The Grumpy Owl

These are my undigested internests for April 15th through April 21st:

• Sense of smell makes flies’ time fly – health – 20 April 2010 – New Scientist – Could smells affect your lifespan? Female fruit flies deprived of the ability to smell food outlive their peers. The sense of smell may be linked to the cellular ageing process in many other organisms – even people.
• Canada’s military chief in Afghanistan ‘fired rifle in air base’ – Telegraph – Canada's senior military commander in Afghanistan has ordered an investigation into himself after he accidentally fired his rifle while loading it at an air base.
• The World’s Ugliest Statues – By Joshua Keating | Foreign Policy – They are ugly.
• The False Religion of Mideast Peace: And Why I’m No Longer a Believer – By Aaron David Miller | Foreign Policy – Etymologists tell us that the word "religion" may come from the Latin root religare, meaning to adhere or bind. It's a wonderful derivation. In both its secular and religious manifestations, faith is alluring and seductive precisely because it's driven by propositions that bind or adhere the believer to a compelling set of ideas that satisfy rationally or spiritually, but always obligate.
• When Situations Not Personality Dictate Our Behaviour | PsyBlog – A fundamental mistake we often make when judging other people is assuming that their behaviour mainly reflects their personality. Unfortunately this ignores another major influence on how people behave staring us right in the face: the situation.
• Tim Wise rips apart racist Neo-Confederate mythology « The Marxist-Leninist – I really like Tim Wise.
• Man Unable To Wear Nice Clothes Without Everyone Asking Questions | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source – Tell me about it.

These are my undigested internests for April 13th through April 15th:

• Steve Jobs’ iPad Pays Homage To Gutenberg’s Printing Press – It's a bit premature to draw any parallels if you ask me.
• Palin sets rules of engagement for Hamilton fundraiser – thestar.com – No jeans . . . no cameras . . . no recording devices . . . no questions . . . a rumoured $100,000 speaking fee
• Check the Hype — There’s No Such Thing As ‘Cyber’ | Threat Level | Wired.com – How can you tell the difference between a real report about online vulnerabilities and someone who is trying to scare you about the security of the internet because they have an agenda, such as landing lucrative, secret contracts from the government?
• final fashion » just a thought – fashionabubble – I'm in agreement here.
• Reporters Sans Frontières – Reporters Without Borders is making a new version of its Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents available to bloggers today to mark Online Free Expression Day.

These are my undigested internests for April 9th through April 12th:

• McLaren & Meyer & Rotten & Vicious & me – Roger Ebert’s Journal – "I need you out here," Russ Meyer told me on the phone in 1977. It was 6 a.m. He could not conceive that I might still be asleep. "Have you ever heard of the Sex Pistols?"
• Chimps reject unfairness to their fellows – life – 12 April 2010 – New Scientist – CHIMPS recognise unfairness, even when it involves individuals other than themselves. This sense of unfairness towards others may be a rudimentary form of the social justice that characterises human societies.
• The New Despotism – Robert A. Nisbet – Mises Institute – We may have in mind the ideal of equality that the monastery or family represents, but what we will get in actual fact in the modern state is the kind of equality that goes with uniformity and homogeneity — above all, with war society.
• iPranged a submarine | The Sun |News – Multitasking might be a bit overrated. "A US nuclear sub rammed another ship causing nearly £60MILLION damage – while its navigator was listening to his iPod."
• Why are anarchists in favour of equality? – Infoshop News – Anarchists are dedicated to social equality because it is the only context in which individual liberty can flourish. However, there has been much nonsense written about "equality," and much of what is commonly believed about it is very strange indeed. Before discussing what anarchist do mean by equality, we have to indicate what we do not mean by it.
• Futility Infielder • AROUND THE BASES – I'd say this piece about Malcolm McLaren is about right.

