Month: November 2002

French Intellectuals to be Deployed in Afghanistan To Convince Taleban of Non-Existence of God

So good, it needs to be posted…

The ground war in Afghanistan hotted up yesterday when the Allies revealed plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialist philosophers into the country to destroy the morale of Taleban zealots by proving the non-existence of God.

Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or ‘Black Berets’, will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy. Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during their long occupation of Paris’s Left Bank, their first action will be to establish a number of pavement cafes at strategic points near the front lines. There they will drink coffee and talk animatedly about the absurd nature of life and man’s lonely isolation in the universe. They will be accompanied by a number of heartbreakingly beautiful girlfriends who will further spread dismay by sticking their tongues in the philosophers’ ears every five minutes and looking remote and unattainable to everyone else.

Their leader, Colonel Marc-Ange Belmondo, spoke yesterday of his confidence in the success of their mission. Sorbonne graduate Belmondo, a very intense and unshaven young man in a black pullover, gesticulated wildly and said, “The Taleban are caught in a logical fallacy of the most ridiculous. There is no God and I can prove it. Take your tongue out of my ear, Juliet, I am talking.”

Marc-Ange plans to deliver an impassioned thesis on man’s nauseating freedom of action with special reference to the work of Foucault and the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

However, humanitarian agencies have been quick to condemn the operation as inhumane, pointing out that the effects of passive smoking from the Frenchmens’ endless Gitanes could wreak a terrible toll on civilians in the area.

Sioux City, Iowa’s airport may no longer SUX

Until then, it really SUX.

SIOUX CITY, Iowa – The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after denying a request by Sioux City officials to change its official three-letter airport code from SUX to another designation, may reverse its decision.

Airport Director Larry Hobald said the western Iowa municipality appealed the ruling after the FAA refused its initial request made last March.

“We feel vindicated and hopeful,” said Sioux City chamber of commerce spokesperson Wendy Warf. “Residents here are quite conservative and are embarrassed when tourists and relatives ask why “SUX” tags have been attached to their luggage.”

They Saved Baader-Meinhof’s Brains!

Nothing like an absolutely weird and random story to brighten the day…

BERLIN, Germany — The brains of three members of the infamous Baader-Meinhof Gang of German urban guerrillas have disappeared, a laboratory said on Monday.

Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were members of the gang that waged a campaign of killings, bombings and kidnappings against the West German establishment in the 1970s.

After the three extreme leftists committed suicide in prison in 1977, their brains were taken to a university hospital in southern Tuebingen for autopsy, but the brains are no longer there and their whereabouts are unknown.

Welcome to Isla California

isla_california We always knew that California was culturally separate from the rest of the U.S. and for a little over a hundred years in the 17th Century it was geographically separate too.

Anyway, I was looking for some images of the “Isla California” map today and discovered that not only are there a lot of different variations of the map – it’s also a popular subcategory for map collectors.

Some fun facts cribbed from the PRigsbee site…

The “California as an island” map originated in 1625 when British cartographer Henry Briggs used reports from Spanish sailors that had mistakenly combined the Gulf of California and San Francisco Bay. Briggs’ map was picked up by Dutch and then German mapmakers who in their hurry to crank out new maps perpetuated the mistake which continued until 1747 when King Ferdinand VII of Spain declared that California was not an island.

Which leads to a question: Is that decree on display in the Spanish archives somewhere? I’d love to see it.

As for the future, there’s always the complete meltdown of the polar caps, but until then we’ve got that John Carpenter movie to hold us.

Got crypto?

Chief cypherpunk John Gilmore tells it like it is:

The US government’s moves to impose totalitarian control in the last year (secret trials, enemies lists, massive domestic surveillance) are what some of the more paranoid among us have been expecting for years.
I was particularly amused by last week’s comments from the Administration that it’ll be too hard to retrain the moral FBI agents
who are so careful of our civil rights — so we’ll need a new
domestic-spying agency that will have no compunctions about violating
our civil rights and wasting our money by spying on innocent people.

While there’s plenty of fodder for argument among the details, the
overall thrust of the effort seems pretty clear.

Now’s a great time to deploy good working encryption, everywhere you
can. Next month or next year may be too late. And even honest ISPs,
banks, airlines (hah), etc, may be forced by law or by secret pressure
to act as government spies. Make your security work end-to-end.

Got STARTTLS?
Got IPSEC?
Got SSH?

Use it or lose it.

What Protects the French From Heart Disease?

Science marches onward and takes another crack at the “French Paradox” – a term that doctors, nutritionists, and their like refer to the French diet paradox. The French eat fatty food, smoke, and drink more than other western country, yet they have lower risks of heart disease. Is it the wine? Not really, but it is cultural…

So, I looked around the world at eating habits, and ended up focussing on France. If one thing above all stands out about French culture, in relation to British culture, it is their attitude to food and eating. The average Brit treats meals as a refuelling exercise, the French, most clearly, do not. They spend hours eating meals, relaxing, enjoying the food. It is a social occasion.

…

Anyway, to return to the question posed in the title of this article. What protects the French? I think it is clear that they are protected not by what they eat, but by how they eat. By eating in a relaxed fashion they do not pit the system of anabolism and catabolism against each other, they do not trigger insulin resistance, and hyperglycaemic spikes, and therefore they do not damage the endothelium in the prandial/post-prandial state. Vive la France!

Vive la France indeed!