American Taliban III: Book of Daniel v AFA

The American Taliban rides again. This time the American Family Association is pressuring companies to not purchase ad time on NBC's new series The Book of Daniel. The AFA seems to be oh so capable of bringing about negative actions, but where were they when Three Wishes floundered and died from lack of viewer support?

January 11, 2006

Advertising

Few Are Booking Ads on 'The Book of Daniel'

By STUART ELLIOTT

ONE of the few advertisers that bought commercial time during the premiere last week of "The Book of Daniel" on NBC will not be back. The series, about a priest, was singled out before its debut by a conservative activist organization, the American Family Association, which condemned it as anti-Christian.

The advertiser is Combe Inc., a company in White Plains that sells personal care products, which bought a 30-second commercial for Just for Men hair coloring. It was one of only about two dozen national spots that ran during the two-hour back-to-back episodes that composed the premiere of "The Book of Daniel" from 9 to 11 p.m. (Eastern and Pacific times) last Friday.

Asked yesterday by a reporter if consumers had reacted to Combe's sponsorship of "The Book of Daniel," the company replied with a statement sent by e-mail that described the advertising buy as "a one-time event."

"The company will not be advertising on the show in the future," the statement concluded, without elaborating. It appears that consumers have called the company, though; when the reporter reached the Combe switchboard, asking only to speak to a company representative, an operator asked, "This wouldn't have anything to do with 'The Book of Daniel,' would it?"

Many mainstream advertisers have long been skittish about television programs with plot lines deemed contentious or provocative. Still, the paucity of marketers buying commercial time during the debut of "The Book of Daniel" was particularly pronounced - despite lower prices for the spots, which reflected a week's worth of media attention devoted to complaints from the American Family Association about the contents of the program.

The complaints led 5 of NBC's 232 affiliates to pre-empt the series last Friday; in one market, Little Rock, Ark., the local WB affiliate ran it instead.

The series "touches on something that our society, and Madison Avenue, are not ready for," said Joe Mandese, editor of MediaPost, an online and print trade publication. "Religion is the ultimate taboo topic."

In the series, which is to return on Friday in its regular time period, 10 p.m., Aidan Quinn portrays Daniel Webster, an Episcopal priest who lives in suburban New York with his dysfunctional family, which includes a daughter who sells marijuana, a son who is gay and another son who is a teenage lothario.

He regularly discusses his problems - for example, an addition to Vicodin - with Jesus, who is also a regular character in the series.

NBC is hoping that the eyebrow-raising story lines of "The Book of Daniel" will appeal to younger, educated and affluent viewers who prefer their TV programs with an edge.

It is part of efforts by NBC and the other big broadcast networks to make up for the viewers they have lost to cable networks that present more daring series like "The L Word," "Nip/Tuck," "Rescue Me" and "The Sopranos."

"Advertisers do have a history of taking a cautious approach to controversial shows," Kevin Reilly, president of NBC Entertainment, said in a telephone interview yesterday.

"It's an age-old issue," Mr. Reilly said. "We want to run contemporary programming, and we want to create the best possible environment for advertisers.

"Sometimes, those two things don't always go hand in hand. Sometimes, you have to experiment to find the right side of the line."

The rest of the episodes of "The Book of Daniel," a limited-run series, remain on the NBC schedule, Mr. Reilly said, "and we will stick with them." The series is to continue on Fridays through Feb. 3.

Some of the provocative series to which "The Book of Daniel" has been compared, like "Nip/Tuck," have lost advertisers because of protests from organizations like the American Family Association. So has "Desperate Housewives" on ABC, which in its episode last Sunday featured a kiss between two young actors who play high-school classmates.

But those series are considered hits because of their large audiences, so when some advertisers stop buying commercials, others emerge soon after to replace them. The two episodes of "The Book of Daniel" shown last Friday attracted only 9 million viewers, compared with more than 20 million for a hit like "Desperate Housewives."

While that was the best performance by NBC in the time period in nine months, the program finished a disappointing third in the national Nielsen ratings behind CBS and ABC.

To compensate for the lack of demand from advertisers last Friday, NBC ran more than three dozen commercials to promote its other prime-time programs. It also advertised its coming coverage of the Golden Globe Awards and Winter Olympics, and movie and DVD releases from two siblings under the NBC Universal and General Electric umbrellas, Universal Pictures and Universal Home Video.

Some of those commercials, promoting the NBC Thursday night lineup, the Winter Games and the Universal movie "King Kong," ran up to two minutes each - a virtual eternity in an era when many advertisers buy commercials in 15-second units.

Of the few outside advertisers, most could be categorized as bottom-feeders - that is, known for their alacrity in buying commercials at lower prices. In addition to Combe, they included the Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corporation; Chattem Inc., for Gold Bond lotion and Icy Hot pain reliever; and movie studios like DreamWorks SKG and the Paramount Pictures division of Viacom.

Among those studios was the Columbia Pictures unit of Sony Pictures, part of the Sony Corporation of America, which ran a commercial for the film "Memoirs of a Geisha." A sibling, Sony Pictures Television, is producing "The Book of Daniel" for NBC, however.

And DreamWorks, which bought a spot for the film "Match Point," is a partner with Universal in releasing the movie "Munich," which was also advertised during "The Book of Daniel" along with "King Kong" and two Universal DVD's, "The Constant Gardener" and "Two for the Money."

Other advertisers, including Burlington and Chattem, did not return telephone calls yesterday seeking comment on whether they would return to "The Book of Daniel" on Friday.

The plight of NBC is reminiscent of the difficulties ABC encountered when it introduced "N.Y.P.D. Blue" in the 1993-94 season, which was unusual for its time in its use of profanity, violence and nudity on a broadcast series.

Most episodes of "N.Y.P.D. Blue" in its first season carried so few commercials - because of protests from the American Family Association - that ABC asked the producers to add several minutes of programming.

And what advertisers there were included little-known brands like Cortizone-10 anti-itch ointment, Permathene-12 diet aid and Wash 'n Curl shampoo.

Only after months of critical acclaim - and audiences of tens of millions of viewers - did mainstream advertisers clamber aboard the "N.Y.P.D. Blue" bandwagon. Some, however, continued to avoid the series because of its subject matter even to the end of its run last March.

"Some advertisers will take a chance on a show and accept some potential backlash," said Jason Kanefsky, vice president and account director at MPG in New York, a media agency owned by Havas.

"But even if you're a bottom-feeder," he added, "you have to look at the results and do they justify the complaints you get for sponsoring the show."

Organizations like the American Family Association are entitled to protest programs, Mr. Kanefsky said, "but you can't just vote no." He cited the failure of a series that NBC introduced on Fridays last fall, "Three Wishes," which had as its host the Christian singer Amy Grant.

