found at the 34th St BDFV platform

If you see a suspicious package leave it for the cleaners at Coney Island - it is garbage.

The Exterminator unexpectedly buzzed this afternoon, on the first saturday of the month. We hectically ran around and cleaned up the food lying around before we let him in, afraid, as if our mothers were knocking, of being chastised for our slovenliness.

Wikipedia is the logical successor to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I say this having spent a good hour and a half on it today.

[Ed. May8/2005: This has been pointed out. Slate beat me to it.]

AP Photo from Iraq

Tue May 3, 7:34 PM ET
Picture released by the U.S. Army Tuesday, May 3, 2005 shows a U.S.
Army soldier comforting a child fatally wounded in a car bomb blast
in Mosul, 360 km (225 miles) northwest of Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, May
2, 2005. 15 Iraqis were wounded in the combined suicide bomb attack.
(AP Photo/U.S. Army)

Today is Yom HaShoah. It showed up on my Palm's calendar this morning, and it wasn't hard to figure out what it was.

And in my lifetime, we've already been through the genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.

How about some of that old fashioned imperial intervention folks?

British Election Day.
Cinco De Mayo.
National Prayer Day
Spring Fevah.

Am I missing anything?

Does one need an excuse to get in contact with people you haven't spoken to in many years? Are the above reasons sufficient?

State of Affairs

sigh.

tactics tactics comrade

I had to restrain myself from using the word "retrospect" in the
common context when sending an email to Dantz (the creators of the
Retrospect software) tech support today.

"In retrospect..."

oy.

Batman Begins

The trailer is pretty. And it is made by the director of memento.

Highlights of the slashdot thread:

Direct link to the full screen trailer.

Ninja reference:

Batman can kill anyone he wants! Batman cuts off heads ALL the time and doesn't even think twice about it. This guy is so crazy and awesome that he flips out ALL the time. I heard that there was this time he was eating at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon Batman killed the whole town. My friend Mark said that he saw Batman totally uppercut some kid just because the kid opened a window.

And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you don't believe that Batman has REAL Ultimate Power you better get a life right now or he will chop your head off!!! It's an easy choice, if you ask me.

American psycho reference:

I live in stately Wayne Manor. My name is Bruce Wayne. I'm 27 years old. I believe in taking care of myself, and a balanced diet and a rigorous exercise routine. In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I'll put on an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches. I can do a thousand now. After I remove the ice pack, I use a deep pore cleanser lotion. In the shower, I use a water activated gel cleanser. Then a honey almond body scrub. And on the face, an exfoliating gel scrub. Then apply an herb mint facial mask, which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an aftershave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm followed by a final moisturizing protective lotion. There is an idea of a Bruce Wayne, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me. Only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our life styles are probably comparable, I simply am not there.

Shana refers me to these amazing sites:

A simple search with the terms "***** *******" led me to a site with some of the
most beautiful urban and architectural decay images I have seen.


Here: http://b.f11.org/

And Here: http://buffaloexploration.com/index.htm


Don't know why or how I landed, or if, indeed, I have.

Guess the search terms.

Scientists create animals that are part-human. Or Flowers for Algernon.

Mice with human brains

In January, an informal ethics committee at Stanford University endorsed a proposal to create mice with brains nearly completely made of human brain cells. Stem cell scientist Irving Weissman said his experiment could provide unparalleled insight into how the human brain develops and how degenerative brain diseases like Parkinson’s progress.

Stanford law professor Hank Greely, who chaired the ethics committee, said the board was satisfied that the size and shape of the mouse brain would prevent the human cells from creating any traits of humanity. Just in case, Greely said, the committee recommended closely monitoring the mice’s behavior and immediately killing any that display human-like behavior.

My feeling on this is that if you kill a being that displays human-like behaviour, you're committing murder. The Turing test should be applied here.

No let me rephrase that. If you kill a sentient being, you are committing murder. A mouse with human brain cells that happens to show signs of sentience would be fascinating, and the bar will probably be far lower for people getting pissed off if you're killing animals with human brain cells.

But I'm not against the research.

"Demonic in nature.": "

A Michigan appellate court in Howard v. Family Independence Agency has ruled that a state agency did not violate a social worker's First Amendment rights when it fired her for trying to perform an exorcism instead of calling 911 after a client had a seizure. While visiting a client, the client had a seizure, which Michelle Howard, a religious woman, decided was 'demonic in nature.' She prayed over the client and anointed her with water. The court ruled that she 'was not terminated for merely praying at the office,' but for violating agency rules."

(Via jwz.)

God is Great, by which I mean, Very Very Large: "

I've been thinking about transubstantiation, the belief of many branches of Christianity that when you take communion, the bread and wine transform physically into the flesh and blood of Christ. According to the Catholic Church as late as 1965, this is literally true, not just symbolism: the flesh is present, the bread is gone.

So let's run some numbers.

1. The Roman Catholic Church says that there are around 1.1 billion baptised Catholics in the world today.

2. The current world population is 6.3 billion (17% Catholic.)

3. The world population in A.D. 1930 was around 1 billion.

4. The world population in A.D. 1 was around 300 million.

5. If we assume an average lifespan of 50 years (which is probably low, since the curve is so steep at the modern end) that gives us 40 non-overlapping 'generations'. So if we put 1, 2, and 6 in the last three buckets, and .4 in every previous bucket, that gives 23 billion as a guess at how many people have been alive during the last two thousand years. (I'm not sure this is a valid generalization to make; do you have a better guess?)

