Live from the Nuke Free Zone

I’ve been stumbling about to find some ideas for another single-topic post, but the day’s been a day that belongs in the class of those days, and I’m kinda tottering around the edge of sentience. So for this evening, I bring you P of a type both M and L!

First and foremost, I’d like to toot someone else’s horn. On my meandering through the TTLB Echosystem, I discovered the blog Silence is Consent. It’s mainly a linkpost blog, but the combination of the blogger’s Must Reads and the variety of sources and topics he uses for his news means that you’re required by the Law of Zibblsnrt to at least give it a look-see.

Elsewhere, James over at Cyborg Democracy summarizes the International Telecommunication Union’s relatively recent “Digital Access Index,” ranking a number of countries based on how accessible information of all kinds are. The top ten is dominated mainly by social democracies, which kinda makes you wonder. Access to information is a Good Thing, of course; I don’t buy much into the idea of information overload, and the fact that I’m writing this and you’re reading this should say something about both our perspectives on creating and spreading knowledge of all types.

Over at Collective Sigh we had the news that the White House is trying to make more humane land mines in what certainly sounds like a crushing defeat for the forces of Common Sense. BBC News‘ take on it, “US promises ’safer’ landmines,” has ever so slight a tinge of irony about it. While the idea is good on paper - mines with a set lifespan Need to Be, if just so we have fewer Afghanistans amputating peoples’ feet at the hip at the rate of some thirty a day - I’d rather see Washington get around to buying into the landmine ban treaties. Their rationale for continuing to use them - protecting the Korean DMZ - would have made more sense in the sixties or early seventies, but a thirty-minute delay in an invasion which is more and more unlikely does not strike me as enough to justify supporting and accepting the use of these things over the entire world.

Over in Haiti, the rebels are beginning to prepare an attack on Port-au-Prince. The revolution against President Aristide, and US troops are preparing to be deployed - albeit only to evacuate embassy personnel. Apparently, the Bush administration is falling into the trap of believing everyone’s rational in war, and claim to be pursuing a diplomatic solution, which strikes me as a bit late and a bit silly. Various Caribbean countries have been calling for a UN force to be deployed in the country. While I don’t believe this has the potential to get all Rwanda on us like many of the revolutions and civil wars of the 1990s, I do believe that there needs to be some kind of international force deployed, even just under a Chapter Six mandate, to put the place back together in a way that means it’ll stay that way for a bit. The news is making it sound like it will simply be an American intervention, which doesn’t sit well with me considering the track record of the last two administrations. Besides, I’d love to see the Monroe Doctrine finally die a deserved death.

Primis discovers a geneology site which includes a list of presidents who married their cousins. I leave interpretation of this as an exercise to the reader, save to say that geneologists worry me at times.

Via Slashdot, the New Scientist gives us an example of how to write sensationalism while discussing engineering flu strains to try and come up with more effective vaccines. The flu’s a nasty critter to try and vaccinate against in the first place, considering it mutates more often than Donald Rumsfeld’s casus belli, but I wouldn’t mind seeing more things that can help reduce it to the status of inconvinience. Granted, I also think there’s more important diseases to go after, like what’s left of the polio epidemic and the like. While there are risks to almost any kind of medical research, I think that reacting to it by howling about terrorism and megadeaths as the primary point of an article is not only insulting to the specialists working on this, it’s also irresponsible journalism. In more pleasant medical news, the FDA approved the use of Avastin, a medication which can apparently treat advanced stages of colon cancer. It isn’t a cure as much as a delayer or an assistant alongside other treatments, but hey, it’s still cool.

And last but not least, I was pleasantly surprised by Warrior Tang when he noted that The CBC of all things has put out an article about the latest space elevator breakthroughs. Not only does the article actually use the word “unobtanium,” which scores it points on its own, but it’s a fairly detailed and lengthly coverage of the subject in a major news source. Although a dismaying chunk of it’s FUDladen, and they throw the terrorism card around a lot - an airliner hitting a space elevator would result only in the lowest note ever strummed by man, and a totalled 747 - there’s a growing enthusiasm for the concept, whose cost estimate seems to be being rounded down as things go by, boggle boggle. A wonderful turn of phrase comes from Brad Edwards, one of the people working on space elevator research, when he says that “as soon as we can build it we need to build it.”

Welp, that’s it for now. More to come when more arrives. Myself, I’m off to crash and prepare for the concert tomorrow by Great Big Sea, whose music you are obliged to enjoy. May the meteors miss all your houses.