Sunday, September 15, 2013

Ta da!  Martin Kleppe gives us the world, spinning – in ASCII, rendered via JavaScript...
Rope. Tree. Some assembly required.  Emails from Lois Lerner show that she was very involved in targeting Tea Party non-profit applications.  Both the original skulduggery and the subsequent coverup are jail-worthy events – but just think how much more effective my solution would be!
That might just be Obama's desired outcome.  Assad is the big winner in the U.S. – Russia chemical weapons deal...
Bruce Schneier is starting to sound like a leader: Take Back the Internet and How to Remain Secure Against the NSA, both excellent (and classically Schneieresque) pieces.  Bruce is working with the Guardian on the Snowden disclosures, which is somehow quite comforting to me.  I would love to see him take the helm of a non-governmental, well-funded effort to guard our online liberty – that would be even more comforting...
It's a brave new world: a Chicago woman forces a man to have sex with her girlfriend.  They robbed the poor bastard, too.  Is it really that hard for a girl to get laid these days?  Or was that just an added bonus for the ladies, who were primarily robbers?
Obama thinks he's playing chess, but Putin is playing poker.  And winning.  This sounds right to me, but I'd take it one level further: Obama is playing chess poorly, and Putin is playing poker like a champ...
It won't be Summers.  Good.  Unfortunately, that still leaves a lot of room for Obama to make a bad choice to replace Ben Bernanke...
What scares me most is just how many people think this is a good idea...  “Drink up!”, says The One's better half.  I have no plans to change my behavior on her advice.  One would be better off seeking counsel from a retarded dead squirrel than from her...
I wish the leader of my country was half as clever and effective...  An imaginary encounter with “Vlad” (Putin, not the Impaler)...
She's thankful now, but at first she didn't like the idea of having a gun in the house.  Her husband insisted that they get the gun, and that she learn how to use it.  That gun, and her knowledge of how to use it, came in awfully handy when two men broke into her house...
“Listen to me, goddamnit!”  Charles Cook, writing at NRO, has a great piece up on the recent successful Colorado recall elections.  The lead:
Despite the media’s insistence that the Colorado recalls were the first skirmish in a new proxy war between the National Rifle Association and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, the simple truth is that Tuesday’s stunning elections were prompted and won by forces on the ground. At the Stargazers Theatre last night, I sat with those forces as a famous victory unfolded. Speaking after Senator Morse conceded, the recall’s founder, Tim Knight, told the crowd that “you must own your freedom in order to protect and pass it on to your children.” He has spent the last few months doing just that.
Amen, brother.  Indications in Washington are that the progressives are taking careful, if dismayed, note of the events in Colorado...
It's the cycle.  For some people, the traditional seasonal cycles of farming are comforting and attractive.  As an engineer, I'm more into creative destruction :)
Water changes everything.  A photographer finds beauty in the myriad ways that humans have affected our planet using water...
Wings of a Butterfly.  Nice name for a beautiful nebula, officially known as M2-9.  Via APOD, of course...
Tomorrow is the shortest day of the year.  Really!  “High noon” is when the sun (wherever you happen to be) is at its highest point in the sky.  The time between one high noon and the next day's high noon is the “apparent solar day”.  The length of that day varies during the year, depending on where the Earth is in its orbit, and (especially) on how fast the Earth is moving.  Because the Earth is in an elliptical (not circular) orbit around the Sun, these things vary.  And tomorrow is the shortest day of all!
Nobody said Mother Nature was fair.  Some tentative indications that having tooth cavities protects against head and neck cancers...
It's an asymmetrical war, but this asymmetry favors us.  A peek at how al Qaeda sees American UAVs (drones)...
How the world sees Putin and Obama...