...more recent posts
A Florida man has died of pulmonary anthrax. Nothing is known yet of how he inhaled the spores. Dr. Sanjay Gupta answered common questions in this CNN interview.
"There have only been 18 confirmed inhalational cases from 1900 to 1976, and not a single case, before yesterday, over the last 25 years. Typically, the way people get it now is through the handling of animals or soil that contain the bacteria and its spores."This is alarming, given the recent talk of possible terrorist antrax attacks, but it's much too early for more rational fear.
Could it be the case that anthrax is really more commonly encountered by humans in nature and merely under or mis-diagnosed? It is reasonable to think that many in the medical community have recently refreshed their knowledge of the symptons and thus the number of reported incidents might rise quickly (if not very far) even without the help of any malevolent human involvement. What if there were suddenly 5 cases in the country? 10? 20? This still might not be any sort of attack. Localization would be the key to deciding how to guess about the terrorist question.
I think it's likely this case has natural causes. But how many will it take before this isn't the gut reaction? Not too many I'll bet, yet we may well get at least one or two more just out of heightened awareness.
MB's grandmother passed away this week. She was 95, and in good health up until the end. I spent most of the last two days on Long Island with the extended family. Lots of great stories remembering the old days in Brooklyn, from the time of the depression up through World War II, and into the early fifties when they moved out to Long Island. That generation lived through some astounding changes. Death, I suppose, is always a sad business, but a long full life lived close with those you love takes most of the heart wrench out of it. Still sad, yes, but an ending that we all think was O.K. with her. She was buried in the last family plot in the Holy Cross Cemetery, which is off Linden Blvd. around 48th street in Brooklyn, not far from where she grew up. Nana - and she was "Nana" to everyone - will be missed. A great woman I am honored to have known.
Sony makes some amazing gadgets, like the DCR-IP7 "Network Handycam IP." I dislike their tendency for proprietary technologies (memorystick especially) but only Apple is in the same design league. They both make really cool stuff that I wish was a lot less expensive and a lot more open to third party additions. (This might be a better picture to show how small this camera is.)
Well, I got a 'success' message back from weblogs.com, and I know they hit my page, and I showed up in changes.xml (you can probably see that if you want by viewing source since it's not an html file - or maybe it will try to download it to your machine and you could open it in a text editor) but then I never showed up in the list at weblogs.com. Possibly this is because I was never on that list in the first place. So either I have to sign up somewhere first, or they confirm changes by comparing your page to the last snapshot of your page, and since that was the first they had heard of me they didn't have a last snapshot to compare it to. If that's the case then I should show up next hour after they get this notification. Let's see.
Test number 3 of the new notification system at weblogs.com
O.K. Seems like that worked. I'm using Edd Dumbill's XMLRPC classes for PHP (see http://phpxmlrpc.sourceforge.net) along with Bill Humphries notifyUserland PHP code. Everything worked great except I had to change the first line of function ping() to actually ping rpc.weblogs.com and not rpc.userland.com.
I'll make the appropriate changes to [editpage] so that anyone here can send update notification to the crawler at weblogs.com. It will only notify for new posts, not edits, or comments.
"Why of course the people don't want war ... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."Can you guess who said this? Click through to the comments for the answer to todays quiz. Brought to you by Ethel.
Daypop and blogdex are both trying to keep track of recent, highly linked stories in the weblog community. Daypop seems more comprehensive at the moment.
Bruce Schneier has a special September 30th issue of Cryptogram covering the Sept. 11 attacks (he had been publishing only once a month on the 15th - thanks to htp for the heads up.) He talks about airport security, intelligence failures, regulating cryptography, and steganography. Some things he said about intelligence failure started me thinking.
He makes the excellent distinction between data and information in the intelligence community. Data is just a bunch of unconnected, unverified bits of what might, with analysis, become information. They have a lot of data. And what we're seeing now is the reexamining of a lot of this data with the advantage of hindsight. The FBI and the CIA and the NSA are pouring over their mountains of old data looking for clues. And guess what? It looks like they should have known something was up. They had the data. But that doesn't necessarily mean there was a "massive intelligence failure" as some are suggesting. This is just a phenomenon that will always happen when your data set far outstrips your ability to analyse it.
Anyway, the interesting thing I thought (although he doesn't really take it this way) is that this should clearly point out that our intelligence community doesn't need more data! They have the data already. Expanding surveillence is not going to make any difference if it just adds to the mountain of data that then sits in a file cabinet or on a computer somewhere until after an attack happens. I don't have an answer (although more human intelligence and less electronic eavesdropping intelligence might be a start) but this might be an interesting line of defense for people in a position to try and put the breaks on police state happy reactionaries. They knew they should be watching Atta, and they still couldn't do it. How reasonable does it seem to add millions of more "potentially suspicious" people to that list? Won't that just make it all the more likely someone will slip through. What is needed is more information - and it might be the case that accumulating more data is counterproductive.
Scripting news thinks Robotwisdom is a a racist blog. Or at least he did on September 27th. I've been unable to come to any conclusion about this. Certainly Jorn Barger (the man behind robotwisdom) is a strong critic of Israel. But is he a racist? I guess I lean towards critic. In any case, he continues to have what I think are good links. Like this great article by Arundhati Roy. For some background on this fascinating woman (and a stunning picture - does that make me a sexist?) check out this Salon article.
This seems like a good change to be making. Dave Winer is updating the weblogs.com recently updated page so that instead of their spiders hitting every site every hour to look for changes, the sites themselves have to send a message requesting the indexing.
To participate a site must be able to send an XML-RPC or SOAP 1.1 message to weblogs.com, and that will schedule a poll event for sometime in the next hour. Our server will only read sites that claim to have updated. This change is necessary in order for Weblogs to scale to support the number of sites that it now works with.I'm not in the index, but dratfink is, and maybe some other people here want to be. I'll add this feature as soon as there are more instructions from Userland. It's expected, but still very cool, that they are making this open so smaller people like us can participate. Thanks!