NOAA bulletin about Hurricane Katrina

The apocalyptic-sounding NOAA bulletin that was released Sunday morning which Brian Williams described on tonight's Daily Show may be found online here.

The REAL Truman Show

Chris Roller's web site (www.mytrumanshow.com), aside from being a guided tour through a profoundly disturbed--though mostly harmless--mind, is immensely entertaining. He updates it often, so it pays to visit it every couple of months.

Especially funny is the clip he's provided of a segment (an amazingly long one, considering the ridiculous subject matter) that some Entertainment Tonight clone did on his $50,000,000 suit against David Copperfield for "using his Godly powers" without his permission. You can tell they were skirting along the edge of blatantly making fun of him.

Roller must be a real trip to be around.

Paramedics in New Orleans

Here's an interesting first-hand account of trying to get out of New Orleans from a couple of socialist paramedics from San Francisco who were attending a conference. This account is critical of both the federal and local responses, but praises spontaneous individual order that kept being stifled by the officials.

Bush Disaster

Here's a great photo, via James Redekop on the SKEPTIC mailing list.

New Orleans catastrophic hurricane disaster plan

DHS/FEMA hired a Baton Rouge company called IEM to develop a "catastrophic hurricane disaster plan for New Orleans & Southeast Louisiana" in June 2004. IEM has now edited this from their website, apparently in embarrassment.

After this was pointed out in the blogosphere, IEM restored the press release.

Internal criticism

Denyse O'Leary (an appallingly bad journalist who blogs in favor of Intelligent Design) wrote that she won't become an internal critic of ID because she opposes the "academic fascism" of ID critics. I find that an appallingly weak justification for being a propagandist. Internal criticism tends to strengthen the quality of arguments and evidence, not weaken them--unless, of course, what you're advocating is false.

Evolution and economics / Daily Show and Evolution

A couple of items from Pharyngula:

1. P.Z. wonders, citing John Allen Poulos, why there's not more affinity between economists and evolutionists. What, no mention of Rothschild's Bionomics? There are some interesting comments on this Pharyngula entry, worth the read.

2. The Daily Show is going to settle the evolution vs. creation battle once and for all with a special called "Evolution Schmevolution: A Daily Show Special Report," filling the "Daily Show" timeslot during the week of September 12. This should be a good one...

Empirical argument for billboard restrictions

The Economist reports on research from Steven Most at Yale into a condition called "emotion-induced blindness" (apparently similar to and named analogously to motion-induced blindness). Most's research shows that gory and erotic images trigger a condition which lasts for two-tenths to eight-tenths of a second during which the viewer fails to process what they see immediately afterwards. This is attributed to "an information-processing bottleneck in the brain when it is presented with important stimuli," the categories in question being relevant to avoiding dangers and reproductive success, respectively.

This phenomenon provides grounds for an argument that some content-based restrictions on visual material in certain locations (e.g., alongside highways) are justified on the basis of their potential to cause physical harm. (Or that liability should be incurred for resulting accidents by those who put such material in place.)

Photography and the Occult

The NY Metropolitan Museum of Art has an exhibition on "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult" that appears quite interesting.

Bush vs. Reality: New Orleans disaster

Pharyngula points out this latest example of a Bush statement at odds with reality:

George W. Bush, September 2005:
"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

Scientific American, October 2001:
"New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh--an area the size of Manhattan--will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities. Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die. The body bags wouldn't go very far."

It seems to me there's at least as much blame to place on Louisiana state and New Orleans city government as on the feds for this one.