Paul thinks Steve Pavlina’s overcoming procrastination is potentiall life-changing. Having read some similar suggestions over at 43folders, I suspect this sort of thing is included in the GTD philosophy.

The Air Force is all pissed off about the email chains with pictures of the hanger filling up with foam (previously covered here). Oh, boo hoo, your poor email system, your poor PR people, your busy, busy lives. Get over it, it was funny, no harm done. Sheesh.

Marine Corps captain Christopher H. Sheppard writes in the _Seattle Times_, having returned from his second tour in Iraq: “As I watched the Iraq war begin, I completely trusted the Bush administration. I thought we were going to prove all of the left-wing antiwar protesters and dissenters wrong. I thought we were going to make America safer. Regrettably, I acknowledge that it was I who was wrong.” (via Igor)

Patrick Moore, a cofunder of Greenpeace, makes the case for switching to nuclear energy. Like Paul, I agree almost completely, and I think new technology like pebble bed reactors are where much of our energy research should be directed. And as long as we’re going to keep using coal-fired plants, we should be doing a lot more to recapture the waste products and use them productively.

At Ellsworth Air Force Base, the test of the foam fire suppression system was supposed to go on for 15 seconds. It didn’t. When the foam filled the hanger to a height of two stories and the crew on the raised platform was up to their heads, they decided they’d better open the doors…

My first MacBook Pro had no noise problems whatsoever. So except for the constant kernel panics, it was great. My *new* MacBook Pro is perfect in every way except that it *does* have an incrediby annoying, very high-pitched CPU whine that gives me a headache. Daniel Jalkut has documented all of the various noise complaints exhibited by different MacBook Pro models and provided two potential solutions. The MagicNoiseKiller app solves the problem for me, which I think will give me back my sanity, at least as soon as the residual ringing in my ears goes away.

In a study of mock jury panels, mixed-race juries had longer, more accurate, and more in-depth deliberations. Why? White jurors performed better in mixed-race environments than on all-white juries. (via my new buddy(!) Anil)

“Like, I totally can’t wait for the Second Coming! All those people who didn’t pay their tithing are, like, going to burn! Their flesh will, like, SIZZLE. And the earthquakes and disease and famine, those are kinda sad and all, but totally necessary, to weed out the evil-doers. Those who are righteous when he comes won’t get hurt, though. Cool, huh?” Check out that picture. Just…wow.

Google just launched their calendar product, and it’s pretty much what you’d expect it to be — slick, simple, powerful, and very, very spiffy. Kevin says and I agree, it was best for us to give up on our (secret) calendar project when we did, because you just can’t compete with this kind of polish.

Khoi Vinh does his own analysis of the price of cable TV and concludes that he doesn’t really need his cable subscription. Good for him!

Bruce Schneider clarifies the circumstances surrounding a “security leak” that made available to the public supposedly classified information about Air Force One and its missile defenses. In reality this sort of information has always been made public, as it is essential to helping first responers around the world react quickly, effectively, and safely to things like aircraft fires.

Caltech students reclaimed their stolen cannon from MIT on Monday. Everyone on both sides was a good sport about the whole thing and Caltech has promised prank revenge.

Seymour Hersh provides a long, in-depth, fascinating, terrifying, and probably highly accurate analysis of US thinking on Iran, nuclear development, and regime change. It sounds like President Bush is on another mission from god.

This 2001 _Wall Street Journal_ story explores how the NSA might be going about tapping underseas fiber-optic cables, an almost impossible task.

How the government uses the state secrets privilege, a holdover from English common law, to derail civil lawsuits where they think national security might be threatened, is interesting and disturbing, especially because of how frequently the privilege is now being used and on what sort of cases.

I clicked on a link about Google buying a search algorithm and started reading it before the page even loaded, saying to myself, “Search engine giant Google…”. Sure enough, those were the opening words of the article.

Guerilla gardeners tend to London land after dark

Romantic ideas for up north. I’ll just file this one away until some point when it might actually be useful…

You know those stupid CAPTCHA tests that force you to type in the text from a horribly distorted image to prove you’re human? Now someone is proposing a far cuter solution, KittenAuth. Pretty much any Mechanical Turk-type tasks would do it, so why not kittens? 🙂 (via Waxy)

TeeVee loves the unabashed cheesiness of the new Doctor Who.