BAGGARS

In the last few weeks, the NERD HURD, has been visiting the beutiful LAKE ERIE in brownstown, MI. So far, BBQ/VOlleyball, has been a success….till next time!!

Hey, I’m finally graduating from Fordson! Good-bye high school, hello WSU college of engineering! 

For all you Fordson alumni, well both of you at least, graduation and the Fordson traditions are not like they used to be. I’ve heard stories of senior pranks (like chicken let run wild in the halls), or over-the-top ‘ratting’ around the school in fancy cars with lound music (usually it’s those people who aren’t really graduating), and the notorious Fordson 500 speedway. Shaving cream and Toilet paper are now out of the question with a new, ultra-conservative principle: Mr.Fadlallah.

Sound familiar? Only in Dearborn will you find that the principle of the school is also the cousin of the assistant principle… Anywho, the new Sheriff has come to ‘clean up’ the school. I mean come on, I understand getting sent to the office for senior pranks, but getting blue slipped for wearing flip-flop slippers?? WASSUP WID DAT? They’ve been strict about a lot of things, but I would agree that some aspects of Fordson could use some reformation.

And those are my words for the day…SENIORS ’06! 

I guess you’d have to take this with quite a large amount of salt, but Juan Cole made some comments about this article basically saying that Iran made a proposal back in 2003 that they would recognize Israel, and a whole bunch of other stuff, like making HZB cool off in Lebanon and keep to politics only.  You should read that article, if only to know someone’s writing this thing.  Not much use though, cuz Bush rejected this proposal.  If you ask me, if I was in Bush’s place, I’d accept it in a second.  I mean, look at Libya.  Talk about double-standards.

Iran offered in 2003 to accept peace with Israel and cut off material assistance to Palestinian armed groups and to pressure them to halt terrorist attacks within Israel’s 1967 borders, according to the secret Iranian proposal to the United States.

Hey guys I’m back…From where??

Well, last week I went on a school trip out to Winthrop, WA (about 4 hours north of Seattle). If you wanna see small town life, this was it. Main street was about 2 city-block’s length, population of 400 or so, little man-made recreation (it’s a modern town, don’t get me wrong) but you would never think you would see cars by the looks of it! all the shops/building must look like it came out of a Clint Eastwood movie and old western style. The clostest mall/movie theater is 2 hours away, so people either work or go on hikes. By the way, I don’t recall seeing anyone that was overweight. Can you guess why…?

It’s a tourist town, mainly for the old style, and for the scenery and hiking adventures. We spent 5 days out there, during which we hiked up a 3500 ft mountain, another smaller mountain, snowshoeing, horsback riding, things like that. The county is a valley (Methow Valley is you were interested) with a few cities which are just as small. The scenery is just amazing, as you can imagine if you lived in a valley. Beautiful mountains everywhere you look, a 360 degree panoramic view. It was well worth every minute, including the 52 hour train ride each way…

I took some amazing pictures, but the uploading feature is not being cooperative. Could someone tell me why it won’t work?!

Until next time.

If I’m ever on the West Coast, I’m gonna subscribe to Qwest over any other company.

“When the NSA asked all the telcos to participate in its apparently illegal campaign to create a database of every call ever made in the U.S., only one stood up to the federal snoopers — Qwest. The company refused to turn over customer information unless it first received a warrant. Qwest customers are safe, because no warrant was ever produced.”

Hey guys. If you were wondering where I was at the last gathering, you may have heard that I was down south in Atlanta, GA. Why? you may ask…

Well, there was a national competition (partially international) for the F.I.R.S.T. robotics for high school students. Although you may be oblivious of such an organization, it’s been there for a while. In fact, as some of you may know, CaptnSaj had participated in it during his high school years.

What is this organization, F.I.R.S.T.? I’ll save you the acronym’s representation and just say that it’s an organization where a bunch of high school students form teams and build robots to play a certain game. (NOT to be mistaken wth ‘Battle Bots’). With the support of corporate sponsors and professional engineers, students turn piles of metal and electronics into fully functional competitive robots which are radio controlled by the students.

This year’s game was to take spherical nerf balls and launch them into one of three goals on the opponent’s side of the field. Two of them are on the floor behind ramps, and one is a bout 7 feet high. Points are tallied depending on where and when you put the balls. Want more info, visit http://www.usfirst.org/robotics/. To watch a match, go to http://soap.circuitrunners.com/2006/movies/newton/ and click on any movie file.

No, we didn’t win anything, but it was still fun, especially since it was my last year doing it. More on this later…

IT Jobs Migration: Fears vs. Reality :: AO is a thoughtful, even-handed review of the job dynamics of the Information Technology field. It refers to an in-depth report by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), “Globalization and Offshoring of Software”.

I’d assume that the analysis of the IT field applies to the closely related engineering fields like hardware and software engineering. Let’s hope that the conclusion is correct, that an open market benefits both developed and developing nations. I’m sure this is true on the macro level, but we must keep an eye on those directly affected by outsourcing — do companies invest in “new business opportunities to generate more new job”?

I like how everyone was hyped about getting baggars.com and how we’re gonna make our nest egg off this site and now a few weeks later 90% of the posts are from the khomsta. Don’t mind me, I just wanted to point out what I knew would happen.

