suspect who tests positive for explosive residue on shoes walks away, shows how lame airport security still is (nyt)
"As to why the man slipped past screeners, officials said a screener had put the man's shoes on the table when the machine beeped a positive result and walked away to alert his supervisor."

And then it took an hour to stop flights from departing (four did depart from the United terminal). And they have no idea where the suspect went.

Meanwhile, the possibility of a positive result apparently wasn't planned for. You'd expect them to have one of the many National Guard MPs with machine guns standing guard around the suspect while they figured out what the next step should be.

The company that provides security for United at SFO is the same one that was fired from Logan.

My girlfriend will be flying out of SFO on Saturday. This incident makes me worry. A lot.
(Thursday, January 31, 2002)

Fighting Erupts in Afghan City as Warlords Compete for Power (nyt)
ahem, surprise!
(Thursday, January 31, 2002)

lesbian identity ends (the onion)
"Man, I remember once telling her I thought her friend Liz was kind of cute," said fellow junior Mike Nygard, 20. "She got unbelievably offended and lectured me for two hours on Lookism and the society-wide evils of the Male Gaze. At the time, I felt awful and apologized profusely for my insensitivity. I remember thinking how lucky I was to have someone like Amanda to point out how sexist I didn't even know I was being. Now, though, I'm thinking maybe she was just being a sanctimonious, self-righteous bitch. Of course, it would be sexist of me to think that, but I sort of do."
(Wednesday, January 30, 2002)

pariahs become heroes. in utah, of course (nyt)
"[Last November,] Local public opinion began to turn in favor of the two men, with the sense growing that the benefits of staging the Games outweighed any stigma attached to exactly how they were secured... Many people here accuse the Justice Department of overzealous prosecution of a crime that, they say, at worst had no victim and that for Mr. Welch and Mr. Johnson had no financial reward."

It's nice to see that the state of Utah is in favor of the ends justifying the means. I suppose it's not much of a surprise, given that they baptize the dead. As for there being no victims of the bribery scandal, I would argue that the residents of other contending cities lost out on any possible financial rewards arising from their cities hosting the Games.
(Wednesday, January 30, 2002)

walker art center (metropolis)
i really wanted to be an intern there, but they didn't pick me. understandably, because at that point (1993, right after graduating with a ba in architecture) i was even less good at designing things than i am now.
(Thursday, January 24, 2002)

back-to-wall-to-wall (nyt)
carpet returns! i wish our upstairs neighbors had some in their condo.
(Thursday, January 24, 2002)

my friend's dad died (la times)
I had no idea that he was an Emmy-winning writer. I'm just sad that a friend lost her father.
(Wednesday, January 23, 2002)

do while
This is one of the best Oval tracks I've heard. It's perverse and wonderful that Amazon has it available as a 22MB MP3 file (the song is around 20 minutes long). If you have the bandwidth, go and get it. I'm clogging up my corporation's wireless network as we speak. (It's fantastic morning music.)
(Tuesday, January 22, 2002)

amazon's shipping (nyt)
sounds like a pretty complex problem. one that i hope they solve soon. it also sounds like their warehouses have some very cool equipment at the center of them: a machine that sorts items into 2,100 different chutes automatically, according to what customer ordered which items? neat!
(Tuesday, January 22, 2002)

oblique strategies redux
for your palm pilot. also featuring an english-esperanto dictionary for your portable edification.
(Tuesday, January 22, 2002)

oblique strategies
Eno's strategies for the recording studio, online. I may start requiring their use in design projects.
(Tuesday, January 22, 2002)

ken lay needed more than $200 million (nyt)
"Assuming that [his personal lawyer] is correct, [Enron CEO Ken] Lay joins a short list of chief executives whose pay in the 1990's was astronomical, and who ended up with severe financial problems because they borrowed too heavily against assets whose high value proved to be temporary. The others known to have such problems are Bernard J. Ebbers, the chief executive of WorldCom, whose margin loans were guaranteed by the company and whose shares are now worth less than he owes, and Steven Hilbert, the former chief executive of Conseco, who bought Conseco shares with money borrowed from the company before the stock price collapsed and he was fired."

If this is true, then it's another illustration of what greed does. As well as showing that if you're not the sharpest crayon in the box, you can be not only president of these United States, but a big-time corporate CEO, too.
(Tuesday, January 22, 2002)

hockey loses something by 'cleaning up' (espn)
"Oh, there's the odd one who speaks his mind -- Brett Hull, for instance -- but such individualism of thought and speech is generally frowned upon and privately censured. By the teams. By the league. Yeah, most of them hail from off-the-beaten-track, small-town Canada, but surely these guys can't be THAT dull?! Can they?!"
(Monday, January 21, 2002)

the cleanup moves quicker and cheaper than expected (nyt)
"There is a need to get the family members back," said Sam Young, an ironworker. "You can't exactly stand around and smoke cigarettes. There's a lot of cops and firemen standing around watching you. You don't want to look like a bum."
(Monday, January 21, 2002)

enron paid no taxes (nyt)
Surprise! Do you think the Enron debacle will make legislators rethink the tax law? If they elimated some of the foreign subsidiary loopholes and ended the practice of stock option profits as deductions, maybe the looming budget deficit could be reduced.

