Thai Food: Threat or Menace?

BBC NEWS | England | London | Burning chilli sparks terror fear: "Firefighters wearing protective breathing apparatus were called to D'Arblay Street, Soho, after reports of noxious smoke filling the air. Police closed off three roads and evacuated homes following the alert. Specialist crews broke down the door to the Thai Cottage restaurant at 1900 BST on Monday where they discovered the source - a 9lb pot of chillies."

Why we're winning in Iraq --- and how

OpinionJournal - Extra: "Meanwhile reconciliation, which will never be complete, is happening. We saw, with the huge success of the two 2005 elections and the week-long nationwide celebrations attending the soccer victory this July, that deep unities have survived the 35-year Baath nightmare. The Kurds and Shiites can be forgiven for not wanting to reward the Sunnis immediately for the destructive insurgency that followed those 35 years of apartheid and genocide.

But from the local level to the national, the huge majority of Iraqis are showing enormous tolerance. Federal money is being pumped into Anbar, and in Baghdad this year over 30 Sunni mosques have been reopened by the government, mostly in the mainly Shiite east of the city. Today the Mahdi Army and the Sunni tribes in the Death Triangle are negotiating a modus vivendi. Sheikh Fawaz al Gerba, a Sunni sheikh and former general, is doing the same around Mosul. And Shiekh Harith al Dari, as head of the Association of Islamic Scholars, the leading Sunni group, which many Iraqis used to call the Association of Islamic Kidnappers, is doing it with Shiites in various parts of the country.

The biggest unifier of all currently might be the most predictable one. Help from foreigners is welcome in Iraq. The country's elected prime minister, possessing after Iraq's heroic elections more popular legitimacy than almost almost any leader in the world, often points out that the Coalition is there as invited guests. When the U.S. Senate passed its disingenuous "plan" for extreme federalism in Iraq last week, the uproar in the country crossed the sectarian divide. Iraq already has a constitution. It was written by freely elected Iraqis and ratified overwhelmingly by the public in a brave vote two years ago.

Thousands of Americans and their allies have died helping to give Iraqis this opportunity. We have shown enormous skill and bravery in helping them fight their enemies, and immeasurable goodwill in sending our young men to protect Iraqi schools, mosques and polling booths. The reason we and Iraqis are winning this war together is that its purpose is to give Iraqis what they want."

Weekly Links

Bloggers vs. tin-pot dictators.

Introducing Kaltura.

Does your brain make you a bad investor?

10 more future web trends.

The first qubit chips.

10 major macro themes from last week.

Urban ruins immortalized.

The search wars heat up.

The mating advantages of the deeper voice.

Fuel from mutated algae.

The new Zunes are out.

The Wikipedia Wars heat up.

How the market will unravel.

A great new Haskell tutorial.

Water is more interesting than you thought.

Inflation data is a lie.

You are an equation

Mathematical cosmos: Reality by numbers - fundamentals - 14 September 2007 - New Scientist: "Here, I will push this idea to its extreme and argue that our universe is not just described by mathematics - it is mathematics. While this hypothesis might sound rather far-fetched, it makes startling predictions about the structure of the universe that could be testable by observations. It should also be useful in narrowing down what an ultimate theory of everything could look like."

Was FDR literally a Fascist?

Reason Magazine - Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt

This Too Shall Pass

Bogged down with superficial heroin chic | The Daily Telegraph: "Instead of seeing old 'Slow Hand' looking cool on stage or imagining him that way while listening to records, youngsters might have learned the reality. And that was that Clapton, during his heroin addiction, was massively constipated."

Picture du Jour

Good News is No News

IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily - Iraq's Golden Silence: "That the media are no longer much interested in Iraq is a sure sign things are going well there. Instead, they're talking about the presidential campaign, or Burma, or global warming, or . . . whatever. Why? Simply put, the news from Iraq has been quite positive, ...."

Picture du Jour

Lately I've come across so many cool pictures that I can't stuff them all into the weekly links. So I'm going to post a few of them from time to time. Please enjoy!

Sunday Links

Bacteria like space.

The Minneapolis of southeast Asia.

Ambisinistral's and Skookumchuk's piracy and maritime links.

The end of the space station before it even begins?

How they deal with protesters in Burma.

The 50 best stocks in the world.

Where vehicles are left to die.

Western civilization continues to poke its head into every corner.

Oliver Sacks speaks.

A maglev railway outside of China.

What US cities used to look like.

Moebius transformations revealed.

Picture Vote

Stung to the quick by recent criticism of my choice of pictures, I decided to get a "sense of the house". Please take a look at the pictures below and use the comments to cast your vote(s) for which one we should use in tomorrow's (Sunday's) links. None of these will be used, but I want to get a general feeling for preferences and why. We appreciate your cooperation in this arduous task.

A.

B.

C.

D.

E.

F.

G.

Gore Dodges Repeated Calls to Debate Global Warming

From TCS Daily:

"[F]ormer Vice President Al Gore, the most prominent proponent of the theory of the human-induced, catastrophic global warming, continues to refuse repeated challenges to debate the issue.

"Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who addressed the General Assembly on climate change September 24, is but the latest global warming skeptic to receive the cold shoulder from Gore. In ads appearing in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Times, Klaus has called on Gore to face him in a one-on-one debate on the proposition: 'Global Warming Is Not a Crisis.'"

‘Warming’ alarmists must be held to higher standard

From a couple of Canadians, an engineer and a science adviser:

"Most of those grabbing the spotlight have little or no post-secondary training in science or technology, let alone climate change."

"Among qualified researchers, there is an intense debate raging about the causes of the past century’s modest warming."

"Considering what’s at stake — either the end of civilization, if you believe extremists, or a waste of hundreds of billions of dollars in one of the biggest science news scandals of all time — society must start to hold “warmers” to a far higher standard."

Read the whole thing here.

Clocks, clocks, clocks and more clocks!

Man, slip up once and post a cuckoo clock (note the correct Swiss spelling this time) instead of a grrrl picture, and this is what you end up having to put up with. Anyhoo... for those fond of clocks, here are a bunch of weird clock links:

klockwerks - eccentric hand-made time pieces by Roger Wood.

Top Ten Strangest Clocks complied by Tech Blog. The Drill Sargent clock pictured in this post is a runner up, so you can imagine the winners.

Some very clever Photoshopped Clocks.

For the carpenters amongst us, make a wooden clock.

A site, with a video, explaining how a pendulum clock works.

The Longitude Prize.

Bah, who cares about these new fangled mechanical contraptions, the home page of the North American Sundial Association.

Everybody, even Wingnuts, like clocks.

Friday Links

Software radio.

Simpson's movie scenes.


Happiness is a warm electrode.

Mashups for the masses.

Birth of a sunspot. 6 days are shown.

Faces in places.

10 brilliant free movies online.

Parallel universes may be the right answer after all. Original paper, for the extremely intrepid.

Is this the dawning of the age of solar panels.

Norway doubts NATO reliability.

Introducing snoopr deals.

Weekly Links

Wonderful old maps brought back to digital life.

Finally! A place to rat out your neighbors.

The velociraptor had feathers.

11 free language courses now online.

Cat whiskers for humans.

Introducing lomography.

Real live pirates are still plying their trade for fun and profit.

Online photography tools.

Introducing Scriblink.

6 long-distance bike trails without cars.

On the verge of an epic bear market?

Beautiful kleptoplasty.

A critical view of software plus services.

Were the Hobbits of 18,000 years ago a distinct species?

Convicted Felon & Disbarred Attorney to teach ethics at Hofstra

Rick Moran at American Thinker reports that Hofstra Law School has invited convicted felon and disbarred attorney Lynne Stewart to speak about legal ethics on October 16.

The law school's press release makes no mention of Stewart's felony conviction for conspiracy and providing material support to terrorists. She was sentenced to 28 months in prison.

Stewart's website shows no remorse for her criminal acts.

Felony conviction brings automatic disbarment for New York attorneys.

The New York State Bar Association and the American Bar Association should weigh in on this matter and provide strong advice for Hofstra that it's not an acceptable practice for felons to be teaching ethics.

I blame it on the booze

"I put these bars on my windows, but still,
the next thing I knew I had a baboon in my living room."

Like my mother used to say, "Spare the rod and spoil the ape."

Achieving Irrelevance

I can remember times when the business press would fill with speculation as to the possibility of a strike by the UAW. Paragraph after paragraph on page upon page would explore the potential ramifications of an auto strike. Which automaker would the UAW select as a target? Would the economy slide into a recession due to the strike? How would the target company fare if the strike was of any duration?

Of course, when the UAW hit it's peak membership of 1.5 million in 1969, it represented over 2% of the entire workforce, whereas today it has managed to shrink to less than 500,000 members and now represents less than one-third of a per cent of the workforce. Calling 73,000 out on strike just doesn't have much fearful resonance in an economy which has added workers at a rate of well over 100,000 per month for years.

Gettlefinger is caught between that old rock and a very hard place. He's reduced to a pathetic "job security" plea as a result of Reuther's heavy handed tactics going back to the '50's. He has made no inroads worth mention in terms of organizing the Japanese plants and calling a strike that won't put an additional nickel in any worker's pocket is unlikely to help organizers in the future. Why in the world would Toyota workers (who receive regular production performance based raises) want anything to do with a union which is succeeding only at self euthanasia?

One might wonder how long this strike would last if Ford locked out in support of GM. The union cancer will eventually kill both of them unless it's excised and Ford has that nice 18 billion in debt that it raised a year ago - why not use it to to cut out the tumor?

Sunday Links

The day of Dr. McCoy draws ever nearer: detecting cancer with lasers without drawing blood.

But will it still be banned in Singapore?

The growing threat of private stock exchanges.

The weave mirror.

The 50 worst cars of all time.

Play to the death.

Swarmbots in action.

The other NRA.


What if Google were evil?

Farewell to Robert Jordan.

Quantum computing and Shor's algorithm. This is a highly technical albeit useful link. It was recently announced that quantum computers able to run Shor's algorithm have become available. This means that standard cryptography (e.g., used by banks) will be crackable very shortly. Expect the NSA, the People's Republic Army, and the Russian Mafia to be all over this.