Google Maps hack shows effects of high-yield explosive detonations
Here's
a haunting
Gmaps hack: "The High Yield Detonation Effects
simulator maps overpressure radii generated by a
ground-level detonation; these radii are an
indicator of structural damage to buildings. No
other effects, such as thermal damage or fallout
levels, are included in this tool. Note that the
displayed rings are "idealized"; that is, no account
is taken of terrain, urban density, ground type,
weather conditions, and so on."
Yikes!
Posted Sun Jul 31st, 2005 - 6:52pm by
CPC
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Internet's Best Friend
by Sarah Boxer | NYT
On the Web you'll find the Infinite Cat Project but no Infinite Dog. My Cat Hates You is big on the Web, but there is no site named My Dog Hates You. (Dogs Hate Bush exists, but then so does Cats Hate Bush.) As any good Web hound can tell you, Rathergood.com is filled with crazy crooning cats. But where, oh where, are the singing dogs? (New Guinea singing dogs, a real breed, do not count.)
Cats are the Web's it-animals. They're everywhere. When you look up Devil Cats, you'll see comics about cat owners who love too much and the cats that cheat on them. Look up Devil Dogs, and you'll be offered apparel for the Marine Corps and information about Drake's cakes. Under the heading "Animal Antics," ifilm.com has four "Viral Videos" of cats, none of dogs. There are tons of badly drawn cats at www.tiddles.co.uk, but there's no such site for dogs.
Sure, there are dog sites aplenty, including fanciers' sites, funny sites and even an occasional hoax site, like thedogisland.com. But most don't have the buzz of Infinite Cat or Rathergood.
Why cats and not dogs?
Perhaps mycathatesyou.com will provide a clue. This site, founded in 2000, offers what it calls "the largest collection of sour-faced, indignant felines on the Internet." There you can see a squinty-eyed, snaggletoothed cat named Guapo, who appears ready to tear someone's head off. If you posted a picture of a dog as scary as that, no one would laugh. They would send for the dogcatcher.
Now take a look at Litterboxcam.com, where a live camera is trained on the litter boxes of two cats, Grey and Black. Every 60 seconds the image is refreshed. Counting down to zero and waiting for the cats to come into the frame is strangely and annoyingly suspenseful.
But if you Google poop and dog, you'll be led to a site called smellypoop.com/photogallery.html, which is more disgusting than funny. Or you may find the story of the "dog poop girl," also known as the "puppy poo girl," or in Korean "gae-ttong-nyue," which, believe it or not, is also not funny.
This is her story. Last month a woman let her dog relieve itself on the subway in Seoul. She was caught, by a cellphone camera, doing nothing about it. Within days, her picture, her identity, her family's identity and her past were revealed to the world on the Web. She quit her university in shame. The Washington Post and The Columbia Journalism Review weighed in. On Wikipedia there's already a "dog poop girl" entry logged, and a movement to delete it.
Interesting, yes, but not funny. Maybe the difference is that dogs are public, everyone's business. They go on subways and they go in parks. They are always caught in flagrante defecato. Cats stay home. They are private, nobody's business. To watch them in their homes is a privilege. They are perfect for the Web, the medium of voyeurs.
For example, go to the "Educational Videos" on zefrank.com, where you can catch the cat named Annie B., also called Mooshie, in 15 different scenarios, including one in which she re-enacts the shower scene in "Psycho." It's special. It's intimate. And another thing: she seems content with her small apartment. Cats are O.K. living in tight places and never going out. They don't mind if their owners spend every waking hour on the Internet.
Dogs would die if they had to wait for their owners to go off line. And who wants to post pictures of a dead animal? Serious bloggers, the kind who float to the top of Google regularly, just don't have time or space for dogs.
But can that be the whole story? There's a deeper answer to be had at infinitecat.com, where users post pictures of their cats gazing at pictures of other cats already posted on the Infinite Cat site. You see an infinite regress: pictures of cats looking at pictures of cats looking at pictures of cats.
Remind you of anything? Those cats are like so many bloggers sitting at home staring into their computer screens and watching other bloggers blog other bloggers. Cats, who live indoors and love to prowl, are the soul of the blogosphere. Dogs would never blog.
