all, I tell you.
  
• I've also fallen behind in my usual practice of linking to cephalopod items on Pharyngula. So here are the latest four items. All hail the Old Ones!
  
• The latest research into the biology of B-Movie Monsters.
  
• The Belmont Station blog has a video of people diving into a gigantic pile of hops. It's like porno for beer geeks.
  
• And for Mac geeks, here's how to set up your own custom kernel panic screen. Not that I've ever actually seen a kernel panic with OSX. Sometimes I almost miss the days of "Sorry, a system error occurred. ID = -17". But the feeling passes quickly.
  
• The latest physics crankery: The upcoming Large Hadron Collider could kill us all!!! Run for the hills!!!!
  
• The Champagne of Blogs has a piece about homebrewing in the great outdoors, with tons of photos. Apparently the Metolius River makes an excellent wort chiller.
  
• Four photos of echidnas.
  
• The only known naughty limerick involving echidnas. They do have remarkable tongues, you know.
  
• A post at Humu Kon Tiki explaining in great detail how to build a Tiki Bar. So now you have no excuse not to.
  
• Baby skunks. Awwwwwww....
  
• If you had a thing for Harmony from Buffy & Angel, November is your lucky month.
  
• Slashdot helpfully points us at what was once The Ultimate Blog Post. That was until this post came along.
  
• Also from Slashdot: Ding, dong, IRIX is dead. That's one less Unix to worry about porting to. Yay!
  
• More cat-related items at Cute Overload & Pharyngula.
  

More:

• Sometimes even giant natural gas tankers need to dress up and feel pretty.
  
• A slideshow at KGW showing our shiny new OHSU tram cabins. The first photo is the only good one, and the others just show heavily-wrapped cabins (or something) being loaded onto a cargo ship.
  
• For future reference: When you're trying to subdue an escaped alligator, it helps to have a roll of duct tape handy.
  
• A couple of Blogspot referrer pages from when I hit "Publish" the first time: The Armchair Nomad and 12 Degrees of Freedom.
  
• The cephalopod items at Pharyngula are coming fast & furious these days. Here's the latest.
  
• Cleaned-up, "digitally remastered" photos of the surface of Venus, courtesy the Soviet-era Venera 13 and 14. The Venera 13 image is especially interesting, with barren, misty hills in the distance.
  
• Also, MRO is finally done aerobraking. The Bad Astronomer geeks out over the occasion. And rightly so.
  

4k : yippi-ti-yi-yay

Today this blog's Sitemeter counter hit a whopping 4000, after a mere, um, 9 months or so of operation. I guess that's sort of impressive, so long as we don't compare the numbers with any of those other blogs out there. Well, whatever. I'm not a competitive person.

I decided earlier today that I'd do a post all about whatever brought the 4000th visitor here, within reason. Then I decided that in case that reason wasn't interesting enough to sustain an entire post, I'd cover a selection of recent reasons people ended up here. Other than people who show up via "Next Blog", I mean, since those generally merit a post of their own. That's basically what I've ended up doing here, more or less. Or that was the starting point for this post, at any rate.

Recently I've gotten a decent number of visitors here via Technorati. Mostly it's because I link somewhere, Technorati picks it up, and someone follows the link back here, for some reason. So here are a few of the recent backlinkees (to coin a stupid word), plus the occasional thing of interest that I ran across via Technorati while checking out the backlinks, plus stuff I found on Del.icio.us in connection with other items here, plus whatever, all in no particular order.

Updated 8/9/2025: You might be wondering why I'm updating a blog post from 19 years ago. And frankly so am I. It started innocently enough: I was spending part of a lazy Saturday morning going through adding labels to old blog posts that didn't have them, and occasionally tidying up sloppy html, changing old image embeds from http to https, housekeeping stuff like that. Apparently adding a label is enough to trigger a content re-review, and the bot decided this post from 2006 no longer met Community Guidelines, and unpublished it. It did not explain what, specifically, the offending bits were, but there were a few links on these lists of odd traffic sources that may have been a bit... risqué, which is generally not something I do here. For context, recall that this was posted in 2006, back in the early years of... I'm not sure it was even social media yet, but the early days of mere mortals publishing stuff and linking back and forth and so on, and the sheer randomness of some of it was rather amusing to me at the time. It was a dark and innocent time, in other words. Google itself still had the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which would take you to a random site somewhere on the internet, maybe related to your last search, if you were lucky.

