Here’s an interesting site with crash reports on lots of recent cars, you can ask for a table of the safest cars in a number of categories for less than 5 years old and 5 years and older. Of course they won’t have everything, but it’s a good start nontheless.
I think it’s good that one of their categories is the “Pedestrian Rating”, i.e. how dangerous they are to pedestrians in an accident.
How Safe Is Your Car ? – http://www.howsafeisyourcar.com.au/
Leon seems to suggest that I’m proposing a solution to suicide bombers, but I’m not (and apologies to Leon if I’m misreading him).
All I was doing was pointing out that the stereotypes that the pollies and media propogate of the people who carry out suicide bombings (of which London probably was not one) being people who are poor and uneducated is incorrect.
I certainly am not suggesting that the fact that they generally are educated is the problem!
I have no idea if there are any solutions, let alone what they may be. But I certainly think that it’s worth bearing in mind what Menken wrote:
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
The above is RMIT Building 19, which is the former Police Watch House.
The larger original by Jeremy is here. The place is now a building site..
Leon Brooks writes about discouraging suicide bombers:
At first glance, a look under the surface of any terrorist will show someone with nothing left to lose. But there is almost always a second layer of people who have plenty of physical resources, directing things. It seems to me that the answer is simple: enrich them.
Sadly this will not help, its basic premise that suicide bombers having nothing left to loose is incorrect.
New Scientist published an article called The Making of a Suicide Bomber (you’ll need to be a subscriber to New Scientist or willing to pay to view the entire text) back in May 2004 dispelling myths such as this on suicide bombers, citing a growing body of work showing that suicide bombers generally come from a higher than average economic and educational level than the population they are drawn from.
To quote the article purely on the economic argument that Leon raises, it says:
Yet in a study of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad suicide terrorists from the late 1980s to 2003, Claude Berrebi, an economist at Princeton University, found that only 13 per cent came from a poor background compared with 32 per cent of the Palestinian population in general. In addition, more than half the suicide bombers had entered further education, compared with just 15 per cent of the general population. And in a paper published last year in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (vol 17, no 4, p 119), economist Alan Krueger of Princeton University and the Russell Sage Foundation in New York and Jitka Maleckov�of the Institute for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, showed that Hezbollah militants who died in action in the 1980s and early 1990s were less likely to be impoverished and more likely to have attended secondary school than others of their age.
You can find more with this Google Scholar search.
BBC News has a continually updated page on the bombings, which currently says:
1215 The ambulance service says there are people still trapped at King’s Cross station, and efforts are being made to rescue them
and:
1125 “We have at least two fatalities, but still unconfirmed,” a police spokesman tells the AFP news agency
There have been multiple bomb attacks in London. Eyewitnesses are reporting many casualties.
Google News has summaries from many sources.
Police report 6 bombs.
Michael Still mentions my experience with the NLA crawler, and along with Steven Hanley speculate about how the NLA is choosing sites to crawl.
Looking at my Apache logs I can see that their is a reference in their browser info to this webpage about their current crawl, which says:
While the Library and its PANDORA partner institutions have been selectively archiving online publications since 1996, this current and first comprehensive crawl of the Australian web domain was begun in June 2005. For the purpose of this collection, the Australian web domain includes .au domain sites. In addition some sites identified by DNS lookup as having an IP address in located in Australia may be included.
The really interesting thing is that my website satisfies neither criteria, being a .org and hosted in the US, although it may be because the little box on this end of my ADSL connection (which redirects everyone to the main site if they forget the www at the start of the URL) does indeed have an Australian IP address..
However, their overview page says:
The purpose of the PANDORA Archive is to collect and provide long-term access to selected online publications and web sites that are about Australia, are by an Australian author on a subject of social, political, cultural, religious, scientific or economic significance and relevance to Australia, or are by an Australian author of recognised authority and make a contribution to international knowledge.
If that’s why I’m in there then I’m realy flattered!
Of course, it’s much more likely to be just be the fact that I got a link from here… 😉
Nice one folks, the new look of Planet Linux Australia is really nice!
In other news, I seem to have just been spidered by the Internet Archive crawler on behalf of the National Library of Australia’s project called PANDORA, which is expanding from archiving just Australian periodicals online to a selection of Australian web domains. Pretty cool..
I’ve mentioned before that I get earthquake alerts from the USGS, and over the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed that most of the emails I’ve gotten have been about the western coast of the Americas.
Looking at their front page shows that currently all of the past 7 big quakes they list lie around the west coast (4 off California and 1 each near Alaska, Chile and Nicaragua) where there are a number of plate boundaries. The mag 6.7 quake off Nicaragua was followed in less than 2 hours by a mag 5.9 quake which is below their threshold for a big quake.
The USGS has maps of earthquakes over the last week for North America and South America (which looks a lot quieter). Both maps show the Nicaraguan quakes due to overlap.
Finally had time to backup all my old data (well, hopefully all) and trash my old Mandrake 9.0 install that I’ve not been able to touch because of it being our mail and web server (now hived off onto the VIA Eden box).
Initially I was thinking about upgrading it to Gentoo as I use that on my desktop at work at the moment, but in the meantime I’ve upgraded my laptop from an oldish Mandrake Cooker install to KUbuntu, a version of Ubuntu Linux that uses KDE rather than Ubuntus usual GNOME desktop.
The fact that Ubuntu chose to go with Gnome rather than KDE is the one thing that’s put me off using it, I’d switched from FVWM2 to Gnome back in 1997/8 and found it incredibly unstable, so I started to use KDE and found that it just worked. I’ve never been tempted to go back, especially having given Ubuntu a go on another system and found it a bit of a straightjacket. Anyway, I digress..
The fact that KUbuntu had a build of KDE 3.4.1 available when the official release came out was great, Gentoo still don’t have 3.4 marked as stable yet (probably for good reasons) and trying to mark 3.4 as unstable and keep the rest of the box stable was too much hard work, so I gave KUbuntu a go.
Well I’m impressed. It’s not faultless, but the installer is great and creating a completely LVM2 system is dead easy (and to my mind is the only sane way to build a system these days). The only major headache was my monitor was configured to run at 1024×768 rather than 1280×1024, but simply adding the “1280×1024” line to the start of the config for 24-bit depth fixed that.
Adding a few extra repositories in meant I’ve now got access to KDE3.4.1, KOffice 1.4 (which again had Kubuntu builds out within a day or so of the official release), all the usual media codecs that you’ll need for browsing badly designed websites (flash, etc) and even Java (ugh).
The thing that most impressed me is that it detected my DVB-T card I brought from the UK and KDE’s Kaffeine media player can auto-detect channels and play them seamlessly. It will also do timed recordings.. 🙂
If you do use KUbuntu then don’t forget to add this repository which gives you updates to KUbuntu that wouldn’t be in the mainline Ubuntu. I’m suprised this isn’t in by default, and it corrects a nasty bug in Kaffeine that causes you to get a crash when exiting.
deb http://kubuntu.org/ hoary-updates main
You can read on to see my entire /etc/apt/sources file.
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