Gulfstream

http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/packages/uk/articles/smith/
smith2.html Zadie Smith’s “Alphabet”—free association on 26 topics. “Girls, (Pretty): … Pretty girls lie at the centre of straight culture, dyke culture, fag culture. They sell everything, they buy everything, they ruin great men and women, and finally they ruin themselves, accidentally, simply by getting old. I think about them. Sometimes I want them and sometimes I worry about them—even though it’s not my business to do so. I wonder about them. …” 11:31

http://theonion.com/onion3911/dead_iraqi.html “Dead Iraqi Would Have Loved Democracy.” Actually the entire Onion is pretty good this week, right down to the Guide to Prescription-Drug Safety. (“If your pharmacist doesn’t offer to have one with you right there in the store, the shit’s probably no good.”) 11:53

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/m29-
oicw.htm About the XM29, the weapon scheduled to replace the M16 in 2008. Fires 5.56mm rounds and 20mm high-explosive rounds—the HE rounds can be set to explode in the air above the target, go through windows and then explode, etc.

(Sometimes I wonder if my (weak and reluctant) support for the war is tainted by my interest in the military, and weapons. I was recently assured that this is okay because I’m a boy but … I still have my doubts.) 17:24

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/magazine/23SOUND.html Inventor Woody Norris has made a device that can project sound … and some other things too. 14:22

http://www.sil.org/~gaultney/ProbsOfDiacDesignLowRes.pdf Problems of diacritic design for Latin script text faces. (Diacritics are accents, umlauts, and so forth.) A fascinating 30-page thesis detailing the difficulties involved in designing a multi-lingual typeface. Does the dot over the i harmonise with the two dots over the ï? What happens when a î is set next to a f? How should diacritics be aligned?

(The thesis is set in the author’s own Gentium.) 13:51

http://english.aljazeera.net/ Seems a little broken right now but even the headlines are instructive. 11:50

http://slate.msn.com/id/2080432/entry/2080434/ Nate Thayer’s Baghdad diary. Bagdad is seems to be getting more volatile, and more defiant. (Thayer seems to specialise in “extreme” journalism—it was he who in 1997 interviewed Pol Pot in northern Cambodia just before he died.) 11:13

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/magazine/23WWLN.html Michael Ignatieff: “It is impossible to be certain that improving the human rights of 25 million people is worth the cost because no one knows what the cost will be.” True, no one can know exactly, but it’s certainly possible to assign probabilities (or probability distributions) to the potential outcomes.

Actually, I wonder how much of the disagreement between the pro-war and anti-war camps is over matters of principle, and how much is over matters of fact. Does the pro-war side think the war will be over in 3 weeks, with 1,000 casualties? Does the anti-war side think the war will be over in 3 months, with 100,000 casualities? (I am simplifying; there are certainly many other factors.)

The Red Cross, for example, has medical supplies for 180,000. Does the military think 180,000 will require medical treatment? 22:26

http://slate.msn.com/id/2074824 How to pronounce “Qatar”: something between “cutter” and “gutter.” 21:11

http://vancouver.indymedia.org/uploads/creeps.jpg Route 23: Creeps & Weirdos. A questionable anti-public transport ad for Chevy’s Cavalier. 18:47

http://slate.msn.com/id/2080362/ Review of Thomas Struth’s photographs, including comparisons to Andreas Gursky (my love!), Gerhard Richter. 11:52

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2874635.stm Turkey to send troops into Northern Iraq. Can’t Nato do something about this? 10:58

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,918712,00.html How the Tomahawk cruise missile is changing the nature of war, to the extent of making previously impossible wars (or strikes) possible. 10:19

http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page3294.asp Blair’s speech to the House of Commons. (1) The first quarter or so deals with Iraq’s well-documented breaches and violations of various resolutions and agreements over the past decade and isn’t very revealing or interesting. (2) He claims that a second UN Resolution could have been negotiated had France not indicated that it would be vetoed “whatever the circumstances.” (If this is the case, why could the coalition not offer Iraq (independently of the UN) the resolution that could have been negotiated?) (3) He positions the UN’s response to Iraq as a test of how the UN will deal with other situations in the future. (For example, North Korea.) 12:55

http://www.centcom.mil/galleries/leaflets/showleaflets.asp Dropped propaganda leaflets. Strange: Arabic doesn’t appear to use Arabic numerals—? (leaflet)

[Arabic Arabic numerals don’t look like English Arabic numerals.] 12:35

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/20/sprj.irq.kuwait.rockets/
index.html Sometimes the media, for unfathomable reasons, don’t ask, or don’t answer, obvious questions. Like: were the missiles fired on Kuwait supposedly banned and/or destroyed? (The ABC is reporting that at least two were Scuds, which are definitely banned.) 12:14

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/03/16/
BA251812.DTL High stakes Rock, Paper, Scissors: “‘Rock is the aggressive way to go, Martinez said, adding that she plans to use her $1,000 winnings ‘to go someplace warm.’” 12:31

http://www.spacehijackers.co.uk/html/projects/circle2/party.html Circle Line Party: partying between stations in the back carriages of a tube train. 11:21

http://newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?030324crat_atlarge “A month earlier, in Mexico, Leon Trotsky had had his head split open with an ice axe.”

