Category: Uncategorized

The cold war was ripe for all kinds of black humor, but this one blows me away. Especially given the basic computer security paranoia about changing your default passwords.

The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the “locks” to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO.

I have seen a great deal of badfilm over the years, but never have I seen anything like The Apple before. Or will again, as there’s only ever going to be room for one biblical dystopic glitter disco movie. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard at a horrible movie that didn’t have Mike and the bots peeking up from the bottom.

According to Movie Geek (of Beat The Geeks fame) who hosts the midnight movie series at the Nuart, there is going to be a DVD release. I can’t wait!

Stock prices in real-time = tired. Area gas prices in real-time = wired

Taking a cue from French regulations on bread making and German laws on beer production, the Italian government is creating legislation as to what is and isn’t real Neapolitan pizza.

It decrees that a Neapolitan pizza must be round and no more than 35 centimetres in diameter. The centre should not be higher than 0.3 cm and the crust cannot rise over two centimetres.

The law specifies what kind of flour, salt, and yeast and tomatoes have to be used. The sub clauses go even further.

Margherita, the classic type, must be topped not with just any type of mozzarella but mozzarella “from the southern Appenine” mountains.

And restauranteurs beware, you can’t call a pizza a “Margherita extra” unless it is topped with mozzarella made from buffalo milk, a southern Italian speciality.

Rolling pins are blasphemous and dough machines are heretical. The law says the dough must be kneaded by hand.

The CNN story is somewhat derisive and files this story under “News > Funny” but let’s hear it for a country that actually considers it’s cuisine to be part of it’s cultural heritage and worth protecting.

The manned space program (at least the non-NASA part of it) returns to where it all started – the dust, mothballed airplanes, tortoises, and old diners with magnetic flatware of the Antelope Valley.

The Federal Aviation Administration’s Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation (FAA/AST) is expected next month to certify that the Mojave Airport Civilian Flight Test Center as a non-federal spaceport to handle horizontal launches of reusable spacecraft.

Check out Alan’s Mojave Airport weblog while you’re at it.

A public service announcement to all readers: when was the last time you backed up your files?

For when (and it is a when) your hard drive starts making the sound of oil hitting a scalding hot wok, you’ll want that recent back up. The one nice side effect of having my hard drive explode is that I get to start over with a fresh pile of music to listen to. Hooray for DVD-R drives.

Ugh, so I just found out that my quiet and out of the way neighborhood here in Long Beach is going to be invaded by the MTV Beach House for the next two weeks. Belmont Shore is the last quiet and remotely affordable place to live on the coast, so of course it has to ground zero for a new gentrification of trustafarians.

LBReport.com was the first LB media outlet to report that MTV’s Beach House — an annual summer television series seen nationwide on the NY-based music television network — is planning to originate in part from the Belmont Shore beachfront.

The publicity coup of having a nationally telecast MTV series originate from LB’s beachfront — showcasing the city as a hip, cool summer location for millions of demographically desirable viewers — came to light after a snafu in which a number of area residents say they were initially kept in the dark by City Hall, then got misinformation from someone.

….

MTV VJ’s Quddus Phillippe, Damien Fahey, Vanessa Minnillo, Hilarie Burton and LaLa Vasquez kick off the summer programming on Monday, May 31st in Long Beach, CA, with a week long TRL dedicated to “Spankin’ New Presents: Sounds of Summer Week” featuring live performances by Nelly and Murphy Lee, New Found Glory, Ashlee Simpson and more.

Godfuckingdamn, I don’t want “demographically desirable” anything in my neighborhood! Traffic and parking is difficult enough as it is without the 700 people MTV is bringing in (hilariously MTV apparently has to import their own hipsters) plus however many MTV choads in Southern California that feel the need to invade. Sigh… Kill me now.

The New Yorker profile of hard-boiled Kiwi squid scientist Steve O’Shea wins.

We then headed to his university office, where he had to gather various things for the expedition. It was in an attic-like space, and seemed entirely devoted to what he described as his “lunatic obsession.” Pasted to the walls and stacked on tables were pictures, many of which he had sketched himself, of giant squid, colossal squid, broad squid, warty squid, leopard squid. In addition, there were squid toys, squid key chains, squid journals, squid movies, and squid-related newspaper clippings (“warning! giant flying squid attacking vessels off australia”). On the floor were dozens of glass jars filled with dead squid that had been preserved in alcohol, their eyes and tentacles pressing against the glass.

Hooray for American health care…

One morning in January, the 22-year-old woke up in the hospital with her long hair pulled up on one side into a ponytail. On the other, she was bald, with only skin and sutures covering an area where nearly half her skull had been removed. She stayed that way for almost four months, a dent in her head showing where her skull had been taken out to save her life following a car accident.

After Lane was released from hospital in February, her skull remained in a hospital freezer while paperwork changed hands between the hospital and Medicaid to determine who’d pay for the surgery to make Lane whole again.

“When you think of weird things happening to people you don’t think of that,” said the former waitress. “It’s like taking out someone’s heart – you need that!”

…..

Waking up in the morning, she would notice how her brain had shifted during the night to one side. She was given a plastic street hockey helmet to wear during the day for protection.

“You’d think they could give me something better protective,” said Lane. “Like a skull, perhaps.”

Lane blames the delay in her surgery to bureaucratic red tape between the University of Utah Health Sciences Center and Medicaid. Without funds to pay for the surgery herself, a frustrated and unemployed Lane eventually contacted a local television station, a move which she believes hastened the surgery.

“All of a sudden – top of the list!” she said.

But, she said, an uninsured, low-income patient in Lane’s situation must wait for a Medicaid disability ruling to come through, a process that takes 90 days from the time of the initial discharge from hospital. Alternately, the physician could expedite surgery by considering it an emergency and signing a certificate of need, but the patient would still be responsible for payment. The hospital did not initially consider the second surgery an emergency, Brillinger said.

Medicaid refused to pay after it was decided Lane did not meet the insurance program’s disability requirements, said Robert Knudson, Utah Department of Health’s director of eligibility services.

Note to self: read this before considering grad school

What does one say to a newly-minted Ph.D. in Economics immediately after graduation? One says this:

“Congratulations. You’ve done it. Take a deep breath and be proud of yourself. You’ve not only done it, you’ve landed a tenure-track job. You’ve not only landed a tenure-track job, but the fact that you had more than one offer means that over the next several years you’ll not only be much better paid but you’ll also teach less than you have in the years just past.

“But don’t think your life will be easy. In six years your university will send out for letters, asking outsiders whether you should be given tenure. What the letter-writers will say about you in year six depends on the articles of yours that they have read in year five. Since nobody reads the journals cover to cover anymore, they will read in year five only those articles published in year four that others have told them are worth reading. To get an article published in year four, you must submit the final draft to the journal after year two.

Thus you need, for the next two years, to work harder than you have ever worked in your life: what you produce in the next two years plays an extraordinarily large role in making your long-run academic reputation.”

“I was going to wait until tomorrow before saying that to him,” says one Berkeley professor. “You’re the second professor to have told me that today,” says one newly-minted Berkeley Ph.D.