For activists, it should not always be "about getting shows off the air," Mr. Kanefsky said, but rather "about getting and keeping shows on the air."

Technorati Tags : NBC, Book+of+Daniel, Advertising, Taliban, American+Family+Association

Stars at the Mily Way Galaxy's Center

The Spitzer Space Telescope took this awesome mosaic of the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Click the picture to read the press release and get high-rez versions of this image.


>JjV<
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Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.


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Pledge to boycott DRM CDs

Go here and sign the petition to show support for the anti-drm efforts of freeculture.org's Elizabeth Stark and Fred Benenson.

 

>JjV<

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Throughout history, the most common debilitating human ailment has been cold feet. - Unknown

Technorati Tags : boycott, drm, pledge, freeculture

Interview with inventor of LSD, Albert Hoffman, now 100

Pointer from Boing Boing......

January 7, 2006

The Saturday Profile

Nearly 100, LSD's Father Ponders His 'Problem Child'

By CRAIG S. SMITH

BURG, Switzerland

ALBERT Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the small corner office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here, hoping to show a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear days. But outside there was only a white blanket of fog hanging just beyond the crest of the hill. He picked up a photograph of the view on his desk instead, left there perhaps to convince visitors of what really lies beyond the windowpane.

Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate behind him, Mr. Hofmann's conversation turns ever more insistently around one theme: man's oneness with nature and the dangers of an increasing inattention to that fact.

"It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature," he said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. "In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans," he said. "The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature." And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his "problem child," could help reconnect people to the universe.

Rounding a century, Mr. Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally clear. He is prone to digressions, ambling with pleasure through memories of his boyhood, but his bright eyes flash with the recollection of a mystical experience he had on a forest path more than 90 years ago in the hills above Baden, Switzerland. The experience left him longing for a similar glimpse of what he calls "a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality."

"I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature," he said, laying a slightly gnarled finger alongside his nose, his longish white hair swept back from his temples and the crown of his head. He said any natural scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural scientist. "Outside is pure energy and colorless substance," he said. "All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings."

He became particularly fascinated by the mechanisms through which plants turn sunlight into the building blocks for our own bodies. "Everything comes from the sun via the plant kingdom," he said.

MR. HOFMANN studied chemistry and took a job with the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz Laboratories, because it had started a program to identify and synthesize the active compounds of medically important plants. He soon began work on the poisonous ergot fungus that grows in grains of rye. Midwives had used it for centuries to precipitate childbirths, but chemists had never succeeded in isolating the chemical that produced the pharmacological effect. Finally, chemists in the United States identified the active component as lysergic acid, and Mr. Hofmann began combining other molecules with the unstable chemical in search of pharmacologically useful compounds.

His work on ergot produced several important drugs, including a compound still in use to prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. But it was the 25th compound that he synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide, that was to have the greatest impact. When he first created it in 1938, the drug yielded no significant pharmacological results. But when his work on ergot was completed, he decided to go back to LSD-25, hoping that improved tests could detect the stimulating effect on the body's circulatory system that he had expected from it. It was as he was synthesizing the drug on a Friday afternoon in April 1943 that he first experienced the altered state of consciousness for which it became famous. "Immediately, I recognized it as the same experience I had had as a child," he said. "I didn't know what caused it, but I knew that it was important."

When he returned to his lab the next Monday, he tried to identify the source of his experience, believing first that it had come from the fumes of a chloroform-like solvent he had been using. Inhaling the fumes produced no effect, though, and he realized he must have somehow ingested a trace of LSD. "LSD spoke to me," Mr. Hofmann said with an amused, animated smile. "He came to me and said, 'You must find me.' He told me, 'Don't give me to the pharmacologist, he won't find anything.' "

HE experimented with the drug, taking a dose so small that even the most active toxin known at that time would have had little or no effect. The result with LSD, however, was a powerful experience, during which he rode his bicycle home, accompanied by an assistant. That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as "bicycle day."

Mr. Hofmann participated in tests in a Sandoz laboratory, but found the experience frightening and realized that the drug should be used only under carefully controlled circumstances. In 1951, he wrote to the German novelist Ernst Junger, who had experimented with mescaline, and proposed that they take LSD together. They each took 0.05 milligrams of pure LSD at Mr. Hofmann's home accompanied by roses, music by Mozart and burning Japanese incense. "That was the first planned psychedelic test," Mr. Hofmann said.

He took the drug dozens of times after that, he said, and once experienced what he called a "horror trip" when he was tired and Mr. Junger gave him amphetamines first. But his hallucinogenic days are long behind him.

"I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," Mr. Hofmann said. "Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley," who asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of his fatal throat cancer.

But Mr. Hofmann calls LSD "medicine for the soul" and is frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. "It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis," he said, adding that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960's and then demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed. He said LSD could be dangerous and called its distribution by Timothy Leary and others "a crime."

"It should be a controlled substance with the same status as morphine," he said.

Mr. Hofmann lives with his wife in the house they built 38 years ago. He raised four children and watched one son struggle with alcoholism before dying at 53. He has eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. As far as he knows, no one in his family besides his wife has tried LSD.

Mr. Hofmann rose, slightly stooped and now barely reaching five feet, and walked through his house with his arm-support cane. When asked if the drug had deepened his understanding of death, he appeared mildly startled and said no. "I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that's all," he said.

Technorati Tags : hofmann, lsd, ergot

CanTaliban Want to Emigrate

Saw a reference to Pandgon's post on Kung Fu Monkey's blog.  In my worst moments I consider emigrating to Canada to escape the American Taliban's stranglehold on our politics, morals, ethics and technology.  Nice to know the CanTaliban is going to make room for me!

 

>JjV<

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All the countries of the world except Burma, Liberia and the United States employ the Metric System. - Edward J. Rose

Technorati Tags : Religion, Bad+Ideas, Canada, Taliban

Running Hot and Cold

Reprinted in its entirety below, a piece by Judith Lewis of the LA Weekly listing a dozen weather anomalies found during 2005. I believe you extrapolate most of these to see what our world will look like as global warming begins to really bite. Thanks to Bruce Sterling, Viridian pope for the pointer!

Running Hot and Cold: A Dozen Weird Weather Moments
by JUDITH LEWIS

Katrina turned the weather into the year’s biggest news event, as the natural world against which Bush has made war since 2000 decided to send back a return salvo. The storm quickly became a political portent for both ends of the spectrum, with Christian conservatives interpreting the supposed fetal shape of Katrina to be a pro-life meteorological statement sent by a vengeful Lord to ravage the Gulf of Mexico, and the sane world noting apprehensively that hurricane season has been worsening with steadily increasing ocean-surface temperatures. Bad as it was, the scientists added, 2005’s weather is just a taste of what’s to come. Here’s the rest of the year in bad weather.

