Though we imagine the Dutch to be a rather unexcitable lot, I did anyway, it turns out they have a history of getting rowdy at football games (yes, if this all happened back in the States I be calling it “soccer”). So it can’t be so much of a surprise that fans rioted again in […] » about 200 words
I don’t watch TV, so I haven’t seen many images of the flooding in New Orleans until I found these. Amazingly, The Times Picayune is publishing PDF editions during disaster. The hurricane and flood damage are truly scary, but the worst news is on page five, which tells of widespread looting: Law enforcement efforts to […] » about 300 words
Via Jon Gordon‘s Future Tense: Re-shelving George Orwell.
Smart people everywhere are taking it upon themselves to re-shelve George Orwell’s 1984 from fiction to more appropriate sections in non-fiction, like “Current Events”, “Politics”, “History”, “True Crime”, or “New Non-Fiction.”
Instructions and photos on Flickr.
Boing Boing has an exclusive profile of neutron bomb inventor Samuel T. Cohen by Charles Platt. All the reports so far are that it’s a 10,000 word “must read.”
The article, Profits of Fear, is available in PDF, plain text, and Palm doc versions at Boing Boing.
Thanks to David Rothman for the heads up. Extra: Rothman asks what it all says about mainstream media when respected authors eschew traditional media for blogs.
While looking for a picture for my memorial to the bomb, I found a number of related links. This blog is sometimes nothing more than an annotated bookmark list, and this is why…. The Bomb Project describes itself as: a comprehensive on-line compendium of nuclear-related links, imagery and documentation. It is intended specifically as a […] » about 300 words
In what was to be the final act of World War II in the Pacific, the United States made the first and only use of nuclear power as a weapon in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th (US dates), 1945. George Weller of the Chicago Daily News snuck in to […] » about 200 words
While I’m anxiously working to better fit libraries into the Google Economy, a few paragraphs of Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear, got me thinking about its role in politics. Glassner was telling of how a 1996 article in USA Today quoted the National Assocation of Scholars saying that Georgetown University had dumbed down its […] » about 700 words
Via Defense Tech: Slate did a series last week titled A Nuclear Family Vacation that visited the Nevada Test Site; Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Labs; and Trinity. Extra: a slideshow accompanies the text and the authors interviewed{#4755708} on NPR’s Day to Day{#4755708}.
Related: previous nuclear stories at MaisonBisson.
Two items from the blogosphere about Rove’s Leak-and-Covergate at Tikun Olam and AlterNet.
First Lady Laura Bush speaking at the White House Correspondents Association gala noted:
George’s answer to any problem at the ranch is to cut it down with a chain saw. Which, I think, is why he and Cheney and Rumsfeld get along so well.
The quote is all over the net now, but I found it in the August issue of Vanity Fair.
Dwight Eisenhower’s eight years as president were about a lot more than I Like Ike buttons and interstate highways. From Wikipedia: After his many wartime successes, General Eisenhower returned to the United States a great hero. It would not be long before many supporters were pressuring him to run for public office. Eisenhower was generally […] » about 300 words
Ken (I wish he had a blog to link to) pointed out Bloggers Need Not Apply in the Chronicle Of Higher Ed over the weekend. The story is to some a highly cautionary tale: A candidate’s blog is more accessible to the search committee than most forms of scholarly output. It can be hard to […] » about 500 words
My dad, who’s called Florida home for quite a while now, emailed me the following about goings on there: The big news here is the struggle to prevent Volusia County adopting the the Diebold touch screen ballot machines. They are bad news, because these Diebold machines do not leave a paper trail and so a […] » about 700 words
Principality of Sealand is a WWII-era gunnery platform — called Roughs Tower — in the North Sea, outside Britain’s pre-1968 three nautical mile claim of sovereign waters. Founded by Roy and Joan Bates in 1967, over time, Roy wrote a constitution and named himself and Joan as prince and princess. The Wikipedia article on Sealand […] » about 600 words
It’s a story that won’t die, and yet it can’t get any attention. Since November 3rd, reasonable people have been wondering what happened. On election night, exit polls predicted a 5 million vote win for Kerry, but the official election results declared Bush the winner by 3 million votes. We’re all suspicious of polls, but […] » about 500 words
