In Brief - February 23rd, 2008

Although Hillary Clinton is staying in the race through March 4th (when Rhode Island, Vermont, Texas, and Ohio hold primaries - and by the way, you could join one of those MoveOn.org phone-bank parties), it seems likely that Barack Obama is going to emerge from this long nominating season as the Democratic standard bearer. Given that Obama's theme is "change we can believe in", I wonder why no one in the Obama campaign seems to have thought of this slogan:

I'm just sayin'...

If anyone in the Obama campaign is reading this, please feel free to steal the idea and let someone with better graphic design skills than mine do something pretty with it. And now, on to the news!

In the Pacific Northwest

• A magnitude 6.0 earthquake rattled parts of Idaho and Nevada not long after midnight on Thursday. No serious injuries have been reported, but some historic buildings in the town of Wells, Nevada (eleven miles from the quake's epicenter) have suffered heavy damage.
• Starbucks, the caffeine darling of the Pacific Northwest, is cutting upwards of six hundred Seattle-area jobs. But consumers don't need to worry about a depletion of talent behind the counter -the company is eliminating corporate jobs, not laying off baristas.
• A bright meteor seen streaking across Washington skies Tuesday failed to leave giant smoking crater as witnesses claimed it would. Meanwhile, Wednesday night's suddenly clear night skies gave way to a lovely total lunar eclipse. You can see, quite clearly in some of these pictures, the circular profile of the Earth's shadow on the moon; a key piece of evidence that led ancient Greek astronomers to deduce the Earth's spherical shape.
• Washington Democratic Chair Dwight Pelz has issued a call to the party grassroots to provide input to the state's superdelegates.

Across the Nation

• Heavy snow has hit the Northeast, dumping up to a foot of snow in places and forcing the cancellation of over a thousand flights.
• The Los Angeles Times has published a story on the disturbing consequences of the Cold War among Navajo Indians. Some of the world's richest uranium deposits are located on Navajo land, and the mining companies who operated there up until late 1960s left behind a horribly contaminated environment, which is causing higher rates of cancer.
• Former Arizona Governor Evan Mecham has died at the age of eighty six. The Mecham saga is a clear example of what is broken with our electoral process. I lived in Phoenix when Mecham was elected with one of the smallest victories anywhere (he won scarcely more than one third of the vote). Mecham survived a recall attempt but was soon out of office - he was impeached and convicted in the wake of a scandal that involved his auto dealership business. Had Arizona used instant runoff voting , either the Democrat or the independent would have been elected, saving Arizona a whole lot of trouble and national embarassment. It is interesting to speculate, in light of Mitt Romney's recent fame and Mecham's membership in the Mormon Church, whether church elders had their eye on a presidential campaign as far back as twenty years ago.
• The National Science Foundation wants your input on the fourteen most important engineering challenges of the 21st century. What should be the top priority? Clean fusion power, cheap solar, large-scale carbon sequestration, or something else?
• And, ScienceDebate 2008 invites the candidates to a debate on science and technology policy. All that's left now is for the candidates to show up. Given that science and technology is about the only thing that's going to save our collective bacon in the coming century, we hope they accept.
• Get ready for the new five-dollar bill (Flash). All this new currency must drive vending machine manufacturers absolutely crazy...

Around the World

• Abu Dhabi, which has the world's highest per-capita carbon footprint, is sinking $22 billion into the Masdar City project. When complete, Masdar City will be the world's first self-sufficient, zero-carbon-emitting city. BBC Radio's The World brings us this story, with additional background information from Wikipedia and official Masdar City website.
• Serbs, unhappy with the U.S. Government's decision to recognize Kosovo as a newly independent nation, attacked and set fire to the U.S. embassy in Belgrade this week. According to the State Department, an unidentified body was discovered in an unused portion of a burned embassy building, but all embassy personnel are accounted for.
• A twin-turboprop plane carrying forty six passengers is missing somewhere over northern Venezuela. The plane's destination was Caracas.
• Tensions between the Turkish government and Iraqi Kurds remain high. Turkey has just embarked on a fifteen day military incursion into Iraq.

The Lighter Side

• Take a look at this cool optical illusion: Contrast Asynchrony (Flash).
• Check out these really amazing origami pieces. Well, I guess you would call them origami, although it's not at all the traditional kind.
• Do you know the names of the ten longest bridges in the world?
• Everything is cultural. Just when you'd gotten used to Farenheit vs. Celsius, month-day-year vs. day-month-year, and driving on the left vs. the right, now we learn that even the way people count their cash is cultural.

This Day in History

• 1455: The Gutenberg Bible was published.
• 1903: The United States signed a lease with Cuba granting America the rights to land on Guantanmo Bay in perpetuity.
• 1982: The EPA announced it would buy the town of Times Beach, Missouri, which was hopelessly contaminated with dioxin. The Times Beach dioxin scare was one of two horrible environmental disasters (the other was Love Canal) that led to the establishment of the Superfund cleanup program.

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