Six year after 9/11, the United States still hasn’t found Osama Bin Laden or his deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri. The reasons for this quandary are manifold, and are detailed in an excellent article in Newsweek.
I stayed on Khao San Road, the legendary backpacker market/hotel strip/hippie magnet in 2001 when I traveled to Japan and Thailand on vacation. At the time it was filled with dread locked Germans and Australians, hucksters and lowball guest houses. At any rate, in the last few years Khao San Road has gone upscale, with spas, decent hotels and even a Starbucks. Weird.
I found this story via the personal blog of the author, Newley Purnell. He’s an American journalist living in Bangkok, and his blog is also some decent reading.
China’s incredible growth spurt over the last decade has exacted a heavy price on the surrounding environment. Unfortunately, the will to improve things runs smack into the inability of the Communist Party to manage the situation properly.
This should come to a shock to no-one, but the steady diet of news available online is weakening the power of the once mighty newspaper. I agree with the author of this Slate column, who says by the time he glances at print, the stories feel old. But on the other hand, I still go out of my way most weekends to kick back with the Saturday Globe and Mail, because reading an actual newspaper that doesn’t change, blink or entice me down numerous side-roads is a different and fairly pleasant experience.
When I was a child, myself and every sugar-addled lad I knew who was forbidden from playing with guns would improvise and create a Lego gun, and then run around the house “shooting” our siblings. Clearly, parental strictures irked the authors of “Forbidden Lego” enough for them to come out with a book detailing exactly how to build high-powered Lego guns and many other projects that probably would have raised the eyebrow and/or spanking hand of many a parent. Check out the video of the gun, it’s plastic kitchen terrorism at its finest.
The episode under fire in our commentary may be nothing to write home about, but this week’s episode of Radio Free Skaro was indeed special in that it included Chris Burgess, our perennial silent partner and Fifth Beatle. Chris threw in his two bits on Evolution of the Daleks (three guesses as to how he felt about this snoozefest) and managed to inspire awe and fright in both Warren and Steven with his vast and sinister knowledge of all things Whovian. (feed, web, direct download)
Engadget pleads with Palm to get its act together and not release another series of phones that dropped out of a wormhole from 2001. I was a happy Handspring Visor owner (until I dropped it one sad day in the Crowsnest Pass) but I can’t say I’ll ever pick up a new Palm device, especially since the iPhone must eventually make its way to Canada.
No argument here on most of these….but what about Doctor Who? Huh? HUH? Plus the old Max Headroom opening was quite the bit of cyber-gold back in the day.
Also, despite the cheesiness of the old Battlestar Galactica….that’s still one hell of an intro and opening theme.
Noted atheist and biologist Richard Dawkins has a new show, “The Enemies of Reason,” which aims to put the lie to the world of superstition and mysticism. Besides being a fine bit of documentary, it’s also beautifully shot, presumably in HD. It’s a British show, so you’ll have to either wait for the secular humanists at CBC Newsworld and/or PBS to further defy God’s wishes or get thee to a torrent site.
One of the cooler seminars at Barcamp Vancouver 2007 was John Beihler’s rundown on the state of iPhone hacking. Besides explaining ways for Canadians to work around the fact that the phone isn’t available here yet (within limits, you can’t use the phone portion of the device…yet), he also gave a rundown on the various programs you can shoehorn into the iPhone once you’ve unlocked it. Notable coolness came in the form of an NES emulator and a program called iphonefrotz which lets you play old Infocom games. He also said there’s already good progress in hardware workarounds to use the phone with other carriers, and he expects a software solution soon, if current innovation is any indicator.
I finally got to do a little hands-on fiddling with the vaunted beast at the Barcamp party the night before, and I can confirm that it is as cool as it looks. Once someone figures out a way for me to pop my Rogers SIM card into an iPhone, I’ll probably make the short trek across the border and get one. I’d only use the web surfing features with Wifi, because Canadian data rates are so egregious, but even so, it’s an amazing little machine. Especially if I can get in a quick game of Zork.