A long time ago.  Like in the ’60s.  I found the article on a website not deemed reputable by the West in general, so I found a Jewish site (I think).

 Israel would likely be able to produce enough plutonium for at least one nuclear bomb by 1965-66, the CIA estimated as early as 1961, recently declassified documents show.

There are recently declassfied documents that explain all this, and now we can just blame Nixon for yet another bumble.  I know that we know about Israeli nukes and that we know that the US knows and accepts it.  But I want it written.  Or typed.  On baggars.com.   Since Google STILL CAN’T SEE US.  Who’s the baggar now?

The Daily Star reports that Baghdad accused Iran of crossing the border to fight with the PKK (Kurdish Geurrilla group).  This is actually the second time Iran has attacked the PKK (without crossing the border the first time). Funny I never got a whiff of this.  What’s even more interesting is that Turkey and Iran made a deal that requires Turkey to fight off Iran’s enemy (MKO, Mujahideen Khalq Organization aka Munafiqeen Khalq Organization; latter name used by Iran since Munafiqeen means ‘hypocrites’) while Iran fights off Turkey’s enemy, the PKK.  I never knew that.  Which means you didn’t either :P  A quote:

The leader of a group of PKK rebels, Rustom Judi, told AFP in an interview that Iranian forces have “no reason” to fight the PKK because “fighting has been between our men and soldiers inside Turkey, far from the Iranian border.”

Good, because I found an alternative, courtesy of www.Hardocp.com finding it. It’s called FoxIt.  And it’s 28 times smaller than Acrobat, it’s faster, more stable and cleaner.

Why?

Ostrich is similar in taste, texture and appearance to beef. And it is comparable to beef in iron and protein content. But Ostrich has less than half the fat of chicken and two-thirds less fat than beef. Ostrich beats the competition with fewer calories too.

That link above goes to an article about Ostriches in Iran.  It goes on to boast about the awesome climate that allows the giant birds to reach maturity faster than in any other country (sometimes twice as fast).  Anyhow, it’s an interesting and, more importantly, short article. Prices are about $15/kilo in the US, whereas Iranians want to set it a bit cheaper.  But that doesn’t matter, because nobody can afford it anyways unless they’re rich.  Sucks.

It’s still just BS, but it got accepted. A quote, if you will:

Three MIT students were tired of receiving repeated spam requesting submissions to the 2005 World Multi-Conference of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, so they wrote a simple computer program to generate a nonsensical paper, which they submitted. It was accepted by human reviewers, according to the New Scientist

And here’s the article from New Scientist. [link]

And another quote:

Starting with skeleton sentences, pools of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and a random assortment of computer science jargon, the program produced a grammatically correct yet utterly nonsensical paper titled: “Rooter: a methodology for the typical unification of access points and redundancy”. “This isn’t artificial intelligence, it’s the dirt-simplest way we could think to do this,” Stribling says.

And now, the humanoid BS generators:

I just found this somewhere in someone’s profile, and I think everyone should have a look.

It’ll take a while to finish, so keep looking :D

That’s not as scary as it sounds, though. Apparently, it’s totally legal to sell the tech. to a country that has signed the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty). In a meeting with Sudan’s President, Omar al-Bashir, Ayatollah Khamenai said that Iran is prepared to transfer their technology and expertise.

I don’t know if Sudan is part of the NPT, I could only assume so, since the only uproar was from Condi, whom the Lebanese just love to boo.

“Military action against Iran will not end our program,” Larijani said at a conference on the energy program. “If you take harsh measures, we will hide this program. If you use the language of force, you should not expect us to act transparently.”

From CNN.com

“4- Javier Halos, 27 years old, was killed by his landlord for failing to pay his rent for 8 years. The landlord, Kirk Weston, clubbed the victim to death with a toilet seat after he realised just how long it had been since Mr Halos paid his rent.” [link]

Ah, so back to the Daily Star and they have an article about how many people were executed around the world and how many in each country. 

“It is a glaring anomaly that China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the U.S. stand out for their extreme use of this form of punishment as the ‘top’ executors in the world,” Amnesty International’s Secretary General Irene Khan said.

 It added that some 1,770 executions were reported in China - although it suspected the real figure could be as high as 8,000 - and at least 94 in Iran, 86 in Saudi Arabia. Sixty were carried out in the United States.

This interested me because the US is on the list.  Of course, there’s a big population in the States, so if you took ratios instead of actual number, Saudi Arabia would probably be way up there with China at the bottom (maybe?).

Anyhow, I’m sure this would interest anybody, so check it out, it’s not a long read.

Then you’ll probably want to save on gas. So try cnn/edmund’s roundup of economically favorite cars from different classes (sport, luxury, etc.).
One thing that surprised me at first was when they chose the corolla over the toyota prius. Then I saw the price tag. The corolla is only 15k, while the prius is probably in the low 20ks. Big difference in value there.

Whoda thunkit? The Daily Star (Lebanese newspaper) has a commentary about the entrenchment of Islam in Russia. The article’s kinda boring, for me, but maybe you’ll like it? Click-Click.