http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/1484716.html

links to an Economist article on the conditions of the 10 million Palestinians in the world, plus some Wikipedia articles on the diaspora and its expulsion from Israel.

http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/1245077.html

In particular see comment #2, with the image.

since apparently the commercial ones are nerfed.

From montyy0

There's a guy out there really worried, not about same-sex marriage but same-sex procreation or conception.
http://www.eggandsperm.org/

"Equal protections, but no genetically engineered conceptions." In other words, we would federally recognize same-sex civil unions that do not grant conception rights, and prohibit all forms of conception that do not join a man and a woman's sperm and egg.

Note that this isn't just a matter of concern about near-term safety of genetic engineering or artificial gametes; he's into a total ban on anything like this. "All children should be created randomly equal."

On the other side is http://www.samesexprocreation.com/

Original source: http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2008/04/transhumanism-still-at-crossroads.html

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080428/pl_nm/guantanamo_hearings_dc_4

I'd missed this. The chief prosecutor of the Guantanmo war crimes tribunals quit last year in protest at the tainted process.

Defense lawyers said Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the legal adviser who was supposed to provide impartial advice to the trials' overseer, had effectively joined the prosecution team.

Davis has alleged Hartmann pushed prosecutors to file cases before they were ready and wanted "sexy" cases that "had blood on them," such as one where an Afghan prisoner was accused of throwing a grenade that injured two U.S. soldiers.

Davis said Hartmann tried to dictate which lawyer would try cases and overrode Davis' ban on filing charges that relied on evidence obtained through the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The Pentagon plans to try as many as 80 of the 280 prisoners in Guantanamo on war crimes charges, and 14 cases are currently pending. Since the United States began sending foreign captives to Guantanamo in 2002, only one case has been resolved, that of Australian former prisoner David Hicks.

Mmm, fair and speedy trials, untainted by torture. Wait, that's un-American.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080428/pl_nm/usa_politics_mccain_dc_4

The Arizona senator criticized national government-run health plans in some European countries.

"I'm not going to do like the Europeans have and have expensive health care systems that are neither efficient or, frankly, the quality we have here in America," he said.

"Expensive" apparently means half the cost of the US while living longer.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080428/ap_on_go_ot/epa_chemical_risks_2

GAO says the White House lets various agencies and non-scientists interfere with the EPA's assessment of chemical risks.

But remember, we have to vote Republican, or the terrorists will win!

Russell Blackford on what it means to be a liberal society, and how the response to the prospect of human cloning shows how fragile ours are.

American life-expectancy dropping.

Well, more like the poorest -- also Southern -- Americans. And female ones.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080411/ap_on_go_pr_wh/animal_disease_5

The US has a research facility on Plum Island, away from livestock, reachable only by helicopter or ferry. Homeland Security wants a new lab, quite possibly located near livestock herds.

"there are financial concerns about operating from a location accessible only by ferry or helicopter."

"An epidemic of the disease, foot and mouth, which only affects animals, could devastate the livestock industry."

"the simulation's National Guardsmen were ordered to kill tens of millions of farm animals, so many that troops ran out of bullets. In the exercise, the government said it would have been forced to dig a ditch in Kansas 25 miles long to bury carcasses. In the simulation, protests broke out in some cities amid food shortages."

This seems like classic penny-wise, pound-foolish. Not to mention something to file under "is there anything this administration won't try to screw up?"

Being deployed in Afghanistan. To be used as "triage" in job interviews; not to be used on US personnel; less accurate than polygraphs; with a cited accuracy of 82-90%... or 63-79% if, unlike the Pentagon, you count all the results, rather than discarding inconclusives. And that's on US subjects in the lab, not on Afghans in the field, who might be a wee bit more stressed out. Studies are from the makers of the devices, and make questionable assumptions about base rates.

Heh, funny quote:

But they acknowledged that this was no easy task. They use the word "non-trivial," which in scientific lexicon means a problem is difficult, even unsolvable.

