Looking to see what other people are doing.

Not quite up to Nikola Tesla’s dream of sending electricity long distance through the air, but still a wonderful invention — even better because it’s real and going into production.

Powercast’s platform uses nothing more complex than a radio–and is cheap enough for just about any company to incorporate into a product. A transmitter plugs into the wall, and a dime-size receiver (the real innovation, costing about $5 to make) can be embedded into any low-voltage device. The receiver turns radio waves into DC electricity, recharging the device’s battery at a distance of up to 3 feet.

Link to Powercast’s site.

My wife, who’s a member of several Yahoo groups, reports that for the past couple of days she’s been getting multiple copies of every e-mail sent to the group — in some cases, a dozen. And, she says, it’s happening to all her groups. Being that she has a lot of interests, from job-hunting to quilting to [sigh] Stargate: Atlantis, I wonder if it’s a widespread problem.

Anyone else noticed this?

Specifically, friends in low places.

You may have read the story of how ITT shared secrets with foreign countries. ITT Night Vision, the division involved, is based in Roanoke, so I got to help cover the story here.

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The stories in other newspapers are fine, but if you want to read the details — e.g., what secrets were ‘leaked,’ and why it matters — our coverage blows the others away.

Mike Gangloff, the guy who wrote most of it, is a great reporter. He pored over all the documents to find questions for ITT and talking points for the story that everyone else missed.

</brag>

Check it out. You’ll get a much better picture of what happened.

According to an announcement today, Circuit City has resorted to extreme measures to improve its financial performance: It plans to dismember about 3400 employees.

From the release:

The company has completed a wage management initiative that will result in the separation of approximately 3,400 store Associates. The separations, which are occurring today, focused on Associates who were paid well above the market-based salary range for their role. New Associates will be hired for these positions and compensated at the current market range for the job.

That strikes me as a pretty brutal thing to do. And I thought Best Buy treated its employees like crap.

Looking up something else (the use of the phrase “Secret - No Foreign”), I came upon a story about Bob Woodward and the beginning of the Iraq War.

After giving the order to start the War, Bush took a walk and told Woodward the following:

I prayed that our troops be safe, be protected by the Almighty. Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord’s will. I’m surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray that I be as good a messenger of his will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for forgiveness.”

Once more, in case you missed that: “I pray that I be as good a messenger of his will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for forgiveness.”

So Bush thinks his god is speaking to him and that he’s doing “God’s will,” but then he also wants forgiveness for doing it?

If you aren’t a Battlestar Galactica fan, you can ignore this post.

If you are, but haven’t seen the season-three finalé, “Crossroads,” you should ignore this post.

I just want to put this out there so some day I can look back and say, “Boy, were you wrong.”

* * *

Based on the events in the show, and on a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette interview with Ron Moore, here’s my wild and guaranteed-incorrect guess at the whole backstory:

About 75,000 years ago, some beings come to Earth and say, “Hey, cute Neanderthals. Let’s take some.” And they do, bringing them to a planet — Kobol.

The Neanderthals do the evolution thing, eventually becoming modern humans who interact with the beings who originally brought them to Kobol.

For some reason, there’s a need to leave Kobol — maybe a natural disaster, maybe an argument among the “gods,” whatever. Of the Kobolians, 12 factions set off for a new star system, but a 13th says, “Hey, we wanna go back to the homeworld. Earth.”

And they do.

Arriving at Earth, things don’t go so well in terms of their civilization. It collapses within a few hundred years. Still, they’re able to out-do the Neanderthals living there, eventually becoming the dominant life form. (After all, it’s not clear why Homo sapiens suddenly took over from Homo neanderthalensis.)

Thus we have stone-age humans on Earth, while a more advanced civilization flourishes on the 12 colonies.

Almost two thousand years pass. The Cylons (created by humans) fight with their creators, leave, and bump into none other than the “gods” — the beings who brought the humans to Kobol.

The Cylons recognize the “gods” as advanced life forms (not worthy of worship). Instead, they begin to obsess about being human and decide there is only one god.

The “gods” take the Cylons under their wings (so to speak), teaching them about humans and helping them create humanoid versions of themselves. But, knowing the Cylons (and humans) might want to find Earth someday, they also plant five special Cylons in human culture — Cylons that are designed to help bring everyone to Earth when the time is right.

When is the time right? When they’re capable of reaching a point in space on the road to Earth. Which is what happened in Crossroads part 1.

The genocide wasn’t part of the plan — that was just Cylon nastiness. The plan was all about bringing everyone back together where it all started: Earth.

