Links (most recent first) that caught my eye, but did not warrant full-blown blog entries ….
- FRC Calls for Impeachment Over National Day of Prayer Ruling – Some more people who need to go back on their meds. The government has no business encouraging (or discouraging) any citizen’s prayers on an organized, annual basis, nor in acknowledging (nor denying) God’s role in our nation’s history or laws. If the FRC (et al.) can only keep God in the “marketplace of ideas” by having the government officially sponsor prayer days, then they (and God) have some other, deeper problems.
- BBC News – World warming to US under Obama, BBC poll suggests – Of course, some folks here think that’s a sign of weakness, not strength.
- New York and the Moscow Subway Bombing – Money graf: “A far better strategy is to spend our limited counterterrorism resources on investigation and intelligence – and on emergency response. These measures don’t hinge on any specific threat; they don’t require us to guess the tactic or target correctly. They’re effective in a variety of circumstances, even nonterrorist ones. The result may not be flashy or outwardly reassuring – as are pricey new scanners in airports. But the strategy will save more lives.”
- The Effectiveness of Air Marshals – The statistic given here is misleading, though. One could easily suggest that the (assumed) presence of air marshals deters certain terrorist attacks. If I were planning such an attack, the presence of one or more air marshals on a flight would have to be part of my calculations.
- Terrorist Attacks and Comparable Risks, Part 2 – Risk assessment is something humans, and human societies, do very poorly — well enough to usually avoid most risks (through luck or intent), but poorly enough to waste a lot of resources doing it, and usually causing other problems down the line.
- This Is Apple’s Next iPhone – Iphone 4 – Gizmodo
- Ash and Lightning Above an Icelandic Volcano – Wow. That looks totally Photoshopped, which makes it even cooler that it’s not.
- Now You’re Cooking With The Empire [WIN] – Nice …
- Twitter launching annotation feature, streaming API – Some interesting developments in the Twitterverse here. Twitter’s more direct involvement in desktop clients and URL-shorteners will be interesting to follow.
- Why the Library of Congress cares about archiving our tweets – Good summary. This is, in fact, historically useful info (pretty much all info is, to someone).
- School IT allegedly took “thousands” of pics in webcam case – If someone can monitor other folks, it will be abused. It WILL be abused. No matter how many promises and policies and “safeguards.” It will be abused. Which doesn’t mean that it might not be appropriate or desirable to do it anyway — police power gets abused, too, and I don’t think the answer is getting rid of the police. But we need to factor that into any such cost-benefit equations, and not accept calming assurances that such a thing “could never, never, ever happen here.”
- Attack of the Golden Retriever Puppies – They blinded me with CUTENESS!
- A Leading Climategate “Expert” – Monckton really is a great example of the dangers of newspapers feeling any “issue” needs a balance of opinions on all sides of it conveyed. That’s a noble principle, but not all issues actually have a worthwhile “other side” to them.
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