The GWIRE, Wax Intellectual Newsticker - not just for Fox Moxin anymore! Options

[droog]

Welcome to the GWIRE.

This is Wax Intellectual's own News Wire, or Newsticker service. We received several government grants which were spent on focus groups and marketing surveys to determine an adequate name. Eventually we settled on the name GWIRE, which roughly stands for Glasseneral of Waterax Intellectual Roundup of Eye-openers. We wanted to clean up the name but ran out of money before we could do it. Anyway, we are stapling the thread at the top of the forum, so you can check in everyday and hopefully get a dose of news pieces everyday.

What is the use of GWIRE? It is a thread where you can come in and post short blurbs and links to matters which you consider Waxy, but which wouldn't, by your estimate, generate enough discussion on a stand-alone thread. There may be various reasons for making such entries: You may feel that everybody will agree with the matter and not much discussion will ensue. You may find the topic is interesting, but too specialised for anyone to comment. It is a place to learn stuff which doesn't fit in the local discussion/flame war format. Maybe it's a science stub with little chances of debate, or some local newsbit from Mozambique where you happen to be on exchange. On past ocassions some members have mentioned how they rely on Wax Intellectual to get some of their news. We hope this thread will help to fortify your news intake with Valuable Minutiae™.

DOs

The way to use the thread is down to common sense and your typical posting habits in Wax I. We hope to attract additional entries which in the past would not have been made because particular new threads seemed excessive, pointless, unpromising, etc. This way we get more content, more informal education. There are also secondary benefits like more traffic, and an unruly collective archive. An entry in the GWIRE may save you the embarrassment of seeing you precious thread sink down the page for lack of attention (What do you mean, 'projecting'?). However, unrelated entries in the same thread also cut down the chances of people talking about your particular entry, which means you may not want to use the GWIRE to bring topics you definitely plan to discuss. Replies concerning a particular entry are welcome. However, after a number of replies the entry and subsequent posts would call for a split. That's not new and we're all comfortable with the practice elsewhere in the Board.

It goes without saying you can still create separate threads even if you know they won't get a lot of replies. Sometimes it's better to create a thread and summon it months or years later. It's tidy and we like that.

DON'Ts

This thread is meant to be similar to other odd-bins in Brunchma. Its purpose is to increase communication, information, and traffic on the forum by allowing members to post and run on obscure topics. Your non-mainstream entries sit in the GWIRE for people to read, possibly comment on, and even spin off into split threads. It is not meant for dumping the existing traffic into one unreadable mesh of entries. You can't use it to save you the trouble of searching for the most recent appropriate thread. As a member of the board, we still expect some diligence from you in looking for an appropriate thread in which to rant about War, Politics, Religion, Economy, Censorship or whatever keeps that vein pumping in your forehead (seriously, look into that).

Same rules of WaxI apply: Don't be an ass, make sure the topic is waxy and not wacky, no images, etc. Since the thread will remain open, continuous violations regarding an individual entry will result in a thread split and mod warning. This way we keep the GWIRE clean and allow tempers to cool. Once split, that thread is treated like any other.

Moving on, here are some entries found over several months which may find a nice home in the GWIRE, given for illustrative purposes:

• Uzbekistan legalizes money laundering until 2013: This is interesting, yet not easily turned into a thread. Uzbekistan is not one of our collective strengths and that's OK, pumpkin. You don't have to run to Google for facts on Uzbekistan in order to post in a WI thread anymore. Why front when you can just use the GWIRE? Also, if you or anyone you know launders money, a quick blurb like this one is invaluable, once we ignore the value of all the money that's laundered. (See? We're already picking up Uzbeki practices, this is going to be great!).
• Humans carry more bacterial cells than human ones. Uh, that's pretty much it. Good thing to know, though.
• The DC Madam died. In this case there was very little to start a thread when the news came out. There is no indication of foul play, no ties to any of the rumoured high ranking politicians who were her clients. A post on the GWIRE makes more sense at first than giving room for unbased speculations. If there are or had been ramifications from the matter, a separate thread can or could be created afterwards.
• Northern Rock Again. This is an example of a marginal case, a gray area. This is a regional topic which can spin into a separate thread. A UK bank going under, government bailing it out. I know little of it, and would probably just need a couple of posts in the GWIRE from other members in order to grasp what's happening (just like a LiaD post can bring a couple of replies, but not too many otherwise it has to be split). So at first, the GWIRE may be a good place for it. If it sparks a long discussion, we can always split it.

