Non-Prophet

Administrative Districs in Baghdad

Wikipedia:

Moktada al-Sadr Calls for Peace

This was billed -- at least in our media -- as the death blow to the Mahdi, and the moment in which we'd see the Iraqi military come into its own. Resistance was far more than what was expected and even with al-Maliki personally overseeing the operation we saw it beginning to need intervention from the US a few days back. Now, with al-Sadr securing a cease fire with concessions, who won? Who lost? What does this all mean for the road ahead?

I really want to know what you think, but my take on it is that al-Sadr won by securing support in the government, by knowing when to quit -- short of bringing the United States in hardcore -- and by coming off as a benevolent peacemaker/savior to the people and families affected. He let Maliki get off in the face of a serious problem , and instead of being decimated Sadr is probably stronger today and more legitimate than ever. "The attack has been repulsed! Sadr has saved us!"

nytimes.co:

BAGHDAD — The Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr on Sunday called for his followers to stop fighting in Basra and in turn demanded concessions from Iraq’s government, after six days in which his Mahdi Army militia has held off an American-supported Iraqi assault on the southern port city.

The substance of Mr. Sadr’s statement, released Sunday afternoon, was hammered out in elaborate negotiations over the past few days with senior Iraqi officials, some of whom traveled to Iran to meet with Mr. Sadr, according to several officials involved in the discussions.

A Culture of Software Updates

It seems to me that over the last year or two we have entered an era of early continuous software updates. I have 4 computers at work (2 OS X Leopard, 2 WinXP) 2 at home (one OS X Leopard/boot-camped Vista and one Windows Vista) and between the 6 of them I seem to be continuously asked to update something. I mean if it isn't OS X, then iTunes wants to get freshened up. On Friday alone I updated Java on my XP machine, the iPhone SDK on 2 machines, Leopard wanted a couple of quick fixes, Aperture 2.0 decided the time was right to go to V2.1. Some of these downloads are massive.

Don't get me wrong, there is something nice about knowing that your favorite app or OS is being fixed, maintained and upgraded. The process is almost effortless, with the exception that Vista wants you to re-boot and gives you the option to do it now or get reminded again in less time than you'd like. But there seems to be a culture that has emerged that has caused me to spend more time clicking that I approve EULA's and on "OK" buttons than I do dealing with the spam menace. Can't these things just run in the background, or at least give me the option to flat out opt-in, and only hear about upgrades on applications that I deem as critical?

Dith Pran Dies at Age 65

I just watched "The Killing Fields" last week. It is a powerful movie about just how wrong things can go when a dictator tries to craft his own utopia. Cambodia in the 1970's stands as what must be one of the most severe failures of Marxist state-craft.

nytimes.com:

Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation.

He had been a journalistic partner of Mr. Schanberg, a Times correspondent assigned to Southeast Asia. He translated, took notes and pictures, and helped Mr. Schanberg maneuver in a fast-changing milieu. With the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, Mr. Schanberg was forced from the country, and Mr. Dith became a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian Communists.

Earth Hour 2008

I think the most successful promotion of this event came today when Google turned its search engine screen black. That is how I learned about it. The fact that it has spread around the world and brought darkness to the Sears Tower means that this is big and getting bigger. What a wonderful way to raise awareness of energy use and the threat of global warming.

cnn.com:

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- From Rome's Colosseum to the Sydney Opera House to the Sears Tower's famous antennas in Chicago, floodlit icons of civilization have gone dark for Earth Hour, a worldwide campaign to highlight the waste of electricity and the threat of climate change.

The environmental group WWF has urged governments, businesses and households to turn back to candle power for at least 60 minutes Saturday starting at 8 p.m. wherever they were.

The campaign began last year in Australia and traveled this year from the South Pacific to Europe in cadence with the setting of the sun.

"What's amazing is that it's transcending political boundaries and happening in places like China, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea," said Andy Ridley, executive director of Earth Hour. "It really seems to have resonated with anybody and everybody."

More of the Same from John McCain

I think about the last thing we need is another leader preaching the New American Century manifesto. Teaming up against the oppressed people of the world is not the path to peace. This is scary.

