Mailbox baseball

Read.  That is all.

I'm slightly frightened to realize that I know this guy.

Random newsy bits

California Assembly Bill 1200 would change California's motorcycle helmet law to allow riders aged 18 and over to choose to ride without a helmet.  Assemblyman John Longville (D-San Bernardino) of California has introduced an amendment to the bill which would make those who choose to ride helmetless automatic organ donors if killed in a crash.

Personally, I don't have too much of an ethical problem with this, as if they receive head injuries in a crash they'll expect medical treatment for their injuries.  You don't want to be an organ donor, wear a frelling helmet.

What's your call?

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Product placement: "Now he says, 'Mom, you named me after a box!' I say, 'Yeah, but it's a good, strong name.' "  Is it just me, or do some of these parents need a good LARTing?  I can't help but wonder how long it'll be before the first lawsuit from Disney for brand dilution.

The Blue Light: Dell and HP have lined up behind the Blu-Ray blue-laser DVD standard, joining Hitachi, LG Electronics, Philips Electronics, Sony and Thomson.  However, the DVD Forum, an alliance of some 220 DVD companies including electronics and media firms, supports the rival technology from Toshiba and NEC.  Well, maybe we'll end up with only two competing blue-laser DVD standards, instead of five for red-laser DVDs... the deciding factor may turn out to be which format Hollywood goes with, as they're expected to support only one.

Small potatoes: And you thought "disk spud" was just geek slang...

Life on Mars

The Washington Post quotes the London Daily Telegraph quoting speculative details about a possible profile for a manned Mars mission.  It's a shame the guy from the Telegraph fails to understand what he just wrote (working from NASA notes, obviously) about how much of the mission will be spent in zero-G.

C'mon, guys, Mars has about a third of a gee.  For a trip that long, NASA's been talking for years about designing a ship that can be spun on a tether to provide artificial gravity.  It would even be entirely feasible to adjust the spin rate during the mission, to vary between a third of a G at the Mars end and about, say, two-thirds G at the Earth end, in both directions.  This would likely almost eliminate mineral loss and provide progressive gravity acclimation throughout the trip.

(Linky from koyote)

Your tax dollars at work

The gummint is going ahead with CAPPS II despite airline opposition.  I believe it can be shown that CAPPS II is AT LEAST as susceptible as CAPPS to "safe" probing to determine which of your operatives are unlikely to be selected for additional screening, and the "registered traveler" program alluded to in the article leads me to believe that it is now possible to arrange (at the cost of a period of advance work) to make your selected operatives LESS likely than the average passenger to be screened.

Ummmm.........

Brings new meaning to "Waiter, there's a fly in my soup..."

Halt! Friend or Pho?

I've just been reminded of the occasion upon which I was persuaded to meet some fellow ICB geeks for lunch at a pho house in north San José.  (During the course of this lunch I discovered that I find pho noodles to be horrible inedible mush ... but I digress.)

I looked down the menu at the available pho selections, and saw one with eggs.

"Hmm," I thought, "eggs are good."  So I ordered that.

"Are you sure?" the waiter wanted to know.  He proceeded to explain to me, in English that wasn't so much broken as shattered, that what I'd ordered had eggs in it, and managed to convey that chickens were somehow involved in the transaction.

"Yes," I said.  "I like eggs."

Well, shortly afterward, my intended lunch arrived.  It did, indeed, contain eggs.  This is the point at which I discovered the key detail which neither the waiter nor the menu had managed to adequately convey, which was that the eggs in question were still on the production line and — as a matter of fact — still attached to the means of production.

Trust me on this:  There are some very strange things inside a chicken.

Iraq war "a strategic error of the first order"

( Error: Irreparable invalid markup in entry. Raw contents behind the cut. )

Iraqi Kurdish entrepreneurs now US military suppliers

Humvees attached to the US 4th Infantry Division are being retrofitted with improvised armor by a Kurdish-owned metalworking shop in Kirkuk.  The up-armored Humvees receive 8mm steel rear compartment "tubs" and doors that are proof against machinegun fire and roadside bombs.