1. 2005 was the hottest year on record. This year’s global average temperature topped the previous record, set in 1998.

2. The Amazon River basin experienced its worst drought in recorded history.

3. The National Climate Data Center (NCDC) reported that nine of the 10 warmest years in history have occurred in the past decade.

4. Satellite monitoring in September revealed that the summer Arctic sea ice has shrunk as much as 40 percent since monitoring began in the late 1970s. At the current rate of decline, there will be no summer Arctic ice pack within two decades.

5. Multiple studies showed that the higher average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the last decade are unprecedented over the past 2,000 years.

6. Swiss and U.S. climatologists working in Antarctica built “EPICA Dome C,” the longest ice-core record to date. Gas bubbles trapped in ice crystals record the atmospheric compositions over time. From this, researchers reported that today’s levels of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, are higher now than at any time in the past 650,000 years.

7. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that sea-surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico this summer were the highest since measurements began in 1890.

8. The warm waters contributed to the year’s record-breaking hurricane season, with 26 named storms forming in the Atlantic. Fourteen became hurricanes, and Katrina, Rita and Wilma created an unprecedented triumvirate of category 5 storms. The NOAA also exhausted its pre-assigned list of storm names, and for the first time had to turn to the Greek alphabet. On the last official day in hurricane season, tropical storm Epsilon strengthened into a hurricane.

9. Wilma played second fiddle to Katrina despite being the stronger storm. In Florida, Wilma was “the Big One” they’ve been expecting for a century. It knocked out the power for weeks, and left a destruction path wider than any previous hurricane in the state. With a central ultralow pressure of 882 millibars, Wilma surpassed 1988’s Gilbert as the strongest hurricane on record.

10. Scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology reported in the May issue of Science that the long-term process of global dimming, a diminishing of the sun’s effects caused by an accumulation of particulate matter in the atmosphere, began to turn around in 1990. Since global dimming has a cooling effect, its decline could speed the effects of global warming.

11. Researchers on a scientific expedition in the Atlantic Ocean discovered that the strength of the current that drives the Gulf Stream — and bathes Britain and Northern Europe in warm waters from the tropics each summer — has slowed by 30 percent in just the past decade. Thought to be a consequence of global warming, the weakened current could trigger severe winters and cooler summers on both sides of the North Atlantic.

12. Outlandish weather effects materialized all over the world. On July 26, 37 inches of rain fell in Mumbai, India’s financial center, during one 24-hour period. Four hundred thirty-eight people drowned or were buried in landslides in India’s highest recorded rainfall. A record 22 tornadoes hit Southwest Australia in May, causing the state’s most expensive natural disaster. In October, 78.9 inches of snow fell on Mount Washington in New Hampshire, nearly doubling the previous record of 39.8 inches, set in 2000.

Paranormal Strings

I have always though that the gap between believers in paranormal (esp, precognition, ghosts, etc) and the scientific community was unbridgeable.  Of late I have come to the conclusion that while paranormal experiences may be real, science does not have an explanatory mechanism, therefore paranormal activity is not real in a scientific way.  How do you explain the persistence of reporting of paranormal experiences that occur?

 

Even if the hoaxes and non-paranormal explanation occurrences are subtracted you are still left with that small number of experiences that occur, but defy scientific explanation.

 

Brian Greene's books on String theory popularized the idea that our universe may have as many as ten (10) dimensions.  Now what does this have to do with paranormal activity?  What if the paranormal events that science can not explain turn out to be interactions with these other dimensions that String theory postulates.

 

Sound outlandish?  Consider the Edwin A. Abbott's classic tale of inter dimensional experience, Flatland.  This story details the encounters a two-dimensional being would have with our three-dimensional world.  For instance a sphere would appear as a circle.  An inhabitant of the two-dimensional Flatland world would consider an interaction with a three-dimensional object to be paranormal.

 

So the next time you want to pooh-pooh tales of ghosts, poltergeists, and other paranormal phenomenon consider that these occurrences may be the result of a ten-dimensional object passing through our three-dimensional world.

 

>JjV<

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Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.

 

Technorati Tags : paranormal, string+theory

The decade the blockbuster died

Chris Anderson details below the demise of the blockbuster album.

>JjV<
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Your mother knows how to push your buttons because she installed them all.

The decade the blockbuster died

I've been collecting data on just how bad it's getting in the music industry, and this useful list of the 100 all-time bestselling albums offered another lens on the meltdown. I looked up the release dates of each and grouped them in half-decade bins. The data speaks for itself:

If you want to do your own analysis, the underlying data

is in this spreadsheet.

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The State of Green Business: Good News and Bad

A good summary of the plusses and minuses in the Green world.

 

>JjV<

---------------------------------------------------

We are born naked, wet and hungry. Then things get worse.

 

The State of Green Business: Good News and Bad

Recently, after 15 years, I ceased publication of my monthly publication, The Green Business Letter. The reason, simply put, had to do with closing one door before opening others -- which I expect to do in 2006.

Following is adapted from the final edition, in which I offered my assessment of the green-business landscape over the past decade and a half.

If you've been engaged in the green business world for any length of time, you know the short story: there's good news and bad. Herewith is a top-ten list of sorts: five reasons for optimism, and five reasons for concern, about the state of business and the environment.

Five Reasons for Optimism
1. The leading edge is moving. During the past two decades, the leading edge of green business activity has moved across three phases. Phase One might be referred to as the Eco-Hippocratic Oath: "First, Do No Harm." During the 1990s, Phase Two -- let's call it "Doing Well By Doing Good" -- kicked in, during which companies recognized they could reduce costs through pollution prevention, waste minimization, energy efficiency, and other means -- and in the process, they could garner public goodwill.

More recently, the leading edge has shifted into Phase Three: "Creating Value." In this phase, sustainable business initiatives are being designed not just to save money, but to drive topline growth -- increased sales, customer retention, innovation, and the like. General Electric, Sun Microsystems, Toyota, Shaw Industries, and other companies are among those demonstrating the business opportunities to be found in offering products and services that help customers to reduce emissions, save money, lower risks, and enjoy other benefits.

Environmental responsibility as a driver of topline growth: This is the point at which sustainability becomes, well, sustainable.

2. Environmental concerns are being widely addressed. Nearly every large company and institution has taken at least some steps to address their environmental impacts. The breadth of issues being addressed has grown, too. This is evident from, among other things, the steady stream of annual environmental (or sustainability or corporate social responsibility) reports being published. Early on, companies focused on toxic emissions or solid waste issues. As pollution prevention, recycling, and waste minimization initiatives took hold, companies began looking at other issues, especially those related to energy and climate, but also looking upstream to consider the impacts of suppliers and downstream to address the impacts of customers, including what happens to a company's products when they are no longer needed or of service to customers.