So 19 years is a long time ago, and a lot has changed since then, and this just doesn't feel like a hill worth dying on, so I went ahead and removed anything that seemed even remotely less than squeaky clean, or potentially offensive to anyone in any way. So now we'll see whether that's enough to satisfy the content bots of 2025 AD.

Misc. Items for July 26th

• The latest scary MAX assault out in the 'burbs. When you hear Portland's movers and shakers bragging about us being the most European city in America, they don't mean we're a center of history, art, culture, and cuisine. We'd sure like to be, but the results so far are decidedly mixed. However, we are doing a great job of pushing our urban poor out of the city center, moving towards the Parisian banlieue model, with similar results. They aren't rioting and burning cars just yet, but let it simmer for a generation or so, and we may have our own Clichy-sus-Bois on our hands right here in Stumptown. Think Rockwood, Aloha, part of Hillsboro, part of the 'Couv, maybe Cornelius, maybe a couple of other spots I can't think of right now.
  
• Or possibly that MAX assault didn't actually happen. Still, my main point stands.
  
• Could be worse, though. In Minneapolis, they've taken to arresting zombies, leading to the best set of mugshots I've ever seen. Now, in Portland if you went around dressing like that, we'd probably elect you mayor or something. Or so we like to think, anyway.
  
• The Oregonian has a truly lame piece up insisting we have our own unique bohemian style here in town, which they insist on calling "PoBo", one of those two-word contractions (a la SoHo) beloved by clueless journalists, greedy developers, sun-addled Californians, and just about nobody else. Someone ought to tell them that in actual European cities, people tend not to wear flip-flops to the opera. Furthermore, despite all the urban mythmaking, people here generally don't wear flip-flops to the opera, either. As the story goes, we Portlanders love nothing better than to wander around to all sorts of formal high-culture events dressed like crazy homeless people: Lime green bicycle shorts to the symphony, stinky dirty sweats to the ballet, speedos and trenchcoats to Shakespeare plays, and so on. (Although this doesn't translate into treating actual homeless people compassionately, of course.) Our dirty little secret is that the legend isn't true. Granted, we have no shortage of badly dressed people, but you're far more likely to find them in suburban multiplexes or the mall than at the opera. Note to recent transplants: We are very reserved folk here. The fact that nobody says anything rude to you when you dress like that should not be mistaken for approval. We're talking about you behind your back. Trust me on this.
  
• Updated:The Mercury has a piece about all the PoBo-bashing, and they forgot to link to me. Even though I'm the Mercury's friend on MySpace and everything. Sheesh. Bunch of freakin' ingrates.
  
• A mini-rant about the upcoming Oregon Brewers' Festival. I still haven't decided on whether I'm going to go or not, myself. Hmm, here's another rant.
  
• A fun news update from the security guy at Reservoir 3.
  
• A nice early crescent moon. Turns out that there's a bit of healthy competition going on to see who can photograph the earliest crescent moon. You can be certain from this that all the competitors are undoubtedly a.) geeks, and b.) men. This crescent is nearly a full 24 hours old, so there's room for you, yes, you to get in on the action and claim your glory, such as it is.
  
• Further afield, seems that Saturn's moon Titan has lakes after all, which are fed by methane rain.
  
• K5 has an interesting roundup of blogs from Lebanon, from a variety of perspectives.
  
• An interesting post at an Irish politics forum draws analogies between "Peak Oil" and the Potato Famine. One additional point: there's nowhere to emigrate to when the oil runs out.
  
• They just don't write books like these anymore. Something tells me Stephen Colbert read "Grizzly" as a child, and never recovered.
  
