As much as I tend to rip into CNN, every so often they carry something that I just have to share. Today their site features a video of a guy who jumps out of airplanes and flies around with a jet-powered contraption that looks like it was made in his basement.

Maybe it’s because I just saw Iron Man, but this looks very cool, if incredibly unsafe. Apparently, the guy goes by the name “Fusion Man.” Evildoers beware!

Photo via the Oz Report.

There are more than 210 million Internet users in China, and according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, nearly all of them want Big Brother watching over their shoulders when they surf.

From the report:

Many Americans assume that China’s internet users are both aware of and unhappy about their government’s oversight and control of the internet. But in a new survey, most Chinese say they approve of internet control and management, especially when it comes from their government.

According to findings from the fourth and most recent of a series of surveys about internet use in China from 2000 to 2007, over 80% of respondents say they think the internet should be managed or controlled, and in 2007, almost 85% say they think the government should be responsible for doing it.

That sounds like a heck of a lot — anyone who’s ever been on a committee knows all too well that it’s damn near impossible to get 85 per cent of any group to agree on much of anything. Once you break down the numbers though, it seems that people generally just want protection from gambling, pornography, violence and spam. Only 27 per cent of Chinese apparently want the government monitoring their online chatting, and just 41 per cent want “political” content policed by the state.

If those numbers still seem high, it may be because they’re inflated as well — if you were living in a country with zero tolerance for “anti-patriotic” leanings, how eager would you be to share your distaste for state censorship with a pollster? A poll like this one seems likely to produce a lot of false answers, much like asking people if they tend not to trust “ethnic types,” or whether or not they play with themselves.

Still, some Chinese netizens clearly do want a state watchdog filtering their content, and not altogether unreasonably — there are indeed some scary things out there. But much of what the Chinese government blocks isn’t scary to anyone but the Chinese government, like reports of police brutality, information about the continuing Chinese colonization in mineral-rich Tibet, and criticisms of the growing rich-poor divide in the nominally socialist country.

According to Harvard Law School, the long list of blocked, filtered or government-altered sites includes everything from the news media (Irish Chronicle, ABC, Yahoo! News, Radio Canada International), to international and government bodies (UNICEF Canada, the U.S. Judiciary, the Taiwanese and Japanese governments) to educational institutions (MIT, Columbia), to the seemingly innocuous Red Lobster restaurant chain and the Red Mountain ski resort in British Columbia — perhaps because of their flippant use of China’s revolutionary colour.

Reasonable people and reasonable governments don’t shut out dissenting views — they address them through public dialogue and debate — but that’s the subject of a post all its own. For now, I’m just hoping this little site stays low enough on the Google rankings to fly under the Chinese government radar.

Story via Slashdot.

Last night I stumbled upon one of the most chilling and touching print journalism pieces I’ve seen in a while, courtesy of the Guardian’s Tania Branigan. It is painfully human and will make you want to cry. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Tenderly, she eased the clean fleece over her little boy’s hand and up around his plump shoulder. The steady rain washing the town’s streets had chilled the usually warm Sichuan weather.

He didn’t look alarmed or frightened but dirt and blood were caked on his forehead. She touched his hair and then they pulled up the zipper on the bodybag and carried him away. Only her husband marked her howls. The whole street was seething with misery and anger. She had seen her son, at least; most of the children still lay in the rubble of Xinjian elementary school.

Four hundred and fifty pupils, aged between six and 12, were there when the quake hit yesterday at 2.28pm. A fortunate few were pulled out within hours by anxious parents scrabbling at the wreckage with bare hands. A handful more were saved overnight, after troops arrived to take over the rescue effort. Doctors were unsure how many had been taken to hospital - perhaps 15, perhaps 50.

What was certain was that hundreds more remained trapped and that hope was ebbing by the moment.

“There’s a slight chance they could save a few more now; probably not very many,” said a white-coated doctor.

Even the medics were raw-eyed and anxious. The sobs, wails and shouting mixed with sirens and the steady patter of rain. Under bright umbrellas, parents and relatives stood in whatever they grabbed when the quake hit: dressing gowns, slippers, straw hats. Some bore the bruises and scars of the previous day. Scores of doctors and nurses were waiting to help survivors from the school. But the scale of the challenge — and the collapse of the nearby hospital — meant that resources appeared to be limited. One child was carried to an ambulance by the arms and legs, apparently because there were not enough stretchers.

[…] Like many parents here, their mood was turning from raw grief to fury as they waited for news. Twenty four hours after the quake they were losing hope, and only rage was left. They blamed everyone: soldiers for coming too late, the builders for cutting corners, officials for — they claimed — siphoning off cash. “The contractors can’t have been qualified. It’s a ‘tofu’ [soft and shoddy] building. Please, help us release this news,” her husband said. “About 450 were inside, in nine classes, and it collapsed completely from the top to the ground. It didn’t fall over; it was almost like an explosion.”

