What's the most important story?

Fig. 4 Character Alignment Graph

Eddie Izzard: On Mass Murderers

Since we're on the subject, and Panic mentioned that whole magic number and empathy thing, and it's Eddie Izzard, after all...

Bonus! I hadn't seen this one before!

Hiroshima photos

The Boston Globe often has some really good photo sets, and this one came out last week.

Odori's post made me think of this shot of the Army engineers, which really leaves me uncomfortable. Not that the others don't, but it's just got this feel of ambivalence to it, like, "Okay, looks like we blew up this place pretty good. Next..." Though I'm sure that's not fair. That guy on the right (played by a young Harrison Ford) could easily be thinking, "Oh fucking god. We just did what?"

Atom bombs

The U.S. dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 64 years ago this week. This seems to underscore how we are still learning how horrific those weapons are:

NAGASAKI (Kyodo) A team of researchers has succeeded in photographing radioactive rays coming from the cells of people who died in the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

The pictures are evidence that the nuclear "death ash" continues to emit radiation from a corpse even after 60-plus years, according to Kazuko Shichijo, an assistant professor at Nagasaki University, a member of the team.

I also read an article in the Japanese magazine Aera this week claiming the U.S. used the weapons _ even though it believed Japan was already on the verge of surrendering _ to see how the bombs affected humans. In other words, the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were experimental guinea pigs for the U.S. military. As evidence, the article noted the U.S. dropped a uranium bomb on Hiroshima and a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki - and sent in researchers to examine residents in both cities as soon as the war was over.

I think this raises a good point - why did the U.S. use a plutonium bomb in Nagasaki on Aug. 9 if it already saw the uranium bomb worked in Hiroshima on Aug. 6?

The U.S. line has always been that President Truman ordered the bombs used to save lives in the view millions of Japanese and Americans would have died during a U.S. invasion of the mainland.

My dad, who survived the extremely bloody Battle of Okinawa in and was scheduled to join the mainland invasion as a grunt in the Marine Corps, tended to agree with this view. But it's an issue worth studying.

Hello, "World"

With an irony too delicious not to report the hell out of, last week Amazon reached into the electric minds of its Kindle book readers and deleted copies of George Orwell's 1984. These were copies that users had paid for, and thought they owned. They did not, it turns out! Granted, these were unauthorized copies of 1984 and Animal Farm, and users in question were refunded the purchase price, so maybe it was more like a recall, except under cover of darkness and completely involuntary.

Had the books not been Orwell's, and instead, say; Dr. Phil's, the act would not have echoed so loudly in the Blongoverse. They were, though, and they did, and today Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gave the increasingly common Big Giant Apology to make up things.

This, along with my net connection crapping out every 20 minutes yesterday, and the island-wide AT&T outage the day before, got me thinking, that hey, a lot of who I am exists in that digital space--not just work, and email, but goals, and plans, and memories, and friends. This is a common modern realization, I know. But now that a good chunk of what I consider to be my mind is subscription-based, I wonder if I've made the right move, here. I couldn't tell you my wife's phone number. I mean, I can access it, and my expanding definitions of what it is to know something make me okay with this.

But every disconnection from the network leaves me a little clammy, and power outages have become downright existential experiences. And if my life is so easy to remove, is it still my life? If I back up properly, will I live forever?

So is this a lot of eggs in one basket, or just the price of doing business? Or perhaps... An entirely different clichéd metaphor, heretofore unexplored, ladies and gentlemen?