• Today's soon-to-be-a-major-horror-movie story: A university in India stands accused of releasing "used" research monkeys back into the forest
  
• And last but not least: Squids!!! With guns!!!
  

Friday (foo) Blogging

A pic of Saturn's weird moon Hyperion, taken by Cassini on Wednesday.



A NASA radar image of the asteroid 2005 CR37, taken when the asteroid passed near the Earth in February.

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A few more blogs I came across with the aid of random "Next Blog" users or similar means:

• Defibrilator - Views from a Student Paramedic. This is a really fascinating read, if you've ever wondered what being an EMT is really like, or even if you haven't.
  
• Lost Remodernist. Has something to say about modern art & architecture, but I'm not clear on what, exactly.
  
• dancing king
  

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A few (primarily) local items of note:

• Two posts at Welcome to Blog debunking Portland's so-called "Shanghai Tunnels ". I can't blame people in town for wishing we had a cool underground netherworld beneath our fair city. I can't blame people for wishing our city's early history was more interesting. Everybody knows that real cities have vast networks of centuries-old catacombs beneath their streets. Also, caves rock.
  
• But lest you think that it's all fun and games underground, you might want to read this cautionary tale over at K5 about getting food poisoning at Carlsbad Caverns. Yikes!!!
  
• A whole category of funny posts over at Jalpuna! about the fun of owning cats.
  
• A post at Loaded Orygun bashing Bojack. Aww, c'mon, Jack's a local institution. Rumor has it Matt Groening actually based the character of Grandpa Simpson on our very own Mr. Bogdanski. (Well, I'm trying to start this rumor, anyway.)
  
• It's official, our neighbors across the Columbia are a bunch of dorks, and I mean that in a good way. Really. The governor of Washington has issued a proclamation declaring today and tomorrow "RSS Days". No, seriously. For the sake of comparison, it doesn't look like Oregon government uses news feeds much at all. So far I see exactly one: The state Department of Revenue, of all people. All other departments apparently release their news in PDF form only. If there are any other feeds, they're cleverly concealed. Multnomah County is just as bad that way. You'd think governments would care more than private sector firms about using open, non-proprietary formats, but at least in this state the opposite is usually true. A few entities have mailing lists, which is fine from a practical standpoint, but it's not exactly geeky these days, and I demand geeky. At least Portland city government's holding up its end of the deal, feedwise. I love the city's news feed. I'm serious.
  
• Local reaction to the latest Tour de France doping scandal. I was going to root for Basso too, and now I can't. Society needs to accept that bike racers are a bunch of freakish mutants, drugs or no drugs, and just let them have at it. The same goes for jockeys.
  
  We have a household tradition that when Le Tour rolls around, we hole up in front of the TV with a couple of baguettes, a wedge of Pierre Robert, and a jug of cheap rose (which we avoid the other 11 months of the year). We were already lamenting not having Armstrong to root against this year (yes, you read that right). Now most of the riders I've heard of won't be in the race either.
  
• Forget everything unkind I ever said about the Portland Aerial Tram. It's official now: the tram is my friend. Yay!
  

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A few articles examining MySpace and its "walled garden" model. I was going to write a post about this myself, but these and other articles are pretty good, so I think I'll just pass some links along instead.

• "If You Don't Get MySpace, You're a Lametard"
  
• "The return of the walled garden"
  
• "MySpace: Walled Garden 2.0?"
  
• "Its MySpace ... but its not MyData!"
  
• "Latest MySpace killers are - almost - on to something"
  
• And an entire blog named Beyond the Walled Garden.
  

Misc. Items 6-20-06

• Just started playing with Opera 9. Seems nice so far, except that my collapsing menu sidebar comes out horribly mangled. Instead of one little arrow graphic next to each menu item, the browser delivers 30-some arrows per item. I have to say I find that a little excessive. So I guess it's back to the Javascript salt mines again.
  
• Here's someone's homebrew recipe for "Echidna's Barleywine". I couldn't resist linking to this because it involves both beer and echidnas. Which is unusual.
  
