inkbluesky

tabbed and numbered

(so much for reliable hosting - some photos posted in the last few days may not go to larger size when clicked. I’m working on a solution)

When is it OK to start saying that we live in a police state without sounding like a shrill alarmist, Report: NYPD Watched RNC-Bound Activists

The secret digests said some of the groups planned acts such as blocking intersections and hacking into Web sites. But the Times reported that the vast majority of the reports it viewed described people who gave no obvious sign of wrongdoing, such as members of the satirical performance-art group “Billionaires for Bush” and a group that had planned concerts peppered with political speeches.

Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the revelations of “spying” were shocking.

If the police have a solid lead that a person or group of people is going to commit a crime then it is reasonable under law to keep an eye on those people. In this case most of the people that were spied on seemed to have meet one simple criteria: they didn’t like George W. Bush’s policies. Disagreeing with politicians is as American as jazz and apple pie, if it becomes a crime to disagree then lots of us from all political persuasions are in trouble. I wonder if they spied on the Republican rioters in Miami in 2000.

As an issue it is pretty dry, but it does behove us to keep up with the net neutrality issue. Do you want the same people that think its alright to broadcast 14 minutes of commercials for every half hour sit-com and that DRM is just great deciding what traffic gets priority on the net, FCC Takes Another Stab at Net Neutrality

The Federal Communications Commission is launching an inquiry to determine how broadband providers are behaving in terms of providing access to the Internet to subscribers.

The Notice of Inquiry, announced at the March 22 commission meeting here, is intended to seek comments on whether providers are restricting access to sites on the Internet, whether they are giving any sites favorable treatment and whether the companies charge extra for that, and how consumers are affected. The inquiry is also designed to determine whether the FCC needs to issue a new principle of nondiscrimination.

tropical perfection larger

Besides not being the next F. Scott Fitzgerald, the biggest problem I have with this blog is photo hosting. At least for now I started a blog on Blogger where I can just host the photos for this blog. I’ve tested the link and the photos even load slightly faster then the ones on flickr. So I’ll probably try this for a while. For me photo hosting has to be two things, reliable and free. Blogger seems to offer both without the restrictions I have at flickr. For those that have wanted larger images to use as wallpaper, like 1600×1200 this is good news for you as I will probably be able to put one up occasionally. Note this is not a rant against flickr, they’re a great photo community and very reliable I just need a little more flexibility then they offer.

Botanists and blue flower fetishists cheer as science creates a true blue rose ( Photoshopped blue rose) The World’s Only Blue Rose - A DNA Wonder

The ’something blue’ was the delphinidin gene that Florigene’s geneticists cloned from a pansy, to direct pigment synthesis in the rose into the ‘blue’ pathway. The ’something borrowed’ was an iris gene for an enzyme, DFR, required to complete the delphinidin-synthesis reaction.

Photo at the link and a chart that tells you about the DNA pathways used.

The pot calling the kettle black. That was always the first thought that came to mind whenever one of the dozens on extremist pundits that dominates the radio airwaves, the broadcast media, or my local op-ed page called moderate hard working Democrats elitist. Nothing like getting a fringe ideologue’s day started by projecting their own deep flaws on others. A few people have started to catch on, An Inside-the-Bushies Mentality

The Bush political operatives have become the people the Republicans once warned the country against — a club of insiders who seem to think that they’re better than other folks. They are so contemptuous of government and the public servants who populate it that they have been unable to govern effectively. They are a smug, inward-looking elite that thinks it knows who the good guys are by the political labels they wear.

This contempt has been evident in many of the administration’s failures. The disastrous incompetence of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 flowed from its status as a clubhouse for ambitious conservatives eager to punch a political ticket in a country they knew nothing about. The political purges that enfeebled the CIA in 2005 were the work of a conservative former member of Congress, Porter Goss, and a coterie of political aides he brought from Capitol Hill who thought they knew more about intelligence than career professionals. The administration’s signature failure, its bumbling response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, was the work of a right-wing political appointee who knew almost nothing about disaster management and who scorned many of the bureaucrats who worked for him.

I disagree with Mr. Ignatius on one thing. They did not “become” what they warned us about - drunk with power they have just shown what they really were all along.

calm and rocky coast. Two words that we usually wouldn’t use in concert, to be both calm and rocky seems a contradiction.

Impaired emotional processing affects moral judgements 

Mr Spock, the fictional Vulcan famously logical and lacking in emotion, sacrificed himself for his comrades in the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan with the following words to Captain Kirk: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one…”

Now, revealing new research shows that people with damage to a key emotion-processing region of the brain also make moral decisions based on the greater good of the community, unclouded by concerns over harming an individual.

