Yostivanich

“The Repub­li­can National Com­mit­tee says it will be run­ning this new TV ad in Florida and on selected cable net­works start­ing Sept. 1. It fea­tures GOP Chair­man Michael Steele tout­ing the party’s “Seniors’ Bill of Rights,” which we said last week is a mix­ture of false, true and mis­lead­ing claims.”

“Poppy cul­ti­va­tion and pro­duc­tion in Afghanistan has decreased sharply, accord­ing to a United Nations report. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime says opium cul­ti­va­tion has dropped by 22% in a year and pro­duc­tion by 10%. The biggest falls have been in Hel­mand province, but lev­els remain higher than three years ago, when British troops began fight­ing Tal­iban mil­i­tants there.”

“An Iran­ian news agency says a young man arrested dur­ing post-election protests died after being beaten, and not from menin­gi­tis as police had first claimed. If con­firmed, it would be the first offi­cial sign that jailed pro­test­ers faced severe abuse, as alleged by some lead­ers of the oppo­si­tion move­ment.” I’m not shocked.

“Unem­ploy­ment in the 16 coun­tries that use the euro rose in July to the high­est level in more than 10 years, show­ing that despite signs of recov­ery, the Euro­pean econ­omy con­tin­ues to strug­gle. The job­less rate in the euro zone rose to 9.5 per­cent in July, the high­est read­ing since May 1999, from 9.4 per­cent in June, Euro­stat, the sta­tis­ti­cal ser­vice of the Euro­pean Union, said Tues­day in Luxembourg.”

“You can play the same game with his Bib­li­cal sce­nario in a lit­tle more detail and cal­cu­late pop­u­la­tions at var­i­ous times in his­tory: the world pop­u­la­tion was about 150,000 at the time of Alexan­der the Great, 600,000 when Jesus was born, 5 bil­lion when I was born. As usu­ally hap­pens with these kinds of bogus cal­cu­la­tions, our smath pro­fes­sor needs to use an invalid for­mula and apply it inap­pro­pri­ately to get num­bers that only match at the begin­ning and end of the time period he is exam­in­ing, but are so low as to be laugh­able at the ear­li­est times in his his­tory, and that don’t match up at all over peri­ods where we have good cen­sus data. Leav­ing death out of his cal­cu­la­tions is a tiny omis­sion that makes even that fudged num­ber wrong.”

“After 18 months of lay­offs, plant shut­downs and other declines, the country’s man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor grew in August, offer­ing another piece of evi­dence that the econ­omy was pulling out of reces­sion.” Good news.

“Very few com­pa­nies hold sound marks, but some of the more famous include: the NBC chimes and the MGM lion.” A trade­mark for a sound, that’s stupid.

“A Chilean judge has issued arrest war­rants for 129 peo­ple for allegedly help­ing to purge crit­ics of for­mer ruler Gen­eral Augusto Pinochet. The sus­pects — the largest group so far to face arrest war­rants — all worked for the secret police agency, Dina. They are accused of tak­ing part in killings and dis­ap­pear­ances of dozens of left­ists and oppo­si­tion activists. Since Gen Pinochet left power in 1990, arrests of his agents have been fre­quent — often divid­ing opin­ion.” Wow.

“Oil indus­try allies said the admin­is­tra­tion was engag­ing in favoritism and financ­ing pro­pa­ganda. “These are for-profit com­pa­nies, and basi­cally the Depart­ment of Energy is under­writ­ing their public-relations cam­paign,” said Daniel Kish, a spokesman for the Insti­tute for Energy Research, a con­ser­v­a­tive group fight­ing the pro­posed emis­sions caps.” It makes some sense till you read this. “The grants were announced by the Depart­ment of Energy last week along with $300 mil­lion in eco­nomic stim­u­lus money awarded to 25 projects to encour­age the use of cleaner and energy-efficient alter­na­tives to petro­leum. Most of the money will help pay for vehi­cles that run on alter­na­tive fuels or build infra­struc­ture to dis­trib­ute the fuels.” Oh that’s right it’s a grant and how much tax breaks do oil com­pa­nies get?