• The latest idiocy from SCO. (Y! has the press release here.) "Biztones" are a clueless PHB-ism for the ages, and SCO's entire wireless initiative is teh st00pid. Yeah, I'm really going to pay for the right to receive spam on my phone, and I'm going to rush out and buy the one model of phone that can run the Me, Inc. software, catastrophic system bugs and all. And I'm going to love it so much that I'll run out and sign up to resell all those super-advanced Me, Inc. services under SCO's MLM scheme, which is most definitely Not A Scam. And I'm also going to rush right out and join their developer program, in hopes of scoring that ultra-desirable Bimmer with the V10 under the hood. Because nothing motivates programmers like a pretentious new set of wheels. I need that there Bimmer so bad I'm going to give SCO all the rights to my work, even if I don't win the grand prize, because it's an honor just to be part of the Revolution. Yeahhhh... Not.
  
• A new survey claims that New York is the world's politest major city. Clearly they've never observed the curious ritual practiced by Oregon drivers at four-way stops: "After you", "Oh, no, you go ahead, I'm in no hurry", "No, no, you were here first, please, be my guest", and on, and on. Well, it's either that, or they simply don't consider us a major city, the bastards. I'll key their cars for that, dammit. It should be noted that the survey was conducted by Readers' Digest, which is based in -- you guessed it -- the New York metro area. So really what they're saying is that New Yorkers do a rather good job of resembling themselves, and people in other cities don't pull it off quite so well. Seems that Mumbai does an especially poor job of it, causing a bit of hand-wringing in the local media.
  
• If you've been in downtown Portland in the last few days, you might have noticed that the parking lot next to the Fox Tower is being torn up. Seems we're getting a brand new Park Block. This is the last vestige of a once-grandiose plan to tear out a bunch of buildings and connect the north & south park blocks. The plan went nowhere, even though it was being promoted by a now-disgraced Ex-Governor Who Shall Not Be Named. Certain power elite types thought it was a fantastic, visionary plan, but everyone else saw it for what it was: A horrible throwback to 60's-style urban renewal. But this one block was just a surface parking lot, so there's no harm in putting that parking underground and sticking a park on top.
  
• I seem to have missed this year's Oregon Eel Festival, which celebrates the local lamprey population. (And yes, I know lampreys technically aren't eels. Tell it to the people who run the festival.) I'm not joking here, I really would've gone if I'd known about it. I keep hearing about how Northwest Indian tribes consider them a delicacy, and I'll try just about anything once or twice. An article in the Portland Tribune claimed lamprey tastes something like a cross between liver and duck, which sounds kind of promising. There's always next year, I guess.
  
• Speaking of liver, the local food fascists (and we have a rather large contingent of them) are hassling a local French bistro for serving foie gras. And if they win, no doubt they'll keep expanding their jihad until we're all making do with vegan raw food, the blander the better. Um, but I have to drop in a little qualifier -- one of the comments mentions a substance known as casu marzu, which is basically cheese full of wriggling insect larvae. I know I just now said I'd try just about anything, but I draw the line here. No thanks, guys. This is why I always say "just about", in case something like this pops up. Ugh!
  

Some news and stuff, 6-17-06

A couple pics of the asteroid 2002 JF56, taken by New Horizons a couple of days ago. Color pics with higher resolution are due next week some time.

In other news:

• This comment takes the place of an extended rant that used to be here. I'm not pleased about yesterday's "don't bother knocking" ruling from the Supremes. But the rant didn't really fit here, so I'll save it for later, probably.
  
• All of this (i.e. the aforementioned supreme court ruling) makes me want a beer. And here's yet another local beer blog I just ran across. Lookit all them hops in that there carboy. Mmmm, tasty.
  
• I don't know if Portland's ex-mayor Vera Katz is a beer drinker or not, and I kind of suspect not, but her new statue seems to like the occasional brewski.
  
• A fun little piece about Crazy Crab, the most hated sports mascot of all time, hands down.
  
• The "OMG PONIES" thing may have run its course, but Portland's tiny plastic pony thing is still going strong. More photos here. I was thinking about taking some photos myself and posting them, but now everybody's doing it. And as I've said before, I'm not much of a joiner.
  
