Obama Will Nominate Elena Kagan To the Supreme Court

http://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/05/10/1328237/Obama-Will-Nominate-Elena-Kagan-To-the-Supreme-Court?art_pos=10

"President Obama has made his choice to fill the vacancy in the Supreme Court that was left by the retirement of Justice Stevens. According to this article that choice will be Elena Kagan."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_Kagan

At her confirmation hearing, Kagan also drew criticism for arguing that battlefield law, including indefinite detention without a trial, could apply outside of traditional battlefields.^[25] The New York Times paraphrases Kagan as saying "that someone suspected of helping finance Al Qaeda should be subject to battlefield law—indefinite detention without a trial—even if he were captured in a place like the Philippines rather than a physical battle zone.

The Helocopter Game

http://www.seethru.co.uk/zine/south_coast/helicopter_game.htm

GIMP Resynth vs. Photoshop Content Aware

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/05/05/1228221/GIMP-Resynth-vs-Photoshop-Content-Aware

"Just after Adobe released videos showing off the content-aware feature of Photoshop CS5, the GIMP community answered by showing the resynthesizer plugin, which has been available for some time and can do a similar job. However, are they really comparable? (In original Portuguese, but really, the images are pretty much self-explaining.) Compare them side by side removing the same objects from different kinds of images. Results do vary, but the most interesting part may be seeing the different results and trying to understand the logic of each algorithm."

Daily Events

So Google changed their search results page again.  I checked to verify that Oracal still worked with the new layout (it does).  For some reason I decided to make a script that would find the current top news item and then ask the Oracal about it.  So now you can get all your news from the Oracal.  It is updated daily at about 8:20am.

Edit: Now 100% more actually working.

http://daleswanson.org/things/dailyevents.htm

Why Aren't There More Terrorist Attacks?

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/05/why_arent_there.html

There are actually several answers to this question. One, terrorist attacks are harder to pull off than popular imagination -- and the movies -- lead everyone to believe. Two, there are far fewer terrorists than the political rhetoric of the past eight years leads everyone to believe. And three, random minor terrorist attacks don't serve Islamic terrorists' interests right now.

Operation Mincemeat

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/10/100510crat_atlarge_gladwell?currentPage=all

To fashion the container that would keep the corpse “fresh,” before it was dumped off the coast of Spain, Mincemeat’s planners turned to Charles Fraser-Smith, whom Ian Fleming is thought to have used as the model for Q in the James Bond novels. Fraser-Smith was the inventor of, among other things, garlic-flavored chocolate intended to render authentic the breath of agents dropping into France and “a compass hidden in a button that unscrewed clockwise, based on the impeccable theory that the ‘unswerving logic of the German mind’ would never guess that something might unscrew the wrong way.” The job of transporting the container to the submarine that would take it to Spain was entrusted to one of England’s leading race-car drivers, St. John (Jock) Horsfall, who, Macintyre notes, “was short-sighted and astigmatic but declined to wear spectacles.” At one point during the journey, Horsfall nearly drove into a tram stop, and then “failed to see a roundabout until too late and shot over the grass circle in the middle.”

How To Prevent Terrorist Attacks In Crowded Areas

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/times-square-bombs-and-big-crowds/?src=tptw#bruce

In the wake of Saturday’s failed Times Square car bombing, it’s natural to ask how we can prevent this sort of thing from happening again. The answer is stop focusing on the specifics of what actually happened, and instead think about the threat in general.

Hyperbole and a Half

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/

This is one of those things I came across several times, but didn't realize it was different posts on the same site.  It is good.

Floor

http://www.xkcd.com/735/

Good Pictures of Oil Spill

Good Pictures of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion and aftermath.  

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/04/oil_spill_approaches_louisiana.html