These are my undigested internests for April 5th through April 8th:

• Up from Slavery – Reason Magazine – "Has there ever been a golden age of liberty? No, and there never will be. There will always be people who want to live their lives in peace, and there will always be people who want to exploit them or impose their own ideas on others"
• What To Do If You’re The First Human To Ever Make Contact With Aliens – Aliens – io9 – "Check out this exhaustive guide, covering how to behave if you're the first human to come in contact with an alien. Handy tips include: "First things first, hold the @!&#;$ still."
• Warren Ellis: On space travel – "I am writing this in the wake of the announcement — entirely expected — that US government funding for Nasa's human space flight initiatives has been cancelled, and any American progress in that area will now be turned over to private enterprise. And if you think that this is a good idea, just ask yourself how reliable your local rail service has been since deregulation."
• Chris Hedges: How the Corporations Broke Ralph Nader and America, Too – Chris Hedges’ Columns – Truthdig – Ralph Nader’s descent from being one of the most respected and powerful men in the country to being a pariah illustrates the totality of the corporate coup.
• Take It to the Limit – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com – In the coming weeks we’ll delve into the great ideas at the heart of calculus. But for now I’d like to begin with the first beautiful hints of them, visible in ancient calculations about circles and pi.

These are my undigested internests for March 9th through April 3rd:

• Rise of Hungary’s far-Right Jobbik party stirs disturbing echoes of the 1940s – Telegraph – As Hungary prepares to vote in a crucial election, the far-Right Jobbik party expects great success – to the consternation of democrats and those old enough to remember the fascist past.
• t r u t h o u t | Welcome to Glennbeckistan – What if the Tea Party ruled? Imagine a land, let's call it Glennbeckistan, where white, patriarchal, religiously zealous, Tea Party-type patriots hold a super-majority in both houses of the legislature, sit in the governor's mansion, and control most local governments. It's a place so out of sync with the rest of the nation that states' rights and even secession are always on the agenda. It's a place where gun-ownership trumps all other rights, climate change is considered an insidious socialist conspiracy, and a miscarriage can be investigated as a potential crime. Welcome to Utah.
• French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment – Telegraph – A 50-year mystery over the 'cursed bread' of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US had spiked the bread with LSD as part of an experiment.
• Global Guerrillas: JOURNAL: Scott Atran, Terrorists, and Global Guerrillas – Individuals now mostly radicalize horizontally with their peers, rather than vertically through institutional leaders or organizational hierarchies. They do so mostly in small groups of friends — from the same neighborhood or social network — or even as loners who find common cause with a virtual internet community.
• The Five Varieties of Bad Political Thinking – Reason Magazine – “You start by reading your horoscope in the newspaper; then you dabble in chakra balancing or feng shui, saying that it is important to keep an open mind; after a while your mind is so open that your brains fall out, and you read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion without noticing anything amiss.”

These are my undigested internests for February 19th through March 8th:

• Mercenaries Circling Haiti | CommonDreams.org – On March 9 and 10, there will be a Haiti conference in Miami for private military and security companies to showcase their services to governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in the earthquake devastated country.
• Make it Faust | Avenue – As a poet, radio show host, novelist and activist, Malcolm Azania has made this city his studio, and become a well-known icon. But what drives the so-called sinister minister Faust?
• BBC News – Nicolas Sarkozy admits Rwanda genocide ‘mistakes’ – I don’t think these were mistakes- Murder and lies is more like it. “Rwanda accuses France of training and arming the Hutu extremists who killed some 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus – a charge denied by Paris.”
• Cheney: “I Was A Big Supporter Of Waterboarding” – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan – Cheney confesses on television to a war crime. Who cares?

These are my undigested internests for February 17th through February 19th:

• Left Behind – The sad truth is everything we are seeing we have already seen. Despite presidents who come and go, permanent war is a hallowed American institution. Start if you will with the War of 1812, the invasion of Mexico, and the carnage of a Civil War. Move to the mass murder of Native Americans and theft of their property, the killing, torture, and prison camps in the Philippines, then the blood-drenched 20th century. The 21st likewise dawns red. It never changes. Doves protest, hawks rule, ordinary people pay the penalty. All wars are “just.”
• Stereotyping People by Their Favorite Author (by Lauren Leto) – I like stereotypes and I like authors so . . .
• Print Roger Ebert: The Essential Man – It has been nearly four years since Roger Ebert lost his lower jaw and his ability to speak. Now television’s most famous movie critic is rarely seen and never heard, but his words have never stopped.
• Dirk Hayhurst Article About His Shoulder Injury -

