Oi! US TV!! We want our Doctor Who!!!

The first episode of the new Doctor Who series just aired in the UK. Reports from colleagues such as Chris and Dave are positive. So why are we in the US having to wait? From the BBC’s FAQ:

Q. Will the new series be aired outside the UK?

A. So far, we only have confirmation that the new series has been bought by CBC television in Canada, who air it on Tuesdays at 7pm, starting on April 5, and Prime TV in New Zealand, who have not yet announced an air date. No Australian or US broadcaster has picked up the series yet.

AARGH!!!!

Tim, Rio, Jini, Rob

Over in ongoing · Java, the Grid, and Rio, Tim was “thinking about how you’d run a big distributed Java system as a service across a whole lot of networked computers”. Dan Templeton pointed him at Rio, and I followed up with a link to the papers from last December’s Jini Community Meeting in London. And I remembered a comment by Rob Gingell, adapting Santayana: “Those who do not use Jini are doomed to reinvent it.”

Balkin on the lessons to be learned from the Schiavo case

In a series of pieces in Balkinization, Professor Jack Balkin of Yale Law School goes into detail on the constitutional aspects of the Schiavo case. But his closing words on one particular entry were particularly acute:

“Finally, the Congressional Republicans’ moves also suggest that if Roe v. Wade were overturned, the matter would not be left to the states, as so many pro-life politicians have advocated in the past, but would quickly become a fight over federal legislation outlawing abortion nationwide. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Indeed. This is more than just Tom DeLay and his henchmen grandstanding to please their base: it’s a real test of the US Constitution.

Crumbs!

Merry complained that I’m always blogging about unpleasant things – why can’t I blog about something nice? How about the crumb test dummy? I think that qualifies. Now, how do I get my hands on some of those McVitie’s Milk Chocolate and Orange Digestives?

Republican or Islamist? Beats me….

Don’t miss this fascinating piece by Juan Cole: “The cynical use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan. These tactics involve a disturbing tendency to make private, intimate decisions matters of public interest and then to bring the courts and the legislature to bear on them.”

The similarities are remarkable.

"Freedom is on the march" – unless you're a woman

From a Reuters piece on threats against progressive women: “Pharmacist Zeena Qushtiny was dressed in the latest Western fashion and wearing a sparkling diamond necklace when she was taken at gunpoint from her pharmacy in Baghdad by insurgents. Her body was found 10 days later with two bullet holes close to her eyes. She was covered in a traditional abaya veil preferred by Islamic conservatives…. During Saddam Hussein’s regime, women could dress less conservatively in the big cities and would not be punished, according to female activists. But now women say they are no longer safe and decapitated female corpses have begun turning up in recent weeks with notes bearing the word ‘collaborator’ pinned to their chests”

Was this what America Bush and Blair went to war for?

(Via Juan Cole.)

That was then….

Salon.com Politics: “As Republicans plotted congressional intervention last week to extend the life of Terri Schiavo, a Texas woman named Wanda Hudson watched her six-month-old baby die in her arms after doctors removed the breathing tube that kept him alive. Hudson didn’t want the tube removed, but the baby’s doctors decided for her. A judge signed off on the decision under the Texas futile care law — a provision first signed into law in 1999 by then-Gov. George W. Bush. Under the 1999 law, doctors in Texas can, with the support of a hospital ethics committee, overrule the wishes of family members and terminate life-support measures if they believe further care would be futile”

Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #162

From today’s Houston Chronicle.com: “Iraq needed fuel. Halliburton Co. was ordered to get it there — quick. So the Houston-based contractor charged the Pentagon $27.5 million to ship $82,100 worth of cooking and heating fuel. In the latest revelation about the company’s oft-criticized performance in Iraq, a Pentagon audit report disclosed Monday showed Halliburton subsidiary KBR spent $82,100 to buy liquefied petroleum gas, better-known as LPG, in Kuwait and then 335 times that number to transport the fuel into violence-ridden Iraq.”

(Via TomDispatch.)

(And Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #162 is Even in the worst of times, someone turns a profit.)

What the bleep was I doing?

For reasons that I won’t go into, I found myself watching the DVD of What the Bleep Do We Know? this evening. After nearly an hour of increasingly nonsensical stuff, my blood pressure and I could stand it no longer. I skipped to the last DVD chapter to watch the credits, to find out which reputable scientists and philosophers had given their support to such hokum. Fortunately, the answer seemed to be “None”.
The writers weren’t even that creative in the way the fabricated the bleeping stuff. They mostly relied on two tricks:

  • Take a term such as “observer”, “consciousness”, “unity”, etc. and then use it interchangably in metaphorical and literal senses.
  • Consistently use the term “possibility” in place of “probability”, conveying a subtle suggestion of unboundedness and unpredictability.

So, if you want to get really drunk really quickly, get a bottle, a glass, and this film and take a shot every time someone recycles a metaphor as literal truth, or opens vistas of boundless possibility wherever a probability distribution belongs. Otherwise, stay away. (I thought we got all that New Age stuff out of our system last century, but I guess not….)