27 Feb 2006
Calving Time
Maeg's New Boy

First calf of 2006 - a little bull calf, born to Maeg (via Chip) this morning about 7am. It was most unusual for a Highland birth: she came up to the paddock and had him under the apple tree. Most of the time these girls go down by the creek in the most isolated spot they can find. Maybe it's experience (this is her second calf here) or maybe there's coyotes about (I did hear some late last night, off in the distance), but whatever. He's on the ground, cleaning up and getting fed. One down, three to go.

00:00 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

Sudan man forced to 'marry' goat

No word on if this made him a polygamist ... in fact, no word if the goat was a nanny or a billy! Gay goat marriage? Who knows?

I wonder if they had a little ceremony of some sort. What would the groom have told his new bride? "There'll never be another ewe..."

A Sudanese man has been forced to take a goat as his "wife", after he was caught having sex with the animal.

(link) [BBC]

00:00 /Humor | 1 comment | permanent link

Blog Epitaphs? Get Me Rewrite!

They don't get. They never got it. It's not "blogging for dollars" - and most of us aren't blogging for fame. We blog for the same reason we keep journals, write novels that never leave the desk drawer and mix our own CD's. We blog to express ourselves - the fact that our musings can now be easily published and widely disseminated at very low cost is ancillary. I'd keep this blog going if I never got another reader, and I daresay that 99.9% of the other bloggers out there feel the same way. Money and fame are the [potential] icing, not the cake.

Blogging differs from traditional, mainstream journalism in that it's intensely personal, in the sense that it's not driven by markets or the needs of others, but strictly by an internal need on the part of the blogger to, well, blog.

And that's not a bad thing.

'Reports of blogging's demise are bosh, but if we're lucky, something else really is going away: the by-turns overheated and uninformed obsession with blogging,' Jason Fry writes on WSJ.com, responding to a recent wave of blog-doubting that includes a Gallup poll and a Chicago Tribune editorial entitled, 'Bloggy, we hardly knew ye.' Fry says blogging might not fly as a business, but 'the failure of blogging to launch a huge number of well-heeled companies or keep attracting VC money won't mean the end of blogs -- instant messaging, for one, hasn't foundered despite the difficulty of turning its popularity into profits.'

(link) [Slashdot]

00:00 /Technology | 4 comments | permanent link

Predators keep the world green, ecologists find

Yep - it's time for another Study in Stupidity. The leader of the "research team" is a professor of environmental science at Duke - and to reach this "startling" conclusion they studied a Venezuelan valley flooded 20 years ago for a hydroelectric project.

I could've saved them a lot of time and travel expenses if they'd have just asked. Hel, they could've asked any farmer, rancher, hunter or woodsman and gotten this answer. They could've visited beautiful Brown County State Park in southern Indiana and seen the effect a hunting ban had on the forest. Here's a hint, fellas: too many deer can deforest a parcel of land quicker than a horde of lumberjacks with a portable sawmill. Ditto for cows. Ditto for anything that eats plants. I've never seen a tree run away from a foraging goat, have you?

The only irony here is that university professors (and other "intellectuals") seem to have such a problem with the obvious.

Predators are, ironically, the key to keeping the world green, because they keep the numbers of plant-eating herbivores under control, reports a research team.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

00:00 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

26 Feb 2006
A Diamond on the Net

I use the Net pretty extensively: looking for information, reading the news, getting directions and generally finding things of interest. One of my favorite pastimes, while sitting in the Comfy Chair in the library, is to go to Wikipedia and select a random page. Google has also provided hours of amusement - try searching for 'Images' on a search term you've entered while seeking text. You'll be surprised at what's out there ...

Anyway, I was just randomly surfing about last evening, looking for a fish graphic I could use to illustrate an article I've got growing in my head, when I stumbled across this, a graduation speech to the class of 1998 by George Gollin, a physics professor at UIUC. Not only it it a fine piece of writing, I daresay that if I'd made it to college on a regular basis, and had a physics prof like Dr. Gollin, I would've ended up as a physicist. Some people are natural teachers, and from this bit, I think it's obvious that Gollin is among them.