Posted Sat Jul 30th, 2005 - 5:00pm by CPC
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What The Hack
CNN | LIEMPDE, Netherlands (AP) -- There are hundreds of tents on the hot and soggy campground, but this isn't your ordinary summertime outing, considering that it includes workshops with such titles as "Politics of Psychedelic Research" or "Fun and Mayhem with RFID."
This is the three-day "What The Hack" convention, a self-styled computer-security conference dealing with such issues as digital passports, biometrics and cryptography.
Borrowing heavily from Woodstock and the more professionalized Def Con conference that begins Friday in Las Vegas, the event held every four years in the Netherlands draws an international array of experts and geeks. About 3,000 gathered Thursday for the opening.
Unlike better-known and better-funded industry meetings, "What the Hack" had to fight for its right to exist.
The mayor of the southern Dutch town of Boxtel, who oversees the village of Liempde where the convention is held, initially tried to stop the event from pitching its hundreds of tents outside his town -- a reluctance stemming from the lingering public image of hackers as asocial, anarchistic and vaguely menacing.
The mayor withdrew his objections after meetings with organizers.
Some of the scheduled lectures and workshops might reinforce the convention's shady reputation, such as the talk about mayhem with RFID, which stands for radio frequency identification tags.
But other seminars appeared wholesome enough, such as the workshop on how to make homes more energy efficient or how activists can lobby governments more effectively.
Even the local police officers assigned to monitor "What the Hack" are being included in the event. Officers are holding daily workshops to educate the public about how they go about securing events like these. Such cooperation with authorities would have raised eyebrows in previous years.
Befitting the age of terrorism, the conference is taking up such security issues as biometrics and new passport technology.
But in line with its anarchic reputation, organizers have made a parody of their own security arrangements, asking attendees to screen their own belongings at an unmanned baggage scanner. Rubber gloves for a "do-it-yourself body cavity search" are provided free of charge.
Overall, the atmosphere resembles that of a music festival, with orderly people waiting in line to buy Jolt colas and vegetarian meals. Children and hammocks are as prevalent as ponytails and laptops, and a curiously popular hangout is the Slacker Salon, a computer-free zone where frenetic Web surfing is taboo.
The relaxed setting is a conscious choice, according to Internet entrepreneur Rop Gonggrijp, who in 1989 helped organize the seminal Galactic Hacker Party, an open-air convention that formed the template for What The Hack.
"The idea was to break the stereotype" of hackers as sun-averse malcontents bent on vandalism, he said. "They've never been part of this community. And now there's fortunately space in the media for more than one kind of hacker."
Rutgers University anthropologist Biella Coleman said events like these serve a critical function for the many communities of people who are acquainted online, but rarely get the chance to meet in the real world.
"Virtuality needs sociality," she said.
Klaartje Bruyn, for example, is a sign-maker by day, but came to What the Hack for social, rather than professional reasons. Electronically arranging meetings with friends both real and virtual from the comfort of her hammock, she lauded how the festival could bring together so many far-flung yet like-minded people.
"It's like a blind date with 3,000 people," she said.
Posted Fri Jul 29th, 2005 - 6:00pm by CPC
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Rave for Rocketo comic
I haven't seen or heard anything about Rocketo except for this preview by Amid Amidi on Cartoon Brew, but it looks like a fantastic comic book.Posted Thu Jul 28th, 2005 - 6:00m by CPCI was prepared for a letdown as soon as I saw ROCKETO's cover because there's no way the interior art could live up to such a masterful drawing, right? Well, what an incredible surprise to open it up and find an entire comic that looks like this. Every page of ROCKETO is a jaw-drop gorgeous work of cartoon art, with tight drawing, color and design throughout. The expressive use of color and rhythmical black inks give the book a distinctive feel that defies comparison to any other current American comic; you have to look at European comics to find anything that remotely resembles ROCKETO's stylish cartoon sensibility.
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Universal Democracy
'Universal Democracy' Is the Goal As Congress Eyes New Legislation
BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun July 27, 2005
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/17604
WASHINGTON - When senators return to Washington this September, they will be set to consider new legislation that would commit America to ending tyranny the world over.
