Palin on GOP Ticket and Murphy's Law

I'm an African living in Africa. However I'm following the buildup to US election with keen interest because the US is not just any nation: whatever is happening in the world's most powerful nation is the concern of everybody, especially us, friends of the US.

Sarah Palin materialized into the campaign on GOP ticket. Her high points include being a hockey mom, barracuda basketballer, moose hunter who can dress a carcass singlehanded (Tarzan Girl, huh), a mother of five. She was mesmerizing during her (it now is apparent, well-rehearsed) acceptance speech.

Since then, the true colours started emerging. And what would you expect from the above wilderness résumé? She's what I'd rank as below average in academics, like the Wiki Answers graphic bares to the world...

With Palin on the ticket, McCain is likely to lose the elections more than any other thing that may influence the outcome of elections. However, tables may turn any day and drown Dems ticket, or place the GOP in a comfortable perch.

Then Murphy's Law says pushy Sarah, skinner of mooses, fisher of salmons, may just as easily step into the Oval Office and rule America. That is, should anything go wrong with McCain (not that I'm praying for that but a hundred things can go wrong, natural causes that shall incapacitate him) the US constitution then take its course, setting Palin smack into the White House.

This moment of uncertainty couldn't have picked a wronger time-housing credit crunch, stock markets poised to come down crashing, Taliban building strength like a cyclones, and cyclones wreaking havoc all over the place. And America fighting wars in far away land.

The October 2 debate of VP hopefuls is likely to finish business for Palin, but if she stays on the ticket, there's a worrying time ahead with her trigger finger on the nuclear bomb switch.

Technology Crescendo

The past few days have seen what looks like a major change of affairs in the technology arena.

• Sandisk, holders of IP for nand flash drives, were doing the only too logical thing-placing media on micro-sd card with a USB sleeve to plug it into players. Now, micro-SD is a tiny weeny thingy no bigger than a SIM-card, but sizes as big as two gigabyte are in existence. Many phones have microSD slots, so it is nothing new, only placing of media such as music and videos in place of (ungainly) CDs and DVDs--all of five and a quarter inches diameter whose surface you can place a hundred micro-SDs which are even slimmer.
• Google teamed up with T-mobile to announce the coming of G1, a Google cellphone widely seen as a rival to much successful Apple's I-phone. Its build is no run-of-mill imitation of existing cellphone-it's got retractable querty keypad and a trackball. Some tech enthusiast has placed the two rivals side-by-side and compared them here. (if this link ever goes stale, ping me, I have saved the text somewhere.
• Like a powerful but aging elephant whose molars can no longer chew enough twigs to drive its huge body, therefore slowly starting to waste away, Microsoft have lately been trying to run catch-on (gaming, search) and not so successful upgrade (vista). Plus, the man whose name is synonymous with Microsoft, Bill Gates, recently retired early. If it weren't for shareholder, Microsoft trustees could have just convened and retired the titan of technology successes whose time has come, like a general who won many wars but has at last shown all the signs of aging.
• One of my recent posts was my concern about the European scientific project dubbed LHC. Something went wrong and they had to halt their experiment: about a ton of liquefied helium liberated itself back into atmosphere where it had been abducted from, rendering the superconducting magnets not so super--Talk of biblical Babel tower.

BBC's perspective of Zimbabwe power-sharing agreement. LOL!

.

Another brick off the wall: RIP Wright of Pink Floyd

If people in the Afterworld do access Internet, Dear Claus Flieger (RIP), here comes your friend and mentor. I do remember how we had been bound by our mutual liking of Pink Floyd music.

It's strange that today I felt moody since morning, playing Crazy Diamonds over and over again, remembering Syd Barrett (whom, hopefully, Claus, you met out there when you joined your ancestors some five years ago). Must have been telepathy or some other superpower communicating with me... maybe you, Claus. Everything became clear upon reading the news story below.

BBC story...

Floyd founder Wright dies at 65

Wright (right) wrote songs on albums including Dark Side Of The Moon

Pink Floyd keyboard player and founder member Richard Wright has died aged 65 from cancer.

Wright appeared on the group's first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, in 1967 alongside lead guitarist Syd Barrett, Roger Waters and Nick Mason.

Dave Gilmour joined the band at the start of 1968 while Barrett left the group shortly afterwards.

Wright penned songs on classic albums including The Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here.

His spokesman said: "The family of Richard Wright, founder member of Pink Floyd, announce with great sadness that Richard died today after a short struggle with cancer.

"The family have asked that their privacy is respected at this difficult time."

He did not say what form of cancer the self-taught keyboard player and pianist had.

Live 8

Wright, a founder member of The Pink Floyd Sound - and other previous incarnations including Sigma 6 - met Waters and Mason at architecture school.

Wright rejoined Pink Floyd for the London Live 8 concert in 2005

Pink Floyd achieved legendary status with albums including 1973's The Dark Side Of The Moon, which stayed in the US album chart for more than a decade.

Wright, known as Rick earlier in his career, wrote The Great Gig In The Sky and Us And Them from the album.

Waters left the band in 1981, performing his last concert at London's Earls Court.

Wright, together with Gilmour and Mason, continued to record and tour as Pink Floyd during the remainder of the 1980s and into the 1990s, releasing their last studio album - The Division Bell - in 1994.