All told, the foundation has been set for developing more comprehensive life-cycle solutions for tomorrow's products and services.

3. The bottom-line case is building. At first, there were the low-hanging fruit derived from reducing pollution and waste. A big company could redesign something as simple as a beer can (Anheuser-Busch) or a paper napkin (McDonald's) and save millions of pounds of natural resources -- and millions of dollars. Simple, sensible management practices in industrial processes could dramatically slash waste, along with the cost of its disposal.

Today, the business case is more sophisticated and robust. Research is showing how investments in energy management, carbon mitigation, toxics reduction, and product end-of-life management can provide both tangible and intangible benefits of interest to financial analysts, institutional investors, and others. And there is evidence that environmentally minded activities can contribute to companies' ability to attract and retain employees.

For companies seeking to justify, on bottom-line grounds, the value of sustainability, the arguments can be readily found.

4. Customers are driving change. In the early 1990s, regulators and activists were the principal drivers of most companies' sustainability agendas. But increasingly, the market is kicking in, with customer needs -- or demands -- shaping company environmental policies and practices.

For example, in its 2005 Global Citizenship Report, HP says that in 2004 it received more than $6 billion in requests for quotations that required information on HP's commitment to social and environmental responsibility -- an increase of 95%% compared to 2003 and 660%% compared to 2002. Those requests came from Asia and Europe as well as North America.

That's on the b-to-b side. On the consumer side, demand for greener products, services, and companies is less apparent, though there are encouraging signs, notably the marketplace success of hybrid vehicles and other energy-efficient products. They show that consumers are willing to embrace green technologies under certain circumstances -- a less-than-worldchanging development, to be sure, but progress nonetheless. It helps when energy markets -- gasoline, heating oil, natural gas, electricity -- reflect true market prices, not the heavily subsidized ones that have kept consumers from paying their full costs and making purchase decisions that reflect more accurate information.

5. Sustainability is spurring innovation. This is implicit in Reasons #1 and #4 above, but it bears repeating: Sustainability is spurring companies to innovate with new processes that enhance their bottom lines, such as closed-loop manufacturing processes, in which there is virtually no energy, water, or material waste. Products designed with fewer, simpler, less-toxic, and more recyclable ingredients enable everything from carpets to car parts to be fully recycled at the end of their useful lives -- not simply "downcycled" into commingled, less-valuable materials. Markets for biobased products -- polymers, building materials, textiles, and other goods made from plants or crops -- have been frustratingly slow to develop, but progress is being made to break through market barriers. And the green-building revolution has led to a wealth of innovative designs, systems, products, and materials intended to make tomorrow's structures simultaneously more livable, more beautiful, less expensive, and less destructive to the environment.

There's more to celebrate, but it's time to look at the other side of the coin.

Five Reasons for Concern
1. The pace of change is slow. While it's easy to point to how far the leading edge has progressed, it's hardly the full story. Many companies still struggle to make even small, incremental improvements to their policies, processes, and products, and many of the innovations being seen inside companies are limited to a single facility, business unit, or product line. It's all progress, of course, but it's easy for cynics to make the case that such changes fall into the too-little-too-late category.

To be fair, the frustratingly slow pace of change isn't always companies' fault -- or, at least, not entirely. Most industries represent a complex web of suppliers, customers, shareholders, activists, regulators, and others whose opinion or actions can thwart even the best-intended companies or most passionate CEOs. I've been sobered over the years by tales of large, multinational companies unable to get supply-chain buy-in to support their companies' laudable goals for reducing toxics, waste, or energy use. And I've heard countless tales of companies that have abandoned development or marketing of greener products and services for lack of customer support. Whether such underwhelming sales resulted from customer resistance or poorly designed or marketed goods is arguable. In most cases, there's plenty of blame to go around.

And some barriers to change are internal -- the failure to gain the support of line employees and, perhaps more critically, that thick, impenetrable band of resistance known as "middle management." While "Get top-level buy-in" remains number one on the list of how-to tips for most company environmental efforts, even the greenest of executives can be thwarted by those down the line. As one CEO famously put it: "An organization's ability to resist and defeat a direct order to do something difficult is just about infinite."

2. "Good" is rarely good enough. When it comes to addressing society's environmental concerns, most companies find themselves aiming at a moving target. Yesterday's activist ideals are tomorrow's minimum requirements. The result is that some companies are never entirely sure how good is "good enough."

Things are most challenging for consumer-facing brands, and especially for market leaders. They often are held to a standard far higher than their competitors -- a function of environmental groups' need to slay corporate dragons in order to rally the troops and justify their funding. One result is that many firms are afraid to promote, or even discuss, their environmental initiatives for fear that doing so will unwittingly illuminate their shortcomings. The unfortunate outcome is twofold: companies don't receive the credit they deserve in the eyes of customers and other interested parties; and the people inside companies who work, often struggle, to make these changes happen find it that much harder to get internal support for taking on the next, perhaps more substantive, set of company challenges.

3. EHS still doesn't get it. Environmental, health, and safety (EHS) departments inside companies remain a ghetto of regulatory compliance and engineering fixes -- perfectly fine functions, to be sure, but ones often seen as outside of core business strategy. As a result, many talented EHS professionals have found themselves on the street, having been handed their walking papers during the latest round of downsizing or re-engineering.

Much of this is self-inflicted. Historically, EHS professionals haven't learned how to make environmental concerns a source of business value and not just a cost. Despite years of effort on the part of professional organizations, business schools, and others to imbue EHS folks with business skills, most remain far more at home talking geek-speak with the regulatory crowd than discussing with their higher-ups how to turn environmental initiatives into new sources of business value.

That's a lost opportunity. EHS has a great deal to contribute. But the lack of EHS departments to think in these terms, let alone take action on them, will forever limit their effectiveness -- and, in many cases, lead to their demise.

4. Small business isn't engaged. The vast majority of efforts to improve companies' environmental performance -- whether taken by regulators, activists, the public, or companies themselves -- have focused on the largest companies. That makes sense: As an environmental Willie Sutton might have put it, that's where the pollution is.

But not all. Roughly 98%% of all U.S. companies have fewer than 100 employees. While many of these smaller firms provide services that have negligible environmental impacts, there are tens of thousands of dry cleaners, printers, bakers, metal finishers, furniture makers, automobile repair shops, and others among them with seemingly small but cumulatively significant emissions and waste. And these firms have largely been left out of the sustainability conversation.

The failure to find effective means of bringing smaller firms into the environmental fold will continue to limit progress on many fronts and will become a growing problem as larger companies continue to improve their performance.

5. The public remains clueless. It's hard for companies to effect widespread culture change if the people who comprise its employees, customers, suppliers, and shareholders don't understand the underlying issues. Despite more than a quarter-century of Earth Days, the rise of green activism, and the growth of environmental curricula in schools at all levels, the public remains woefully uninformed. Surveys show that most citizens' understanding of environmental issues remains depressingly low and that myths and misunderstandings persist.

