Greg In The Desert

• Incredible journey of a dog called Sophie Tucker | smh.com.au – A canine castaway lost at sea has been reunited with her owners after spending more than four months living off goats on a Queensland island.

  Owner Jan Griffith said her family were devastated when their cattle dog, Sophie Tucker, fell off the side of their boat in choppy waters off the Mackay coast in north Queensland in late November.

• Home Again – The best time was spending time in a museum that reminds one that times never change. They just repeat. The LBJ library is a step back into the 60s. It traces LBJ's career from childhood to death, but it really emphasizes the political turmoil and change of that incredible decade. Walking through the exhibits and arriving at the year 1968 I was reminded of the horrible events of that year. Every time something happened that would make you think things couldn't get any worse, they then promptly got worse. The Tet Offensive in Viet Nam, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Chicago Riots….sheesh.
• ABQJOURNAL UPFRONT: LANL Still Waiting for News on Future – In 1989, the Department of Energy told Congress that the old building was contaminated, with widespread corrosion, and asked for money to build a replacement.

  A year later, Congress killed funding, saying the federal government needed to come up with an overarching plan for its nuclear arsenal and the infrastructure needed to maintain it.

  In the two decades since, we have planned and replanned, formed commissions and task forces, that have never quite settled the question of what U.S. nuclear weapons are for, how many we need, and what sort of manufacturing and research infrastructure we need in response.

• Rumors suggest slew of new iPhone features | iPhone | iPhone Central | Macworld – If the latest crop of speculation is to be believed, the next-generation iPhone (unofficially dubbed “iPhone 4G” or “iPhone 3.0”) will have pretty much every new feature under the sun: a 3.2-megapixel camera will support video recording; there will be rudimentary video-editing software included; support for 802.11n Wi-Fi networking; and—get this—a built-in FM radio. Let's dive a little deeper into all this rumor and hearsay.
• globeandmail.com: RIM rocks a new tune – "I'm very excited about this," Bono told Mr. Cross about the RIM deal. "Research In Motion is going to give us what Apple wouldn't — access to their labs and their people so we can do something really spectacular."
• Credit Scores for Apartments and Other Rental Properties  on One Project Closer – bad tenants are more trouble than they’re worth. A bad tenant can cause so much damage to a property that even if they do pay their rent, you’ll be left in the red. After we decided to start renting out one of our properties, we heard countless horror stories of people who had rental situations go bad. Every time we heard of a story, I asked if the people had performed credit checks on their tenants. Many times the answer was no.
• pr_040609a.html – As part of the initiative, AP will develop a system to track content distributed online to determine if it is being legally used. AP President Tom Curley said the initiative would also include the development of new search pages that point users to the latest and most authoritative sources of breaking news.
• Sallie Mae To Create 2,000 US Jobs Over 18 Months – SLM Corp. (SLM) said Monday it plans to create 2,000 jobs by bringing its overseas operations to the U.S. "This is the right thing to do," Chief Executive Albert Lord said during a conference call.
• Intel ‘Unthinkable’ Exit Leaves Philippine Cooks Without Jobs – Bloomberg.com – The world’s biggest maker of semiconductors will close its chip-assembly factory in General Trias later this year, leaving 1,800 workers jobless. The township south of Manila will lose its largest employer, which Intel says accounted for 36 percent of the region’s real domestic production in 2004.

  “This is the worst thing that has happened to our municipality,” Maglalang, 42, said as she took a break from cooking chicken adobo, a Philippine delicacy. “It’s unthinkable.”

• U.S. warns mortgage fraudsters are eyeing rescue| Reuters – Fraudsters are using the publicity around foreclosure-prevention plans to lure desperate homeowners into costly scams, the U.S. Treasury Department said on Monday.

  As the housing crisis has intensified and the government has hatched several plans to aid troubled borrowers, the number of mortgage scams has mushroomed, several government agencies said at a press conference.

