I'll slip out & get some fruit from Chile

This is one of my favourite themes.

Oil on your plate

What do you have on your plate that is heavily

reliant on oil? It's incredible, but now normal, how

the world can literally be found in your supermarket.

Although I've shown others arguments that deny this,

I think it's ridiculously dangerous letting oil sort out

our diets because whenever the bankers want to play

the oil market, people's diet will suffer. If you can't

raise enough food locally it's because you've chosen

to play real estate baron and built suburbs where 

there should be farms.

As happened with Rome, that ruined most of its

topsoil meaning it had to get its food from too far away, 

we are vulnerable to disaster, and we're 

wasting oil.

this fellow is a Canadian prof, interviewed by 

treehugger, and he's got the same angle:

the Avenging Engineers

a TWA plane popped after leaving NY in '96.

Planes just don't do that, these days. There was

some proof at the time, from eye-witnesses,

that I saw on tv, that there was a missile shot

at the plane.

I wonder if it was domestic services?

checkit: FoxNews.com

Investigators want missile theory probed in '96 TWA Flight 800 crash

Published June 19, 2013

        Reaction to new claims about TWA Flight 800 crash

        Was TWA Flight 800 crash actually caused by missile...

        Documentary challenges cause of TWA Flight 800 crash

A handful of aviation experts, including a number of investigators who were part of the original probe of TWA Flight 800, have come forward in a new documentary to say evidence points to a missile as the cause of the crash off the coast of Long Island 17 years ago.

The New York-to-Paris flight crashed July 17, 1996, just minutes after takeoff from JFK Airport, killing all 230 people aboard. In the weeks that followed, the plane was reassembled in a hangar from parts retrieved from the sea. But the cause of the crash was not identified immediately, and after authorities said the crash was caused by static electricity ignited fuel fumes, many skeptics cast doubt on the theory. Adding to the controversy were multiple eyewitness accounts of a fireball going up from the ground and hitting the plane before it went down, accounts which the FBI dismissed at the time.

    “It’s obvious that the truth was not allowed to be pursued."

- Jim Speer, accident investigator for the Airline Pilots Association

The half-dozen investigators whose charges will be fleshed out in a documentary set to air July 17 - the anniversary of the crash - say they were never allowed to get at the truth. But they are confident a missile brought down the plane.

"We don't know who fired the missile," said Jim Speer, an accident investigator for the Airline Pilots Association, one of a half-dozen experts seeking a new review of the probe. "But we have a lot more confidence that it was a missile."

The group is comprised of people who worked for the National Transportation Safety Board, TWA and the Airline Pilots Association, all of whom have since retired. All six say that the evidence shows the plane was brought down by a projectile traveling at a high speed.

“It all fits like a glove,” said Tom Stalcup, a physicist who is considered one of the foremost independent researchers and participated in the documentary, said during a press conference on Wednesday. “It is what it is and all the evidence is there.”

Hank Hughes, a retired senior accident investigator for NTSB, said probers were not allowed to seek answers once the FBI took over the crime scene. "We just want to see the truth come out," Hughes said. "We don't have hidden agendas. The only thing we are looking for is the truth."

Speer, who says he found explosive residue on a part from the right wing which also had three holes, agreed.

“It’s obvious that the truth was not allowed to be pursued," said Speer. “A majority of people working in that hangar did not feel as if the evidence was properly being handled.”

Bollygram. stop

a spice of life in India will soon end.

the telegram

I was most impressed with the story below and

how it looked at the historical, personal, legal and 

technological aspects of the telegram. 

I'm always fascinated by the changes in 

technology, as I've seen or used most of 

them:

typewriter

8-track

cassette

dial phone

VCR

telegram

This also fits into the general mechanisation of the
world that is saving money, but costing jobs.
People in the telegram business have to find something
to do.

more comments later

checkit: Csmonitor

India to send world's last telegram. Stop.

Once a staple of authoritative communication across the Indian subcontinent, the telegram has lost too much ground to smartphones. One devotee is threatening a Gandhi-style fast.

By Shivam Vij, Correspondent / June 14, 2013

An Indian staff member, foreground, of central telegraph office dispatches telegrams in Mumbai, India, Friday, June 14. The state-run telecom firm Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has decided to discontinue the 160-year-old telegram service from July 15, in India once a source of quick and urgent communication.

At the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), India's state-owned telecom company, a message emerges from a dot matrix printer addressing a soldier's Army unit in Delhi. "GRANDMOTHER SERIOUS. 15 DAYS LEAVE EXTENSION," it reads. It's one of about 5,000 such missives still being sent every day by telegram – a format favored for its "sense of urgency and authenticity," explains a BSNL official.

But the days of such communication are numbered: The world's last telegram message will be sent somewhere in India on July 14.

That missive will come 144 years after Samuel Morse sent the first telegram in Washington, and seven years after Western Union shuttered its services in the United States. In India, telegraph services were introduced by a British doctor and inventor who used a different code for the first time in 1850 to send a message.