• In Ireland, even mad scientists have literary leanings. "Bloomsday device". I love it.
  
• The OLCC's jackbooted thugs are at it again. Like I said before, I'm not a libertarian when it comes to the economic side of things, but I'm all in favor of abolishing the OLCC. Never give puritanical power-mad busybodies their own funding source and their own law enforcement arm. Everything they do would be handled better by local governments (licensing), regular state & local police (enforcement), and the private sector (liquor retailing). There's no need for them to exist. If we ever did abolish the agency there'd be no need to shed a tear for all the unemployed OLCC bureaucrats -- with their experience, they'll have no trouble finding similar jobs in Saudi Arabia.
  
• A couple of lists of the world's worst beers. If the OLCC really wanted to perform a public service, they'd establish minimum quality standards for beer and wine, as a consumer protection measure. But noooooo....
  

More news from here, 6-15-06

• Bloglines is having issues right now. It's kind of surprising how quickly you come to depend on a service like that being available all the time. My precious RSS feeds are nowhere to be seen. Even this blog's mini-sibling, cyclotram2, is unavailable right now. Last time Blogger was down, I popped over to the other blog and whined about it. So I figure it's only fair to do the same thing now that the reverse situation's occurred. Once the thing comes back up, I think I'll need to use Bloglines' "export as OPML" feature just so I'll have an offline backup around somewhere.
  
• I've gotten a lot of search hits in the last couple of days because of a brief reference (towards the end of the post) to a Portuguese celebrity named Merche Romero. I'm not sure why. But she does figure in this juicy British tabloid story. I don't actually care about any of this stuff even a tiny bit, but it seems to be driving page views at the moment, so I may as well milk it while I can. I guess I'm just cynical that way. Here's a photo of Ms. Romero, if you're curious. Probably safe for work.
  
• Our Glorious Leader has done an unusual thing, bestowing national monument status on a huge, uninhabited chunk of the Hawaiian Islands. It's one of those things presidents are allowed to do by unilateral executive order, without consulting Congress (which may explain his attraction to the idea). It's worth noting that the R's freaked out when Clinton used this power to create vastly smaller monuments out of unhabited chunks of southwestern desert. But as usual it's ok when Bush does it.
  
• Yet another testimonial about why Windows Mobile / PocketPC / Windows CE is teh sux0r. I've had three or four WinCE PDAs dumped on me over the years, by vendors who I guess hoped I'd write some useful code for 'em. I got them all for free, and I still felt I overpaid. They were all useless junk, not worth the rather generous amounts of electricity I lavished on keeping them charged up. The hardware itself is often pretty impressive, but then they stick this nightmarish botch of an OS on top, and the result is always so slow it's practically unusable. It's a sad fact about the tech industry that while Moore's Law gives a fairly good idea of how quickly processor power is likely to increase, there's no equivalent law that places an upper bound on the speed of software bloat. The more money you've got to play with, the faster it happens, and MS has a lot of money.
  
• Now that Zarqawi's out of the picture, Congress is finally going to have a "debate" about Iraq. Well, it's actually just a political stunt, like everything else they do anymore. They may complain a lot about Bush usurping their authority with his "signing statements", but their actions suggest they've accepted their new role as a toothless debating society with barely a whimper. I can understand their feelings of relief -- knowing that nothing you do or say matters really takes the pressure off. We already know the end result of this pointless debate: This time it's Congress's turn to haul up the big "Mission Accomplished" sign, and it's bound to work out just as well now as it did the first time around.
  
• A NewScientist article about Neptune's family of Trojan asteroids. Only four have actually been found so far, but researchers are estimating there must be a huge number of them out there. More info plus images here.
  
• This was probably accidental, but a brand new form of graffiti has been invented. Check out this pic from Google Maps. This area is a fenced-off former industrial site south of downtown Portland, and in all likelihood nobody would've ever seen this if it wasn't for the magic of Google. So I'd just like to say hello and congratulations to the mysterious "GPK". You're way more famous than any of those small-timers who go around tagging dumpsters and abandoned buildings. If Google can see this, the aliens probably can too. Someday maybe they'll probably up at your door looking for an autograph, or maybe a tissue sample, or whatever it is they do.
  
