How screwed up is this? A photographer named Jill Greenberg torments kids to get them to cry, photographs them and calls it art. Her defense? The kids’ parents were there, and one of the kids was her own, and, in her husband’s words, “they don’t seem any worse for wear.”

Here’s the logic: Because these kids aren’t really hurt the way adults think of “hurt,” it’s OK. The fact that they are clearly suffering doesn’t matter. Losing a lollipop might be nothing for an adult, but for some kids it’s a Big Deal.

So there are two possibilities here. 1) These kids really are upset and suffering, which makes Jill Greenberg an abuser, or 2) This isn’t really suffering we’re seeing, which makes Jill Greenberg a fake.

I think it’s the former. In American Photo magazine, Greenberg was quoted as saying, “Some would just cry for no reason — my daughter did that; she didn’t like standing on the apple box I used for a platform because it was a little wobbly.”

AUGH! How incredibly ignorant! How incredibly stupid! Her daughter wasn’t crying “for no reason.” She was terrified about where she was standing. Just because Greenberg isn’t afraid of standing on a wobbly box, she thinks a toddler shouldn’t be, either.

Here’s a quote from her: “Some just wouldn’t cry at all. For all the kids I worked really fast. We would book 12 or so for one day, and see who we could make cry.”

…and see who we could make cry. Holy moly, and she doesn’t think that’s abuse? These kids didn’t volunteer for this; they’re two or three years old, tops. And they’re subject to a woman who is deliberately doing things to scare them, hurt them, or torment them.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s abuse, plain and simple.

Thomas Hawk, who first brought this woman to people’s attention, has a much longer and better post on the subject entitled, “Jill Greenberg is a Sick Woman Who Should Be Arrested and Charged With Child Abuse.”

So does Charlie Owen.

If you read the Constitution, you’ll notice something about what it does: It lays out the powers and (to some extent) the procedures of our government. It assigns certain powers to certain branches, and it explicitly guarantees certain rights for the people.

In other words, the Constitution defines and limits the powers of government. No where does it limit the power or rights of the people.

There has been one exception to that: Prohibition. the Eighteenth Amendment was the only part of the Constitution that imposed limits on people instead of government.

Prohibition was ineffective, divisive, and repealed by the Twenty-First Amendment.

Some members of Congress just tried and failed to repeat history. They wanted to change the Constitution and add a section — one banning desecration of the American flag — that would be the only part of the document to limit the rights of the people.

Think about that. Everything in the Constitution either defines or limits the powers of government, or guarantees the rights of the people. Except that. (Technically you might say that the proposed amendment doesn’t take away rights — it only gives Congress the power to do that. But we both know that’s splitting hairs.)

How insulting it is to our millions of war dead, our millions of veterans, and our millions of men and women serving in the armed forces to trample on the Constitution in the name of protecting a symbol. Our elected leaders took an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Not the flag — the Constitution.

Americans have fought and died not to protect a symbol, but to protect the idea and values that symbol represents. Something is very, very wrong when we confuse the two. What’s more important, living in a nation that has our flag, or living in a nation that has our Constitution?

I vote for the latter, and I’m glad to see that enough people agreed with me.

Lesson learned today: If you need to send a package overnight, stick with FedEx and avoid the US Postal Service.

The USPS offers a thing called “Click-N-Ship,” where you can supposedly go online and, using your credit card, print out Priority Mail or Express Mail labels and ship them yourself, without a trip to the Post Office.

Unfortunately, the USPS has blatantly incorrect information on its Web site — information that, if you believe it, will make you think your package is being delivered quickly even when it’s not.

The Web site makes is absolutely clear in the FAQ:

Do I have to take my packages to a Post Office when I print labels online?

It is not necessary to take your packages to a Post Office when you print labels and postage online. You may deposit Priority Mail or Express Mail packages into any Postal Service collection box.

This is simply not true. In reality, you have to drop Click-N-Ship packages at the Post Office, or they’ll be delivered by regular mail. (You can also request a carrier pickup.)

That’s what I was told by not one, but two USPS representatives, despite the Web site saying exactly the opposite.

Now the whole point of Click-N-Ship is that you can save yourself the trouble of running down to the Post Office. But no … you still have to go, or, like me, you’ll spend $14.40 to send an “overnight” letter that won’t get to its destination for three or four days.

Next time, FedEx.

Winners of Webbys, one of the biggest awards given to Internet-related people and ventures, are limited to five-word acceptance speeches. (When Al Gore won the Lifetime Achievement Award last year, his speech was, “Please don’t recount this vote.”)

This year, National Geographic won the award for Best Science site for its Genographic Project. The acceptance speech? “More than just bare breasts.”

Read them all here.

In the movies, the Good Guys can the location of someone’s cell phone just by punching their number into a computer. Up pops a map with a blinking dot.

You’re expecting me to say that “In the real world it doesn’t work like that.”

Actually, it does.

