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New Scientist’s technology blog has a cool post on robot jellies! This is real slick engineering done by the German automation company Festo, which describes its AquaJelly as “”an artificial autonomous jellyfish with an electric drive and an intelligent, adaptive mechanical system.” Some cool features include:
* tentacles designed after fish fins to maximize propulsion
* motion controlled by shifting its weight
* 4-arm pendulum that enables steering in 4 directions
* communicates with charging station, regulates own energy supply

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State Secrets: A government misstep in a wiretapping case. A New Yorker article on the Kafkaesque case of Al Haramain v. Bush. [Via Threat Level.]

Note that Threat Level disagrees with the New Yorker piece about the future of the case.

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If you’re having scalability problems and blaming it on a single technology, chances are, you’re doing it wrong.

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“People like you are not holding up the Constitution …” Or so said Major Freddy Welborn, Specialist Jeremy Hall’s commanding officer in Tikrit. “Last month, Specialist Hall and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an advocacy group, filed suit in federal court in Kansas, alleging that Specialist Hall’s right to be free from state endorsement of religion under the First Amendment had been violated and that he had faced retaliation for his views. In November, he was sent home early from Iraq because of threats from fellow soldiers.

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If you dislike the new Dilbert flash layout, try this.

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Sun continues to pursue talks with Apple Computer to have Java applications run on Apple’s iPhone while acknowledging a third party’s efforts toward the same goal.

“We’ve expressed our intent to do this and our desire, really, to work with Apple to build a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) for the iPhone and we’re sort of moving forward with that,” said Eric Klein, Sun vice president of Java marketing, this week. The JVM could run Java applications.

What the hell is “sort of” moving forward?

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A picture named streaker.jpgEvery so often a beer-drunk fan will run on the field during a baseball game causing a delay while the cops chase him down. Back in the days of streaking sometimes these fans would run out on the field naked. Permalink to this paragraph

You’ll never see one of these scenes on TV because there’s a rule that the broadcasters are not allowed to follow the drunk baseball fan onto the field. If they were to broadcast the drunk fan, the theory goes, that would just encourage more people to do it, meaning more delayed games, annoyed players, offended fans and busted streakers. Permalink to this paragraph

It seems to me this very simple rule should be adopted by news networks when it comes to the most hideous attack ads. Permalink to this paragraph

Example. The North Carolina Republican Party has yet to spend a dime running a racist attack ad against Obama, one that McCain and the national party swear they don’t want them to run. But millions of TV viewers have seen the ad, repeatedly, run for free on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc. This seems grossly unfair, and how does it not count as a campaign contribution? Permalink to this paragraph

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The mainstream media is loathe to call out Hillary on this garbage, which is why millions of us have to tune in to Jon Stewart to do it for us.

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India has rebuffed a call by the United States for it to ask Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment programme.

The foreign ministry said neither India nor Iran needed external guidance on how to conduct bilateral relations.

It said relations between the two spanned centuries, and they were capable of handling them with due care.

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Foto’s van prinses Máxima die een bril draagt, mogen niet in Nederland gepubliceerd worden. De Rijksvoorlichtingsdienst geeft geen toestemming voor publicatie van foto’s die eerder deze week werden gemaakt in Argentinië, waar de prinses was voor een werkbezoek.

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De dienst hanteert de zelf opgestelde Mediacode, die plaatsing van foto’s in de privésfeer verbiedt.

Goh. Ik heb ook een Mediacode opgesteld voor mezelf. Raad eens wat die over deze foto’s zegt…

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… Republican Representative John Duncan of Tennessee. Confronted with a vast amount of evidence provided by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, the US Institute of Medicine , the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Psychological Association that abstinence-only education does not work, does not reduce the incidence of either teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted disease, and that it is a waste of money, the honorable Mr Duncan declared his complete disinterest in data and expertise.

Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, said that it seems “rather elitist” that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate. “I don’t think it’s something we should abandon,” he said of abstinence-only funding.

Nobody is advocating an abandonment of the idea of encouraging abstinence; they’re saying that abstinence-only is a failure, and we should be encouraging dissemination of more information. I know, that’s terribly elitist — how dare we oppose some parents’ desire to keep their children ignorant and stupid.

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As Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald spoke with a roomful of IT managers about the future of Windows, he asked two key questions. To learn how these tech professionals view Windows, he requested a show of hands:

First, he asked how many in the room felt that the current Windows course and speed is sustainable: Is it tenable, is it something we can actually live with?

“No one raised their hand,” MacDonald tells me.

Then, given that response, he asked: is radical change is necessary?

“And half the room raised their hand.”

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Microsoft has the ability, if it felt threatened, to make these changes, he says. However, “There is currently nothing serious that threatens their position on the desktop, or their position with Office, and therefore they are not highly motivated to embark on such radical innovation.”

While the company feels some pressure to change, it’s the depth of the change that’s in question. “Microsoft is aware of the trends that we talked about, they acknowledge that the trends exist,” MacDonald says. “They disagree about whether radical change is necessary…I think they feel they can contain this, with continued incremental improvements in the modularity of the underlying operating system, repackaging different SKUs.”

“But I think there’s a disconnect between Microsoft and its customers on how bad it’s gotten.”

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I’m sure this latest America-hating outburst by the bigoted preacher and McCain supporter John Hagee will lead to endless 24/7 analysis in the corporate media, especially Faux News, be the subject of an entire presidential debate, and raise all kinds of “electability” issues with regards to St. McCain, right?

PRAGER: Right, but in the case, did NPR get, is this quote correct though that in the case of New Orleans you do feel it was sin?

HAGEE: In the case of New Orleans, their plan to have that homosexual rally was sin. But it never happened. The rally never happened.

PRAGER: No, I understand.

HAGEE: It was scheduled that Monday.

PRAGER: No, I’m only trying to understand that in the case of New Orleans, you do feel that God’s hand was in it because of a sinful city?

HAGEE: That it was a city that was planning a sinful conduct, yes.

Shorter John Hagee: God damned the US because of teh gay.

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Pat sent me and I presume everyone he knows on Facebook this photo. The story is that Chinese soldiers dressed up as Tibetan monks and caused a riot at a rally. After a quick search it appears this is a photo taken on a movie set. This post has much more detail including the following:

UPDATE - TUES. APRIL 8: The International Campaign for Tibet made a statement via their website that they do not regard this photo as credible evidence of Chinese soldiers disguising themselves as Buddhist monks during unrest in Lhasa last month. They acknowledge that they are in possession of similar images of soldiers carrying monks robes in the Jokhang temple in Lhasa, which were taken during a film shoot in 2001 which involved soldiers appearing as monks.

UPDATE - SUN. APRIL 20: The photo is from the set of “The Touch”, starring Michelle Yeoh, shot in Tibet in 2001. This has been confirmed by the films’ distribution company, and am waiting to hear about a supporting confirmation from an inside source. Will update soon.

(thanks, Roland)

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