Remember not to look up

Nick Wingfield and Somini Sengupta have an article in The New York Times about the latest drone technology:

Daniel Gárate’s career came crashing to earth a few weeks ago. That’s when the Los Angeles Police Department warned local real estate agents not to hire photographers like Gárate, who was helping sell luxury property by using a drone to shoot sumptuous aerial movies. Flying drones for commercial purposes, the police said, violated federal aviation rules. “I was paying the bills with this,” said Gárate, who recently gave an unpaid demonstration of his drone in the Southern California suburb of Woodland Hills.
His career will soon get back on track. A new federal law, recently signed by the President, compels the Federal Aviation Administration to allow drones to be used for all sorts of commercial endeavors, from selling real estate and dusting crops, to monitoring oil spills and wildlife, and even shooting Hollywood films. Local police and emergency services will also be freer to send up their own drones.
But while businesses, and drone manufacturers especially, are celebrating the opening of the skies to these unmanned aerial vehicles, the law raises new worries about how much detail the drones will capture about lives down below, and what will be done with that information. Safety concerns like midair collisions and property damage on the ground are also an issue.
American courts have generally permitted surveillance of private property from public airspace. But scholars of privacy law expect that the likely proliferation of drones will force Americans to re-examine how much surveillance they are comfortable with. “As privacy law stands today, you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy while out in public, nor almost anywhere visible from a public vantage,” said Ryan Calo, director of privacy and robotics at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University. “I don’t think this doctrine makes sense, and I think the widespread availability of drones will drive home why to lawmakers, courts, and the public.”
Some questions likely to come up: can a drone flying over a house pick up heat from a lamp used to grow marijuana inside, or take pictures from outside someone’s third-floor fire escape? Can images taken from a drone be sold to a third party, and how long can they be kept?
Drone proponents say the privacy concerns are overblown. Randy McDaniel, chief deputy of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department in Conroe, Texas, near Houston, whose agency bought a drone to use for various law enforcement operations, dismissed worries about surveillance, saying everyone everywhere can be photographed with cellphone cameras anyway. “We don’t spy on people,” he said. “We worry about criminal elements.”
Still, the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups are calling for new protections against what the ACLU has said could be “routine aerial surveillance of American life.”
Under the new law, within ninety days, the FAA must allow police and first responders to fly drones under 4.4 pounds, as long as they keep them under an altitude of four hundred feet and meet other requirements. The agency must also allow for “the safe integration” of all kinds of drones into American airspace, including those for commercial uses, by 30 September 2015. And it must come up with a plan for certifying operators and handling airspace safety issues, among other rules.
The new law, part of a broader financing bill for the FAA, came after intense lobbying by drone makers and potential customers.
The agency probably will not be making privacy rules for drones. Although federal law until now had prohibited drones except for recreational use or for some waiver-specific law enforcement purposes, the agency has issued only warnings, never penalties, for unauthorized uses, a spokeswoman said. The agency was reviewing the law’s language, the spokeswoman said.
For drone makers, the change in the law comes at a particularly good time. With the winding-down of the war in Afghanistan, where drones have been used to gather intelligence and fire missiles, these manufacturers have been awaiting lucrative new opportunities at home. The market for drones is valued at $5.9 billion and is expected to double in the next decade, according to industry figures. Drones can cost millions of dollars for the most sophisticated varieties to as little as $300 for one that can be piloted from an iPhone.
“We see a huge potential market,” said Ben Gielow of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a drone maker trade group.
For Patrick Egan, who represents small businesses and others in his work for the Remote Control Aerial Photography Association in Sacramento, the new law also can’t come fast enough. Until 2007, when the federal agency began warning against nonrecreational use of drones, he made up to two thousand dollars an hour using a drone to photograph crops for farmers, helping them spot irrigation leaks. “I’ve got organic farmers screaming for me to come out,” he said.
The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department in Texas bought its fifty-pound drone from Vanguard Defense Industries, a company founded by Michael Buscher, who built drones for the Army, and then sold them to an oil company whose ships were threatened by pirates in the Gulf of Aden. The company custom-built the drone, which takes pictures by day and senses heat sources at night. It cost $300,000, a fraction of the cost of a helicopter.
McDaniel said his SWAT team could use it for reconnaissance, or to manage road traffic after a big accident. He said he regretted that he didn’t have it a few months ago, to search for a missing person in a densely wooded area. Buscher, meanwhile, said he was negotiating with several police agencies. “There is tremendous potential,” he said. “We see agencies dipping their toes.”
The possibilities for drones appear limitless. Last year, Cy Brown of Bunkie, Louisiana began hunting feral pigs at night by outfitting a model airplane with a heat-sensing camera that soared around his brother’s rice farm, feeding live aerial images of the pigs to Brown on the ground. Brown relayed the pigs’ locations by radio to a friend with a shotgun. He calls his plane the Dehogaflier, and says it saves him time wandering in the muck looking for skittish pigs. “Now you can know in fifteen minutes if it’s worth going out,” said Brown, an electrical engineer.
Earlier this month, in Woodland Hills, Gárate, the photographer, demonstrated his drone by flicking a hand-held joystick and sending the five thousand dollar machine hovering high above a tennis court. A camera beneath the drone recorded lush, high-definition video of the surrounding property.
Bill Kerbox, a real estate agent in Malibu who hired Gárate for several shoots before the LAPD crackdown, said that aerial video had helped him stand out from his competitors, and that the loss of it had been painful.
Gárate, for now, plans to work mainly in his native Peru, where he has used his drone to shoot commercials for banks. He said he was approached by paparazzi last year about filming the reality television star Kim Kardashian’s wedding using a drone, but turned down the offer. “Maybe the FAA should give a driver’s license for this, with a flight test,” he said. “Do a background check to make sure I’m not a terrorist.”

Rico says he hopes to use one of these, owned by his friend Derrick, to shoot a Civil War reenactment during the Sesquicentennial...

History for the day

On 18 February 1861, Jefferson Davis was sworn in as President of the Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Alabama.

Who knew?

Rico says his friend Doug forwards this information:

What is the main ingredient of WD-40?
(Before you read to the end, does anybody know what the main ingredient  of WD-40 is? Don't lie and don't cheat. )

I had a neighbor who bought a new pickup. I got up very early one Sunday morning and saw that someone had sprayed red paint all around the  sides of his beige truck, for some unknown reason.  I went over, woke him up, and told him the bad news. He was very upset and was trying to figure out what to do; probably nothing until Monday morning, since nothing was open.
Another neighbor  came out and told him to get some WD-40 and clean it off.  It removed the unwanted paint  beautifully and did not harm the paint job on the truck.  I was impressed!   Who knew? 'Water Displacement #40'.
The  product began from a search for a rust preventative solvent and degreaser to protect missile parts. WD-40 was created in 1953 by three technicians at the San Diego Rocket Chemical Company. Its name comes from the project, to find a 'water displacement' compound. They were successful with the fortieth formulation, thus WD-40. The Convair  Company bought it in bulk to protect their Atlas missile parts.
Ken East (one of the original founders) says there's nothing in WD-40 that can hurt you. When you read the 'shower  door' part, try it. It's the first thing that has ever cleaned that spotty shower  door.  If yours is plastic, it  works just as well as glass. It's a miracle! Then  try it on your stove top... Viola! It's now shinier than it's ever been. You'll be amazed.

WD-40 uses:
1. Protects silver from tarnishing.
2. Removes road tar and grime from cars.
3. Cleans and  lubricates guitar strings.
4. Gives floors that 'just-waxed' sheen without making them slippery.
5. Keeps flies off cows.
6. Restores and cleans chalkboards.
7. Removes lipstick stains.
8. Loosens stubborn zippers.
9. Untangles jewelry chains.
10. Removes stains from stainless steel sinks.
11. Removes dirt and grime from the barbecue grill.
12. Keeps ceramic/terra cotta garden pots from oxidizing.
13. Removes tomato stains from clothing.
14. Keeps glass shower doors free of water spots.
15. Camouflages scratches in ceramic and marble floors.
16. Keeps scissors working smoothly.
17. Lubricates noisy door hinges on vehicles and doors in  homes.
18. Removes black scuff marks from the kitchen floor. Use WD-40 for those nasty tar and scuff marks on flooring. It doesn't seem to harm the finish and you won't have to scrub nearly as hard to get them off. Just remember to open some windows if you have a lot of marks.
19. Bug guts will eat away the finish on your car if not removed quickly; use WD-40.
20. Gives a children's  playground gym slide a shine for a superfast slide.
21. Lubricates gear shift and mower deck lever for ease of handling on riding mowers.
22. Rids kids' rocking chairs and swings of squeaky noises.
23. Lubricates tracks in sticking home windows and makes them easier to open..
24. Spraying an umbrella stem makes it easier to open and close.
25. Restores and cleans padded leather dashboards in vehicles, as well as vinyl bumpers.
26. Restores and cleans roof racks on vehicles.
27. Lubricates and stops squeaks in electric fans
28. Lubricates wheel sprockets on tricycles, wagons, and bicycles for easy handling.
29. Lubricates fan belts on washers and dryers and keeps them running smoothly.
30. Keeps rust from forming on saws and saw blades and other tools.
31. Removes splattered grease on stove.
32. Keeps bathroom mirrors from fogging.
33. Lubricates prosthetic limbs.
34. Keeps pigeons off the balcony (they hate the smell).
35. Removes all traces of duct tape.
36. Folks even spray it  on their arms, hands, and knees to relieve arthritis pain.
37. Florida 's favorite use: 'cleans and removes love bugs from grills and bumpers.'
38. The favorite use in the state of New York: WD-40 protects  the Statue of Liberty from the elements.
39. WD-40 attracts fish. Spray a little on live bait or lures and you will be catching the big one in no time; also, it's a lot cheaper than the chemical attractants that are made for just that purpose. Keep in mind though, using chemical-laced baits or lures for fishing are not allowed in some states.
40. Use it for fire ant bites. It takes the sting away immediately and stops the itch.
41. WD-40 is great for removing crayon from walls. Spray on the mark and wipe with a clean rag.
42. Also, if you've discovered that your teenager has washed and dried  a tube of lipstick with a load of laundry, saturate the lipstick spots with WD-40 and rewash. Presto! The lipstick is gone!
43. If your car won't start because you drove through some deep water, spray WD-40 on the distributor cap; it will displace the moisture and allow the car to start.

PS: The basic ingredient is fish oil. 

Gotta see it to believe it

Rico says that, first off, you have amazing Chinese scenery. Add to that some crazy Americans in flying suits and video cameras, and you've got a truly mind-bending video.

Hell, indeed

Maureen Dowd also has a regular op-ed column in The New York Times; this one is about religion:

As though Bill Donohue didn’t have enough to be cranky about. The perpetually apoplectic Catholic League president is on the rampage about President Obama trying to make sure women working at Catholic institutions get insurance coverage for birth control.
What’s wrong with the rhythm method anyway? That’s how I got here.
Donohue took time out from hyperventilating against the President to hyperventilate against the rapper Nicki Minaj. He was in a snit about Minaj arriving at the Grammys in a red Versace cloak resembling a Cardinal’s, arm in arm with an actor dressed like the Pope, and her over-the-top exorcist-themed number. “Perhaps the most vulgar part was the sexual statement that showed a scantily clad female dancer stretching backwards while an altar boy knelt between her legs in prayer,” Donohue bristled.
The rapper was debuting a song called Roman Holiday, featuring one of her alter-egos, Roman Zolanski. She has described Roman as her gay twin sister and a lunatic, born of rage who comes out when she’s angry (or hyping a new album).
It was more bizarre than outrageous, like bad vintage Madonna now that the Material Girl has gone mainstream. The only good thing about it, as Marc Hogan wrote in Spin, was the chance that her devilish song might make “Bill Donohue’s head spin while spewing green vomit.”
The satanic rap was merely the latest illustration of the renewed fascination with the ancient rite of exorcism. After languishing in the Catholic Church, exorcisms are back in fashion. In 2004, worried about the rise of the occult, Pope John Paul II asked Cardinal Ratzinger, the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI, to direct bishops around the world to appoint and train exorcists in their dioceses.
The infusion of Hispanic and African Catholics to the US, with their more intense belief in the supernatural, has brought a fresh demand. In 2010, American bishops held a conference in Baltimore on the topic.
Last month, the low-budget shaky-cam exorcist movie, The Devil Inside, scored big despite sulfurous reviews. And, in a new book, Father Gabriele Amorth, the exorcist for the diocese of Rome— who has complained that yoga and Harry Potter are evil— claims that Pope Benedict exorcised two possessed men who were howling and banging their heads on the ground by blessing them. The Vatican demurred that the Pope has no knowledge of this. But Father Amorth wrote that “simply the presence of the Pope can soothe and in some way help the possessed in their fight against the one who possesses them.”
In an interview in October with The Huffington Post, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty said his book and the Linda Blair movie resonated as an affirmation that “man is something more than a neuron net”, that “there is an intelligence, a creator whom C.S. Lewis famously alluded to as ‘the love that made the worlds.’”
I recently visited Father Gary Thomas, the pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in Saratoga in Northern California, an exorcist who was the focus of a book by Matt Baglio called The Rite that became a movie last year with Anthony Hopkins. It chronicled Thomas’ demonology and exorcism training in Rome.
Father Thomas thinks the time is ripe for exorcisms because “our country is culturally at war with itself over whether or not it believes in God” and because “there is a growing amount of paganism; New Age practices like crystals, reiki, witchcraft, black magic, tarot cards, ouija boards, seances.” He said he knows of more than fifty exorcising priests in America. Sitting in his office, holding a red book titled De Exorcismis Et Supplicationibus Quibusdam, (Of Exorcisms and Certain Supplications), he conceded that, despite 75 exorcisms on eight people, his success has been limited. (Nicki Minaj told Ryan Seacrest that her mock exorcism failed, too, because Roman was too “amazing” to succumb to holy water.) The pastor explained that “soul wounds”, such as sexual abuse, pornography, and sexual addiction, can serve as “doorways” to demonic attachment and possession. “Demons are always looking for people who have broken relationships and no relationships,” he said. “That’s why sexual abuse mixed with the occult is the perfect cocktail. Demons don’t have corporeal bodies like we do. They can travel faster, are far more intelligent and have a much keener sense of free will.” He’s not frightened of meeting a violent end like Fathers Merrin and Karras. “I’m protected,” he said. “I go to confession before an exorcism.” The 58-year-old priest does, however, think that Satan has tried to tempt him with “lustful urges. I would be in my car and have this visual rush,” he said, “and I’m like: ‘Where the hell did that come from?’”
Hell?

Rico says this is yet another of the major delusions that being religious creates...

The end of an era, maybe

Thomas L. Friedman has an op-ed column in The New York Times about the situation in Syria:

Watching the Syrian army pummel the Syrian town of Homs to put down the rebellion there against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad is the remake of a really bad movie that starred Bashar’s father, Hafez, exactly thirty years ago this month. I know. I saw the original.
It was April of 1982 and I had just arrived in Beirut as a reporter for The New York Times. I quickly heard terrifying stories about an uprising that had happened in February in the Syrian town of Hama, led by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. Word had it (there were no cellphones or the internet in those days) that then-President Hafez al-Assad had quashed the rebellion by shelling whole Hama neighborhoods, then dynamiting buildings, some with residents still inside. That May, I got a visa to Syria, just as Hama had been reopened. The Syrian regime was “encouraging” Syrians to drive through the broken town and reflect on its meaning. So I just hired a cab and went.
It was stunning. Whole swaths of buildings had, indeed, been destroyed and then professionally steamrolled into parking lots the size of football fields. If you kicked the ground, you’d come up with scraps of clothing, a tattered book, a shoe. Amnesty International estimated that as many as twenty thousand people were killed there. I had never seen brutality at that scale, and, in a book I wrote later, I gave it a name: Hama Rules.
Hama Rules are no rules at all. You do whatever it takes to stay in power and you don’t just defeat your foes. You bomb them in their homes and then you steamroll them so that their children and their children’s children will never forget and never even dream of challenging you again.
Well, thirty years later, the children of those Syrian children have forgotten. They’ve lost their fear. This time around, though, it is not just the Muslim Brotherhood rebelling in one town. Now it is youths from all over Syria. Navtej Dhillon and Tarik Yousef, the editors of Generation in Waiting: The Unfulfilled Promise of Young People in the Middle East, note that more than a hundred million individuals between the ages of 15 and 29 live in the Middle East, up from less than 67 million in 1990, and much of what their governments have promised them by way of jobs, marriage opportunities, apartments, and a voice in their own future have not materialized. This is what sparked all these volcanic uprisings.
But Syria is not Norway. The quest for democracy is not the only drama playing out there. Syria is also a highly tribalized and sectarian-divided country. Its Shi'ite-leaning Alawite minority— led by the Assads and comprising twelve percent of the population— dominates the government, army and security services. Sunni-Muslim Syrian Arabs are 75 percent, Christians ten percent and Druze, Kurds, and others make up the rest. While Syria’s uprising started as a nonsectarian, nonviolent expression of the desire by young Syrians to be treated as citizens, when Assad responded with Hama Rules it triggered a violent response. This has brought out the sectarian fears on all sides. Now it is hard to tell where the democratic aspirations of the rebellion stop and the sectarian aspirations— the raw desire by Syria’s Sunni majority to oust the Alawite minority— begin.
As a result, most Alawis are rallying to Assad, as are some Sunnis who have benefitted from his regime, particularly in Aleppo and Damascus, the capital. These pro-regime Alawis and Sunnis see the chaos and soccer riots in Egypt and say to themselves: “Assad or chaos? We’ll take Assad.” What to do? Ideally we’d like a peaceful transition from Assad’s one-man rule to more pluralistic consensual politics. We do not want a civil war in Syria, which could destabilize the whole region. Remember this: Egypt implodes, Libya implodes, Tunisia implodes. Syria explodes.
I don’t know what is sufficient to persuade Assad to cede power to a national unity government, but I know what is necessary: He has to lose the two most important props holding up his regime. One is the support of China, Iran, and Russia. There, the UN, the European Union, and Arab and Muslim countries need to keep calling out Moscow, Beijing, and Teheran for supporting Assad’s mass killing of unarmed civilians. China, Iran, and Russia don’t care about US condemnation, but they might care about the rest of the world’s.
The other prop, though, can only be removed by Syrians. The still-fractious Syrian opposition has to find a way to unify itself and also reach out to the Alawis, as well as Syria’s Christian and Sunni merchants, and guarantee that their interests will be secure in a new Syria so they give up on Assad. Without that, nothing good will come of any of this. The more the Syrian opposition demonstrates to itself, to all Syrians and to the world that it is about creating a pluralistic Syria— where everyone is treated as an equal citizen— the weaker Assad will be and the more likely that a post-Assad Syria will have chance at stability and decency. The more the Syrian opposition remains fractured, the stronger Assad will be, the more some Syrians will cling to him out of fear of chaos and the more he will get away with Hama Rules.

Rico says the man is cogent and erudite, as ever. But one is tempted, if one is addicted to puns like Rico, to call all this Assad (a sad, get it?) story...

History for the day

On 17 February 1972, President Richard M. Nixon departed on his historic trip to China.

Coincidence in Berwyn

Rico says that, when you walk around with an eyepatch, people ask you about it. This time, however, it was someone in Yang's Market, where he happened to be shopping, which led him to this story by Richard Ilgenfritz in Main Line Media News:

One suspect waived his hearing and all charges were held over on 1 February for a second suspect in the violent robbery of a 74-year-old Berwyn business owner in January.
Octavio Sandoval, eighteen, and a seventeen-year-old boy are charged with the 18 January robbery of Yong Yang, owner of Yang’s Market. Both suspects were in district court the morning of 1 February for their preliminary hearings. The boy waived his right to a hearing; Sandoval did not.
Police say Yang closed his business on the night of 18 January and walked to his van. While sitting in his van, a man he described as white Hispanic entered the van through a passenger-side door. He was waving a knife with one hand and trying to cover his face with the other. While Yang was yelling at the first man, a second male, described as white, walked in front of the van.
That's when, police say, the first man, later identified as Sandoval, punched Yang in the face. The second, later identified as the teen, pushed Yang’s head forward and took his wallet.
Since their arrests, both suspects have been in prison, Sandoval on $100,000 bail and the teen on $75,000 bail.
In the hearing for Sandoval, Easttown police Lieutenant Scott Albee testified that he spoke with Sandoval in the days after the robbery. In court, Albee had with him a signed confession from Sandoval.
However, the purpose of a preliminary hearing is for the prosecution to show, first, that a crime has been committed and, second, that there is evidence that the arrestee is the person who committed it. Because they hadn’t yet shown the court that a crime had been committed, Albee stepped down from the witness stand and the state’s second witness, John Bullock, was brought up. Bullock is Yang’s son-in-law. He helped his father-in-law write out a description of what had happened. Yang speaks Korean, but only some English.
In the affidavit that Bullock helped Yang prepare, he said that Sandoval worked for him as a dishwasher for a couple of weeks one summer. He then goes on to describe the robbery the same way it was described by police.
Albee then returned to the stand and read from the confession that Sandoval was said to have signed.
Although both Sandoval and Yang were present at the district court in Devon, neither testified.
Because he could be called as a future witness, the court agreed with the defense that Yang be sequestered outside the court while testimony was taking place. He, along with his daughter, waited outside while the hearing took place.
Sandoval, who was wearing the same clothing he had on when he was arrested, remained in court but did not speak. He also did not speak after the hearing as he was being taken back to prison by constables.
After District Magisterial Judge Thomas Tartaglio ordered all charges on Sandoval be held over for trial, the judge also denied a defense request to modify the bail.
At the boy’s hearing, which took place just before Sandoval’s, the defense also asked for a reduction in bail. Tartaglio was willing to grant a modification of a ten-percent provision on the $75,000, provided that the boy can be electronically monitored. That order would have to be finalized at the county level. So as the hearing came to an end, both suspects’ bail remained the same and both were taken back to prison.

Rico says that one little fact not mentioned in the article, though pointed out to him in the market, is that the question of the eyepatch came up because Yang now wears one, due to the fact that the beating cost him an eye. (Rico says that that should cost each of these idiots one of theirs, if possible, and fuck the Constitutional injunction against torture...) A discussion was had that, in a more perfect world, Yang, in reaching for his wallet, should have pulled out of a concealed holster his Glock 30 and put two .45-caliber rounds into each of these clowns, thus saving him an eye and the county a lot of money...

Alphabet soup

Rico says his friend Tex sends this one:

After being married for thirty years, a wife asked her husband to describe her. He looked at her for a while, then said: "You're A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K."
She asked: "What does that mean?"
He said: "Adorable. Beautiful. Cute. Delightful. Elegant. Foxy. Gorgeous. Hot."
She smiled happily and said: "Oh, that's so lovely. What about I, J, and K?"
He said: "I'm Just Kidding!"

The swelling in his eye is going down and the doctor is fairly optimistic about saving his testicles.

Better not try that in our Georgia

Thomas Fuller has an article in The New York Times about the latest bombings:

Bombs discovered in a house in Bangkok were similar to devices used earlier this week against Israeli diplomats in India and Georgia, Israel’s ambassador to Thailand said. “It’s almost the same system that was used in Delhi and in Tblisi, which leads us to think that they are connected,” Ambassador Itzhak Shoham said in a telephone interview.
Iranian officials immediately rejected the accusation, and a senior official for the Thai police said it was too early to draw any links to an explosion and a series of grenade blasts.
After the blasts, two men who Thai police officials said carried Iranian passports were captured. The officials also said two other suspects, whom they believed to be Iranians, were being sought, and that one of them had fled to neighboring Malaysia.
Israeli authorities believe that the discovery of explosives in Bangkok fits into a pattern of Iranian-backed attacks on Israeli targets. Shoham said he believed Bangkok had been chosen because it was a “soft target. It’s easy to come in and out, to rent a house,” he said. “Nobody pays attention to people coming and going.” Shoham said the devices seized in Bangkok used the same type of explosive as those in New Delhi and Tblisi, the Georgian capital, and were similarly outfitted with magnets that would allow them to be attached to metal objects. The devices used in the New Delhi attack and discovered on the car of an Israeli Embassy staff member in Tbilisi were attached to vehicles using magnets.
A senior Thai police official said he was not ready to draw conclusions. “We haven’t concluded yet that we have the same magnets used in the incidents in India or Georgia,” Lieutenant General Winai Thongsong, the head of the Bangkok Metropolitan Police, said in a telephone interview. “That’s only the conclusion from Israeli authorities.” General Winai said Thai police had not yet seen the magnets used in the other incidents. The devices seized in Thailand contained eight magnets, each the size of a penny, he said.
Wichean Potephosree, the head of Thailand’s national security council, said on Wednesday that the explosives found in Bangkok were designed to “target individuals. The destructive power did not reach the level of being able to target groups of people or big buildings,” Wichean said at a media briefing.
Witnesses said three men (photo), who appeared to be foreigners, fled a house in the Sukhumvit neighborhood of Bangkok after an explosion destroyed the house’s roof. One escaped and another was detained at the city’s main international airport. Witnesses and police officials said the third man, bleeding and apparently disoriented, lobbed two explosive devices as he left the house, one at a taxi and later another at approaching police officers. The second blast severed the man’s legs and wounded several Thais, they said. A fourth suspect, a woman, was not at the house at the time of the explosion, but is being sought because she rented the house and was occasionally seen there, the police said.
The reported nationalities of the two captured suspects raised suspicions that the suspects were part of what Israel has called a terrorist campaign by Iran and the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah aimed at Israeli targets, an accusation denied by Iran and Hezbollah.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, reiterated Tehran’s rejection of the allegations, calling them “baseless” and accusing Israel of trying to damage its relations with Thailand, The Associated Press reported.
Some terrorism experts urged caution about what they called a rush to judgment immediately after the explosions in Bangkok. Will Hartley, the editor of Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center in London, said in an email that “The attacks in India, Georgia, and now Thailand have all been highly amateurish, and lack the sophistication that would normally be expected from an operation” by either Hezbollah or Iran’s external operations wing, the Quds Force.
Israeli officials said that Israeli forensic teams were in New Delhi and Tbilisi, helping the local authorities investigate the bombings, a standard practice whenever Israelis are the targets of attacks abroad.
For the past month, Israeli and Thai security forces had been cooperating on a separate case of a possible planned terrorist attack. The Thai authorities said Israeli intelligence agents had warned that a group of people who appeared to be from Hezbollah were planning to strike tourist sites. Shortly after that warning, a Lebanese man was arrested at Bangkok’s main airport as he tried to leave the country.

