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Wednesday, December 31, 2003
No Shit, Sherlock... A New Scientist article reports that the US is finally going to stop processing crippled and diseased cows for human consumption. Yet another obvious safety measure that the beef industry managed to stall until it was too late to protect Americans....


Blog of a Bookslut looks like an interesting take on the world of literature and publishing. While I don't relly follow the industry, I'm always looking for good discussions of serious writing. Alas, they currently lack an SF editor...

Monday, December 29, 2003
Probability, Luck and One Mad Cow is a NY Times piece that emphasizes just how lax the USDA has been about detecting mad cow. The beef industry always opposed systematic inspections -- a futile stance that only ensured that when BSE was discovered in the US, it would already have spread into the human food chain. I have no sympathy for the poor beef ranchers that preferred to let people die rather than stop the disease early. Any economic damages they suffer are well-deserved. On the plus side, maybe this means dirt cheap beef in the US for a while....

Tuesday, December 23, 2003
BBspot has a useful article comparing the pros and cons of all the current players in the online music stores that sell downloadable tracks. It's brief but informative. I haven't downloaded much in the last year or so, so I'm not chomping at the bit -- but if I was a heavy downloader I still think "free" would be more appealing....

Monday, December 22, 2003
The Language Construction Kit is a fascinating set of pages on how to construct languages. I'm using it and some modern language "isolates" such as Basque, Gilyak, Burushaski, and Ainu to construct very brief, very simple fantasy languages for my role-playing stuff. Some of the disctinctions between grammars, in particular, are very interesting. Who knew there was a language with seven tenses (ie not just past tense but distant past, recent past, immediate past, etc.)?

Saturday, December 20, 2003
Another film I want to see -- if it comes to Dayton, that is...


More evidence that cats suck -- not that a mousey would be biased or anything....


Then again, it sounds like foreigners are still receiving better treatment than American children, some of whom haven't even commited crimes but are simply suicidal. Yeah, juvi hall in Mississippi is a great cure for that. Sample quote: "forced to eat their own vomit"


Washingtonpost.com: Tapes Show Abuse of 9/11 Detainees. Gee, who was surprised by this one? Sample quote: "Hundreds of videotapes that federal prison officials had claimed were destroyed show that foreign nationals held at a New York detention facility after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were victims of physical and verbal abuse by guards, the Justice Department's inspector general said yesterday. An investigation by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine also found that officials at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, N.Y., which is run by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, improperly taped meetings between detainees and their lawyers, and used excessive strip searches and restraints to punish those in confinement... Many detainees also told investigators that, in the month before the installation of the camera system in October 2001, jail conditions and abuse had been much worse."


An important story on Slashdot discusses the problems with Diebold e-voting machines. Using closed-source, private, unaudited software to collect votes is simply dangerous, regardless of the political affiliations of the folks who program the machines....


I have to put in a word for the folks at New Line; they sure know how to please Tolkien fans. They did a terrific job with Trilogy Tuesday, showing the extended version of the first two LotR films on the big screen for the first time, then giving us a preview of RotK a few hours before its general release. My review of Return of the King is now available. Warning: it contains minor spoilers.

Friday, December 19, 2003
Blocking Unwanted Parasites with a Hosts File is a useful page on how to avoid spyware and suppress banner ads at the same time....


The Day After Tomorrow could be a very cool movie. I just hope it doesn't turn into another of the long line of lame disaster flicks focusing on everyday people's lives before the catastrophe rather than earth-shattering decisions and derring-do after the catastrophe....


The mousey musings section is now open. For now, the Links and Research pages are not finished while some of the music pages are also incomplete. There's lots of work to be done, but check out the photo galleries for some new pics!

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