His neighbour, still half hoping for a sight of her daughter, burst out angrily: “Why isn’t there money to build a good school for our kids? Chinese officials are too corrupt and bad.

“These buildings outside have been here for 20 years and didn’t collapse — the school was only 10 years old. They took the money from investment, so they took the lives of hundreds of kids. They have money for prostitutes and second wives but they don’t have money for our children.

“This is not a natural disaster - this is done by humans.”

I hadn’t heard of her either, but I wish I had.

In 1958, at the tender age of 18, a pregnant Mildred Jeter travelled to Washington, D.C. to marry Richard Loving. Mildred was black, Richard was white, and interracial marriage was illegal in their home state of Virginia. In spite of their novel attempt to get around the law, they were arrested on their return, taken away in the middle of the night and banned from living together. The charge, according to MSNBC: “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth.”

Very much in love, they refused to live apart, and moved to D.C. to circumvent the ban. Once there, Mildred took the state of Virgina to court. Black people didn’t often have their grievances heard by the Supreme Court, and black women even less so, but against all odds, she won her day in court; in 1967 interracial marriage bans were struck down across America. At least 17 states were forced to change their laws.

On May 2, Mildred Loving died. But last year, on the 40th anniversary of the landmark ruling, she released a statement that included the following:

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the “wrong kind of person” for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.

Whether you’re a a chivalrous hero or a dastardly black knight, CatapultKits.com sells the right siege weapon for you, from onagers to catapults, trebuchets to ballistae. Many items are available in pint-sized desktop format, so you can lob projectiles over cubicle walls at your co-workers. They’ll never know it was you — unless you happen to be the only one at the office with an authentic scale replica of an ancient Roman onager on your desk. Then they’ll know.

The bad boy up top is a replica of the trebuchet used in the siege of Stirling by Edward Longshanks in 1304. (Yes, the bad guy from Braveheart.) The original stood 30 feet high and launched its projectiles up to 1200 feet — something in the area of four football fields. The replica, unfortunately, is just 18 inches tall, but it’ll still nail a target 60 feet away — more than enough for your inter-cubicle warfare. At right is a Greek ballista that’ll fire golf balls up to 200 feet. Your neighbours will love you!

Real siege weapons, of course, didn’t fire golf balls — they launched anything from stones to flaming pitch to the rotting corpses of animals and fallen soldiers. Imagine how terrifying and demoralizing it must have been to be bombarded with all this awful stuff by a besieging army that’s sitting safely four football fields away.

If you’re a siege weapon snob and only the real thing will do for you, check out Steve Seigars’s 52,000-pound trebuchet, built at a cost of $100,000 to advertise the owner’s pumpkin patch. The contraption can send a regular pumpkin 1,760 feet and once launched a 300-pound pumpkin 400 feet — enough for a homerun at Chicago’s Wrigley field.

“When it hit,” Siegars says, “it sounded like a cannon going off.”

From FOX News, unfortunately:

Code Pink members unfurled a pink banner reading “Troops Home Now” and waved signs as they began the protest, which they promised would include incantations and pointy hats for a “witches, crones and sirens” day.

“Women are coming to cast spells and do rituals and to impart wisdom to figure out how we’re going to end war,” Zanne Sam Joi of Bay Area Code Pink told FOXNews.com.

Members of the pro-troops group Move Forward America came armed with packages of salt, which they spread around the recruiting station to keep the Marines safe from spells. The group’s Web site implored members to bring brooms to “mock the anti-American witches of Code Pink.”

Police kept guard outside the recruiting station to keep the peace.

For several months, Code Pink has been protesting outside San Francisco’s Marine recruiting centre. The group is made up of women of all ages, and includes a “grandmother” brigade.

Photo via Wikipedia.
Image via Fark.

Today, the UN believes that the death toll could hit 100,000 — about 286 times the Myanmar government’s initial public estimate of 350 deaths. Fearing a loss of control over its people if the world intervenes, the ruling military has refused to allow most aid organizations to enter the country — worsening the disaster and condemning many thousands of its citizens to death by starvation and disease.

Many aid supplies that do get into the country are quickly locked up in government warehouses. This makes me so mad.

From the BBC:

About 5,000 square kilometres (1,930 square miles) of farmland in the Irrawaddy delta are now under water, littered with thousands of corpses.

Aid agencies say the lack of access to clean drinking water and outbreaks of communicable diseases such as dengue and malaria are a major concern.

The country’s ruling generals have faced mounting criticism over their handling of the crisis, their reluctance to allow international aid teams into the country and their insistence on distributing aid themselves.