In 2005, the full band reunited - for the first time in 24 years - for the Live 8 concert in London's Hyde Park.

Large Hardon Collider: what if??

GOOGLE MARKING THE EXPERIMENT STYLISTICALLY ON THEIR SEARCHPAGE ON 10 SEPT 2008.------>

CERN, European Research Institution is today undertaking an experiment meant to discover what might have not be discovered in nuclear physics as at now. What'll you get when you break a proton by smashing protons into each other while moving at the speed of light?

For that research they have been building a huge hoop of 23 kilometre circumferences where protons race by being propelled by strong magnetic fields supplied by superconducting magnets chilled by liquid helium.

Here's what in the past has been described as Deathwish, or Curiosity of Cat; or Pandora's Box: a consortium of the best of brains from several countries in the world are doing something whose outcome is unknown. Proton is a positively-charged smallest particulate matter that, we have been all along considering as indivisible. When two protons smash upon each other at ~2c speed (that is, two particles each moving at almost the speed of light) one of the expected outcome is breakage of unbreakable, forming another hitherto unknown particle (call it makundon or demiroton so). The other outcome may be fusion of two protons into a particle twice the mass of proton (call it biproton or so). Now, here's trouble. This particle of twice the mass of proton may exert such a strong attractive force that will result into other protons being attracted and fusing onto the "biproton" forming an even bigger particle as each piece of mass joins the orgy. The result may be a black hole whereby our earth shall collapse with the instance of a punched baloon, with moon, solar system, galaxy etc to follow.

When that happens it will be so quick and painless, so earthlings needn't worry about it. Plus, there won't be anywhere to go. Since universe came out of big bang, it will all come in together in a big whoosh, and there shall be peace and quiet commonplace when you have absolute zero temperature and a particle of negligible dimensions but weighing one Universe: until such time that there shall be anoter big bang (zillions of centuries from today) followed by evolution etc. If life was an accident, this week shall be the end of life and no one to tell the story.


Bye, fellow earthlings, should the experiment go WHOOOOSH!

Chrome - yet another browser, but from Google, no less...

I've come to be so accustomed to Mozilla's Firefox browser to the point I'd thought, hey, this is an ultimate browser. I've gone around preaching it to colleagues and cybercafe owners, carried installation file in my thumb drive for anyone to make use of.
It was therefore with surprise when I heard that google were rolling out their own browser. Now Google have rolled out many products, they are all outstanding--from SketchUp to Picasa to Gmail etc. With a browser to keep up with their record of producing winners, I started feeling sad that I'd have to move on and leave the browser I'd grown to like.
I downloaded and installed Chrome beta for feel. Immediately I knew I'll keep on with Firefox, at least for the time being--here are my reasons:

1. Chrome could not be installed on Windows 2000 and earlier versions. Now, my favourite OS is Win2K. Firefox could install even on Win98, tab browsing and all. In a typical Third World locale like Tanzania, we still have loads of PIIs and PIIIs running Win98SE and Win2K, therefore it is a serious observation.
   
2. My PC has this necklace of RSS feeds bookmarks that I regularly scour during my typical of workday (Google News, BBC News, Channel Register, My blog etc). I didn't see an obvious way of placing live bookmarks on Chrome.
   
3. Mozilla has sooo many supporters, these over time have developed ingenious addons and extensions making life quite easy. With Chrome it is going to take a while coming to that.

Recently on this blog I was critical of Cuil search engine that was out to challenge Google. I hope to find more reasons to prefer chrome, but maybe that's the way life goes, some things have to be dropped over time. Like when I had to scrap my tiny notebook, Compaq Contura Aero 486 on the day I installed Chrome 9/4, 2008: that will be the subject of another post.

Some people are blindly opportunistic

Some people are blindly opportunistic--that's my conclusion when McCain picked former pageant, first-season Governor of Alaska (shiver!-what a far reach...). And a mother of five too.

At her forties, she nicely dilutes the rather heavy age of McCain of 73, yeah. Gender has been thrown in to pick what they can of the Clinton die-hards.

Soon the press got to work. We started hearing about earmark funds and the infant politician mixing herself up. A bridge she had sought earmark funds to construct sometime earlier was later named by her as a bridge to nowhere ("nowhere") happens to be an island in her jurisdiction as Governoress.

B4 dust settled, there was this teen pregnancy fiasco: her 17-year-old was carrying a love-child, four months to come). Mama explained, proudly, the child's father was going to marry her daughter. The world press needed exactly that. Media from AAustralia to ZZimbabwe carried the story. GOP felt short-changed: didn't McCain Campaign not do any vetting of potential running mates?

Whatever haste to pick a woman to make use of Clinton vacuum, I just can't picture the imagination of how a mother of five is going to cope with the demanding duties of VP. Sure some are quite grown-up, but the very task of bringing those up was a heavy-duty assignment in itself. I think the voters who have to make a decision of who the commander-in-chief shall be should something happen to the old man McCain might be a bit heavy-handed. Which works well with me, because I am all for Dems to take the White House. I can see the team of Obama and Biden bringing America to new height, winding up the affairs in Iraq amicably and not poking another arms-sale gambit in Iran.