Tucked inside the House version of a bill that authorizes spending on foreign aid is the language of what is known as the ADVANCE Democracy Act. The act instructs American ambassadors and embassy staffs to draw up democracy transition plans for unfree regimes, with input from nonviolent opposition movements in the various countries. While Congress has passed laws that require America to work with democratic opposition groups for specific countries - such as the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act - never before has it considered a law that would, as ADVANCE proposes, "commit United States foreign policy to the challenge of achieving universal democracy."
A sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Tom Lantos, a Democrat of California, predicted that in the Senate the bill, sponsored there by Senator McCain, a Republican of Arizona, and Senator Lieberman, a Democrat of Connecticut, would not be opposed. "I don't think there will be any opposition in the Senate," he told The New York Sun.
A spokesman for Senator Biden, a Democrat of Delaware who is the most senior member of his party on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, yesterday said that he supported the bill. "We need a sign of readiness from chairman Lugar," the spokesman, Norm Kurz, said in reference to the Republican of Indiana. "Assuming that that is there, the assumption is the committee will take it up and begin working on it. It needs to be cleaned up a little bit." A spokesman for Senator Lugar did not offer a comment yesterday.
The little-noticed legislation passed the House a week ago today as part of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act by a vote of 351-78. Mr. Lantos last week told the Sun that the bill "puts the meat on the bones of the president's second inaugural address." In that speech, President Bush said, "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."
The bill would allow the State Department to "use all instruments of United States influence to support, promote, and strengthen democratic principles, practices, and values in foreign countries." It charges the CIA and Treasury Department with tracking the personal assets of dictators and their associates...
read the rest here
Posted Wed Jul 27th, 2005 - 6:00pm by CPC
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China pig tattoos drives artist wild
BEIJING,
China (Reuters) -- Tattoos of mermaids and roses,
cherubs bearing crimson hearts, Lenin's head and the
trademarked pattern of French luxury brand Louis
Vuitton stand out against bright pink skin soaking in
the sun outside Beijing.
This living gallery of skin art is not on display for a tattooists' convention or a Harley-Davidson fan club meeting. It is an everyday sight in Chenjiatuo village and is borne on the flesh of some unlikely subjects -- big, fat pigs.
The idea was cooked up by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, who has hired a small staff of local farmers and tattoo artists to raise some 20 sows and use them as canvases for skin art at his rustic China base, Art Farm.
"I decided to do something in China first, and I realized tattooing pigs would be a good introduction to the country. It's low-tech," Delvoye, 40, told Reuters.
The pigs get sedatives before they go under the needle and are carefully raised until their natural deaths, normally well past the six-month mark when farm pigs are slaughtered.
Collectors can buy the pigs live and pay for their keep as "foster parents" or simply purchase their tattoo-festooned skins for display after the pigs pass.
"The Art Farm is a real enterprise and by selling, eventually, the skins, the whole thing gets financed and I can go on," said Delvoye, who has pushed other artistic boundaries with previous works.
Mortality is a primary theme in the porky "paintings".
"Tattoos remind you of death. It's leaving something permanent on something non-permanent," he said. "Even when tattooing flowers, there is a morbid side to the activity."
He has tattooed pigs off and on in Europe and Indonesia for a decade, but in booming China Delvoye sees a perfect environment for steady production.
In turn, he has been unexpectedly inspired by the country -- from its burgeoning art scene to the rampant piracy of everything from DVDs to Paris's latest fashions, which is behind the Louis Vuitton-patterned pigs.
"We
saw all these fake Louis Vuitton designer bags. You
always read in newspapers about other countries
complaining about these fakes and then, as an artist,
I'm interested in what's fake and what's real,"
Delvoye said.
"I like to play with ownership rights."
Funny gringo With fans and radiators in their pens and plenty of food and running water on the farm, the pigs enjoy better living conditions than millions of China's rural poor, even many people in Chenjiatuo, a situation he admits some locals find "crazy".
Still, Delvoye says he has been welcomed, in part because he has given gainful employment to several villagers.
"They love me here. They think I'm a funny gringo," he said.
Wang Chao, 20, followed his father to a job on the farm, which on a scorching summer day meant following several pigs and rubbing sun-block lotion on their sensitive, patterned backs.