Companies often are their own worst enemies here. The tremendous communications clout many businesses, especially service-sector firms, possess could be harnessed to improve the public's eco-literacy and, in the process, help garner newfound appreciation and build markets for companies' environmental initiatives. But there's been little appetite on the part of companies to educate, and not just propagandize, the masses on these issues.

As with the good news, there are more concerns, too, but I'll leave it at that. And despite the obstacles, I remain optimistic -- indeed, confident -- that the hard work of good people inside good companies will continue to raise the bar, the performance, and the appreciation of corporate environmental practices.

(Posted by Joel Makower in Sustainability Sundays at 05:00 AM)

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WashingtonPost.com Extends Free Content Length to 60 Days (38380)

This is Good News for the blogosphere .

WashingtonPost.com Extends Free Content Length to 60 DaysClickZ reports that traffic from blogs and feeds have encouraged the WashingtonPost.com to extend its free content window from 14 days to 60 days.

In a bid to increase traffic and reap more online advertising revenues, WashingtonPost.com will allow articles to remain free on the site for 60 days before they go behind the subscribers-only wall. Previously, stories were only accessible for 14 days.The switch is an acknowledgement of the role of blogs, search and RSS, which have all worked to keep news stories in the public eye for longer periods of time. Company executive point to the news operation's recent scoop regarding secret CIA prisons in foreign countries -- a story that has continued to generate links and buzz for weeks after its debut."For us to take that article offline after 14 days really does us a disservice," Jim Brady, executive editor of the site, told ClickZ News.These new blog and search links tend to drive traffic directly to stories, rather than to the front page of the site, contributing to the importance of individual articles. About half the traffic at WashingtonPost.com now comes through these "side doors," according to Brady.

ClickZ also says that Houston Chronicle and The Toronto Star recently removed registration barriers to allow more incoming traffic but notes that the New York Times moved in the opposite direction by making more content subscription-only. Hopefully, more newspaper websites will follow the Washington Post's lead and ignore the decision made at the New York Times.

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Sam Harris: Science Must Destroy Religion

From the I wish I had said this department: HuffPo posting by Sam Harris.

 

Sam Harris: Science Must Destroy Religion

Most people believe that the Creator of the universe wrote (or dictated) one of their books. Unfortunately, there are many books that pretend to divine authorship, and each makes incompatible claims about how we all must live. Despite the ecumenical efforts of many well-intentioned people, these irreconcilable religious commitments still inspire an appalling amount of human conflict.

In response to this situation, most sensible people advocate something called "religious tolerance." While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its liabilities. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of criticizing ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive. It has also obliged us to lie to ourselves — repeatedly and at the highest levels — about the compatibility between religious faith and scientific rationality.

The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science. It is time we conceded a basic fact of human discourse: either a person has good reasons for what he believes, or he does not. When a person has good reasons, his beliefs contribute to our growing understanding of the world. We need not distinguish between "hard" and "soft" science here, or between science and other evidence-based disciplines like history. There happen to be very good reasons to believe that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. Consequently, the idea that the Egyptians actually did it lacks credibility. Every sane human being recognizes that to rely merely upon "faith" to decide specific questions of historical fact would be both idiotic and grotesque — that is, until the conversation turns to the origin of books like the bible and the Koran, to the resurrection of Jesus, to Muhammad's conversation with the angel Gabriel, or to any of the other hallowed travesties that still crowd the altar of human ignorance.

Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world. If there were good reasons to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse, these beliefs would necessarily form part of our rational description of the universe. Faith is nothing more than the license that religious people give one another to believe such propositions when reasons fail. The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so. The distinction could not be more obvious, or more consequential, and yet it is everywhere elided, even in the ivory tower.

Religion is fast growing incompatible with the emergence of a global, civil society. Religious faith — faith that there is a God who cares what name he is called, that one of our books is infallible, that Jesus is coming back to earth to judge the living and the dead, that Muslim martyrs go straight to Paradise, etc. — is on the wrong side of an escalating war of ideas. The difference between science and religion is the difference between a genuine openness to fruits of human inquiry in the 21st century, and a premature closure to such inquiry as a matter of principle. I believe that the antagonism between reason and faith will only grow more pervasive and intractable in the coming years. Iron Age beliefs — about God, the soul, sin, free will, etc. — continue to impede medical research and distort public policy. The possibility that we could elect a U.S. President who takes biblical prophesy seriously is real and terrifying; the likelihood that we will one day confront Islamists armed with nuclear or biological weapons is also terrifying, and it is increasing by the day. We are doing very little, at the level of our intellectual discourse, to prevent such possibilities. ??In the spirit of religious tolerance, most scientists are keeping silent when they should be blasting the hideous fantasies of a prior age with all the facts at their disposal.

To win this war of ideas, scientists and other rational people will need to find new ways of talking about ethics and spiritual experience. The distinction between science and religion is not a matter of excluding our ethical intuitions and non-ordinary states of consciousness from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being rigorous about what is reasonable to conclude on their basis. We must find ways of meeting our emotional needs that do not require the abject embrace of the preposterous. We must learn to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity — birth, marriage, death, etc. — without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality.

I am hopeful that the necessary transformation in our thinking will come about as our scientific understanding of ourselves matures. When we find reliable ways to make human beings more loving, less fearful, and genuinely enraptured by the fact of our appearance in the cosmos, we will have no need for divisive religious myths. Only then will the practice of raising our children to believe that they are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu be broadly recognized as the ludicrous obscenity that it is. And only then will we stand a chance of healing the deepest and most dangerous fractures in our world.

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Tropical Storm Zeta has Formed!!

Tropical storm Zeta formed overnight.  What's the record for the latest forming tropical storm?

 

Hurricane Center Discussion #1

 

Technorati Tags : Atlantic, tropical+storm, zeta

>JjV<

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Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.

Real-time US Air Flight Activity

 

Check out the current activity and animated versions of this image.  Cool stuff!!

 

Found via Fark

 

Technorati Tags : flight+tracker, airline, real-time

>JjV<

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The tree of liberty grows only when watered by the blood of tyrants. - Bertran Barere

You Know You're From Louisville When...

