Beware the Explod­ing Frogs. Res­i­dents of Ham­burg, Ger­many have an unusual prob­lem to deal with: explod­ing frogs. The frogs appear per­fectly nor­mal. How­ever, at night they swell to three… [SciS­coop — Sci­ence News Forum]

This is from the end of the article:

bq. Ger­mans are par­tic­u­larly attached to toads and they have become, in some respects, a sym­bol of the Green move­ment. The Gov­ern­ment has allocated

MARK BRADY: Iraq Still Isn’t an Elec­tion Issue. Bren­dan O’Neill explains why here. Sad but true. [Lib­erty & Power: Group Blog]

The arti­cle addresses the hypocrisy of “anti-war” types who are opposed to the con­quest of Iraq, but were per­fectly happy to sup­port pre­vi­ous wars of aggres­sion such as Kosovo. The arti­cle is directed at Tony Blair and British politi­cians, but it applies equally to “anti-war unless it’s our war” Americans.

AEON J. SKOBLE: Know what this is? Guess I didn’t.. This NYT story is inter­est­ing in lots of ways, but what struck me the most was the rev­e­la­tion that that famous photo of the heli­copter evac­u­at­ing peo­ple from the embassy roof in Saigon is actu­ally some­thing else. Have a look!

In other news, my pro­mo­tion to Asso­ciate is now offi­cial. Woo-hoo! [Lib­erty & Power: Group Blog]

A very inter­est­ing story by the pho­togra­her who took the picture.

#
Old Horse­man -

Police State in Progress: Less Lethal Weapons… — cops have taken
a lik­ing to the sup­posed non-lethal weapons, e.g. pep­per spray and
tasers. Prob­lem is, they’re not really non-lethal, only less-probably
lethal than their pis­tols. And pep­per spray in the eyes or a taser zap
could rea­son­ably be called tor­ture. So why is it OK for cops to use
them on peo­ple whose only “crime” is dis­obey­ing orders? It’s not OK,
of course. And we should remind the cops in ques­tion that they’re
engag­ing in tor­ture and risk­ing mur­der when they do it.
bq.
Police forces in Amer­ica should be stripped of tasers, pep­per spray,
and other instru­ments of tor­ture until they get it through their heads
that you don’t hurt peo­ple who are doing no harm. Cit­i­zens are
not cat­tle to be prod­ded and pun­ished because the guy behind the badge
doesn’t like their atti­tude or is such a chicken-shit cow­ard that he
can’t stand eye to eye with a cit­i­zen and talk to him like a human
being.

If cops keep act­ing like Nazis, treat­ing the cit­i­zens like the Enemy,
sooner or later, the cit­i­zens will respond in kind. I per­son­ally
con­sider pep­per spray and tasers to be lethal weapons, and would
respond to any­one attack­ing me with them in exactly the same man­ner as
I would if they were armed with a gun or knife. (Which is to say, with
oppos­ing lethal force.)

The hus­band of the old woman

who was double-zapped was arrested for “inter­fer­ing with an
offi­cer” when he con­fronted the jack­boots over their attack on his
wife. In all hon­esty, if he’d shot the cop through the head with a
rifle from his win­dow, he would never have been con­victed with me on
the jury.
[End the War on Free­dom]

It’s not just tasers and pep­per spray, either. the mil­i­tary has been work­ing on new ways to tor­ture large groups of peo­ple from a dis­tance, and you can be sure that the cops will be using them too.

Blog­ging on mul­ti­ple machines. One of the dis­ad­van­tages of blog­ging appli­ca­tions that sit on a sin­gle machine rather than on a server is that you are tied to that machine when you want to write. Every time I want to shoot some­thing to this place, I have to run over to my lap­top. No blog­ging from work or from the other machines that sit on the home network.

If you’re going to be blog­ging from mul­ti­ple machines and loca­tions, it’s some­thing to con­sider when you are choos­ing your tools. [code: theWeb­Socket;]

I’ve run into this myself, since Radio is one of those apps that sits on a sin­gle machine. For a while, I was run­ning it on my desk­top PC at home, and con­nect­ing to it with my lap­top from whereever I hap­pened to be. Unfor­tu­nately the IT depart­ment at work, in its ongo­ing quest to make life dif­fi­cult for work­ers, started block­ing my access. Now I keep Radio on my lap­top, and just carry the lap­top around with me.