He seems to be a couple of years older than I am, and his litany of problems from the sixties and seventies are the same as I remember: we were certain to die in a radioactive cloud of nuclear annihilation, after all. The perspective he gives to these "Gordian knots" is inspiring, to say the least. The true object of education is to provide some rudimentary experience to the student, and then to provide the student with the tools to use that and other life experience to fully engage with the world in a meaningful way. Gollin accomplishes this goal with positive style. Read the whole thnig - you won't be disappointed.

And if I'd not been searching for a fish picture, I never would've found it ...

00:00 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

25 Feb 2006
Are Usenet fans vulnerable to copyright lawsuits?

The Web couldn't kill it, SPAM couldn't kill, even ignorance of it by the vast majority of today's netizens hasn't made it go away. But now the lawyers are going to give it a shot, and I fear for the future of the oldest operating network service...

Newsgroups predate P2P by 20 years or so, but they're finally being targeted by Hollywood. Who should worry?

(link) [CNET News.com]

00:00 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

Emmy-winning comic actor Don Knotts dies at 81

One of the classic comics of his (or any) generation... RIP.

Reuters - Don Knotts, who won five Emmys for portraying the bungling deputy Barney Fife on the hit television program "The Andy Griffith Show," has died at age 81, a spokesman said on Saturday.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

00:00 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

24 Feb 2006
In the Land of Coq au Vin, Soul-Searching Over Bird Flu

Am I getting paranoid in my old age? Because the more I read about this, the more suspicious I get of the whole deal. I'm even starting to wonder if I've been a bit too credulous in my prior reporting on this issue. Ian Fleming, in his James Bond novels, put an interesting thought in the head of his protagonist: "One time is happenstance, two times is coincidence, three times is enemy action." So let's count...

First off, despite nearly hysterical reports all over the mass media, there's been no human outbreak of bird flu. There's happenstance.

Despite it's initial appearance in the Orient, where the vast majority of birds are raised free range in folks backyards, it has not utterly devastated the national poultry flocks. China has made some quixotic efforts at vaccination, but basically, after the initial wave, there's been nothing - it's moved on west - to Europe and Africa. Coincidence?

Now here we are in Europe - and H5N1 will be in the US before summer, I guarantee it. What's the reaction in the West? Why, confine all birds, of course, since now the transmission vector is perceived to be migratory waterfowl. Which are the only birds, upon review, that've been found with the virus in Europe.

Most free range producers can't lock their birds up: we don't have the space or the equipment. Most of us don't want to in any event: we've become convinced, like the gentlemen in the referenced article, that "Un bon poulet est un poulet libre!" ("A Good Chicken is a Free Chicken!"). But unless we confine our birds per government health order, they'll cull our flocks as a preventative measure:

Underscoring those concerns, French officials cordoned off the suspicious turkey farm and ordered the slaughter of all 11,000 birds on Thursday, even though definitive results from laboratory testing for the virus were not expected before Friday.

Qui bono?

Meanwhile, Duc, a French mass-production poultry company, is taking a different tack, touting the fact that its chickens are raised in confinement. The company has begun distributing pictures of its birds in cages.

I'm not saying that corporate commercial poultry producers caused this outbreak - but I'm getting damn suspicious that they're manipulating it to quash their competition - if I got a "confine or cull" order from the USDA my flock would be dead by nightfall, and I'd be out of business.

And that qualifies, in my book anyway, as "enemy action".

The fowl is part of the national heritage of France, and fears of avian flu have set off a national panic as well as an identity crisis.

(link) [New York Times]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

23 Feb 2006
We own all your rich internet media

You don't need a law degree to read this patent (linked in the article below), nor do you need to be a genius to figure out that it's entirely bogus. I have no idea how the USPTO could possibly have been so stupid as to grant this patent. It's truly unbelievable - read it for yourself.

