My community is collecting items such as clothing, blankets & pillows, radios, flashlights, canned goods, diapers, children’s toys & books, etc. to send to hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans. In addition, people can offer help to new orleans residents on this page. Of course there’s always Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund. If you’re a DreamHost customer, their monthly charity is the Red Cross and they will match all contributions.

Via nancies.org: DMB will play a benefit concert for New Orleans-area hurricane victims, Billboard reports. They’re adding a fourth show to their three-night Red Rocks stint, on September 12, with all proceeds benefiting victims of Hurricane Katrina. Tickets will go on sale next week. Thanks to Susie Lake for the tip.

Remember the Kutztown 13? It seems their case has been resolved. n meetings with students over the last several days, the Berks County juvenile probation office has quietly offered the students a deal in which all charges would be dropped in exchange for 15 hours of community service, a letter of apology, a class on personal responsibility and a few months of probation.

“The probation department realizes this is small potatoes,” said William Bispels, an attorney representing nearly half the accused students.

The 13 were initially charged with computer trespass and computer theft, both felonies, and could have faced a wide range of sanctions, including juvenile detention. Read more here.

Racism

Originally uploaded by dustin3000.

Look at the two of these photos on Yahoo News – notice anything different between them? According to Yahoo, black people “loot” — white people “find.”

(via Boing Boing)

My little trial of Opera is over. I got fed up with its quirkiness & went back to Camino (at least until it starts crashing or slows down).

I switch browsers frequently because I get annoyed with the one I’m using. I try to keep my bookmarks pretty much in sync between browsers using URL Manager Pro, and I usually add new bookmarks to del.icio.us rather than my browser’s bookmarks.

Right now I’m trying Opera as my default browser, thanks to the free registration. I’ve used it before unregistered & the ads really weren’t too intrusive. Opera is very fast, but has too many quirks I find annoying & features don’t work as expected. I’d like it if it acted more like other browsers. I do love the speed & stability, however.

I usually go back to Safari, but end up getting annoyed when it freezes up & slows down my entire system. Safari is by far the nicest & when it works, I like it’s OS integration & support.

When I get annoyed with Safari’s slowdowns, I usually switch to Camino but soon get annoyed with its extremely slow typing in text fields & rendering problems in certain pages or it will start crashing on me.

I often end up using FireFox because I love its speed & I find it more stable than Camino, but I dislike its poor OS integration and lack of support for services or the middle mouse button.

My ideal browser would have FireFox’s speed, Opera’s stability, and Safari’s OS integration.

Via Flablog: Could this be another Jerry Rieger? Jeb names ultraconservative think tanker with Congressional ambitions as Florida’s chancellor of K-12 education. (And self-described creationist) See the Fla. Politics post comparing coverage. Related: The Austringer wonders if Florida will be the next flash point for people trying to teach Intelligent Design/Creationism in public schools.

Also, Wired talks about ‘Swift Boating science:

Some time ago, I conducted an interview with Florida Rep. Cliff Stearns, a Republican and staunch member of the religious right. At the time, Stearns was proposing a law to jail any scientist who attempted to make a human embryo through cloning. He opposed cloning and embryonic stem-cell research, he said, because clones would not have “tentacles” like you and me and we’d wind up with “categories of people who didn’t have these tentacles, so there might be superior and inferior people. If you met them and knew they were cloned, how would you deal with them?”

OK, so maybe you can’t blame Stearns for concocting an Ed Wood plot point. He’s no scientist, and besides, he provides comic relief. But how funny is it that President George W. Bush recently endorsed the teaching of “intelligent design” as an alternative to the theory of evolution?

Not very, especially because Bush’s comments about deus ex machina versus book learnin’ are not just a goofy one-off. They are, as science writer Chris Mooney so brilliantly shows, part of The Republican War on Science. (Here let me declare that Mooney and I share a publisher, Basic Books, and let me also declare that my book for Basic sold so few copies I can honestly say I am not being influenced by money.)

It’s not news that the reign of Bush fils has been marked by an antagonism toward science and scientists unlike any since 1954, when Robert Oppenheimer had his security clearance revoked and Linus Pauling had his passport pulled. The many times this administration and its supporters have fudged or even lied about scientists and scientific research are well-known. Global warming, stem cells, cloning, sex, land use, pollution and missile defense come to mind.

The current antagonism towards science is one of the most pressing problems facing our country. We’re falling behind the rest of the world in the scientific community and if this continues we’ll no longer be able to compete. We need to regain our lead and stop our slide into the dark ages. The rest of the world is becoming more enlightened and we’re doing the opposite.

I was surprised to find this song in iTunes Music Store after hearing it on Link TV’s world music show. I checked LinkTV’s store and they didn’t have it. That song immediately caught my ear since it sampled “Ay Chona La” by Youssou N’dour.

Professional AC installation

Originally uploaded by mike3k.

I had to have my air conditioning unit repaired after it started leaking a few days ago. When the guy moved the ceiling tile to access it, this is what we found lurking. I can’t believe it was like this since I’ve lived here.

Thankfully we missed the worst of Katrina. It was only a category 1 storm when it hit us and it’s now far away from us. After it left south Florida, it strengthened to category 5 and it’s now heading towards New Orleans. This is going to be really bad. Hurricane Andrew was a category 5 storm, but it was a lot smaller than Katrina so it only destroyed a limited area. Katrina is about 3 times as wide and will cause more damage when it hits. It can also pick up more strength before it hits.

For anyone in New Orleans, GET OUT NOW!

