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The Difference Between A Terrorist And Someone Who Flies A Plane Into A Building

March 14th, 2010 · Rants

Recent events in the US involving some pretty high-profile incidents where individuals have gone on a violent suicidal rampage in protest of oppressive government. One of the incidents involved someone in a shootout at the Pentagon and another famous incident where a person flew their single-engine plane into an IRS building.

Politicians in the US were left scrambling to explain why these situations, which sounded like, smelled like and looked like terrorist acts, were not in fact terrorist acts. They were all pretty difficult to understand and a lot of the things they said Reese Erlich has explained it clearly so that we can all understand.

So he’s cleared it up to explain that right-wing white people don’t commit terrorist acts, only middle-eastern muslims do. Which immediately brought to mind the DC sniper attacks. I remember being really surprised that nobody was using the T-word through the weeks when these guys had people in DC so terrified that they either drove miles and miles out of their way to gas up or they scrambled to the site of a recent shooting to gas up because it would now be crawling with cops. To me, the level of terror within the population seemed to suggest that they were being terrorized, possibly by a terrorist. You see this one was tricky, they were both muslim, but one of them was American and the other Jamaican. Since there was no middle-eastern link, the US media chose to stay away from branding these two terrorists.

So why be so picky about which to call terrorists and which not? Well the word terrorist is meant to help Americans understand who they should be afraid of. Should you be afraid of the white guy next door who hates the government, thinks they’re out to get him and has more guns and ammo in his shed than he could possibly shoot in a lifetime even if he fired non-stop starting today? No, he’s probably fine. Just a colourful character. Should you fear a man thousands of miles away who just had his family killed by an errant US drone attack and is swearing that he wants justice on TV? You betcha! This guy is probably at the airport right now trying to buy a flight to your house where he plans on killing you and everyone you love.

So there you go. That should help you understand why the US government calls some people terrorists and not others. It’s really all in a bid to help you figure out who you should be watching out for. Because if they don’t tell you who you should be afraid of, how else would you know?

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Google Books Fails With Popular Science

March 9th, 2010 · Topics Of Interest

I just mentioned that Google Books and Popular Science had published a significant portion of the Popular Science archive, online for free. I had added the caveat that it only went as far back as 1926. Turns out that’s not true at all. If you go down to the halfway point on this page, you’ll find the full listing of all Popular Science magazines, starting in May 1872.

So why does it look like it only goes as far back as 1926? If you click on the “Browse all issues” it will bring you to what appears to be a full listing of all of the issues. The only problem is that if you start clicking to navigate to other pages, you’ll find that you can go to page 33 where it stops. The earliest issue there is May 1926. Even stranger, if you trim down the URL to http://books.google.com/books/serial/ISSN:01617370, you’ll see fewer issues per page but the listings go up to 100 pages. That leaves the earliest issue in this list to be July, 1925.

For each of these, you can alter the URLs to set the start parameter to larger numbers and it will let you get to older issues. So the moral of the story is that all of the content is there, but good luck finding it. Of all organizations, I would have expected Google to be able to provide quality access to a full catalogue of material like this. Their search seems to work well which is ok, but with an archive like this, the ability to browse the whole thing is an equally valuable and should be fixed.

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Old Popular Science Online

March 5th, 2010 · Topics Of Interest

In conjunction with Google, Popular Science has put a significant chunk of its archive online. At first it looked like all of it, but as I began to browse through the first issue listed from May 1926, they were celebrating their 52nd anniversary!!!

After browsing a little, I thought I’d share a few chunks that caught my attention. Some things amazed me for the fact that they were even in existence in 1926. Ever seen one of these in a building before?

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I found it amazing that they were conducting X-rays on pets so early on. Given the state of medicine in general at that time, I find it quite something that pets would have access to such medical care.

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A novel concept for a new car body design.

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Then there were some terrifying inventions when considered from a modern context. For example the Cocain injecting dentist’s drill and using lead injections to cure cancer.

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Overall it’s a blast to go through these. I’ve only ever caught bits and pieces of old Popular Science magazines online. To have a complete archive like this is a goldmine.

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Why The Russians Aren’t Doing Well

February 22nd, 2010 · Topics Of Interest

There’s a significant story emerging from the Olympics. That is the overall poor performance of the Russians. It’s a significant story for a few reasons. Russian officials are starting to get upset with one stating that anything lower than 4th place overall would be a disgrace. Another significant issue is that the Olympics are in Russia in 4 years. They obviously want to have a good showing at home, just as we Canadians are trying to do this year. With a really poor showing in these Olympics, it does not bode well for the Russians.

The major question that’s been hanging out there is, “why aren’t the Russians doing well?” To me, it seems obvious. To ask why the Russians aren’t doing well is to ask what was going on in Russia 15-25 years ago which is when most of the athletes would have been born/young/growing up.

Here’s your answer. The collapse of the Soviet Union meant that while their future Olympic competitors were starting to learn to skate/ski/etc… many Russian children were wondering whether or not their parents would be able to find food that day. It wasn’t necessarily that bad for all Russians, but the country as a whole was devastated. With an environment like this in which to grow up, it’s no surprise to me that the Russian Olympians of 2010 are struggling against the competition.

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Olympic Fever

February 21st, 2010 · Topics Of Interest

I’ve got it. I wasn’t particularly excited for the 2010 winter Olympics heading into it, but as soon as it kicked off, I started watching and was addicted right away. I knew I would watch hockey, but didn’t really care that much about the rest of the sports.

So why the sudden interest? We’re actually good at a lot of stuff this time around. While we’re not doing as well as we had hoped, we are doing much better than any previous Olympics. Watching Canadians doing well on a global stage is always fun to see, but to see that so many Canadians are competing for medals, it’s truly inspiring.

There’s been an outbreak of national pride in Vancouver and it’s been spreading across the country.

The games did get off to a very rough start with the death of a Georgian athlete setting a somber tone to start. The follow-up included poor weather conditions and ravaged courses all around. The venues were in a world of hurt. But as the days have worn on, the athlete performances have really taken the spotlight.

The significant emerging criticism seems to be regarding the Own The Podium program. Some are suggesting that “we” have sunk all this money into our athletes and we’re not “owning the podium”. I think that’s a pretty black and white perspective on things. My response is that perhaps we’ve underestimated how much it costs to “own the podium”. Sure we’ve sunk millions of dollars into supporting our athletes, but here’s a secret that the critics might not be aware of. So is everyone else.

We’ve had some bad breaks. Two or three of our top skiers went down to injury in the months/weeks leading into the Olympics. Our best male skier is not skiing and we still placed 5th in a couple of events. You have to figure that if our best guy was out there, we’d have a couple more medals.

Trying to win the games is a daunting task. It means winning medals in sports like short track and long track speed skating which are dominated by Denmark and South Korea respectively. Unseating countries which take a national pride in a particular sport is not an easy task. Their skating is our hockey.

Honestly, from the outside looking in, it looks like the Own The Podium program has worked well. Critics seem to be assuming that winning the Olympics is simply a money issue. That if we sink in a given amount of money, we can win. It doesn’t work that way. Even if it did, the amount of money we’ve put into it isn’t enough to dominate the Olympics. It does seem to be enough to significantly improve our performance though. To me, that’s great. It might not be what we were hoping for, but you have to admit that it’s been pretty impressive so far.

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Halifamous

February 6th, 2010 · Halifax

A Grooveshark list of my favourite Halifamous music. I’ve highlighted most of these in previous posts, but I wanted to put them all together for an expat friend.

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