It’s a pre-civilization Earth to be sure (no lights on the night side at the end of Crossroads 2), but it’s Earth.

Maybe the “gods” will make them give up all their tech before they land, and they’ll become our ancestors.

Or… everything in this post may be wrong. :)

In an editorial in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal (OpinionJournal), Katherine Kersten of the Minneapolis Star Tribune has written something so inane, so incredibly narrow-minded, that it boggles the mind.

She says in her first graf that “hard-line Muslim activists are injecting an element that is anything but nice” into Minnesota.

As evidence, she brings up two events: Muslim taxi drivers who refuse to drive people carrying alcohol, and Muslim cashiers who refuse to scan pork products.

Huh? That’s “anything but nice”? Last I checked, there were lots of radical Christian pharmacists refusing to dispense “Plan B,” the day-after, non-abortive contraceptive. I wonder if Kesten would put them in the same category.

But, you see, it’s not that those taxi drivers aren’t being nice. They’re trying to open a gateway to America subscribing to fundamentalist Islamic law!

Check out this bit of inanity:

In September 2006, the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC) proposed a two color top-light pilot project to indicate which drivers would accept passengers with alcohol. The proposal, later dropped, would apparently have marked the first time that a government agency in the U.S. officially recognized Shariah law, and distinguished individuals who follow it from those who don’t. (Emphasis mine.)

Sharia law (it’s commonly spelled without the ‘h’) is what you think of when you think of thigns like the stoning of women, the cutting off of hands, and so on.

It makes a great scare tactic, even if Kersten is full of it, to jump from two small examples (refusing to drive with alcohol, asking customers or other cashiers to scan pork products) to “Sharia law” in general.

Once we let them refuse to scan our pepperoni pizzas, next we’ll have to let them stone their women!

What a load of crap.

It’s especially crap because Kersten herself points out that it’s far from clear that driving someone who’s carrying a bottle of wine (or scanning a pepperoni pizza) is even part of Sharia:

Ahmed Samatar, a recognized expert on Somali society at Macalester College in St. Paul notes that “There is a general Islamic prohibition against drinking, but carrying alcohol for people in commercial enterprise has never been forbidden.” Similarly, Islam prohibits consuming pork, but not touching or scanning it, according to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the American Society for Muslim Advancement in New York. It is, or should be, “a nonissue.”

But let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good scare-the-people story, eh?

Then Kersten lays it on thicker, bringing up those six imams who were detained ”after engaging in what an airport police report called “suspicious” activity,” she wrote. “Some prayed loudly in the gate area, spoke angrily about the U.S. and Saddam, switched seats and unnecessarily requested seat belt extenders with heavy buckles that could be used as weapons, according to witnesses.”

First they’ll refuse to scan our pizza, next they’ll be taking down our airplanes with seat belt extenders!

Am I the only one tired of this scare-tactic bullshit?

Those imams were a bunch of idiots. I doubt they were planning anything other than to scare people and be detained so they could raise a fuss. (If it wasn’t intentional, the level of idiocy involved staggers the mind.)

And the taxi drivers and supermarket scanners are no worse than drug-store employees demanding that another employee ring up Plan B. The hacks and cashiers don’t understand the law they think they’re upholding, and the pharmacists don’t understand basic biology.

Stupid? Yes. Threatening to the American way of life? Doubtful. Not nearly as threatening as, oh, secret tribunals, suspension of habeas corpus, warrantless wiretaps, lying attorneys general, and so on.

It’s all a matter of your agenda, isn’t it?

Whew. Last night was the last Vista straw for me. I’d been getting a variety of minor errors since I installed Vista (and got past the bigger issues), but nothing that would stop me from working.

Still, getting regular errors every time I view a folder full of thumbnails was annoying, as were things like a very slow CD writer.

Then last night I noticed that my daily backup hadn’t been done. Hmm. I check to make sure that Task Scheduler was running, but it wasn’t.

Or it was. One error message said it wasn’t running, but Task Scheduler itself said it was. When I tried to get a list of what was scheduled, I got an error telling me it couldn’t access that data.

What I had done before with Vista (and any time I had a problem) was type the error message into Google and eventually find a solution to the problem. This time, though, no joy. There was a total of two sites that mentioned the error I got, and neither in the correct context.

Ergo, Task Scheduler wasn’t gonna run.

And that was the last straw. I copied all my data manually to a backup drive, formatted my C: drive, thought for a moment about doing a clean Vista install (the one I had was an upgrade), decided against it, and loaded XP.

The XP disk I had was old, so after installing it had to download a lot of updates, but that was no big deal. And I had already made a list of what needed to be reinstalled (Firefox, Thunderbird, Office, Photoshop, etc.), so even that was relatively painless.

