zero tolerance

Posted on Monday, 2002 May 27 by Anton

Darth Vader’s War on Terror.

Posted in cinema, security theater | Leave a comment

no nukes here, really!

Posted on Monday, 2002 May 27 by Anton

Since logging began in November, I’ve had 13 referrals from www.iaea.org, which appears to be dead; whois says it’s the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna. Ha? Is someone spoofing?

Update 6/01: That site is up now.

Posted in me!me!me! | Leave a comment

victory is around the corner

Posted on Sunday, 2002 May 26 by Anton

Freezerbox: This Is American History On Drugs

California now imprisons more people than do France, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands combined. It has more people in jail for drug offenses than were in jail in the entire United States in 1978.

Posted in drugwar | Leave a comment

a great icosahedron

Posted on Sunday, 2002 May 26 by Anton

. . made in PoV-Ray using a couple of beta features. I took the liberty of naming the pigment “Tufte” : it uses unsaturated colors to represent angles in a natural way.

Posted in eye-candy, mathematics | Leave a comment

your tweezers, please

Posted on Sunday, 2002 May 26 by Anton

Security can be more about power trips than safe travel. Hooray, we cranks are not alone in saying it. (Link from Monty Solomon.)

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the final enemy

Posted on Saturday, 2002 May 25 by Anton

Charles Murtaugh quotes from the NY Times obituary an interesting sentence from Stephen Jay Gould (apparently in 1982 when he first had cancer):

“When my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way,” he wrote. However, “death is the ultimate enemy – and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.”

What a contrast to the mystical morality of Star Trek, in which death is a duty to posterity and progress – the progress that Gould (like Dawkins) denies so often. Continue reading →

Posted in futures | 1 Comment

sovereignty ≠ liberty

Posted on Friday, 2002 May 24 by Anton

USS Clueless defends American unilateralism again:

[quoting a British paper] “a disdain for any treaty that might, even marginally, tie the administration’s hands”. We in the US refer to that as “liberty”. I know it’s a foreign notion in Europe, but we actually fought a revolution to get it, and we’d like to keep it. We think it’s pretty damned important.

No, that’s sovereignty, not the same thing at all; though Steve is right in saying our ancestors fought a war for it (when they already had considerable liberty). Liberty, on the other hand, is defended precisely by tying the administration’s hands – or so Americans once used to say.

(While I’m up, democracy is also not the same thing as either liberty or sovereignty.)

Posted in history, politics | Leave a comment