China ties in the "World's Tallest Building" sweepstakes

CNN.com informs us here that as of today, the Shanghai World Financial Center has been "topped off," completing construction on one of only two 101-story office towers in the world (the Red Chinese government's perennial bête-noire, Taipei, Taiwan, has the other).

Look at the artist's rendering on the tower's Wikipedia page and tell me: Am I the only one who looks at this thing and sees a gigantic bottle opener? (ADDENDUM, 3:44 p.m.: It occurs to me I may be severely dating myself; I doubt more than half my friends list is old enough to remember when beer, sodas etc. came in bottles you needed this sort of tool to open, before screw-tops became common. Am I incorrect?)

The Confederate battle flag (again)

James Burns, a local fellow illustrator/designer of mine here, publishes an excellent editorial cartoon strip in The Sunday Paper, an alternative weekly launched a couple of years ago to address what its founders saw as a lack of diversity in political viewpoints represented by the dominant alt-paper here, Creative Loafing, and in our major corporate-owned daily, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (Would that make it an alternative-alternative weekly? Just wondering...)

Anyhoo, Jimbo published this edition of his strip, Grumbles, a couple weeks ago in SP, by way of trying once again to combat the disinformation campaign still being waged by so-called "flaggers," Georgians still livid at the past two governors' ridding the state flag of the racially inflammatory St. Andrew's Cross, better known as the battle ensign of the Confederate States of America. (As of this writing, almost all the other states that still carried this symbol of "heritage" on their flags have removed it; Mississippi remains the last holdout.) He caught hell from one of his targets, who wrote a letter of complaint printed in this week's dead-tree issue of SP (unfortunately, the paper's editors don't seem to think the letters-to-the-editor section is needed on the website, so I can't point you to the letter in question; I'll try and post some of the text later). He has my sympathy in this; last year, I got the raw end of another flagger's temper with my own LJ post on the same subject (original artwork and responses archived here).

This week's letter-writer makes the absurd claim that the North couldn't have cared less about slavery (making the usual subliterate mistake and writing "could care less") and was really at war with the South over trade issues. So defiance of the law and direct orders from Washington, race-based brutality, secession and treason didn't enter into it, eh? Even a cursory glance at Wikipedia's page on the Civil War shows amply footnoted documentation of the historic fact (long accepted by all reputable historians specializing in the period) that the war absolutely was indeed about slavery, "states' rights" (read: picking and choosing which federal edicts to obey and ignore) and the South's festering disloyalty to the Union. (Do I really need to remind y'all that the South attacked first, at Fort Sumter?)

If I, a native-born-and-raised son of the deep South with a modicum of intelligence and no lack of pride in my ancestry, can see this, why can't these people? The more they bloviate, the more they remind me of Holocaust deniers.

Today's Meme: What Makes Me Happy, from A to Z

Inspired by cadhla's 100 things list:

( An alphabetical list of things that make life worth hanging on to, for me. )

Birthday greetings to...a newspaper?!

Yep, you read right; tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of USA Today's first issue hitting the streets (only those in DC/Baltimore and environs, initially; it was rolled out in other cities as the months went by). The first attempt at an explicitly national newspaper in the nation's history (The New York Times and Washington Post are only "national" in a de facto sense; their stated beat is still local), it was derided widely as a homogenizing "McPaper" for its short-attention-span reporting, consciously geared to a generation raised on TV, and its abundance of color photos and info-graphics. Even Garry Trudeau made fun of it in his Doonesbury strip, early on; now a lot of those early critics have had to dine on a healthy helping of crow, as one major daily after another has begun  copying these features.

As a newspaper junkie since roughly the age of two (no lie; my late mother loved recounting how I would sound out sentences from the Lafayette Daily Advertiser phonetically as I learned to read) and a student journalist in high school and college, I find this significant news—"meta-news," as today's media-studies academic types might put it. I had had no clue this occasion was nearing until I went to lunch today and spotted the paper's special anniversary edition for sale in the restaurant; naturally, I snapped up a copy. When lunch was ready, I stuffed my face and read avidly the paper's "package" of commemorative features, including a timeline of events in the rag's history...and that of the nation it covered. They even note the reporter of theirs who got caught fabricating elements of some 20 stories he filed; kudos to the current editors for being willing to do a warts-and-all outline. (No mention of the paper's failed foray into television, USA Today: The Television Series, broadcast all too briefly in syndication in 1989, however, so I'll have to deduct a kudo or two.)

More kudos for holding the line admirably on pricing; the cover price has only increased threefold from its original 25 cents, which is more than most papers can say (granted, USA Today enjoys economies of scale very few local papers other than the two named above do, which helps hold down costs). And while it can be argued that their short-'n'-snappy prose style encourages less tolerance for the longer-form, in-depth reporting that used to be a key value of the medium, economic as well as cultural pressures have left their mark on other papers as well.

What were you doing on Wednesday, Sept. 15, 1982? (I was about two weeks into my second year at Louisiana State University's Baton Rouge home campus, having finished my first year, or "Junior Division" as they called it back then, back in May.) And what effect(s), salutary or otherwise, do you believe USA Today's advent has had on journalism in general and newspapers in particular? My own verdict: mixed (raising the bar for readability and visual design, demerits for lack of depth and laxity in fact-checking).

Are you buying that software...or only licensing it?

Former eBay Member Sues AutoDesk for Getting Him Ejected Under False Copyright Violation Charge
Courtesy of TechDirt via Digg.com. This has more than a passing interest to me, as resale on eBay or elsewhere is often the only way I can afford to buy the big-name, over-sized, over-priced software programs work in my business demands. I know my friends list has at least a couple of code monkeys talented programmers on it, not to mention a legal eagle or two; what do y'all think?

Today's Meme #2: That Career Quiz

Tediously taken from half my f-list:
1. Go to www.careercruising.com
2. Put in Username: nycareers, Password: landmark.
3. Take their "Career Matchmaker" questions.
4. Post the top ten results. (Below, with my comments in parentheses.)

( Because just 10 wouldn't tell you NEAR enough about me... )

Solving one (maybe even two) of the Lunarites' problems

This article by Vince Beiser in the latest Wired issue recounts NASA's recent staging of the Regolith Excavation Challenge. The object: to derive breathable oxygen from the dust covering the Moon's surface, which is at least 40 percent O2. The challenge involves building contraptions capable of scooping up enough dust to make 150 kilos—using no more electricity than your PC's monitor in sleep mode.

There's also this piece on the Wired website about what we can realistically expect from nanotechnology in the near future.

So...my Lunapolis colonists (see Fanfic Samplers #1-5 previous) will need oxygen, and plenty of it. They'll also need to dig out tunnels and rooms beneath the surface for at least part of the settlement habitat. How about nanites to eat away at all that yummy regolith (Wikipedia informs me it's 4-5 meters deep in maria, deeper in so-called "highland" areas; more than deep enough to shelter them) and convert it to O2? Or genegineered bacteria? Seems to me we could kill two birds with the proverbial single stone here (not to mention lightening the load of heavy equipment they'd have to bring on the initial flight). Plus there'd be no messy piles of dirt to move around. And the mining applications...!

Anyone knowledgeable enough to tell me if this is a reasonable extrapolation from current tech? Or if I'm simply typing out my ass and better find another solution?