Month: April 2004

Check out EGO for an interview with Body in Mind founder Dwayne Bell. Dwayne is the creator of the Bell Scale for measuring female beauty. I liked his article (not to mention the photos!) enough to post an add on my site.

Bell also runs SuperBeauty.org, “a group of independent websites united in a modern movement to change the world and improve the human condition through the creation, admiration, understanding, moral defence and political protection of female beauty and sexuality throughout the world.”

WASHINGTON, DC – The U.S. Department of Transportation today announced it has issued the world’s first license for a sub-orbital manned rocket flight.

The license was issued April 1 by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation to Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif., headed by aviation record-holder Burt Rutan, for a sequence of sub-orbital flights spanning a one-year period.
…
While the highest criteria to issue a license is public safety, applicants must undergo an extensive pre-application process, demonstrate adequate financial responsibility to cover any potential losses, and meet strict environmental requirements.

Does anyone else see something wrong with regulating private space travel to death before the first spaceship is even launched?

I saw the first episode of the Firefly DVD series today, and it is absolutely fantastic. A brilliant combination of sci-fi and western, the series was produced by Joss Whedon, the creator the Buffy and Angel series, which I have also grown to like. Unfortunately, Fox canceled the series before the end of the season, so some of these episodes are only available on DVD. While I have only seen one episode, I’m already cursing Fox for killing this awesome series.

Anyway, the plot revolves around a retired sergeant named Mal who owns and captains Serenity, a Firefly-class spaceship. Mal is a businessman first and a gunslinger second who just trying to make a profit carrying quasi-legal cargo and passengers between the “moons” on the edge of civilized space, while staying clear of the authoritarian Alliance government.

(More show info at FireflyFans.net)

I’ve decided to replace my server-side Java chat with a PHP/Java applet interface to connect to the #AynRand IRC channel. Actually, it will allow you connect to any IRC server you want.

CAIRO, Egypt — Hanan Nsour, a veiled, 21-year-old Muslim in Jordan, came out of “The Passion of the Christ” in tears and pronounced her verdict: Mel Gibson’s crucifixion epic “unmasked the Jews’ lies and I hope that everybody, everywhere, turns against the Jews.”
The Quran, though, says Jesus’s crucifixion never happened.

Such are the contradictions that are welling up as the Arab world deals with “The Passion,” even as the film draws large audiences in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and other Arab countries that have approved it for screening.

In the Arab world, openly voiced anti-Semitism — and by extension the warm reception for “The Passion” — is bound up in the Arab conflict with Israel. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, after watching the film at his compound in the West Bank, was quoted by an aide as likening Jesus’ suffering to the Palestinians’.

While this highlights the obvious anti-Semitic potential of the movie, there is a bigger and much more important point: the story is a denunciation of humanity itself.

In a victory for intellectual freedom, Tatiana Menaker’s expulsion from San Francisco State University has been reversed. She was expelled from school after protesting the same Marxist and Anti-Semitic attitude she escaped the USSR from in 1986. You can read her editorial about the anti-Americanism she encountered in academia, and an account of her story at the Students for Academic Freedom website.

Wow:

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — Rabies spread by vampire bats has claimed 13 lives on an Amazon river island, local media reported Saturday.

The deaths occurred over the past 21 days on Portel Island, according to the O Liberal newspaper. The island is about 1,500 miles northeast of Rio de Janeiro.