I was chatting with John Johnson, director of corporate communications for Verizon Wireless, about the Migo phone. It’s designed for kids, with only four buttons (you can only call four numbers, plus 911). The new version adds a “chaperon” feature: If the kid strays from a certain area, the parents are alerted.

You might think this is done strictly with the GPS chips that are in most modern phones. But Verizon Wireless doesn’t just use that — after all, GPS requires a clear view of the sky, and people aren’t always out in the open.

Instead, VZW supplements GPS with AFLT: Advanced Forward Link Trilateration. By computing the signal strength between a phone and a couple of cell towers (that’s right, a couple — it doesn’t need three), the system can get a general location of a phone. Granted, it won’t work for geocaching, but if your kid goes missing, locating him within a couple of hundred feet is darned good enough.

So I asked Johnson if this kind of technology could be used as a “poor man’s Lojack” — that is, a locater for stolen cars.

(I had thought it required GPS. In fact, in January, when a car was stolen with a baby in the back seat, Sprint refused to help police locate it despite (the news reports said) the phone’s having a GPS receiver.)

Yes, said Johnson, it could be used to locate a person or a car, although he didn’t know offhand if it had ever been done. Next question: Would the technology work with any phone, or would it need to be specially equipped with AFLT technology? Any phone, Johnson said.

So, while TV and the movies generally play fast and loose with the capabilities of technology, in this case they’ve actually got it right.

I usually prefer to link directly to a news story I want to tell you about, but that isn’t possible in this case; the Mail on Sunday’s report isn’t available online.

But Macworld in the UK wrote a summary of the story, so that’s the best I can do for now.

The Mail got to visit the factories where iPods are made, and it’s obvious why we can’t compete with China when it comes to manufacturing: We tend not to treat our workers as prisoners.

Writing about the 200,000-worker Longhua plant, which it nicknamed “iPod City,” Macworld said:

The report claims Longhua’s workers live in dormitories that house 100 people, and that visitors from the outside world are not permitted. Workers toil for 15-hours a day to make the iconic music player, the report claims. They earn £27 per month. The report reveals that the iPod nano is made in a five-storey factory (E3) that is secured by police officers.

Another factory in Suzhou, Shanghai, makes iPod shuffles. The workers are housed outside the plant, and earn £54 per month - but they must pay for their accommodation and food, “which takes up half their salaries”, the report observes.

If more stories like this got out — if people realized the conditions under which all their stuff is made, from iPods to toys to (looking around my desk) telephones, clocks, picture frames, and hundreds of other things — maybe they’d think twice before buying them.

Oh, who am I kidding? It’s cheap, so it sells — sells to the same people who bemoan the loss of America’s downtowns and any semblance of regional individualism, all while driving to Wal-Mart.

I was sitting in a conference the other day about applying game theory to networking. The idea, in a nutshell, is to teach computers (and other network nodes) to treat the network as a cooperative game. If they’re competitive, the network as a whole suffers, but if they work together it’s good for everyone’s traffic.

Anyway, that’s the gist. I can’t tell you any more because the discussion rapidly progressed into math that I just don’t understand; symbols went on the board that I’ve never seen, and letters were written in specific fonts. (You just know that an Old English “R” means something specific.)

But what finally made me realize that I wasn’t going to get much out of the presentation was when this phrase reared its head:

The von Neumann-Morgenstern Axioms are key to the existence of expected utility representations.

I know when to cut my losses. I was outta there.

This is interesting. Back in March 2004 1994, NBC News reported how the Bush Administration turned down two opportunities to kill Abu Musab Zarqawi in 2002 — it was more interested in the impending war in Iraq than in the war on terrorism.

The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.

“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.

…on a planet much like our own, but where the rules of reason don’t apply, the US military says that the suicides of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay (prisoners whose names we’re not allowed to know, and who are being held without indictment or trial), was an act of war against America.

Yes, you read that right. They attacked us by killing themselves.

But wait, the bang-your-head-against-the-table logic continues, this time from the other side.

Per the BBC:

William Goodman from the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights told AFP news agency the three dead men were “heroes for those of us who believe in basic American values of justice, fairness and democracy”.

Heroes? For committing suicide? Granted, the term “hero” has lost a lot of meaning these days — but huh?

Put the two together and you get this: These gallant men are heroes for attacking the United States by killing themselves. Roll that one around your head for a while.

Many of us know how Diet Coke + Mentos = geyser. But what if you rigged a setup with 100 two-liter bottles, 500 Mentos, and timers to drop them in?

Answer: Bellagio Lite — one heck of an impressive fountain display.

(I also note that the page is “dcm1,” presumably “Diet Coke and Mentos 1.” Which has me looking forward to dcm2.)

Thanks, Miranda!

Raise your hands in excitement during graduation, get kicked out.

The school district handbook also states that “students who raise their hands above their waists for any reasons other than receiving the diplomas or shaking hands may be removed from the graduation ceremony.”

Thanks, Eric!