6. I'm not sure how quickly Christianity grew, but let's guess that 12% of all those people were Christian, of a variety that believed in transubstantiation. (I think this is probably a reasonable guess because Christianity was very widespread by the 10th century or so, and by the numbers above, 83% of the population came after that.)

7. How often do these folks take the Eucharist, on average? Hard to guess, let's say once a year.

8. By my measure, one 'sip' is 1/4 fl. oz.

9. One serving of Ritz crackers is 5 crackers at 100 grams, or 20 grams per cracker.

10. An adult male contains about six quarts of blood.

11. The current average weight for an American male is 180 pounds, but Americans are fatties and people used to be smaller, so let's call the two-millenium average 120 pounds.

Which gives us:

	23,000,000,000	people
x	12	%
x	1	communion
x	2000	years
=	5,520,000,000,000	servings
x	0.25	fl. oz.
=	10,781,250,000	gallons of blood
x	20	grams
=	243,390,340,000	pounds of flesh
=	121,695,170	tons of flesh

So how big is Jesus?

If you conservatively assume that these are the End Times and that Jesus will soon be completely consumed (a detail that I do not believe is a part of mainstream Christian dogma), then he weighs two billion times more than you, and contains fourteen billion times as much blood. (2,028,252,833x and 14,375,000,000x).

By comparison, the largest living animal on Earth is the Blue Whale, at a paltry 150 tons (a mere 2,500× bigger than you). It is believed that the largest dinosaur, the Argentinosaurus, weighed only 90 tons.

However, perhaps Jesus, like Wolverine, has amazing regenerative powers (in which case, it's surprising it took him three days to return from the dead. But maybe he was just taking a little time-out.)

I wish I could find figures on how much skin people shed. I've heard that most household dust is made of people, but I haven't found any numbers. He would be very much larger indeed if we were to assume that all this consumed flesh and blood was non-essential.

"

(Via jwz.)

Soylent Rice is People: "

Human gene in rice:

Japanese researchers have inserted a gene from the human liver into rice to enable it to digest pesticides and industrial chemicals. The gene makes an enzyme, code-named CPY2B6, which is particularly good at breaking down harmful chemicals in the body.

Present GM crops are modified with genes from bacteria to make them tolerate herbicides, so that they are not harmed when fields are sprayed to kill weeds. But most of them are only able to deal with a single herbicide, which means that it has to be used over and over again, allowing weeds to build up resistance to it.

But the researchers at the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences in Tsukuba, north of Tokyo, have found that adding the human touch gave the rice immunity to 13 different herbicides. This would mean that weeds could be kept down by constantly changing the chemicals used.

"

(Via jwz.)

The Warren Variations.

Trailers on TCM rock.

Forgive me for calling this hope.

What the Republicans Could Learn from Hayek: "

I was talking to someone tonight about whether there is a unifying theme to the Republican setbacks of this winter and spring -- Social Security, the Bolton nomination, and DeLay, to name the three biggies. I don't want to make more than should be made of things that are very much in media res, but I think the answer is simple and predictable: A command-control system like the White House-led Republican congressional system can be absolutely formidable for a certain period of time. But when it breaks down, it breaks down completely. The collapse is sudden, and total. Signals get crossed, backs get stabbed, the suddenly leaderless pawns in the system start acting for themselves, with no system or structure to coordinate their individual impulses.

Is this happening? I don't know, but it's getting close. I thought I'd seen it before, but each time they've pulled it back together. This time, I think there's too much happening at once.

The irony of all this for conservatives is that if they actually read Hayek and got anything out of it other than 'government sucks,' they would know this. Hayek's libertarianism was very pragmatic. Centrally controlled systems are flawed above all because they have no mechanism to correct their own errors, unlike distributed, self-organized systems. The Democrats in the Clinton years always operated in chaos, no one followed the party line, and there was a cost to that, but in the chaos and improvisation they found ways to get out of the holes that they had dug for themselves. The Rove/DeLay/Frist system doesn't have any means for correcting its mistakes -- look at the blank, lost looks on the faces of Senators Lugar and Chafee yesterday when they just had no idea what to do with a nomination that had fallen apart and couldn't fulfill their promises.

The Republicans accomplished unimaginable feats through the centralization of power. Three tax cuts, a prescription drug plan that will make Americans hate government, an insane war. But if the goal was long-term power, it is a strategy they will come to regret, if not today, someday.

"

(Via The Decembrist.)

Also, Con Listings.

There's a new study linking low levels of Hydrogen sulfide (80ppm) to induced, completely reversible torpor in mice.

The mice enter a hibernation state, reducing their oxygen intake by 90%.

Absolutely amazing. If this scales up to humans, we could see a radical change in the way surgery is done, as well as long distance space flight. Imagine inducing hibernation in the case of a heart attack or stroke until you can get to a hospital.

The Adobe Macromedia acquisition, unorwellianized.