Monday, October 14, 2002

posted by stbalbach at October 14 11:48 AM. The fate of Israel?s 10 lost tribes, which, after being driven from ancient Palestine in the eighth century B.C. by Assyrian conquerors, disappeared into ethnic oblivion, ranks among history?s biggest mysteries. Some Israeli rabbis believe descendants of the lost tribes number more than 35 million around the world and could help offset the sharply increasing Palestinian population. The Bnei Menashe of India are part of the solution to Israel?s demographic problems. [MetaFilter] Aw, damn - now I'm going to spend all evening trying to find out information on the Lost Tribes online. This keeps happening to me - run across something quick and interesting in metafilter and get sucked up by it for hours.

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This Ain't No Religious Cervix: College Christians Vs. Annie Sprinkle. Plastic::Etcetera::Sex: Porn-star turned sex-ed lecturer Annie Sprinkler got the rough end of a protest from a group of Christian protestors at a campus lecture in Philadelphia. [Plastic: Most Recent] Hey - Annie Sprinkle spoke at Oberlin while I was there. My ex met her - Drag Ball stuff. I thought she was a little strange, kinda by definition, but I'd imagine she'd conflict quite nicely with Christian activists...which we didn't really have at Oberlin.

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Scariest item of the week -- and it's only Monday From yesterday's N.Y. Times Week in Review, a brief item noting that an asteroid entered the earth's atmosphere in June somewhere over the Mediterranean and exploded with the force of a Hiroshima-strength nuclear bomb. U.S. instruments detected the explosion and properly identified it as the random natural event it was. A U.S. officer quoted in the story asks us to imagine that the asteroid had been poised over, say, India or Pakistan: "To our knowledge, neither of those nations have the sophisticated sensors that can determine the difference between a natural N.E.O. ["near earth object"] impact and a nuclear detonation." [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] eep.

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Blair condemns 'evil' Bali bomb attack. Tony Blair has condemned the "evil" perpetrators of the Bali bomb explosion¸ as the death toll of Britons rises to 33. [BBC News | UK] Now, the Bali attack was obviously an altogther bad thing - but why is that Bush and Blair are falling over themselves to condemn it. Isn't it freakin' obvious that it's evil? I don't get it.
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The Dark Side Beckons Steve Jobs, a boyhood hero of mine, is allegedly heeding the siren-like summons of the negative energy that permeates so much of our universe. According to Nando this morning, Apple is contemplating a move away from Motorola chips toward a 64-bit IBM CPU dubbed the IBM PowerPC 970. This has to do with the "Clock-Speed Wars," which from this desk has been a battle waged on the advertising front, not on the desktop. RISC architecture and CPU/OS integration make a Mac running at a slower speed outperform its hopped-up PC counterpart. Who's in charge of R&D at Apple these days? A bunch of 10-year-olds arguing in back of the bus over whose computer is "faster"? [The Raven] Now now - remember that IBM has always been the driving force behind the PowerPC chip. The difference here is that Motorola won't be manufacturing the chips, I think. It's still a PowerPC type chip, continuing along the architectural path that Apple's been on for years now.

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posted by WolfDaddy at October 14 11:04 AM. Tools you can use. In my line of work, I'm often tasked with finding out information about local telephone numbers. This website is an invaluable aid to that end such as the ability to type in someone's area code and prefix and find out where the number is located, or to find out all the prefixes in a given area (ratecenter). Now you too can identify strange unidentified phone numbers your Caller ID reports to you. [MetaFilter] Ooooh, this'll be handy. I've always just resorted to reverse-lookup, and hitting a wide range of numbers with the area code and prefix until I got one that was identifiable...but this seems a wee bit simpler. Some of it seems to be phone lines, though. A friend of mine had always come up as "Ohio" when she called me on her cell phone, but when I moved, she started coming up as herself. In fact, I don't think I've gotten really vague caller IDs since moving - sure, a couple unknown name/unknown numbers on telemarketers, but it's been more consistent.

