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Thursday, July 14, 2005 A Few Good Men done in Half Life 2. Worth checking out. Really nice work on the lip synching. You can't handle the truth! @ 10:53 PM CST [Link] Clever Rove/iPod pshop. Also: Check out this interview with Ambassador Wilson. My understanding is that shortly thereafter, a meeting was held - sometime in March of 2003 - in the offices of the Vice President at which it was decided to do a “work up” on me. A work up means to run an intel op to glean all the information you can about “me.” My understanding is that at a minimum, [Cheney's chief of staff] Scooter Libby was at this meeting. But in retrospect looking at this, the natural group [of people] who would meet to discuss something like this would be the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). Raw Story: Right, and the group includes Karl Rove as part of that main group of six. Wilson: Yes, that would include Rove. I believe it is Rove, Karen Hughes, Libby, and others. Raw Story: Also: Andrew Card, Mary Matlin and James Wilkinson as well as others who advised then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley. Wilson: That would be the natural group because they were constituted to spin the war, so they would be naturally the ones to try to deflect criticism. Now, some of those people would have very high security clearances. @ 04:17 PM CST [Link] Qatar tests robot camel jockeys. Man, doesn't this look like bad science fiction? The call for robot replacements is largely fueled by all the human rights abuses perpetrated on child jockeys. "If they are robots, then why are they wearing helmets?" @ 01:12 AM CST [Link] Great colorization work over at w1k today. Mr. Smith goes to color: @ 01:04 AM CST [Link] Wednesday, July 13, 2005 Last 30 pictures posted to livejournal. Nice for the voyeur in you. Mostly random pics of teens acting silly. Or slutty. Or stoned. Or some bad art. Small and gothy, and large and gothy. Frightening Harry Potterism. Bad tan lines. Weirdo looking kids. And the occasional head wound. @ 04:25 PM CST [Link] Stoner British hacker awaits extridition. Looks like he broke into various US government boxes over the span of a decade to prove UFO conspiracy theories. All he found was a file listing "Non-terrestrial officers" which he suggests means there's a secret US spacecraft or spacestation, which is pretty hard to believe as every amateur astronomer would have seen it by now. When pressed for details about this he claims he was too stoned to remember. He faces 70 years in prison. What a a moron. Somehwere out there aliens are laughing at us. @ 03:52 PM CST [Link] Rubber Johnny video online. Looks like an extra-creepy aphex twin video. @ 03:48 PM CST [Link] Richard Dawkins, agnostic? Of course, you can only work with the software/hardware you have. Arguably, an intelligent race can overcome such barriers with technology and strict methology, but that's the old "knowable vs. unknowable" universe argument. I'm surprised to see Dawkins on the unknowable part, which always seemed to me to be erring on the side of caution and the knowable universe argument to be pretty presumptious. "Are there things about the Universe that will be forever beyond our grasp, in principle, ungraspable in any mind, however superior?" he asked. "Successive generations have come to terms with the increasing queerness of the Universe." Each species, in fact, has a different "reality". They work with different "software" to make them feel comfortable, he suggested. Because different species live in different models of the world, there was a discomfiting variety of real worlds, he suggested. @ 03:13 PM CST [Link] Ebert gets politically correct. Again. Roger, its a friggin comedy. I remember when he couldn't recommend Ben Stiller's Zoolander because it involved a plot to kill a prime minister. After seeing him recommend Blade and its sequels, well, perhaps its time for the sun-times to find a replacement. Perhaps the man has simply grown humorless. Also: Rotten Tomatoes page on Happy Times. @ 09:10 AM CST [Link] Neat little puzzle game. Something of a brain-teaser, but not much of one. Probably a good way to waste half and hour. @ 08:58 AM CST [Link] Tuesday, July 12, 2005 40% chance the shuttle won't fly tomorrow. NASA weather officers are now predicting a 40 percent chance that thunderstorms and other poor weather could violate flight rules for Discovery’s 3:51 p.m. EDT (1951 GMT) launch Wednesday. The threat of storms is up 10 percent from Monday, they added. “We are expecting some thunderstorms and showers,” said shuttle weather officer Kathy Winters during a countdown update here at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC). “We may even go red during the countdown.” During the countdown? Talk about being a tease. Ironically, the BBC has the best presentation on the safety changes made to the shuttle. Then again, out-doing the US corporate media doesn't really take much. @ 01:29 PM CST [Link] Decent article on how to use the EFF's Tor program to surf the net anonymously. Actually, its not limited to browsers, any application can use it (using SOCKS). Tor homepage here. @ 12:53 PM CST [Link] Sunday, July 10, 2005 Frank Herbert interview from 1969. Long, but probably worth it for Dune fans, at least worth skimming. WM: Bene (Bené) Gesserit, you pronounce it? FH: Bene (Benny) Gesserit, yes. WM: Bene Gesserit. The...their whole mystique and so on is relatively unexplained. Why do they want the Kwisatz Haderach in the first place? You see, is relatively, at the time… FH: The name of the game is power. WM: Yes, and they want power. That…that explains it to a certain extent but… FH: They want power in a specific way. You know, I’ve always been amazed by the statement or by the label of psychological warfare. There can be no such thing as psychological warfare…if you develop a psychological weapon sufficiently that it is destructive to any potential enemy, it will destroy you with the enemy…it’s a two-edged sword without a handle, and if you grab it hard enough to wield it, you’re going to… WM: It’s self destructive. FH: Yes. WM: So we could have a variation of the Lord Acton notion: power corrupts both the user and the receiver of the power, both absolutely... FH: Right. Acton saw it. See also: Wikipedia entry on Herbert. @ 08:46 PM CST [Link] [Archives] Search entries: