Eideard

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If you want Jesus on your license plate, the Florida Senate is looking out for you.

Religious specialty plates offered by Sen. Ronda Storms, R-Valrico, and Sen. Gary Siplin, D-Orlando, made it onto a bill Friday even though many members had not seen images of those plates and none were produced for the debate.

Siplin didn’t mince words when asked what his ”Trinity” plate looks like, saying: “It has a picture of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

Storms’ ”I Believe” plate would benefit Faith in Teaching, an Orlando company that funds faith-based programs at schools. The design features a cross over a stained-glass window…

”The issue is whether the state of Florida ought to be producing license plates with religious images on them,” said Sen. Ted Deutch, D-Boca Raton, “and I don’t believe that we should.”

Before the day was over, the Anti-Defamation League and the ACLU registered opposition, and across the hall in the House, proposals for the same plates were withdrawn from legislation.

Florida has more than 100 specialty plates with several new ones proposed this year.

Separation of church from state is always the issue – except when opportunist political hacks are trying to claw a few more votes.

A bull filmed rampaging around a supermarket after escaping from a cattle market has put a small town in the west of Ireland on the international map.

CCTV footage from the security cameras in Cummins’ SuperValu store in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, put on YouTube has been viewed by thousands of people around the world.

Residents’ relatives have been calling from as far afield as Sydney and Hong Kong to say they have seen it.

Har!

Building bigger, stronger levees in New Orleans will not be enough to save the US city from another Hurricane Katrina, a report has said…

The report said the authorities should consider raising the level of buildings and even abandoning flood-prone areas…

New Orleans has about 563 km (350 miles) of barriers, levees and other structures intended to protect the city. But in August 2005, large sections of this system failed and much of the city was inundated by the storm surges brought by Katrina.

The report, from the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the National Research Council (NRC), said the disaster had exposed the “many weaknesses in the hurricane protection and preparedness systems” for New Orleans and surrounding areas. It said there had been “undue optimism” about the ability of the protection systems to withstand the impact of a storm on the scale of Katrina.

The report said improvements made to the flood protection system since Katrina had “reduced some vulnerabilities”. But, it said that “the risks of inundation and flooding never can be fully eliminated by protective structures, no matter how large or sturdy those structures may be”.

The authors advised that as there can be no absolute protection against storm surges and flooding, the authorities should consider encouraging people to move away from areas at risk. Where this is not possible, “significant improvements in flood-proofing measures will be essential”.

This would include raising the standard height for ground floors of properties, strengthening critical infrastructure such as power and telecommunications and improving evacuation plans.

Seems pretty reasonable to me. Not that my opinion is worth a whole hill of beans. I haven’t lived there in decades and folks whose roots are deep and timed into the city ain’t ever paying much attention to outsiders.

The Horrors of Free Speech

Undercover police are running a network of hundreds of informants inside protest organisations who secretly feed them intelligence in return for cash, according to evidence handed to the Guardian.

They claim to have infiltrated a number of environmental groups and said they are receiving information about leaders, tactics and plans of future demonstrations.

The dramatic disclosures are revealed in almost three hours of secretly recorded discussions between covert officers claiming to be from Strathclyde police, and an activist from the protest group Plane Stupid, whom the officers attempted to recruit as a paid spy after she had been released on bail following a demonstration at Aberdeen airport last month.

Matilda Gifford, 24, said she recorded the meetings in an attempt to expose how police seek to disrupt the legitimate activities of climate change activists. She met the officers twice; they said they were a detective constable and his assistant. During the taped discussions, the officers:

• Indicate that she could receive tens of thousands of pounds to pay off her student loans in return for information about individuals within Plane Stupid.

• Say they will not pay money direct into her bank account because that would leave an audit trail that would leave her compromised. They said the money would be tax-free, and added: “UK plc can afford more than 20 quid.”

• Explain that spying could assist her if she was arrested. “People would sell their soul to the devil,” an officer said…

This mostly falls under the category of recording the bastards who’re recording you. I may as well look on the humorous side of it all – though over beaucoup years I’ve spent challenging the kreeps in charge, I witnessed enough attempts by the FBI, CIA and other alphabet soup sluggos to turn friends and family into informants.

Turning them out to the public Left was one of my specialties, one of my delights.

What would you give up first, air conditioning or your cell phone?

In tough economic times with people looking to cut costs many Americans said a cell phone or computer are must-have items and regard a clothes dryers, air conditioner and microwave as less of a necessity, according to survey by the Pew Research Center. “A relative newcomer in the everyday lives of most Americans, the cell phone is among a handful of newer gadgets that have held their own on the necessity scale from 2006 to 2009″.

The number of people who said microwaves were a necessity for their homes fell 21 percentage points in 2009 from 2006. Air conditioners dropped 16 points while dishwashers slumped 14 points, the poll showed.

Job losses, the months-long recession, and tight access to credit have convinced U.S. consumers to reduce their spending in the past year on anything they consider unnecessary or a luxury…

But as tech gadgets increasingly find a place in homes, cell phones, flat screen TVs and Apple’s iPod are now part of the must-have category, according to the survey of 1,003 adults.

No surprise to me. Americans are still in love with cars. What kind of car – or pickup – may be changing; but, the flexibility, mobility, enabled by those 4-wheel fuel-suckers still rules.

Looking East down the LCLS Undulator Array

The world’s brightest X-ray source sprang to life last week at the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) offers researchers the first-ever glimpse of high-energy or “hard” X-ray laser light produced in a laboratory.

