Yahoo Music is shutting down and their customers are losing their music. Ed Felton reminds, "Yahoo deserves blame here, but let's not forget who else contributed to this mess."
"For a planet plagued by rising energy prices and rising temperatures, better energy management has gigantic potential." Good summary of the current state of 'smart metering'. [via veen]
"...this moving skyscape features Jupiter above the southeastern horizon and the marbled streets of the ancient port city of Ephesus, located in modern day Turkey."
Today I recorded a strange bird that lives at this four-way stop in McMinnville. It's a fairly busy intersection and the bird hears cars stop and take off all day, every day. Its standard chirp is already loud and screechy, but it has another chirp that sounds exactly like a car with a loose fan belt taking off from a stop. Check it out:
That whine is the bird. The funny part is, there's a house at the corner where the people obviously have an antagonistic relationship with this bird. Their trees are full of silver streamers that blow in the breeze—meant to scare the bird away. I couldn't see the bird at all, but it must be some sort of mockingbird.
"This, no less than the defiling of the Constitution, is the legacy of an administration that not merely rationalized the immorality of torture but shackled our national security to the absurdity that torture could easily fix the terrorist threat."
"Differences between Republican and Democrats exist...but those differences are often dwarfed by the differences between those entrenched in and dependent upon the Washington Establishment and...American citizens -- who are not." [via rc3]
"The U.S. Senate this afternoon passed the FISA Amendments Act...granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the president's illegal domestic wiretapping program." Discouraging.