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Our Leader’s base
TSA Pilot Would Offer Ads at Airport Security Checkpoints
[Quote:]
proposed Transportation Security Administration pilot program.
Under the one-year pilot program, TSA will allow commercial advertising at passenger screening checkpoints in select airports throughout the U.S. and its territories. “Interested parties will have to partner with airport operators to develop a proposal for TSA review. Only airport operators can submit proposals for use of the checkpoints for advertising,” according to a Dec. 21, 2006, posting on the Federal Business Opportunities web site.
“TSA plans to launch a one-year pilot program where airport operators may enter into an agreement with vendors, who will provide divestiture bins, divestiture and composure tables, and metal-free bin return carts at no cost to TSA,” said spokeswoman Amy Kudwa. “In return for the equipment, TSA will allow airport operator-approved advertisements to be displayed on the bottom of the inside of the bins.”
I wonder which advertisers are stupid enough to do this…
M-LAW’s Wacky Warning Labels – microwaves
Talib Kweli and Madlib release a free album
The skeptic’s horoscope
The skeptic’s horoscope for Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, and Sagittarius (Jan 1, 2007 – Dec 31, 2007):
The coming year is likely to present challenges; these trials are when your true character will show. Trusted friends can provide assistance in particularly pressing situations. Make use of the skills you have to compensate for ones you lack. Your reputation in the future depends on your honesty and integrity this year. Monetary investments will prove risky; inform yourself as much as possible. On the positive side, your chances of winning the lottery have never been greater!
Army asks dead to sign up for another hitch
[Quote:]
The Army said Friday it would apologize to the families of about 275 officers killed or wounded in action who were mistakenly sent letters urging them to return to active duty.
The letters were sent a few days after Christmas to more than 5,100 Army officers who had recently left the service. Included were letters to about 75 officers killed in action and about 200 wounded in action.
Kafka
[Quote:]
I went to renew my driver’s license on November 27th 2006, and just yesterday, on January 4th 2007, was I able to get my license renewed.
An outstanding warrant from 1984 in Massachusetts popped up the federal crime database, at the Missouri DMV and I was refused a driver’s license. What’s relevant is I’ve never been arrested for a crime in Massachusetts and when I gave that information Missouri DMV clerk, she looked look at me as if to say, “Yeah right, you and 1001 other criminal deadbeats who jumped bail.”
She refused to renew my license. So did her supervisor. They wouldn’t give me any details on the crime I had allegedly committed Crime doesn’t pay, especially when you when you’ve never committed it.
Finally, a month and half later I was allowed to renew my driver’s license but only AFTER the refusal to renew my driving license, triggered a daisy chain of events happened, between November 27, 2006 and January 4 2007:
* After spending 40 hours of being put on hold by various electronic answering services in nearly every Boston area municipal court. I simply wanted to know what the charges were that I allegedly failed to appear in court to settle. All of those phone calls were long distance and are going to cost me a small fortune..
* After lobbying two state representatives, one in Missouri and one in Massachusetts
* After turning myself in, at my local municipal police station and demanding they arrest me on an outstanding warrant in Massachusetts.
* After spending an entire afternoon in a holding cell of that same municipal police station, while the cops checked 3 different national databases for warrants in my name and came up empty handed. When I kept insisting there was a 1984 warrant out for my arrest, the local cops looked at me like I was insane, and told me to go home because they couldn’t arrest me.
* After spending two weeks on needles and pins wondering what the warrant was all about and if I’d ever get a driving license again. I’d talked to 40 people in two dozen government agencies and nobody would reveal the nature of the criminal charges against me.
* After nearly over an hour on the telephone with the Cambridge court clerk who my attorney had to threaten to take to court to get her to check the dead warrants files in the basement morgue of the Cambridge court house for my 22 year old bench warrant.
* After that same court clerk took a week to find an outstanding warrant with my name on it for the crime of Posting an Illegal Handbill in Central Square in Cambridge in 1984.
* After sending a registered letter the Chief Clerk of the Cambridge Court informing him that the warrant was a mistake.
* After getting a letter back from the Chief Clerk of the Cambridge acknowledging the 1984 warrant for posting illegal handbills was a clerical error that happened from mistakenly entering my name on a warrant. I was a witness for the defense on a handbill case in 1984 in Cambridge, not the defendant!
* After driving for 40 days with an expired driver’s license, and risking arrest by my local municipal police for actually committing a real crime.
After that, and only after all of that crap and a few hundred dollars later, I could now renew my Missouri driver’s license, but only after being assessed a $25 late fee added to the cost of the renewal of my driving license. The late fee was one last kiss-off slap in the face, from the bureaucracy that was the cause of the problem in the first place.
All of this loss of time and money was a result of an administrative decision by the Bush administration to require the state motor vehicle registries to deny driver’s licenses to anyone who had an outstanding warrant for any trivial misdemeanor dating back to Civil War Reconstruction.
And back in 1984:
I was riding with my black roommate in Cambridge and he was pulled over for running a stop sign (as it turns out, there wasn’t even a stop sign at the corner). My roommate was driving the car in the Cambridge cop ordered us both out of the car for a search. When he searched the trunk he found a stack of handbills advertising a reggae concert by Mutuburuka at a club where my room mate worked as a deejay.
Mutaburuka looks like this:
The cop went ballistic when he saw the handbills and started asking my room mate if he was one of those “black power” Negroes. When my room mate gave him some lip, the cop put handcuffs on my roommate while I stood in watched in stunned silence.