It is the first study to demonstrate how emotion impacts moral judgement and sheds light on why people often act out of respect for an individual rather than choosing to act in a more logical, utilitarian way. The findings could cause a rethink in how society determines a “moral good”, and challenge the 18th-century philosophies of Immanuel Kant and David Hume.

I’m not doing the article justice, but the short version is that people who have had an area of their brain damaged called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC) were confronted with the Spock predicament - “For example, subjects had to say whether they would throw a person in front of a train if doing so would stop the train from barrelling into five workmen, killing all five.” Most participants would not choose to sacrifice the individual to save the many - their identification with the individual outweighing any logical or what could be called Kantian considerations. While those with damaged VMPC were more utilitarian - save the five. Yet when presented with  impersonal  morally distant decisions the group with damaged VMPC and the non-damaged group  would make about the same decision - to generally choose to to what was best for the greatest number even if a few were harmed. The moral to the story is that we need the full arsenal of our emotional-mental arsenal to be able to weigh all the  factors involved in making a moral decision - both consideration of the individual life and its dignity and the well being of the “many”. There are a few examples of the kinds of moral dilemmas they used in the study at the link. Here’s one to get the morning water cooler discussion going:

You are the captain of a military submarine travelling underneath a large iceberg. An onboard explosion has caused you to lose most of your oxygen supply and has injured one of your crew who is quickly losing blood. The injured crew member is going to die from his wounds no matter what happens.

The remaining oxygen is not sufficient for the entire crew to make it to the surface. The only way to save the other crew members is to shoot dead the injured crew member so that there will be just enough oxygen for the rest of the crew to survive.

Would you kill the fatally injured crew member in order to save the lives of the remaining crew members?

blurred justice 

To some in Paris, sinister past is back - In Texas, a white teenager burns down her family’s home and receives probation. A black one shoves a hall monitor and gets 7 years in prison. The state NAACP calls it `a signal to black folks.’

Brenda Cherry, a local civil rights activist, can see the fairgrounds from the front yard of her modest home, in the heart of the “black” side of this starkly segregated town of 26,000. And lately, Cherry says, she’s begun to wonder whether the racist legacy of those lynchings is rebounding in a place that calls itself “the best small town in Texas.”

“Some of the things that happen here would not happen if we were in Dallas or Houston,” Cherry said. “They happen because we are in this closed town. I compare it to 1930s.”

There was the 19-year-old white man, convicted last July of criminally negligent homicide for killing a 54-year-old black woman and her 3-year-old grandson with his truck, who was sentenced in Paris to probation and required to send an annual Christmas card to the victims’ family.

There are the Paris public schools, which are under investigation by the U.S. Education Department after repeated complaints that administrators discipline black students more frequently, and more harshly, than white students.

And then there is the case that most troubles Cherry and leaders of the Texas NAACP, involving a 14-year-old black freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, who shoved a hall monitor at Paris High School in a dispute over entering the building before the school day had officially begun.

The youth had no prior arrest record, and the hall monitor–a 58-year-old teacher’s aide–was not seriously injured. But Shaquanda was tried in March 2006 in the town’s juvenile court, convicted of “assault on a public servant” and sentenced by Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville to prison for up to 7 years, until she turns 21.

Just three months earlier, Superville sentenced a 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down her family’s house, to probation.

“All Shaquanda did was grab somebody and she will be in jail for 5 or 6 years?” said Gary Bledsoe, an Austin attorney who is president of the state NAACP branch. “It’s like they are sending a signal to black folks in Paris that you stay in your place in this community, in the shadows, intimidated.”

Shaquanda might have had some disciplinary problems, but those problems were well within the realm of the kinds of problems many teens have - especially if they have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Prison should not have even been on the table as far as dealing with those problems. She is in jail and she is scared. She is scared because most of the youths that are put into detention facilities have pushed society to its limits - everyday she has to deal with people who were convicted of violent robberies, sexual offenses and similar crimes. She is getting a new kind of education while a 19 white male who ran over and killed a black woman and her grandson got probation for his crimes. Some people have said that there is no racism in America, its a thing of the past and they’re tired of others whining about something that doesn’t exist - sure and the earth is flat.

Map proves Portuguese discovered Australia

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A 16th century maritime map in a Los Angeles library vault proves that Portuguese adventurers, not British or Dutch, were the first Europeans to discover Australia, says a new book which details the secret discovery of Australia.

At least it does say first Europeans. Travel tip: If you go someplace and there are people already there, you did not discover that place.

101 Shareware and Freeware Programs Every Nerd Needs. I did find a couple that I didn’t already know about.