Epistemic Ingemination

Sen. Rick Santorum, (R-Pa) introduced a bill in the Senate last week that would prohibit federal meteorologists from competing with companies such as AccuWeather and The Weather Channel which offer their own forecasts through paid services and free ad-supported Web sites. He says that as he reads the bill, a vast amount of federal weather data would be forced offline. "I believe I've paid for that data once. ... I don't want to have to pay for it again," said Scott Bradner, a technical consultant at Harvard University. The bill has been referred to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

(From Metafilter.)

Posted at 07:37 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]

Wed, 20 Apr 2005

Are You A Neocon?

http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/quiz/neoconQuiz.html

(Hold the phone! I came out of it labeled a "liberal." Who would've thought?)

Posted at 11:09 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]

Mon, 18 Apr 2005

A Good Day For Classisists

From The Independent:

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.
Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.
In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.
The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye - decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even predicting a "second Renaissance".

Cool beans...

Posted at 11:16 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]

Fri, 08 Apr 2005

Here It Comes

Znet has an article that'll curl your hair:

Tired of waiting for the Second Coming to enforce Christ's rule on Earth? Fortunately, so is your Congress and they know how to "bring it on."
Just when you thought the corporatist/Christian Coalition had milked the 9/11 "surprise" for all it was worth in powers, profits and votes, we regret to report that you may have to think again. Just in case you've briefly fallen behind on your rightwing mailing lists, you might have missed the March 3rd filing of Senate bill S. 520 and House version is H.R. 1070, AKA the "Constitution Restoration Act" (CRA).
In the worshipful words of the Conservative Caucus, this historic legislation will "RESTORE OUR CONSTITUTION!", mainly by barring ANY federal court or judge from ever again reviewing "any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer or agent of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official or personal capacity), concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government." [Emphasis demanded - see full text here.]
In other words, the bill ensures that God's divine word (and our infallible leaders' interpretation thereof) will hereafter trump all our pathetic democratic notions about freedom, law and rights -- and our courts can't say a thing. This, of course, will take "In God We Trust" to an entirely new level, because soon He (and His personally anointed political elite) will be all the legal recourse we have left.
This is not a joke, a test, or a fit of libertarian paranoia. The CRA already has 28 sponsors in the House and Senate, and a March 20 call to lead sponsor Sen. Richard Shelby's office assures us that "we have the votes for passage." This is a highly credible projection as Bill Moyers observes in his 3/24/05 "Welcome to Doomsday" piece in the New York Review of Books: "The corporate, political, and religious right's hammerlock... extends to the US Congress. Nearly half of its members before the election-231 legislators in all (more since the election)-are backed by the religious right... Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the most influential Christian Right advocacy groups."

Posted at 12:23 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]

Hi Ho

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, three weeks without a post and a couple of months without any serious ranting or Cool Information. That'll change again soon. Been turning inward, retooling several areas of my life; the New Improved Version® is almost ready. Heh.

Look for more traffic to ramp up soon. Probably more varied and useful traffic at that. The rest of the year promises to be Very Interesting -- but hopefully not in the Chinese Curse sense of the phrase.

Posted at 12:07 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]