• Two referrer pages from folks Blogger sent my way when I posted this baby: Walaykinha and Dysdiadokinesis & Mosaicism. FWIW.
  

The news from here, 6-14-06

• Stephen Hawking says we desperately need colonies in space. Pharyngula is not so sure.
  
• From NewScientist: A theory about why planetary moons seem to have an upper size limit. Several announcements of new extrasolar planets have noted that they lie in their parent stars' "habitable zones". The hope being that one of these planets just might have a big Earth-sized habitable moon or two. That may be impossible under the new theory.
  
• One of the great things about the blog world is that one gets a window into the lives of people in circumstances utterly different than one's own. Here are two blogs by women from the Philippines who work in the Persian Gulf region.
  
• This blog recounts the ongoing story of a large number of cats rescued from homeless camps in the Corvallis/Albany OR area.
  
• Worldwide Pablo has the first post about Portland's shiny new tram tower. I would've thought Jack Bog would've had something unkind to say about it by now. Maybe he's waiting until they've got the whole thing installed, I dunno. I took some pics of it myself this morning, and I'll try to post them later on, if I get around to it.
  
• A fun little bit of Python bashing. The language, not the snake. Bashing snakes would be cruel. Unless by "bash" you mean the shell, not the violent act. And if you do mean bash=shell and python=snake, you end up with a sentence that just makes no sense at all.
  
• A good post at pdxleft about our Glorious Leader's recent heroic photo op in Baghdad.
  
• The food fascists are now suing KFC. Gee, and all this time I thought KFC served healthy non-fattening fare, because if there are 3 words in the English language that I most strongly associate with healthiness, they'd have to be "chicken", "fried" and "Kentucky". (Note for the irony-impaired... oh, forget it, never mind...) Crap like this makes me want to run out and buy one of those "cheesy chicken bowls" they've been advertising lately. You know, the one with a big bowl of mashed potatoes, fried chicken strips, gravy, corn, and a layer of cheese on top. Who the hell are these people, anyway? Here's a great article about the clowns at CSPI, from the libertarian mag Reason. I'm generally not a libertarian on the economic side of things, but eating whatever you want without Beltway control freaks lecturing you about it is an issue of basic personal freedom. Especially since the food police also moonlight as the beer police. Grrrr!!!!!
  
• FOX News manages to be "Fair and Balanced" for once. Seems the Fred Phelps cultists are so nutty even Rupert Murdoch won't touch 'em.
  
• In sad news, Roseburg's Hawks Brewing is ceasing operations, at least for the time being. You can't really understand what an unfortunate turn of events this is unless you've tried their beer. The ESB can't be improved upon. Look for the beer with the boring-est logo.
  
• At least the historic Yerkes Observatory isn't going to fall into the clutches of greedy developers.
  
• Referrer pages of the two folks Blogger sent my way when I first posted this thing: Transglobal Permutations, an interesting blog from Spain with lots of pictures, and Really Nothing To Say, which is just a bunch of empty posts. It bills itself as the silliest blog on the planet, which I think is a bit debatable.
  
• And then, three more visitors from when I added the previous item, arriving here from: Why Aren't I Famous, a blog mostly about hip hop music and culture; Disneyland2006, photos of someone's trip to Disneyland; and orgias69.blogspot.com, which I haven't visited but the URL suggests it's probably not safe for work. So there you have it. Let's see if anyone new shows up here this time when I repost this baby...
  

Spring Cleaning

Keeping a pile of local bookmarks in one's browser is so 20th century, so Old New Economy, etcetera. I was looking through my Firefox bookmarks and I realized how few of them I use on a daily basis. Many hadn't been touched in years, migrating silently from one machine to the next and one browser to the next. Bookmarks are an electronic equivalent of that junk drawer everyone keeps around. Sooner or later you've got bags of old rubber bands that crumble into dust when touched, keys to cars you haven't owned for over a decade, dead insects you don't recall owning at all, a vast pile of rusty thumbtacks, a wad of Canadian currency, the Ark of the Covenant, a never-used doorknob complete with receipt (from 1997), a few nuggets of dry cat food, a mysterious sticky substance in the back of the drawer, and much, much more.

