news around the world

Good morning all you people who insist on hurting your brains by reading this drivel. I am so glad you have returned for another dose. BTW, the annual meeting of masochistic blog readers will take place in Seattle this year, please bring rain gear.

And now the news:

It would seem that Slashdot no longer holds the power it once did. I am not surprised. Here is an article discussing the decline of the slashdot effect which goes hand in hand with something I have noticed as of late. Slashdot, for the most part, has news hours after it is reported elsewhere. Thats fine if you use slashdot as your only source for such news, but if you are looking to slashdot for timely reporting of interesting geek news, your out of luck. I attribute this time lag and general decline to the incredible amount of mail slashdot must get. They probably have to go through hundreds of thousands of submissions before finding one that MIGHT be worth posting. Even if they spend only 3 seconds on each, that means it will be a long time before the good stuff gets noticed if it ever does. To fix this they need to invest in more people scanning the submissions.

In other news, the US Drops demand for anti-abortion words in a UN document on women's rights. This is good news, maybe next the US government will realize that their own studies show abstinence programs do not work in cutting underage pregnancy rates or the spread of STDs, but thats asking a lot.

India is facing a problem that probably all the other tsunami hit countries are facing: What to do with the orphans. The answer would seem simple, get them adopted as fast as you can, removing the fiscal burden of raising them from the government and improving their lives (kids in orphanages tend not to do well). But the fear is that in the rush to get them settled the kids may be accidentally given over to the black market in children. I understand those fears completely, the horror stories out there are ..... well.... horrible.

And now for something that is not a shocker New Poll Finds Bush Priorities Are Out of Step With Americans but the question remains, if hes so out of touch with America, how in gods name did he get elected TWICE?!?!?!? (well at least once)

Continuing with what i was saying yesterday, more from Alan Greenspan on the Deficit. I guess running the country in the red is not such a great idea.

The NY Public Library is opening its collection of images/posters/post cards/etc.. up to be viewed on the web. A NYTimes Story is here and the link to the image library is here. I hope someone smart somewhere creates a screen saver that just grabs random images from the library and displays them on my screen..... hell I hope someone smart somewhere creates a picture frame that I can hang on my wall that will grab images from this and other image libraries and displays them in an ever changing slide show.... or maybe thats too tacky... whatever.

An interesting problem faces all 'small' societies. Population growth. It must be carefully balanced with the other needs and wants of the society. Japan is facing a huge problem. Their population is not growing, at least not in the past few generations. Italy faces a similar problem, but less so in that italians do not have the same kind of taboos on marrying non-italians.... non-catholics maybe. Japanese look down on people who intermarry and worse than that they look down on people who adopt children or put children up for adoption, especially to foreigners. I read an article once (cannot find it now) about special orphanages in Japan filled with children whose parents don't want them but don't want anyone else to have them either. This simply compounds their population problem, those children are unlikely to grow up wanting children of their own.

speaking of Japan, It seems that the Japanese jumped the gun on MMR and saved the rest of us the trouble which is to say that the Japanese ban on the MMR vaccine in an attempt to slow or stop the rising incidence of autism proved for the rest of the world that there is no link between the two. Despite their ban on MMR vaccination, the incidence of autism went UP, pointing to some other cause. 30,000 children were involved in this 'study'. So all those who are conspiracy theorists or just plain nuts and were convinced by bad science and good PR that MMR caused autism, you need a new scapegoat. WAIT, i got it, both Japan and California border the Pacific Ocean AND both are seeing a rise in autism.... so it must be the Pacific Ocean that causes autism..... quick, ban the pacific ocean! (always remember, correlation is not causation, look deeper)

Speaking of correlation and causation..... ITS ENVIRONMENT TIME!

An essay/editorial in New Scientist Covers Michael Crichton's new book about global warming. It requires full access but basically discusses how the book claims global warming is a conspiracy and how in fact, it is not.

In the environment and food area we have two items:
1) scientists discuss how to increase rice production which is a big deal cause it wreaks havoc with local environments and worse it gives off HUGE amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. I once suggested collecting and using that methane, but no one listened to me. I even devised a way of doing it.
2) A discusion of how to turn ethiopia back into a fertile land.

A blurb on a paper that describes How science survived the middle ages which is a neat way of looking at it.

A cool article on how google created a fault tolerant system and corporate culture though the corporate culture thing is not really covered, just alluded to.

thats all for now.... I found a host of things on gizmag but i will leave that for later.