Scientific American recently ran An Earth Without People, an article about just how fragile and maintenance intensive our infrastructure is. Larger images from the article can be found at mondolithic, and other interesting visualizations are out there.

My friend David Hilfiker just let me know that he's publishing his writings on the web. He writes a lot of interesting, insightful material about the state of our country and our planet, and approaches his subjects of justice, religion, health, and poverty from a humble but perceptive place.

He's a Christian (which i am not), and one of a too-rare species of Christian who seems to take the best parts of those teachings and really dedicate himself to them in a way that tries to make the world better. One of the articles on his site is his Letter to Lefties, which addresses the relationship between the secular and religious sections of the progressive movement.

There was an interesting piece on the Brian Lehrer Show this morning about No Impact Man, a guy and his family ("10 legs and a tail") who live in Manhattan and are trying to live the next year with no net impact. There is also an interesting piece in the New York Times about him. There's a bit of the "Super Size Me" self-promotional aspect to the whole thing, but it's obviously a worthwhile message.

A few examples of difficult it is:

electricity (my computers!): bad
biking: good
fruit from South America: bad
locally-grown food: good
trash (take out containers): bad
shitting in a bucket: good
etc.

I'm most interested in it as a guide to some useful ways I can reduce my own impact. Particularly, in buying locally grown food. I've been pushing a lot in my house recently to reduce the amount of trash that we generate, which I think is way too much as it is. I'm willing to allow myself some luxuries, if I can manage to reduce my consumption considerably.

Anyway, it's a interesting read, with lots of good food for thought.

Some folks at Princeton's CS department have done a good analysis of a Diebold voting system, the kind used in many elections across the country. They've done a good job of presenting their findings in several different forms, for various audiences ("executive summary", a video, an in-depth technical whitepaper). There's ways for anyone with web access to really grasp the content of their research, which i find pretty admirable.

Folks who know me know my personal preference is for the technical whitepaper, which was actually a great read. It's very clearly explained, sober and direct, and points out the wide range of potential vulnerabilities that the machines share with most commercial PCs, in addition to a series of vulnerabilities specific to the Diebold-proprietary software. If you have any interest in computer security, do yourself a favor and read it. They're thinking about these things the right way.

I've been following this story in New Orleans of a doctor and some nurses accussed of "murdering" patients in the chaos following Katrine.

It seems pretty clear to me, at least from the NYTimes article, that she was doing her best to act responsibly and as morally as possible under incredibly extreme circumstances. Yet the attorney general of Louisiana is bent on prosecuting her for murder. Nevermind that all of the patients would have died anyway, just more painfully and slowly, as the US government essentially left them there to die in a sweltering sesspool.

This is happening at the same time as Bush's veto of a bill to fund stem cell research (note: this in the first veto in Bush's entire career, the longest a president has gone without a veto since Thomas Jefferson in 1801). In a speech Bush gave yesterday, surrounded by dozens of white babies, Bush said that the bill, which would "kill" things that aren't actually alive, violates his "principles on the sanctity of human life". Meanwhile, we wage war in Iraq killing thousands of Iraq's, and fully support Isreal's slaughter of Lebanese.

"Culture of life" my ass.