Webistemology

A sad day for nerds, geeks, and SF fans:

Majel Roddenberry, widow of ‘Trek’ creator, dies

`Star Trek’ will always be her legacy

Troubled economic waters | rabble.ca

Worth a look, if only for the picture!

Village life everywhere must be much improved, what with all the village idiots working as airport screeners. Its not enough that passenger screening is easily gamed. It’s not that while they are semi-screening carry on luggage, cargo and stowed luggage is frequently unscreened, and therefore a ‘security risk’. Now some TSA agents appear to have gone out of their way to demonstrate their inability to do the limited job they are supposed to do. In the last month these two incidents just go to provehow wrong this policy is:

• TSA can’t believe MacBook Air is a real laptop
• Woman says TSA forced piercings removal

While there may be some amusement in the first story, the humiliation visited upon the woman in the second story is unconsionable. With this level of training and service, its pretty clear that airport screening is ineffective and just serves to slow down service and increase annoyance.

Would it be totally heretical to suggest that we shut down all of the current system. If we have to do something let me suggest the following rules:

1. Eliminate the current screening system, and just check for boarding passes to allow passengers into the gate areas.
2. All backage and cargo will be subject to random inspection, including the opening and inspection of the contents.
3. Passengers will be subject to similar random inspection while in the gate area.

Measure the impact on travellers in terms of delays, and see if there is a noticeable difference in flight incidents. Fine tune the % of inspections based on evidence.

Enjoy your vaction.

Pity the poor villages that have got their idiots back.

And Still I Persist » Blog Archive » Arthur C. Clarke: requiescat intra astra
The best memorial that we can give to Clarke — and Asimov, and Heinlein — are permanent human stations outside of near-earth orbit.

While I agree that these where the  Big Three, and read them all voraciously, this passing reminds me of my one -almost- brush with SF greatness. When I was university age, one of the things that I did to pay for it was to drive cab. My greatest regret from that time was hearing from another driver how ‘some guy’ took his cab for a good chunk of the day to drive around the city. Turns out ‘some guy’ was Heinlein and he was driving around Winnipeg to get a sense of the city to include it, or more properly Stonewall, a small town just outside Winnipeg, in one of his later novels, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.

Probably just as well for the novel that I wasn’t the driver, at least for Mr. Heinlein’s ability to concentrate while looking around.

Record-High Ratio of Americans in Prison – washingtonpost.com
With more than 2.3 million people behind bars at the start of 2008, the United States leads the world in both the number and the percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving even far more populous China a distant second…

And that, my children, is how you bring ‘freedumb’ and ‘dumbocracy’ to the world.

Peace in the Middle East?

Al Jazeera English – News – Bush Moves To Seal Saudi Arms Deal
The US president has made clear his intention to go ahead with a $20bn arms deal to Saudi Arabia, as he arrived in Riyadh, near the end of his Middle East tour.