answering the question that's been plaguing scientists for ages

can hamsters ride subways?

it's got just as much scientific merit as this. first prize!

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NATO

a nice thing about 20th anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall are all the articles about what was going on behind the scenes at that time. they are particularly interesting to me because i remember that period in broad strokes but not so much of the day-by-day news that added up to the end of the cold war.

which is why i found mary elise sarotte's piece in today's NYT to be so fascinating. it looks like the reunification of germany really was based on a misunderstanding. the USSR agreed to pull out of east germany on the condition that NATO would not expand to include former warsaw pact members. the US unofficially made that offer, but later backed away from it. because there was no comprehensive written agreement outlining the terms, each side went away thinking they got what they wanted. later when NATO expanded and russia cried foul, the US didn't know what it was talking about. russia really did get screwed in the deal, but i don't think the US intended to screw them. the story also explains one of the reasons why to this day russia is upset about NATO expansion.

which raises one of my pet issues about why NATO survived the end of the cold war. it was formed as an anti-soviet alliance and should have ended with the end of the soviet threat.it seems to me that NATO survived due to the inability of the political and military leaders of the time to break out of the cold war mentality that they had grown up with. Over the past 20 years as NATO has survived beyond its original purpose there have been periodic attempts to attribute some new point to the alliance, like stopping genocide in eastern europe or fighting terrorism. both are fine goals, but it's really not clear why an alliance to accomplish those things has to exclude russia. any claims that it is no longer an anti-russian alliance are undermined by the fact that russia is the only eastern european country that has never been invited to join.

so it's just about snubbing france?

i didn't know a country that wasn't a former british colony could do that. it makes me question the point of the whole commonwealth thing.

the bibi freeze

the UN, backed by all security council members, has demanded that iran immediately freeze its uranium enrichment program. i keep waiting for iran to respond by agreeing to the freeze, but add that its freeze will be netanyahu-style.

the israeli government recently announced a "freeze" in settlement construction that doesn't doesn't apply to whatever the israel's decides to call "east jerusalem", doesn't freeze the construction of 3,000 or so projects that were already approved (even though many were approved in anticipation of the current settlement freeze) and which doesn't apply to the construction of public buildings on settlements. (which is how they approved the construction of 28 new buildings at the same time they announced the freeze).

so why doesn't the iranian government announce a "freeze" of uranium production that doesn't apply to its main enrichment facility at natanz, doesn't apply to any processing that is already in progress and doesn't apply to any enrichment for public purposes? they could even call it a "bibi freeze." sure, it isn't everything the west wants, but it's progress, right? no doubt the west will understand the internal pressures the iranian government is facing and view a loophole-filled freeze as a welcome move.

40

woo-hoo! i'm now protected by the ADEA!!!

(39, 38, 37, 36, 35, 34)

out with it

i think at least 80% of my regular readers already know this. but in case you haven't heard it from me in real life or don't read arabic, it's time to end the embargo:

mrs. noz and i have been trying to adopt a baby for some time. but now it looks like it might actually work. barring something else going wrong (and believe me, there has already been plenty of that),it looks like we will go to kazakhstan fairly soon. we will then spend the next two months or so in aktobe (also spelled aqtobe), in the northwest bit of the country and then eventually come home with a baby.

so that's the deal with all those references to being fingerprinted, the two censored comments, the race (which i lost), my musings about pronunciation, the random references to aktobe scattered throughout my posts, that post i wrote the day we got our regional assignment (when we were told would start a 60 day wait before we get our letter of invitation and travel), and the post i scheduled to appear 60 days later, before i realized that the phrase "about 60 days" is kazakh for "165 days". (or something like that--inshallah i'll know the exact number soon). that's also the deal with my not exactly hypothetical question.

so there are big changes ahead, both for this blog and life in general. i cannot yet comprehend what the full extent on those changes will be on either. i guess we will find out eventually.

admitting my deep dark thanksgiving secret

i don't really like pumpkin pie.

