Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Our society, as a whole, has no surge protection - no ability to take shocks. We have no excess beds, no excess equipment, no excess ability to produce vaccines or medicines, nothing. Everybody has worshiped at the altar of efficiency for so long that they don't understand that if you don't have extra capacity you have no ability to deal with unexpected events." -- Ian Welsh, 2005-08-24 (thanks to lpetrazickis for pointing it out.)

I had a couple of browser crashes and restarts ... and lost track of where I found some of these.

• Snopes.com has a section dedicated to Katrina-related rumours and urban legends. An obviously important resource for anyone reading, writing, or arguing about this topic.
  


• Divine Proportions: Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry, by N J Wildberger, promises to replace transcendental trig functions with rational functions. It looks interesting, but I retain some cautious skepticism for now. Note that he's not suggesting that sin, cos, and tan can be replaced by rationals; he's using "quadrance" (square of distance, thus avoiding that square root when you use the Pythagorean theorem to calculate the distance between points in the Cartesian plane) and "spread" (replacing angle with a ratio between the quadrance of a hypotenuse and the quadrance of an altitude to describe how quickly two lines diverge). While I can understand the desire to minimize irrationals and to have functions easy to calculate, I'm not sure this approach is actually easirer to learn. I'll have to wait until I get my hands on a copy of the book to decide that -- if I can get past conventional circle-trig seeming easy to me because I learned it so long ago. The bit in the blurb that gives me serious pause is the claim that, "It develops a complete theory of planar Euclidean geometry over a general field without any reliance on 'axioms'." That sounds ... suspicious to me.
  


• An irreverent Career Retrospective of God (yes, from a "mocking intelligent design" perspective). Cutely illustrated. "A gifted child with a talent for creating 'life forms', God showed promise early in his career by creating an array of simple yet elegant designs [...]" The 'history' presented here does make sense of the fossil record, but is unlikely to cheer ID proponents. I liked, "At this point God sought out therapy, where it was suggested that he try some self-portraiture." Need I even bother with a warning that you shouldn't read it if such portrayals are likely to offend you?
  


• Looking for the few places to live in the US that aren't as at high a risk of disaster as those places that "people are stupid to live in"? Perhaps this map of presidential disaster declarations by county, 1965-01-01 to 2003-06-01 will provide useful clues.
  


• Editor and Publisher examines media coverage of the UN 'leak' note -- a bit of background on how the photo came to be published, but mostly paying attention to various newspapers' decisions to cover it.
  


• A FAQ about various attempts/proposals to weaken or destroy hurricanes (found indirectly via hunterkirk) -- examines such ideas as cooling the ocean with dry ice or an iceberg, breaking up a storm with bombs, absorbing or prematurely precipitating a storm's moisture, etc. A common problem is that folks proposing these ideas fail to grasp the size of a hurricane, the area of ocean involved, and just how much energy is involved: "a hurricane releases heat energy at a rate of 50 trillion to 200 trillion watts. (trillion here is used in the U.S. and French sense: a number followed by 12 zeros) This is the equivalent of a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding about every 20 minutes." I found it interesting to read about some of the same ideas we used to toss around on the school bus a long time ago, and why they don't work.
  


• Find The Brownie" lists places where Bush is trying to hire unqualified people for important government roles. (Link thanks to yesthattom, who got it from rainbear.)
  


• Psychopaths may make better stock market investors according to an article about neuroeconomics research. (Though a quick reading leaves me with the impression that the test only applies to particular conditions, or that psychopaths are just better at following financial experts' advice. I'll reread it when I'm less sleepy. Thanks to lpetrazickis for the link.))
  


• Genesis, with help, from The New Yorker. Delightful. "And the Lord God said, 'Let there be light,' and lo, there was light. But then the Lord God said, 'Wait, what if I make it a sort of rosy, sunset-at-the-beach, filtered half-light, so that everything else I design will look younger??'" And:

  "One word," said the Lord God. "Landscaping. But I want it to look natural, as if it all somehow just happened."
  "Do rain forests," suggested a primitive tribal god, who was known only as a clicking noise.
  "Rain forests here," decreed the Lord God. "And deserts there. For a spa feeling."
  'Which is fresh, but let's give it glow," said Buddha. "Polished stones and bamboo, with a soothing trickle of something."

  
  


• Stick Figure Firefly is pretty self-explanatory ...
  


• As whomever I got this link from said, "when Little Golden Books go bad" -- enjoy My Little Golden Book About Zogg. From the introductory blurb: "For the safety of our race (if any still remain) I have translated this book in the hopes that a resistance may arise. Read the baby powder scented Final Solution of our enemies from beyond."