Entries from May 2005The Posts You Asked For

My guess is there aren’t many Mensa members among principals.
From CNN, we get this nice little item in which we learn of principal Kenny Lee of El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, Calif., who ordered satirical posters of President Bush taken down (they were advertising a school play) because… they promoted smoking and [...]

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Get this: Frances Ball, the principal of Clarke County High School in Virginia, cancelled the free delivery of the local paper (the Clarke Times-Courier) to students because — horrors! — the paper reported that the school board held an illegal meeting.
Ball, well-worn jackboots in place, wasn’t making an educational decision; she was making a political [...]

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I’ve written a few times about thermal depolymerization (TDP) — a process that converts just about anything into oil. (In fact, “Anything Into Oil” was the title of a Discover magazine article on the subject.)
Changing World Technology, the Long Island, N.Y., company behind the process, opened a plant in Carthage, Mo., as a prototype/testbed for [...]

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So a guy threw a rock through the window of Temple Emmanuel here.
The temple’s security cameras taped him. He didn’t just throw a rock. He stopped his car across the street, put on his hazard blinkers, got out and got something from the back of the car, crossed the street, and repeatedly threw it against [...]

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I just have to point this out, because it’s buried in the CNN story.
The House of Representatives passed a bill, HR 810, that would reduce the current ban on stem-cell research.
The CNN story wrote in the lede that the new bill “would expand public funding for embryonic stem cell research.” Yes, this is true. But [...]

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Yay, CNN! The site not only reported that Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith had been leaked to a file-sharing network, but also gave the all-important detail of which one (Bittorrent).
Good thing they didn’t explain how to use it — that you would need to install a free Bittorrent client (such as ABC), then go [...]

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I just received my 140+ photos back from Shutterfly, along with a (free) note card; a (free) 11×14 print is on its way.
For the record: great quality, great service, and damned fast.
Most of the photos were high-res images, but there were a few in which I only had a small JPEG to work with. (Shutterfly [...]

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From Edmunds comes this tidbit:
AUBURN HILLS, Mich.

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I finally decided to enable comments on the site, so you can tell me what an idiot I am in public, instead of just by e-mail. Click on the “Comment!” link after any blog entry to go to a page where you can speak your mind.
Comments had been enabled on the USA Today follow-ups, but [...]

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Here’s a novel twist on spam: Send a newsletter, and instead of a simple “Click here to stop receiving these,” require that the user send a detailed e-mail. And then refuse to accept the message.
That’s what the American Chemical Society does. I am getting its Chemistry.org newsletter. I do not want this newsletter. The instructions [...]

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I’ve been sitting in a discussion with Ken Sands, online publisher of the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash. Lots of good things to learn about the future of journalism and the things newspapers, reporters, bloggers, et al. have to look forward to.
Anyway, we were talking about craigslist, the free online classifieds service that is “in” hundreds [...]

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I have a ton of photos of my son, almost all of them in electronic form. Further, I tend to save photos as TIFFs, not JPEGs (or at least in addition to JPEGS) because JPEGs use lossy compression, meaning that saving it that way loses some information. Usually it’s too subtle for human beings to [...]

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From the Institute of Oriental Study in Brazil:

(Via BoingBoing.)
More: When told it was a logo for the Institute of Oriental Study, colleague Lindsey Nair quipped, “What is that, ‘up the yin-yang’?”
Still more: I guess the site’s unexpected popularity has finally taken its toll. It’s down for repairs.

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Money quotes from the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, in its ruling on the broadcast flag case:
The result that we reach in this case finds support in the All
Channel Receiver Act of 1962 and the Communications
Amendments Act of 1982. These two statutory enactments
confirm that Congress never conferred authority on the FCC to
regulate consumers

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…always an asshole.

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