Category: Uncategorized

Nice photograph of the Southern Sierra and Owens Valley (my old tromping grounds!) as seen from the International Space Station.

Flipped on CNBC World this morning and the first thing I hear is the world market scoreboard described as a “Wall Of Fear” followed by the news crawl mentioning the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Djindjic.

Good morning indeed…

UPDATE: The BBC reports on the European market slide. Choice quote:

And Germany is now in the grips of a market downturn worse than it suffered in the Great Depression, calculations at investment bank Merrill Lynch have revealed.

“There’s one word for it – carnage. It’s horrible,” said Richard Wright, at brokerage GNI in London.

The BBC reports

Jewish settlers are offering special “terror tours” of the West Bank and Gaza, in which tourists will be trained to fire weapons and participate in mock fights with Arab militants.

The four-day excursion will include aerial tours of “terrorist” enclaves and a chance to sit in the cockpit of a fighter-plane capable of delivering nuclear bombs.

“There’s a lot of the ‘wow’ factor, like going up in an army helicopter and firing machine guns,” organiser Jake Greenwald told BBC News Online, “but it is also aimed at training people in how to deal with a terrorist situation”.

Mr Greenwald said it was also a way of attracting thrill-seekers to Israel at a time when tourism is suffering because of the violence with the Palestinians.

The Pioneer Press has a nice story about the Vertebrats and their classic power pop song “Left In The Dark”

…just realize that you could be in Heavy Seas. A mind-croggling collection of photographs of big waves and heavy seas taken from tankers, drilling rigs, etc. I’m in awe of the topmost photograph of a 100 foot wave getting ready to blow out a 2″ thick glass porthole.

Fauxdunk: a small town whose original 5 & 10, feed store, and greasy spoon have been replaced by art galleries, antique shops, and Starbucks.

John Kiesling was a career diplomat who has served in United States embassies from Tel Aviv to Casablanca to Yerevan. He just submitted his letter of resignation to Colin Powell. Pretty strong stuff and worth reading…

It is inevitable that during twenty years with the State Department I would become more sophisticated and cynical about the narrow and selfish bureaucratic motives that sometimes shaped our policies. Human nature is what it is, and I was rewarded and promoted for understanding human nature. But until this Administration it had been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president I was also upholding the interests of the American people and the world. I believe it no longer.

The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America?s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.

DroneOn has been talking about field recording techniques lately which led to the following links (which I’m putting into The Record here)

Quiet American

Hours and hours of field recordings of everyday life in Vietnam: Folks walking down the street, children leaving school, ambient restaurant noise, etc. Good info on recording tips, gear, and a detailed list of other resources.

Fallt Publishing – Invisible Cities

An art installation that brings together 20 different recordings from 20 different cities.

Phonography.org

Pretty much home base for the avid field recorder. Lots of interesting sounds from all over here.

In 1968, Doug Engelbart at SRI demoed NLS, a computer system the research group had been working on for six years. Engelbart shows off a mouse, hyperlinking, network collaboration, file cut/copy/paste – pretty much everything that we think of as the fundamentals of computer interfacing a full fifteen years before they became commercial. Check out the video of the 1968 demonstration.

Hey, I thought they were supposed to be denying this sort of stuff?

Yesterday at approximately 4 p.m. (EST) North American Aerospace Defense Command received unverified reports of what appeared to be a contrail of unknown origin in the vicinity of the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. Initially, it was reported to be heading northwestward toward the United States. Commercial airline pilots later reported the contrail over Florida and later over Indiana. Thereafter, no other sightings were reported.

NORAD scrambled fighter aircraft from several bases in an attempt to intercept and identify the source of the contrail. No visual or confirmed radar contact was made with the source of the contrail. NORAD continues to investigate these reports. NORAD is coordinating with the FAA to determine any further information on the nature of these reports.