Discover Magazine announced that highly respected wildlife biologist Dr. Aprile Pazzo has discovered a new species in Antarctica: the hotheaded naked ice borer. These fascinating creatures have bony plates on their heads that, fed by numerous blood vessels, can become burning hot, allowing the animals to bore through ice at high speeds. They use this ability to hunt penguins, melting the ice beneath the penguins and causing them to sink downwards into the resulting slush where the hotheads consume them.

After much research, Dr. Pazzo theorized that the hotheads might have been responsible for the mysterious disappearance of noted Antarctic explorer Philippe Poisson in 1837. “To the ice borers, he would have looked like a penguin.”

Read more here about yesterday’s announcement.

Along with the possiblity of losing your citizenship if you’re found to have contributed “material support” to organizations deemed by the government, even retroactively, to be “terrorist,” this does what many feared:

…many of PATRIOT I’s “sunset provisions” � stipulating that the expanded new enforcement powers would be rescinded in 2005 � would be erased from the books, cementing Ashcroft’s rushed legislation in the law books. As UPI noted March 10, “These sunset provisions were a concession to critics of the bill in Congress.”

The act was leaked a couple of months ago, and quickly denied as “just an early draft.” But this article points out that, just as Patriot 1 was rushed through after 9/11, “if 10,000 residents of Los Angeles had been vaporized by a “suitcase nuke” in late January, it is reasonable to assume that the then-secret proposal would have been speed-delivered for a congressional vote, even though Congress has not so far participated in drafting the legislation.”

Furniture and more at Straight Line Designs

Funny how I was reading about some of this stuff yesterday while writing a response to the “Who’s Smarter?” e-mail that’s been going around, and then I encounter new stuff today. Connect the dots…

An article titled “The Cheney Connection” says:

… there are serious questions emerging over the process by which US companies are hired to put out oil fires, … and do whatever is necessary to ”reconstruct” Iraq after allied forces deconstruct it. Some answers need to come from Vice President Dick Cheney, a major architect of the war with Iraq, … who was, until 2 1/2 years ago, chief executive officer of Halliburton Co., a Houston-based oil field services firm…

It is a Halliburton subsidiary — Kellogg, Brown & Root — that landed on a short list of companies invited by the US Agency for International Development to bid on what could grow to be a $900 million contract to rebuild Iraq. That’s the same Kellogg, Brown & Root that was recently awarded, by the Defense Department, the contract to put out fires at oil fields in Iraq.

In the first Gulf War, Iraqis torched more than 700 oil wells in Kuwait. About half the fires were extinguished by Halliburton.

Of course this isn’t really new news. And then I saw another press release about an upcoming movie by Michael Moore, of “Bowling for Columbine”, “Stupid White Men” and Oscar speech fame. It’s titled “Fahrenheit 911” and is a documentary about “the murky relationship” between former President George Bush and the family of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

According to Moore, the former president had a business relationship with Osama bin Laden’s father, Mohammed bin Laden, a Saudi construction magnate who left $300 million to Osama bin Laden. It has been widely reported that bin Laden used the inheritance to finance global terrorism.

Moore said the bin Laden family was heavily invested in the Carlyle Group, a private global investment firm that the filmmaker said frequently buys failing defense companies and then sells them at a profit. Former President Bush has reportedly served as a senior adviser with the firm.

“The senior Bush kept his ties with the bin Laden family up until two months after Sept. 11, “said Moore.

And I was reading about that yesterday at The First 80 Years Behind the Bushes. Again, it’s not really new news. There have been stories about this stuff for a long time.

So many dots, so little time.

Californians can now pre-register here for the nationwide Do Not Call list that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is expected to launch this summer.

A number of states are considering bills that apparently are intended to extend the national Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Freedom To Tinker provides a lot of concise info. Their original description from 3/26 is already out of date, but it’s the best I’ve seen. The MPAA is pushing it. It has already passed in Michigan.

It’s best if you read about it there, but here are a couple of examples:

• Most security “firewalls” use NAT, so if you use a firewall (and you should be), you’re in violation.
• If you have a home DSL router, or if you use the “Internet Connection Sharing” feature of your favorite operating system product, you’re in violation for the same reason.
• Most operating system products would also apparently be banned, because they support connection sharing via NAT.

Another example of the government trying to legislate what it doesn’t understand.