Rico says that whoever is responsible for this better be looking over their shoulders; the Israelis have no sense of humor about this. Of course, neither do guys from the Georgia in the American South...

New stuff

Rico says he'd never heard of a Rodin coil until his friend Dusty asked him about it, but it's fascinating...

What else could you call him?

Rico says his arch-perv friend Dave sends along this photo of a dog with unfortunate markings but, appropriately, named Dick...


Anonymous has left an appropriate comment: "Woody"

History for the day

On 16 February 16, 1923, the burial chamber of King Tutankhamen's recently unearthed tomb (photo) was unsealed in Egypt.

Doesn't translate well, apparently

Michael Wines has an article in The New York Times about the latest out of China about Apple:

The authorities in a second Chinese city have begun seizing iPads from local retailers in an escalating trademark dispute between Apple and an insolvent maker of computer displays, Proview Technology.
The tablet computers are under “temporary impoundment” from retailers in Xuzhou, a city of 1.8 million people in coastal Jiangsu Province, Ma Dongxiao, a lawyer for Proview’s creditors and the company, said by telephone. State-owned CCTV television confirmed the seizures in Xuzhou.
The seizures follow a ruling in December in which a court in Shenzhen dismissed Apple’s contention that it owned the iPad name in China. Proview later asked the authorities in more than twenty Chinese cities to investigative whether iPads were being sold after the ruling, Ma said, a move that allows the authorities to impound the tablets until their inquiries are complete.
News reports said that about 45 iPads had been confiscated from outlets in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province, about 265 kilometers southwest of Beijing. Reports on the Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo said that other retailers had removed iPads from displays, though some were selling them under the counter.
Proview has also made a filing with the General Administration of Customs in China, Ma said, putting Apple on notice that the company could seek to block the export of iPads, should Proview’s ownership claims be upheld. In effect, the seizures and the filing are warnings by Proview of the havoc it could wreak unless Apple agrees to pay a large fee to settle the trademark fight.
The Chinese government is widely accused of ignoring what foreign intellectual property experts call the rampant theft of patents, trademarks and other creations like Hollywood films and computer software.
Paradoxically, however, China’s own intellectual property laws are so sweeping that they allow the government to ban the worldwide sale of any made-in-China product that is found to violate a Chinese patent, trademark, or other protection. Tens of millions of iPads have been manufactured in plants in Chengdu and Shenzhen since the tablet was introduced in April of 2010.
Moreover, because Chinese courts answer to the Communist Party, rulings can frequently be swayed by politics, personal relationships and other factors. “It’s the wild, wild East,” one lawyer said of China’s intellectual property environment in an interview Tuesday. The lawyer, who refused to be identified for fear of recrimination by government officials, said that a rush by foreign companies to shift manufacturing to China had left them exposed to draconian remedies not just in legitimate disputes, but in lawsuits brought by so-called trolls, who seek to exploit dubious property claims to extort settlements from global brands. “You can’t afford to lose a case in China,” said the lawyer.
Some specialists have called it unlikely that the Chinese government will shut down exports by a major multinational company, even one that lost an intellectual property case, because of the potential for diplomatic repercussions and an exodus of foreign corporations unwilling to put their operations at risk.
A spokesman for Apple could not be reached, but in the past the company has refused to comment on the dispute.
Proview, based in Hong Kong, was once one of the world’s biggest makers of computer displays. But it fell into financial difficulties and was delisted by the Hong Kong stock exchange in 2010. Proview trademarked the name IPAD in several countries in 2000, intending to use it for a Web-capable hand-held device, but the project was scrapped, said Ma, the lawyer for the company. Apple bought the rights to the name from a subsidiary in Taiwan in 2009.
Proview now contends that that sale did not cover its Shenzhen subsidiary, which had registered the trademark in China. The Shenzhen court rejected Apple’s argument against that in December, but Apple is appealing that ruling. Proview has filed another lawsuit in Shanghai; arguments in that case will be heard this month, Ma said.
Ma declined to say how much money the company and its creditors were seeking from Apple but said they were willing to settle the case “in or outside of court.”

Rico wonders how you say Psst, buddy, wanna iPad? in Chinese...

Brown study

Willie Brown was the mayor of San Francisco when Rico lived in Oakland, and Erica Goode has an article in The New York Times about him now:

Wilkes Bashford, of the renowned San Francisco clothing store that bears his name, places a John Lobb suede oxford, size 11, marked down to $1,650, on the table at Le Central. “It’s a gorgeous color,” says Willie Brown (photo), the former mayor of San Francisco and Bashford’s customer and close friend of 45 years. “I wouldn’t even call that burgundy. It’s headed for... It’s Bordeaux.”
“The color is the reason I brought them over,” Bashford says. “I wouldn’t push shoes at lunch otherwise.”
“Wilkes, that’s the most sensitive thing you’ve ever said,” Brown quips.
As repartee, it is pure Willie Lewis Brown Jr., perfected over the four decades he has been a central figure in the city’s political and social life, and served up for almost that long at Le Central, where Brown, Bashford, and a select group of others (Herb Caen, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist who died in 1997, was a founding member) have assembled every Friday since 1973 to talk politics, restaurants, real estate, children, grandchildren and the occasional pair of shoes.
The lunches are mentioned frequently in Brown’s own Chronicle column, Willie’s World. And in their way, the gatherings capture the qualities that have made him so lastingly compelling to both his fans and critics: his mischievous wit and infectious charm, his entrancement with power and celebrity, his fondness for five thousand dollar suits and $two thousand dollar shoes, his loyalty and, at times, imperiousness on full display.
He is now 77, turns 78 next month, and his eyesight has been diminished by retinitis pigmentosa. The political world in which he came of age as a Democrat in the State Assembly— a world of cross-the-aisle compromise and quid pro quo— has given way to Tea Party zeal and ideological intransigence.
But he has refused to creep quietly offstage. Since leaving public office in 2004 at the end of his second term as mayor— the worst day of his career, he says, because “that was my life, my whole life, my first, second, and third in my life”— he has remained a power broker, his influence still palpable.
His law firm represents prominent clients, among them Aecom, an engineering firm involved in San Francisco’s central subway project, and the California Online Poker Association. And he offers informal counsel to a stream of business executives, elected officials, and bureaucrats who breakfast with him at the St. Regis, where his apartment is on the 35th floor.
“There are so few people left around with institutional memory, and with a track record that makes that memory advisable,” he said in a recent interview. “I think that’s where I am, that’s who I am and that’s what I do.”
Along with Rose Pak, the Chinese-American community’s powerful organizer, and others, Brown helped usher Mayor Ed Lee into office in November. A pre-inaugural bash for four hundred guests that he hosted at the Palace Hotel’s Garden Court in January was, in contrast to most of Brown’s parties, not a black-tie affair; to spare Lee from having to rent a tuxedo, he said. He rises each morning at 5:30 and forces himself to go to the gym; “If I feel any little tweak anywhere, I stop,” he said.
He follows politics assiduously. He gets along well with Governor Jerry Brown, as he did with his Republican predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and retains strong ties to Senator Dianne Feinstein. The Republican presidential race inspires him to punditry (On Mitt Romney: “If Newt Gingrich really wants to get under Romney’s skin, he ought to start calling him by his first name: Willard”; On Newt Gingrich: “Extremely bright, volatile, opinionated”; On Rick Santorum: “a total and complete misfit for elective office”; On Ron Paul: “He is probably the most honest”).
Yet, Brown laments the intolerance that now dominates Washington and Sacramento. “Representative democracy is handicapped by preconditions,” he said. “The system now, the participants, are all geared to whether or not their side wins, not whether or not their side is best for the system. That’s a dramatic change from my day.”
Voters, he noted in his 2008 autobiography, Basic Brown, wanted “politicians who could make things work and who could work with each other”.
Brown’s determination to stay involved has kept his appeal undiminished; the curious still drop in at Le Central to catch a glimpse of Da Mayor, and every stroll through North Beach or Nob Hill draws a shower of greetings.
“Californians like good entertainers, and Willie is as much Hollywood as Sacramento,” said James Richardson, the author of a 1996 biography of Brown.
Notorious for bringing a different date to every party, he is still surrounded by women: Sonya Molodetskaya, his girlfriend of nine years; Blanche Brown, his wife and the mother of his three adult children, who remains a friend though they have lived separately for a quarter-century; Sydney, a fourth child, ten, who, already fond of high-end apparel, appears to rule his life.
But his continued public presence has also kept alive the ardor of his critics. As mayor and during the almost fifteen years he served as speaker of the California Assembly, where he reigned as the self-declared Ayatollah, he was admired for his negotiating skills— as adept at working with Republicans as with Democrats—his loyalty to friends and expert filleting of enemies. But he also drew criticism for his use of political patronage and for what some saw as shady backroom deals. He was investigated by the FBI more than once; no indictments resulted. He once joked, a former colleague said, that the “e” in email stood for “evidence”.
Now that he is out of office, the critics have focused on his column, arguing that he uses it to promote clients’ interests. “People read this stuff and they actually think here’s this nonpartisan retired mayor,” said Aaron Peskin, a former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the chairman of the local Democratic Party. “They don’t realize that he’s on people’s payrolls and has access to the mayor and the ability to needle people or destroy them.”
But Brown has always been unapologetic about his style, be it in politics or business, and he seems almost delighted at the persisting barbs. They are proof he is still in the game. “I’m sorry that he hasn’t been successful in many of the things he’s tried to be,” Brown said of Peskin. “The paper asked me to share my world and I am sharing my world. Food, taxis, clothing, friendship, movies, stories; that’s my world. I am not a journalist. I’m not much of a writer. But I’m a good storyteller. And fact-checking won’t help. So there.”
Brown’s friends and even some journalists who tried unsuccessfully over the years to nail him for improprieties, say they think that much of the criticism is driven by envy or racism.
“I think he gets a lot of cheap shots for those reasons,” said Don Solem, a political analyst and president of Solem & Associates, a public relations firm. “He leaves himself hanging out and people find ways to attack him.”
In fact, it can be hard to remember that behind the Brioni suits, the trendy restaurants, the endless fund-raisers and celebrity events, is the young boy who grew up in segregated Mineola, Texas, in the 1940s, his grandmother once a slave, his mother a domestic servant, who had to scrabble for everything he achieved.
Brown, though, has not forgotten. Asked what the expensive clothing means to him, he says: “It’s my golf game, it’s my pleasure craft, it’s my Bohemian Club, it’s my annual vacation. It’s all the things that everyone else does and I do them in one place.” He confesses to using a clothes brush on his suit each day and getting annoyed with himself “when I don’t get it exactly right”, when the color is wrong, or the fabrics do not quite match. How much of this can be traced to his childhood deprivation? “All of it, all of it, all of it,” he says.
When the plates have been taken away at Le Central, Brown stops in at Bashford’s store to try on the suede oxfords. “That’s a good-looking shoe,” he says. “You know what you’d wear them with, though? A very pale gray.”
“Obviously it’s not going to be a shoe that every man is going to buy and understand,” a salesman tells him.
“Okay, okay, I’ll take them,” Brown says.

