Yostivanich

“Could astronomers acci­den­tally blind Earth-observing satel­lites? That seems to be the worry of the US air force, which restricts the use of lasers pointed at the sky to help focus tele­scopes. But some astronomers warn they will miss key obser­va­tions under the rules, which have tight­ened in recent years. About half to two-thirds of the objects astronomers seek to observe have off-limits peri­ods, or clo­sures, in a given night, the report adds. These peri­ods last a few sec­onds to a few min­utes each. But it is not clear how sen­si­tive the satel­lites’ optics are, or how likely a given laser is to directly hit a satellite’s optics, since details on some US Depart­ment of Defense satel­lites are not pub­licly released. The air force sim­ply takes astronomers’ pro­posed laser-assisted obser­va­tions and tells them when to turn the lasers off after crunch­ing its own data on satel­lite orbits.”

“Here’s a lit­tle story to show just how thor­oughly Google’s long-awaited chat­ting tool, called Google Wave, can kill your mood to chat: The other day, I was “wav­ing” with Zach Frechette, the edi­tor of GOOD mag­a­zine. Nat­u­rally, we were talk­ing about the new site’s mer­its and flaws. As we went back and forth, I had a tiny epiphany. I wanted to tell Zach that I thought Wave would have a much tougher time catch­ing on than Twit­ter, because it was ask­ing so much more of its users. The trou­ble is, every­thing you type into Wave is trans­mit­ted live, in real time—every key­stroke was get­ting sent to Zach just as I hit it. This made me too self-conscious to get my thoughts across.” I agree.

“Over­all, Branas’s study found that peo­ple who car­ried guns were 4.5 times as likely to be shot and 4.2 times as likely to get killed com­pared with unarmed cit­i­zens. When the team looked at shoot­ings in which vic­tims had a chance to defend them­selves, their odds of get­ting shot were even higher.”

“The Arc­tic Ocean could be largely ice-free and open to ship­ping dur­ing the sum­mer in as lit­tle as ten years’ time, a top polar spe­cial­ist has said.”

“Sen. Sher­rod Brown (D-OH) and 29 of his col­leagues have sent a let­ter to Sen­ate Major­ity Leader Harry Reid sup­port­ing a pub­lic option.”

“U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said today there will be a “pub­lic option” in what­ever health insur­ance reform bill comes out of Congress.”

“A man put to death in 2004 for killing his three chil­dren was “a mon­ster,” and sug­ges­tions that he may have been inno­cent are anti-death penalty pro­pa­ganda, Gov. Rick Perry said Wednes­day. Foren­sic sci­en­tists have called into ques­tion arson evi­dence used to con­vict Will­ing­ham, who main­tained his inno­cence until his death. John Jack­son, the Navarro County pros­e­cu­tor who argued the case, still believes Will­ing­ham is guilty, but acknowl­edges it would have been hard to win a death sen­tence with­out the arson find­ing.” The New Yorker did a piece on this and it was pretty clear that Will­ing­ham was wrongly executed.

“As many com­men­ta­tors have noted, the Nobel Prize appears to have been moti­vated in part by anti-Bush sen­ti­ment, which makes Hannity’s sug­ges­tion par­tic­u­larly absurd. After all, George W. Bush engaged in the tor­ture of detainees, waged an unpro­voked and ille­gal war, and brought about the largest protests in his­tory against U.S. poli­cies — hardly behav­ior that is fit­ting for a Nobel Peace Prize.”

“Stu­pid is a con­di­tion. Igno­rance is a choice.”

“The pack­age, which Mr Kerry co-authored with Sen­a­tor Richard Lugar, triples non-military aid to Pak­istan to an annual out­lay of $1.5bn for five years. The Kerry-Lugar bill set sev­eral con­di­tions for the aid to Pak­istan. Under the bill, the sec­re­tary of state will have to cer­tify peri­od­i­cally that Pak­istan is work­ing to dis­man­tle the ille­gal nuclear pro­lif­er­a­tion net­works. The US also has to cer­tify that Pak­istan is no longer sup­port­ing mil­i­tant groups. The aid money will be spent on var­i­ous devel­op­ment projects.”

“That would give the Kerry-Graham bill a fight­ing chance, espe­cially if an addi­tional vote or two — pos­si­bly John McCain’s — can also be picked up as a result of the nuclear energy com­pro­mise. Of course, that’s assum­ing that no lib­er­als would rebel against the new pro­vi­sions, but the oppo­si­tion to both off­shore drilling and nuclear energy seems to be fairly soft in the lib­eral cau­cus. I would not place money on the cli­mate bill pass­ing this year, but the odds would seem to be a lot bet­ter with the drilling com­pro­mise in place.”

“The Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle Why Email No Longer Rules is mak­ing the rounds online. Fast Com­pany pro­vided a fast response, high­light­ing the tech­ni­cal short­com­ings of try­ing to replace email with Face­book and Twit­ter (where do the attach­ments go?). Email Ser­vice Guide points out that Face­book and Twit­ter are inef­fec­tive for one-off com­mu­ni­ca­tions. With Google Wave on the hori­zon, we’ll prob­a­bly have to go through the whole cha­rade yet again.” Noth­ing to add but WSJ is wrong.

“US Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Clin­ton has told the BBC that Rus­sia now recog­nises the threat posed by Iran. Wrap­ping up a Euro­pean tour in Moscow, Mrs Clin­ton said Russ­ian lead­ers had in pri­vate said they were ready to act if Tehran did not meet its oblig­a­tions. But Prime Min­is­ter Vladimir Putin, on a visit to China, said it was too early to talk about sanc­tions on Iran. Russ­ian For­eign Min­is­ter Sergei Lavrov said on Tues­day that threats of sanc­tions were counter-productive.”

