2. Conan the Bacterium!

    30 November 2010

    Inspired by the prose of Dr. Peter Watts, I bring you Conan the Bacterium (otherwise known as deinococcus radiodurans, "..the toughest microbial motherfucker on the planet, a microbe who laughs at hard vacuum and radiation hot enough to cook you to a cinder.")

    Picture from the Wikipedia article on deinococcus radiodurans. Quote from Conan the Barbarian. Picture of Peter Watts from here, originally taken by Allan Weiss. Macro engineered with the GIMP and cheezburger.com.

    I'm on crack.

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  3. More on the TSA's power trip.

    28 November 2010

    Note: I started working on this article the day after the first one went up. Since that time, I've been keeping an eye on things while on vacation in Pennsylvania and collecting another queue of a few dozen links to sort through. I've also had a couple of disressing conversations with people which went something like this: "The TSA is there to keep us safe when traveling. It's worth being imaged nude to stay safe. It's worth being skin searched to stay safe. No, the TSA would never hire screeners who abuse their power. No screeners are abusing their power …

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  4. Anybody want to help buy a comsat?

    26 November 2010

    There are some forward-thinking countries in the world who have decided that net.access is a basic human right and are taking steps to provide it to everyone who needs it. When you think about it a little, for many people life without the Net is a difficult one, indeed: it's difficult to apply for jobs if you can't get online. It's indeed difficult to be gainfully employed if you can't get online in some fashion these days. The Net is also, in a very real sense, the repository of a fantastic amount of knowledge and wisdom accumulated by the …

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  6. The TSA is listening to the people, all right...

    23 November 2010

    I was originally going to fold this into my follow-up post on the TSA's "get imaged by a pornoscanner or get felt up by a screener" policy but I think this deserves to be brought up by itself, lest it get lost in the noise.

    The US TSA is most certainly listening to everyone pushing for them to stop degrading people and do something which actually increases security. They are paying attention. And they have decided to say that everyone kicking up a fuss is a threat. The high points of an internal TSA document were sent anonymously to a …

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  9. Launch of Spaceblimp-3, 13 November 2010.

    16 November 2010

    I got up rather earlier than usual last Saturday morning (0600 EST5EDT) to get ready for another Spaceblimp launch by HacDC, this time from a location in semi-rural Maryland. I had just enough time to get Windbringer prepped, my doctor's bag packed, and the rest of the stuff I wanted to keep close by into my backpack when I got a phone call from Bjorn in the parking lot outside my apartment building, who would be driving the chase car this time around. We met up with Nick (who rode shotgun in the TARDIS last time) and then struck out …

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  10. The people said "No more!" and the TSA said "Shut your pie holes!"

    14 November 2010

    First, I'd like to give special thanks to I/Oerror who's been keeping a hawk's eye on this. I found a couple of the articles for this post on his Twitter feed during my daily news crawl. I wish I had the time to dedicate to scanning feeds constantly for stuff like this.

    I haven't been posting about this for two reasons: first, because hearing that stuff like this is going on within the United States of America to decent people who haven't done anything upsets me greatly. There is simply no reason to mistreat people like this, all it …

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