Rico says it's always good to be the Black Prince...

Not the right Larry Jordan

Larry Jordan has a blog with a post about Final Cut:

Apple has announced the latest update to Final Cut Pro X. Following its announcement last September that the next major version of the software would include support for multicam editing and broadcast monitoring, this update delivers on that promise.
This free update, available in the App Store, includes:

Project import from FCP 7 to FCP X (via a 3rd-party utility)
Clip relinking
Multicam
Layered Photoshop import
Broadcast monitor output
And dozens of other features

You can read the rest of his column here and more about FCP here.

Rico says it's not the Larry Jordan he knew (because he's dead), but this will be of interest to those of us who like video...

Oops is now a criminal term

A.G.Sulzberger has an article in The New York Times about another guy who thought he got away with it:

As she listened to the outlandish story pour out, slightly slurred, from her new husband’s mouth, Jessica King dismissed the tale of his family’s two-decade run from the law as the product of an overactive imagination and too many drinks. The couple had been married two months, and now Lee King was telling her that his father, a balding local cable technician (photo), was actually an international fugitive who had staged one of England’s most infamous bank heists.
A few weeks later, on 28 December, all doubts vanished. That night, she said her father-in-law appeared at the newlyweds’ home, grabbed her arm and, leaning in to fix his eyes on hers, warned her to keep quiet. “I know you know,” she said he told her in his native British accent. “I will kill you. I will bloody kill you.” A day earlier, King, who recounted these conversations in an interview, had been shocked to discover that her husband’s claims might in fact be true.
Sitting at a computer with two friends who confirmed her account, she discovered an article about a famous 1993 robbery in England with a picture of the suspect, an armored car driver who made off with the equivalent of $1.5 million and disappeared with his wife and infant son, Lee, into the United States.
The man in the photo, identified as Edward Maher, was younger and thinner, with a full head of dark hair, but he was unmistakably her father-in-law, whom she knew as Michael.
After almost twenty years as a wanted man in England, the suspect the British tabloids called Fast Eddie saw his restless run from the law come to an unexpected end last week, his tale of international intrigue emerging in startling contrast to his ordinary life in this mostly rural corner of southwest Missouri.
In a few frenetic days the case was cracked, nearly botched, then brought to an unlikely close. Maher, who had prepared to flee after being accidentally tipped off about the investigation by a police officer, agreed to be taken into custody and acknowledged his real identity, according to court documents.
The distance between his worlds was brought into sharp relief when the Ozark police tried to notify their British counterparts, only to discover that their phone plan did not allow overseas dialing.
After years of tight-lipped caution, Maher, 56, was brought down by his talkative son, the 22-year-old King, who told his wife, she said, that he had been trained to lie as a child to protect the family. Despite that, several people say, King repeatedly shared his most carefully guarded secret, one so unbelievable that for years no one took him at his word. That changed on 6 February when King, increasingly terrified of her husband as well as his father, tipped off the local police about the family.
In an interview King denied his wife’s version of events, saying he learned about his family’s past only last week when his parents showed him his real birth certificate. That, he said, is how he learned his real last name was Brett, his mother’s last name, and not— as is tattooed on both his and his wife’s wrists— King.
But in the hours after learning that his father’s secret had been revealed, King sent his wife a barrage of irate text messages accusing her of telling the police, “things only you know”.  In one of the messages, which she shared to support her story, he lamented his own role in exposing his father. “It’s my fault,” he wrote.
The crime was as carefully executed as the escape. On 22 January 1993, the authorities say, Maher disappeared, along with an armored car he was driving for Securicor. It was found abandoned a half mile from Lloyds Bank in Felixstowe, on England’s east coast, emptied of £1 million in bills and coins. His wife and three-year-old son had already left for the United States. The money was never found. Once in the country the family moved constantly, King said, with stops in New Hampshire, Colorado, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Maher worked regular jobs, including eight years at Nielsen, the television ratings company. His wife, Deborah Brett, who introduced herself variously as Sarah or Barbara (sometimes she couldn’t seem to keep the names straight), raised the two children, including a second son, Mark, who was born in the United States and is now a teenager.By all accounts, the family was private and unusually tight knit. Maher was quiet, with a stern demeanor and a fondness for racial slurs. He seemed to intimidate his family, particularly his doting wife. They spoke rarely, and then only vaguely, about England.
About five years ago the family moved to Ozark. As the fastest-growing city in Missouri, swelling from 4,000 to 18,000 in two decades as it became a popular bedroom community for Springfield, it was an easy place for a newcomer to go unnoticed. Living in a drab housing complex, the family showed few signs of wealth. Maher worked as a broadband technician at Suddenlink, a cable company. Brett cleaned apartments for extra income.
Maher filed for bankruptcy in 2010. Almost $35,000 in debt— more than he earned in a year— he listed assets worth just $3,655, including a Mercury Mountaineer with more than 250,000 miles on it. (Brett once told her son’s fiancée that the family used to have more money, but lost it in the stock market.) The family, however, found unexpected fortune last September when King won $100,000 on a scratch lottery ticket, according to the Missouri Lottery.Meanwhile the celebrated case of Fast Eddie had gone cold in England. A story last month in The Ipswich Star, marking the start of his twentieth year on the run, suggested that it was unlikely that the police would ever catch “the man who committed the perfect crime”.
Even though no one seemed to be on the tail of his father, a growing number of aggrieved former girlfriends were tracking King. Each had similar complaints: he was controlling, physically abusive and an almost pathological liar.
Though he told each, early in the relationship, that his family was here illegally, his explanations varied. “He told me that his dad was an assassin,” said Kayla Jacoby, who had a daughter with King during their two-year relationship.
King, who has a history of pretending to be a decorated military officer, told the same story to Amanda Zignego, his former fiancée and the mother of two of his children, later threatening to kill her if she shared the secret.
When Hannah Evans, his next fiancée, broke off their engagement last September, citing his constant deceptions, he came clean. His father, he confessed, was actually Fast Eddie, a fugitive who, he said, had hijacked an armored car in England. “I thought it was another lie,” said Evans, who is nine months pregnant with his child. “And of every lie he had ever told me, that was the one where I had to laugh at him.”
King, who is also pregnant and currently living in a safe house, said she turned him in, though denied doing so in text messages to him, out of fear for her safety. There was a £100,000 reward in the case, but it is unclear whether the offer was still valid.
David Overcast, the police officer who skeptically took her statement last week, said King seemed nervous  about her safety as she laid out her allegations. “I’ve heard a lot of stories over the years and this, right off the bat, was one of the craziest,” Officer Overcast said.
When Maher learned that he had been exposed, he was irate, threatening to kill the informant, according to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court. After vowing to run again, even spending the night at a motel with his wife and younger son, Maher said that he would not resist arrest, wrote Special Agent Jeffrey W. Atwood.
Maher is being held on federal charges of possessing firearms as an illegal immigrant. The court determined he was unable to pay for a lawyer. Conversations are under way about extradition, which could take months.
A week later, residents still shake their heads at the idea of an international manhunt ending in Ozark. “It’s kind of back to business as usual,” said the police chief, Lyle Hodges. “But it was pretty interesting there for a while.”

