Category — General

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Dispatches From Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University:

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This is funny.

Dying to Avoid Rape:

Dying to Avoid Rape
Female soldiers in Iraq are having to make an impossible choice: Risk being raped , or risk dying of dehydration. Many of them have ended up dead.

In a startling revelation, the former commander of Abu Ghraib prison testified that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former senior US military commander in Iraq, gave orders to cover up the cause of death for some female American soldiers serving in Iraq.

Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women’s latrine after dark.

The latrine for female soldiers at Camp Victory wasn’t located near their barracks, so they had to go outside if they needed to use the bathroom. “There were no lights near any of their facilities, so women were doubly easy targets in the dark of the night,” Karpinski told retired US Army Col. David Hackworth in a September 2004 interview.

It was there that male soldiers assaulted and raped women soldiers. So the women took matters into their own hands. They didn’t drink in the late afternoon so they wouldn’t have to urinate at night. They didn’t get raped. But some died of dehydration in the desert heat, Karpinski said.

Read the whole article.

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this is not a choice that any person should have to make… especially in relation to their own colleagues.

Bare Bones Intros Yojimbo:

Given all the stories we’ve been running today about getting Windows on your Mac, I thought we should all take a breath and have a look at Bare Bones’ newest product. Today they are launching Yojimbo, an information management tool for your Mac. From the site: Yojimbo makes keeping all the small (or even large) bits of information that pour in every day organized and accessible. It’s so simple, there is no learning curve. Yojimbo’s mechanism for collecting, storing and finding information is so natural and effortless, it will change the way you work. Bring it on.

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this could be handy… but i wonder how well it will handle some or my text searching issues, if it does that at all….

Why don’t laptops antennas collaborate for better reception? If you have 12 or so laptops in a room all getting poor reception, why don’t they automatically reconfigure to be an array of antennas to get better reception? If computing power increases as it has been, then there is no reason not to use some of that to compute signal relationships and reception arrays. In short, instead of each person having a receiver, why not have an always active cloud of receivers proxying for each other and getting the message through. The packet based internet could do this, but the radio systems aren’t designed to do it. it is the conceptualization of the individual in the communication environment and the ‘individual’s privacy’ too, but that might as well be thought of as the ‘individual as market’. I’m pretty sure this idea is feasible, but i don’t know how efficient it can be done.

i missed it… it is dec. 28th… very disappointing…. anyway we’ll keep this going until we don’t eh?

I honestly did not get anything done in the fall or even late summer other than some reading and thinking. Now i’m getting into writing again, i have tons of things to do, but i’m laying strong odds that i’ll be finished this spring. I’ll not let the blog go for a whole year.

I’m in Milan this week doing some research and things. this time i’m in the starhotel splendido. it has been raining all day, so even though i arrived in town around 10am, i only took a short walk, and got some lunch. Tomorrow, if it isn’t raining, i’m going to walk corso buenos aires if it isn’t raining and then do the golden quadrangle. I don’t know how long that will take, but we’ll see. If it raining I’m going to figure out the metro and go to some museums or churches or whatever is open.

Malpensa Airport was pretty bad this time. There were huge lines in the international terminal for both transfers, and I mean it looked like several hundred, perhaps as many as a thousand people waiting in two huge groups. Luckily I figured out that i was in those groups and went to passport control, which had 7 lines and took about 45 minutes to get through.

after that it was the malpensa shuttle to central station. it is quick and fast. i mobblogged some of it.

I gave up on orkut.com today. they are formally merging things into the broader google system. they are requiring people to have a google acct. i don’t want to have a google acct. anymore than i want a msn acct., which is in fact a negative relation. I do not want one, nor do I want someone to require me to have one to fit into their business model.

According to the SelectSmart.com Belief System Selector, my #3 belief match is Liberal Quakers. What do you believe? Visit SelectSmart.com/RELIGION

but it said i was:

According to the SelectSmart.com Belief System Selector, my #1 belief match is Unitarian Universalism. What do you believe? Visit SelectSmart.com/RELIGION