"Determining these decision rules," the researchers wrote, "is both non-trivial and subjective."

The article seems pretty detailed and documented. And they say investigative journalism is dead. Go MSNBC!

"How can they not know that?" "I'm surprised you don't know about ___". I'm sure we've all had experiences like that. After a while I stopped getting surprised.

* San Francisco bus stop. A couple of young women were talking about religion. One a Catholic from Austria, the other a presumed Muslim from Egypt. Between the two of them, they were unsure if Jesus came chronologically before or after Mohammed.

( That was longer than I thought. So, cut. )

A 'small' local war -- 50 Hiroshimas -- could damage the ozone layer in mid-latitudes -- where you and I and other rich people live -- for years.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080408/ap_on_sc/nuclear_ozone_3

Self-replicating printer in development. Another article.

Not to overhype the things: they're made of a couple of plastics and a local melting point metal, plus chips, and the goal is to have it handle all three materials, and to be able to print all of its parts apart from the chips, and lubricating grease, and it won't be make its raw materials either. Or assembling the parts, a human will have to do that. So they're nowhere near being released into the desert. But it's a step.

“We know that people are going to use the printer to try to make weapons [and] sex toys and drug paraphernalia,” he says. “This is obviously not what we’re hoping they are going to build. We are hoping they are going to build more and better RepRaps.”

Oh no, people might make cheap plastic sex toys.

Our Mrs. Reynolds.

Because projecting the racial issues of today's United States (Australian author, BTW) onto off-planet people 500 years in the future makes so much sense... I wonder more about the "deep cover to make feminists look bad" possibility, frankly.

Some guy on rasfs has an approach I hadn't thought of before (my two posts are 16 through 18 in the thread) to heating a city: just heat it, not worrying about the dome or roof. Running some numbers, it seems... maybe doable. A lot depends on how quickly heat is lost to the air, and how little we can get away with to get halfway comfortable; adding 100 W/m2 gets too expensive. OTOH, that was assuming continuous year-round heating. Just doing the worst days would cut cost a lot (though raise the proportion of the infrastructure). For purposes of not dying, simple de-icing might be sufficient -- bursts of heat to clear the ground, and people can wear coats like normal.

The thing prompted me to try to actually estimate costs of the roofs I like to go on about. I don't know enough for a good estimate, but comparison to greenhouses ($7.50/square foot) or the raw costs of transparent materials ($3/foot2 plexiglass, $4 Lexan or glass, all 1/8 inch thick) suggests a minimum of $100/m2 for $100 million per square kilometer. That would seem feasible. I don't know how this scales -- big building costs can look a lot higher, and we'd have to be building a lot higher than a greenhouse, but then we don't actually need a normal building, just a roof or umbrella. Unless we want smart roofs, which we might, for summer... $1 billion/km2 would be a lot even for Manhattanites. There's also a question of how thick the panels have to be to survive -- 1/8 inch, or 1/2 inch?

Domed cities link! Notes possibility of floating a dome on air pressure.

Buckminster Fuller's little essay

http://www.usaweekend.com/08_issues/080406/080406abtn-money-family-size.html

Unrelatedly, a girl at swing told me "you're a very good dancer". *preens*

I'm reading a collection of Draco Tavern stories and Fleet of Worlds. Some of the stories are recent -- 2000, 2006. They still seem to have the old touch, apart from snarky comments about Iraqis, a "we try to prevent those" from a character in response to a list of sexual perversions, including male-male attraction, and Rich Schumann thinking there are 1e20 cells in the human brain.

Fleet of Worlds seems nice so far. There was a nice touch of modern AI/data mining applied to translation of tapped video. One might wonder why the puppeteers wouldn't think of that. One is then answered, as Nessus connects language to intelligence, and then one is invited to imagine what the puppeteers make of AI. Yeah. Pierson's puppeteers are like the epitome of "Safe-Tech".