Iran to halt spot atomic checks if reported to UN - Yahoo! News

Iran to halt spot atomic checks if reported to UN - Yahoo! News

"If these countries use all their means ... to put pressure on Iran, Iran will use its capacity in the region," the semi-official ISNA news agency quoted Larijani as saying.

It was not clear what regional capacities he meant. Analysts and diplomats say Iran, with its links to Islamist parties and militants, has the means to create trouble for the West in
Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and elsewhere.

Iran was responding to an agreement ... among the Security Council's big five, plus Germany and the
European Union, ... that the U.N. nuclear watchdog should report to the council this week on what Tehran must do to cooperate with the agency.

"We consider any referral or report of Iran to the Security Council as the end of diplomacy," Larijani, who is secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told state television.

Iran's Oil Minister Kazem Vaziri eased concerns that the world's fourth biggest crude oil producer could curb oil exports in reprisal, as Tehran has previously hinted it may do.

"We are not mixing oil with politics," he told reporters at the start of an
OPEC meeting in Vienna.

Posting to iWeb from NetNewsWire

http://web.mac.com/mitch.chapman/iWeb/Dot-Mitch/Blogum/3226B4C3-15F7-4570-8ABB-8CA2E58438C4.html



I've been fiddling around with iLife '06 this week. Since NetNewsWire is my favorite RSS reader I wondered how hard it would be to make it use iWeb as its Weblog Editor.

I'm an AppleScript newbie, so for me the answer was "pretty hard". But the solution was straightforward once I found it.

New Scientist Breaking News - Banknote tracking helps model spread of disease

New Scientist Breaking News - Banknote tracking helps model spread of disease

Modeling with massively parallel analog computers...

Algae - like a breath mint for smokestacks | csmonitor.com

Algae - like a breath mint for smokestacks | csmonitor.com

It's kind of like rabbits eating their own poop. You know, for that little extra energy kick.

PBS | I, Cringely . January 19, 2006 - Hitler on Line One

PBS | I, Cringely . January 19, 2006 - Hitler on Line One

Fascinating stuff in this article, and – the current administration's behaviors aside – a sign that sometimes government shores up, rather than erodes, our civil rights.

For example, throughout WWII, all international communications originating in the U.S. (phone, cable, mail) were intercepted and monitored. Only in later years did the courts decide this was a violation of the 4th amendment.

Anyway, the question Cringely is trying to answer, is whether the Bush administration violated the law, and how serious any violations were.

I didn't know whether to be outraged or bored, and I feared that most Americans were in similar positions.

Dogs as good as screening for cancer detection

New Scientist Breaking News -
Dogs as good as screening for cancer detection

At least, for lung and breast cancer. Still unknown is whether they're sniffing out the signatures of cancer, specifically, or if they're detecting general disease indicators.

The dogs correctly detected 99% of the lung cancer samples, and made a mistake with only 1% of the healthy controls. With breast cancer, they correctly detected 88% of the positive samples, and made a mistake on only 2% of the controls.

DICEE

Let the Good Times Roll by Guy Kawasaki: Guy's Golden Touch

Describes the traits Guy associates with a great product:

• Deep. ...As your demands get more sophisticated, you discover that you don’t need a different product.


• Indulgent. ...not the least common denominator, cheapest solution in sight.


• Complete. Documentation counts. Customer service counts. Tech support counts...a great total user experience...


• Elegant. Things work the way you’d think they would.


• Emotive. ...so deep, indulgent, complete, and elegant that it compels you to tell other people about it.

Hm. So I've never worked on a great product, but some have been pretty good.

Red Skies at Morning

Red Skies at Morning - 1
Originally uploaded by Chitch.

Daybreak today was a little more colorful than usual.

Orion

Orion
Originally uploaded by Chitch.

Bobi got me a Canon A620 for Christmas. Tonight I got to play with shutter priority mode. 15 seconds at ISO 100, and a 2 second shutter delay to make up for my shivering trigger finger.

National Geographic's Genographic Project

How to Participate - The Genographic Project

Remember Spencer Wells and The Journey of Man? This is his follow-on project, funded by Nat Geo.

I guess they figured out a way to get different ethnic groups to participate. And they even found a way to get us to foot the bill. $100 is steep, but it's still kind of cool.

With a simple and painless cheek swab you can sample your own DNA.

To insure total anonymity you will be identified at all times only by your kit number.

If you'd like to contribute your own results to the project's global database you'll be asked to answer a dozen "phenotyping" questions that will help place your DNA in cultural context.

Samples will be analyzed for genetic "markers" found in mitochondrial DNA and on the Y chromosome. We will be performing ONE OF two tests for each public participant:

Males: Y-DNA test. This test allows you to identify your deep ancestral geographic origins on your direct paternal line.

Females: Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). This tests the mtDNA of females to identify the ancestral migratory origins of your direct maternal line.

Sciam: Fast neutron reactors and nuclear waste

A New Breed of Nuclear Reactors?: BLOG: SciAm Observations

Synopsis: Many are coming to believe that nuclear energy may be the most environmentally friendly way to generate electricity. Fast-neutron reactors could be fueled by what would otherwise be nuclear waste. But power utilities in the U.S. are not interested, in part because of the costs of developing a new generation of reactors.

"...the electrorefining method associated with fueling these reactors could also be used to process some of the existing mountains of radioactive fission waste."

"When the Energy Department decided to get rid of some surplus weapons-type plutonium by turning it into nuclear fuel, no utilities would take it, even at no charge."

Were the utilities concerned about accounting for the materials? The new reactor design would address such concerns, at least in part: "The actinides are kept mixed with the plutonium so it cannot be used directly in weapons."