Monthly Archives: April 2009
Where’s Osama bin Waldo?
Pakistani president Zardari said Tuesday that he believes Osama bin Laden may be dead, but US officials insist that he’s still alive – and, apparently, just as elusive as ever… Continue reading
Still Not Funny
Denmark cartoonist Kurt Westergaard’s unflattering portrait of the prophet festooned in a bulbously bomb-laden, fuse-lit turban appeared alongside eleven other similarly-topical comic entries in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in September of 2005.
He is apparently now trying to sell numbered prints of his work over the internet… Continue reading
9/11: Back to The Future
(VizReport) It’s not unusual for us to recall significant events from our past, but it’s certainly less common (one might even venture to say that it would be remarkable) to recall moments of great impact from our future… Continue reading
Acute Respiratory Retrospective
Given our prevailing concerns about swine flu, this might be a good time to look back at the 2003 SARS crisis. Reproduced below, courtesy of VizReport, is a 2006 SARS retrospective written at a time when we feared a widespread outbreak – not of swine flu – but of avian influenza (bird flu)… Continue reading
DPRK: N-Test, Take 2
It was early October, 2006. Overhead, satellites skimmed the sky above the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and took careful note of the goings-on below.
On the ground, as well as far beneath it, technicians busily prepared for North Korea’s highly-anticipated, first nuclear weapons test – an event that was confirmed in dramatic fashion on October 9th, when it appeared on one of the seismographs I was monitoring… Continue reading
Our False Sense of CyberSecurity
We have long relied upon groups like Microsoft, Symantec and “The Government” to shield us from the not-so-nice elements of network computing, but is it reasonable to assume that they will always be successful in defending us? Continue reading
On the Current State of Currency
Pegging global economic well-being to a single currency or a single commodity would be to invite the same sort of disaster that followed the Great Tulip Collapse of 1673. Continue reading