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Send lawyers, guns, and money. Hey, my triumvirate of motivations meme is getting legs. I noticed a visitor today referred from a post called [Python-Dev] Missing symbol in sre.py (Python 2.2.2b1) on what I gather is a list for Python developers). [Radio Free Blogistan] Wow - that's an honest-to-god meme you spawned there, xian. I'm impressed!
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posted by jmevius to Basketball October 14 9:34 AM. McDyess goes down. Antonio McDyess went down with a fractured kneecap Saturday night -- the same knee that he had surgery on last year. He came to New York to be the low-post presence the Knicks had been lacking since Patrick Ewing was good. Are the Knicks cursed? Do they stand a chance of making the playoffs? Or is this just punishment for making the rest of the league watch boring 82-79 games where Kurt Thomas is treated like a Hall of Famer? [SportsFilter] The latter. The main reason I didn't watch basketball during the mid-to-late '90s was the general suckitude of the Celtics, but following close behind were the painfully boring Knicks and Heat. Yay down with New York.

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Al-Qaeda blamed for Bali bombing. Al-Qaeda and allied local militants are accused by Indonesia's defence minister of involvement in the Bali attack that killed at least 188 people. [BBC News | WORLD] I'm shocked, aren't you? Even if al Qaeda isn't involved in this, you can bet they're going to be blamed for it...at this point, al Qaeda is taking on the same all-pervasive qualities of the Red Scare-era Comintern. Oh, but there is one big difference - this time, they can filter out the baddies by race. White people aren't really the trouble, y'see - sure, John Walker Lindh is white, but he was "misled". Notice how he also got his day in court, unlike his fellow American citizen discovered in Afghanistan, Hamdi.

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You know what we need right now? Music as good as we had going into the LAST Gulf War. Think about it - the Pixies hadn't broken up yet, U2 was soon to release Achtung Baby, Nine Inch Nails was in the Pretty Hate Machine era, Nirvana was about to break...and what do we have now? Crap. Even the good stuff is kinda crappy. That said, I'm liking the White Stripes more each time I listen to them. At first, I thought it was kind of irritating noise-rock, but there's some really fun power-pop songwriting underneath the fuzz and distortion.

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The Bali Bombing [Washington Post: Editorial] Obviously, this was a horrible tragedy, but the big deal made out of Bush condemning the bombing was just strange. What, did we expect him to express his support for the bombers? Of frickin' course he was going to condemn the bombing.
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Accuracy.org fisks Bush. Find here a point-by-point refutation of Bush's big speech. An excerpt:Bush: In 1995, after several years of deceit by the Iraqi regime, the head of Iraq's military industries defected. It was then that the regime was forced to admit that it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. [Bite Media] Excellent, excellent article. Oh, and on CNN right now, they're saying going to war will lead to a drop of oil prices. Supposedly, the fear of war is built into the current price, and actually going to war will cause everyone to just calm down and sell the oil cheaper. Uh, right. When did CNN turn into Fox News 2?

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Rumsfeld Favors Forceful Actions to Foil an Attack [New York Times: International News] There is such a freakin' irony to the Republican administration getting more active in overseas adventurism. After all, the Republicans in Congress ripped the Clinton administration for every bit of military activity they ever tried to engage in. And they accuse Democrats of just being partisan about it?
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Site for the Truly Geeky Makes a Few Bucks [New York Times: Technology] "Apparently, our readers need caffeinated soap," Mr. Malda said.
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posted by jasonbondshow to Baseball October 13 7:45 PM. Angels reach the promised land! Make World Series for first time in 42 years!Who would have thought at the beginning of this season that Anaheim would be in the Fall Classic? Not me, that's for sure! [SportsFilter] I was convinced they'd end up late in the game, up by a run or two, when their closer would give up a home run to give the game to their opponents. 'course, that's exactly what happened sixteen years ago when the Angels were up 3 games to 1 against my precious Red Sox...sadly, the Twins couldn't do the same. Ah well - good luck, Angels.

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Reid suspends NI assembly. Northern Ireland's power-sharing assembly is to be suspended for the fourth time from midnight¸ the government confirms. [BBC News | Front Page] Damn. Hopefully, something can get worked out soon.
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