This article in today’s New York Times about the new self-created suspect in JonBenet Ramsey’s killing describes Boulder as a “rustic college town.” Okay, there’s a big university here, and yes, the city is about 125,000 people which makes it a town in the eyes of a big city, but rustic? I don’t get that, particularly with all of the commercial development that’s happened in the years since she was killed. Clearly that reporter has never seen Ward, for instance. read more

Just in case you’re curious about what’s going to happen down the road with airline security, in the wake of the recently foiled liquid-bomb plot, there’s an article by a Time correspondent here that pretty much paints the picture. It’s about airport security in Israel, a country that has forgotten far more about conflict and terrorism than we know, that has never had an outbound airplane hijacked.

The gist of it is this: you can’t win this game by looking for the weapon. You have to look for the people whielding the weapons. It’s like any other arms race: as soon as one side invents a new weapon, the other side invents a way to disarm it, a means to protect against it, or a bigger weapon. Ultimately nobody wins. Just like copy-protection for software, DVDs, and CDs: a few bright people inventing ways to prevent something from being copied are no match for an endless number of fanatics figuring out ways to circumvent that protection. read more

Our neighbor Lisa has two pugs. I’m not much of a dog person but I have to admit that pugs are kind of charming. They’re compact, good-natured, and so goofy-looking that it’s hard not to like them.

A couple of days ago, in a moment of weakness and insanity, Lisa agreed to board two other pugs–pugs belonging to friends of hers who were about to leave town on vacation and found out at the 11th hour that their kennel couldn’t take their pugs. So we now have four pugs of varying ages and dimensions next door. read more

There’s a neat video here of a touch-sensitive computer screen (“screen” in a loose sense) that can respond to multiple points of contact. This has been done before, but I’ve never seen it done so fluidly, and apparently the hardware is not terribly expensive. The guy makes some good points (briefly) about user interfaces; it is interesting to consider that the mouse/keyboard system we’re all used to really hasn’t changed in the ~25 years since it was invented by Xerox, and the QWERTY keyboard itself is much older. [Found via musicthing.] read more

I need to start compiling a list of all of dietary additives which (within my relatively brief lifetime) were touted as being good to eat but turned out to be bad to eat. The latest is soy, which besides being the obvious base of things like soy milk and veggie burgers, is in 60% of all processed food sold in Britain, a statistic which is presumably about the same in the US. It turns out that the stuff is loaded with plant estrogens, which means that if you (for example) feed soy milk to your baby, you’re giving him/her the equivalent of a whopping big dose of birth-control pills. The article is here. It’s yet another good reason to not eat processed foods, just in case you don’t have enough already. read more

I’m tentatively turning the commenting mechanism back on for this site. I’m trying a security plug-in that theoretically makes it much more difficult for comment spammers to exploit the site. If it turns out to not work, I’ll turn comments off again. We’ll all see how it goes, I suppose.