The 'Shrek Virus'

I really usually don't just post a link and be off, but... okay. There's this dating site called 'Beautiful People' that only allows beautiful people to be members.

Someone went and unleashed something called the 'Shrek Virus' that essentially allowed ugly people to storm the gates.

The article just got more utterly messed up from there. I don't comment on it mainly because of the sheer amount of dumbstruck.

No, He Didn't Vanish After Bush 41 Left Office

Sorry for nothing yesterday; was working on a larger piece I'm going to try and farm out first before I put it here.

Today, France is moving to extradite Manuel Noriega to Panama. For those of you for whom this falls into the category of 'wait, he was in France?': yes, he was. He had spent 20 years in prison in Florida for drug trafficking, money laundering and racketeering. In 1999, though, France tried and convicted Noriega in absentia for the money laundering. Last year, he was sent to France to begin serving the seven-year sentence handed down there.

Now, though, he faces being sent back to Panama to face charges surrounding the murder of his political opponents, after the United States offered consent for said extradition; France needed permission as Noriega's French sentence has no yet been served. Noriega, currently age 77, has the right to try to fight it; he'll have one month to start that process should he choose to do so. However, his lawyers have stated that Noriega won't stand in the way.

Panama has also tried Noriega in absentia; he stands convicted there of three counts of human rights violations. Each carries a 20-year sentence. The Latin American Herald Tribune also reports conviction on one count of corruption and one count of embezzlement.

Meanwhile, while Panama would love to have Noriega back, they would also love to be able to offload his old mansion. Two attempts to sell it at a $2.5 million asking price at auction have failed for lack of interest. The government is bound to try one more auction by Panamanian law, and if that fails too, they can drop the price by half and sell it directly.

Although to be fair to Noriega, it may not necessarily be all his fault that the place won't sell. It could also partly be the condition of the mansion itself, left to the weeds ever since Noriega's arrest. Anthony Bourdain, conduct the tour...

When Is Green Bad?

When it's algae and it's actually blue-green and it's been found in Pigeon Lake in Peterborough County, Ontario, Canada.

Why is that bad? Blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria because it's not really algae, can produce cyanotoxins into the water when harmed. These can cause all sorts of health problems up to and including Lou Gehrig's Disease. One 2005 study looked into cyanotoxins' potential military applications. We could run down a list of other potential symptoms, but those two tidbits ought to get the message across on their own: if blue-green algae is in the water, you're not if you know what's good for you.

There's also an advisory for Ohio's Buckeye Lake in Fairfield County, and it has shut down two ponds in Massachusetts and Meade State Lake in Kansas, among many others. The Great Lakes in particular have seen an explosion in blue-green algae blooms. Why? Long story short, zebra mussels, a type of mollusk that devour so much plankton and reproduce so quickly that they choke out the food supply of other fish. In the process, blue-green algae, which the zebra mussels aren't interested in, has a chance to grow unchecked.

Zebra mussels are to the Great Lakes what rabbits are to Australia: neither is supposed to be there, and in the minds of the local experts, the only good specimen is a dead one. The rabbits will eat your garden. The mussels will eat your boat, or at least clog the motor's intake valve. They'll also stick to the hull, and if not removed before the boat is used on another body of water, that body of water, if it didn't have a zebra mussel problem before, will have one now.

There's also the quagga mussel, which experts think is even worse.

The process for eradicating a land-based invasive species is long, incredibly difficult, and rarely if ever succeeds. The process for eradicating a water-based invasive species is 'yeah, good luck with that'.

You may want to stick to waterparks this year.

Swing And A Long Drive, There It Is, Number 500

This is the 500th post of the blog, and in most places, something like that might merit some sort of milestone celebration thingie.

But I spent most of the day playing in a company softball tournament, am completely spent and having not written a thing for today because I got up at 6:30 and basically just headed straight to the diamond.

So for Glorious Post #500, you get a TED talk.

...oh hell, it's a milestone, after all.

FIVE TED talks. What a guy I am. I'll give a brief description of each, view the ones you like.

First, from Long Beach, CA in March, here's John Hunter, inventor of the World Peace Game, a 4-layered game he made for a gifted class...



