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Showing posts from August, 2006

A Plutonic Relationship

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It isn't you -- it's me. But I hope we can still be friends. I minored in astronomy in college, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. The subject's appeal to me was fueled by the tantilizing prospect of other intelligent (or intelligent) life in the universe. SETI was a hot topic a generation or so before SETI@Home made us all universe scanners and way before Aricebo graduate Jodie Foster made Contact -- or did she? -- with a race that also liked TV too much. The prospect that we are not alone and the seeming inevitability, a mere half-dozen years after "Star Trek" got cancelled, of long-distance human space travel was enough for me to read astronomy books even on school breaks. Long after my academic days ended we did in fact find evidence of life, or at least evidence of evidence life , right here in our own solar system. That was cool, but fosilized remains of microbes and places water might have been doesn't pack much dramatic punch. There is, on th

Activism vs. the Rule of Law

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U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, who has ruled that the government's warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional Bush says anti-wiretap ruling ignores reality "Those who herald this decision simply do not understand the nature of the world in which we live," Bush told reporters at the presidential retreat in Camp David, Md. "This country of ours is at war and we must give those whose responsibility it is to protect the United States the tools necessary to protect this country in a time of war." Does this administration believe that the courts should strictly construe the Constitution as the Founding Fathers would have, and leave legislating to the Congress, or does it believe that judges should at least on some occasions allow social factors to influence decisions that would then not be strictly, obviously or entirely based in Constitutional law? This president has frequently espoused a philosophy that judicial appointments be limited to people

Truth & (Citizen) Journalism, 101

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The worst thing that can happen to a news organization happened to the one where I used to work over the weekend: Reuters published a doctored photo of Beirut , depicting damage from an Israeli air raid. They got 2,000 emails and also discovered, from another reader's observations, that the same photographer had altered at least one other image that they previously published. So, on the most sensitive story in the most sensitive arena in the world – you hear the word ”tinderbox” a lot on TV these days -- Reuters is forced to defend itself against lots and lots of people who already think that it in particular and MSM in general is biased. When I was there the complaints from readers ran pretty even that Reuters was biased in favor of the Arab and Persian nations in the region and/or the Palestinian cause and biased in favor of Israel . Sometimes readers would look at the same image or read the same story and come to opposite conclusions. It comes with the territory, no pun intende