by Chris Barrus
I didn’t have a decent-enough filter on me to take a direct picture of the eclipse, but the shadow pictures turned out rather nice. Here’s what it looked like from UC Irvine. It’s kinda cool to be able to walk out of my office and immediately see this on the wall.
First in a series of articles on Kuro5hin on room acoustics. Essential knowledge for the home recorder.
A big pile of mostly Soviet radio transmissions and transponders from manned and unmanned satellites.
This is cool… Punch in the URL (or upload) of an image and this page will generate the X-Face code for you.
Charles Dodgson of The Looking Glass ‘blog nails it in regards to the “Homeland Security Department”:
The problem in the runup to September 11th, it is increasingly plain, was that the FBI and CIA had plenty of information concerning the people and the plan, but failed to make good use of it. The agencies failed to distribute critical information to each other, and headquarters failed to distribute critical information to agents that could have used it in the field.
The proposed solution is a government reorganization which doesn’t touch the FBI and CIA, but combines other agencies including the Secret Service (which handles counterfeiting), the Coast Guard (which handles rescue and shore safety), Customs (which does revenue and tariff enforcement), the INS (which issues tourist visas) and so forth into a single agency which will focus on counterterrorism.
The intelligence problems are addressed by creating a center within the new agency which will review intelligence gathered by other agencies (FBI, CIA, apparently, NSA).
So — the problem of turf wars between the FBI and CIA is dealt with by giving them both a new agency to fight with, the problem of information hoarding at headquarters is dealt with by establishing a new hoard of information at headquarters, and we also improve matters by imposing a new layer of centralized bureaucracy on agencies which (with the possible exception of INS) didn’t have much to do with the problem.
But it does have strong bipartisan support in Congress.
What could possibly go wrong?
And we haven’t even addressed the issue of zero civil liberties after this…
As you may be aware, most of your low-powered devices come with what’s known as a “wallwart,” an external transformer pack which hangs off of the wall. Please stop using wallwarts for everything.
Yesterday and today, Democracy Now! ran a pretty good radio documentary on the infiltration of the left by the US government during the COINTELPRO years. MP3s are available on their site.
Kuro5hin links to a series of articles on some stone maps that have been found in China.
Cosmiverse, Pravda and Outside Asylum have a rather interesting series of articles about some stone maps that have been found in China that may date to some 120 million years ago. The map appears to be a topographical relief map done on a scale 1 : 1.1 Kilometers. To blockquote:
The map indicates the use of civil engineering to create a system of channels about 12,000 km in length and 500 meters wide, and 12 dams that are 300-500 meters wide.
Their work is being peer reviewed in the scientific community, so there is some hope and reasonable possibility that this is not a hoax.
Build your own gauss gun out of a ruler, a couple of magnets, and some steel ball bearings.