This isn’t a per­fect solu­tion, though, because of the reli­a­bil­ity prob­lems I’ve had with my Mac lap­tops. When one goes down I can move Radio to the other and run it from there, but if both go down at once (which has hap­pened), it’s much harder to move to my PC laptop.

From one of the mail­ing lists I sub­scribe to:

bq.
Rus­sell opined:

bq. My only quib­ble is this: as Jeff Cooper has pointed out, in my pres­ence and *point­edly* to a cop who called non-cops “civil­ians”: cops are _also_ “civilians.”

Cops are not mil­i­tary, they are “civil author­ity.” Only the igno­rant
copy use the term civil­ians… the oth­ers call us “lit­tle people.”

Rus­sell, this is not only com­plete bull­shit, it’s dan­ger­ous bull­shit,
even if Jeff believes it. I once had a dis­agree­ment on this same issue,
with one of those “almost a lib­er­tar­i­ans” you hear about, a police chief
friend of Aaron Zelman’s, who regur­gi­tated the same lame theory.

Cops are armed when civil­ians can’t be, often with weapons civil­ians
can’t have. I can’t tell you how sick I get of see­ing nota­tions in
cat­a­logs like Bro­gade Quar­ter­mas­ter that cer­tain items are for cops only.

Cops live and oper­ate within a strict hier­ar­chy, usu­ally with titles like
“sergeant”, “lieu­tenant”, “cap­tain”, and so forth. Most of them wear
military-style uni­forms, and an argu­ment can be made that so-called
“plain­clothes” oper­a­tions ought to be out­lawed. Increas­ingly, they wear
mil­i­tary bat­tle­dress and carry mil­i­tary weapons.

Cops form a cul­ture all to them­selves, like pro­fes­sional sol­diers, and
usu­ally have lit­tle to do with those who are not cops. They do call us
“civil­ians”. I never heard this term “lit­tle peo­ple” before. They also
call us “ass­holes” and say that the pub­lic just con­sists of crim­i­nals
who haven’t been caught yet. I know because I was there at one time.

Yeah, I under­stand the the­ory that they’re civil­ians, too. I repeat that
it’s bull­shit. What they are, in fact, is an occu­py­ing mil­i­tary force,
with strate­gic bases in every ham­let in the nation — which is why they
and their hangers-on lie to us and pos­si­bly to them­selves about being
civil­ians, too.

They are the very stand­ing army that the Found­ing Fathers were afraid of.

And for good reason.

L. Neil Smith

I have the same opin­ion of cops, but I couldn’t say it half as well.

#
Manuel Roig-Franzia at The Wash­ing­ton Post -

Fla. Gun Law to Expand Lee­way for Self-Defense — it seems that
Florida slipped one under the radar of the Brady Bunch. For some
rea­son they don’t under­stand that if some­body comes at you with a
knife, he has for­feit his right to life, and you are com­pletely
jus­ti­fied in shoot­ing him dead, no ques­tions asked. For­tu­nately, the
Florida leg­is­la­ture under­stands the real­ity of the situ­ta­tion. Bravo!
[trt-ny]
bq.
The Florida mea­sure says any per­son “has the right to stand his or her
ground and meet force with force, includ­ing deadly force if he or she
rea­son­ably believes it is nec­es­sary to do so to pre­vent death or great
bod­ily harm.”

Florida law already lets res­i­dents defend them­selves against attack­ers
if they can prove they could not have escaped. The new law would allow
them to use deadly force even if they could have fled and says that
pros­e­cu­tors must auto­mat­i­cally pre­sume that would-be vic­tims feared
for their lives if attacked.

The over­whelm­ing vote mar­gins and bipar­ti­san sup­port for the Florida
gun bill — it passed unan­i­mously in the state Sen­ate and was approved
94 to 20 in the state House, with nearly a dozen Demo­c­ra­tic
co-sponsors — have alarmed some national gun-control advo­cates, who
say a mea­sure that made head­lines in Florida slipped beneath their
radar.

