March 2006 Archives

OK, I have a little problem with gadgets. I love them a little too much. It gets expensive.

And I have my eye on yet another one: the new Sony Portable Reader System (May I say what a goofy-ass product name that is. Am I going to become more portable if I purchase this product?)

It's not that I want to read books on the thing. I'm very fond of analog, paper-based books. I judge books by their cover. I buy them. I beat them up. I read them in the bathtub. Not a good thing to do with an ebook reader.

But I also have an electronic subscription to the New Republic that I'm barely using. I get notified each week that there's a shiny new PDF of that week's issue to download. What am I supposed to do with it? Read it on my laptop? I hate reading PDFs or long documents on my computer. Print it out? And waste dozens of pieces of paper on something I'll toss out (OK, recycle in a few days?) It makes no sense.

But put a nice, sharp readable PDF on something like this Reader, I might actually get around to it. I could read it on BART. I wouldn't have paper piling up everywhere. I would print less stuff and finish reading more articles.

Then again, it is Sony we're talking about. They could manage to cock this new product up as badly as just about everything else they've done lately.

But we'll see. I'm keeping an eye on it. Anyone actually used one yet?

(though as Michael said, "not that there's anything wrong with saying that (I too am glad you're not having tom cruise's baby), you're still a freak for suggesting it as a possibility!")

From the Sun:

TOM Cruise’s pregnant fiancée Katie Holmes will be reminded to keep her vow of silence during birth — by signs plastered around their home.

The couple — following the Scientology tradition of a silent birth — had the posters delivered to their Beverly Hills mansion.

The 6ft placards will be placed so Katie can see them in labour.

One reads: “Be silent and make all physical movements slow and understandable.”

This twaddle is because...

Followers believe it is traumatic for babies to hear their mother scream or groan when giving birth. They think it can cause “psychic” damage, which takes years of therapy to overcome.

Ah. Time to go watch that forbidden South Park episode again...

      s   a  l

   a           i     e   on the r                  e.

W               ttl                   o             d

                                            c         i

                                              ky   s

So that's it. Three seasons and goodbye. It's over. No Showtime to the rescue.

Wah!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have no patience this week.

Or maybe people really ARE idiots.

Idiot #1: The bicyclist merrily toodling his way down the sidewalk on Telegraph Avenue, ipod buds firmly in his thick ears, cheerfully ignoring the bike lane not 2 feet to his left. (All the better not to hear somebody coming up behind him, whacking him off the sidewalk, and taking his iPod?)

Idiot #2 (and #3, and #4, and...): The people who, lo these many years of email and web later, who insist on forwarding along every stupid rumor and "warning" they get without bothering to check it out first, or even consider whether they're really making anybody's life any better by doing so. The latest one was a warning that tampons contain asbestos. I beg people to bookmark snopes.com in vain. Honestly, isn't the world already scary enough? Why do we need to be scared more by stupid made-up shit?

This is how he does it:

The federal government has a national breast and cervical cancer early detection program, run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It provides screening and other important services to low-income women who do not have health insurance, or are underinsured.

There is agreement across the board that the program is a success. It saves lives and it saves money. Its biggest problem is that it doesn't reach enough women. At the moment there is only enough funding to screen one in five eligible women.

A sensible policy position for the Bush administration would be to expand funding for the program so that it reached everyone who was eligible. It terms of overall federal spending, the result would be a net decrease. Preventing cancer, or treating it early, is a lot less expensive than treating advanced cancer.

So what did this president do? He proposed a cut in the program of $1.4 million (a minuscule amount when you're talking about the national budget), which would mean that 4,000 fewer women would have access to early detection.

I wouldn't wish cancer on my worst enemy... but part of me is visualizing painful and unslightly, non-life-threatening polyps somewhere on his asinine hiney.

"Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis" says the Donald, but others who oughta know disagree.

Maybe I don't know history as well as I should either, but I was thinking yesterday, "What if we'd botched the post-WWII reconstruction in Western Europe the way we've botched Iraq. The Soviets would have taken over the whole continent!"

Iraq's true cost continues to grow (from the Houston Chronicle)

"Impeach Bush" Chorus Grows (from the London Times)

Change of Heartland (from the Boston Globe) — Bush is losing Indiana, it seems)

Maybe we still have three more years... maybe less?

You've got to be fucking kidding me.

Oh wait, this IS the Bush administration we're talking about, after all.

US plans to scale back mad cow testing

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has considered scaling back the enhanced national BSE testing program, which resulted in the discovery of the third US case of mad cow disease. The US Chief Veterinary Officer John Clifford indicated such a move in his announcement.

The reason may be this: the enhanced BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) testing program has been not intended as a measure to prevent mad cow disease. Rather, it is designed to survey the prevalence of mad cow disease, according to the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), an agency of the USDA.

"Testing is not a food safety measure. Rather, it's a way to find out the prevalence of the disease," The associated Press said, citing Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns who was at a trade meeting Monday in Warsaw, Poland.

The BSE testing program, part of the BSE surveillance plan, was initiated in March, 2004 to respond to the possible high risk of mad cow disease in the US after the first case of mad cow was discovered in December 2003. The goal of the plan is to test as many cattle in the targeted high risk population as possible in a 12-18 month period, APHIS states.

Under this program, 1000 cows at high risk are tested daily compared with 55 per day in 2003. The Department of Agriculture intends to call for a budget that supports 110 tests a day, according to the AP.

Reduction in the testing would lower the odds of discovering new cases in the US as APHIS acknowledges that more cases of mad cow disease should be expected when the enhanced testing program remains in place.

The testing program does not test all cows, but only those at a higher risk of mad cow disease. Cows at high risk include dead cows; non-ambulatory cattle or downers who can't walk into the slaughterhouse; cattle showing signs of a central nervous system disorder, or other signs associated with BSE. So far, more than 650,000 cows, a small fraction of the total cow slaughtered, have been tested for mad cow disease.

The testing protocol does not seem satisfying to everybody. At least, Japan, one of the US largest beef consumers, required the US last year to test all beef cows as a prerequisite to lift its ban on US beef imports.

Japan may have more say about how to find mad cow disease. So far, at least 23 cows have been diagnosed with mad cow disease in Japan. The latest case, a 38-month-old cow, was announced on Wednesday March 15, according to Xinhua. As a Japanese official once said last year, Japan would have missed six or so cases if they followed the US surveillance protocol.

The USDA Office of Inspector General (OIG) on Feb 2, 2006 filed a report saying that the USDA surveillance program is spending much of its resources looking in the wrong places for this disease and the agency does not adequately sample the cows at highest risk of BSE or mad cow disease.

The possible move to scale back the BSE testing program worried consumers' groups, which had already believed the program is insufficient to safeguard the US beef and protect the public against mad cow disease. Consumers Union issued a statement on March 13 urging the government "to expand its surveillance program, which tests less than 1 percent of US cattle per year and to require that all cattle over 20 months of age be tested at slaughter for mad cow disease."

USDA officials said the BSE testing program should not be regarded as a preventive measure. Other effective measures are in place to protect American consumers against getting mad cow disease.

Yeah, right!

Pass the tofu.

Stereolab rocks. And you can dance to them too.

That is all.