The suggestion that customer name and address information is not sensitive information because it is the sort of info listed in a phone book misses the point. The sensitivity of the information depends on the context. Your name on a list of residents in a city is not particularly revealing, but your name on a list of people who are being treated for depression surely is. If police are looking for a customer's name and address, it's not because they're carrying out a census. It's because they think they have something nasty to connect that person to. And if they are looking for it without a warrant, it's because they don't have enough evidence to satisfy a judge or a justice of the peace. Or because they think constitutional rights to privacy are an inconvenience.
- http://ping.fm/UDj37

Within white culture, your choice of transportation method says a lot about you. For example a Prius says you care about the Earth, a bicycle shows you REALLY care about the earth, and a bus shows that you are probably not white. But these three options are not the only viable ways for a white person to get around, they have literally dozens of choices including Volvos, old Mercedes that run on vegetable oil, Subaru Outbacks, and Vespa Scooters.

As it stands, every single white person on earth either owns, has owned, or is dreaming about owning a Vespa Scooter. And why not? They are Italian, feature vintage design, low emissions, make the rider look more sophisticated, and they carry a little bit of risk. In fact, were it to have a liberal arts degree and a steady income, a Vespa scooter would possesses every important quality that a white person looks for in a spouse.

A few months after Omar Khadr arrived at Guantanamo, he was awakened by a guard around midnight. Get up, the guard said. You have a reservation. Reservation was the commonly used term at Gitmo for torture session.

In the interrogation room, Omar's interviewer grew displeased with his level of cooperation. He summoned several MPs, who chained Khadr tightly to an eye-bolt in the center of the floor. Omar's hands and feet were shackled together; the eye-bolt held him at the point where his hands and feet met. Fetally positioned, he was left alone for about a half hour.

Upon their return, the MPs uncuffed Omar's arms, pulled them behind his back, and recuffed them to his legs, straining them badly at their sockets. At the junction of his arms and legs he was again bolted to the floor and left alone. The degree of pain a human body experiences in this from of stress positioning can quickly lead to delirium, and ultimately to unconsciousness. Before that happened, the MPs returned, forced Omar onto his knees, and cuffed his wrists and ankles together behind his back. This made his body into a kind of bow, his torso convex and rigid, right at the limit of its flexibility. The force of his cuffed wrists straining upward against his cuffed ankles drove his kneecaps into the concrete floor. The guards left.

An hour or two later they came back, checked the tautness of the chains between his hands and feet, and pushed him over onto his stomach. Transfixed in his bonds, Omar toppled like a figurine. Again they left. Many hours had passed since Omar had been taken from his cell. He urinated on himself and onto the floor. The MPs returned, mocked him for a while, and then poured pine oil solvent all over his body. Without altering his chains, they began dragging him by his feet through the mixture of urine and pine oil. Because his body had been so tightened, the new motion racked it. The MPs swung him around and around, the piss and solvent washing up into his face. The idea was to use him as a human mop. When the MPs felt they had sucessfully pretended to soak up the liquid with his body, they uncuffed him and carried him back to his cell. He was not allowed a change of clothes for two days.
- http://ping.fm/dHV4V

Oil will not just "run out" because all oil production follows a bell curve. This is true whether we're talking about an individual field, a country, or on the planet as a whole.

Oil is increasingly plentiful on the upslope of the bell curve, increasingly scarce and expensive on the down slope. The peak of the curve coincides with the point at which the endowment of oil has been 50 percent depleted. Once the peak is passed, oil production begins to go down while cost begins to go up.

In practical and considerably oversimplified terms, this means that if 2005 was the year of global Peak Oil, worldwide oil production in the year 2030 will be the same as it was in 1980. However, the world’s population in 2030 will be both much larger (approximately twice) and much more industrialized (oil-dependent) than it was in 1980. Consequently, worldwide demand for oil will outpace worldwide production of oil by a significant margin. As a result, the price will skyrocket, oil dependant economies will crumble, and resource wars will explode.

[In 2008 the International Energy Association released] the latest edition of its annual World Energy Outlook, which predicts a global oil production peak or plateau by 2030. In a video that appears online soon after, the Guardian’s George Monbiot requests a more precise figure from the IEA’s chief economist, Fatih Birol. The official estimate, he confesses, is 2020. Monbiot also inquires as to the motivation for the IEA’s sudden about-face, and Birol explains dryly that previous studies were “mainly an assumption.” That is, the 2008 version was the first in which the IEA actually examined hard data, wellhead by wellhead, from the world’s 800 largest oil fields. Monbiot asks, with understandable incredulity, how it was that such a survey hadn’t been conducted previously. Birol’s response: “In fact, nobody has done that research.”