there, i said it. i mean, it's okay. i don't hate it or anything. but it is, unquestionably, the least tasty pie in the universe. maybe i should try covering it with fudge.

reality TV is a menace 2 society

well not really. but it does make people try to do stupid things in public. (which i'm not necessarily against). first, we had balloon boy and now this (not to mention this).

i don't understand why anyone would want to be on reality TV. actually, i don't understand why anyone would want to watch it either. and yet a lot of people do and do. also there is this idea that doing something stupid and high profile is a way to get on a show. that idea seems to be right. more is coming.

i studied arabic for years, housewife

i was playing with google translate's new "type phonetically" feature to translate from arabic to english and, um, i think it needs a little work.

visually, it was pretty neat. each time that i hit the space bar after typing a phonetic arabic word, it turned my word into arabic script. but here's what it did to my last two words:




when i decided to try "8 years" instead, the sentence came out: "i studied the arabic language for years of ottoman."

this is the life

why we can't have a two and a-half day work week every week?

oops he did it again

doug hoffman un-unununconcedes the NY-23 congressional race.

(background)

the matrix (1905) [russian w/eng subtitles]

(via elayne)

lesser known? but i know who i am!

hey, it looks like i'm quoted in a philadelphia weekly column this week.

thanks brendan!

accidental geography

i can totally relate to this post. i am always seeing the shapes of countries and continents in the world around me. although i think #15 looks more like a backwards croatia than new zealand.

even weirder is when i start seeing the outlines of countries or continents in maps of other things. wisconsin sideways looks a little bit like australia (though i've never thought that australia sideways looks much like wisconsin). also, i've long thought that illinois looks a lot like sudan. when i lived in chicago i briefly considered telling people that i lived in port sudan. but i dropped the idea because no one would know what the hell i was talking about.

livestation

last week, og left a comment about livestation. i downloaded the program shortly thereafter, but only got to play with it today. it's pretty great if you want to practice a foreign language, or just watch the news from a different perspective. where else would i be able to see the russian arabic language news channel, or al-manar (hezbollah's tv station)?

right now i'm watching a news correspondent from a french news channel try to explain the american health reform debate in arabic.

it's annoying that al-jazeera tv is "not allowed to be displayed in [my] region", whatever the hell that means. the livestation page for the channel says (under the availability tab) "Available worldwide, not USA", how annoying is that? it's not like i can't watch it stream from the al-j page.

opure

yesterday's cloture vote on the health reform bill has been bugging me. not because i mind the outcome. (i'm glad it passed) rather, what bugs me is that they called it "cloture".

as i understood it, "cloture" is a vote on whether to end debate on a bill and bring it to a vote. yesterday was a vote to begin the debate on the senate health reform bill. it wasn't closing anything. shouldn't that vote, yesterday's kind of vote, be called "opure"?

khyber

i always wondered how that bar got the name "the khyber".¹ at some point someone told me that it had to do with the former owner. i just never learned what exactly that was until this morning.

------------------------------------------------
1-it really is called "the khyber", not "the khyber pass". at least i've never heard anyone call it anything other than "the khyber" and that's what is on the sign out front, as the NYT's own photo shows.

cheese day XV

very excited for cheese day today (as i was last year). this year's is a real nostalgia pick. i took all my friends to see it in the theater for my 11th birthday party. i don't think i've seen it all the way through since that day.



i'm a little offended that the music video is such a spoiler.

how far can he go?

first doug hoffman conceded that he had lost the NY-23 congressional race.

then, while hoffman was on the air with glenn beck, beck prodded him into un-conceding.

then the next day, free from the mesmerizing aura of mr. beck, hoffman un-unconceded.

it's been a few days. i guess hoffman got bored or something. because now he's un-ununconceding.

the guy just can't stop undoing what he's just done. he's an un-maniac!!!

d'oh!

it looks like the anti-gay marriage folks may have accidentally eliminated the legal recognition of all marriages in texas when they amended the state constitution in 2005. article I, section 32(b) seems clear enough to me:

This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

people do funny things when they try to "defend traditional marriage."

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