Large diamonds made from gas are the hardest yet. If you're thinking of "investing" in a fat rock for your sweetie, maybe you should start thinking of something besides diamond, since the rate at which synthetic diamond manufacturer is improving, we can expect to see diamonds in the prize-packet of Cracker-Jack any day now.

Iran caught making Polonium. I don't know why Iran keeps trying to pretend its nuclear program is for peaceful use and failing to disclose all of its activities to international inspectors. The country is swimming in oil, and has no need for nuclear energy. The very few legitimate industrial uses beyond energy production could be more affordably satisfied on the free market, instead of constructing reactors and enrichment centrifuges.

It's just embarrassing to see a supposedly mature government acting like a five year old caught dipping into a cookie jar who says "I was just getting a cookie for you, mommy!"

Bush calls for gay marriage ban. Now I find myself tempted to repeat what some of my hard-left friends say about Bush: "He's an idiot!"

In the first place, the definitions of "man" and "woman" are not perfectly sharp. Folks with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, for example, are considered intersexual, and exist at all gradiations between "man" and "woman". Consider Jamie Lee Curtis, for example. Laws restricting marriage to a relationship between a "man" and a "woman" prohibit intersexuals from ever marrying anyone.

Next, people regularly undergo sexual reassignment through a combination of surgery, hormonal therapy and counselling. Some of these people are already married, and some remain married after their reassignment. Should couples in this situation be forcibly divorced by the state? Alternatively, do we require that one member of a same-sex union undergo sexual reassignment? This would certainly allow gays to marry. Perhaps a partial reassignment, such as "femininization" of a gay man by the use of hormone supplements, would be sufficient to change his sex long enough to get a legal marriage license?

The socially-sanctioned practice of marriage is a union between two people and the society around them. Our society has laws that provide different rights to people inside of marriage. The intent of such laws was and is to re-enforce the stability of such relationships and to recognize the importance of married partnerships to the nuclear family that characterizes successful civilizations. The only aspect of marriage that relates to the expressed secondary sex characteristics of the people involved is the notion of reproduction. Every other aspect of this relationship with society is genderless.

By insisting that marriage exists purely between a "man" and a "woman", we are stating that the reproductive aspects of marriage are so much more important than all the other aspects that marriage cannot exist without it. Should we then attune the law further by forbidding marriage between people who are sterile or who choose to practice birth control? That seems more salient than using the fuzzy boundary between "man" and "woman".

Okay, I'll say it. He's an idiot!

Gaddafi had plutonium. But now he's decided to end Libya's international isolation and has allowed international inspectors to dismantle secret Libyan WMD facilities.

Just one more example of the favorable ripple effect we're seeing from the overthrow of Saddam.

Teaching computers to program. Computer programs are forms of communication. They are a conversation between programmers. This conversation describes a solution to a problem, but in a language that computers are barely smart enough to understand. As software development grows in sophistication, so do the languages used to express the solutions to problems. The conversations become more abstract. Ultimately, we may have computers that are smart enough to allow us to express a problem in very abstract, human-conversational terms, and see the computer able to implement the solution in software. This step will be necessary if software development is to keep up with the advancements we see in hardware - doubling in capability every 18 months. (Programmer productivity has been argued to double roughly once every 6 years!)

RIAA Sued Under Racketeering Laws. This is an excellent idea. The actions of the RIAA are not very much different from extortion. The question of whether respondents have a case is never addressed, since our tort system favors deeper pockets, and almost all of the respondents choose to settle for a few thousand dollars rather than take on a huge and well-funded opponent in a legal battle that could cost hundreds of thousands.

The RIAA maintain that file-sharing is theft. However, the legal definition of theft is based on depriving an injured party of access or enjoyment of something they would otherwise have had. In perhaps 99.9% of the files swapped, the receiving party would never have purchased the file they received, even if they were somehow aware of the product and had a channel for buying it. In a surprising number of cases, people receiving the file become aware of new music they like, and go buy a product they otherwise would have had no knowledge of. So file sharing really only fits the legal definition of theft when someone receives a file that they would otherwise have paid for and fails to follow up with a purchase. File sharing is therefore sometimes a curious sort of contingent theft, at worst, and a free advertising channel at best.

Pending a Vote, Some Iraqis Press for a Larger Governing Council. Perhaps I'm just overly cynical, but this seems like a fairly transparent attempt to dilute the influence of the originally appointed council with people aligned with special interests. I would be astonished if Iraq ends up with a truely representative government from this process, but who knows? It seems to me that the only representative government that would truely work in such a sharply divided population would have to rely on tribal traditions. Perhaps granting every citizen some arbitrary number of "votes" per year, which they pass on to their representatives, who spend them or hoard them until just the right moment would allow even the smallest minority opinion to (eventually) have its way.

Archbishop Tutu demands apology from Bush and Blair for immoral war against Iraq. His emminence goes on to say "the world is a less safe place than before". Let's see, Saddam is no longer persecuting his own people or the people around Iraq, nor is he harboring or funding terrorists any longer, Iran has opened up about its nuclear program, Syria has taken its rhetoric down a notch or two, Ghaddifi has renounced WMD and is apparently trying to re-join the civilized world, Pakistan is actually jailing a few Islamic extremists and trying to look as though it is assisting US forces hunting for Al Queda along the Afghan/Pakistan border. Hmmm....less safe? For whom, exactly?

