I wasn’t going to blog tonight. I really wasn’t. Tivo has three episodes of Columbo saved for me and Linette’s upstairs in bed with a cold, unable to veto even one of them…. I took a moment to check my e-mail though, and got something from Dave, my friend in Oregon. He was forwarding an English translation of a story that appeared in today’s edition of the Russian newspaper of record, Pravda. It’s a story about a UFO crashing in Iraq. Apparently, there are stories circulating, crazy stories about the US wanting to invade before Saddam has the opportunity to reverse-engineer the technology… Here’s a clip from the story:

Mohammed Hajj al-Amdar said on the basis of strange stories coming out of that valley: “Saddam gave the aliens sanctuary, so that they couldn’t be captured by Americans. Nobody can reach the citadel Qalaat-e-Julundi at night. They say that the aliens created “watchdogs” for Saddam. The aliens took ordinary desert scorpions and used their bio-engineering to grow the scorpions to giant size. Scorpions of a cow-size! They are wonderful watchdogs: they blend in with the desert, swiftly and silently move on their warm-blooded prey for a decisive attack. Luckless intruders hear just some strange sound from behind stones, then a pincer crushes their necks, another pincer crushes their legs; then the victims is slammed to the ground and beaten with a barbed tail six or seven times. Death comes almost immediately.”

For the whole story, the story that our American media isn’t giving us, follow this link.

The flesh on my finger, right below my wedding ring, is rotting and dying. I’m sitting here, smelling it as I type, hoping it’s not somehow symbolic.

I think my marriage is a happy one. I feel good about it. And I think that Linette feels good about it. But, there’s this persistent stink and it’s causing me to wonder.

They said it was dead, but maybe it’s not. This article from Salon agrees with me that Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program may not be completely, stake through the heart, dead. Here’s a clip from the article:

But while Congress asks for reports, TIA is already steaming forward. According to people with knowledge of the program, TIA has now advanced to the point where it’s much more than a mere “research project.” There is a working prototype of the system, and federal agencies outside the Defense Department have expressed interest in it.

Most alarmingly, an examination of the research that has been conducted so far into TIA reveals that even while the project has been charging ahead, only token attention has been paid to perhaps its most critical aspect — privacy and civil liberties protection. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is taking the lead on TIA, has stymied the efforts of outside groups to find out more about TIA’s protections.

human brain stands up to assault by gigantic, bloodthirsty robot monster
Grand chess champion, Gary Kasparov, has won the first of a best of five series against Deep Junior, the IBM-fathered offspring of Deep Blue, the machine that emasculated him in May 1997. The New Scientist ran a story that explained how he did it. Here’s a clip:

Kasparov defeated his new opponent, Deep Junior, after apparently spotting a weakness in his opponent’s “opening book”, or repertoire of early moves. Kasparov’s ninth move maneuvered Deep Junior into an unfamiliar position causing the computer to spend 20 minutes searching for its next move.

I love the fact that a man’s mind could make a super-computer spin its wheels for twenty minutes… I suspect this is one of the last opportunities we’ll have to celebrate a human victory over a machine. Relish it.

I’ve got lots more that I want to tell you about, but I need to sleep now. Goodnight.