Keys Corner

I read this a few days ago, and forgot to bookmark it. Now it has been reported again by CNN:

Scientists at a U.S. weapons laboratory say they have trained bees to sniff out explosives in a project they say could have far-reaching applications for U.S. homeland security and the Iraq war.

Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico said they trained honeybees to stick out their proboscis—the tube they use to feed on nectar—when they smell explosives in anything from cars and roadside bombs to belts similar to those used by suicide bombers.

Researchers in the program, dubbed the Stealthy Insect Sensor Project, published their findings Monday…

We saw Volver last night, with our Spanish evening class (and a lot of other Spanish evening class groups, as the cinema was running a special evening class session). We really enjoyed it – see the summary here, to find out what it’s about.

You don’t get any choice by the way – as far as I know it is only available in Spanish with subtitles, which is why we went to see it. For some reason, most people there didn’t seem to find it a hassle, reading German subtitles and listening at the same time to the Spanish dialog… Recommended!

I was expecting a padded envelope with a remote flash trigger which is about 2cm in each direction (you can see it in the blister-pack), so I was a bit surprised when our neighbour came round this evening with a parcel they’d taken in earlier today. When I opened it, I thought there had been a mistake, because I couldn’t find anything in the box, but after taking each piece of packing material out, it finally dropped onto the floor from between two pieces of bubble-pack!

It appears that Bush has been caught lying again. By Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker. Just like before the Iraq war. Am I surprised?

No.

A man in Manchester (UK) used his MP3 music player to hack into cash dispensers and capture details of customer’s credit cards and PINs, allowing him to steal £200,000 from them. He was only discovered after being stopped for making an illegal U-turn; police discoved a fake credit card in his car, which led to his house being searched and additional evidence being found there.

William Pfaff comments in today’s Observer on a phemonenom that has worried most Europeans for the last 3 or 4 years:

... In America, it’s as though Bush, his inner cabinet, and the neocons have been playing a video game, with fictional characters and victims, virtual death and torture. Now the disc has suddenly finished, and it’s time to shut down the player.

This is not just a figure of speech. American policy has been running on images rather than evidence of real nations and people doing things for real human motives. It has been populated by abstractions: Global Terrorist Conspiracies, Rogue Nations, Fanatics Who Hate Our Freedoms, Generations of Terrorism and The Global Menace of Al-Qaeda.

The US, where actual people live, has been turned into an abstraction: the Sole Superpower, which everyone in the world knows is a Righteous Nation, the Mars (in the neocon Robert Kagan’s formulation) defending the fragile Venus which is Europe, the Straussian (Leo Strauss, the University of Chicago philosopher) Realist unflinchingly battling in a Hobbesian universe to protect Kantian Europeans, with their illusions of global parliaments and peace, from nameless horrors…

I remember, when we first visited the USA in 1982, being both shocked and interested in how the American media were reporting on the IRA. At a time when the IRA was viewed in the UK (and many other countries) as an illegal Irish terror-organisation, some American media were running interviews the IRA leaders (who the British politicians would have loved to arrest, if they could find them) and were portraying the IRA as freedom-fighters struggling for the rights of the northern Irish population.

It was an absolute eye-opener to realise how much one’s view of a situation could be manipulated by the slant the media put on a story. Since then, I’ve always tried to read and watch news stories from as many different sources as possible, so that I can form my own opinion about what is going on in the world. So we’ve been periodically flipping to the Al Jazeera English channel on our satellite receiver, waiting for them to start transmitting more than the endless loop of advertising, saying they are starting an English language saervice. And then, we missed the start of the news service yesterday!

We’ll be watching the Al Jazeera channel from now on, in addition to Sky News, CNN, Bloomberg, the BBC and the various German TV stations, to try and get a better overall view of the world news.

By the way, if you look for Al Jazeera’s web site, be aware that Aljazeera.com is not associated with the satellite news channel. The corresponding English language Al Jazeera web site is here.

nu Zealand students cn nw wrte thR exam papRz n “text-speak”.

See which were the most common words in each US President’s speechs, and when they were first used on Chirag Mehta’s blog. Interesting – you can see clearly events such as McCarthyism, the Cuba Missile Crisis and 9/11 reflected in the words used in speechs at those times.

(via Boing Boing)

November 1st was Sushi Day (there’s a day for everything, these days), but I only noticed today. Nonetheless I love sushi, so here’s a link to a little web site, which tells you all you wanted to know about sushi. Sushi, by the way – as you will discover on the website – is not raw fish (which is called sashimi); sushi refers to the rice with which the fish, or other ingredients, are prepared.