Rico says that they always screw up in the end...

Eleven is a funny name

It's probably pronounced Jhee or Zee, but Mark Landler and Edward Wong have an article in The New York Times about the future leader of China:

 China’s vice president and likely future leader, Xi Jinping, embarked on a get-to-know-you tour of the United States on Tuesday, with a day of meetings from the White House to the Pentagon. But he was met with blunt criticism from his host, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who declared that the United States and China could cooperate “only if the game is fair". Biden presented a long list of grievances— ranging from theft of intellectual property and human rights abuses to China’s refusal to back United Nations sanctions against Syria— during a toast at a State Department lunch, striking a sober and businesslike mood in a stately dining room decorated with pink and red roses for Valentine’s Day. “As Americans, we welcome competition,” Biden said as the Chinese vice president listened with a poker face. “But cooperation, as you and I have spoken about, can only be mutually beneficial if the game is fair.”
On the list of American concerns, Biden said, were China’s artificially depressed currency and conditions imposed by the Chinese that require foreign companies to turn over technology in return for doing business in China. He raised the issue of jailed Chinese dissidents and said about Syria: “We strongly disagreed with China and Russia’s veto of a resolution against the unconscionable violence being perpetrated” by the government.
Xi’s toast— a standard diplomatic script that repeated Chinese demands for “mutual respect” and urged the United States to avoid protectionism— added to the sense of an American lecture, as did the ensuing translation of Biden’s remarks, which stretched out his points in the pin-drop silence. Xi stood by with clasped hands and smiled. There were moments, though, when the room broke up in laughter at some of Biden’s quips.
The United States has been stiffening its language toward China in recent months, most notably in President Obama’s visit to Asia last November, and again during his State of the Union address last month, when he challenged China to play by the same economic rules as other countries.
But Biden’s remarks were a vivid reminder that Xi’s visit comes during an election year, when the White House is eager to appeal to manufacturing workers who view China’s trade policy with deep suspicion. It also wants to avoid being painted as weak on China by Republican challengers.
Some of Biden’s message echoed the meeting Xi had with Obama in the Oval Office, an administration official said. The president pressed him on trade practices and China’s currency, as well as on Syria, though he thanked China for its support of sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.
In a brief appearance with Xi, Obama was more diplomatic, though he, too, said he wanted to make sure “everybody is working by the same rules of the road when it comes to the world economic system.”
Balancing domestic political concerns over China with the desire to cultivate relations with a future Chinese leader was never going to be easy. Part of the challenge, officials said, was that the Chinese government did not want Xi, who is facing his own delicate political transition, to be exposed to questions. So it fell to Biden to register America’s complaints in the somewhat incongruous setting of a champagne toast.
“How do you have a visit where we don’t get into a tit-for-tat with the man who is going to be running China for the next ten years, which is something we don’t want to do, but is tougher to avoid during an election year?” said Jeffrey A. Bader, a former China policymaker in the White House. “Both sides are aware of that risk.”
Administration officials had earlier put particular emphasis on Xi’s stop at the Pentagon, where he met with Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin E. Dempsey. While he holds the title of vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission, Xi remains a civilian official, making his visit to the Pentagon unusual, officials said.
China and the United States have had a strained military relationship, with China balking at Obama’s reassertion of the American military presence in Asia. But the Pentagon said Xi and Panetta reaffirmed the need for a “healthy, stable and reliable military-to-military relationship”.
Xi’s trip also comes at a delicate moment in Chinese politics. Except for Xi and one other senior official, Li Keqiang, the members of the most powerful policy-making group in the Communist Party, the nine-member Standing Committee of the Politburo, are expected to leave their posts in the fall. The selection of their replacements is a secretive process.
So a kind of court intrigue is the backdrop for Xi’s trip, and even Xi, 58, does not have his position locked up yet. He is expected to replace President Hu Jintao, who has fulfilled the understood limit of ten years in office. But a serious misstep could derail his political ambitions, which have been carefully nurtured from his first political job in Beijing as an aide to an army general to stints in top party posts in the booming provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang.
Above all, it was economic issues that American officials were keen to address with Xi. After visiting the Pentagon, he showed up with Biden at the United States Chamber of Commerce to preside over a meeting of more than twenty business leaders from both countries. Outside, hundreds of protesters held up signs and flags and shouted for the Chinese to end their repressive policies in Tibet and Xinjiang. Inside, Biden again reiterated his desire that “the rules of the game are understood, agreed upon and followed.”
Xi acknowledged the economic concerns, and said: “The Chinese side has taken steps to address them and will continue to do so. We hope the US side will take steps to address Chinese concerns.” That included lifting restrictions on high-tech exports to China, he said.Cheng Li, a scholar of Chinese politics at the Brookings Institution, said: “I think we should remember that he has two different audiences. One is the international audience, the American audience, and the other is the domestic audience. For him, the domestic audience is more important.”
Xi’s visit began causing an uproar in parts of Washington, when he flew into town and attended a dinner whose guests included Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft. That day, hundreds of people gathered outside the White House to denounce Chinese policies in Tibet. Several protesters were arrested after they unfurled a large banner at Arlington Memorial Bridge that said Tibet Will Be Free. Some held up photos of Tibetans who had self-immolated in recent months out of frustration at Chinese rule; the most recent act was by a monk, Lobsang Gyatso.Other dissident voices have been making plans to be heard. Among them is Yu Jie, a prominent writer who left China for Washington with his family last month because he feared for his life, he said. Yu said he had been tortured by security officers and had lived under house arrest. “I want to express my opinion freely now that I’m in a free country,” Yu said in an interview. Like several prominent Chinese dissidents, Yu was a member of an unofficial Christian church in China.
Suzan D. Johnson Cook, the United States ambassador for international religious freedom, was denied a visa to visit China earlier this month, Representative Frank R. Wolf, a Republican from Virginia, said at a Congressional hearing on two Christian dissidents imprisoned in China, Gao Zhisheng and Guo Quan.

Rico says religion will get you in trouble in a country that professes not to have one...

History for the day

On 15 February 1898, the USS Maine blew up in Havana harbor, killing 260 crew members and escalating tensions with Spain. (Painting of the Maine by H.E. Verrill, painted in 1898, formerly in Rico's collection.)

That whirring sound...

...is Steve Jobs spinning somewhere at this, as reported by Abby Ohlheiser in Slate:

Apple is testing a version of the iPad with a smaller screen, say officials at some of the company's Asian suppliers. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple has shown screen designs for an eight-inch iPad (compared with the 9.7-inch iPad 2) to suppliers, and is working with companies that include Taiwan's AU Optronics and LG Display of South Korea on producing test versions of the new product, which may or may not actually go into production.
The test might indicate a departure from Apple's approach to tablets under Steve Jobs: the smaller size would be below the minimum size the late Apple co-founder believed was necessary for "great tablet apps". But a smaller tablet could also be more competitive in an increasingly full marketplace.
Samsung and Amazon are doing well in sales of smaller-size tablet offerings, including Amazon's seven-inch Kindle Fire and Samsung's Galaxy Tab, which comes in three sizes, including a seven-inch. As the Journal notes, however, Apple would also need to price competitively in the smaller tablet market to make any dent in current sales; compared with the Kindle Fire at $199, the lowest price one can pay for an iPad from Apple is a relatively whopping $499.
Apple is expected to launch its next version of the iPad in early March. The iPad 3, which will support G4 networks on both AT&T and Verizon, is also supposed to have a higher-resolution screen than the current iPad 2, with a screen of similar size.