…

[Florida lob­by­ist Mar­ion P.] Ham­mer, a 4-foot-11 dynamo with a
national rep­u­ta­tion for her per­sua­sive pow­ers, dis­missed the papers as
“lib­eral, anti-gunners” and “Chicken Lit­tles.” The cur­rent law
unfairly forces Florid­i­ans to make split-second deci­sions about a
criminal’s intent, she said, and NRA lob­by­ists like to note that was
deemed impos­si­ble gen­er­a­tions ago by leg­endary Supreme Court Jus­tice
Oliver Wen­dell Holmes. “Detached reflec­tion,” Holmes said in one of
his most oft-quoted pro­nounce­ments, “can­not be demanded in the
pres­ence of an uplifted knife.“
[End the War on Free­dom]

I’m pleased to see this devel­op­ment. It’s strange that Florida actu­ally had worse self-defense laws than Cal­i­for­nia, and I’m happy to see that at least par­tially rectified.

Just got a call from the brother. He said he’s been get­ting a lot of pos­i­tive feed­back this week after point­ing peo­ple to my posts regard­ing macro tools for Windows.

This may be one of the big “misses” in the Win­tel world. In the Mac world, we’ve had tools like Apple­script, iKey, Quick­eys, and TypeIt4Me (among oth­ers) for years. We’ve just taken it for granted that you can use automa­tion tools with good user inter­faces to improve pro­duc­tiv­ity in our per­sonal workplace.

(Later: There’s a Quick­eys for Win­dows? Who knew?)

Not so in the Win­tel world. When you ask Win­heads about text replace­ment, for exam­ple, they start talk­ing about how fast they can accu­rately type. They miss the point — no mat­ter how fast you type, the com­puter can do it faster. If you have to type it over and over again, it’s faster and eas­ier just to auto­mate the process. Dull, rep­e­ti­tious, tedious work is best left to the CPU on the desk­top, not the one between your ears.

It’s not like the tools aren’t there. There are macros in the Office Suite as well as stand alone pro­grams like Active­Words, Pow­er­Pro and Macro Express that can auto­mate much of the mou­s­ing and key­board­ing we do every day. But it’s not a widely pro­moted fea­ture, and you have to won­der why — this is the sort of non­sense that com­put­ers were sup­posed to make easier.

I’m impressed that the util­i­ties exist, and dis­ap­pointed that they aren’t pushed harder by Microsoft and the Win­tel blog­ging press. It’s an area wor­thy of much more atten­tion, and — at least from what I’ve seen — get’s short shrift when talk­ing about rea­sons to stay on the Win­tel plat­form. [code: theWeb­Socket;]

I didn’t know there was a QuicK­eys for Win­dows. I used to use it on the Mac years ago, before mov­ing to OneClick, and I’m happy to see that it’s avail­able on Win­dows. I’ll have to check out the trial version.

From smith2004:
bq.
“School shoot­ings hap­pen because the over­whelm­ing major­ity of stu­dents
are never trained in the tech­niques — and more impor­tantly, the
atti­tude — of self-defense. And of course the most reli­able
means of self-defense, firearms, have been demo­nized by those with a
polit­i­cal agenda and an end­less sup­ply of dull-witted fol­low­ers. It
also appears now that mind-altering pre­scrip­tion drugs like Prozac and
Zoloft play a part. But chiefly, these inci­dents illus­trate the
con­se­quences of hav­ing too few guns around, not too many.” –
L. Neil Smith
[End the War on Free­dom]

How to Sur­vive a Zom­bie Attack. I finally saw Dawn of the Dead (2004), and I just have to won­der, did these peo­ple even think about how they would sur­vive a zom­bie attack? Since we’ve had a rash of zom­bie movies lately — 28 Day, Shaun of the Dead — I think some­one needs to pub­lish a zom­bie sur­vival guide to help these peo­ple out. And that some­one is me, because I for one don’t wel­come our new zom­bie over­lords. [kuro5hin.org]

You never know what kind of use­ful infor­ma­tion you’ll find on the Internet.