You can bring in math, weird stats, events and ceremonies of interest, art. We want Wax that isn't always about arguing, and this thread is a very good tool for it. So, have fun and profit with the thread. Any initial questions or comments can be left here and we'll look into it.

[Slow Motion Walter]

sweet idea.

Go, Alan, go! Keep on chasing the rainbow!

This post has been edited by Slow Motion Walter: May 16 2008, 02:08 PM

[Bookwyrm]

Double Amputee allowed to go for Olympics

[droog]

Via Eschaton, how Harvard gets richer by 7 billion while reporting losses:

If you think of Harvard as a corporation, it had an income statement in FY 2007 with about $2.2 billion of revenues (tuition, sponsored research contracts, and so on) and about $3.2 billion of expenses, and therefore had to move about $1 billion from the endowment to make up the difference in order to run at basically break-even. In other words, it’s a big institution, but hey, it doesn’t make any money and has to survive on the kindness of donors, even if these donations are channeled through an endowment.

But this isn’t quite the whole picture. The overall Harvard corporation gets to make money through investment returns on its endowment (or, more precisely, the General Investment Account, which currently includes about $6 billion of investable assets in operational accounts in addition to the $34 billion endowment) that doesn’t get reported as revenue. Last year, Harvard made more than $7 billion of tax-free investment income.

So if you just think about how much cash went into the shoebox and how much came out of it, a more accurate accounting for Harvard for FY 2007 would, in rough numbers, be a lot more like the following:

Receipts = $2 billion of operating revenue + $7.3 billion of investment income + $0.6 billion of gifts to the endowment = ~$10 billion.

Operating costs = ~$3 billion.

Profit = $10 billion – $3 billion = ~$7 billion.

This explains why Harvard’s net assets increased about $7 billion in 2007, from about $35 billion to about $42 billion.

Viewed purely in terms of economics, Harvard is really a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University that has the job of raising the investment capital and protecting the fund’s preferential tax treatment.

[Dutch Philosopher]

The Dutch DoJ manages to mishandle a politically sensitive case.
link.

What should've been kept a low-key investigation, turns into a full media circus.

[Sergei]

This is particularly difficult for me of course. Just today I was drawing satirical cartoons criticizing our anti-hatred laws in Ireland for being too weak. Do I back up and say "All right, maybe weak isn't so bad..."?

I don't want to. I want strong laws against intimidation of or discrimination against minorities. I want the law to say that equality is not an optional extra but a founding principle of society.

However I also want the law to protect all kinds of political or social criticism. That's also a founding principle.

I'll get back to this.

[antiquated_Tory]

Glad to see that the American commenter on that news piece is showing our usual deep understanding of European matters:

The new EU totalitarianism - your well deserved future - opening its wing and this is just the beginning. There will be wide scale persecution of "subversive" thought all over the Continent and it will happen soon. There is no need to add comments : ask Solzhenitsyn and Hitler's book-burning crowd what is the best way to silence those who dare to think.

I particularly like the "your well-deserved future." Because if you weren't such a bunch of radical Leftists who love faggots and hate freedom, you'd kick all the Moslems out of your country after locking up all the radicals without trial.
To be honest, I don't think arresting this cartoonist for being insulting is a very good move, unless he is clearly inciting violence. I don't know this guy's cartoons, so I can't comment on that. But you just know what kind of Little Green Footballer the American commenter is.

[Arwon]

It's actually an article from March, but the story of Nauru, ravaged by ecological destruction, robbed of its native culture and left with virtually no economy thanks to two centuries of colonial and post-colonial phosphate mining, is interesting but depressing reading. They're actually considering buying a new island and starting over with the money they have left.

This post has been edited by Arwon: May 19 2008, 02:17 PM

[droog]

Arwon, that article is from 1995, right? From the sound of it, the devastation would have brought about dramatic chances over the past 13 years. One topic that crops in the NYT searches for articles starting on the year 2000 is that Nauru is considered a key money laundering nation. Would you say that is related to the depletion of mining reserves? Wikipedia says they started mining a second, deeper layer of phosphate, so maybe they aren't starved for income yet.

This post has been edited by droog: May 20 2008, 03:15 AM

[droog]

Topology! 20 minute video on how to turn an abstract sphere inside out.

Part 1
Part 2

[antiquated_Tory]

The Washington Post has a story, found via Aqoul, of an attempt to organize a protest strike in Egypt via Facebook. The government's response? Take the organizer into police custody and beat and abuse him for 14 hours to try and get the real names of the participants and the passwords for their Facebook group.