The BSNL board, after dilly-dallying for two years, decided to shut down the service as it was no longer commercially viable.

"We were incurring losses of over $23 million a year because SMS and smartphones have rendered this service redundant," Shamim Akhtar, general manager of BSNL's telegraph services, told the Monitor.

An important tool of British colonial administration and control in India, the telegram is connected with some key moments in Indian history, such as helping the British put down a popular revolt in 1857 and being the mode of communication with which Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru informed London of Pakistan's invasion of Kashmir.

Colloquially known as "taar" or wire in India, the telegram has been a part of Indian life, a metaphor for an urgent message, bypassing the delays of the postal system. Responsible for a twist in the plot of many a Bollywood film, telegrams were often the harbinger of the news of the death of a family member. Today, death telegrams, still priced at a fifth of the regular fee, account for less than 1 percent of telegram traffic.

At their peak in 1985, 60 million telegrams were being sent and received a year in India from 45,000 offices. Today, only 75 offices exist, though they are located in each of India's 671 districts through franchises. And an industry that once employed 12,500 people, today has only 998 workers.

One of them is R.D. Ram, who has been working in the Delhi office for 38 years. "They will now move me to another department where I will feel like a fresher [beginner]," he complains.

Mr. Ram once learned the Morse code technology for telegraphy, but today oversees staff who type out and send telegrams over a Web software. He tries to put up a spirited defense of the obsolete technology in the age of the smartphone, arguing that mobile penetration is much lower than it is hyped to be. Mobile penetration is indeed a dismal 26 percent, but even in the remotest village, at least someone has a phone.

Ram notes that the telegram has legal benefits as well. "It is still accepted by the courts as a valid form of evidence. And is taken seriously by a judge when a government official sends a telegram to say he is unwell and cannot be present in court today," he says.

Sixty-five percent of daily telegrams are sent by the government. But it is the remaining 35 percent that Ram worries about. A number of telegrams are from runaway couples who marry secretly because their parents wouldn't let them marry in the wrong caste, class, or religion.  "They inform their parents that they are married, and fearing violence from the family, inform the police and the National Human Rights Commission," he said. 

the secret computer code for privacy rights?

on the one hand you have people just using
communication media in the running of their
busy lives, and on the other you have
governments who want to know our every
move, because there might be a terrorist
in our midst, once a decade, of those they
didn't plant anyway.

the enablers of this "human soap opera"
are the coders and programmers. They
know if a program's code has a sleeper spy code
in it.
As a result, they're rather blase' about surveillance,
just because they know how it works.
Anyway, you'd think that admitting
that you're not surprised would be
coupled with advice on encryption.
But, you would be wrong.

Checkit: Code academy

The NSA, Code Literacy, and You

rushkoff June 17, 2013

Whatever we might think of Edward Snowden’s release of classified documents detailing the NSA’s snooping on America’s - well, everyone’s - communications, at least we all now know what’s going on.

Sure, most of us on the coding side of the screen already knew the deal. I haven’t found a programmer who was surprised by the news that our emails, text messages, and phone calls are being logged and stored. If anything, most of them are surprised that the general public seems so shocked. What were people thinking? That Google just gives us services like Gmail for free? We pay for this stuff - not with cash, but with our data.

None of our data may be so interesting in itself, but when it’s combined with everyone else’s it reveals a whole lot of information about us. Using factor analysis and other statistical techniques, big data can identify members of a population who might be about to purchase a new car, trying to have a baby, or even about to change political affiliations. No logic is required; the people and machines analyzing big data sets don’t care about why one set of data points might indicate some other data point; they only care that it does.

As long as corporations from Facebook to Twitter are collecting and using this data, why shouldn’t government get in on the act? Instead of looking for potential car buyers or new mothers, however, government is looking for potential terrorists. Or at least that’s what they say. In reality, the sample size of known terrorists is so small that it’s essentially impossible to draw statistical conclusions about their data. The only way to know what they’re saying is to listen to what they’re saying. Luckily (or terrifyingly, depending on your perspective) voice calls can be scanned for keywords as easily as a text document. The conversation can then be parsed by humans to determine whether there’s a threat.

The big news here, if any, is that now this stuff is public knowledge. Most of my friends and colleagues knew about government surveillance of digital communications, already. Some former students had even told me about installing switches at cell phone companies to be used for government snooping. Others helped write the database architecture for facilities that store voicemail long after it has been “deleted” by its recipients. Most of them were relieved that the information they were afraid to leak themselves is finally out.

But they aren’t the only ones who had foreknowledge of this recent leak. Pretty much anybody who knows how code works was prepared for this sort of revelation. Because becoming code fluent is about more than simply knowing enough javascript to get a job. It’s a way to become familiar with the operating system on which the human drama is playing itself out.