Astronaut Launches Tirade

I visited Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, last July, spending an afternoon at the tourist exhibits and launch pads. The original countdown for space shuttle mission STS-114 was underway, and we were taken by bus to see Discovery on launch pad 39B.

Though the pad obscured everything but the top of the shuttle's external tank and booster rockets, the sight of the spacecraft was the highlight of the trip. I think I started to cry a little. Science rocks.

Kennedy offers a lunch with an astronaut program and "astronaut encounter," two chances to meet a spaceman. Ours was three-timer Mike Mullane, and he gave two funny, innocuous speeches with lots of questions from kids, venturing carefully into the subject of the upcoming mission and concerns over safety. (I didn't have the nerve to pose the question I wanted to ask, fearing a beating from parents who didn't want to explain to their children the concept of the "50-mile-high club.")

Mullane's more blunt in an interview published Sunday by The Guardian:

It's the most dangerous manned spacecraft ever flown. It has no powered-flight escape system ... Basically the bail-out system we have on the shuttle is the same bail-out system a B-17 bomber pilot had in World War II.

He has a new memoir out tomorrow, Riding Rockets, and is scheduled to appear again at the center July 1-7. His comments make me wonder how much candor NASA will take from an astronaut before he stops being a tourist attraction.

Update: I sent Mullane an e-mail asking about the "deathtrap" headline, which seemed far more severe than any of his quotes in the article. He sent this response to NASA (and to me):

As you might have heard, my life story, Riding Rockets, has been published by Scribner and is now in book stores. I've been doing a lot of media interviews. Some of the things I say and what appears in print afterwards are sometimes considerably different. A case in point is this article in a UK newspaper, the Guardian.

First of all, I never interviewed with anybody from that newspaper. While some of the quotes from my book are accurate, the "Deathtrap" theme was grossly out of context and sensationalized. I've never called the shuttle a "Deathtrap." Basically, I've been saying what the current NASA Administrator has said in testimony to Congress. Something along the lines of, "The shuttle is a flawed system. It has no crew escape system." Griffin has gone on to say that he wants to fly the minimum number of missions and retire the shuttle so as to minimize the chances of losing another shuttle and crew. That's basically my theme in interviews. I have repeatedly said the lack of a powered-flight bailout system means that crews have no hope of escape in the event of a catastrophic failure. I guess somebody at the Guardian used that to say "Deathtrap." I just wanted you to be aware, in case somebody inquires about the article. Also, please forward it to anybody at NASA who might also need to be aware.

Politics · Florida · 2006/01/23 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Tracking Click Pings with PHP/MySQL

Earlier this week, Mozilla Firefox developer Darin Fisher announced that test builds of the browser include support for click pings, an experimental new HTML feature that makes it easier for web sites to track clicks on outgoing links:

I'm sure this may raise some eye-brows among privacy conscious folks, but please know that this change is being considered with the utmost regard for user privacy. The point of this feature is to enable link tracking mechanisms commonly employed on the web to get out of the critical path and thereby reduce the time required for users to see the page they clicked on.

Click pings work in web page markup by specifying one or more URLs in a link's ping attribute (an unofficial addition to HTML):

<a href="http://cnn.com" ping="http://drudge.com/receive-click-ping.php? url=http://cnn.com">Visit CNN</a>

When you click such a link using a development build of Firefox, the browser requests the ping link in the background as it loads the linked page. These pings can produce click usage reports.

I've created a new PHP class library, Poplink, that can receive click pings and report on the most popular links. It's released under the GPL and requires MySQL.

Mozilla's being hammered by privacy advocates since Fisher broke the news -- Chris Messina of Flock writes, "I feel like a piece of me is dying as a result of this."

Don't believe the gripe: Click pings are an improvement on the present situation. Any web publisher already can track clicks using HTTP redirects, and many do -- all ad brokers use the technique to track clickthroughs. This is a clumsy process that puts a click-counting script between the originating page and the destination, causing links to point to local scripts rather than their real destinations.

If click pings are adopted by browser developers, web users desiring more privacy could turn off these pings like they turn off pop-ups and referrer tracking, gaining a measure of control that's not available to them today. This also has the side effect of improving Google, which gets more real links and less redirect scripts fed to its almighty algorithm.