Design shop learns from patent big boys

(link) [The Register]

00:00 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

Misreported Boxed Beef Prices

A lot of folks wonder how corporations take advantage of producers: this case illustrates a classic scam. Commodities markets depend on transparency: information is the currency that's being traded here, and perfect information makes for market equilibrium. Of course, information is never perfect, and so prices constantly move and flow, adjusting themselves in a sort of feedback loop to try to find the balance.

If the information can be controlled and skewed, it can be used to leverage huge advantages in trading. This is exactly what happened here: this should be a pretty open and shut case. It'll be interesting to see how the packers try to defend themselves.

I strongly suspect that this kind of thing goes on pretty much all of the time, behind the scenes, in various commodity markets, including such non-agricultural goods as energy and metals. It was a variation on this theme that got Enron in so much trouble trading electricity in California before their collapse - and it wouldn't surprise me a bit to see a major "agribusiness" follow in it's footsteps at some time in the near future.

(Aberdeen, S.D.) A federal jury trial will begin here April 3 to consider claims made against the four largest United States beef packers arising out of the misreporting of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's boxed beef prices that occurred between April 2 and May 11, 2001.

(link) [The Prairie Star]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

U.S. Ports Raise Proxy Problem

This is the first rational analysis of the whole port security controversy - by a well known and respected cryptographer, no less! Read it and understand the fuss... I can certainly see my own initial reaction in light of this analysis, and it goes a long way towards explaining why this seems to have become a truly bipartisan issue.

The controversy over President Bush's plan to turn over management of six U.S. ports to Dubai is a proxy war between competing interests -- and it's not clear which ones are ours. Commentary by Bruce Schneier.

(link) [Wired News: Top Stories]

00:00 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Ketchup is a Vegetable, Milk is Junk Food

Remember when the USDA decided that ketchup is a vegetable in the Reagan years? Well, it seems as though the State of Indiana is trying to do them one better: Senate Bill 0111 would effectively classify whole milk as a junk food. Milk that's been processed, dried and had every bit of natural goodness sucked right out of it would be just fine - but not whole milk, and certainly not real milk. Hel, that's illegal to sell in Indiana, if you want to drink it you have to own a cow share.

If anyone out there still suffers from the delusion that our government is run by rational folks, this should go a long ways to dispelling it.

00:00 /Agriculture | 5 comments | permanent link

China Bans Cartoons That Blend Animation

Conservatives are constantly complaining about the "Hollywood elite" and their often rabid support of protectionist measures and general anti-globalization attitudes. They don't seem to understand that Hollywood is acting in it's own economic self-interest in these initiatives: it's frequently American cultural products (such as the ones being banned here) that bear the brunt of foreign protectionist measures.

Nobody has yet explained to me what's free about trade that allows China to sell their products here, and also allows them to ban imports of our products. I'm sure that the US Trade Representative will engage in "serious negotiations" with the Chinese on this issue - for at least ten years, with the Chinese dragging their feet all the way. By that time their native animation production facilities will have overtaken ours, by way of having a captive audience in the worlds largest market. We'll finally reach an agreement allowing the import of our films into China, but we won't have any to sell. The whole incident will be declared a "victory for free trade" ... and another American industry will be left in shambles.

Is it any wonder that Hollywood uses it's political influence to try and stem the tide? There can be no such thing as free trade on a one way street.

AP - "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" could be out of the picture in China — along with many other cartoon favorites.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

00:00 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

22 Feb 2006
Get the Number Off the Beast

No NAIS!

Today is the birthday of our first president, and in his honor NoNAIS.org is calling for us to spread the word about this nightmare that's lurking in the wings. I urge you to visit the site, get yourself informed, and take the appropriate action.

“As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air however slight, least we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”

Justice William O. Douglas,
US Supreme Court (1939-75)

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

Teen sexual encounters not only a result of unsupervised afternoons

Yep, there are certainly other factors. They're called hormones...

More than just opportunity plays a role in the frequency of sexual activity among teens, according to Indiana University School of Medicine researchers.

(link) [EurekAlert! - Breaking News]

00:00 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link