These are my undigested internets for February 17th from 12:30 to 18:45:

• Brainwashed by a parasite « Neurophilosophy – The spores of the fungus attach themselves to the external surface of the ant, where they germinate. They then enter the ant’s body through the tracheae (the tubes through which insects breathe), via holes in the exoskeleton called spiracles. Fine fungal filaments called mycelia then start to grow inside the ant’s body cavity, absorbing the host’s soft tissues but avoiding its vital organs.
• Parasite Makes Ants Resemble Berries – Fruit pickers beware. That red berry might actually be an infested ant’s rear end.
• Philip K Dick’s FBI file and the bizarre story of a neo-Nazi plot to start a Third World War | Technoccult – “Undoubtedly, one of the prime reasons why Dick attracted attention from the FBI was a series of bizarre letters he penned to the Bureau in the early 1970s, in which he described his personal knowledge of an alleged underground Nazi cabal that was attempting to covertly manipulate science fiction writers to further advance its hidden cause.”
• Evo Morales launches ‘Coca Colla’ – Telegraph – Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president and known for chewing coca leaves at UN meetings, has launched a drink featuring the leaf called “Coca Colla”.

These are my undigested internets for February 9th through February 17th:

• spring-training-the-40s-and-50s?xid=liferss from life.com – StumbleUpon – Spring has almost sprung.
• Please Rob Me – Uses twitter to list all the empty homes in your area.
• The House of David – “The House of David was a Michigan-based religious commune that was founded in 1903. Members of the House of David had to obstain from eating meat, sexual intercourse and shaving/haircuts. Ten years after its inception, the commune formed a barnstorming baseball team originally known as “The Israelite House of David.””
• Fuck you, Google « Fugitivus – I second that. They blew any goodwill I had towards them too.
• Johnny Ryan’s BLECKY YUCKERELLA – 02/04/10 – I just don’t know.

These are my undigested internests for February 4th through February 8th:

• The Canadian Press: AP source says US investigating whether officials of Blackwater sought to bribe Iraqis – WASHINGTON — The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether security contractor Blackwater Worldwide tried to bribe Iraqi officials to allow the company to keep working there after a fatal shooting involving Blackwater guards, according to a person close to the investigation.
• Use of Twitter, Facebook rising among gang members – Boston.com – Tech-savvy gangsters have long been at home in chatrooms and on Web sites like MySpace, but they appear to be gravitating toward Twitter and Facebook, where they can make threats, boast about crimes, share intelligence on rivals and network with people across the country.
• Хуясе КОТИК (PHOTO) – 15 Февраля 2007 – Здесь всё что Вам нужно! – You just need to look at this.
• Google to enlist NSA to help it ward off cyberattacks – Google and the NSA, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G . . .
• Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com – The president can now order the assassination of Americans without trials or any of that nonsense. Change?” Here we are, almost four years later with a new party in power, and the President’s top intelligence official announces — without any real controversy — that the President claims the power to assassinate American citizens with no charges, no trials, no judicial oversight of any kind.”

These are my undigested internests for February 1st through February 3rd:

• Giving the ‘unconscious’ a voice – health – 03 February 2010 – New Scientist – Some opinions might need to be rethought: “For the first time, researchers have struck up a conversation with a man diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. All they had to do was monitor how his brain responded to specific questions. This means that it may now be possible to give some individuals in the same state a degree of autonomy.”
• BAD Press: The Best Of « Invisible Molotov – A really good intro to anarchism – what it is, what it isn’t and so forth.
• Top U.S. officer wants gays to serve openly – The Globe and Mail – Why so eager to fight for a country that doesn’t even want you to fight for it?
• ITV – John Pilger – The kidnapping of Haiti – In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the “swift and crude” appropriation of earthquake-ravaged Haiti by the militarised Obama administration. With George W. Bush attending to the “relief effort” and Bill Clinton the UN’s man, The Comedians, Graham Greene’s dark novel about exploted Haiti comes to mind.
• Give your relationship a boost with the ‘we’ word – Short Sharp Science – New Scientist – “If you want your marriage – or other long-term relationship – to last, try to make heavy use of the first-person plural pronoun.”

