Category: Blog

Trying out the video on my new camera. It just goes to show how shocking it is that any photo I ever take is in focus – I’m one shaky person!

…again. This time, it’s the guest room door. So, I try once again to work out the focus and shake issues with taking photos with my new camera…I still have a lot to learn.

So, which came first – our disinterest in actual news or the media directing our attention away from it? Click thru for examples of how the covers of Newsweek and Time magazine differ between the US edition and the rest of the world.

Sociological Images » American Vs. International News: Time And Newsweek

Americans are notorious for their ignorance of global issues and international news. This may be because Americans aren’t interested or it may be that our news outlets feed us fluff and focus us only on the U.S. Probably it’s a vicious cycle.

Dmitriy T.M. pointed me to some stunning evidence of this phenomenon.

The cover story for Newsweek magazine’s September 2006 edition was “Losing Afghanistan” in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. It was “My Life in Pictures,” a story about the photographer Annie Liebovitz in the U.S. (via):

Glad they are being cautious and I hope Endeavour has a safe return flight/landing.

NASA probes new space shuttle fuel tank problem

NASA will hold off launching any more space shuttles until it understands why strips of insulating foam peeled off the fuel tank used by shuttle Endeavour, the U.S. space agency shuttle program manager said on Thursday.

Endeavour arrived safely in orbit after Wednesday’s liftoff from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida though video and images of the launch showed about a dozen pieces of debris flying off the fuel tank during the 8.5-minute climb to orbit.

Some smashed into the ship’s heat shield, though NASA does not believe they caused any serious damage.

“We’re not worried about this one, but we need to understand what’s going on for the next flight,” shuttle program manager John Shannon said at a news conference.

“This is new,” Shannon said. “I don’t know if we have a material issue or a process issue but we’ll get to the bottom of it and clear it before the August flight.”

He told Reuters in an interview that no new shuttle launches would take place until the foam loss problem was understood.

Nasa likely taped over original Apollo 11 moon walk footage | Science | guardian.co.uk

It was mankind’s crowning achievement, with millions around the world glued to their television sets as astronaut Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the surface of the moon 40 years ago.

But in the scientific equivalent of recording an old episode of EastEnders over the prized video of your daughter’s wedding day, Nasa likely taped over its only high resolution images of the first moonwalk with electronic data from a satellite or a later manned space mission, officials said today.

This cracks me up much more than it should…

NYTimes.com

C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.

The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.

A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

NYTimes.com

The Justice Department on Thursday made public detailed memos describing brutal interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency, as President Obama sought to reassure the agency that the C.I.A. operatives involved would not be prosecuted.

In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior operatives of Al Qaeda are spelled out in careful detail — like keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, placing them in a dark, cramped box or putting insects into the box to exploit their fears.

The interrogation methods were authorized beginning in 2002, and some were used as late as 2005 in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons. The techniques were among the Bush administration’s most closely guarded secrets, and the documents released Thursday afternoon were the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the program.

Some senior Obama administration officials, including Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., have labeled one of the 14 approved techniques, waterboarding, illegal torture. The United States prosecuted some Japanese interrogators at war crimes trials after World War II for waterboarding and other methods detailed in the memos.

Some of these are quite fun – well, except for the Axe one. 15 Creative Ads in Unusual Places via Oddee.com.

news.yahoo.com

One small step for NASA, one giant running leap for Stephen Colbert.

NASA announced Tuesday that it won’t name a room in the international space station after the comedian. Instead, it has named a treadmill after him.