Also in March at Long Beach, Paul Romer gave an update on a 2009 talk he gave concerning a proposal for a charter city- a newly-built city with a particular working model you want but is too difficult to achieve by modifying an existing city. Basically, think a modification of Bender's immortal Futurama quote- go build your own city, with blackjack, and hookers...



Third, at Penn State University in October, computer security expert Bruce Schneier discusses security, and how the amount of safety we feel and the amount of safety we actually have are not the same thing...



Fourth, if anyone out there besides me is having fun with the new Discovery Channel series 'Deception with Keith Barry', here's Barry in 2004 working over an audience in Monterey, California. For those who haven't seen the series, here's a guy who loves nothing more than to hijack people's brains.



And finally, TED cheated a little bit and posted a talk from 2008's Entertainment Gathering, also in Monterey, so they could host the video of a talk from Mythbuster Adam Savage about dodo birds and the Maltese Falcon and you clicked at 'Mythbuster' don't you.

The Political Bee

I've been watching two things of interest on TV lately.

(But wait, there's more!)

The first was Monday's Republican Presidential debate in New Hampshire. In my reasoned and not-at-all-biased mind of a commie pinko socialist liberal who hates America, the thing was frankly a two-hour seven-car train wreck. The consensus "winner" people seem to have decided on is a bit of a split. Some call it for Michelle Bachmann for her command of people's attention. Some call it for Mitt Romney because in a two-hour debate for a nomination that at most one out of the seven people on stage can win, and with Romney the clear front-runner in New Hampshire, the other six were given every opportunity to try to beat on him to drag his numbers down and seemed to actively avoid it as if to concede New Hampshire to Romney straightaway.

Gun to my head, I fall in the Romney camp. Unless the other six are trying to be Romney's running mate, failing to attack him made absolutely no sense. But then, neither did much else on Monday night. From where I sat, everyone was acting as if the general election were a week away and that, aside from whoever happened to be speaking, Barack Obama were the only other one on stage. And also that there was no moderator; anything CNN's John King asked was almost guaranteed to be taken as a suggested topic rather than a direct question to be answered, even if King made an explicit appeal to answer the original question.

No matter what the topic eventually turned out to be, most answers would inevitably end up as either a direct attack on Obama, a proposal to privatize something or other, or both. Newt Gingrich, most bewilderingly, suggested that privatizing NASA after the moon landing in 1969 would have been preferable to what we have actually done since, claiming that if we had privatized after 1969, we would "probably have a permanent station on the moon, three or four permanent stations in space, a new generation of lift vehicles." Romney, who you'll remember I had pegged as the "winner," implied to King if not outright stated that we cannot afford to fund disaster relief efforts. Herman Cain, asked about not being comfortable with having a Muslim in his cabinet, answered that "I would not be comfortable because you have peaceful Muslims and then you have militant Muslims- those that are trying to kill us. And so when I said I wouldn't be comfortable, I was thinking about the ones who are trying to kill us."

I'll spare you the rest. Suffice to say, you wonder just how people like this have been able to penetrate the highest, most important level of debate this nation can offer. You- at this point I am of course brainwashing you to think in a way that lets this article progress smoothly- realize that, with the exception of Cain, the voters at some point allowed all of these people to hold public office at a high level. You wonder if there isn't some way to nip these people in the bud before they get this far. Perhaps one could create an easy-to-understand, generally-acceptable, and above all reliable way to tell who at least knows enough of what they're doing to where they won't completely embarrass themselves.

I have to do everything for you people, don't I?

It so happens that the second TV show of interest was the National Geography Bee, coming fairly on the heels of the National Spelling Bee. In both competitions, you have some of the smartest kids in our elementary and middle schools facing off against each other in those two respective fields until only one remains to claim a big scholarship, among other prizes. Both bees, at their national finals, are full of kids with obviously bright futures ahead of them. After all, they just proved to a nationwide audience that they're smarter than millions of their peers in their age group. That tends to look good on a resume.

So why not make a Political Bee?