These are my undigested internests for January 28th through February 1st:

• The iPad’s Closed System: Sometimes I Hate Being Right | Popular Science – “Remember that groundbreaking Apple Super Bowl ad from 1984? The one where the woman throws a hammer at Big Brother, signifying a new era of freedom that would be ushered in with Macintosh? My, how times have changed. Here we are more than 25 years later and the despotic, all-knowing face up there on that giant screen now belongs to Steve Jobs—and Big Brother Steve is holding an iPad.”
• Study finds reduced brain gray matter concentration in patients with severe obstructive sleep apnea – A study in the Feb. 1 issue of the journal SLEEP found gray matter concentration deficits in multiple brain areas of people with severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). The study suggests that the memory impairment, cardiovascular disturbances, executive dysfunctions, and dysregulation of autonomic and respiratory control frequently observed in OSA patients may be related to morphological changes in brain structure.
• Slashdot Hardware Story | Evolving Robots Learn To Prey On Each Other – “Dario Floreano and Laurent Keller report in PLoS ONE how their robots were able to rapidly evolve complex behaviors such as collision-free movement, homing, predator versus prey strategies, cooperation, and even altruism. A hundred generations of selection controlled by a simple neural network were sufficient to allow robots to evolve these behaviors. Their robots initially exhibited completely uncoordinated behavior, but as they evolved, the robots were able to orientate, escape predators, and even cooperate. The authors point out that this confirms a proposal by Alan Turing who suggested in the 1950s that building machines capable of adaptation and learning would be too difficult for a human designer and could instead be done using an evolutionary process. The robots aren’t yet ready to compete in Robot Wars, but they’re still pretty impressive.”
• Homeopathy: Overdosing on nothing – opinion – 29 January 2010 – New Scientist – AT 10.23 am on 30 January, more than 300 activists in the UK, Canada, Australia and the US will take part in a mass homeopathic “overdose”. Sceptics will publicly swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic pills to demonstrate to the public that homeopathic remedies, the product of a scientifically unfounded 18th-century ritual, are simply sugar pills.
• BUNNY ROGER | ENGLISH STYLE ICON YOU’VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF « The Selvedge Yard – He invented the tight-cut Capri trousers while on holiday on the island in 1949, and by the 1950s he was sponsoring a neo-Edwardian silhouette – four-button jackets with generous shoulders and mean waists, lapelled waistcoats, high-cut trousers – for plain, checked and striped suits. Accessories, whether a high-crowned bowler or ruby cuff-links, were indispensable.
• Web-Surfing Chimp Target of Porno Spam | GlossyNews.com – “I have to check Charlie’s laptop several times a day to make sure he isn’t exposed to any media, especially explicit photos, that would confuse him and compromise the progress he is making,” said Lively. “Already we are seeing him using new, inappropriate signs, like balling up his hands into fists, holding them at his sides, and thrusting his pelvis in a ‘to and fro’ in a highly suggestive manner.”

These are my undigested internests for January 24th through January 28th:

• Haiti quake raises fears of child-eating spirits - – PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) – “The earthquake that shattered Haiti has unleashed fears that child-eating spirits, mythological figures entrenched in Haitian culture, are prowling homeless camps in search of young prey.” You know, I think Madonna might be one of these loups-garous.
• 30 Awesome Orange Websites For Your Inspiration | Web Design Tutorials and Inspiration | Learn Photoshop Online | Creative Inspiration | Web Resources – I was kinda worried about the amount of orange on this site. Liked how it looked but wasn’t sure how hard it is on the eyes. But I only had one complaint –from a friend who is always complaining anyway and that’s not an invitation for you to start-. Looking at these other orange sites, I find I don’t mind the colour at all..
• Ubuntu to use Yahoo as default search engine – TechSpot News – This is probably interesting to about 10 people but I’m one of them. Big announcement on the day of the iPad Launch.
• Blue Jays GM Confirms There Never Really Was A ‘Roy Halladay’ | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source – TORONTO—Responding to criticism that the team should have done more to deal star pitcher Roy Halladay by the trade deadline, Blue Jays general manager J.P. Ricciardi revealed at a press conference Monday that there was no such person as the alleged six-time All-Star.
• Carlton Fisk blasts Mark McGwire – chicagotribune.com – “But when you have some of these obscene numbers being put up by people who shouldn’t even be there. … I mean, you know what’s going on. … The people it should have been most obvious to are the people who covered it up by not addressing it . . . You don’t blame people for not ratting them out; you blame the people who abused the pharmaceutical world. It’s not like you are taking a couple of aspirin and you don’t know what’s going on. (Non-prescription steroid use has been) a federal offense for a long time, regardless of whether baseball was recognizing it and putting rules into place. The people who did it … they were breaking the law to start with. It doesn’t have to be a baseball law. They knew what they were doing and the reason they were doing it. Now they are sorry because they are getting called out.” What else is new, Carlton?

