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got me a movie
i want you to know
slicing up eyeballs
i want you to know
girlie so groovy
i want you to know
don't know about you
but i am un chien andalusia
wanna grow
up to be
be a debaser, debaser

got me a movie
ha ha ha ho
slicing up eyeballs
ha ha ha ho
girlie so groovie
ha ha ha ho
don't know about you
but i am un chien andalusia

debaser

got me a movie
i want you to know
slicing up eyeballs
i want you to know
girlie so groovy
i want you to know
don't know about you
but i am un chien andalusia
wanna grow
up to be
be a debaser, debaser

got me a movie
ha ha ha ho
slicing up eyeballs
ha ha ha ho
girlie so groovie
ha ha ha ho
don't know about you
but i am un chien andalusia

debaser

Sadly Hawaii isn't the only ecosystem being disrupted by exotic species. Most island ecologies are now threatened by these invaders. Australia has its cane toads and rabbits. Zebra mussels infest the US waterways. Some idiot in the 1930s decided he would dry up the Everglades in Florida by seeding it with swamp killing trees from a plane.

Invasive species destroy biodiversity and alter ecosytems beyind thier ability to cope easily. Add to that the effect of human alteration and climate shift we are rapidly losing vital species and habitat. Unfortunatly there are no easy answers. Remember the SNL skit about "The Bat Problem?" :)

Now if I may be excused I have to go battle the kudzu, it grew another foot today.

Here is a link to the guy's site--much more information and should be read before anybody starts making-up explanations.

Let me give you a run down of where Im at. Im a senior majoring in Computer Science and Physics at the University of Alabama. I got into research within The Center for Materials for Information Technonology and Im loving it. So where will I go next? Intern at Bell South doing security analysis of course. But in the long run I can not avoid my thirst for knowledge. I will end up in grad school certainly. Right now it looks like I'll get a Masters of Electrical Engineering and move on to a PHD in something. All the while of course making 20+ and tuition and fees. ;-) Just keep your eyes open to further education because the real world is not an easy place to survive.

At my school, they just block napster and gnutella/bearshare. They also block SMTP and NNTP traffic to any servers but the campus mail and news server. I don't think it is because they are trying to be evil....I think its just because they are incompetent.

what happened in my case is that the internet gave me a fifteen second attention span. i mean at least tv made me sit there now i cant even focus on tv for that long. because here im only a single click away from another interesting distracting bit of information, halfway through an article.

Good Post. I read in Matt Ridley's book "Genome" about this and was fascinated by it. So I guess what you are saying is that it's like a zipper that doesn't zip all the way down, getting shorter with each replication. So using adult cells means that the DNA is already sonewhat burned down and thus will yield for a shorter-lived being. I didn't think that the end was strictly "A"s but some innocuous sequence.

Now back to the topic: inasmuch as scientists are finding that they cannot completely duplicate the entire genomic sequence for a single creature, doesn't this mean that unless they have a way to accurately determine that the DNA matches exactly that of the adult, then they cannot legally, ethically, or morally proceed to clone humans (and PETA soon will speak up on the creation of animal monsters, I imagine)? Forgive my use of the perjorative 'monsters', but it is exactly how I see it. In this month's Wired we see the battles between an artist and a biotech firm over a glowing rabbit - a rabbit whose genes were spliced with (or somehow infused with) fluorescing bacteria. IMHO the genetic scientists have already crossed moral barriers in their research, but I suppose there is little we can do simply because corporations Want this technology. In the meantime we have recalls on genetically-modified corn (star-link?) in Trader Joe's food stores here, but corps are fighting for their FrankenFoods...

*sigh* Coming from Florida as I do, I know of the dangers of scientists' (and corps) meddling with nature. We have kudzu, supposed to be a boon for feeding goats, but instead a rampant consumer of everything in its path ("you have to close your windows at night to keep it out of your house"); we have love bugs, which were bred for noble reasons, I'm sure; and we have recently, in the University of Florida, seen African Trout, imported to help process wastewater streams, take over the habitats of all other fish. In California we have mustard plants, and of course everyone knows the story of killer bees.

Not to stray too far off-topic, but it seems to me that we are headed for monstrous problems of biblical proportions, revealing the real lesson behind the parable of eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Mankind cannot be trusted with this information, because he can't help himself, even though he call himself a responsible scientist. Books are filled with the folly of arrogance, from Frankenstein (and don't tell me that it doesn't fit here) to Robin Cook's Acceptable Risk.

..and I'm serious when I say this: "God help us all." Wow, I've become a Luddite in five minutes.

Katz,

You seem to be laboring under the illusion that our voting system can be made to be "fair". It can't. Arrow's Theorem pretty much demolishes the concept.

A google search for "Arrow's Theorem" will turn up lots of useful links, like this on path-voting or this collection of notes.

If you're going to talk about changing how we vote, other than just the mechanics, you really need to read up on this stuff. Yeah, it's all academic and abstract, but it's quite relevent (imagine that!).

Which is why I think *all* polls in the US should open and close at exactly the same time, regardless of time zone. Also, the polls should be open for a minimum of 48 hours, preferably 72. Most votes should be mail-in or via internet (assuming both can be made verifiably more secure than the current in-person systems that are most popular).

I sat in front of the TV watching the commentators pontificate until they nearly passed and I wanted to hear the results of the exit polls, but I think the less accurate the exit polls are, the better (hence my preference for mail-in and internet voting) because if they are known to be less accurate, then people are more likely to ignore them.

I also think alternate voting systems would be a good thing, such as the two systems explained in an article recently referenced in a slashdot article (sorry, I can't find it right now, but it was something along the lines of the methods listed here). Preferential systems of voting would, I think, make third-party candidates more viable and less damaging.

And while I'm at it, why not switch to a parliamentary government where we can have better proportional representation of the public's wishes?

Of course, none of these things seem likely to happen, some less so than others.

Two problems with Borda. First, it would be exceedingly painful to explain preference ranking to everyone in the country, and it would drastically increase the time needed to cast each vote. Second, most current voting machines would need to be heavily rewired or completely scrapped.

A much easier method that is arguably equal to Borda is Approval Voting . It's trivial -- each candidate has a yes/no checkbox that says "would you approve if this guy won?" You check yes for the ones you like, and the most yesses wins. Easy to explain, avoids "spoiler vote" problems, and most current voting machines can handle the counting.

He meant to say http://www.bama.ua.edu/~sotir001/.

It seems that ESR's recent writing are both volumous and comprehensive, and If he is taking suggestions for after-the-fact mods, perhaps we are beginning to see an era in which we "open source" our documentation, theory, and text-books. Yeah, I know, books are open, you can read them. But I am talking about development projects, where the original author throws up a basic outline of the work, with a few sections filled in, and then manages the submissions. So I want to propose the _YALS_ project, standing for "Yet Another Love Story", we need some web space, and a few core developers, and we'll be ready to go. The basic outline will be:
1) Character_One Meets Character_Two
2) Character_One Loses Character_Two
3) Character_One Gets Character_Two We should try to flesh the plot out by August 20th, Aiming for a Version 0.1 publication by January 1st. Check The site at http://taz.eng.ua.edu:1138/crutcher/yals


-Crutcher