Sleep Position

Should we sleep with our heads elevated? (Get past the "menopause" website.)

Might be worth trying.

(Link found here.)

Video: Cat in Coke Box

This video of a cat in a coke box made me smile.

That is all.

Anderson Cooper: Still Self Obsessed

Anderson Cooper Sucks

So I come home the other day and Jenn has the Oprah show on. Oprah has aparrently dropped everything on the schedule in order to be there live as New Orleans sinks further into the cesspool of history. One of the pieces she showed was done by CNN's Anderson Cooper. In this piece, Mr. Cooper trolls through the mess showing various disasters and tragedies -- however, the focus of the piece is the affect that so much tragedy and misery is having on the observing journalist.

Human interest stories are one thing. I may not like them, but the people do. Mr. Cooper's piece, though, was a human interest story... where _he_ was the "human of interest".

Navel gazing of the worst kind.

It is one thing to be affected by what is going on. That's fine. Mention it even. But to shoot and edit a 120 second piece about yourself is the ultimate in faux journalism.

I've had these thoughts in the past -- I think last year CNN celebrated September 11th by having an hour-long program telling the events of the day by having the reporters who reported on it tell the story and including how the unfolding events were affecting them.

The media's favorite subject always has been itself.

(me, Fri, 09 Sep 2005 , old blog)

I mention this because I was at a customer site, and they have this gigantic lobby with lots of chairs and a flat-screen TV. Goes well in the gigantic building they are occupying, but whatever.

This TV was on CNN, and unsurprisingly CNN was doing wall-to-wall Haiti coverage. I noticed this on my way in but didn't pay too much attention.

On my way out I stopped in the lobby to write some notes to myself. There were a couple of people having a quiet meeting on the side of the lobby away from the TV, so to give them privacy I moved away from them and wrote out my notes.

When I was done and packing up, my attention turned to the TV, and wouldn't you know it -- there was Anderson Cooper, diligently covering what a horrible effect the Haiti earthquake was having on him.

He climbs rubble. He talks to people. He stops and has a quiet moment to himself (as the cameraman simultaneously steps away to give him some privacy but zooms back in so we can feel his distress.)

I find it amazing that people watch this crap, but I guess when you have 24 hours of air time to fill, your standards for quality reportage drop somewhat.

Clowns

Kenneth Gray of The Bulldog contemplates the race for the Mayor's seat, and concludes it is serious business.

My reply:

Serious business? How can you say that?

Let's review the result of the last election. The mayor was sent with a mandate to keep tax increases to zero. However, practically all of the incumbents were re-elected -- presumably the very same councilors who produced the financial mismanagement Mr. O'Brien was sent to correct.

The subtext of this result is: hold overall increases, but I want my ward to keep getting goodies. Make cuts somewhere else.

While Mr. O'Brien's mandate was clearly impossible on its face, the fact that the very same voters who sent him to city hall sabotaged their own agenda meant that the last three years were in many respects inevitable.

The problem is not the elected mayor and councillors. The problem is not the lack of quality, qualified candidates.

The problem is the voters. Those who do vote clearly vote for their own interests first, and don't have any interest in a "vision" for the city.

The voters get what they vote for. And until the voters stop trying to put themselves first at the expense of every- (or any-) one else, that isn't going to change.

So bring on the Stuntman.

Every circus needs a clown, and Mr. O'Brien isn't likely to be re-elected.

TLA Space Dangerously Oversubscribed

From Slashdot:

There are only 17,576 three letter acronyms. We've been warning people for years of the need to upgrade to TLAv6, which allows for a wider range of three letter acronyms, including punctuation and numbers as well as unicode support. But many major buzzword providers have refused to upgrade. The last unique TLAs will be depleted within 18 months in our field. Thanks to AAT (Acronym Address Translation), there are already far more TLAs than there are available spaces -- we've been using CIAR (Classless Inter-Acronym Routing) to separate namespaces based on subject matter and field, but it's only a matter of time before even that fails.

An actual Funny from slashdot. How refreshing.

4K on ServerFault

Thanks to a burst of reputation gained on some low-hanging fruit, I broke 4000 on Server Fault today.

(Previously.)

Energy Economics

No More Power Lines?

These superconducting cables contain special materials chilled to superlow temperatures, allowing electricity to flow efficiently, with little resistance. While Harris’s “hub” would run in a loop, it would demonstrate the potential for superconducting power lines that could travel long distances and eliminate the 7 percent of electricity wasted by ugly, above-ground transmission lines.

I don't get it. They are proposing to save the 7% of energy that is lost in modern electrical transmission systems by supercooling cables? How are they going to do that for less than the 7% energy cost they are proposing to save? Because otherwise it is a net loss.