Via Sullivan, the New York Times has its lede checked twice, and found wanting. The Times ran a story claiming two people's mobile phone conversations in China disconnected after a participant said the word "protest" twice. As we say in technology, we could not duplicate the issue:
METHODS: The staff prepared three phrases. A) Queen Gertrude’s response to Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks;” b) “I like Bob Dylan’s protest songs, the most;” and c) “PROTEST PROTEST PROTEST!” The staff also prepared a list of five individuals with phones in China. They are a) a foreign Shanghai entrepreneur; b) a Shanghai school teacher; c) a Beijing-based foreign correspondent; d) a Beijing-based scrap metal entrepreneur; e) a Foshan-based scrap metal entrepreneur. Each individual was called from a Shanghai phone line, and asked to listen to the three phrases, repeated twice.
RESULTS: In all five cases, the connection was sustained and the staff was subjected to varying degrees of bewildered responses....
Read to the bottom, where it appears the Times Beijing correspondent wants to correct the record.
After a little more than six months, the sun will finally set at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station at 23:42 UTC today. It rises again at 07:52 UTC on September 21st.
The station has decent weather today: it's a brisk -60°C with a gentle breeze causing a wind chill of -84°C. To understand what that means, just keep in mind dry ice forms at -77.5°C.
Actually, the place is really cool fascinating; I recommend starting with the Wikipedia entry and exploring from there. I can't fathom over-wintering there, but I'd take any opportunity to visit in December or January.
Via Sullivan, a Japanese coast guard vessel climbs up the tsunami—and stays there, because it's a tsunami, not an ocean wave:
Sullivan sums up the frustration a lot of us feel:
I watched the president stand idly by as countless young Iranians were slaughtered, imprisoned, tortured and bludgeoned by government thugs by day and night. I believed that this was born of a strategy that understood that, however horrifying it was to watch the Iranian bloodbath, it was too imprudent to launch military action to protect a defenseless people against snipers, murderers and torturers.
Now I am told that "we cannot stand idly by" as tyrants tell their people they will be given no mercy. And so one comes to terms with the fact that this administration is willing to throw out its entire strategy and principles in this period of Middle Eastern revolt - in defense of rebels about whom we know almost nothing, whose strategy is violence, not nonviolence, and whose ability to resist Qaddafi even with Western help is unknowable.
My exasperation and anger is not because I want Obama to fail; but because I want him to succeed. But the views of any blogger, or of the American people, or the US Congress seem irrelevant to this. We live in an empire, it must simply be conceded, in which the emperor gets to tell us, after the fact, that we have embarked on a brutal, bloody war against a madman who holds almost all the cards on the ground.
This comes shortly after the Arab League reverses course now that we've done, you know, what they begged us to do. A pox on all their houses. Or a pax on them, which in the long run might be best.
On April 12th, I'm starting a new role on the Valkre Solutions development team. Valkre is a startup in Chicago's West Loop neighborhood approximately 0.13% the size of Avanade, the company I left yesterday.
Avanade would like me to remind Daily Parker readers (and those of you tuning in through Facebook) that "Avanade does not control or endorse the content, messages or information found in any public Weblog, and therefore specifically disclaims any liability with regard to this Weblog and any actions resulting from the author's participation in any Weblog."
Now that's out of the way, let me say I truly enjoyed working with every Avanade consultant I met. I'm going to miss them, especially the team I worked most closely with at [a major food and beverage company in Chicago]. Accenture, Avanade's parent company, is a different matter, which I'll leave there.
Anyway, I'm excited to start at Valkre, and in addition to the cool work, great team, and huge potential of the company, I'll be working 5 km from my apartment (about an hour's walk or 12-minute bike ride).
Gen-X, of course. David Frum:
For the under-40s who will be exposed to the fullest impact of entitlement reform, the past half decade has been an economic disaster. Now we are about to load an additional burden on a generation already struggling with under-employment and (in many cases) heavy student debt. We also are about to ask them to simultaneously pay the taxes to support current retirees and save for their own retirement, while receiving less help from later generations than earlier generations will receive from them.
To put it a different way: Every previous wave of retirees has been supported by the young. Today's young are expected first to provide for today's old, then provide for themselves.
Yeah, but don't worry, kids. We X-ers will fix it, the same way we built the Internet, fought in the first Gulf war, and paved the way for the nonchalant life many of you born after 1978 enjoy.
We're not bitter, either. We're happy to have our parents take our money and give it to you, as has been the pattern since 1964.
Via TPM, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) explains how the Republican Party have finally solved all the problems in America:
Sitting in the lounge at Boston's airport, I have to ask them what crime we all committed to deserve the punishment they're inflicting. They're playing a Muzak version of "My Heart Will Go On" (from the movie Titanic).
It's like drowning in rancid honey. Blah.
The Illinois Department of Corrections wants to make sure convicts leave prison with less than nothing:
Kensley Hawkins, 60, has saved $11,000 by working in a Joliet prison since the 1980s, making about $75 a month. The state says he owes them for the cost of his stay.
Hawkins began working soon after he entered Stateville, where he was sentenced to 60 years for the 1980 slaying of a 65-year-old man and attempting to kill two Chicago policemen. He wanted to send some money to his daughter, who was 8 when he went to prison, said Glad. Hawkins is up for parole in 2028.
Hawkins learned to build desks, chairs, dividers and cabinets in the prison's wood shop, Glad said. His wages amount to about $2 a day, not including a small commission he earned on each piece sold.
In March 2005, nearly 23 years after he entered prison, the Corrections Department sued Hawkins in Will County. It demanded more than $455,000 that it has spent to house him from July 1, 1983, to March 17, 2005, or an average of about $57 a day.
Under Illinois law, prisoners are liable for their incarceration costs. Most offenders do not have the means to pay, but the department can begin collection proceedings against those who have sufficient assets. Hawkins' lawyers said the threshold is $10,000 in assets. The state requires prisoners to file financial statements.
Hawkins's case went before the Illinois Supreme Court yesterday (large video of the oral argument here).
I'll have more on this later, but for now, just consider: what potential for rehabilitation does making prisoners pay for their incarceration provide? Or, to put it slightly differently, if the state charges $57 per day for incarceration, shouldn't the state pay prisoners a fair wage to compensate?
Tom Lehrer joked once that all the trouble in the world made him "feel like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis." Leonid Rogozov had appendicitis once...at the Soviet Antarctic base...and he was the only surgeon there:
Operating mostly by feeling around, Rogozov worked for an hour and 45 minutes, cutting himself open and removing the appendix. The men he'd chosen as assistants watched as the "calm and focused" doctor completed the operation, resting every five minutes for a few seconds as he battled vertigo and weakness.
"I worked without gloves. It was hard to see. The mirror helps, but it also hinders -- after all, it's showing things backwards. I work mainly by touch. The bleeding is quite heavy, but I take my time -- I try to work surely. Opening the peritoneum, I injured the blind gut and had to sew it up. Suddenly it flashed through my mind: there are more injuries here and I didn't notice them ... I grow weaker and weaker, my head starts to spin. Every 4-5 minutes I rest for 20-25 seconds. Finally, here it is, the cursed appendage! With horror I notice the dark stain at its base. That means just a day longer and it would have burst..."
Reading crap like that reminds me why (a) I never went into medicine and (b) why I never went into the wilderness without a cell phone.
Oh, the outcome? "Two weeks later, he was back on regular duty. He died at the age of 66 in St. Petersburg in 2000."