Well, that was kind of lame...

(ganked from shaddyr)

The latest air-safety threat

Now the TSA is afraid that spare lithium batteries will spontaneously combust. Or that somebody will try to light them instead of their shoe, but if so why are thay banned from checked baggage and not from carry-ons?

Never mind that they're just as likely to combust inside a laptop. Maybe more, since an external short might develop. (Added 08:55 sbisson points out that there's a real reason for the apparent anomaly: cabin fire extinguishers can cope with lithium fires, while the automatic ones in the baggage hold can't. But you can still check a laptop through, and those have been known to burst into flames.)

(From BoingBoing.) Note that most batteries installed in devices are permitted, and even a lot of add-on batteries. Forget about checking through a big pile of camcorder batteries, though.

It's dead, Jim

It seems that somebody at AOL has finally noticed that Netscape is dead; they're pulling the plug in February. BoingBoing asks for memories, and points to the BBC's article.

I remember switching from Chimera to Netscape; I'd started using Chimera (the first one, not the one on the Mac) because it was lean and fast and took its style parameters from the X defaults like a well-behaved Xtk app ought to. Before that there was Mosaic, the ancestor of both Netscape and IE; it killed off a lot of innovative browsers in the early days of the web, and Netscape finished the job. I don't miss it much.

State of the Mandelbear

(Cross-posted to healthy_fen and mdlbear.)

There have been several major changes in my approach to health this year, mainly brought on by a belated awareness of impending mortality and a couple of alarming sets of symptoms.

Walking: I've been getting in roughly three-mile walks most of this week. It's very frustrating: in order to avoid leg cramps I have to either walk slowly (i.e., my old pace that didn't give me much actual exercise) or shorten my stride to what to me is an unnatural degree. These days I usually pick the fast pace and short stride, but it's annoying to have to make the trade-off. I end up walking at about the same speed (3mph) regardless. I've gone back to power walking to compensate. Hopefully when I'm back at work I can cut off the usually-fascinating lunchtime conversations and the temptation to dive back into LJ in time to walk for an hour during the week, too.

Facehugger: I finally built a little shelf on the dresser beside the bed, and just last weekend bent up a piece of coathanger wire to hold up the hose. The combination really helps; it's a lot less likely to leak now. I can also sleep on my back without waking up -- that's a big win. I can't say there's been a huge difference in how sleepy I get or how much sleep I need, but I think there's been some. The silliest thing about it is having to shave about 1cm off the top of my mustache in order for the mask to seat properly -- first time I've had to shave in about 40 years. Well, it was a good excuse for a new backpack, anyway.

Nose-watering: Watering my nose seems to be roughly as effective as taking a standard dose of sudafed, and lasts for roughly as long: 6-8 hours. I've fallen into a routine: morning, before dinner, and about an hour before bed. Morning is, of course, combined with making coffee, and takes about 15-20 minutes. The evening wash is combined with brushing my teeth; I've gotten a bit better about that, too.

Diet: This is the newest bit of attempted behavior modification. It's my understanding that a reduced-carbohydrate, low-sugar diet is good for reducing both cholesterol and weight, so I'm going to try it. It's hard -- potatoes and pasta are both popular in this family. At least the rice we use is basmati, which is unique in having a low glycemic index, and I prefer whole-grain bread anyway. I've stopped eating fried-eggs-on-toast for breakfast and switched to omelettes. At least dark chocolate, and one alcoholic drink/day are still on the diet. By doctor's orders. So there.

With a little luck and more determination than I've shown to date, I might even survive another decade. We'll see.

Security theater

From this post in BoingBoing we get a link to a column by Patrick Smith in today's New York Times titled "The Airport Security Follies". Well worth a read, but it will make you angry. If enough people read it, maybe...

To understand what makes these measures so absurd, we first need to revisit the morning of September 11th, and grasp exactly what it was the 19 hijackers so easily took advantage of. Conventional wisdom says the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard box-cutters. What they actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset -- a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings.

In years past, a takeover meant hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were trained in the concept of "passive resistance." All of that changed forever the instant American Airlines Flight 11 collided with the north tower. What weapons the 19 men possessed mattered little; the success of their plan relied fundamentally on the element of surprise. And in this respect, their scheme was all but guaranteed not to fail.

For several reasons -- particularly the awareness of passengers and crew -- just the opposite is true today. Any hijacker would face a planeload of angry and frightened people ready to fight back. Say what you want of terrorists, they cannot afford to waste time and resources on schemes with a high probability of failure. And thus the September 11th template is all but useless to potential hijackers.

No matter that a deadly sharp can be fashioned from virtually anything found on a plane, be it a broken wine bottle or a snapped-off length of plastic, we are content wasting billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened, asked to queue for absurd lengths of time, subject to embarrassing pat-downs and loss of our belongings.

The comments are worthwhile, too.