The historical Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI) for conventional oil is 100:1. This refers to the kind of crude that gushes up in the opening credits of The Beverly Hillbillies, the kind that first flowed out of the Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia when it was tapped in 1948. Invest a barrel’s worth of energy drilling and refining in a spot like Ghawar, then and forever the largest single crude oil deposit on the planet, and you used to get 100 barrels of energy-dense, easily transported fuel in return. These days, conventional EROEI for such places is closer to 25:1.

The EROEI on more recent “new conventional” deposits, which Dave cites mostly by their discovery and extraction methods (“deepwater oil, horizontal wells, 3-D seismic”) is also around 25:1. In Alberta’s tar sands, the surface-mined bitumen comes to market at an EROEI of 6:1. “In situ” bitumen — sludge buried too far under the boreal forest floor to excavate, which comprises the lion’s share of the most breathless estimates of Canada’s energy superpower–scale oil production — rings in at 3:1. Corn ethanol, that darling of America’s farm states, is somewhere between 1.3:1 and 0.75:1. Shale oil, another unconventional source held by its boosters to be capable of indefinitely extending the age of oil, has never been converted into fuel at a net energy profit, at least as far as Dave has been able to ascertain.

As he drives, Dave indulges in a little academic exercise. He’s comfortable with numbers, quick with calculations. A barrel of oil, he tells you, contains about six gigajoules of energy. That’s six billion joules. Put your average healthy Albertan on a treadmill and wire it to a generator, and in an hour the guy could produce about 100 watts of energy. That’s 360,000 joules. Pay the guy the provincial minimum wage, give him breaks and weekends and statutory holidays off, and it would take 8.6 years for him to produce one barrel of oil equivalent (boe, the standard unit of measure in hydrocarbon circles). And you’d owe him $138,363 in wages. That, Dave tells you, is what a barrel of oil is worth.

Following the revelation last Christmas of how many Canadians - starting with the Prime Minister - have a twisted understanding of how we choose our governments, some of the best minds in academe decided urgent therapy was in order. In less than three months - the speed of light in the academy - under the leadership of the venerable Peter Russell, they have assembled a powerful and lucid book of essays about how Canada's Constitution really works.
http://ping.fm/Lv7FS

# Best Overall MP: Jason Kenney (Conservative)
# Best Orator: Bob Rae (Liberal)
# Best Rookie: Megan Leslie (NDP)
# Most Collegial: Peter Stoffer (NDP)
# Best Represents Constituents: Bill Casey (Independent)
# Hardest Working: Paul Szabo (Liberal)
# Most Knowledgeable: Joe Comartin (NDP)"

http://ping.fm/36wLs

"...a complex puzzle that plays out over the course of Wired's May issue, which involves decoding multiple ciphers and deriving a secret message that takes sleuths to a hidden page on Wired.com." - http://ping.fm/ENn4y

...a strange thing about the climate change debate. Opponents of a policy change generally believe that market economies are wonderful things, able to adapt to just about anything -- anything, that is, except a government policy that puts a price on greenhouse gas emissions. Limits on the world supply of oil, land, water -- no problem. Limits on the amount of CO2 we can emit -- total disaster. - http://ping.fm/XvZnC

"You may be surprised by the number of people that there are and they all seem to be rushing around everywhere," the guide says.

"Even though some may look like they have a frown on their face, they are very friendly people - many of them just work in offices, jobs they don't enjoy, and so they do not smile as much as they should." - http://ping.fm/rn5jQ

ENG: 232WR Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll
LIT: 223 Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or Less
ENG: 102 Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are Talking
ENG: 301 Advanced Blog and Book Skimming
ENG: 231WR Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance
LIT: 202 The Literary Merits of Lolcats
LIT: 209 Internet-Age Surrealistic Narcissism and Self-Absorption
- http://ping.fm/vVviY

Let's assume your relationship is a refrigerator. One day, a problem arises in your relationship--the refrigerator quits working. You walk into your kitchen, there's a puddle on the floor, and all your frozen pizzas and ice cream are a gooey mass in the bottom of the freezer. There are a few things you can do at this point, once you've mopped up the mess and scraped the remains of last night's lunch out of the fridge. One solution is to fix the refrigerator; another is to replace it. A third solution is to leave the refrigerator exactly where it is and change your life around the problem--"From this day forward, I will bring no frozen or refrigerated foods into this house." - http://ping.fm/dBTNc