The Tempest Over a Teaspoon of a Bird: on two calliope hummingbirds, which should be a lot farther south this time of year, which have been in north Manhattan for the past month.
As the universe continues to expand, one astrophysicist has calculated that in billions of years astronomers will have nothing new to look at. Objects will become so distant that new light from them will never reach us. [via Honeyguide]
Office XP is configured by default to send debugging information, including a memory dump which could include all or part of the document being worked on, to Microsoft in the event of a crash. [via Risks]
Afghan Drought Inflicts Its Own Misery: on the other Afghan crisis - a drought in southwest Asia that has last three years.
Loophole lets terror suspect remain free: on Abu Hamza, who is wanted in connection to a terrorist incident in Yemen that left three British tourists dead but cannot be held under the new British terrorism law because he is a British citizen.
Anti-Globalization Group Says It Knows Exactly How to End World Terrorism: on the Association for the Taxation of financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens (ATTAC), which says that the way to end terror is to address the causes, poverty and injustice, by introducing a Tobin Tax on international financial transactions and using the proceeds for third world development.
The author of The Perils of Totalitarian "Patriotism" makes a good point, though I don't agree with he takes it:
Some conservative defenders of the Bush administration would insist that the President and Attorney General Ashcroft are honorable men of character who can be entrusted with extraordinary powers. But they should remember English philosopher John Locke's warning that liberty is most imperiled during the reign of "good rulers." This is because their evil successors "draw the actions of those good rulers into precedent and make them the standard of their prerogative -- as if what had been done only for the good of the people was a right in them to do for the harm of the people, if they so pleased...."
Did I really just link to the John Birch Society? [via BookNotes]
India braced for terror response: and it looks like their target is our ally of convenience, Pakistan.
Golden State terrorists: Southeast Asia's most wanted are living large in the LA area. [via Alternet]
The USA Patriot Act and the US Department of Justice: losing our balances? "Partly because of the most recent spate of anti-terrorism legislation, two out of three branches of the federal government are also being left out of the loop in a growing number of circumstances."
Capitol Hill Anthrax Matches Army's Stocks: the strains are genetically identical to those maintained at an Army facility at Fort Detrick. Matching samples at labs in the U.S. and Britain trace their origin to Fort Detrick. [via Interesting People]