A Political Bee, as I imagine it, would consist of the kind of questions that we would expect an elected official to know the answers to. You can do this without being explicitly partisan. You couldn't ask, for example, 'Which economic system is better, that of John Maynard Keynes or that of Adam Smith', but you could ask 'Which economist first described the marketplace as an 'invisible hand'?' (Smith.) The general rule is, if Alex Trebek could use the information in Jeopardy, you could use it here. Remember, this is not a debate. This is a quiz, with explicit right and wrong answers.

Among the things that would work in a Political Bee:

*Knowledge of various issues important to the catchment area of the participants (the scope of questions would be scaled up or down depending on the level of competition; more on this in a bit)
*General and political history of the catchment area
*Electoral maps of previous elections
*How specific people in a particular legislative body voted on a certain major bill in the past (this wouldn't necessarily have to be recent- don't think TARP, think the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution)
*How a particular person voted over time on a variety of bills
*The rules and procedures of the political process relevant to the catchment area
*An ethics round- various ethical dilemmas are presented, a solution provided, and the question is, do the rules say that was an appropriate solution

Questions would be scaled depending on the level of competition- at the local level, the school level (or sponsor level depending on how you conduct the preliminaries), kids would be asked local-level questions. In the written test to qualify for state, they get bumped up to county- and district-level matters. At the state level, they get asked questions about the entire state. Only in the national finals do questions about foreign policy, Congress, the Supreme Court and the Presidency come into play. Why is this? Because not every politician is going to make it to the federal level. There are state legislators, mayors and city aldermen all over the place, though. Each level of the bee would be designed to test your capability to lead at that specific level. As you progress further into the bee, you get tested for bigger and bigger offices. Ideally, the last few standing would be kids fit to run for Congress.

These kids, and all others who had any sort of a showing in the bee, could then, ideally, use their bee performance as part of a campaign resume, should they decide to pursue politics. Voters would know just how far they got, and therefore, what level we could be reasonably certain they'd be fit for. If you won at school level, you proved you would be a good local official.

This has historical precedent. As we noted here back in April, China had for 1,300 years the Imperial Examination system, in which you essentially tested into the ability to hold high-level government jobs, and could make multiple attempts at it. In fact, the more I look at it, the more the Political Bee starts to resemble the exams themselves- different levels of exams for different levels of service; the ability to just brush yourself off after failing and try again next year; the general principle that anyone from any corner of the country, provided they test well enough, can prove themselves capable of leading at the highest levels.

There were two main problems with the exam system, aside from the emphasis on rote learning, but the bee can fix them easily enough. The first was corruption and cheating- some Chinese emperors cancelled exams and simply sold the political positions- but unless students are buying answers to questions, that won't be much of a concern. (And if it does get out that a participant in a Political Bee cheated, that's the kind of problem the voters can fix in a heartbeat when that person tries to run for office later.) The second is cost- studying for the exams was sometimes so expensive that only the elite could afford to do so. In this day and age, however, that's less of a concern than ever. Anyone with access to a computer or a library or even City Hall can study for a Political Bee. The only real issue is finding schools and/or sponsors willing to host the preliminaries.

Whether the eventual products of the Political Bee eventually use those smarts to do good or harm is ultimately up to them. But at the very least, we know those smarts will exist.

Hold My Beer And Watch This

Guns and beer in Wisconsin are things that, even if you've never partaken in either, are pervasive in your daily life.

The beer should be obvious. For Bucky's sake, we have a professional baseball team called the Brewers, and they play at Miller Park. Milwaukee prides itself on being a beer capital, even if the major breweries have mostly moved away or folded. In some towns- like mine- drinking is almost a requirement in order to have any semblance of a social life.

On the flip side, state pride in beer leads to extremely lax drunk-driving laws, exacerbated by the fact that the state has the highest percentage of drunk drivers in the nation. Wisconsin is the only state in America where a first-offense DUI is not a crime, but rather a mere traffic ticket, this designation holding even after a toughening of drunk-driving laws in late 2009. Wisconsin also rates highly in underage and binge drinking, sometimes leading in one or both.

