Physical spam

On our dog walk this evening, we found that two neighborhoods to the south of us have been targeted by a new sort of marketing technique--in each yard was a bag containing a few rocks and a business card, apparently dropped by someone driving by who was too lazy to deliver them to the front door. In one neighborhood, these were like the ones pictured, in a ziploc bag with a card advertising a landscaping service. In another neighborhood, they were in twist-tied baggies with a piece of paper advertising a cleaning service.

This doesn't seem to me like a very effective method of advertising. The door hanger flyers are annoying already, but these are worse--it's like tossing trash into people's yards.

Some interesting technology

The March 7th, 2009 issue of The Economist Technical Quarterly has some items of interest:

Cool Earth Solar of Livermore, California is using balloons as solar energy collectors.

Narasimharao Kondamudi, Susanta Mohapatra, and Manoranjan Misra of the University of Nevada at Reno have found a way to turn coffee grounds into biodiesel.

David Whitten of the University of New Mexico and Kirk Schanze of the University of Florida have built "micro-sized 'roach motels'" for capturing bacteria in hospitals and on the surfaces of ships.

Nicholas Kotov and his team at the University of Michigan have come up with a way to coat cotton threads with carbon nanotubes which can be used to carry electricity, and to add an additional material that reacts with human serum albumin, in order to detect bleeding, which might be used by the military in monitoring soldiers.

The success of drug decriminalization in Portugal

Portugal decriminalized drugs in 2001, and Glenn Greenwald discusses the evidence that he says shows it has been "an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug consumption as a criminal offense."

Answers in Genesis censorship turns old-earther into young-earther

Commenter Tim H pointed me to a post at Tim Martin's Beyond Creation Science blog about another Answers in Genesis controversy. Old-earth creationist Charles Spurgeon delivered a June 17, 1855 sermon (four years before Darwin published Origin of Species) in which he stated that the earth had to be "many millions of years" old. When Answers in Genesis published that sermon on their website, they omitted that sentence, "We know not how remote the period of the creation of this globe may be-certainly many millions of years before the time of Adam."

After Martin pointed out the omission, Answers in Genesis inserted a footnote containing the omitted sentence, stating that this footnote was inadvertently omitted from their publication of the sermon. But they made no apologies for removing the sentence in question from its proper context and relegating it to a footnote.

UPDATE: AiG did more than just remove that sentence--they revised language throughout the sermon, which in some other areas also changed the intended meaning to bring it in line with young-earth creationist dogma.

The U.S. Nazi dirty bomb plot

Remember how the press was all over the story of the 29-year-old millionaire white supremacist and fan of Adolf Hitler in Maine who was building a dirty bomb that he planned to set off at Obama's inauguration, but it didn't happen because his wife shot and killed him?

Me neither, but James G. Cummings of Belfast, Maine, had (quoting Wikileaks) "four lots of one gallon containers of bomb-grade hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium (also radioactive), lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium (radiation booster), boron, black iron oxide and magnesium ribbon" which he somehow planned to set off at the inauguration. Personally, I don't think that volume of material could have been easily smuggled in anywhere near the inauguration activities without raising suspicion.

Why no press coverage of this story, apart from the Bangor Daily News?

Wikileaks has a summary; Wonkette has summarized that; the Washington D.C. Regional Threat and Analysis Center report (PDF) is here.

Pat Robertson on Christians studying the Koran

From the J-Walk blog:

Pat Robertson answers a question from a "pastor of a ministry to international college students" who asks whether his ministry leaders should be permitted to study the Koran in order to understand Islam, which he thinks is a bad idea since "there are plenty of Christian resources out there to get information on other religions."

Robertson's reply:

Kelly, it won't be wrong if somebody studies Islam, but they need guided study, because somebody needs to go along and point out the incredible inconsistencies in that book. And if you have a guided study of the Koran and see how much in there is just repetitious, how much comes out of the Old Testament and the New Testament, how much is just plagiarism from the Bible, etc.?.

If you will go through it with them, I think it would be a very helpful exercise. But I doubt very seriously by reading the Koran they're going to get converted to Islam. I wouldn't worry about it. But I think they need to see it. They need to see what is in there. Many people who are Muslim don't know what the Koran says. And when you begin to tell them, they say, "Well, I don't believe that." And you say, "Well, it's in your sacred book. It's supposed to be holy words." So it won't hurt, but guided study.

Blogger John Walkenbach responds: "Now, turn that answer around a pretend it's in response to a Muslim asking if he should study the Bible. It still works!"

Indeed, with a few small changes. (Hat tip to Dave Palmer at the SKEPTIC list for the pointer to Robertson's Q&A.)

Copyright treaty classified on national security grounds

The U.S. government is negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a treaty which imposes new controls over copyright, but refuses to let the general public know its specific content. In response to a Freedom of Information Act Request from Knowledge Ecology International, the Obama administration responded that the content is classified for national security reasons pursuant to Executive Order 12958, a Clinton order from 1995.

As Declan McCullagh points out, the executive order "allows material to be classified only if disclosure would do 'damage to the national security and the original classification authority is able to identify or describe the damage.'" He also points out that one of Obama's first acts as president was to sign a memo that said that FOIA "should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure."

The claim that this treaty cannot be disclosed for national security reasons sounds bogus, but if it's so, what's the purported damage being prevented? In the absence of a clear rationale, this treaty should be openly discussed and available to the general public.

SkeptiCamp Phoenix

On March 28, SkeptiCamp Phoenix 2009 will take place at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Participants include Mike Stackpole of the Phoenix Skeptics on "Practical Techniques for Street Skepticism," John Lynch on "Academic Freedom and Intelligent Design," and Tony Barnhart on "Methods of the Pseudo-Psychic."

The event is sponsored by the Skeptics Society/Skeptic magazine, the Center for Skeptical Inquiry/Skeptical Inquirer magazine, and by the James Randi Educational Foundation. It will be the fifth SkeptiCamp, after two in Colorado, one in Vancouver, and one in Atlanta.

For more information on the event, see the SkeptiCamp Phoenix 2009 wiki page, the SkeptiCamp Phoenix registration site, or the SkeptiCamp Phoenix Facebook page.

For more on SkeptiCamp, see Reed Esau's "The Skepticamp Bargain" in JREF's Swift and his article "Raising Our Game" (PDF) published by the Skeptics Society.

(Previously, previously, previously.)

Scientology and religious visas

Jeff Jacobsen has a new article on Scientology's use of religious R-1 visas to bring people from other countries to the U.S. to work at menial labor for $50/week (with billion-year Sea Org contracts). R-1 visas are supposed to be for religious ministers who have been working for the U.S. organization sponsoring them for at least two years, and it appears that Scientology has abused these conditions to get cheap labor. And in the process, they've brought in people like Artur Solomonyan from Armenia, who was subsequently arrested and found guilty of illegal weapons sales after trying to sell weapons including surface-to-air missiles to an FBI informant.

Legalize pot and tax the crap out of it

Today's Overcompensating makes a timely proposal. Just as the repeal of Prohibition during the Great Depression helped economic recovery and reduced associated criminal activity, repealing the drug war could do the same. Legalizing prostitution along the lines of the New Zealand model (adopted in 2003, and in 2008 in Western Australia) is also a good idea.

Now that Attorney General Eric Holder has confirmed Obama's campaign promise that the feds will not engage in drug raids against medical marijuana operations in states that have legalized such activity, the time is right.