DanKohn.com

View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.

This is a spectacular demo.

Ready for a completely revolutionary insight into Star Wars? For reasons explained in this press release, I prefer the empire to the rebels. (Note, though, that neither come anywhere close to providing due process or any other critical human rights).

In an attack led by Darth Vader, Empire forces were able to rout hundreds of Rebels from a network of caves underneath the surface of the planet Hoth. “We’re not sure we got them all,” says a Vader spokesman. “There are a lot of places to hide in those caves. But we’ve delivered powerful blow to the terrorist’s infrastructure, that’s for sure. Today, the Empire has struck back.”

Initial reports are unclear as to the fate of Luke Skywalker, a hero among the Rebels, who is rumored to have delivered the fatal blow to the Death Star. Skywalker, a former desert-dweller from the planet Tattooine, became a part of the Rebellion after family members were killed. Skywalker was trained by a militant wing of the Rebels, known as “Jedi Knights.” Fanatical in their religious beliefs, the Jedi Knights claim to derive their power from the mystical “Force.”

Here’s a clever Weekly Standard article by Jonathan Last making the same arguments.

My atrociously ugly sed regex of the evening:

| lynx -dump -force_html -stdin \
| sed -e 's/^\ \ \ \ \ /bigindent/' \
| sed -e 's/\ \+/\ /g' \
| sed -e 's/^\ /\ \ \ /g' \
| sed -e 's/^bigindent/\ \ \ \ \ /'

I’ve already asked for help on simplifying the beast (and I also explain why I’m using it in the first place).

A nice summary of the current state of Iran by Thomas Friedman.

Hit reload on this page to see a random New Yorker cartoon.

The NYT has a good article about new television shows.

At each network, 100 scripts become 20 pilots become half a dozen new TV programs. The story of three first-time show creators, in a profligate system, up against impossible odds

It seems that Hunter S. Thompson’s words still hold true: “The TV business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs.”

Katharine Seelye writes in the NYT:

In one of the strange turns in the war on terrorism, two Americans are being held in military brigs without access to lawyers, while two foreigners accused of terrorist activities are being tried in federal court with the full range of protections usually accorded to Americans….

“The route they have created in this ad hoc way is devoid of any constraint on the president’s power,” David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor, said. “The notion that he can pick people up off the street, label them and lock them up for the rest of their lives without a hearing is a remarkable one.”

It is unfathomable to me how the NYT can call this “odd” and “strange” rather than shocking, outrageous, and unconstitutional. On a separate note, I hope you’ll agree that the pictures of the accused show 5 of the most guilty-looking people you would ever not want to run into in a dark alley. Of course, we (used to be) lucky enough to live in a country where guilt required more than that John Ashcroft thinks you’re guilty.

Also, don’t miss the pro-precrime referendum site. Motto: “That which keeps us safe also keeps us free.” Contrast this with Benjamin Franklin who wrote, “He that would give up even one freedom for security, deserves neither freedom nor security.”

The Economist describes a new technique to “stamp minute features on to melted silicon, just as a seal is stamped on to softened wax”. This is more fodder to dispose of the contention that Moore’s Law will soon be coming to an end.

Go out and see Minority Report. In Blame Runner David Edelstein writes that “Minority Report is a fabulous, witty totalitarian nightmare”. Jeremy Lott provocatively asserts in Reason that the movie will be to the Bush administration what Wag the Dog was to the Clinton team: both “capture a political and cultural moment”. Wag the Dog featured a war to distract the public from a presidential sex scandal, and soon afterward the bombing on Kosovo began during the peak of the Lewinsky scandal. Minority Report convicts and punishes perpetrators of future crimes before they can commit them.

Of course, in a world without “pre-cogs” to stop the future before it happens, we’re stuck back with all the inconveniences of potentially flawed justice, and therefore the due process guarantees that help protect us from inevitable mistakes. Unless, of course, John Ashcroft decides that we are an “enemy combatant”, in which case we (like American citizen Yaser Esam Hamdi) can be held without a lawyer until the war ends, i.e., until hell freezes over.