What to do with the dead people
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Salon’s Carol Lay has the following suggestion for what to do with dead people:
Salon’s Carol Lay has the following suggestion for what to do with dead people:
Two laddies from villages in India just signed free-agent contracts with the Major League Baseball team The Pittsburgh Pirates. Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel were winners of a reality TV show called “Million Dollar Arm” that sought to find people who could pitch at 85 miles per hour. While a lot of MLB players are from countries as disparate as Cuba and Japan, this is the first time athletes from cricket loving India has signed on. Let’s hope they shine.
Worthy sequel to the first boymongoose video (thanks to Suman for the tip):
As has been rumored all of last week, the incomparable Tina Fey is indeed on SNL again, this time as Sarah Palin. This clip with Amy Poehler as usual playing Hillary Clinton, introduces us to the new season of Saturday Night Live. These two women, who recently starred in a movie called “Baby Mama” together, have got to be the funniest women in the country. Tina Fey is destined to play this role at least as long as Palin is in the national spotlight. In fact, I think she could even be a dupe for the latter if she, cough, becomes our president in a heartbeat.
Thank you, Lorne, for keeping us sane in these crazy times.
By now, I am sure you have heard that the largest particle accelerator ever built is about to go live. On September 10, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will attempt to circulate a beam through the 17 mile circular tunnel beneath the Franco-Swiss border. The first collisions are planned for late October when it will be officially unveiled.
Amidst doomsday reports of the possibility of a black hole being created by this collider and thus gobbling up the planet we call home, the physicists in the thick of things are working on improving their improv skills. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday on how the CERN physicists are honing their communication skills by taking lessons in improvisational comedy. Some of the gems coming out of this meeting of minds with above average IQs:
She: “Do my bosons give you a hadron?”
“Two protons walk into a black hole.” (end of joke)
“A neutron walks into a bar and asks how much the drinks cost. The bartender replies, ‘For you, no charge.’ ”
I have never heard of this guy before but he’s sure funny as hell:
This is not exactly new news but for the first time, the Department of Homeland Security is admitting that their border enforcement policies include confiscating electronic equipment such as laptops, cellphones, external hard disks, iPods, etc. This can be done without any reasonable cause of suspicion. According to The Washington Post:
The policies state that officers may “detain” laptops “for a reasonable period of time” to “review and analyze information.” This may take place “absent individualized suspicion.”
I first heard of this egregious policy a couple of months ago when computer security maven Bruce Schneier blogged about the ruling by a US court that border agents can do this with no restrictions. I have been traveling a lot internationally and often have my laptop (plus PDA, cellphone, flash drives, etc.) with me and so far the only untoward border incident has been me stupidly forgetting the laptop at the security conveyor belt at Washington, DC. (Luckily for me, it ended up in the TSA lost and found and I was able to have a friend pick it up and mail it to me.) But the odds of me being a victim of “profiling” are rather high and I am taking no chances in the future.
The obvious solution to avoid the scenario of not having your laptop for weeks (or in one case, months) is to not take one. Or for that matter, don’t take anything that you don’t want usurped at the border. Schneier has some other recommendations at his site.
Another option is to carry a content-free laptop with you. Recently, I purchased for my organization a laptop meant for just this purpose. The idea is to re-install the laptop with a new operating system (Opensolaris in our case) every time we cross the US border. We plan to do this both to and fro from our travels so that there is no trace left of our usage and more importantly no company confidential information. I also keep a cheap unlocked Motorola Razr phone for international roaming or local sim card use. And my ancient iPod still gets toted around. I don’t care if they usurp any of these from me. Though now I am seriously debating whether I should even carry my fancier dSLR abroad or just take my point and shoot.
If the goal of the terrorists was to make America more like some of the countries they come from, they have won the war already. I long for the day when we can transport ourselves by hologram.
You can read the full customs policy here.
Read about this in the WSJ today… in an op-ed expressing the need to educate the general public (i.e., us) about how safe nuclear reactors (the power generating ones) are. The video is pretty awesome:
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