Was Trotsky killed by a mountaineer’s ice axe or a bartender’s ice pick? I have wondered about this for years. What would an assassin be doing with a (mountaineer’s) ice axe in Mexico City? (Is there some special significance to death-by-ice-axe?) Does a (bartender’s) ice pick split a head open? This is driving me crazy! 02:08

http://www.sorabji.com/2003/march/11/ “Death to Death” 16:03

http://dearraed.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_dear_raed_archive.html#90779364 A Baghdad blogger: “There is no person inside Iraq (and this is a bold, blinking and underlined inside) who will be jumping up and down asking for the bombs to drop.”

By this I think the author means that Iraqis are not excited by the prospect of war because war is the lesser of two very great evils (war is a lesser evil than living with Saddam)—and you can never be excited by the prospect of any sort of evil, especially when you know that it should never have come to this. (That is, Saddam should have been dealt with, over the past decade, in other ways.) 11:59

http://www.22minutes.com/realwrapper.php?target=apology_
256.rm 12:31

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/business/yourmoney/16FUEL.html Fuel cells likely to power portable electronics gear before they power cars: fuel cells are cheaper and last longer than batteries, but (at least for cars) gas is better than both. 12:13

http://www.thestranger.com/2003-03-13/feature2.html Commentary from a “lifelong lefty of the commie- pinko-faggot variety”: “But what right do we have to impose our values on them? About as much right as we had to impose ‘our’ values on them Germans. There’s also the small matter of our values being superior—can we lefties get behind that concept?” 12:28

http://newyorker.com/talk/content/?030203ta_talk_specter Where Kevin Mitnick, convicted computer hacker and neophyte web surfer, went first. (“Don’t be freaked out by advertising,” Goldstein told Mitnick. “It’s everywhere. So is pornography.”) 14:51

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/12/education/12COLL.html Historically black university gets Russian students as part of diversification program. (“It’s worse than the education we had in Russia. But it’s America.”) 16:45

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0303/03031101asyaschweeninterview.asp Interview with Asya Schween, creator of disturbing self-portraits. (Scroll to bottom to see samples.) 13:54

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/12/international/europe/12CND-
LIST.html “Unofficial” list of British demands—what’s with the “will promise to”/“will pledge to” shit?! How about “will destroy”? 10:47

http://slate.msn.com/id/2080036/ A veto is the same as a “no” to the U.N. Security Council. (Also some Security Council veto history—U.S. and the U.S.S.R. have together vetoed 185 times, France 18.) 10:43

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2839699.stm Concert-goer hit in head by … the head of a sheep. 11:21

http://slate.msn.com/id/2079975/ On the House of Representatives’ “Freedom Fries.” 10:52

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030307.html “Why are we in space?” The Stennis Space Center FAQ explains that NASA’s funding represents a penny out of every dollar in the U.S. federal budget and that “diverting this money into social programs would provide a very minimal increase for those immediate needs, while eliminating resources devoted to the future and new solutions to problems.” (I don’t think NASA itself is necessarily bad value, though sending people into space might be.)

(NASA used to have a more official “justification” page on one of their sites but I can’t find it now. It was pretty weak, I recall.) 11:15

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/magazine/09GIBSON.html Mel Gibson and Catholic traditionalists. Catholic traditionalists more or less reject the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. (That mass should be conducted not in Latin but in the popular language of each country, etc.) Story also has some information on Gibson’s $25m movie on the life of Jesus, which is being filmed entirely in Aramaic and Latin, without subtitles. 11:14

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/opinion/09FRIE.html “Think about F.D.R. He had just won World War II. America was at the apex of its power. It didn’t need anyone’s permission for anything. Yet, on his way home from Yalta, confined to a wheelchair, F.D.R. traveled to the Mideast to meet and show respect for the leaders of Ethiopia, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Why? Because he knew he needed them not to win the war, but to win the peace.” 11:12

http://slate.msn.com/id/2079769/ American books are better made than British books. (I will vouch for this.) 13:45

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/18/business/18FORE.html “On a round trip from New York to London, according to the calculations of the Edinburgh Center for Carbon Management in Scotland, a Boeing 747 spews out about 440 tons of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.”

I screwed up here before in saying that since a 747-400 carries only 170 tons of fuel (215,000 liters) it can’t produce more than twice that in carbon dioxide. But it probably can: I forgot about the oxygen it takes from the air.

What disturbs me more, though, is that the amount (mass) of gas produced is greater than the amount (mass) of fuel burnt. So a car filled with 40 liters (30kgs) of petrol produces at least 30kgs of (mostly harmful) gas. (Petrol has a specific gravity of 0.75, so a liter of petrol weighs about 750g.) How many tons of petrol do you burn each year? For how long have you been driving?

Also: it’s the Edinburgh Centre, not the Edinburgh Center! You can’t Americanise the spelling of a name! 17:27

http://board.crewcial.org/t.php?id=16330 www.ready.gov caption contest. (Sample of originals.) 12:14

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2812167.stm British museums, though now largely free (because of lottery money?), still only attracting the rich. 11:15

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/01/nyregion/01COUR.html Bill Clinton is apparently being considered for jury duty in Manhattan. (“Apparently” because most of the details were overheard by a court reporter.) 23:00

http://slate.msn.com/id/2079497/ “The Canadians have a sensible proposal for a compromise resolution that could lend some political legitimacy to the coming war against Iraq. …” I quite like this idea, for all the reasons mentioned. Michael Kinsley also has a good piece on various war topics (not just on human shields). 12:43