You know you’re getting significant work done in your yard when your wife sends you a note that reads, “The front lawn is being unloaded from a truck right now.”

The headline reads “South Alabama Man Facing Bestiality Charge.” But the story gets even better — it has to, when PETA gets involved.

I love Photoshop, but I also know that it can be overkill for a lot of people — and the menus and options can be intimidating. (Photoshop Elements, also a great program, can be a bit condescending in its menus.)

For the kind of basic fixes that most people need, Picasa is a good choice, although it has some problems. For one, you have to install it, and for two, it also demands to be an image organizer (and, to be honest, not one I’m thrilled with).

Comes now PXN8, an online, AJAX-based image editor. (AJAX, which stands for asynchronous JavaScript and XML, allows Web sites to act as smoothly and quickly as installed applications. See my column on the subject for more.)

Anyway, on first glance PXN8 looks great. A few minor things are annoying, but they’re not significant enough to take away from the overall goodness.

It allows you to choose an image from your hard drive, then crop and enhance it in all sorts of ways — not just ultra-basics like brightness and contrast. It’s got a fill light tool, a decent color shifter, a straightener, and some other nice stuff (but not too many to be overwhelming).

It’s free, it’s good, and it’s worth checking out.

Guess what? If you’re angry on the road and take it out on other drivers, you’re not an inconsiderate jerk with a road-rage problem.

No no — you have a gen-u-ine disorder — intermittent explosive disorder, to be specific. So it’s not your fault!

Heck, wait long enough and every kind of annoying or stupid behavior will be classified as a disorder, and there’ll be even less we have to take responsibility for!

Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh!

When zero tolerance gets stupid:

Example 1.

Example 2.

Curious about the Army’s official guide to interrogations (the Army Field Manual 34-52, “Intelligence Interrogation”). Get your copy here (14 MB PDF).

A new study from GMAC found that one out of 11 people who took a test similar to a written driver’s test would fail, i.e., they don’t know the rules of the road.

Okey doke, whatever. But the study also pointed out this alarming tidbit:

The study also found nearly one-quarter of U.S. drivers believe there are circumstances in which it’s acceptable to not wear a seatbelt, the report said.

But guess what: If you asked me “Are there any situations when you’re driving when it’s acceptable not to wear a seatbelt?” I’d have to answer “Of course.”

For example, moving my car out of my driveway so my wife can pull hers in, or straightening the car in a parking space. So yes, of course there are times you don’t need a seatbelt while driving, but the authors of the study make it sound as if millions of people are idiots when it comes to buckling up.

I hate spin like that — spin that uses the answer to one question (”Is it ever OK not to wear a seatbelt?”) to imply the answer to another (”In normal driving conditions, is it OK not to wear a seatbelt for a long period of time?”).

I suspect the answer to the latter question would skew differently.

Nothing more to say.

In Albany, N.Y.’s Crossgates Mall, there’s a memorial to the Karner Blue butterfly under a staircase. It’s there because, in building the mall, one of the Karner Blue’s rare habitats was virtually wiped out. So instead of the butterflies, the people of Albany have a steel and glass reminder of them.

In New York, N.Y., there’s a memorial to freedom being built: the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower that’s replacing the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Instead of our freedoms, we have a glass and steel reminder of them.

The old style of war was a war of conquest: One group tried to conquer another by occupying its land. Your fight against the invaders was a fight for your freedom — if they won, they’d impose a law and culture you didn’t want.

In fighting the war on terrorism, though, we aren’t fighting against an enemy intent on conquering our lands. That’s one reason this is a very different kind of war. There is no realistic point in which the Bad Guys will have won. The Western world will not become an Islamic caliphate; the United States will not be wiped off the map.

There is no agenda and there are no demands. They are simply trying to hurt us.

The fight, for us, is simple: Do not let that happen. And there are many ways to accomplish that goal, offensive and defensive.

The problem is that in a desperate attempt to fight that war, to stop ourselves from being hurt, we’ve found a way to lose the other kind.

What does it mean to be conquered? It means that different people set the rules — people you may not like creating laws you may not like. Sometimes those laws are based on ideology, sometimes on religion, sometimes on something else. If those ideals or gods or what have you are not yours, you have lost.

Which is why we as a people are losing that other kind of war. We have enabled a different kind of government to set the rules.

It’s one that taps our phone calls and collects our phone records, then lies about doing it.

It’s one that tells us we must sacrifice our privacy for security, then demands for itself absolute secrecy in its dealings.

It’s one that feels it doesn’t need warrants to search our homes, stamping the paperwork “National Security” and telling us it’s for our own good.

It’s one that gives itself the right to look at our library records, our health records, our phone calls, and our e-mail, but denies us the right to know when this is being done.

And it’s one that portrays anyone who disagrees with it as an enemy.

The age of conquering armies is over. But the potential for the effects are the same: the loss of our ideals, our values, and our freedoms — the very things that make us who we are. When those are gone, we are a different people. Perhaps we should consider this for what it is before we hail our conquerors.