Must have been a great costume, very convincing.

Heaven only knows what would happen if the literary heroes of yesteryear lived today...

"Prominent Sleuth Proclaims Innocence"
Metropolitan police today arrested Lord Peter Wimsey for violation of the frightful dress ordinance. "He said he was on his way to a party," said a spokesman, "but what reasonable citizen would wear motley and a domino mask in public? He could have been an Al Qaeda terrorist!"

"Wooster residence."
"Jeeves, this is Bertie. Listen quick, I only have a three minute call."
"Yes, sir."
"I need you to eat some fish and put that magnificent brain in gear. You know Boat Race night was the night before last? Bingo Little and I got a bit sloshed, and I bet him a fiver he wouldn't steal a policeman's helmet. And now we're in some place in Cuba, I think they call it Guantanamo. Rummy place, Jeeves. They refuse to provide kippers or the fragrant eggs and b. for breakfast. By the way, have you ever heard of something called 'rendition'?"

Here you go - the sequence of speakers by well login id, with real names at the end:

onezie, hank, rab/ onezie, hank, fig, stewart, [hlr at whiteboard], hlr at mac, hlr, matisse, booter, don't know man, don't remember woman, stewart, hlr, janey, matisse, janey, matisse, flash, [hlr at whiteboard]

onezie = Tina Loney
rab = Bob Bickford
hank = Hank Roberts
fig = Clif Figallo
stewart = Stewart Brand
hlr = Howard Rheingold
matisse = Matisse Enzer
booter = Elaine Richards
janey = Janey Frtische
flash = Flash Gordon

Me: bobert = Bob Murphy, met my wife (debbym = Deborah Mitchell) on the WELL, and neither of us are in the video.

I quit the WELL around the time of this video and lost track of most of these folks. I knew rab had dided, but until seeing this post, I didn't know about onezie.

There is nothing really going on with Web 2.0 (aka user-generated content) that wasn't happening on the WELL during 1985-1990. The technology is now better, but by and large the information content is usually not as good. Back then, it took either tech know-how or real passion to participate, and there was (almost) no anonymity. We used to say on the WELL that your coin was your words: your reputation was who you were, and it was based on what you said. Anyone who spouted the drivel found in many blogs and most comments usually went somewhere else pretty quickly.

Hey, I see Roger Karraker got a post in before I did! :-)

The onset of violence in the Hatfield-McCoy feud was also triggered by a dispute over a pig:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield-McCoy_feud

@Qubex: I don't know about that cranked-up death metal.

The California town I live in has a noise ordinance that limits how loud things can be at the property line, with different values in decibels depending on the zoning and time of day. You can get cited for exceeding the ambient noise level at the property line by 5 decibels, which isn't much.

It's also illegal here to use "a loudspeaker or sound amplifying equipment" for commercial purposes "except within a completely enclosed building". Realistically, they're not busting the guy who drives the ice cream truck. But private property or not, I'd guess if one of these gadgets were installed on the outside of a store, and somebody complained to the cops or the town, the store owner would have to take it down.

That is seventeen levels of awesome!

And big props to the mall management for their support and opening up the mall the night before for rehearsal.

The original article is amazing. Some poor loser with no home and no car, who works as a clerk at EB Games, is disaffected and has fantasies of blowing up the mall - but only when nobody's there, doesn't want to hurt anybody. An informant - a crack dealer who was convicted of attempted robbery - is paid by the FBi to invite this guy home and egg him on. The loser has no money either, so the informant encourages him to trade his stereo speakers to an undercover agent for fake hand grenades and a gun with fake ammo. Loser is arrested, America is once again saved from "lone wolf" terrorists!

There are a lot of folks out there who feel grudges but would never actually follow through on them unless encouraged. Heck, when I was an angsty pubescent, I had fantasies of blowing up my school!

So now our government is luring harmless nutjobs into criminal acts and then arresting them. What a waste of lives and tax dollars! But it's a lot easier to jail the local kooks and claim victory than to do something genuinely useful, like finding Bin Laden and bringing him to justice.

I used to be very religious, and was not only a pacifist, but refused to take oaths - just affirmations - and got some strange looks at places like the Texas DMV. Now I'm not religious, so oaths and violence are not against my principles.

But I have a broad view of "defending" the Constitution, mostly via nonviolent means like exercising my rights and supporting others in exercising theirs, even if I disagree with them.

So even if I were still pacifist and unwilling to swear oaths, I would have signed the paper as-is, maybe underlining affirmation or doing the note-in-a-file the school suggested.

But this is a matter of conscience and conviction, and while I would not have done what Ms. Kearney-Brown did, I will defend to the death her right to do it.

"Do they have security cameras in the areas where baggage handlers are free to rifle through our bags?"

Even if they did, it wouldn't matter if nobody was watching the cameras or reviewing the tapes. If the airlines stick baggage handlers in a room by themselves, do you think they'd pay a rent-a-cop to watch them? Plus it would be trivial for a handler to bend over a suitcase and block the view from a camera.

I had an iPod stolen from checked luggage. Yes, I was stupid, and yes, it shouldn't have happened anyway.

The "war on terror" is not winnable, like LBJ's "war on poverty". People who feel aggrieved lash out violently and unpredictably with the intention of frightening people into a course of action. We just call it "terrorism" these days instead of "anarchist bomb-throwers" (19th cent) or "scalping" (17th cent). All you can do is try to prevent it, and try to minimize the damage when it occurs. But that approach doesn't scare voters into electing demagogues.

The big exciting news here seem to be that these folks are using custom-synthesized zeolites with large pores to selectively capture carbon dioxide, and are using X-ray crystallography to analyze the structure of these zeolites.

We covered custom-synthesized zeolites for selective capture of molecules including water and specific hydrocarbons in a heterogeneous catalysis class in 1979, and they'd been used that way in oil refineries for many years at that point. And Linus Pauling got his first Nobel prize in the 1954 based in part on using X-ray crystallography to determine protein structures.

I can see where the information in this article would seem startlingly novel and "nanotech" to people who've never encountered it, but to a chemist it's just part of the normal development of the field. Wired fails to make that clear, which means the article is not so much news as a puff piece.

As a chemist, what I would find most interesting would be details on the new techniques for zeolite synthesis, but of course in an article for the general public, that's not there.

Instead, the article talks about how this academic lab is using "custom-built" robotic sample handling equipment normally used in biotech. Oh, and they have a piece of impressive-looking, commercially-available X-ray diffraction equipment. That just means they got some nice grants.

I'm not saying these folks aren't doing good science, they are! It's just that this article is the scientific equivalent of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" going for a tour of Pamela Anderson's Malibu beach house. Nothing wrong with that - and I love the porn pix - but don't mistake it for something it's not.