Rico says it's another hide-and-watch product release from Apple...

Uzbekistan cracks down, or up

Rachael Levy has an article in Slate about Uzbekistan:

Uzbek youth can still give their sweethearts chocolate, but the government is hoping they do it in the name of Genghis Khan descendant Babur. Bitter singletons and coupled Valentine's Day-haters alike can finally move to a country where their distaste for the holiday is enthroned in government policy: Uzbekistan.
The BBC reports that Uzbek authorities have canceled hundreds of Valentine’s Day events this year, including a concert by national pop sensation Rayhan, who has performed love ballads on 14 February for years. Instead, the country, whose authoritarian leader has been in power since 1989 and is known to heavily censor the media, will put on patriotic festivities of a national legend who's birthday falls on 14 February.
Babur, a descendant of Genghis Khan and founder of a culturally rich and tolerant empire across South and Central Asia, will be celebrated in nationwide poetry readings and commemorations. The BBC reports that an official from the Education Ministry's Department for Enlightenment and Promoting Values said it had issued an internal decree "not to celebrate holidays that are alien to our culture and instead promote Babur's birthday.” Valentine's Day has become popular in recent years, especially among Uzbek youth, who have been increasingly spotted sending love letters and chocolates to their respective sweethearts, and the crackdown comes as the central Asian country struggles to shield its culture from Western influence. Positioned on the ancient Great Silk Road between Europe and Asia, the post-Soviet bloc country with a majority Muslim population has long held socially conservative views and struggled to maintain its identity from outside powers.

Rico says maybe they'll let Chaka Khan in to sing...

Song parody for the day

If Glenn Campbell did a star turn on Big Bang Theory, he'd be singing, instead of Wichita Lineman, that Richard Feynman is still on the line...

Oops is now a 911 term

Michael Brick has an article in The New York Times about 911 problems in Texas:

Four and a half hours into her shift, at 11:34 a.m. on Christmas Day, an emergency dispatcher in the suburbs took another call. “Grapevine 911, where is your emergency?” she asked. Static came back. “Hello, Grapevine 911?” the dispatcher said.
The caller responded with two deep breaths. Days later, using audio software to scrutinize a recording of the call, investigators would find hints of the horror unfolding on the other end of the line. But at the moment, the dispatcher faced the signature predicament of her corner of law enforcement: an open line.
“Afterwards, when you realize, ‘I was listening to something horrific and I couldn’t do anything,’ that’s when the emotions kick in,” said Gary Allen, a retired dispatcher who worked for twenty years in Berkeley, California. “When you find out what you were in the middle of over the phone.”
Open-line calls have long plagued emergency dispatchers, who handle about 240 million calls in more than six thousand communications centers across the country, according to Trey Forgety, government affairs director for the National Emergency Number Association, a trade group. The advent of cellular technology has only expanded the potential for confusion. To those on the receiving end of the line, the silence can signify a prank, a pocket-dial, or, just as easily, something haunting.
Even in the land-line age, open-line calls provided a singular vexation. On New Year’s Day in 1989, Sharyn Gilbert, a dispatcher for the LAPD, handled a 3:58 a.m. call from the home of O. J. Simpson. Six years later, she became the opening witness at his murder trial, called by prosecutors to establish a history of violent behavior.

“Okay. So the call came to you, right?” asked an assistant district attorney, Christopher Darden, according to a transcript.
“Right,” Gilbert said. “It was an open line.”
“Okay. Could you hear anything over the open line?” Darden asked.
“No,” Gilbert answered. “At the beginning, no.”
After a period of silence, Gilbert testified, she eventually heard “a female screaming, and that’s when I went back and changed the incident type from ‘unknown trouble’ to ‘a screaming woman.’” Then, Gilbert testified, “I heard someone being hit.”
On cross-examination, defense lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. challenged her claim: “You hadn’t talked to anybody, so you don’t know what was taking place at that location, do you?” Cochran asked.
“No, I do not,” Gilbert said.
“You have no way of knowing that, do you?”
Gilbert said: “Only what I heard.”

Modern dispatchers work under banks of video screens, answering calls with a mouse click, speaking into headsets and monitoring digital mapping programs. About seventy percent of their calls come from cellular phones, which tend to provide only a vague indication of the caller’s whereabouts, according to the Federal Communications Commission.
“Cellular changed everything enormously,” Allen said. “You didn’t have any idea where it was coming from. People could sit on the phones and dial accidentally. There were a lot of misunderstanding calls, finding out a day later that there was an emergency out there. Even if you heard something on the phone, you didn’t know where to go.”
Across the country, policies on open-line calls vary, depending on the size and resources of the city. Some require dispatchers to investigate every call, reaching out to cellphone service providers for more information if necessary. The results can be unpredictable. In 2004, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that an open-line call had not provided proper grounds for a search that turned up marijuana plants, grow lights, and an elaborate watering system.
Faced with the uncertainty of an open line, dispatchers sometimes send officers into comically innocuous settings, some of which make the local newspapers. In 2008, when a dispatcher in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, heard a child screaming in the background, the responding officer reported that an “eight-year-old child was given a timeout and called 911.” And last winter, a dispatcher in Glenburn, Maine, sent a deputy to an empty house, where a pug named Lucy was found chewing on the phone that had dialed 911.
“Listening is really the name of the game,” Allen said. “Listen, interpret and judge against the agency’s policy. Most of the time it works out. Sometimes it doesn’t.”
On Christmas Day in Grapevine, Texas, the dispatcher was sitting at one of five workstations in a seven-hundred-square-foot communications center, according to Sergeant Robert Eberling of the Grapevine Police Department.
The call came from a land line. On her screen, she could see the location: Unit 1111 of a gated apartment complex called Lincoln Vineyards. She could hear the caller exhaling heavily into the phone.
“It’s not uncommon for us to get a hang-up call or an open-line call where you can’t hear what’s going on,” Sergeant Eberling said. “A lot of the time, it’s just children playing on the phone.”
For the next twenty seconds, the dispatcher tried to get a response. “You need help?” she asked. More panting came back. “Are you sick?” she asked.
The next response, played back later, sounded something like a muffled phrase: “shooting people.”
The dispatcher asked: “What was that?” More deep breathing. “Do you need an ambulance or police?” the dispatcher asked. Ten seconds later, the dispatcher told a colleague, “I’m just getting heavy breathing on the phone,” and concluded, “So please send both.”
Inside the apartment, the police said, a 56-year-old man dressed as Santa Claus had shot and killed six relatives, including his estranged wife and their son and daughter, as they finished opening gifts. Next to the body of the suspected gunman, Aziz Yazdanpanah, investigators found a cordless telephone.
In a written statement to reporters about the results of using audio software to scrutinize the 911 call, Lieutenant Todd Dearing said: “On the recording, we discovered that the caller, whom we believe to be Aziz, additionally saying: ‘I am shooting people,’ after he said, ‘Help. ... Help.’ The newly discovered audio was not heard on the original audio software over many playbacks, and was not heard/understood by the dispatcher who took the call on Sunday.”
But even amid the uncertainty on Christmas morning, as the 911 call was ending, the dispatcher warned firefighters to let the police approach the door first. “At that point,” Sergeant Eberling said, “they didn’t know what kind of call they were dealing with.”

Rico says 'Unit 1111'? That's scary, given Rico's interaction with that number...

When you marry a Southern woman...

Rico says his mother (herself a Southern woman) forwards this from Rico's cousin Deborah (herself a Southern woman):

Three men married women from different parts of the country.
The first man married a woman from Wisconsin. He told her that she was to do the dishes and house cleaning. It took a couple of days, but on the third day, he came home to see a clean house and dishes washed and put away.
The second man married a woman from Minnesota. He gave his wife  orders that she was to do all the cleaning, dishes, and cooking. The first day he didn't see any results, but the next day he saw it was better. By the third day, he saw his house was clean, the dishes were done, and there was a huge dinner on the table.
The third man married a girl from the South. He ordered her to keep the house cleaned, the dishes washed,  the lawn mowed,  the laundry washed, and hot meals on the table for every meal.
He said the first day he didn't see anything, the second day he still didn't see anything, but, by the third day, some of the swelling had gone down and he could see a little out of his left eye, and his arm was healed enough that he could fix himself a sandwich and load the dishwasher, but he still experiences some difficulty when he pees.