The World Food Programme is in talks with the government after tonnes of aid it flew into Burma was impounded by the military authorities, who wanted to control its distribution.

Travelex, the world’s largest currency exchange company, wants to see its newly minted Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination (QUID) become the money of choice for spacefaring tourists.

The cutesy name might be a bit of a stretch — intergalactic? — but with space tourism starting to take off, thrill-seeking billionaires from all over the world may well need a universal currency to spend and gamble in the space hotels of tomorrow. And tomorrow may come sooner than we think — Virgin Galactic seems set to start shuttling tourists into space next year, and Bigelow Aerospace says it’ll have orbiting hotels in place three years after that. Two prototype hotels are already in orbit.

By Travelex’s reckoning, one QUID is worth about $12.50. I guess space food will be pricey.

From the press release:

Professor George Fraser from the University of Leicester commented: “None of the existing payment systems we use on earth -– like cash, credit or debit cards -– could be used in space for a variety of different reasons. Anything with sharp edges, like coins, would be a risk to astronauts while the chips and magnetic strips used in our cards on Earth would be damaged beyond repair by cosmic radiation. What’s more, because of the distances involved — it is more than 230,000 miles from the Earth to the moon — chip and pin technology is also out of the question.”

Professor Fraser continued: “We have had to completely rethink the design of the currency from the materials used to the payment mechanisms and aesthetics. The currency cannot contain any chemicals that might contaminate the astronauts’ life support systems and must be able to survive the extreme environment of space. We also had in mind that the currency should be meaningful for any intelligent life we might encounter in other planetary systems.”

By “meaningful,” he means that each QUID is modelled after the solar system, and portrays the Sun and its eight orbiting planets. Just in case the Fleegle race from the planet Glargutron decides to accept our little plastic baubles in exchange for their sweet sweet synthehol.

Incidentally, Travelex is also trying to secure its spot as the first currency exchange office on the moon.

Thanks Lysanne!

Dove’s much-ballyhooed “Real Beauty” advertising campaign makes a point of showcasing “real women” — love handles and all — as opposed to the scrawny models and twenty-somethings that typically prance around in beauty product ads. As it turns out, the Dove models may not be so real after all.

The New Yorker’s Lauren Collins recently sat down with Pascal Dangin, quite possibly the world’s leading airbrush artist, for a feature piece that’s actually quite interesting,and offers a neat look at how a flick of the airbrush turns everyday women turn into cover girls. Dangin works with Air France, American Express, Disney, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co., Vogue, Victoria’s Secret, Vanity Fair… well you get the idea. Point is, he apparently worked on the Dove campaign as well, and had this to say:

Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

I’ve always thought this was a neat campaign, and I still do. In an advertising environment saturated with emaciated stick figures, Dove’s ads are a sorely needed reminder that you don’t need a perfectly sculpted body to be beautiful, and the women in the ads — airbrushed or otherwise — truly are. But it’s a little sad that not even Dove was confident enough about the natural beauty of these radiant “ordinary women” to lay off the airbrushing.

Image via cultureby.com.

What’s the world coming to when you can’t even hop onto the bus, sit back and crack open a cold one? Next they’ll ban stogeys in daycare.

From London mayor Boris Johnson’s website:

“London has a higher rate of alcohol-related crimes than any other region in England and I have been told time and again that people are scared of taking the Underground late at night because of aggressive behaviour by drunken yobs. Too many people find themselves forced to sit opposite someone swigging from a can of lager and engaging in behaviour that is intimidating or worse. I want everyone’s journeys to be safer and more pleasant.

Any politician who uses the phrase “drunken yobs” is alright in my book.

Public transport staff are expected to use “reasonable force” to remove drinkers, and to call the police if more force — presumably the unreasonable kind — is needed. Bus drivers and ticket-takers are understandably upset about this, as tossing out drunken, potentially violent riders is likely not part of their job description.

If you’re from the U.S. or Canada, you may be surprised to learn that Londoners have been happily and legally boozing on the bus and subway. Before you rush off to make your vacation plans, you should know that the new law is part of a trend toward banning alcohol in public places. Surrey Heath, for example, says it’s no longer legal to drink on some highways, or in some parking lots. Talk about fascists.

As well, a UK-wide law passed in February will finally allow police to confiscate alcohol from children who drink in public — though there’s still no law preventing them from drinking behind closed doors. Trying to sound stern as she announced the new police powers, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said: “Let me be perfectly clear –- if children are caught drinking in public they’ll have those drinks confiscated.” Not arrested though. Or fined. Or escorted home to mom and dad. But no drinking for little Billy until he can stumble back to the liquor store.

That image is about the most complicated Photoshopping I can manage right now, but I’m taking lessons from the very best.