Besides, there’s a distinct pleasure to be had when you wipe out and start from scratch with a clean system. And because I was prepared, all my docs (including my mail, which I briefly lost with Vista) were exactly where they were supposed to be.

And now, for the first time in weeks, I know I can sit at my computer again and have it just work.

Whew. Last night was the last Vista straw for me. I’d been getting a variety of minor errors since I installed Vista (and got past the bigger issues), but nothing that would stop me from working.

Still, getting regular errors every time I view a folder full of thumbnails was annoying, as were things like a very slow CD writer.

Then last night I noticed that my daily backup hadn’t been done. Hmm. I check to make sure that Task Scheduler was running, but it wasn’t.

Or it was. One error message said it wasn’t running, but Task Scheduler itself said it was. When I tried to get a list of what was scheduled, I got an error telling me it couldn’t access that data.

What I had done before with Vista (and any time I had a problem) was type the error message into Google and eventually find a solution to the problem. This time, though, no joy. There was a total of two sites that mentioned the error I got, and neither in the correct context.

Ergo, Task Scheduler wasn’t gonna run.

And that was the last straw. I copied all my data manually to a backup drive, formatted my C: drive, thought for a moment about doing a clean Vista install (the one I had was an upgrade), decided against it, and loaded XP.

The XP disk I had was old, so after installing it had to download a lot of updates, but that was no big deal. And I had already made a list of what needed to be reinstalled (Firefox, Thunderbird, Office, Photoshop, etc.), so even that was relatively painless.

Besides, there’s a distinct pleasure to be had when you wipe out and start from scratch with a clean system. And because I was prepared, all my docs (including my mail, which I briefly lost with Vista) were exactly where they were supposed to be.

And now, for the first time in weeks, I know I can sit at my computer again and have it just work.

“Your food kills animals and ours doesn’t! Nyah, nyah, nyah!”

I was looking through some old product recalls for a story I’m working on, when I came across this one that struck me as A) particularly scary, and B) quite understated when you consider what would happen.

On February 15, 2005 Brave Products recalled about 4000 log splitters because “The log splitter’s hydraulic cylinders can have defective rod retention, causing the seals to leak and the rods to detach. This can result in serious injury to the operator, as the rod can rapidly and unexpectedly extend the splitting wedge.”

I think the word “extend” is what makes it sound almost benign. It sound like the splitter could slowly start moving, which would be annoying but only dangerous to the very slow. But that’s not the case — the wedge can rapidly and unexpectedly extend.

Ever used a log splitter? I have. I wouldn’t want the wedge to rapidly or unexpectedly do anything.

The latest browser-survey results from W3Schools are here.

For both charts, click ‘em to enlarge ‘em.

Here’s the broad-stroke breakdown, in which I combine Internet Explorer versions, and Firefox with other Mozilla-based browsers:

And the more-detailed breakdown for those who like such things:

Here’s an interesting stat from the folks at Parks Associates. According to the company’s most recent data and survey, 29 percent of all U.S. households do not have Internet access — that’s about 31 million homes — and don’t plan on getting it.

There are several reasons for this: They can’t afford it, they get it at work, they’re unsure of using the Internet, etc.

But by far the number-one reason for not having access is “Not interested in anything on the Internet.”

I’m… I’m… I’m not sure what to say. To me, that’s like saying, “There are no books that interest me.” Certainly, some of those people probably could not afford the Net but were embarrassed to say so, but still the vast plurality just doesn’t want it. Wild.

From a collection of best unintentionally funny comic panels:

Remember that L.A. firefighter who was awarded $2.7 million because he was fed dog food by his coworkers as part of a series of pranks? He claimed that somehow dog food and black people had some kind of bad history.

I wonder what he’d make of Derek McGinty of WUSA in Washington, D.C., who voluntarily ate the stuff on television for a story about organic dog foods.

“The things I do for this job,” McGinty joked, then [dog] chowed down.

This could be the mostest wonderfulest thing I’ve ever read from a Christian extremist ever:

From a post to SmashBoards.com:

One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn’t possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.

“Hmm,” says Andrew, looking out the window. “Hmm.”

And from the same source comes a link to this beauty (click it to read it) posted at Christian Forums:

Thanks and blessings to Dorene for sending me to the site that led me to these.

He sends me to sites like this.

LONDON (AP) — A first-class passenger on a flight from Delhi to London awoke find the corpse of a woman who had died in the economy cabin being placed in a seat next to him, British Airways said Monday.

(From Airline moves dead body to 1st class.)