We escaped with little damage other than a lot of downed trees and a few signs destroyed. Luckily we never lost power, although much of the surrounding neighborhood still has no power. The Publix around the corner has only emergency power with no refrigeration or air conditioning. The ATM was working & they were selling only foods that don’t need to be refrigerated. Most areas are expected to have full power back by Tuesday.

I went to visit my mother in Pompano Beach today. Although most traffic signals are out to the south of me, almost all of them were working north of here. My mother lost power Thursday night until last night & her phone was out until late this afternoon.

For the last few days I’ve been getting weird feedback emails for all of my websites. I get 3-4 of them with random bogus addresses at my website’s domain and containing empty multipart MIME messages containing only the mime section headers. It looks like someone is trying to hack my feedback forms, most likely a spammer. Those forms have always been able to send email only to a particular hard-coded address. I secured all of the forms to prevent them from being accessed in any way other than from my webpage and I eliminated the PHP files so they’re now stored entirely within the site’s content management system.

I think it’s time to take some more drastic action against spammers. It’s gone beyond annoying to the nightmare stage. I’m almost at the point of giving up email & shutting down all of my websites, since I waste too much of my time dealing with spam.

Katrina demonstrated that there’s no such thing as a ‘minimal hurricane’. Katrina was barely a category 1 storm and the winds we got here didn’t even reach hurricane strength, yet we had as much damage as we did last year from Frances & Jeanne, which were category 3 & 4 storms that didn’t hit us directly. Katrina also didn’t hit us directly, but it was a lot closer.

Is something missing?

Originally uploaded by mike3k.

The wooden “Embarcadero” sign in front of the clubhouse is gone.

08-26-05_1351

Originally uploaded by mike3k.

A whole stalk with 6 flowers broke off this orchid during the storm. Yesterday I noticed the stem was bent & I planned to cut it off and put the flowers in a vase, but it got blown away before I could do it.

Damaged tree

Originally uploaded by mike3k.

No major damage and we never lost power. There were a lot of branches down and a few damaged screens. The worst damage we had was this newly planted palm tree that got taken down. I’ve posted a full gallery at www.mcdevzone.com/gallery/katrina.

It’s now 11:45PM. The wind died down but it’s still raining.

We’re getting hit by the worst part of Hurricane Katrina right now. The rain is very heavy and we’ve had some strong gusts of wind. A lot of trees are down & most of the neighborhood is without power. Our condo is one of the only places that still has power around here, just like last year with Frances & Jeanne. We could see bright blue flashes in the distance as transformers blew out.

The winds seem as strong or worse than last year’s storm, even though this is only a minimal hurricane (barely category 1 and most likely about to get downgraded to a tropical storm). Katrina hit us directly, but last year’s storms were about 60 miles north of us.

Via Daily Kos (original link):

Montana’s governor wants to solve America’s rising energy costs using a technology discovered in Germany 80 years ago that converts coal into gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel.

The Fischer-Tropsch technology, discovered by German researchers in 1923 and later used by the Nazis to convert coal into wartime fuels, was not economical as long as oil cost less than $30 a barrel.

But with U.S. crude oil now hitting more than double that price, Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s plan is getting more attention across the country and some analysts are taking him very seriously.

Montana is “sitting on more energy than they have in the Middle East,” Schweitzer told Reuters in an interview this week.

“I am leading this country in this desire and demand to convert coal into gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel. We can do it in Montana for $1 per gallon,” he said.

“We can do it cheaper than importing oil from the sheiks, dictators, rats and crooks that we’re bringing it from right now.”

The governor estimated the cost of producing a barrel of oil through the Fischer-Tropsch method at $32, and said that with its 120 billion tons of coal — a little less than a third of the U.S total — Montana could supply the entire United States with its aviation, gas and diesel fuel for 40 years without creating environmental damage.

An entry level Fischer-Tropsch plant producing 22,000 barrels a day would cost about $1.5 billion, he said.

The fuel that comes out of the Fischer-Tropsch method (also used by South Africa during their embargo years) burns cleaner than current fuels, stripping out sulfur, arsenic, and other nasty byproducts. And if Montana alone can deliver 40 years worth of the nation’s energy needs, imagine how much more we’d have when you throw Wyoming, Illinois, Ohio, and West Virginia coal into the mix. More than enough fuel to get us inexpensively into the hydrogen economy.

The geopolitical ramifications are also huge — no need for wars in the Middle East or saber-rattling in Venezuela. The impetus for foolish wars would wane. And cheaper gas (I don’t buy $1/gallon, but even twice that would be a boon) would provide huge benefits to the economy.

Not a modest vision for a small state governor.

Compare to Republican governors getting indicted and convicted and investigated all around the country.

Via Daily Kos – Bob Davidson, a scientist who is also a devout Christian, was at first attracted to Seattle’s Discovery Institute but soon saw through their psuedo-science:

“I’m kind of embarrassed that I ever got involved with this”

“It’s laughable: There have been millions of experiments over more than a century that support evolution,” he says. “There’s always questions being asked about parts of the theory, as there are with any theory, but there’s no real scientific controversy about it.”

Davidson began to believe the institute is an “elaborate, clever marketing program” to tear down evolution for religious reasons. He read its writings on intelligent design — the notion that some of life is so complex it must have been designed — and found them lacking in scientific merit.

An “elaborate, clever marketing program” that may not fool scientists, but just might start to influence the American public enough so that these poll numbers will lean toward belief in “intelligent design”, and science will fall by the wayside.