He was taken down to the Cambridge Police station at locked up for “posting illegal handbills.” While he was in the holding cell, the arresting officer tacked on an additional charge of marijuana possession. He produced a bag of marijuana (probably from an police evidence locker) and claimed he found it in the trunk of the car with the handbills.
So it’s more complicated than a simple charge of posting illegal handbills. My role as a witness was to confirm that my roommate hadn’t posted any handbills that night and also confirm that I witnessed the search and no marijuana was found by the officer in the trunk of the car. Eventually my roommate got off with a fine for posting the posters he never posted. How my name got entered into the database as a defendant in the case is beyond me.
The Great Paris Flood of 1910
[Quote:]
At ten minutes to eleven on the morning of Friday, January 21, 1910 the power station from which all the public clocks of Paris are worked by compressed air was flooded by the Seine. All the clocks stopped simultaneously with military exactitude, and with a start of surprise Parisians began to realize that the Seine in flood was not a harmless spectacle that could be watched with the cheerful calm of philosophic detachment, and that the river in revolt was an enemy to be feared even by the most civilized city in Europe.
Crowds, it is true, had gathered on the embankments, admiring the headlong rush of the silent yellow river that carried with it logs and barrels, broken furniture, the carcasses of animals, and perhaps sometimes a corpse, all racing madly to the sea; they had watched cranes, great piles of stones, and the roofs of sheds emerge for a time from the flooded wharves and then vanish in the swirl of the rising water, while barges and pontoons, generally hidden from sight far below, rose gradually above the level of the streets, notably one great two-storied bathing barge, a vision of unsuspected hideousness, that threatened at any moment, triply moored as it was, to crash into the parapet.
Keynote Bingo
[Quote:]
Twice a year, Steve Jobs takes the stage extending his reality distortion field over the masses. These events are really celebrated holidays for Mac fanatics all over the world. And now, after the roaring success of WWDC Bingo 06, our fearless Swedish Viking Keynote Bingo Team got together again to produce the even more ultimate experience: MWSF Bingo 07!
This time Bingo templates are randomized out of a pool of 50 possible keynote events. When one event happens, press a button. If you get five buttons in a row, column or diagonally you scream: bIngqo!! (Because only a Klingon is prepared for what Steve has in store this year.)
When you launch the application, you are asked for a random number. This number is the seed for the generation of the template. The same number will generate the same template again. This will be a way for you to prove to your friends and blog readers that your scream of bIngqo was justified
Download (MWSF 07 version): Multilingual
Battery fires, rootkits and what they mean to a brand name
[Quote:]
The Sony brand name was pounded into punch-line fodder last year by all the battery pyrotechnics — aren’t those videos fun to watch? — and the rootkit debacle that had technology types literally calling for jail time for those responsible.
That’s the conventional wisdom, right?
Well, a recent brand survey of 2,017 adults by Landor Associates indicates that this wisdom couldn’t be more wrongheaded. In fact, according to the survey, the Sony brand finished a gaudy ninth among the “Top 20 Winners for 2006,” sandwiched comfortably between a couple of saintly American icons: Oprah and the National Football League. Moreover, the respondents see Sony climbing to No. 4 among this year’s gainers, right above Amazon and eBay.
Moral: Build a better PlayStation and the American consumer will forgive all else.
Landor is a PR firm. Take a look at their web site. Why would they do this survey? And what happens if a Landor client shows up on the “losers” list?
Anecdotally, I’d agree with them about the average joe. He doesn’t care about batteries and rootkits. But we do, and we influence some fair amount of purchasing, through our recommendations to less tech savvy family and friends, and our purchases or recommendations at work. And this PR campaign is aimed squarely at us. If they can convince us that this bad press doesn’t matter to the average person, we will probably stop talking about it and go back to loving Sony.
Cola Light Domino
Oak Ridge National Laboratory team discovers new way to spin up pulsars
[Quote:]
A team of scientists using Oak Ridge National Laboratory supercomputers has discovered the first plausible explanation for a pulsar’s spin that fits the observations made by astronomers. Anthony Mezzacappa of the Department of Energy lab’s Physics Division and John Blondin of North Carolina State University explain their results in the Jan. 4 issue of the journal Nature. According to three-dimensional simulations they performed at the Leadership Computing Facility, located at ORNL, the spin of a pulsar is determined not by the spin of the original star, but by the shock wave created when the star’s massive iron core collapses.
I always thought pulsars simply leaned to the right and let Fox create all the spin..
Cartoons
Power Washing 188 Suffolk St.
Tidy tape exercise ‘is madness’
[Quote:]
Black tape has been put on civil servants’ desks to show them where to put their pens.
The pilot exercise at National Insurance offices in Longbenton, North Tyneside, is part of a UK-drive to encourage staff to tidy their desks.
The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union claimed the scheme was costing £7.4m nationally and branded it “demeaning” and “demoralising”.
HM Revenue and Customs said it was in line with workstation training.
[..]
“The markers on desks are used to demonstrate that it is much better to work in a tidy work environment where everything has its place.
“Staff involved have confirmed they prefer the tidier workspace.”
But a PCS spokesman said: “The tape idea illustrates the madness of the Lean project.
“The scheme is demoralising and demeaning. Staff know how to order their desks themselves.
“We had a situation in some offices in Scotland where staff were asked ‘Is that banana on your desk active or inactive?’, meaning were they going to eat it?
I figure that sock manufacturers will be most likely to utilize this form of advertising. Travelers have to remove their shoes and will likely see the socks of everyone around them, so socks will already be on the target customers’ minds. Makes sense to me.