2009 January « More shameless remarks by Larko

What if?

Saturday, January 31, 2009 at 4:30 | Posted in History, Iraq | Leave a comment
Tags: Tony Blair

Tony Blair, reflecting his decision to join the war in Iraq (in Guardian), makes this remark:

On the other hand you have to take the decision and I look at the Middle East now and I think, well, if Saddam and his two sons were still running Iraq how many other people would have died and would the region be more stable?

That is exactly what I have been thinking about these last couple of years. Could the situation have been more unstable than it is now? Could it outright have been more stable?

We do not know and we are never going to know. Unfortunately, the “what if” option in history does not exist.

Commenting Prescott

Sunday, January 25, 2009 at 20:21 | Posted in Blogosphere, Politics | Leave a comment
Tags: britain

British freshman blogger and veteran labor politician John Prescott solicits comments to his blog posts. It would be a lot easier to accomodate his wish if one did not have to register before posting a comment. It would also be helpful if he blogged about something else than blogging itself. In that case there would be something to comment.

Happy birthday!

Sunday, January 25, 2009 at 0:47 | Posted in Personal | 2 Comments
Tags: birthday

If you want to wish somebody a happy birthday and their web site is currently down, all you have to do is to re-run the same video you ran last year. Handy!

Have another nice year, Geirsan!

The first gardener

Saturday, January 24, 2009 at 1:20 | Posted in USA | Leave a comment
Tags: garden

Read all about the first garden in NYT.

A matter of security

Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 15:55 | Posted in e-mail, internet | 3 Comments
Tags: security

If you had reason to believe that somebody’s e-mail has been compromised and your only means of warning them about it would be e-mailing them, how would you go about? You could not just tell them about your suspicions because that would be most helpful for the suspected crackers. You could, of course, try to reach your friend some other way but what would you do if that were not possible?

This is not a hypotethical question, I am afraid.

Earth vs. Space resumes

Sunday, January 18, 2009 at 21:53 | Posted in internet | Leave a comment
Tags: chess

The Earth vs. Space chess game which started last fall has been on hold for two months while astronaut Greg Chamitoff has spent time reacclimating with the Earth conditions. Chamitoff has now made his 15th move: 15. Rfe1. He is going to play ahead in NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The students of Stevenson Elementary School in Bellevue offer two options for Earth’s response: 15…f7-f6, and 15…e7-e6. I just voted for 15…f7-f6. The vote closes tomorrow at 2200 GMT. I am keeping in touch with the game through this RSS feed.

Upside down

Sunday, January 18, 2009 at 15:23 | Posted in traffic | 2 Comments
Tags: weather, winter

I embedded a video a while ago about traffic chaos caused by unexpected snow fall in a city where it does not snow too often. As it eventually turned out the footage was from Seattle.

This fresh footage (via Barbara) is from Madrid a week ago. Unlike drivers in Seattle, drivers in Madrid seem to be reasonably well in control of the unusual road conditions. That said, several highways around Madrid were closed to cope with the snow, according to eSpanien.

Meanwhile here in Helsinki where that kind of weather would be normal this time of the year, we have just 2 degrees below freezing point and a very thin, almost non-existing snow layer on the ground. Looks like the weather map has been turned upside down.