• Your "International" airport has only one passenger flight that actually leaves the 48 contiguous U.S. states
• The in-state sports rivalry is paid more attention to than the national championship.
• You live in an area that occasionally gets considerable snowfalls, floods, and tornadoes... but has no capacity to deal with any of the above.
• You pronounce the name of your city different than anyone else you've heard.
• You think the rest of the people in Kentucky sound like hicks.
• When you think "Kentucky" you don't automatically think horse racing or fried chicken.
• You ask your doctor for an allergy cure and he tells you to "move."
• You've shovelled 10+ inches of snow and worn shorts in the same week.
• When people ask what school you went to, they don't mean Vanderbilt, Yale, or Harvard; they mean Ballard, Male, Manual, Trinity or St. X.
• You know what the Bambi Walk is.
• Your last ten vacations were in Panama City or Destin.
• You make an emergency run to Kroger for bread and milk at the first sighting of a snowflake.
• You've lived here for years, yet somehow you get hopelessly lost each time you attempt a shortcut through Cherokee Park.
• You're convinced turn signals are useless options on a vehicle.
• You hold up traffic to let a motorist you don't know into your lane.
• You give directions based on landmarks that no longer exist or street names that have changed, but your directions never confuse any of the other Louisvillians
• You have never been to the Derby, but wouldn't miss the Oaks.
• You call in sick to attend the Oaks and spot your boss - who also called in sick - at the next betting window.
• You think all the REAL hicks live in New Albany.
• You think the only thing Southern Indiana is good for is buying pumpkins.
• When introduced to another life-long Louisvillian, you spend the first part of the conversation finding out how you are connected. It's never as many as six degrees of separation - usually three will do it.
• You think a pervert is someone who would rather have sex than watch basketball.
• You've built a shrine to Rick Pitino in your basement.
• You can read about Rick Pitino in at least three different sections of your newspaper.
• You think the rest of the world knows what Benedictine spread is.
• You think the rest of the world knows what a Hot Brown is.
• You have never eaten fish that wasn't fried.
• You think the whole world puts spaghetti in chili.
• You want another bridge built over the Ohio River, just so long as it doesn't cut through YOUR neighborhood.
• You've experienced a "salt storm" after a two-inch snowfall.
• You actually get these jokes and pass them on to other friends from Louisville.
  

Found here

Technorati Tags : Louisville, Humor

>JjV<

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When your only tool is a hammer, you tend to treat everything you find like a nail.

Another Day, Another Blog Editor

Here's a test post using Qumana blog editor.  Pretty sane interface and configuration.  Guess We'll see if this graphic makes it into the post.

 

>JjV<

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Ninety-nine percent of the people in this world are fools. The rest of us are in danger of contagion. -Thorton Wilder

 

Technorati Tags : Qumana, blog+editor

johniacsDesktop

johniacsDesktop,
originally uploaded by johniac.

Took a snapshot of my desktop to enter the LifeHacker desktop contest. I have 9 url's from weather.com embedded in my active desktop along with 4 Yahoo widgets, Weatherpulse local conditions applet and NASA's Space Station locator url.

w00t!!

>JjV<
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I have found you an argument; I am not obliged to find you an understanding. - Ben Johnson

The American Taliban II

Proponents of Evolution and/or Intelligent Design have hacked the web site of Scott Seigler hosting his new novel/Podiobook Ancestor. I found out about this through the Dragonpage weblog.

I continue to be amazed at the length, breadth and depth of extreme tactics these individuals will go to in their attemps to shove their religious memes down the throats of the rest of us.

BTW: I listened to Scott’s first book, Earthcore and it was excellent. I recommend both Earthcore and Ancestor to any scifi/horror genre fan.

PS Evo and Michael: Please feed the loons who attacked Scott’s site to the Dragon.

>JjV<

---------------------------------------------------

I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear those who fear him. - Theresa of Avila

Season's Greetings

Thanks Tom

The American Taliban

Jeez.... How is it that a tiny minority gets so much press? Leave the girls alone!!

Dolls Draw Conservatives' Ire

CHICAGO, Dec. 21, 2005

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(CBS) With $379 million in sales last year, the American Girl dolls are just like the girls who adore them — wholesome and sweet and rooted in American history.

They were a huge hit in the Wiesner household.

Claire Wiesner says, "They are so much fun to play with and they seem so real." Her sister Elena adds, "And they're really pretty."

Renee Wiesner, Claire's mom tells CBS News correspondent Mika Brzezinski, "Everything that they sold to us seemed very consistent with our values."

That was until the Wiesners found out that the American Girl company donates money to an organization called Girls Incorporated, which offers support to underprivileged girls. Girls Inc. also endorses Roe v. Wade — the right to abortion and it promotes acceptance of homosexuality. It's an association that families like the Wiesners are protesting with their wallets.

"This year, we're not going to buy any of the products for Christmas," Wiesner says bluntly.

And some are taking it a step further. The Pro-Life Action League is calling for a boycott of the dolls. Some Catholic schools have cancelled American Girl events.

"They take a position that I am 100 percent against which would be in telling girls abortion is a solution for them," Wiesner says.

American Girl, which just launched its first ever major ad campaign in its 20-year history, released a statement saying it is "profoundly disappointed that certain groups have chosen to misconstrue American Girl's purely altruistic efforts."

Also Mattel, the maker of the doll has decided it will not renew its partnership with Girls Inc. which runs out this year.

And next year we'll find out if that's enough to bring back the American Girl's conservative consumer base.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Clarification: American Girl responded after viewing the CBS report, saying while they considered the report fair and balanced they wanted to point out the "I Can" program and Girls Inc. partnership was always planned as a 2005 initiative and the end date of Dec 26, 2005, was mutually agreed upon by both parties.

© MMV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

People fleeing pricey coastal states for South, West

Just as well since the next few years will see multiple hurricanes reducing southeastern seacoast property to junk-yard status!

People fleeing pricey coastal states for South, West

By Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg, USA TODAY

The quest for affordable housing and jobs is driving Americans from expensive coastal states to more moderately priced parts of the country, according to an analysis of Census population estimates out Thursday.

Halfway through the decade, people continue to leave states such as New York and California and spill into parts of the Southwest, Southeast and Rocky Mountains. (Related: State population estimates)

In the 12 months ending July 1, Florida gained more people (404,434) than any other state for the first time in at least 15 years. Despite four hurricanes that hit the state last year, Florida added an average 1,100 people a day, bringing its population to almost 18 million. If that pace continues, Florida will overtake New York as the third-most-populous state by 2010.

Other highlights in the data:

�New York lost people for the first time since 1980. "New York state's losses were masked in the boom of New York City and its suburbs in the '90s," says Robert Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. "Once they slow down, even slightly, the decline Upstate becomes very apparent."

�California was not the top gainer for the first time since 1995. Most of the state's net gain of 290,109 came from births. The data show that 239,417 more people left California for other parts of the USA than moved in.

"It's a symptom of the new divide in housing costs between the expensive, congested, urbanized states such as California and New York and newly sprawling suburban states on both coasts," says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "This whole half of the decade, housing has been an issue. ... The question is: Will it continue?"

�Largely because of strong job growth, Virginia gained more people (86,133) than the nine Northeastern states combined (59,880).