• jfleck at inkstain » On High-Probability, High-Consequence Events – My friends in the nuclear weapons community have, over the years, helped me understand the tools for thinking about low-probability, high-consequence events, like a warhead accidentally going off. You really don’t want that to happen, so even though averaged across all possible futures the average badness might be relatively low, it’s worth spending some time and energy thinking through ways of reducing the probability of the high-consequence event.

  But if the chance of the truly horrific event is somewhere betwen 57 and 95 percent over the next four decades? Holy crap. If you’ve seen that coming and haven’t already started doing an awful lot to try to drive that number down, your system for solving societal problems is seriously fucked up.

• ABQJOURNAL NEWS/METRO: Actor’s $50,000 Keeps Boys/Girls Club Running – Arthur Garcia, its executive director, said his club — which has been in Roswell since 1965 — was on the verge of closing for the summer, its busiest time. The economy, he said, had taken its toll on donations the club needs to survive.
  "We were drowning," he said. "Even our grants have been cut."
  So, last week after KRQE Channel 13 did a story on the club's financial pain, Denzel Washington called to say he'd love to help.
  Washington, who is in Albuquerque filming the "Book of Eli" at Albuquerque Studios, donated $50,000 to the club, enough to keep it open through the summer.
• Where Gadgets Go to Die: Facility Strips, Rips and Recycles – With 15 locations in the United States, Sims Recycling Solutions is one of the world’s largest electronics scrap recyclers. Pictured here is the "demanufacturing" center of the company's Roseville, California facility, where workers disassemble everything from printers, cameras and computers to Jumbotrons for their reusable materials. The facility receives roughly 150,000 pounds of used electronics a day.
• Report Details Alleged Fraud Scheme Against AT – CBS 11 News has uncovered new information about FBI raids against Dallas companies that provide web servers for dozens of businesses in North Texas and across the country.

  Court documents show it's all part of an alleged massive fraud scheme against AT&T and Verizon.

  Court records show Verizon first went to the FBI this past January, alleging some North Texas web server providers were cheating them and AT&T out of millions of dollars.

• Chris Paling on time spent on a ward with alcoholics | Society | The Guardian – Barrel Man is immediately put on a drain. Several clear bags of fluid are emptied from his stomach every couple of hours. During the night, at around 2am, we are awoken by the sound of a cry and a splash of liquid. The room fills with the aroma of faeces. A nurse dashes in, switches on the light and pulls Barrel Man's curtain round, but not before we have glimpsed the pool of blood and faeces on the floor. Two doctors arrive. Barrel Man is wheeled down to the theatre. We don't expect to see him on the ward again. With typical understatement, the following day the nurse reports his condition as "very poorly".
• “Dow 36,000″ and your pension – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com – So in 2007 the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation — which stands behind corporate pensions — switched from bonds only to lots of stocks, buying in at, natch, the peak of the market. Oops. And this is big stuff: the Bush administration may have left us all a gratuitous loss of hundreds of billions.
• What Fourth-Graders “Know” About Money – Recently I used some of the latitude I have in teaching social studies when completing a unit on economics with two 4th-grade classes (41 students total). One group of students was from my classroom; the other group of students was from a neighboring teacher’s class. During the unit, I had an opportunity to gauge the students’ knowledge of a few concepts of money and the financial world around them.
• Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Weblog: What We Can Learn From MacHeist – Mac software impressario Phill Ryu brought his controversial MacHeist bundle back for another round recently, this time with one of its former critics in the fold, which means that the old debates about its legitimacy and value have been raging once again. I’ll admit I’ve been a critic of MacHeist in the past, and one way to think about it is definitely as either a sign of or cause of a troubling devaluation of indie software. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why software products and services succeed or fail, though, and I’ve started to feel that, whatever you think of them, we indie developers can learn a lot from MacHeist.
• The G-20 can do better next time | csmonitor.com – The Group of 20 meeting took place largely because of a demand by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to set up a global regulatory cop to rein in excessive risk-taking by financial institutions – mainly American and British.