Programming · Php · Mysql · Html · Google · 2006/01/20 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

No-Fly Canadian Linked to Hezbollah

I've been following the story of Sami Kahil, 38, a Canadian shoe store owner denied entry to Mexico Jan. 5 because his name appears on the U.S. no-fly list.

Few American media have covered the incident, in spite of the fact that the U.S. was concerned enough about Kahil's presence on a plane to scramble fighter jets to escort it across the country.

Kahil has become a cause célèbre in Canada, doing television interviews, hiring attorneys and soliciting the help of Amnesty International to clear his name.

Asked by several reporters why he might have been placed on the no-fly list, Kahil neglected to reveal something the Toronto Star reported today: He was associated with the terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon 17 years ago, according to his 1991 application for refugee status in Canada:

While living with his parents in Basta, West Beirut, when he was in his early 20s, Kahil claimed Hezbollah (Party of God) -- a pro-Iranian terrorist organization with global links -- came to his home and coerced him at gunpoint to work for the group.

According to court documents, Kahil said he worked for the group without pay, in a non-combat role, filling sandbags and transporting ammunition.

In January 1989 he was hit by bomb shrapnel. Six days after Hezbollah members took him to hospital, according to the court papers, Kahil fled to the mountain village of Aramoun outside Beirut and sheltered there with a friend until he was accused of spying for Hezbollah by another Lebanese faction, the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP).

Whether his association with Hezbollah was voluntary or coerced, court documents linking Kahil to the group seem like a rock-solid reason to exclude him from U.S. airspace.

Hezbollah, considered a terrorist organization by the U.S., U.K., Canada and other Western countries, is suspected of several terror attacks and kidnappings in Lebanon, including the 1983 bombing that killed 241 U.S. soldiers in Beirut.

This new detail puts Department of Homeland Security comments about Kahil in a new light. "I can assure you that if your name is on a U.S. no-fly list, it is not put there in any willy-nilly fashion," spokesperson Brian Doyle told the Star immediately after the incident. "This is not a case of mistaken identity."

Politics · 2006/01/16 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Worst New Word of 2005: Popesquatter

The American Dialect Society has declared that pope-squatting is the new term least likely to succeed for 2005, rating it ahead of the acronym GSAVE (global struggle against violent extremism) and Brangelina, the nickname given to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

The society defines the term as a verb that means "registering a domain name that is the same of a new pope before the pope chooses his new name in order to profit from it."

This would exclude me, since I donated BenedictXVI.Com to the charity Modest Needs, but I was called a popesquatter by no less august a personage as Katie Couric.

Past winners of the "least likely to succeed" award:

• 2004: FLOHPA, noun, "collectively, the states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, said to have been important in the 2004 American presidential election. From the postal codes for the three states: FL, OH and PA."
• 2003: tomacco: noun, "a hybrid of tomato and tobacco, which happens to be poisonous."
• 2001: Osamaniac, noun, "Woman sexually attracted to Osama bin Laden."
• 2000: kablokeys, noun, "a hard-to-pronounce and obscure word used in phrases like It scared the kablokeys out of me."
• 1998: compfusion, noun, "confusion over computers."

This will come as bad news to Bret Fausett, who coined the term around three hours after I announced the papal domain registrations on Workbench.

I'm still holding out hope for googlemilking, a word I devised for a game to find phrases like "I'm totally straight but" that lend themselves to hilarious, off-color or unintentionally self-revealing results in Google.

The game hasn't taken off -- use it in Google and you'll be asked, "did you mean: googlewanking" -- but it has given me the number one spot for the search term totally straight.

Jargon · Google · Domains · 2006/01/16 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Living La Vida Del Boca Vista

On one of the Seinfeld episodes where Jerry visited his parents' insane retirement community Del Boca Vista Phase II, a map showed that it was in North Florida in the vicinity of St. Augustine.

I was reminded of that yesterday when I faced lines 10-15 people deep to buy two-cent stamps and mail some overdue bills. First-class stamps increased from 37 to 39 cents on Sunday because of a 2003 law requiring the Postal Service to put $3 billion in escrow. There's no stated need for this "rainy-day fund" -- I'm guessing Congress wants another stack of money they can borrow for other purposes, carrying on the pretense that Republicans never raise taxes.

Two post offices and a bookstore that mails packages were a sea of seniors. One in five residents of St. Johns County is retirement age. All of them wanted two-cent stamps.