History for the day

John Noble Wilford has an article in The New York Times about John Glenn:

In the winter of 1962, the nation needed a hero. Americans had yet to recover from the Soviet Union’s launching of the first spacecraft, Sputnik, in October of 1957, a rude jolt to our confidence as world leaders in all things technological. The space race was on.
Soon after he took office in 1961, President John F. Kennedy had thrown down the challenge to send men to the Moon by the end of the decade. But the Russians still set the pace, boastfully. They launched a dog into orbit, then the first man, Yuri A. Gagarin, and another, Gherman S. Titov.
The United States lagged, managing only two fifteen-minute suborbital astronaut flights with only five minutes of weightlessness each time.
Then, on 20 February 1962— fifty years ago next Monday— a Marine Corps fighter pilot from small-town America stepped forward in response to the country’s need. The astronaut was John Glenn, whom author Tom Wolfe has called “the last true national hero America has ever had.”
Squeezed into the cockpit of a Mercury spacecraft called Friendship 7 (photo), launched by an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, Glenn circled the Earth three times, becoming the first American to orbit the planet. Perhaps no other spaceflight— all 4 hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds of it— has been followed by so many with such paralyzing apprehension.
Glenn saw three sunsets and sunrises that Tuesday, from a maximum altitude of 162 miles. At each sunrise, an explosion of what looked like fireflies appeared outside the window, mystifying him. Then came a signal of a suspected problem that had ground controllers bracing for an uncertain, possibly catastrophic re-entry into the atmosphere.
The ending was a happy one. A collective sigh of relief was heard across the land. The President rushed off to Cape Canaveral to hail the returning hero. Bands played. Ticker tape streamed from the high windows of Broadway. People cried. Never mind that a Soviet cosmonaut had already spent 25 hours in orbit. As Wolfe wrote: “John Glenn made us whole again!”
Now, at ninety, Glenn was reminded in one of two lengthy interviews that the author of The Right Stuff had judged him the country’s last true hero. His response was a kind of dismissive aw shucks. Hero is an elastic word, after all, stretchable to fit a favorite ballplayer or a great conqueror in war or discovery— almost anyone admirable.
“I don’t think of myself that way,” Glenn said. “I get up each day and have the same problems others have at my age. As far as trying to analyze all the attention I received, I will leave that to others.”
(For his part, Wolfe stood by his characterization, saying a national hero was someone seen as “a great protector” of the people. “He really wasn’t their protector, but that’s what people felt and thought,” he said of Glenn in an interview last week. “He made them cry, and this made him a hero.”)
Glenn will again get a hero’s welcome at Cape Canaveral for a reunion with the dwindling Mercury space team, those remaining managers, engineers, and technicians who sent the first Americans into space. He will be honored with a dinner and a spaceflight forum at Ohio State University, home of the John Glenn School of Public Affairs.
Glenn keeps an office at the school, holds seminars with students, and is close to the archive of papers from his careers as an astronaut and, later, a four-term United States senator from Ohio and a candidate in the 1984 Democratic presidential primaries. It is quite an archive: about 1,800 boxes of materials. “I was a pack rat,” he said.
He and his wife, Anna (he calls her Annie), divide their time between a house in a suburb of Washington and a condominium in Columbus. She was his childhood sweetheart, and their marriage has stood the test of almost 69 years of devotion in the turbulence of spaceflight and politics. From the time they came to public attention, each has seemed the other’s center of gravity. Through years of therapy, Glenn said, Annie has overcome the severe stammer that had made her ill at ease at public appearances. “She can give speeches now,” he said, and she likes talking to students of speech pathology.
Both have had knee-replacement surgery. Their knees had made it hard for them, especially Annie, to climb on the wing and into the cabin of their twin-engine Beechcraft Baron. They used to fly it on vacations and back and forth to Washington, sometimes logging as many as 160 airborne hours a year. Last month, as a concession to their aging knees, the Glenns sold their airplane, but Glenn was pleased to say he still has a valid pilot’s license.
The other honored guest at the anniversary events in Cape Canaveral will be Scott Carpenter, the Mercury astronaut who was Glenn’s backup and radio link, called capcom, in the launching blockhouse that day of flight. The two are the only surviving members of what were known as the Mercury Seven. Virgil I. 'Gus' Grissom died in 1967 in an Apollo spacecraft fire during a launching-pad test. Donald K. 'Deke' Slayton died of cancer in 1993. Alan B. Shepard Jr. died of leukemia in 1998. L. Gordon 'Gordo' Cooper Jr. died of natural causes in 2004. Walter M. 'Wally' Schirra Jr. died of a heart attack in 2007.
In 1998, his last year in the Senate, the first American to orbit Earth became, at 77, the oldest person to travel in space. Glenn felt he still had enough of the right stuff. He had continued to pilot his own airplane and had kept in shape— “attitude and exercise,” he said, “that’s what keeps you going”— and he persuaded NASA to let him fly on the space shuttle Discovery and conduct tests on the physiological effects of nine days of weightlessness on older people.
In the recent interviews, Glenn said, “I am not at all happy with some of the directions the space program is going, in particular retiring the space shuttles before we have a new heavy-lift launching system in place.” Glenn said he was concerned that, since the final shuttle flight last July, the United States must depend on Russian Soyuz space vehicles for ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station, assembled in orbit at a cost well over $100 billion, mainly from American taxpayers. The Soyuz is limited to three passengers and about 125 pounds of gear, hardly sufficient for hauling replacement parts for the space station. “If the Russians had a hiccup with Soyuz, our manned space program would be ended, maybe for years,” Glenn said.
In a meeting with President Obama two years ago, Glenn made his case for continuing shuttle flights and full space station operations for several more years, contrary to President George W. Bush’s policy that a new generation of boosters and spacecraft would be developed with the savings from the cancellation of shuttle operations. “The president didn’t disagree with any of my arguments,” he recalled. “He said we just don’t have the money.”
As Glenn settled into recollections of that February day in 1962, the interview glided into easy conversation over shared memories. Ten times over almost a month the launching was scheduled, only to be scrubbed because of poor weather or mechanical glitches. “On again, off again,” Glenn said. “I actually suited up four times, and two times was up on top of the Atlas, strapped into Friendship 7, ready to go.”
Reporters from all over the world grew restive, desperate for anything to write about. After one cancellation, Mercury information officers begged Glenn to give them something to tell the journalists. When he got off the booster, he went running on the beach and happened to see where sea turtles had buried their eggs. This was duly reported, and one writer remarked that it was understood the astronaut had a good recipe for turtle egg soup. “Well, that got me into a whole lot of trouble with environmentalists,” Glenn recalled. “I got mail calling me everything but a good guy, and should be replaced.”
The waiting got so tiresome for the press corps that when a waitress at one of the watering holes was shot dead by her boyfriend around midnight, some reporters rushed to file the story. A London tabloid declared it “the first successful shot here in weeks.” Glenn said he had not heard that tale before.
At last, on the eleventh attempt, with his backup, Carpenter, bidding “Godspeed, John Glenn,” Friendship 7 lifted off for its three orbits of Earth. Christopher C. Kraft Jr., the flight director, remembers, “Nothing about John Glenn’s flight was easy.”
At the first sunrise, Glenn saw a swarm of greenish-yellow lights outside the craft, reminding him of fireflies. He saw them again at the other sunrises. “No one had anticipated this, and it was fascinating,” he said. “Turns out these were tiny moisture particles vented from the heat-exchange system, but I don’t know if we have ever explained their particular colors.”
Near the end of the first orbit, trouble with the automatic control system forced Glenn to take manual control for much of the remaining orbits. He felt he was the pilot, not a passenger on autopilot. Not Spam in a can, in the minds of the veteran test pilots unimpressed by these new astronauts.
Then a signal sent to the ground warned of a potentially more serious problem. It indicated that the craft had a loose heat shield. Flight controllers suspected it was a spurious signal, but could not be sure. They decided not to jettison the retro rockets after they braked the capsule for its descent. The retro-pack should keep the heat shield in place and prevent serious damage to the capsule.
“Glancing out the window during re-entry,” Glenn recalled, “I was seeing big chunks of something coming off. It was the retro-pack, not the heat shield, thank goodness. It had been a false alarm. If you go to the Air and Space Museum in Washington, you can see the burn patterns on Friendship 7.”
In the epilogue to The Right Stuff, his best seller on the original seven astronauts, Wolfe wrote that the day of Glenn the hero “when an astronaut could parade up Broadway while traffic policemen wept in the intersections,” was no more. An era, he continues, “had come, and it had gone, perhaps never to be relived.”
But, in a time short of heroes, John Glenn keeps alive the memory.

Rico says he's just old enough (being ten at the time) to remember Glenn going up (and coming down safely, fortunately; it wasn't a sure thing).