Population shifts ultimately have political consequences because seats in the House of Representatives are reallocated after the full Census every 10 years. Based on the latest estimates, five states would lose a seat, according to Kim Brace, president of Election Data Services, a Washington consulting company.

Texas and four other states would gain a seat. Texas could gain a second seat because Louisiana is likely to lose one once hundreds of thousands of residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina are reflected in Census counts, Brace says. Many evacuees moved to Texas.

The U.S. population's growth rate has slowed slightly since record growth in the 1990s. As of July 1, the population was at 296.4 million, but it may hit 300 million in 2007.

"The decade began with the economy off track, but the population boom kept rolling along and is on track to nearly match the record 1990s," Lang says. "The country found places to keep booming, shying away from the high-cost coasts and seeking the South and the mountain West."

Another test w Ecto

Trying a new version of ecto....

>JjV< http://johniac.blogspot.com
---------------------------------------------------
...I'd even be willing to entertain the notion of a black hole passing over the area or some cosmic anomaly but it's not really black hole season either...Fox Mulder

Strain of bird flu resistant to Tamiflu kills two patients

From the Uh Oh department....

Strain of bird flu resistant to Tamiflu kills two patients
By Liz Szabo, USA TODAY
Two Vietnamese patients have died after developing strains of bird flu that were resistant to Tamiflu, the antiviral drug that nations around the world are stockpiling in the hope of saving lives if a global pandemic occurs.
Their deaths, which took place in January, were reported Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine. A third patient, a 14-year-old Vietnamese girl whose case was reported in Nature in October, also developed resistance but survived.
Health officials had predicted that the bird flu virus, H5N1, would evolve into resistant forms, which happens often with virus-fighting medications. But experts also say the deaths are a warning that countries are not yet prepared to deal with a pandemic.
Experts are unsure whether a flu pandemic is imminent, but they fear that the H5N1 virus could trigger one if it becomes highly contagious.
Fifty countries are stockpiling Tamiflu, which can be used to treat and prevent infections. Tamiflu's maker, Roche, announced Wednesday that U.S. regulators would allow it to market the drug to prevent flu in children ages 1 through 12, Reuters reported.
Roche can now produce enough of the drug to treat 65 million people but will make enough for 300 million patients by the end of 2006, says David Reddy, leader of Roche's influenza pandemic task force.
It still makes sense for countries to stockpile the drug because most patients respond to Tamiflu, says Arnold Monto, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. The New England Journal article said four of eight Vietnamese patients treated with Tamiflu survived.
But the study suggests doctors might need to use higher doses to prevent resistance, Reddy says. Roche plans to work with the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health on a trial that would give patients twice the standard dose of Tamiflu.
If that dose proves effective, nations might need to double their planned stockpiles, says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. For now, he says, doctors just don't know the ideal dose.
Doctors might need to find other ways to treat bird flu should there be a pandemic. The same genetic changes that make the virus more contagious also could make it less deadly, Reddy adds.
Beyond Tamiflu, the Infectious Diseases Society of America recommends stockpiling another antiviral, Relenza, says Andrew Pavia, a member of the group's task force on pandemic flu. Unlike Tamiflu, which is in pill form, Relenza is given through an inhaler and is harder to administer, especially to patients who are unconscious. Researchers are testing an injectable form.
People who misuse Tamiflu or stockpile it themselves could waste the drug or harm themselves by developing resistance, say doctors Allan Brett and Abigail Zuger in an editorial accompanying the New England Journal article.
Original article
>JjV<
---------------------------------------------------
Always remember... You are unique, just like everyone else.

Strain of bird flu resistant to Tamiflu kills two patients

By Liz Szabo, USA TODAY
Two Vietnamese patients have died after developing strains of bird flu that were resistant to Tamiflu, the antiviral drug that nations around the world are stockpiling in the hope of saving lives if a global pandemic occurs.
Their deaths, which took place in January, were reported Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine. A third patient, a 14-year-old Vietnamese girl whose case was reported in Nature in October, also developed resistance but survived.
Health officials had predicted that the bird flu virus, H5N1, would evolve into resistant forms, which happens often with virus-fighting medications. But experts also say the deaths are a warning that countries are not yet prepared to deal with a pandemic.
Experts are unsure whether a flu pandemic is imminent, but they fear that the H5N1 virus could trigger one if it becomes highly contagious.
Fifty countries are stockpiling Tamiflu, which can be used to treat and prevent infections. Tamiflu's maker, Roche, announced Wednesday that U.S. regulators would allow it to market the drug to prevent flu in children ages 1 through 12, Reuters reported.
Roche can now produce enough of the drug to treat 65 million people but will make enough for 300 million patients by the end of 2006, says David Reddy, leader of Roche's influenza pandemic task force.
It still makes sense for countries to stockpile the drug because most patients respond to Tamiflu, says Arnold Monto, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. The New England Journal article said four of eight Vietnamese patients treated with Tamiflu survived.
But the study suggests doctors might need to use higher doses to prevent resistance, Reddy says. Roche plans to work with the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health on a trial that would give patients twice the standard dose of Tamiflu.
If that dose proves effective, nations might need to double their planned stockpiles, says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. For now, he says, doctors just don't know the ideal dose.
Doctors might need to find other ways to treat bird flu should there be a pandemic. The same genetic changes that make the virus more contagious also could make it less deadly, Reddy adds.
Beyond Tamiflu, the Infectious Diseases Society of America recommends stockpiling another antiviral, Relenza, says Andrew Pavia, a member of the group's task force on pandemic flu. Unlike Tamiflu, which is in pill form, Relenza is given through an inhaler and is harder to administer, especially to patients who are unconscious. Researchers are testing an injectable form.
People who misuse Tamiflu or stockpile it themselves could waste the drug or harm themselves by developing resistance, say doctors Allan Brett and Abigail Zuger in an editorial accompanying the New England Journal article.
Read the original.....
(Uh Oh.....)

>JjV< http://johniac.blogspot.com
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There is a difference between celibate and simply not getting any. It's like the difference between fast and starve.

The top 20 "geek novels"

From Jack Schofield

What are the top 20 "geek novels"?

Bold them, if you've read them......

1. The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams

2. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell

3. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley

4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick

5. Neuromancer -- William Gibson

6. Dune -- Frank Herbert

7. I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov

8. Foundation -- Isaac Asimov

9. The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett

10. Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland

11. Snow Crash-- Neal Stephenson

12. Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

13. Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson

14. Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks

15. Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein

16. The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick

17. American Gods -- Neil Gaiman

18. The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson

19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson

20. Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham

Thanks Morgan

>JjV<

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That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists
trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder. - Calvin

Holiday Greetings

Scott sums up my feeling about all this talk about politically correct holiday greetings!!