"These pigs live very well," Wang said, admitting he did not really understand the meaning of Delvoye's work.
"He's part of the neighborhood now. It's good to work together and understand each other," Wang's tanned, thickly built father said.
For Delvoye, the pigs and the farm represent just the start of his China ambitions.
He is working on a new, larger Art Farm with the space to raise more pigs and crops to feed them. Typical for China's dynamic building boom, construction is set to begin around the end of July and the farm should be finished in September.
"I did a similar thing in Belgium and it took two years," he said.
The new farm will also have video cameras to allow collectors or anyone else to watch the tattooed pigs cavort and sleep live on the Internet, a program he has dubbed "Pig Brother".
For his next project, Delvoye plans to tap China's mighty factories to have 5,000 anatomically correct, Barbie-like dolls in his likeness made in Shenzhen, a southern manufacturing hub.
"I tattoo pigs here today, but maybe tomorrow I do something else. Anything is possible," he said.
"I'm only warming up."
Posted Tue Jul 26th, 2005 - 10:55am by CPC
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The war on terror is coming home
By Ben Tripp | SmirkingChimp.com
Terrorism is the new black. It will remain in fashion until the War on Terror ends.
Two things have been proven by this so-called 'War on Terror', an idea that from its outset was as absurd as a 'War on Violence'. First, this escapade has demonstrated that terrorism works. It works better than anything: better than diplomacy, better than eloquence, better than the teachings of Gandhi or Jesus Christ or Martin Luther King. Second, the War on Terror has proven that the battleground of the future is at home, where the civilians are.
In the past weeks, London has suffered a major, coordinated terrorist bombing attack and a second attempt. Egypt is reeling from an equally savage attack within hours of this writing. The targets in both cases were civilians. The world is terrorized. Meanwhile, American armed forces continue hunting after phantoms in the rubble of Iraq, a nation destroyed in the name of the War on Terror, and where, until we invaded it, there were no terrorists.
Terrorism works. The outcome of a national election in Spain was swayed by acts of terror. The outcome of the 2004 presidential election in the USA was swayed by acts of terror. In the first instance terrorism worked against the standing government; in the second, terrorism helped George W. Bush squeak back into office. Nobody learns from a profitable mistake. So the War on Terror continues. Corporations closely allied with the White House reap record-breaking profits from open-ended, effectively unaudited contracts to assist the military in prosecuting the war. This profiteering will rage on as long as the emergency of war persists. A kind of corporatized mercenary infrastructure has arisen to perpetuate the War on Terror, from materiel to catering to torture. The worse things get for the military, the more profitable they become for the military industrial complex. War on Terror has no foreseeable end...
Read the rest of the article here Posted Mon Jul 25th, 2005 - 11:55pm by CPC
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Lifeboat Foundation
Wingnuts safeguarding humanity
Hahahaha! Beware the grey ooze!!
"Even a few pioneering groups, living independently of Earth, would offer a safeguard against the worst possible disaster—the foreclosure of intelligent life's future through the extinction of all humankind." - Sir Martin Rees
From the web site: The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, dedicated to providing solutions that will safeguard humanity from the growing threat of terrorism and technological cataclysm. This humanitarian organization is pursuing all possible options, including self-sustaining technologies using AI and nanotechnology, with an emphasis on self-contained space arks.
Check out the Lifeboat Foundation FAQ Posted Sun Jul 24th, 2005 - 10:00pm by CPC
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Long John Baldry dies
Blues
legend Long John Baldry has died at age 64 after a
four-month battle with a severe chest infection.
Baldry's agent posted an announcement on the musician's website that Baldry had passed away Thursday night in Vancouver, where he had been living.
"Our world is a lesser place without him, for John was a person that enhanced this world with his enormous presence and talent," said the statement posted on the website.
The musician was admitted to the intensive care unit of a Vancouver hospital in April after returning from a trip to his native Britain.
Baldry was nicknamed "Long John" because of his height – six foot seven –and had been living in Canada for the past 25 years.
The bluesman named Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry as his musical influences.