Star's core is made of solid diamond. Ten billion trillion trillion carats. And it's only 50 light-years away, just waiting for the first interstellar salvage operation. Of course, with synthetic diamonds now as good or better than gemstone quality, this may not be as attractive as it used to be. Kind of like what happened after they figured out how to electrolyze aluminum, which used to be more valuable than silver. (The cap of the Washington monument is made of aluminum, which was then was a precious metal).

Finding the leader. Researchers have identified methodologies for identifying the most influential folks on the net. This will further refine the attention-getting obsession of prominent bloggers. (Though I doubt it will improve much on Technorati for ego-validation).

Gene therapy jab melts fat away. If only this worked in humans. Unfortunately, it appears the role of leptin in human fat metabolism is somewhat more complex than in rats, since obese humans often have higher than average levels of leptin already. (With all the successful scientific work done on rats, maybe we should start worrying about immortal, super-strong, super-intelligent rats taking over the world).

Food aid to North Korea dries up. This tragedy really has only one cause and one solution - government. The people of DPRK have a strong cultural bias toward self-sufficiency, so accepting foreign aid really rubs them the wrong way. It is far more culturally acceptable to give something in exchange for this aid, such as assurances against building and selling WMD on the black market. Too bad the DPRK government cannot get their economy to produce something the rest of the world really wants to buy.

Now this is just bizarre: Challenger to Putin for Russian Presidency Is Missing. The guy was expected to garner maybe 1% of the popular vote, so it's not like he was a serious political threat. I'd say either he knew too much about organized crime infiltration of Putin's government and he had to be silenced, or he saw himself making a 1% scratch in the Putin machine and thought that if he "disappears" until after the election, more voters will have second thoughts about continuing to support an increasingly nepotistic and criminalistic regime. Who knows? Maybe he'll double his effect, and 2% of the voters will vote for him, despite his having gone missing.

[UPDATE: 040210 - He's been found. Says he just decided to take a break. (Without telling his wife or campaign workers or anyone else. Hmmmm...)]

Frederick Turner mulls a subject that's been giving me pause lately - the political and economic realignment that's blurring the old lines between conservative and liberal. A New Politics is his essay covering this and a bunch of other ground. Well worth a squint and a scratch, though I disagree with some of his predictions, particularly regarding the charm economy.

Drug may give cells a fresh start: A chemical could switch adult cells from one type to another. Man, I keep hoping they'll get something like this working before more of me falls apart from old age disease. It would be so cool to have a can of "body spackle" that we can just apply to an ageing body part and rejuvinate it.

Further evidence, (as if any were needed), that DPRK is another place where a case for humanitarian overthrow of their government would surely be prosecuted if the UN believed in a humanitarian basis for the use of force. And, although DPRK is playing ball by continuing to threaten our national security by attempting to produce WMD, it is unlikely that the US will attempt to overthrow Kim Jong Il. There are a variety of reasons why not, including the great liklihood of collateral damage to South Korea and the much higher cost in both treasure and blood. Too bad, IMO. DPRK could really shine, just like their southern neighbor, if only they had a decent government.

An intelligence success story. It appears the US managed to allow the Soviets to steal intentionally defective software back in the early 1980's, resulting in a huge pipeline explosion in Siberia. This struck a heavy economic blow, not only through the damaged pipeline, but also through a sudden lack of confidence in all the wares the Soviets had pirated from the west.

I suspect our failed Strategic Defense Initiative was another early 1980's attempt to wage economic warfare. It didn't matter if we actually succeeded in creating lasers that could down an ICBM. All that mattered was that the Soviets believed this was enough of a threat to require redesign of their ICBMs to include reflective and/or ablative coatings. The added weight would necessitate a total redesign, which would bankrupt their already teetering economy.

No surprise here: US officials knew in May Iraq possessed no WMD. Of course, Iraq has roughly the same square mileage as California. Finding a cache of WMD that could fit in a basement in a land area that big could be impossible without help from someone who knows where to look. So "knowing" that no WMD had been immediately found back in May after inspecting the most likely hotspots doesn't prove there were none anywhere.

Still, it seems far more likely that GWB felt compelled to depose Saddam for other reasons - both personal and humanitarian. Saddam only killed about a million people, so he isn't quite in the same league as Stalin, Hitler or Pol Pot, but it is hard to imagine that the world would be any better off if he were still in power. The problem with staging an invasion for humanitarian reasons is that the UN doesn't agree that's a legitimate reason. So we have to trot out the old "direct threat to our national security" justification. Saddam at least played ball by flouting all 17 UN resolutions directed at revealing any WMD inside Iraq.

It's a shame that Bush could not stage an invasion for "Manifest-Destiny-Humanitarian" reasons. In the arcane calculus of world politics, it is better to endure the slaughter of a million people at the hands of a despot than to allow a more powerful nation to put an end to the brutality by force. So now we get to watch the media harp endlessly about the lack of WMD and how totally unjustified the invasion was.

CNN.com - Hajj stampede: 244 pilgrims dead - Feb. 1, 2004. What does this say about their culture? Are the roots of this phenemenon in religion, culture or genetics?

As you can see, Little Fugue has gotten a simlpifying makeover. I decided I really wasn't going to use much of the paraphernalia that came along with PHP-Nuke, and the posting procedure was tiresome, so I switched over to a nice, simple and clean Blogger interface. This also let's me post using the "Blog This" button on the Google toolbar. (Yeah, I really am that lazy...)