The science President

Can’t really say it better than this, by Chris Mooney.

A while back I blogged about an idea floated by Morton Kondracke: That George W. Bush should try to become the “science” president by emphasizing, in his State of the Union speech, themes of global scientific competitiveness and the need to ensure that the good old USA is leading the pack. Well, it now seems official: According to the Boston Globe, in his speech tonight Bush plans to highlight Norman Augustine, a former Lockheed Martin CEO who “last year led a congressionally mandated National Academies team that issued a report warning that America is ‘on a losing path’ in the global marketplace.”

EFF sues AT&T for assisting NSA with President Bush’s illegal wiretaps

Full link.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications.

[tags]EFF, Wiretaps, NSA, Bush[/tags]

Smart fridge magnets make poetry

From Engadget. Here is a set of refridgerator magnets made up of a 16 character LCD display. The magnets can recognize what other parts of speech are nearby and adjust themselves to make poetry without user interaction. And if you don’t like what comes up, you can shake a magnet to change its word.

As you compose a poem, placing words in grammatical order, the magnets communicate with each other to learn the grammar rules you are using.

Once they are ‘trained’, the magnets can change the words they are displaying to substitute words that don’t fit the established grammar rules, like an autocorrect function.

[tags]Poetry, magnets, Cool[/tags]

Senators see the light on broadcast flag

Over at EFF (support this group if you don’t already – they work to protect our digital rights), there is an article about how some Senators are turning against the broadcast flag. The reason for this is they now see that the broadcast flag would make Senator Stevens’ ipod fairly worthless. This matters, because Senator Stevens is one of the original proponents of the bill.

[tags]Broadcast flag, EFF, Digital rights[/tags]