These are my undigested internests for January 23rd through January 24th:

• Vancouver police seize ecstasy pills stamped with Olympic rings | Vancouver, Canada | Straight.com – Calling this one censorship might be a bit of a stretch.
• CP24- Haitian orphans arrive in Canada into open arms of new parents – CTV News, Shows and Sports — Canadian Television – It sounds like dog adoption: "From the workers who carried the little wide-eyed bundles on a bus from the Canadian Embassy to the airport, to the Air Canada volunteers who gently stroked their bellies to help them sleep on the plane, the children were the recipients of a tremendous outpouring of care — before they even reached their anxious parents." I mean, shit, did anyone remember to scratch behind their ears? Were their tails wagging?
• Censorship Gallery « 2010 Legal Observer Program – "Despite claims that they won’t be censoring political expression during the Olympics, the City of Vancouver has already started doing just that. We’re going to keep an up-to-date gallery of the things that VANOC, the IOC, and the City of Vancouver order removed in the leadup to the Games."
• Sleepy transit worker a hero | Toronto & GTA | News | Toronto Sun – "The TTC collector caught sleeping inside a Scarborough station is a veteran employee who once saved the life of a rider." You know, I couldn't give a fuck about this guy having a nap. And I'd bet you could get more embarrassing pictures of the TTC ridership than of it's workers – but it still pisses me off that the union's first move was to blame the riders for not waking him up.
• Doing stuff « Jankypanky – Shalome's take on MONSTER JAM. I forgot that I said "Toronto is where cars and dreams come to die." If I had of remembered, I'd have used that joke instead of the one about Rogers Centre being as hard on cars as it was on Troy Glaus's knees. Because, what reader of mine even knows who the fuck Troy Glaus is?
• The Breaking Time: Werner Herzog reads Curious George – Awesome.
• TTC catnaps ignite rider fury amid higher transit fares – thestar.com – This story about the TTC reads like the Onion: "Local 113 of the Amalgamated Transit Union also issued a short news release Friday, admonishing transit users for not waking up the McCowan collector."

These are my undigested internests for January 21st through January 23rd:

• Military Discovers They’ve Been Using Guns Marked With Bible Codes, AKA ‘Jesus Guns’ – Geekologie – I once heard a funny saying about the army: They can't turn around without stepping on their own dicks.
• Twitter user ‘Shit My Dad Says’ gets CBS deal — The Live Feed | THR – If you write, start cleaning your gun. You might need it. To shoot yourself.
• Table of Contents « The Homebrew Industrial Revolution – I've been look forward to this: "Kevin Carson’s third book manuscript is available in unfinished form — The Homebrew Industrial Revolution A Low Overhead Manifesto."
• Privacy is Over Here Comes Sociality – An interesting piece about privacy in the digital age that doesn't fall back on cliche. As for me, I doubt that privacy ever even really existed. Neighbours have always been nosy and people have always been in each other's business. Now strangers are. Big deal.
• Society versus the State – It's hard to make it clearer than this: "Anarchists believe that groups of people can rightfully exercise only those powers that are delegated to them by individuals; and individuals cannot delegate to any group, including the community, powers and rights which they do not themselves possess as individuals."
• Out Of Left Field: Bill Hicks speaking truth from beyond the grave … – Classic Bill Hicks on a baseball blog. I'm in some sort of heaven.