  For two reasons, he rightly didn't succeed.

  As long as the world remains organized around sovereign states, capitalism will largely be regulated within each state. Even the European Union can't agree on tougher rules for hedge funds, etc.

  A second reason is the difficulty of regulating complex financial instruments. Even the people who design them failed to see their flaws as this crisis unfolded. Would a global cop do any better at assessing such intricate risk? Exhibit A: The SEC's inability to uncover Bernie Madoff's scam.

• Al Jazeera English – Americas – FBI rejects Taliban US attack claim – The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has dismissed claims made by the Pakistan Taliban that it was responsible for an attack in the state of New York in which a gunman killed 13 people.

  Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, had claimed in a phone call to Al Jazeera that he had ordered the shooting in which a man, believed to be a Vietnamese immigrant, opened fire at an immigration centre.

At first I thought this was spam. It’s not however, and it looks like it could be a good thing. egeltje.org has some more information and contact info such.

From: mr2302@columbia.edu
Subject: Urgent Appeal – New Mexico and Nuclear Testing
Date: January 12, 2005 3:28:04 PM MST
Hi,

My name is Michael Roston. I found your blog because I was looking for bloggers from New Mexico, and I wanted to write and ask for your assistance.

I produce an email newsletter, also posted at my blog, called Nuclear Test Watch. Over the last four years, Americans of conscience may not have prevented President Bush from pursuing his ill-conceived war in Iraq. But we have prevented him from starting a nuclear war. 

Even in the aftermath of the election, a bipartisan collection of members of Congress successfully blocked White House-sponsored efforts to build new nuclear weapons and accelerate the ability of the United States to test nuclear weapons. In the current international climate, Congress recognized that taking such a step would be reckless and endanger more than it would protect America.

The next four years are here, and President Bush has nominated a new Energy Secretary whose position on issues of nuclear weapons is uncertain. Worryingly, here are indications in the press that an intellectual case is now being built to resume nuclear testing. 

So what does this have to do with New Mexico?

More than you think. On Wednesday, January 19, one week from now, your Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman will lead a hearing of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. This hearing will be to confirm the nomination of Samuel Bodman to be the next Energy Secretary. The Senators will have the opportunity to say to Bodman Do you see any need to test nuclear weapons in the next four years, even if it imperils international security? Such a line of questioning will have a powerful effect as it will force Bodman to publicly stake out a position that can be debated and discussed.

The agenda for the hearing will be crowded, and the Senators may concentrate on other issues. But if they believe their constituents are concerned with the dangers of a return to nuclear testing, they are likely to bring this issue to the fore. Therefore, a telephone lobbying effort, with New Mexicans contacting the DC offices of Mr.s Domenici and Bingaman can help ensure that these issues are on the agenda. 

I am certain that bloggers have the power to bring about political change. So what I am asking you to do is post a message on your blog relating to this issue. I encourage one of these two steps:

1. Link to this posting at my blog, with a brief introductory message of your own: http://nucleartestwatch.blogspot.com/2005/01/action-alert-for-citizens-of-new.html
2. Or, post your own message, using mine as a template from which you can draw facts and contact information for the Senators offices.

Just to provide you with a little background about me, as I am writing from out of the blue I am a graduate student in international affairs at Columbia University in New York. Prior to moving up here for school, I worked in Washington, DC, as an analyst for a small non-profit organization on US-Russia nuclear nonproliferation cooperation. Nuclear Test Watch is voluntary, spare-time activism on my part to make sure someone in the world is directly concentrated on whether or not the disastrous decision might be made to resume nuclear testing. I receive no pay for the work I do. 

In the week to come, I may have an op-ed published on this subject in the Albuquerque Tribune fingers-crossed. I will also be contacting newspapers throughout New Mexico and asking them to concentrate some reporting on this issue. But I think starting with bloggers like you is most important as you have so much power to get New Mexicans thinking about this important issue.

Please feel free to write back here or call me at 212-XXX-XXXX if you have any questions.