Baldry, born in London in 1941, is recognized as one of the chief influences in British blues and rock music in the 1960s. His seminal 1962 album, R&B From The Marquee is considered the first British blues album. Baldry hit the top of the singles charts there in 1967 with Let the Heartaches Begin. He also performed in the Beatles' first worldwide television special in April 1964.
During the last half of the 1960s, he led a band called Bluesology that included Reginald Dwight, who went on to become Elton John. His other bands included Blues Inc., Cyril Davis and the All Stars and the Hoochie Coochie Men.
Baldry has released more than 40 albums, performing with a string of other famous musicians including Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger. The Rolling Stones opened for Baldry in London in the early 1960s before the Stones hit it big.
Stewart considered Baldry a mentor and was at his bedside when he was admitted to hospital in March.
In 1979, he teamed up with Seattle singer Kathi MacDonald to record a very successful version of You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'.
After spending time in New York City and Los Angeles in the late '70s, Baldry chose to settle permanently in Vancouver, B.C. and became a Canadian citizen in 1980.
Posted Sat Jul 23rd, 2005 - 11:12am by CPC
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Flushed with Success
Despite some criticism, Mr. Floatie brings a comedic touch to a serious issue
Peter Cowan | Times Colonist
You can't ignore a seven-foot-tall turd.
That's Christianne Wilhelmson's take on Mr. Floatie, who has become a fixture at Victoria-area events. The program co-ordinator with the Georgia Strait Alliance says the chocolate bar-shaped mascot is responsible for renewed debate about what Victoria should do with its sewage.
Most people were tired of hearing about the issue, which the alliance has been pushing for more than a decade, but Wilhelmson said Mr. Floatie's recent appearances have changed that.
"He has managed to raise the issue back to the level where people are talking about it again," she said.
However,
Wilhelmson's enthusiasm is not shared by Denise
Blackwell of the Capital Regional District, who thinks
Mr. Floatie is a childish waste of time.
Mr. Floatie is the mascot for People Opposed to Outfall Pollution, or POOP. Organizer James Skwarok, who also wears the mascot suit, said Mr. Floatie has been an invaluable tool.
"Without our mascot, I don't think we would have nearly as high a profile," he said.
Humour is a big part of the way Skwarok says he gets his message across. His business card identifies him as the "movement co-ordinator" and in conversation he switches to Mr. Floatie's falsetto voice, cracking jokes about the importance of fibre. The organization's website features a recipe for floatie snacks and the lyrics for the Mr. Floatie song.
The idea for Mr. Floatie came to Skwarok after seeing an episode of the TV show South Park, which featured a character named "Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo."
Using a backpack, garden wire, foam and velour, Skwarok and Terry Bieman built Mr. Floatie. A small fan inside the costume prevents Skwarok from overheating while he is out glad-handing.
This weekend, Mr. Floatie will be cheering on contestants at the Victoria Toilet Regatta in the Inner Harbour. They'll race human-powered boats, which must be fitted with a toilet.
The group is raising money to help pay for a sewage treatment plant, but with only $700 in the bank Skwarok admits it is more about raising awareness. POOP would like to see the sewage go through a secondary treatment system where an aeration system breaks down the sewage before it enters the ocean.
Right now, 120 million litres of raw, screened sewage are dumped into the ocean.
Since April 2004, Mr. Floatie has made appearances at many local events, including parades, the Tall Ships Festival and Swiftsure yacht race. He also attended candidate debates in the provincial election, raising the sewage issue with local candidates.
While POOP and the Alliance say Mr. Floatie has people interested in the issue, Blackwell, a Langford councillor and chairwoman of the Capital Region District's environmental and liquid waste committees, said the mascot is a waste of time.
"It's so juvenile that he draws attention to himself, not the issue," she said.
She thinks recent articles and letters to the editor have done far more to help the debate than Mr. Floatie has.
Posted Fri Jul 22nd, 2005 - 6:22pm by CPC
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Give me that prime time religion!
Hrmmm....
Very often, you can measure the health of a society by what it values in terms of popular culture. So, considering the popularity of Paris Hilton, Monster Truck rallies and “The Fantastic Four,” I’d say America’s pretty close to flat-lining. Who can save us from our crass, juvenile tastes? Who can raise the bar on our cultural identity?
If NBC has anything to say about it, it will be Jesus.
