Yearly Archives: 2006

Friday Ark #70

This entry was posted in Bird Blogging Cat Blogging Dog Blogging Friday Ark Pet Blogging Pets Weekend Cat Blogging Weekend Dog Blogging on by

We’ll post links to sites that have Friday (plus or minus a few days) photos of their chosen animals (photoshops at our discretion and humans only in supporting roles). Watch the Exception category for rocks, beer, coffee cups, and….?

ALERT: Apologies in advance. Our key staff member well be taking in general anaesthesia at about 15:15 GMT and will most likely not be able to make any updates to the ARK from about 13:30 GMT (5:30 PST) until sometime Saturday. If you normally use the Carnival Submission Form or email please consider also leaving a comment. Until you see an update here saying that we’ve caught up with postings click through the comments and trackbacks for furry, scaly and slimy surprises!

We will add your post to the list if you do one of the following:

  • Leave a comment or trackback to this post,

  • Use the Carnival Submission Form,

  • Email Modulator or

  • Our extensive staff finds it during our weekly search of the web

Of course, if our staff goes on strike then we will link only those posts someone tells us about. Time permitting we will continue boardings until the Carnival of the Cats goes up on Sunday.

Do link to the Friday Ark whether you use trackbacks or not.

Visit each border and come back regularly Friday-Sunday to visit new boarders.

Extra, Extra: All Ark boarders are invited to shout out at the Friday Ark Frapper Map. (46 shouts as of 01/19)

Dog folks: remember to submit your links to the Carnival of the Dogs hosted by Mickey’s Musings.

Cat folks: remember to submit your links to the Carnival of the Cats which goes up every Sunday and the 96th edition will be hosted this week by Meryl Yourish. There are more weekly cats at eatstuff’s Weekend Cat Blogging which has many participants who may not be familiar to Ark or Carnival participants.

Bird folks: I and the Bird: A Blog Carnival for Bird Lovers is published every 2 weeks. The 15th edition edition is up and hosted by Snail’s Tales.

New for the spineless: Circus of the Spineless. A monthly celebration of Insects, Arachnids, Molluscs, Crustaceans, Worms and most anything else that wiggles. The fourth edition is up at bootstrap analysis. The 5th edition is scheduled for January 31 and will be hosted by Pharyngula.

Cats

InvertebratesDogsBirdsOther VertebratesIn MemoriamDidn’t Make It
Exceptions (inclusion not guaranteed)

For other current carnivals check out The Conservative Cat’s Carnival Page and The TTLB Uber Carnival

Note for Haloscan Users: Haloscan started (the end of July) rejecting trackbacks if they were submitted “too rapidly” by the same host. I don’t know what the timer is but it is long enough so that it was very difficult to ping everyone that is using Haloscan for trackbacks. I’m sure that they are doing this to try to hold back the tide of trackback spam but it makes the service pretty useless for carnival type posts. Perhaps you can contact them and urge some different solution. Update: Typepad appears to be doing the same thing. Everytime I update the Ark it appears the timers are reset and the long list of MT autogenerated pings fail. Yecchhhh….

Good For Google

This entry was posted in Privacy on by

Is there any reason to believe the bush administration could be trusted with this data?

The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases.
The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.
In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for one million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.
The Mountain View-based search engine opposes releasing the information on a variety of grounds, saying it would violate the privacy rights of its users and reveal company trade secrets, according to court documents.

No, I don’t think they are trustworthy at all and they shouldn’t be in the censorship business anyway.
Some other search companies aren’t quite so sensitive:

The government indicated that other, unspecified search engines have agreed to release the information, but not Google.

If we can find out jwho they are we can make sure not to use their services.
In the meantime let’s help out the bushies:

…government lawyers said in court papers they are developing a defense of the 1998 law based on the argument that it is far more effective than software filters in protecting children from porn. To back that claim, the government has subpoenaed search engines to develop a factual record of how often Web users encounter online porn and how Web searches turn up material they say is “harmful to minors.”

Here is a data point for them: in the last two years of daily performing multiple searches on a wide variety of subjects I have never accidently encountered a porn site. I have, though, on several occasions been in schools or libraries that had filtering systems and found them so effective that I couldn’t even get to this blog.

Update 1/20: I’ve never liked the fact that the search companies retain history and identifying information but they all do it. So, here is a good reason to not use any of them except Google:

Federal investigators already have obtained potentially billions of Internet search requests made by users of major Web sites run by Microsoft, Yahoo! and America Online, which all complied with the government request, issued in August, a Justice Department official said Thursday.

bush Supports End to Prohibition

This entry was posted in Drug Laws on by

Comparing immigration to prohibition is not that farfetched:

It also makes sense to take pressure off the border by giving people a legal means on a temporary basis to come here, so they don’t have to sneak across. Now, some of you all may be old enough to remember the days of Prohibition. I’m not. (Laughter.) But remember, we illegalized whisky, and guess what? People found all kinds of ways to make it, and to run it. NASCAR got started — positive thing that came out of all that. (Laughter.)

The result bush describes is what happens anytime government gets in the way of people freely exchanging goods and services. Now if bush would just open his mind a little bit more and see that the war on drugs also needs to be dismantled.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to evaluate the NASCAR reference.

Via a new Nevada focused marijuana legalization site.

Laughter is Still A Great Medicine

This entry was posted in Health Care Movies on by

Apparently we should go to more funny movies:

Viewer responses to movies in a humorous vein (such as the 1998 comedy There’s Something About Mary) appear to have a beneficial effect on arterial endothelial function, reported researchers from the University of Maryland Medical Center here.

In contrast, responses to serious films, such as the heart-wrenching opening D-Day sequence in the 1998 drama Saving Private Ryan appear to constrict arterial blood flow, wrote Michael Miller, M.D., and colleagues in a scientific letter published in the February 2006 issue of the journal Heart.

I suppose some will extend this to TV sitcoms but my stress level seems to go up when a typical sitcom is running on our tube…the quality and humor is just so bad.