« "And so the obvious phallic symbolism of Wolverine's claws provides a counterpoint to the Oedipal blindness motif of Cyclops' ruby visor." —Carl Rigney | Main | "That war be, and the same is hereby, declared to exist." »
April 04, 2006
"I believe all God's creatures have a soul...except bears, bears are godless killing machines!"
O frabjous day! For DeLay did say: "I'm going away." Callooh! Callay! via
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Rep. Tom DeLay , who was forced to step down as House majority leader last year after being indicted in his home state of Texas, will drop out of his re-election race, two Republican congressional sources told CNN Monday.
The reason for DeLay's departure was unclear.
DELAY: Why? Well, this campaign actually started over a year ago. It's very nasty.
Sean-Paul, proprietor of The Agonist, calls it likes he sees it:
Tom DeLay, says politics is too nasty? The guy who impeached Bill Clinton? The guy who once famously roared, "I AM THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT!"
What a crock. Republicans have been spewing jingoistic bile and vitriol at the Democrats for years and now DeLay gets his own medicine and guess what? He can't take it.
What a pussy.
Jake Tapper has the best obit on DeLay's political career.
Single-molecule diodes explained:
Created by a research team at the University of Chicago, the single-molecule diode is merely a few tens of atoms in size and 1,000 times smaller than its conventional counterparts. Recently, theorists from the University of South Florida and the Russian Academy of Sciences have explained the principles that make the device work.
The researchers showed electron energy levels in a molecule are efficient channels for transferring electrons from one electrode to another. Because the molecule in the diode is asymmetrical, the electronic response is also asymmetrical when voltage is applied. The asymmetry contributes to a phenomenon called molecular rectification: the channels conduct electrons in one direction, but limit flow in the opposite direction when the voltage polarity reverses. That property makes the molecular diode a potential gatekeeper for circuits and a candidate to one day replace silicon in computer chips.
Leonardo grids can make spheres by weaving together planar elements. via
How-to: tunneling SSH over HTTP(S) via
In an interview, a developer describes some cool upcoming features in OpenSSH: via
Damien Miller: Reyk and Markus' new tunneling support allows you to make a real VPN using OpenSSH without the need for any additional software. This goes well beyond the TCP port forwarding that we have supported for years - each end of a ssh connection that uses the new tunnel support gets a tun(4) interface which can pass packets between them. This is similar to the type of VPN supported by OpenVPN or other SSL-VPN systems, only it runs over SSH. It is therefore really easy to set up and automatically inherit the ability to use all of the authentication schemes supported by SSH (password, public key, Kerberos, etc.)
The tunnel interfaces that form the endpoints of the tunnel can be configured as either a layer-3 or a layer-2 link. In layer-3 mode you can configure the tun(4) interfaces with IP or IPv6 addresses and route packets over them like any other interface - you could even run a dynamic routing protocol like OSPF over them if you were so inclined. In layer-2 mode, you can make them part of a bridge(4) group to bridge raw ethernet frames between the two ends.
A practical use of this might be securely linking back to your home network while connected to an untrusted wireless net, being able to send and receive ICMP pings and to use UDP based services like DNS.
Okay, I'm gonna end with a bit of Lost. Last week, the show's producers flashed a hell of a lot of information on the screen for maybe 60 frames. The lights turned off, some UV lamps turned on, and a here-to-now invisible diagram is illuminated on the wall. Filled with a rough map, crabbed, hard to read handwriting, half-scratched out notes, mathematic equations, and ambiguous Latin phrases, the entire thing has been deciphered.
Lost.cubit.net, the same people who translated the Egyptian hieroglyphs on the countdown timer earlier this season, have produced a screenshot of the map with an overlay explaining everything. The Latin is translated and the notes are all typed up and easily legible. So what does the map reveal? via
Well, one of the men on the Black Rock, the mining ship that crashed on the island generations ago, was Magnus Hanso, presumably an ancestor of Alvar Hanso, the mysterious head of the DHARMA Initiative.
The black smoke monster has a great name: Cerberus.
The incident, whatever it was, took place in the medical lab in 1985.
All the hatches on the island are arranged in a hexagon, with closed-off tunnels leading to a mysterious center facility.
We've known since the pilot that there's a radio transmitter on the island. It was broadcasting Danielle's distress call at that point. She'd changed it 16 years ago, but in the time since the Others had gained control of it. The enduring mystery is why they leave her message playing. Anyway, whoever drew this new UV map in the hatch was curious about that transmitter. He didn't see why there were some many "Dharmatel relays" there since it's so hard to reach. It was in the mountains, where it could be used for meteorological research, but the "geological composition" would cause "magnetic interference" with some kind of weather project, and make the station unusable as a listening/crypto station.
Whoever drew the diagram was fascinated by the numbers. He wrote "√16 √64 √225" and "3 of 6 (4 8 15 16 23 42)."
One thing the diagram answers conclusively: the polar bears. The stated goal of the zoological research facility was "repatriation and accelerated de-territorialization of Ursus Maritimus through gene therapy and extreme climate change."
Posted by Jon Rubin at April 4, 2006 03:41 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.ubiquit.us/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/107