So I've been taking a fresh look at those crusty old bookmarks. Quite a few are dead links, including quite a few I remember liking back in the day. I've got a huge menu hierarchy full of (mostly) Big Media news sites, which I've barely touched since Google News came out. I put this together in the period right after 9/11, during the start of the Afghanistan war, and before the Iraq war, so it has sort of a weird feel to it. It was a different time. Sooner or later I'll write a post or two about how weird that era looks in retrospect just a few short years later. But this is not that post.

Anyway, I figured I'd salvage anything that looked like it might be worth sharing, and post it here. I've also tossed in a few recent items to spice things up, especially in the politics section. (If you're surprised that there's nothing about beer here, never fear; I'm saving all my sudsy-ambrosia-related material for a future post.)

Politics

• The latest action on the impeachment front.
  
• That intriguing Section 603 can be found here.
  
• A nice photo of GWB on his bicycle
  
• Hyperreal and Imaginary. No, this doesn't belong in the math section further down. An interesting post about Iraq, where hyperreal is used in the sense of Baudrillard, not of Robinson.
  

Stuff from Beneath the Sea

• SciAm article about drilling beneath the ocean to reach a new deep layer of the Earth's crust.
  
• Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
  

Vaguely Urban

• A fascinating 1957 City Club of Portland report on race relations in the city.
  
• Kerch, Crimea, Ukraine
  
• Disused stations on the London Underground
  
• portland ground, pictures from here.
  
• A news page about urban parks.
  

Miscellany

• Playing telephone with Babelfish
  
• Find-the-Spam
  
• Quatloos!, the "Cyber-Museum of Scams and Frauds".
  
• Anthropology News @ Texas A&M
  

Movie stuff

• Wooden Spoon's Obscure Horror Reviews
  
• TheOneRing.net, an LOTR fansite. I'd forgotten all about this site after the ROTK Extended DVD set came out.
  
• A blog about Cheap DVDs
  

Spacey

• When did the asteroids become minor planets?
  
• Gunter's space page
  
• Antique Telescope Society
  
• Asteroid Radar Research @ JPL
  

Math articles & blog entries

• Favorite mathematical constants
  
• A good page about visualizing complex numbers & quaternions
  
• "But what if?", with a long thread of comments about P =/!= NP and related topics.
  
• Nonstandard Analysis & the Hyperreals
  
• Did you mean Hyperreal number?
  
• A Nonstandard Proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra
  
• Surreal Numbers and Many Worlds
  

Scary Militaristic Post-9/11 Bookmarks

• Jane's Information Group
  
• DoD 101, from the Federation of American Scientists
  
• Haze Gray & Underway
  
• Military.com
  

Tech and Retrotech

• Atari TOS roms
  
• favorite ASR posts
  
• SECURITY-PROTOCOLS
  
• Unix Heritage Society
  
• HP3000 Humor
  
• Cylinder record project @ UCSB
  
• Infrequently Asked Questions in comp.lang.c.
  
• UNIX-HATERS, based more or less on the hillarious book.
  
• A paper about Security and BeOS.
  
• All about the late, lamented(?) IBM RT.
  
• Sveinbjorn Thordarson's Website (Mac OS X tools)
  
• Towards a New Strategy of OS Design, a paper about the GNU HURD operating system.
  

---

I was also cleaning out a local "My Documents" folder and found a small text file with a couple of quotes I wanted to keep around. Here they are:

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword.
It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind.
And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry.
Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so.
How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar. – Julius Caesar (apocryphal)

"Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.
In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.
The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manner and of morals, engendered in both.
No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

"War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.
In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it.
In war, the public treasuries are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them.
In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.
The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace."

- James Madison