Since I have relatives in both Sri Lanka and New Zealand, I have taken some pretty long flights and I can tell you that they are not fun, though the people I feel most sorry for are the flight staff. I thought that they must have two sets of staff with one set replacing the other half way through but I see some of the same people working the whole time. Maybe they have some place to take a nap from time to time. [Read more…]
The excellent book Dirty Wars that I reviewed yesterday is about 530 pages but is so well written that it was not hard to get through. What made it hard to take were the things the book described. For those who do not have the time to read it, the documentary of the same name covers the main points. But even those who have read the book will find the film well worth watching. It is one thing to read about the people and events described in the book, it is quite another to actually see the people and places involved and to hear from them first hand. [Read more…]
Developments in robotics that mimic living things are quite amazing. Here’s one robot designed to look and work like a pack mule that can go over rough terrain. [Read more…]
Henry Farrell, associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, has a good article on how Greenwald’s new media venture is shaping up and why it is a big deal. [Read more…]
In a startling display of good sense, the ban on Chinese scientists attending a conference on the Kepler space telescope program at a NASA site has been reversed, after many non-Chinese scientists started talking about boycotting the event altogether, since even Chinese graduate students and post docs working in the US with US scientists would be barred. [Read more…]
Ohio governor John Kasich managed to get the Medicaid expansion policy passed in Ohio yesterday by doing an end run around the Republican-dominated state legislature that had opposed the move because they oppose anything to do with the Affordable Care Act even if it benefits those who are too poor to benefit from the new health care exchange and even if the federal government fully funds it for the first three years and at 90% thereafter. [Read more…]
Yesterday, as a result of a court ruling, same-sex couples were able to get married in New Jersey, making it the 14th state to do so, along with the District of Columbia. This is of course an important step forward for equality but I thought it a telling sign of how same-sex marriage has become normalized, at least in the major media, that the story they seemed to focus on was governor Chris Christie’s decision to not appeal the lower court decision to the New Jersey Supreme Court and what impact that move would have on his chances to win the 2016 Republican nomination for president, assuming that he decides to run. [Read more…]
The book came out earlier this year and a documentary film with the same name was released in June and is available on demand on Netflix. Both cover the same ground but in different ways and are invaluable for anyone who wants to understand how the war of terror has evolved and where it is heading. In short, it is headed in the direction in which ‘the world is a battlefield’ (the subtitle of the book) and the US is now engaged in fighting eruptions of what it sees as terrorism in over 70 countries around the globe. [Read more…]
I tend to like much of the new technology, though some of it is quite gimmicky and appeals only to those who like technology for its own sake. I am usually slow to adopt them waiting until I am sure that I really need it. What really bothers me is when people think that technology will solve a problem that the lack of technology did not create. [Read more…]
The practice of snake handling as a test of faith is popular in certain rural Pentecostal churches in the US. There is even a TV series called Snake Salvation about this practice on the National Geographic channel. It is highly dangerous to handle poisonous snakes and this has resulted in some of the people being fatally bitten. [Read more…]