Only in America do you find a spaceship being towed by a pickup truck.

(Actualy, an older pickup, with the window down, driver’s arm out, and an American flag. Cowboys! )

Photo by Bryan Bell

300 miles south of Iceland, a small 30’ foot Canadian yacht lost its mast in heavy North Atlantic seas. One of two sailors aboard the yacht had a broken leg and other injuries, and the boat was slowly taking on water. They activated an emergency beacon.

In South Carolina on the Fourth of July, a “slightly” intoxicated man was driving his ATV in the woods when he went over twelve foot creek bank and into the water. He pulled himself to the strip of sand at the edge of the creek bank, but could not move anymore.

In the North Atlantic a patrol plane flew out from Britain to locate the beacon. After the aircraft found the yacht. a fishing vessel 12-15 miles away, arrived on scene and took them into tow. Gale wind and sea conditions made getting the men off the yacht onto the fishing vessel impractical or impossible. Two US Air Force rescue helicopters and a refueling plane flew the 300 miles from Iceland picked up the men, and flew back to a hospital in Reykjavik. (More photos)

In South Carolina, our family was talking a lazy canoe trip down Sugar Creek, when we came to injured man just a few minutes after his accident. Help was summoned, and soon there was twenty or thirty volunteer firefighters and an EMT down by the creek. Steps were cut into the creek bank, a path was cleared out, and the man was taken out in the back of a volunteer firefighters pickup. On arriving at real paved roads, the man’s vital signs took a nose dive. A helicopter was called in, picked the man up, and flew him to a hospital in Charlotte.

I am amazed at the value of human life in “civilization”. The rescue in the North Atlantic had to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. In South Carolina there was a whole horde of people working without pay to save lives, with a reasonably efficient communications system setup so that they could quickly be at problem situation and if needed quickly bring in expensive outside assets like a helicopter.

It’s an awesome thing.

On the miniscule chance that one of my friends wants a GMail invite but does not already have one, I’m announcing that I have six to give away.

Here is an experiment in displaying a customer’s payment history. Each bar is a project. The width of the bar shows the dollar value of a project, the length how many days it took to be payed.

At a glance I can compare how big of a customer they are, and the size of the projects, and how well they pay. Pretty cool.

(I’m using this on my internal project “Dashboard” that I’ve built)

bq. It’s more likely that a million people will correctly guess all the California Lottery numbers every day for a billion trillion years…

– From the “Illustrated Guide to Cryptographic Hashes”:http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/iguide-crypto-hashes.html

Extreme Ironing, the pursuit of taking photos of yourself ironing while doing crazy things.

<p>Favorite commentary during the opening ceremony of the olympics:</p>

<ul>
    <li>&#8221;...the small <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Belize">island nation</a></i> of Belize.&#8221;</li>
    <li>&#8220;Athena, the <em>patron saint</em> of Athens.&#8221; </li>
</ul>

Posted for Google to find:

Safari does not like functions to called be called “status”. If you commit such a monstrosity, execution will stop when you call your function. Naming a function “status” works fine in IE, Firefox, and Opera.

If you have javascript debugging turned on in Safari, you will see:

(result of expression status) is not object. Cannot be called.
(event handler):Value function status() 

Demonstration of problem:

I’ve just “discovered” TeX and LaTeX, the unix way of making pretty documents. TeX uses special codes inside a plain text document - no WYSIWYG here. I’m in love with the separation between content and presentation. In the past, for this reason, I just used HTML and CSS for writing documents.

From the official policy document, National Security Concept of the Russian Federation:

There are growing threats to the national security of the Russian Federation in the information sphere. There is a major threat in the striving of some countries to dominate the world information space and oust Russia from the foreign and domestic information market; the elaboration by some countries of a concept of information wars, which provides for the creation of means of dangerous influence on the information spheres of other world countries…

And later in the document:

The ensurance of the national security of the Russian Federation also includes… …the elaboration of a state policy in the sphere of spiritual and moral education, the introduction of a ban on the use of air time of the electronic mass media for showing programmes that popularise violence and exploit base instincts, as well as resistance to the negative influence of foreign religious organizations and missionaries.