Yes, Jesus Christ will find himself taking a prime time berth next spring in a new, darkly comedic drama, “The Book of Daniel.” But, fear not, this won’t be that old, stodgy Redeemer many of us encountered in Bible class but, rather, a “contemporary, cool” kinda guy.
“The Book of Daniel” centers around the life of a conflicted Episcopal minister and family man, the Rev. Daniel Webster, who’s also addicted to pain-killers. His only confidant? “Hip” Jesus. But, here’s the kicker! ONLY Daniel can see Jesus!
NBC President Kevin Reilly describes the show as being “different” and “out-of-the-box.” No, it’s not. It’s a variation of the old flick “Harvey,” wherein James Stewart portrayed tippler Elwood P. Dowd whose constant companion was an invisible “pooka,” a six foot tall rabbit named “Harvey.”
Welcome to the New Mellenium, gang, where an invisible rabbit has been replaced by Jesus Christ. I’m not sure who should be more upset, Jerry Falwell or PETA...
Read the rest at the M. Kane Jeeves site
Posted Thu Jul 21st, 2005 - 10:40am by CPC
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Inventor of TV Dinner dies at 83
First TV dinners drew hate mail from husbands
PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) -- Gerry Thomas, who changed the way Americans eat -- for better or worse -- with his invention of the TV Dinner during the baby boom years, has died at 83.
Thomas, who died in Paradise Valley on Monday after a bout with cancer, was a salesman for Omaha, Nebraska-based C.A. Swanson and Sons in 1954 when he got the idea of packaging frozen meals in a disposable aluminum-foil tray, divided into compartments to keep the foods from mixing. He also gave the product its singular name.
The first Swanson TV Dinner -- turkey with cornbread dressing and gravy, sweet potatoes and buttered peas -- sold for about $1 and could be cooked in 25 minutes at 425 degrees. Ten million sold in the first year of national distribution.
It
was fast and convenient, and fit nicely on a TV tray
in the living room, so that you didn't have to drag
yourself away from your favorite television show.
'Modular' eating Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, said the TV Dinner "started a change in American eating habits bigger than any change in culinary history since the discovery of fire and cooked foods."
The TV Dinner fit in with societal changes at the time, when more women were entering the work force and did not have the time to spend all day preparing dinner, Thompson said. It also helped introduce the notion of "modular" eating: If there were only two people at home, you put only two dinners in the oven.
"Some people claim that the TV Dinner was the first step toward breaking up the American family because it made it possible for everybody to eat in a modular way," Thompson said. "That was going to happen anyway. The redefinition of the American family was going on anyway."
In a 1999 Associated Press interview, Thomas recalled that the inspiration for the TV Dinner came when he was visiting a distributor, spotted a metal tray and was told it was developed for an experiment in the preparation of hot meals on airliners.
"It was just a single compartment tray with foil," he recalled. "I asked if I could borrow it and stuck it in the pocket of my overcoat."
Bonus pay for creation He said he came up with a three-compartment tray because "I spent five years in the service so I knew what a mess kit was. You could never tell what you were eating because it was all mixed together."
Since interest in television was booming, he added: "I figured if you could borrow from that, maybe you could get some attention. I think the name made all the difference in the world."
"We had the TV screen and the knobs pictured on the package. That was the real start of marketing," Thomas said.
The TV Dinner drew "hate mail from men who wanted their wives to cook from scratch like their mothers did," Thomas said, but it got him a bump in pay to $300 a month and a $1,000 bonus.
"I didn't complain. A thousand dollars was a lot of money back then," he said.
After the Campbell Soup Co. acquired Swanson in 1955, Thomas became a sales manager, then marketing manager and director of marketing and sales. He left the company after a heart attack in 1970.
He later directed an art gallery and did consulting work.
"It's a pleasure being identified as the person who did this because it changed the way people live," Thomas said. "It's part of the fabric of our society."
Thompson said that until last year, Thomas had spent one day each summer talking to Thompson's history of television class for graduate students.
"This was really fun for them," Thompson said. "This was like meeting a great American industrial legend. So many things we take for granted remain anonymous. We know the architect that designed St. Peter's, but who knows the architect that designed that basic ranch-style house?"