These 50-per-dollar stamps are so cheap that it seems like you're getting a great deal, so people can't resist the urge to horde them after a rate increase. A post office in Arizona sold its entire allotment of 10,000 in less than an hour.

I don't want to speak ill of my gray-haired homies, because they're generally a nice group of people who share my belief that five miles over the speed limit is plenty fast. But when you take rambunctious kids around large crowds of senior citizens, there's always a few who greet the children with a look of abject terror, fearing that they'll be bowled over and break another hip. The boys don't always allay this concern -- at a Publix supermarket, they once staged an impromptu obstacle course race using several of them as human traffic cones.

Lining up for stamps yesterday, everyone but me was empty-handed, so I know they weren't urgently mailing letters. They were just being conscientious by getting the stamps promptly, which annoyed the hell out of me. That's exactly the kind of thoughtful foresight that stuck them with a bunch of 37-cent stamps.

Florida · Jacksonville · 2006/01/10 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Mexico Bars Canadian over U.S. No-Fly List

A story today in the Canadian media ought to get more coverage in the U.S.: American fighter jets intercepted a Air Transat plane flying from Toronto to Ixtapa, Mexico, on Thursday because a passenger appears on the U.S. no-fly list.

Canadian citizen Sami Kahil, 38, was denied entry to Mexico and detained one night in jail, then sent home in the company of Royal Canadian Mounted Police:

U.S. fighter jets shadowed Kahil's flight after American officials declared the plane was not cleared to travel over the U.S. with Kahil on board.

While his wife and sons were sent home on the next flight to Toronto, Kahil was told he could not board the flight because U.S. authorities would not let him fly over U.S. airspace.

Kahil, a shoe store owner in Ontario, was vacationing with his wife and two young sons. He has not been charged with any crime related to the incident.

During the flight to Mexico, which did not have a layover in the U.S., the pilot informed the passengers:

Kahil, who was taking his family on a sun vacation to celebrate his 10th wedding anniversary, said his flight was approaching Ixtapa when the pilot announced over a loudspeaker that "they had two people who are not allowed to fly over American airspace.

"You should have seen the faces of the passengers," said Kahil.

NORAD monitored the flight and it was accompanied by either F-15s or F-16s, according to the Toronto Star.

The Washington Post reported in April that the U.S. was considering a measure to demand passenger lists and enforce no-fly rules of all foreign flights that pass through U.S. airspace. This would affect as many as 1,000 international flights and 3,000 domestic flights each week in Canada, because domestic routes often pass over the U.S..

Politics · 2006/01/08 · 13 COMMENTS · Link

Art Bell's Wife Dies Unexpectedly

Ramona Bell, the wife of syndicated radio legend Art Bell, died unexpectedly Thursday at age 47 while vacationing with her husband in Laughlin, Nev., according to an announcement by Coast to Coast AM, the program Bell founded and still occasionally hosts.

"At present, the exact cause of Mrs. Bell's death has not been determined," the announcement states. "It apparently took place during her sleep." An asthma sufferer for years, Ramona Bell reportedly experienced an attack before her death.

The Bells married in the early '90s after meeting as coworkers at radio station KWDN in Las Vegas. Art Bell broadcast his show from the couple's home in Pahrump, Nev., a remote desert town 50 miles from Las Vegas near Area 51, where Ramona booked guests and handled many other duties. The couple also own FM radio station KNYE, an eclectic oldies station they began in Pahrump four years ago.

Though Bell has not been an everyday radio host since 2002, he appears weekends on Coast to Coast, engages regularly in ham radio chats at call sign W60BB and is frequently seen on his studio webcam. The photo of the Bells ringing in the New Year was one of dozens contributed by fans to an Art Bell online forum since Ramona's death.

As befitting a host who became famous for covering paranormal subjects, Bell once claimed to have seen a UFO while driving with his wife, according to a July 13, 1998, Newsweek article:

Four years ago he and Ramona were driving around 2 am. on the lonely stretch of road leading to their house. "Coming up from behind us. oh my God, was a gigantic triangular craft," says Bell. "It had a strobing red light on the front and a white light on each back point. We watched it float across the valley for five minutes, before we lost sight of it."

Update: Art Bell remarried in April and announced plans to leave the U.S.

Radio · 2006/01/07 · 818 COMMENTS · Link

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