But that would mean that Dubya was "raising taxes" just like his poor old dad.
(Thursday, January 17, 2002)

the world press on w and the pretzel (la times)
"The incident proved Bush is 'a man of the people,' London's Daily Telegraph said in an editorial. 'This is exactly the sort of accident that befalls Homer Simpson, night after night.' The conservative paper noted in its news pages that the president 'was not eating something foreign or in any way fancy when he passed out.'"
(Wednesday, January 16, 2002)

one example of john weir coding goodness
your site can now have clippings. just like the international herald tribune! cool!
(Tuesday, January 15, 2002)

[not "the"] smoking gun
john weir designed and coded iht.com. he rocks! and he is sharing code goodness with us!
(Tuesday, January 15, 2002)

the cube of the future (iht)
"The office is becoming like the mother ship in Star Trek, a docking station that seamlessly combines physical space and cyberspace," said Michael Joroff, a senior lecturer in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's school of architecture and planning.

It doesn't matter whether it's IBM's version of a cubicle or IDEO's, I still won't work in one.
(Tuesday, January 15, 2002)

the beer can house
I saw this when I was in graduate school. I keep forgetting to find out where it is whenever I'm in Houston. Now I know.
(Thursday, January 10, 2002)

finding forsberg (espn)
for some reason, this little article makes me want to go to sweden.
(Monday, January 7, 2002)

ted rall in afghanistan (la times)
"They'll say, 'I had a great friend, but he died. I had a good father, but he was killed. There was a town here, but it's gone. A museum there, but it was bombed.' Afghanistan is all about what was, not what is. Because there is nothing now. It's like driving through a ghost town in Nevada, except it's almost the whole country," Rall says.
...
"War you can live with. But when you are being hunted down like prey for the money you carry, when you are in a country where every man over 13 carries an AK-47 and wants to point it at you, when almost every breath you take is filled with toxic dust--Afghan dust is the consistency of flour, and even a dog walking on a road causes a cloud to rise so that you must breathe it," he says.

This cartoon is something of a supplement, then. I am looking forward to Ted's book on his trip to Afghanistan. He doesn't pull punches, unlike most every other reporter covering this subject.
(Monday, January 7, 2002)

usa doctors osama photo without thinking of the repurcussions (cnn)
"Asked whether the leaflet could be used by some to say the United States is willing to doctor or make up things -- as has been alleged about the videotape found in Afghanistan by the United States -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he had not thought about the possibility."

sounds pretty standard to me.
(Friday, January 4, 2002)

daily radical (la weekly)
the boondocks and september 11.
(Thursday, January 3, 2002)

hong kong unlearns english (economist)
alas, it seems that hong kong is reverting to an english-free zone. when the MTR loses the bilingual announcements the transformation will be complete.
(Thursday, January 3, 2002)

the brick testament
obsessive and beautiful.
(Thursday, January 3, 2002)

sam mockbee, dead at 57 (al.com)
This is just sad. Sam Mockbee's work, especially with Auburn's Rural Studio, is some of the most humane architecture ever created. He will be sorely missed.
(Thursday, January 3, 2002)

'buddy' (not hackett) dies (ap)
"Buddy, former President Clinton's ebullient chocolate retriever, was killed by a car near the Clinton home, police said Thursday."

'Ebullient.' It's 'nice' to see this above the fold on nytimes.com this morning, as it shows that there is still a place in our post-September 11 world for somewhat minor news. It's also genuinely nice to see some sense of sentiment in the news: it seems Buddy was universally liked by the reporters covering Clinton.
(Thursday, January 3, 2002)

greenland ice and climate change (new yorker)
"[Q:] According to what scientists know about the past, we're on schedule for another ice age. At the same time, we're worried about global warming. Is there any chance that there might be some balancing act—that the warming and cooling might compensate for each other?

"[A:]One can always hope. However, the odds are extremely small. We are pumping carbon dioxide into the air very quickly, which is causing the climate to change, while climate cycles normally take thousands of years. There is also a chance that global warming could, paradoxically, lead to precipitous cooling in Europe and North America, by shutting down the Gulf Stream."

A Q&A related to an article in the latest issue of the New Yorker, one which I just finished reading, aghast at the conclusions it pointed to.
(Thursday, January 3, 2002)

29H from 28E
A first-hand account of what happened when "Richard Reid" attempted to set off the plastic explosive in his shoe.
(Wednesday, January 2, 2002)

the Big Mac Index (economist)
This is a great method to determine whether a currency is overvalued or undervalued compared to the dollar.
(Tuesday, January 1, 2002)

the perfect espresso (economist)
"The biggest challenge remains avoiding dud beans. It is quite normal for a fair quality batch of green coffee (that is, coffee before roasting) to be 1-2% defective. But if two beans in 100 are duds, the chances of a bad espresso are unacceptably high. Few plantations, however, can afford the sophisticated equipment needed to create defect-free supplies. Instead, coffee companies such as illycaffe and Hausbrandt, a rival based in Treviso near Venice, have developed electronic detection systems. These use light waves to scan individual green beans, which are rejected by a puff of air if they show up as defective. Illycaffe's scanners can assess 400 beans every second."

A condensed history and catalog of brewing techniques, technologies, and statistics. In other words, one of the things the Economist does very well.
(Tuesday, January 1, 2002)

filler without the pictures, sorta
polly esther returns with rabbit blog.

"3. Another great way to get really good content for your blog is to repeat intensely funny jokes you made recently while riding home from dinner in the car with your family. Sure, they didn't laugh at the time, but that's because the people in your family don't like you that much - unlike your adoring, mesmerized readers.

"An Incredibly Funny Joke I Made Upon Spotting a Sign That Said 'I-40 Waterfowl Impoundment Area'

"rabbit: Another duck prison! Isn't anyone teaching our ducks right from wrong anymore?"
(Tuesday, January 1, 2002)

exploding dog returns
new year, new drawings. yay!
(i still need to buy the book)
(Tuesday, January 1, 2002)