Bloomberg.com:

March 26 (Bloomberg) -- John McCain called for a new ``League of Democracies'' to advance western values and said he'd explore a free-trade agreement with the European Union in a speech outlining his foreign policy positions.

``We have to strengthen our global alliances as the core of a new global compact -- a League of Democracies -- that can harness the vast influence of the more than 100 democratic nations around the world to advance our values and defend our shared interests,'' McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.

Super3Boy to the Rescue

Some of you have heard me talk about my occasional passion for the free 3d modeling program Blender. It is truly an awesome application, allowing you to make 3D art and animations worthy of a Pixar film. There is one fairly large hurdle that must be overcome to enjoy its chocolatey goodness though, it is a bear to learn. The user interface initially comes off as a confusing maze of endless screens and options. The concepts are difficult to understand for the newbie 3D modeler. It is enough to send even the most enthusiastic entrant running away frustrated.

Fear not though, help has arrived. In what I've found to be the most user friendly and accessible set of tutorials available, Super3Boy has made it almost easy to get started modeling with Blender. He's made a series of videos and put them on YouTube that walk you through some of the basic techniques. He sounds young too, like a kid. Part of the fun in watching these movies is hearing this kid wonderfully describe the current topic while taking you through the Blender interface. He's entertaining in that way in which we love to marvel at a child protege play a violin, not to mention the constant thought spinning in the back of your head guiltily reminding you that if this kid can make a tutorial surely you can learn this damn thing. If he isn't actually a kid, my apologies. Perhaps he has the inverse of the vocal condition of that "Chocolate Rain" dude.

His video tutorials are all here. He maintains a blog here, and he even encourages folks watching his tutorials to ask questions and to post their Blender renderings on his BB found on his Nystic.com forum. The entrepreneurial little bugger is also working on a DVD containing more in depth tutorials that will be release shortly. Keep an eye out for it, I know I'm going to.

So now you can stop thinking that Blender has too much of a learning curve to bother with. Super3Boy has it in the bag and serves it up in an easy to digest pre-masticated package.

Those who aren't familiar with Blender, check out what some artists are doing with it.

ordb.org is back... sort of.

Not that I claim to know much about such things, but it looks like the defunct black listing service ordb.org is up and is blacklisting everything in sight. Our email server started refusing all mail here at work at ordb.org's recommendation. We fixed the problem by turning off blacklisting, but it had us scratching our heads for a few.

I suspect malicious children. Can anyone shed any light on what happened?

4,000 Dead (not counting Iraqis or Contractors)

This whole scene makes me sick. We've far exceeded the actual death toll from 9/11 in a war that seems to have no end, and which doesn't involve anyone who was involved in 9/11. We seem to be claiming some sort of victory with "The Surge," which to me seems only to be a saturation of military in a region that had already been largely cleansed via death or exodus. That, and we're paying the militias to cool it. I see no reason why what we're seeing now is nothing more than a temporary lull created by the surge, I can't see stability being presently built by the elected government. Bush said today that the war's outcome will "merit the sacrifice." I'm not as optimistic. I think this is all a bunch of bullshit that isn't working, not beyond a press minded lull that we bought. The surge is an imposition of a military state on a people in trouble, but lacks a solution to a problem that has no solution. Doom.

Stems Cells Used to Cure Parkinson's Disease in Mice

So when this technology finds its way into practical use for humans, how many morally outraged Christians are going to refuse the cure for their loved ones?

Bloomberg.com:

March 23 (Bloomberg) -- Researchers cured mice with a version of Parkinson's disease by treating them with brain cells made from clones of their own skin cells.

The researchers employed nuclear transfer, which involves swapping genetic material from one individual into an egg cell belonging to another. The same procedure was used to create Dolly the sheep, one of the first animals produced by cloning.

The findings, published today in the journal Nature Medicine, offer a glimpse into how the cloning technique might one day be used to develop therapies, as opposed to making copies of an individual. There are still hurdles to clear before the technique could be used in people with Parkinson's, said Mark Tomashima, a stem cell researcher at Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York.

[Off a tip from my beloved]