“It’s all worth a read, but once again it’s hard to lis­ten to AT&T’s argument’s for net neu­tral­ity when it con­cludes the let­ter by say­ing it’s against changes in pol­icy in the first place. Still, AT&T does raise some inter­est­ing points, and it’s likely we’ll be hear­ing sim­i­lar debates as the line between telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion ser­vices and Inter­net ser­vices con­tin­ues to blur. For now though, the FCC doesn’t seem to buy­ing the net neu­tral­ity angle.” Both are in the wrong.

“You see Elisa, despite the fact that seem­ingly every­where I turn in San Fran­cisco I see another one of your new ads on a bus shel­ter some­where, the mes­sage rings hol­low. It’s dou­ble­s­peak. It’s inau­then­tic.” Yahoo and their sense of free­dom on Flickr.

“While the study shows that com­pa­nies invest­ing in top-of-the-range telep­res­ence and tele­phony sys­tems get the most return, even orga­ni­za­tions deploy­ing just basic col­lab­o­ra­tive tools (like IM and web con­fer­enc­ing) reap a return on col­lab­o­ra­tive invest­ment of over two times. The study sug­gests this is because teams using col­lab­o­ra­tive tools can ben­e­fit from a net­work effect — the more users on a net­work, the more value is real­ized from it.” My cur­rent work­place needs to use more col­lab­o­ra­tive tools.

“Accord­ing to the report, every per­son in Fin­land (a lit­tle over 5 mil­lion peo­ple, accord­ing to a 2009 esti­mate) will have the right of access to a 1Mb broad­band con­nec­tion start­ing in July. And they may ulti­mately gain the right to a 100Mb broad­band con­nec­tion.” Can you say awesome.

“Our Louisville KY web design team cre­ated this quick ref­er­ence guide to expe­dite our Word­Press theme devel­op­ment, and we found it so use­ful that we would like to share it with you.” Awe­some tool.

“US Pres­i­dent Barack Obama may announce a sub­stan­tial surge in US troops to Afghanistan, the BBC has been told.” I’m not surprised.

“Pro­posed last week by Repub­li­can Sens. David Vit­ter of Louisiana and Bob Ben­nett of Utah, the amend­ment would exclude ille­gal immi­grants from the pop­u­la­tion count used to allo­cate con­gres­sional seats after the 2010 Cen­sus. It also would require the Cen­sus to ask peo­ple whether they are cit­i­zens. Since the first Cen­sus in 1790, the bureau has rou­tinely asked in var­i­ous sur­veys whether peo­ple are native-born or foreign-born, but it has never asked about legal sta­tus.” Have to admit that does make sense.

“His­tory remem­bers Ben­ito Mus­solini as a founder mem­ber of the orig­i­nal Axis of Evil, the Ital­ian dic­ta­tor who ruled his coun­try with fear and forged a dis­as­trous alliance with Nazi Ger­many. But a pre­vi­ously unknown area of Il Duce’s CV has come to light: his brief career as a British agent.”

“In more than a decade of lob­by­ing for this law, its sup­port­ers have never shown that state offi­cials are let­ting peo­ple get away with mur­der, or lesser crimes of vio­lence, when the vic­tims belong to his­tor­i­cally oppressed groups. Instead they have pre­sented the leg­is­la­tion as a lit­mus test of antipa­thy toward vio­lent big­ots and sym­pa­thy for their vic­tims. Given this fram­ing, it’s sur­pris­ing the law’s oppo­nents man­aged to resist it for so long, when all they had on their side was the Con­sti­tu­tion and basic prin­ci­ples of jus­tice.” One of the many rea­sons Rea­son stands out as an excel­lent magazine.

“The cul­tural elit­ism that tinges culi­nary local­ism is by no means inher­ent. Still, it’s hard to say that it’s not there. And how­ever ingrained it may be, such exclu­siv­ity is hardly a pre­con­di­tion for com­mu­nity cohe­sion. The­o­ret­i­cally, this per­sis­tent exclu­siv­ity could change, but for now it seems as if the loca­vore move­ment might very well be alien­at­ing many Amer­i­can con­sumers who might oth­er­wise be will­ing to think about, and act upon, the agri­cul­tural prob­lems that weigh so heav­ily upon us.”

“By attack­ing Malkin’s pol­i­tics with an assault on women of every polit­i­cal per­sua­sion, and then indi­cat­ing a desire to see her phys­i­cally harmed, it sug­gests that Keith Olber­mann only likes women if they agree with him. And if they don’t? They’re obvi­ously just stu­pid Val­ley girls who deserve a good beat­ing.” Sex­ism needs to be called out no mat­ter who does it.

“Ralph Lauren’s cloth­ing com­pany fired the model whose body looked ema­ci­ated in a touched-up ad because she weighed too much, the woman told the Daily News Tues­day. Fil­ippa Hamil­ton — whose hips appeared slim­mer than her head in the recent altered ad — said her con­tract was ter­mi­nated in April because she was too heavy.” Seriously?

“This morn­ing we’ve been hav­ing a heated dis­cus­sion at the Hack a Day offices (read: legion of doom) over Dyson’s new offer­ing, a “blade­less fan”. At first this seemed extremely excit­ing, but how is the air being moved? We were hop­ing for a device oper­at­ing via ionic wind but that’s sim­ply not the case. Some of us think the blade­less claim is an out­right lie, oth­ers under­stand it from a mar­ket­ing stance, but we all agree: a fan with blades is still mov­ing the air.”

“I’ve never legit got­ten to break a story before, but I just found out that some news I’ve known for 24 hours is now pub­lic: Prince­ton will have a gender-neutral hous­ing option start­ing in this spring’s hous­ing lot­tery for the 2010-11 school year.” Very cool.