Something Stinks...

Don't think that politicians aren't at the bottom of the current financial problems. Some links:

Keating Deja-vu for guess who?


Remember a 2003 $11 billion accounting fraud at Fannie Mae? Very Interesting, Frankly, so to speak.

And I'm not a Gingrich fan but this is worth reading.

Mbeki Bites the Dust

However, this may mean he just lost in some political infighting to someone potentially even worse? I'm not sure, but this blogger is not impressed. "Bring me my machine gun" doesn't sound good.

Berwyn Heights Raid update

The Link will take you to a speech by the Mayor. Ironically, I think he could really benefit from this if he has further political ambitions.

Wow! is RealPlayer outdated now in the age of youtube or what?? Trying to watch this has been frustrating for me. RealPlayer was always some kind of user-unfriendly, fairly useless monstrosity to me. I see it hasn't changed a bit.

I hope you have better luck, perhaps this will show up on youtube and it can be watched there. In the meantime if you have the same problem I did, getting stuck in "buffering", try moving the advancement bar around.

Smooth Operator

Matt found something on this, good job Matt! Evidently not a Federal program after all, although one of the "sponsors", whatever that means, is Federal. Matt sent this link.

PS

currently [and often for some reason] seem to have a problem with uploading images. I upload them and the post looks fine but later does not. This ruins the joke in "earth in 2 months"

The Earth in 2 Months

Alas, Mad Scientists refuse to listen to reason and this is what is going to happen.

Regarding very small black holes, here is a wikipedia link talking about them. It doesn't seem to mention the idea of ravenous consumption except in the "fiction" section. It does say the energy required to create them with collisions is probably beyond what is possible today, and that they would in any case be "immensely unstable, and almost immediately disintegrate." However, the writers of these calming statements are being challenged to produce citations. So look at the picture and plot how you're going to get out of that thing.

Wikipedia has it's detractors but is supposed to be pretty good when it comes to science articles anyway.

World Will End on November 10th

Don't believe me, eh? Check out the Link.

What I learned at the Newseum

Sue and I checked it out over the weekend. I found it more interesting than I thought I would, and recommend it. In particular saw a good film on the 1798 Sedition Act. I have a dim memory of it from taking American History as a teenager, but the film did a good job of bringing out what the school course did not (assuming I was paying attention), especially how completely unconstitutional the law was. Sue and I agreed that this museum, like other good museums, leaves you with the feeling you haven't done it justice. You could spend an entire single visit just in one section of one floor.

Something else stood out: it's some kind of DC employment project. An amazing number of workers were milling about, which made it nice in a lot of ways. Typically you didn't walk far without someone paying attention to you, sometimes just to say "watch your step" getting off an escalator, and so on. There were something like 100 different employees I spotted. If I'm right, I can't see how that would be less than something like a 5 million dollar payroll, assuming there isn't some kind of part-time employment going on. This in addition to any unseen folks getting paid. It's an untaxed foundation called the Freedom Forum that runs it, so I guess I can accept that it's none of my business if they are in fact going overboard with it all. But it sure caught my attention. Tickets were $20 apiece.