George Weller won a Pulitzer Prize, a Polk Award, and was named a Neimann Fellow during his fifty-some-odd year career during which he covered much of Europe and Asia for the New York Times and Chicago Daily News. Weller died in 2002 at age 95, leaving behind a body of work that tells much of […] » about 500 words
David Rothman points to a Daily KOS story that points to a MyDD story titled “Aristocratic Right Wing Blogosphere Stagnating.” What’s the point? Of the top 40 political blogs, more than half are ‘liberal,’ and more importantly, they support community involvement — including basic features like comments — that the conservative blogs shun. of the […] » about 300 words
Copyfight is pointing to the EFF‘s new Legal Guide for Bloggers. Most of the content is about liability, but it also addresses issues of access and privilege that are generally granted to journalists, election law, and labor law. From the introduction: Whether you’re a newly minted blogger or a relative old-timer, you’ve been seeing more […] » about 400 words
Gary Wolf wrote in the June issue of Wired about how smart mobs in New York’s World Trade Center outbrained the “authorities” and enjoyed higher survival rates because of it. Wolf is talking about the NIST report on Occupant Behavior, Egress, and Emergency Communications (warning: PDFs). There’s also this executive summary and this looks like […] » about 300 words
Alan Wexelblat at Copyfight pointed out this story that talks about increasing limits on public photography.
If you’re standing on public property, you can shoot anything the naked eye can see, explains Ken Kobre, professor of photojournalism at San Francisco State University and author of one of the seminal textbooks on the subject.
…But that apparently doesn’t stop security guards, cops, and others from intimidating and sometimes arresting those who try it.
Lawrence Lessig had a little bit to say about this in Free Culture, though his real point there was about copyright issues related to photography. Here, at the bottom of page 33, he makes the point that I’m getting at:
[E]arly in the history of photography, there was a series of judicial decisions that could well have changed the course of photography[…]. Courts were asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional, required permission before he could capture and print whatever image he wanted. Their answer was no.
Various forces have been chipping away at this basic presumption of freedom to photograph ever since, but Lessig rightly credits this early decision with creating the cover necessary for consumer photography to emerge and boom as it did.
Jonathan Crowe points out this Risks In Global Filmmaking Map by Aon, the entertainment industry insurance company. Go view the PDF or a full-size PNG for all the details. Technorati Tags: aon, industry, entertainment, filmmaking, insurance company, map, risk » about 100 words
I love the following quote from Copyfight:
Frank Field, responding to James Boyle’s much–discussed FT column, Deconstructing Stupidity: “Flat-earthers are harmless — until they start forcing you to write the specifications for your GPS system in accordance with their views. Then, you’re screwed.”
And Boyle’s column is pretty good too.
It’s been a few days of “long tail” talk here at MaisonBisson. Stories about popularity vs. the long tail and aesthetics of the short head are just below. Here’s one on the violence of the long tail. John Robb at Global Guerrillas wrote about the “dark side” of the long tail in a March 18 […] » about 300 words
It’s hard to find the words to introduce Eric Berndt‘s open letter to his NYU Law School classmates. The Nation said the following:
Justice Antonin Scalia got more than he bargained for when he accepted the NYU Annual Survey of American Law’s invitation to engage students in a Q&A session. Randomly selected to attend the limited-seating and closed-to-the-press event, NYU law school student Eric Berndt asked Scalia to explain his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case that overturned Bowers v. Hardwick and struck down the nation’s sodomy laws. Not satisfied with Scalia’s answer, Berndt asked the Justice, “Do you sodomize your wife?” Scalia demurred and law school administrators promptly turned off Berndt’s microphone. As Berndt explains in his post to fellow law school students, it was an entirely fair question to pose to a Justice whose opinion–had it been in the majority — would have allowed the state to ask that same question to thousands of gays and lesbians, and to punish them if the answer is yes.
Read.
In a story in the Sacramento News and Review, Peter Thompson writes about his drug use. At 16 he tried making mead, but when that failed he continued to look elsewhere: I began to see the supermarket and drugstore as potential drug dealers. I drank bottles of cough syrup before I knew what dextromethorphan (DXM) […] » about 600 words