As for guns, every year, deer season comes along in the fall. And every year when I was in school, when deer season came along, half the class would vanish for at least one day, maybe several. They were out hunting. This is no exaggeration. Half, sometimes more. On one occasion in college, so many of my classmates were out hunting that class was cancelled. I'm positive that those of you in hunting-intensive regions have similar stories.

And what is a time-honored part of modern-day hunting? Drinking, of course.

These factors should have at least prepared me a bit for this study out of UC-Davis, but it proved no less troubling. According to the study, people who carry concealed weapons, and who engage in various irresponsible gun-related behaviors, are more likely to drink heavily- and drive drunk- than people who don't own guns. And the more dangerous the behavior, the more likely you are to drink heavily. One example showed that people who drive with loaded guns in their car were twice as likely to drink heavily as gun-owners who don't, who were in turn twice as likely to drink heavily as non-gun owners.

The data was gathered from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, using the results of a phone poll done over eight states in 1996 and 1997- the most recent data available. The eight states are Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota and Ohio.

The article, and study director Garen J. Wintermute, note that four states explicitly allow concealed guns in bars: Arizona, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia. There is a provision that this is dependent on the person not drinking alcohol, but as Wintermute notes, because the gun is concealed, it seems difficult to enforce.

Wintermute notes the age of the data used, and calls for more research, with more recent data, to be done on the relationship between guns and alcohol. He will likely run into trouble, though. The only early responses we have are the comments in the linked article, and all eight comments as of this writing allege Wintermute of having an anti-gun bias.

They've had plenty of run-ins with Wintermute before. By 2007, he had racked up over 50 published articles on gun violence. Among his work is this piece on sales at gun shows, this piece exploring the risk factors of recently-purchased handguns being used in a crime or as part of trafficking, and this piece (PDF) on recently-purchased guns being used for suicides.

As the scientific community holds, though, that doesn't constitute a bias. Just a trend.

And as the trend goes any time Wintermute releases a study, he's in for another earful.

Updates, Updates, Three Bags Full

I've been getting a little overboard with my writing hours lately and it caused me to bonk on Sunday at the job that actually pays me money after I forgot to eat lunch. This explains the off day I took yesterday.

Let's see if I can avoid being so monumentally stupid in the future.

Today, there's a little bit of updating we need to do. First, Duke Nukem Forever ships today. A delay (what else?) forced it to today from the May 3 date reported here back in January. Review copies are in, scores have been given.

How is it? Bad. Really bad. Screamingly bad. Intestine-twistingly bad. Maybe-it-would-have-been-better-to-remain-a-joke bad.

Sorry, fellow Penny Arcader slash000. (That pre-order is dated 2001, just in case the text is too small for you.)

Secondly, a second sustained protest has emerged in Madison; I attended the earlier one back in February. This is a little tent village set up across the street from Capitol Square, albeit a somewhat disorganized one, as Russ Feingold found out when he dropped by for a visit on Sunday. The AV Club- the Onion's non-satire branch with local coverage of Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Denver/Boulder, Austin and Philadelphia- has further current updates in the linked article on Wisconsin's ongoing partisan battle to the death. (Battle does not actually entail death.) Things are moving rather quickly now as the recall election ballots get scheduled and confirm their various challengers, and also as Republicans gear up to pass the budget that started the whole mess in the first place for a second time; the first attempt has been mired in a legal battle over the procedure used. This second run is sounding the alarm enough on the Democratic side that we may have a much larger protest once again.

Finally, back on March 5, I passed along Microsoft's request for you to stop using it. Microsoft's goal is to get worldwide IE6 usage down below 1% so providers can save themselves the hassle of supporting it.

As of then, worldwide usage was 12%. Norway and Finland were under the 1% threshold. As of now, the percentage is 10.9% still on IE6, with Sweden and Denmark now also under 1%. About half of the people still using it are from China, which still shows 33.9% usage of IE6. South Korea shows 22.3% usage, Vietnam 11.6%, India 11.5%, and Taiwan at 8.6% rounds out the bottom 5. The United States currently sits at 2.3%, with Canada and the UK both at 2.7%.

Also, sometime in the past month, someone rolled into here using Netscape. What's up with that?