“Iran­ian MPs have strongly backed the defence minister-designate, in defi­ance of Argen­tine demands for his arrest over a 1994 bomb­ing in Buenos Aires. Ahmad Vahidi faced no oppo­si­tion from MPs on the third day of a debate on Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadinejad’s choices for his new cab­i­net. Inter­pol has dis­trib­uted Argentina’s war­rant for his arrest for an attack on a Jew­ish cen­tre that killed 85 people.”

“Last night, we wrote about another devel­oper thor­oughly bash­ing the app store for its inane approval poli­cies. This time it was well known devel­oper Joe Stump, who had an impor­tant bug-fix for his company’s game Chess Wars sit in App Store limbo for six weeks. Finally, this morn­ing an Apple rep­re­sen­ta­tive named Richard called Stump to inform him why Chess Wars was being rejected after the six week wait: the bub­bles in its chat rooms are too shiny, and Apple has trade­marked that bub­bly design. Yes, the App Store has reached a new low.” Because that makes sense.

“Such ran­dom­ness has prompted Tesco, the country’s largest gro­cery chain, to cre­ate its own weather team in hopes of bet­ter fore­cast­ing tem­per­a­tures and how con­sumer demand changes with them. After three years of research, the six-person team has cre­ated its own soft­ware that cal­cu­lates how shop­ping pat­terns change “for every degree of tem­per­a­ture and every hour of sun­shine,” Tesco said last month.” That’s cool and another exam­ple of com­put­ing power becom­ing a commodity.

“And all I can think is, how did these guys man­age to set up a sys­tem where peo­ple pay to drive traf­fic from one place on Face­book to another place on Face­book? Even Google hasn’t man­aged to fig­ure that one out yet. I’ve known they (and MySpace) have done this since launch­ing their ad plat­forms, but it never really hit home until today how bril­liant this all is.” Buy an ad on Face­book to send peo­ple to Facebook.

“Chief Pow­ers expressed his absolute con­fi­dence that they will save the Obser­va­tory. He said that while it may have appeared over the last day or so that the Obser­va­tory was being neglected, that they never lost sight of the impor­tance of Mount Wilson’s preser­va­tion and it is now their high­est pri­or­ity. He flew up to the moun­tain yes­ter­day, was delighted with what he found and knew they could achieve suc­cess here. There are now 150 fire fight­ers on Mount Wil­son. Not only are the crews from Calav­eras County (Cal Fire) back up there, but there are Los Ange­les County fire fight­ers and even a crew from Helena, Mon­tana. They have eight engines equipped to spray fire retar­dant on struc­tures in addi­tion to the crew engines. Chief Pow­ers told me this army of fire fight­ers is “not going any­where. They are very hard work­ing and tal­ented peo­ple who will get the job done.”” Awe­some news.

“A Pales­tin­ian youth, 15, has been shot dead by Israeli forces in an inci­dent out­side a set­tle­ment near the West Bank town of Ramallah.”

“To rephrase: I vis­ited a reli­gious space and took pic­tures. How ridicu­lous that any­one could believe in these things! Don’t they know how crazy they look? These sto­ries are ridicu­lous! These peo­ple have no hope! If only they could see things from my point of view, they would see the light.”

“I recently got my driver’s license and bought my first car. Obvi­ously the next step was get­ting the car reg­is­tered, and I was pleas­antly sur­prised to find that WWFSMD was avail­able as a van­ity plate! I quickly doled out the extra cash it would cost to have the plate, inspite of my par­ents objec­tions to the fact that “no one would know what it means.” I say that doesn’t mat­ter, other Pasta­far­i­ans will. Appar­ently there aren’t many around my small town, I won­der how many Pasta­far­i­ans will be in the city I’m going to for college?”