When fine tuning is complete, the LCLS will provide the world’s brightest, shortest pulses of laser X-rays for scientific study. It will give scientists an unprecedented tool for studying and understanding the arrangement of atoms in materials such as metals, semiconductors, ceramics, polymers, catalysts, plastics, and biological molecules, with wide-ranging impact on advanced energy research and other fields.

“This milestone establishes proof-of-concept for this incredible machine, the first of its kind,” said SLAC Director Persis Drell. “The LCLS team overcame unprecedented technical challenges to make this happen, and their work will enable frontier research in a host of fields. For some disciplines, this tool will be as important to the future as the microscope has been to the past.”

Even in these initial stages of operation, the LCLS X-ray beam is brighter than any other human-made source of short-pulse, hard X-rays. Initial tests produced laser light with a wavelength of 1.5 Angstroms, or 0.15 nanometers—the shortest-wavelength, highest-energy X-rays ever created by any laser. To generate that light, the team had to align the electron beam with extreme precision. The beam cannot deviate from a straight line by more than about 5 micrometers per 5 meters—an astounding feat of engineering.

“This is the most difficult lightsource that has ever been turned on,” said LCLS Construction Project Director John Galayda. “It’s on the boundary between the impossible and possible, and within two hours of start-up these guys had it right on.”

Good luck – and science the world over will be watching and waiting for information. I was around in early days when X-ray metallography just began to reach into commercial use. I can only imagine what a tool like this will be capable of producing.

Dough-Vo (L) and Vo-Vo (R)

An Australian biscuit company has threatened legal action against US chain Krispy Kreme if does not stop selling its Iced Dough-Vo doughnut.

Arnott believes the product is almost identical to its own Iced Vo-Vo biscuit, and breaches trademarks registered in 1906. Krispy Kreme has been given until the end of today to withdraw its doughnut, but has refused to comply.

The Iced Vo-Vo biscuit is much loved by many generations of Australians.

It is topped with pink fondant, strawberry jam and sprinkled with coconut.

Krispy Kreme’s Iced Dough-Vo, part of the chain’s limited edition of Australian-themed treats, is filled with raspberry jam and topped with pink icing and coconut.

But the head of the US chain’s Australian arm, John McGuigan, remains indignant.

“I think people know the difference between a doughnut and a biscuit,” he said.

Think so, eh? Americans can’t tell the difference between a conservative and a populist demagogue. Baked goods demand even more sophistication.

Photo courtesy Stanley Tom

The indigenous people of Alaska have stood firm against some of the most extreme weather conditions on Earth for thousands of years. But now, flooding blamed on climate change is forcing at least one Eskimo village to move to safer ground.

The community of the tiny coastal village of Newtok voted to relocate its 340 residents to new homes 9 miles away, up the Ninglick River. The village, home to indigenous Yup’ik Eskimos, is the first of possibly scores of threatened Alaskan communities that could be abandoned.

Warming temperatures are melting coastal ice shelves and frozen sub-soils, which act as natural barriers to protect the village against summer deluges from ocean storm surges.

“We are seeing the erosion, flooding and sinking of our village right now,” said Stanley Tom, a Yup’ik Eskimo and tribal administrator for the Newtok Traditional Council…

Newtok is just one example of what the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns is part of a growing climate change crisis that will displace 150 million people by 2050…

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has estimated that moving Newtok could cost $130 million. Twenty-six other Alaskan villages are in immediate danger, with an additional 60 considered under threat in the next decade, according to the corps.

Of course, we could just sit back and listen to the country club set discuss it to death for another forty years.

A stolen state government laptop computer contains personal information about more than 1 million Oklahoma residents, officials.

The state Department of Human Services said the laptop, stolen from a state employee’s vehicle in Oklahoma City on April 3, has not yet been recovered, The Oklahoman newspaper reported…

Despite the reassurances, others said the potential for the spread of personal information held on the computer is greater than officials have acknowledged because the data was not encrypted…

A DHS spokesman told the Oklahoman the computer held the names and Social Security numbers for about a million people who use such state programs as Medicaid, childcare assistance, food stamps and disability coverage.

We should probably just set up a category for “stolen government laptop with unencrypted data” – call it Stupid Government Trick or some such.

Entering the General Hospital in Mexico City
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Mexican officials, scrambling to control a swine flu outbreak that has killed at least 16 people and possibly dozens more in recent weeks, shuttered schools from kindergarten to university for millions of young people in and around the capital on Friday and urged people with flu symptoms to stay home from work.

”We’re dealing with a new flu virus that constitutes a respiratory epidemic that so far is controllable,” Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova told reporters late Thursday, after huddling with President Felipe Calderón and other top officials. He said the virus had mutated from pigs and had at some point been transmitted to humans.

Mexico’s flu season is usually over by now, but health officials have noticed a significant spike in flu cases. The World Health Organization reported about 800 cases of flu-like symptoms in Mexico in recent weeks, most of them among healthy young adults, with 57 deaths in Mexico City and 3 in the central part of the country. Mexican officials confirmed 16 deaths from swine flu, and said another 45 were under investigation…

The WHO and the CDC now consider all 60 deaths as likely swine flu.

Health officials in the United States were working to determine whether the Mexican outbreak was tied to the unusual strain of swine flu that has been circulating among people in the American Southwest but is not known to have caused any deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The agency, which has found only seven cases in the United States, expects to find more now that it has begun looking intensively for them…

Dr. Cox of the disease control center said officials did not yet know whether the flu shot this year protected against the new swine strain.

Well, I had my flu shot and I’m still nervous.