Damn.

Here's to you Mr. Wizard. Thanks for the introduction to science.

'Mr. Wizard' dies at 89 - Los Angeles Times

The Concept: King Plow has been transformed from an antiquated plow factory into an arts community and center for commercial, performing and visual arts. In 1990, the owners designed a plan to build affordable Live/work studios, commercial artist spaces, art galleries, areas designed for the performing arts, and a restaurant within the buildings while preserving their historic and architectural significance. The project started with eleven different buildings. Several of the buildings were built at different periods of time throughout the Plow Company's existence. The oldest, as well as the only two-story building, was built circa 1890. Most of other buildings were built between 1936-38. Because of the different types of architecture involved the renovation of the building created spaces that are truly unique.

The Reality: The King Plow Arts Center has more than sixty-five tenants representing fine, commercial and performing arts. Tenants representing six fine art areas include: photographers, sculptors, writers, painters, metal smiths and printmakers. The commercial arts are represented by a floral sculptor, architectural firms, a modeling agency, graphic design firms, a film production company advertising agencies, a set designer, multi-media designers, art galleries, and several product and fashion photographers. Representing performing arts are a theater company, a dance school and circus arts school Also located in the center is the City of Atlanta's Clearinghouse.

King Plow Art Center is pleased to serve as a model of adaptive reuse of historic structures and a catalyst for the proposed Marietta Street Arts Corridor. King Plow is the largest center of its kind in the city and has become a significant part of Atlanta's Arts community.

King Plow Arts Center

I mention this book as a sort of follow-up on the Doctorow essay in Forbes (part of the Twenty-First Century Cities special feature), where he writes:

The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression ... To make it possible to see without seeing.

About this book:

In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape. So begins Portuguese author Jose Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege, written with a dearth of paragraphs, limited punctuation, and embedded dialogue minus either quotation marks or attribution. At first this may seem challenging, but the style actually contributes to the narrative's building tension, and to the reader's involvement.

Blindness is in many ways a horrific novel, detailing as it does the total breakdown in society that follows upon this most unnatural disaster. Saramago takes his characters to the very edge of humanity and then pushes them over the precipice. His people learn to live in inexpressible filth, they commit acts of both unspeakable violence and amazing generosity that would have been unimaginable to them before the tragedy. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads traveling by touch from building to building in search of food. The devil is in the details, and Saramago has imagined for us in all its devastation a hell where those who went blind in the streets can never find their homes again, where people are reduced to eating chickens raw and packs of dogs roam the excrement-covered sidewalks scavenging from corpses.

And yet in the midst of all this horror Saramago has written passages of unsurpassed beauty. Upon being told she is beautiful by three of her charges, women who have never seen her, "the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain." In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human.

See also "Seeing".

Blindness, by Jose Saramago

"I think Robert Jackson, who's the architect of Nuremberg, would turn over in his grave if he knew what was going on at Guantanamo," Nuremberg prosecutor Henry King Jr. told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"It violates the Nuremberg principles, what they're doing, as well as the spirit of the Geneva Conventions of 1949."

Pretty much sums it up I think.

Reuters AlertNet - Nuremberg prosecutor says Guantanamo trials unfair

"The notion was that a chemical that would probably be pleasant in the human body in low quantities could be identified, and by virtue of either breathing or having their skin exposed to this chemical, the notion was that soliders would become gay," explained Hammond.

Your tax dollars at work...

cbs5.com - Pentagon Confirms It Sought To Build A 'Gay Bomb'

Ironically if she succeeds in banning the books for their "religious influence" she sets a precedent which might make it easier to strip away the Christian influence in our schools as well. Harry Potter is less Wiccan than intelligent design is Christian. Praying isn't so different than uttering spells. Children should be able to pick a religion, but they should be prevented from exposure to them at all costs.

RE: Laura Mallory Speaks Out about Harry Potter

In his speech, Jobs announced that the iPhone will be able to run Web 2.0 applications that look just like the iPhone's built-in apps but are created by third-party developers. As the iPhone will have a full-fledged version of Apple's Safari Web browser, developers can build their applications with Ajax and other Web technologies.

Ok, I'm not sure what this means exactly (and granted this is 2 steps removed from the source). Its a browser with a JavaScript interpreter. Of course it can run Ajax apps. I wonder if this referes to Adobe's Apollo apps which can run external of a browser.

"I'm underwhelmed," said Avi Greengart, an analyst with industry research firm Current Analysis. Many developers, he said, "were expecting to be able to write apps and run them in a browser anyway."

Yeah, nothing new here.

He pointed out that, although Jobs said that the Web 2.0 apps will run in a sandbox, they still will be able to reach beyond the sandbox to access key functions, such as phone calls

... ... SWEET! Now Samy can let you know he is your new hero by calling you. On your Phone. Thousands of times a second. From JavaScript.

This makes John Terrill's curse "I'm going to XSS your FACE!" that much closer to reality.

iPhone + XSS = All your cell networks are belong to Acidus

OK. I THINKS DIS B DA BEST PROGARMING LANG EVAR. IT HAS A FLAVOR AND IT ARE ABLE TO B RUN ON DA BUKKIT.

IT R ALMOST AZ GUD AS RUBY.

O'Reilly's Newest Release: LOLCODE

Check out this wonderful street view image. Someone was a bit distracted when they took this one for the database, but I think it's teh awesome.

Museum of Thongs, courtesy of Google Maps

I begin to think that what we need is a new topic called simply "Orgasms" because I just can't describe how ecstatic I am that the following has happened...

Robert Allen Soloway has been arrested in Seattle, Washington after being indicted on charges of (but which will probably ultimately not be limited to):

* Identity Theft
* Money Laundering
* Mail, Wire, and E-Mail Fraud

He has targeted personally for harassment the people who have called him out for his business practices, up to and including trying to astroturf others as being responsible for his spamming. He had moved his operations overseas to use China to hide his activities. The things he was spamming for weren't even legal most of the time, let alone being in near-perpetual violation of CAN-SPAM. I could expound on the morally reprehensible things this man has done over the years, but it would just seem a drop in the bucket compared to what comes up when you Google his name.

This man is going to jail, do not pass go, do not collect 200 email addresses.

...and that almost makes me need to go change my shorts.

MAJOR SPAMMER ARRESTED!