Posted by matt
Thu, 20 Oct 2005 16:39:34 GMT
I get an RSS feed from the BBC and this showed up, the day after I went to see Romeo D'allaire. It was, terrible timing, to say the least.
BBC NEWS Wars 'less frequent, less deadly'
That's a really rose-colored report. When you think of all the genocides
and ethnic cleansings and child armies that have exploded since the end of
the Cold War, war may have gotten slightly less deadly, but a whole lot
dirtier. I was at a lecture by Romeo D'Allaire, the commander of the UN
forces during the failed Rwanda mission on Tuesday, and he asked a
question which illustrates war in these times, I'll have to paraphrase it,
because I didn't take notes, but the question goes something like this.
"We came upon a small village in Rwanda, and we were looking for
survivors, and once we came upon the church, villagers started streaming
out of it, which was unusual, because the normal way of doing things was
to round up the entire village, lock all of the villagers in the church,
and burn it down. In this case, we thought we were lucky, because the
villagers came streaming out of the church when we came into view.
Suddenly a bunch of young boys between the ages of 9 and 14 came out of
the jungle on our right, and started firing at us with AK-47s. Then a
bunch of young girls about the same ages, some of whom were pregnant,
appeared out of the jungle on our left, they were being used as human
shields by yet more young boys with AK-47s firing at us, and the villagers
coming out of the Church. Now, knowing that most of these children were
forced into camps, brainwashed, and pressed into service under penalty of
death, knowing that these children had a "Buddy system" where if your
buddy ran away, you were shot, knowing that these children where only
unknowing automatons, probably given drugs to commit this act, what do you
do? You have nanoseconds to make a decision, and bullets are killing
both your soldiers, as well as the villagers all around you."
What do you do, indeed. It's a heartbreaking question. Luckily, he
didn't ask us the answer to the question, and I think the answer he came
up with on that spot has haunted his dreams for more than 10 years now.
Posted in politics, personal
Posted by matt
Fri, 07 Oct 2005 14:18:44 GMT
I think his job is getting him down
Posted in funny, personal
Posted by matt
Fri, 23 Sep 2005 15:22:11 GMT
I found this quote on the Burning Man/DPW blog, and I really think it fits.
They say Burning Man is about community or art or expression... and it is, but behind most of that is some really hard core engineering, planning and logistical dynamics, and elegant execution of these feats under the worst possible conditions.
Posted in personal
Posted by matt
Tue, 20 Sep 2005 18:28:05 GMT
This has to be the most obscure form of humor, but it's fucking funny to me. The list of Cautions on the Jeppesen map is funny, as well as the X-Ray advisory.
Posted in funny, personal
Posted by matt
Tue, 20 Sep 2005 15:21:15 GMT
create your own visited countries map
Update: Apparently I should add zambia to that map, according to my mom.
Posted in personal
Posted by matt
Wed, 03 Aug 2005 18:25:10 GMT
This NY Times article talks about a study that once again, and in new ways, refutes any claims to a cold remedy.
Some cool quotes.
The study, being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine,
involved 437 people who volunteered to have cold viruses dripped into their
noses. Some swallowed echinacea for a week beforehand, others a placebo.
Still others took echinacea or a placebo at the time they were infected.
Then the subjects were secluded in hotel rooms for five days while
scientists examined them for symptoms and took nasal washings to look for
the virus and for an immune system protein, interleukin-8. Some had
hypothesized that interleukin-8 was stimulated by echinacea, enabling the
herb to stop colds.
But the investigators found that those who took echinacea fared no
differently from those who took a placebo: they were just as likely to
catch a cold, their symptoms were just as severe, they had just as much
virus in their nasal secretions, and they made no more interleukin-8.
Now, with increasing evidence that echinacea does not work for colds,
scientists are confronting a problem, Dr. Sampson said, in that "there is
no 'demarcation of the absurd,' a point at which it is unwise to pursue an
investigation further."
For Dr. Turner, that point is here.
"We should assume that echinacea does not work until somebody proves it
does," he said. That, he added, "is the flip side of where we've been."
Posted in politics, personal
Posted by matt
Thu, 28 Jul 2005 17:18:30 GMT
We need one of these for our drive down to Burning Man
Posted in personal
Posted by matt
Thu, 28 Jul 2005 17:17:59 GMT
Alexander Vinokourov has signed with Liberty Seguros. An excerpt from the article:
Alexander Vinokourov has signed with the Spanish Liberty Seguros cycling team in the belief he will win the Tour de France in the next two years.
Vino single-handedly made the Tour De France exciting this year, especially considering the dominating power of the Discovery team, and managing to single-handedly beat out an entire peloton going flat out at 60 km/h. I've never seen anything like that.
Posted in personal
Posted by matt
Wed, 20 Jul 2005 20:55:36 GMT
As some of you may know, liz and I often drive down to burning man in Nevada. It's a straight haul from Gary, Indiana to San Francisco, and every year, one of the most unpleasant things about the drive is the weak-ass dishwater that truck stops along the I80 try to pass off as coffee.
So I decided to look up locations of starbucks in towns along the route. This makes me stupidly happy.
see below for version 1.0
Read more...
Posted in personal
Posted by matt
Tue, 12 Jul 2005 14:31:44 GMT
this is a little snippet I wrote to monitor the bugzilla server at work, and put a tray icon in my GNOME panel to tell me that there is a bug in the queue.
the code is below. there's probably some wordwrap issues.
The huge todo list.
Properly deal with when someone reassigns a bug out of the queue, and kill the notification.
properly background the process, so that I can just run it out of the gnome session manager.
have the ability to configure the icon
have the ability to pass in the filename containing the url on the command line, or pass in the url on the command line.
Later on:
Properly deal with more than one entry in the queue, and print out a list of bugnumbers and summaries. I already set up the dictionary to do this right, but I can't figure out what to do with it. I probably should look at porting libnotify to python, if no-one else has.
Read more...
Posted in personal