Comic for 16 Dec 2005


PvP Store PvP Community


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Only those who attempt the absurd achieve the impossible.

ID May Be Coming to KY

Rumblings in the capital of our fair state to teach Intelligent Design (ID) in science class on the same footing as Evolution.

Intelligent Design is NOT at the same level of scientific theory that Evolution is. Teach ID in any religious or humanities class if you like, but do not teach it in science class which gives it the same implicit theoretical standing as Evolution.

Pete at BlueGrassRoots concurs.

>JjV< --------------------------------------------------- We don't know who discovered water, but we are certain it wasn't a fish. - John Culkin

The Band My Morning Jacket Offers Its Own Recall

Rolling Stone via EFF DeepLinks is reporting that My Morning Jacket is replacing copy-protected versions of their latest album Z with non-copy protected versions so fans can get the music onto their MP3 players.

Mike Martinovich, manager for My Morning Jacket, says that even before the revelation of MediaMax's security problems, his company had been mailing burned, unprotected copies of MMJ's new album Z to fans who complained that MediaMax prevented them from transferring songs to their iPods. "It should have been enough that fans are annoyed," he says. "But this should be the final reason."

God Bless Them Every One......

>JjV<

--------------------------------------------------

Always remember... You are unique, just like everyone else.

My Morning Jacket: Live at the Palace

The up and coming group My Morning Jacket (aka MMJ) closed out their fall tour with their annual performance in their hometown of Louisville, Kentucky on this past Thanksgiving eve. This year’s sold-out concert was held at the magnificent Louisville Palace on November 23rd 2005. The Palace is a renovated theatre from the late 1920’s with lots of ornate decorations in the Spanish Baroque motif and excellent acoustics.

MMJ consists of singer-guitarist and songwriter Jim James, bassist Two-Tone Tommy, drummer Patrick Hallahan, keyboardist Bo Koster, and guitarist Carl Broemel. Koster and Broemel are recent additions to MMJ replacing founding members Johnny Quaid and Danny Cash.

The band opened the two hour, 20 song set with three back-to-back songs from their newest album Z: Wordless, It Beats, and Gideon. The band’s sound was tight and focused from the get go as they tore into One Big from 2003’s It Still Moves. Based on the large amount of sing-along voices coming from the crowd this was one of MMJ fan’s favorites. The guitar breaks featured Carl and Jim performing dueling leads with excellent backing from the rest of the band.

Wonderful, from Z was next followed by Lowdown and I Will Sing from At Dawn and It Still Moves respectively. I Will Sing featured more of Jim James’s excellent electric guitar work. It seemed like each time he picked up his Flying V guitar the band’s sound would just explode and rock really hard. The acoustic number Golden followed with its haunting steel guitar riffing expertly layered under Jim’s vocals. The quirky Sooner from the Darla Records compilation CD.

The last track from 1999’s Tennessee Fire, I Think I'm Going To Hell came next. More haunting guitars with Jims’s lonesome voice providing the perfect counter-point to the weeping guitar track. Three more tracks from Z followed: Lay Low, Off the Record and Dondante. Lay Low’s pulsing drum beat and soaring guitar contrasted with the previous track and brought the audience back to life. The up-tempo mood continued with the growling intro to Off the Record and more blazing solos courtesy of Jim and his Flying V. Dondante brought the temp back down showcasing Jim’s fantastic vocals backed by a simple drum-bass guitar skeleton. The song built into a frenetic crescendo with the MMJ trademark dueling lead guitars again making an appearance.

Dancefloor from It Still Moves returned to the bouncy, danceable beat that is the hallmark of MMJ’s more accessible tunes. Dancefloor was followed by bone fide hit Anytime from Z which closed the band’s official set list.

The encore opened up with a pair of acoustic numbers with Jim on stage by himself. I Will be There from Tennessee Fire and Bermuda from At Dawn.

The rest of the band joined Jim onstage for At Dawn from the album of the same name. A pair of tunes from It Still Moves, Run Thru and Magheeta closed out the set ending the concert on a straight-on rock note.

All of MMJ’s hometown fans got a early Christmas present this year with an excellent concert from an very talented band.

You can access a recording of the concert from the Archive.org web site. You can either download the individual songs in various digital formats or listen to the entire show as an Internet Radio Stream.

Johniac
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Modesty in delivering our opinions leaves us the liberty of changing them without humiliation.

Orcas most polluted Arctic mammal

Orcas most polluted Arctic mammal from PhysOrg.com

Orcas, or killer whales, reportedly have passed the polar bear to become the most contaminated mammal in the Arctic.

[...]

What a Network Neutrality Rule Wants

From David S. Isenberg's musings about loci of intelligence and stupidity, isen.blog.  Good Stuff!!!

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What a Network Neutrality Rule Wants

Network Neutrality, that is, a network that just delivers the packets, stupid, with no cognizance of what app, device, or end-user generated them, is an public good that gives rise to much innovation, value creation and economic growth at the application layer. It is the single greatest factor in the success of the current Internet.

But a Network Neutrality rule, even a strong one, can fail. Here's my thinking:

1. The carriers have huge incentives to discriminate, as a ground-breaking paper, entitled Towards an Economic Framework for Network Neutrality Regulation, by Barbara van Schewick clearly shows. One major finding is that a carrier does not need to be a monopoly to reap clear benefits from discrimination; carriers can benefit from discriminating even in a competitive market.

2. Anybody who says that there's no need for Network Neutrality because the carriers have no intention to discriminate is ignoring the carriers' huge incentives to discriminate. Please, Mr. Fox, guard my hen house; I know your intentions are pure. [Link]

3. No mealy-mouthed language. Any Network Neutrality rule must be iron-clad, with no possibility of misinterpretation. Because carriers will try to misinterpret it. Because they will have economic incentives to do so.

4. The punishment must fit the crime. Network Neutrality rules are not in the carriers' best interests. They put carriers in a self-competitive situation, that is, in a situation where following the rule is not in their self-interest. Therefore, if carriers stand to make billions by violating Network Neutrality, then the punishment must be in the tens of billions.

5. Physical network development is still a problem. Under Network Neutrality and competition, unless we find a way around the Paradox of the Best Network, carriers do lose incentive to build according to the latest technology. We need to solve this problem by confronting it squarely, by dis-entangling the network development issue from the network neutrality issue.

Network Neutrality is a clear case of public good versus private benefit. That's what regulation is for. In this case, competition will not replace regulation. We don't need any old Network Neutrality rule. We need a network neutrality rule that is (a) clear, (b) strongly enforceable, and (c) incents physical network development. Anything less is bound to fail.

Technorati Tags: Berkman, Competition, Content-Conduit, Deregulation, F2C, Internet, NetworkNeutrality, OpenAccess, ParadoxoftheBestNetwork, Politics, Regulatorium, Telco, Telepocalypse

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