Life and stuff

The LA Times has a story pretty far down on the website about the U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press.

The articles, written by U.S. military “information operations” troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
…
Though the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said. Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles, with headlines such as “Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism,” since the effort began this year.
…
The military’s effort to disseminate propaganda in the Iraqi media is taking place even as U.S. officials are pledging to promote democratic principles, political transparency and freedom of speech in a country emerging from decades of dictatorship and corruption.
…
“Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq. Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we’re breaking all the first principles of democracy when we’re doing it,”

The usual drill, grab it from Mozilla (.com this time instead of .org). Some notable changes from 1.0.x:

1. The UI for the menus in Windows seems “flat”, and the look of the dropdown menus seems to bother me more than usual.
2. Native SVG support. If you’re running Seamonkey 1.0a or Firefox 1.5, give this SVG Tetris example a try.
3. Better/faster rendering engine (Gecko 1.8). Most people probably don’t really care about this, except for the nice speedups it provides to back/forward performance.
   • Not sure if the faster back/forward is enabled by default in Firefox 1.5. You can check for it by going to ‘about:config’ in the URL bar, then search for ‘browser.sessionhistory.max_viewers’, and set it to ‘5′ or ‘8′ (or create it and set it to one of those values if it doesn’t exist)
4. The preferences box seems to be more Mac-like.
5. Mac integration seems to be better

And with that, I’ll just continue to keep using Mozilla Seamonkey as my prime browser. Perhaps not as pretty, but Firefox isn’t any lighter, and they use the same exact rendering engine. To each his own UI …

Some pretty nifty gems, like rubbing ice on the back of your hand to cure toothaches, and slowing down your heart rate by blowing on your thumb:

18 Tricks To Teach Your Body (menshealth.com)

I find it highly amusing that the November issue of “Embedded Systems Design” magazine has this as the lead blurb in their opinion section:

Don’t let your children grow up to be engineers