[Arwon]

Arwon, that article is from 1995, right? From the sound of it, the devastation would have brought about dramatic chances over the past 13 years. One topic that crops in the NYT searches for articles starting on the year 2000 is that Nauru is considered a key money laundering nation. Would you say that is related to the depletion of mining reserves? Wikipedia says they started mining a second, deeper layer of phosphate, so maybe they aren't starved for income yet.

Huh, you're right, too. Where did I get March from?

One source of income they found was accepting an Australian refugee detention centre, part of the "Pacific Solution" to avoiding our humanitarian obligations in the name of anti immigrant paranoia. See if you don't let them on shore they can't seek asylum!

Um. Yeah. It was closed by the new Labor government and has caused a lot of unemployment on the island. Here's an Economist article from April about the place. Apparently 10% of the island was directly employed by the detention centres.

Almost certainly the tax haven thing was a result of the income problems as well, I seem to recall reading that they've ended that practise. I don't know much more than that, though given that for years articles have been talking about the depletion of the phosphate and lack of arable soil and dependence on outside support, I doubt any continued mining could be that substantive.



This post has been edited by Arwon: May 20 2008, 07:39 AM

[spamhead]

That seizure that Teddy Kennedy suffered the other day, that everyone thought was a stroke? Malignant brain tumor.

[thurdl01]

But, it sounds like, a treatable brain tumor. Yeah, it's horrible news, but the news and prognosis could be a lot worse.

[Sergei]

Open Source Software's worst day ever.

Thanks to developers at Debian fixing what they thought was a bug in the OpenSSL Library, several Linux versions - Ubuntu included - are now deeply insecure.

OpenSSL generates public encryption keys, numbers which are generated in so random a way that it would take billions of years of computing to break one. Only these idiots thought part of the randomness generation was a bug and commented out the code. So now, instead of an effectively limitless number of keys, these version of Linux have to choose one from only 32,768 possibilities. Effectively, data encrypted with one of such a tiny number of possible keys isn't encrypted at all.

Though this "fix" will be easily fixed in the Linux code, that's not the problem. The problem is that all the encryption keys generated by the faulty systems - but now in use on many, many other computers - will have to be replaced. That's going to be a huge pain, and a huge blow to Open Source's reputation.

[Medieval Cow]

Yeah, that is a freaking mess. Blech. I had to regenerate my openSSH key that I use to log into my MythBuntu box remotely. I mean, it did it automatically, so it's not like I had to deal with as much as some IT managers are dealing with because of this, but it did sort of hammer the point home of how widespread this is, and how much it's affecting.

And the article does explain it, but just to clarify, the problem was that the Debian developers took this package and updated the code themselves, instead of reporting the bug to to the people who actually maintain that program, or at the very least, fixing it and contributing the patch back "upstream" to them, where they would have caught it. As the openSSL developer said, they never should have been fixing a bug they didn't understand. One would hope this will spur the Debian developers to reexamine their policies about this sort of thing going forward. It's definitely a blow to their image, not leastwise because it's been out there so long like that, but before anyone loses their heads, I still feel a hell of a lot safer running Linux than I do running Windows.

[Arwon]

NYT article about Purity Balls. There's not much discussion likely because I assume we all agree, but it's still a creepshow.

[droog]

But, it sounds like, a treatable brain tumor. Yeah, it's horrible news, but the news and prognosis could be a lot worse.

It's treatable, but Kennedy isn't the most promising case:

"As a general rule, at 76, without the ability to do a surgical resection, as kind of a ballpark figure you're probably looking at a survival of less than a year," said Dr. Keith Black, chairman of neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

[...]

Malignant gliomas are diagnosed in about 9,000 Americans a year. In general, half of all patients die within a year.

"It's treatable but not curable. You can put it into remission for a while but it's not a curable tumor," said Dr. Suriya Jeyapalan, a neuroncologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

[Fox_Moxin]

NYT article about Purity Balls. There's not much discussion likely because I assume we all agree, but it's still a creepshow.

These things creep me the Fuck out.

[thurdl01]

Hadn't seen the grim prognosis in the original CNN.com article. It kept talking about treatment, which sounded much more positive than I guess reality bears out.

[Ivy]

Federal appeals court upholds ruling that U.S. paper money discriminates against the blind.

In a 2 to 1 decision, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the existing currency system violates the federal Rehabilitation Act. The judges said that the Treasury Department must find a way to accommodate the needs of the visually impaired.

The Council of the Blind has suggested distinguishing bills of different amounts by changing their size, adding embossed dots or foil to the paper or using raised ink.