April 1st to April 8th is a week during which everyone is encouraged to turn off outdoor lighting. It was founded to reduce light pollution so we can step back for a moment and see the night sky. It occurs from 10pm to 12 am (ET & MT) and 9pm to 11pm (CT & PT).

Read about it the at NDSW web site.

You probably didn’t know that Bush apparently went AWOL (Dallas Morning News) from his Air National Guard duty in the 1970s. It was covered by a few newspapers, but the story disappeared after he claimed he couldn’t remember what happened. Right. “I can’t remember what I did, but I wasn’t flying because they didn’t have the same airplanes. I fulfilled my obligations.”�

He also apparently skipped a medical exam that required a drug test.� Can you say special treatment?

While I’m at it, both these items are mention in this article about why we’re really going to Iraq.

It seems like it takes almost all day to read the Sunday paper. So, just how much stuff is in there? What if it was in book format instead of that thing that takes over the floor or couch or sometimes both?

If this Sunday’s LA Times was put into a standard size paperback book format, it would be over 2,500 pages long. And it would have a second 1,250 page supplement to cover the classified, jobs and cars ads. Yeah, there are lots of full page ads (each taking almost 13 paperback pages) that you would just skim through, but that’s still a lot of reading material. And the page count doesn’t include any of the extras like ad or magazine inserts.

The Times was made up of a 200 page main paper with another 100 pages of classified and car ads. Just a coincidence, or is it this size all the time? Stay tuned.

Q: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
A: Who cares, they’re both delicious!

Somebody that’s offended by PETA’s latest advertising campaign came up with this great idea for today.  Too bad I found out too late and don’t have any meat in the fridge.  Yeah, that will be the day.  They’ve even got a letter to PETA and addresses to send it.

I think it’s time to go heat up some sausage…

Ten Second Films. They require a lot of bandwidth: cable and DSL are considered slow.

Do not breakdance under piles of rubble.

The government is trying to help us prepare for terrorist attacks with ambiguous pictures. Some wisecrackers made new captions. The site became so popular that they removed many of the pages to cut down on the traffic. What’s left is still good.

This is just a start, but I wanted to get the initial page posted. There’s a lot more to read on HCA’s main site. The bill (SB 921) has been introduced. There is activity taking place. GO. Read. Join.

Disturbed, from A to Z: link

From a Sacramento Business Journal article: Double-digit percentage premium increases continue to pay off for the three big for-profit HMOs in Greater Sacramento � their combined net profits for 2002 are up 74 percent from 2001.

I guess that explains why my insurance premiums went up over 25% in less than two months. Too bad the money isn’t going to health care. A for-profit system doesn’t make sense when it comes to medicine.

Ganguro are Japanese girls who try to look black (at least that’s one opinion out there). Here’s a page of ganguro girl pics.

I was wondering if there was a name for the style.

“Who is Tom Glazer, you ask? He was a silly folk singer who wrote and recorded the classic song ‘On Top of Spaghetti’.” Okay, I didn’t know both that he died last week and that he wrote the song until today. But I did recognize this delightful ditty of his:

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where Hydrogen is built into Helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees

My good friend Rich put it on a tape that he made and now it is forever etched into my memory. Here is a low bandwidth mp3 to listen to.

You can find more MP3s of Glazer’s work (written by Lou Singer and Hy Zaret) at http://www.acme.com/jef/science_songs/.

Reuters: “A lawyer was arrested late Monday and charged with trespassing at a public mall in the state of New York after refusing to take off a T-shirt advocating peace that he had just purchased at the mall.” Link

Almost everybody I talk to is feeling overwhelmed in one way or another. Alvin Toffler, author of the 1970 book Future Shock, says that some of the problem has to do with our inability to cope with the pace of rapid decision making. He says that people feel “that the world has become so fast that there isn�t time to think through the complexities of the decisions they need to make.”

Politicians are having the same problem. He says, “I know some elected representatives who say they can�t assimilate all the information they need to make truly informed decisions, so their staff makes the decisions on most issues. To which I replied, ‘Exactly who elected your staff?'”.

Read the a slightly old (Sept. 2000) but interesting Toffler interview by Business2.0 magazine.

An interesting quote from the Forbes WEF article linked to in the “bcc: Everybody…” blog, below:

Hotmail, Microsoft’s free e-mail service, has 200 million users, but 30% to 40% of the cost goes to delivering messages they don’t want, thanks to an all-time peak in spam.