The TV Dinner, Thompson said, is "one of the few things we've got that we actually have the human being who had his fingerprints all over it."
Posted Wed Jul 20th, 2005 - 11:33pm by CPC
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Tattooed Fruit Is Coming
Run for the hills!
Laser
coding could mean the end of those tiny stubborn
stickers that have to be picked, scraped or yanked off
produce.
A pear is just a pear, except when it is also a laser-coded information delivery system with advanced security clearance.
And that is what pears - not to mention organic apples, waxy cucumbers and delicate peaches - are becoming in some supermarkets around the country. A new technology being used by produce distributors employs lasers to tattoo fruits and vegetables with their names, identifying numbers, countries of origin and other information that helps speed distribution. The marks are burned onto the outer layer of the skin and are visible to discerning consumers and befuddled cashiers alike.
A new laser technology for labeling fruits and vegetables, designed by Durand-Wayland, Inc., is being put to work at Southern Oregon Sales, a pear distributor in Medford, Ore. The process, government approved and called safe by the industry, may sound sinister. But it was designed with the consumer in mind: laser coding could mean the end of those tiny stubborn stickers that have to be picked, scraped or yanked off produce.
Sticker-removal duty took Jean Lemeaux of Clarksville, Tex., half an hour one day last week.
"I was picking all the little stickers from the Piggly Wiggly off my plums and my avocado pears and my peaches," said Ms. Lemeaux, 76. "Then I had to make fruit salad out of the ones that got hurt when I took the stickers off, and then I had to wash the glue off the other ones before I put them in the fruit bowl."
"One time," she said, "I got up the next morning and looked in the mirror and there were two of them up in my hair."
go the the article at the NYT (registration required)
Posted Tue Jul 19th, 2005 - 7:48am by CPC
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China's oil painting industry
Today's
New York Times has an interesting article about the
mass production of oil paintings in China that are
exported for sale in Western stores like Pier 1 and
Bed, Bath & Beyond. Groups of artists crank out the
paintings based on postcards, Internet images, and in
some cases, art monographs about masters like van
Gogh. From the article:
The biggest market for oil paintings from China turns out to be in Florida condominiums and other second homes being built as part of the global housing market boom. Hotels and restaurants also buy large numbers of Chinese paintings.
Many of the paintings depict scenes that Chinese artists have never seen. "European landscapes, like the Mediterranean or Venice or Paris, are the best sellers for us," Moses Ben Herut, the president of Oilpaintings.com, said in a telephone interview from Alpharetta, Ga...
Wang Yuankang, the paintings entrepreneur at the Canton Trade Fair... said his factory had 10 "designers" who do original paintings and 300 painters who copy these originals. Another 200 workers do the framing, he said.
Some operations are even larger. Vicky Leung, the business manager for the Chaozhou Hongjia Arts and Crafts Company, with a booth near Mr. Wang's, said that the company had two factories with a total of 10 designers, 250 painters and more than 500 framers and assistant painters.
One advantage of the larger operations is that they allow specialization, with simple assembly lines like those that Henry Ford brought to the automobile industry. The larger factories have some painters specializing in trees, others in skies, others in flowers and so forth, an approach that not only improves "quality" but also increases output and reduces costs.
Posted Sun Jul 17th, 2005 - 10:01pm by CPC
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South Carolina, The New Holy Land
In
a bold bid to cleanse the United States of Satanic
filth, thousands of Christians are migrating to South
Carolina. This mass migration, organized by Christian
Exodus, seeks to "reestablish constitutionally limited
government founded upon Christian principles. This
includes the return to South Carolina of all 'powers
not delegated to the United States by the
Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States.'"
But why would anyone want to do this? According to Christian Exodus, many Christian activists are disappointed that "the U.S. Constitution has been abandoned under our current federal system, and the efforts of Christian activism to restore our Godly republic have proven futile over the past three decades." As such, they feel that "the time has come for Christian Constitutionalists to protect our American principles in a State like South Carolina by interposing the State's sovereign authority retained under the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution."
But how is this migration of thousands of Christians into South Carolina going to help? Their clever idea is that since "millions of Christian conservatives are geographically spread out and diluted at the national level," it would make political sense to