Salon.com News | NASA photo analyst: Bush wore a device during debate

Oct. 29, 2004 | George W. Bush tried to laugh off the bulge. "I don't know what that is," he said on "Good Morning America" on Wednesday, referring to the infamous protrusion beneath his jacket during the presidential debates. "I'm embarrassed to say it's a poorly tailored shirt."

Dr. Robert M. Nelson, however, was not laughing. He knew the president was not telling the truth. And Nelson is neither conspiracy theorist nor midnight blogger. He's a senior research scientist for NASA and for Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and an international authority on image analysis. Currently he's engrossed in analyzing digital photos of Saturn's moon Titan, determining its shape, whether it contains craters or canyons.

Ough. This should impact the election, but I doubt that it will. In this case it seems we have scientific evidence that Bush is lying when he claims there was nothing underneath his shirt except from bad tailoring and wrinkles.

[Update 2004.11.01] Anders has some interesting new links to the spectacle of the Bush bulge. Possible medical problems and the LIFEcor LifeVest.

The question is: If Bush has a serious medical condition, shouldn't the american voters have the right to know upfront?

Sarah McLachlan just scored herself a new fan. Instead of using 150,000 dollars on her video (not uncommon) she decided to give it all to various chareties. (According to the video, a total of $15 was used to make the video).

Check out the video for World on fire, and also the donation list - could give you some good tips on how to use some of your christmas gift money this year.

Oh, and YubaNet.com has the full story of how it all came about.

Today I got this error message when killing yet another spam in my blog:

"Could not save your blacklist data: Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet'"

Pretty interesting error message. It didn't immediately dawn on me that this was a MySQL related problem, before I started googeling it.

Google-search: max_allowed_packet= mysql

The problem seems to be that the whole blacklist is inserted as one insert into the database, and when it grows beyond 3914 spam listings it just gets so big to post directly to MySQL.

Or as MySQL puts it:
"A communication packet is a single SQL statement sent to the MySQL server or a single row that is sent to the client. "

The solution is to allow larger packages to be sent to MySQL. Per default MySQL only allows for packages of 1 KB. (the total size of the query). This can be expanded to 16 MB on MySQL 3.x and 1 GB(!) on MySQL 4.x.

Information of how to accomplish that can be found in the MySQL manual: A.2.9 Packet too large.

PS: You either have to be able to administrate the install of MySQL, or you will have to talk to your sysadmin about fixing the problem.

In my case it was just a matter of adding two lines to a configuration file and the problem was history.

Rick Ellis writes a good piece about the Daily Show, Jon Stewart, Crossfire and Novaks reactions after the fact.

I think Rick is dead on when he writes

You can see just one small indication of the problems facing old media by looking at the aftermath of Stewart's "Crossfire" appearance.

While Friday's show received decent numbers for an episode of "Crossfire," that's not the way that most people viewed it. Videos of the show were passed around online last weekend, from sites such as iFilm (where more than a half a million people have already looked at the video), to methods such as BitTorrent.

While it's difficult to know for sure, my best guess is that the show has probably been seen by at least ten times as many people online as the original broadcast. And that's without CNN providing an "official" feed of the episode.

The people who watched the show online are not typical CNN viewers. In fact, I suspect many of them would agree with Stewart's assessment that "Crossfire" is depressing to watch. And yet viewers sought out the show, in ways that Robert Novak can scarcely comprehend.

Read the whole story: Everything You Think You Know About 'The Daily Show' Is Wrong

More coverage:
Jon Stewart, Again in the Crossfire - Washington Post
Jon Stewart from "The Daily Show" Photo: Comedy Central Jon Stewart Bitchslaps CNN's 'Crossfire' Show - MTV.com

I am almost never in agreement with Dave Winer, but this posting from his blog, dated 19th of october 2000 struck a note. Thoughtful writing and maybe a thought provoker for people living their lives solely to make more money.

DaveNet : Transcendental Money

Thanks to Dave for digging up some of his old stuff from time to time.

Author and fake news anchor Jon Stewart was guest on CNNs Crossfire last friday. Rather than plugging his show and book Stewart took Crossfires Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson to school and said Crossfire was hurting America.

The show turned into a discussion about Crossfires and medias failure to make politicians accountable and to ask the tough and real questions instead of just following the spin.

I thought it was a very interesting edition of Crossfire, and I hope (although, I wouldn't place much money on it) that Tucker, Paul & co at Crossfire hears what Jon said and tries to start asking the real tough questions and starts having a real debate show - rather than just providing entertainment and spin.

The Crossfire show is available as Torrent download
CNN has a transcript of the show

And there is some interesting comments about it here:
TWoP Forums
The blogging of the president: Jon Stewart in the Crossfire

Anders writes about the norwegian ad against the Bush administration and the english call for action to sway voters in the US. The question, will it work or just piss everyone off?

Impacting the vote or pissing everyone off?

The grass root movement Tellhim.no runs an ad in todays Washington Post where the movement articulates that the Norwegian government is not with the people when supporting George W. Bush and his was in Iraq.

See the Washington Post ad [PDF]

For those of you without PDF reader, I have included the letter in the extended entry for this post.

Mr. President

As friends of the United States, we respect your country’s strength, creativity and generosity. At this point in history however, we are compelled to speak out. Four out of five Norwegians oppose the U.S.-led war on Iraq and our government has failed to clearly express the majority opinion of its people.

Mr. President – we urge you to change your foreign policy. To pursue a flawed and failed policy is a sign of weakness. We want the United States to be strong and creative enough to apologize to the Iraqi people for an unjust war, and to the Allies for having misled them. We want the USA to be generous enough to
compensate the innocent victims of violence, looting and trauma inflicted by torture. We firmly believe that the quest for peace in Iraq is best led by the United Nations and a democratically-elected Iraqi government.

Mr. President – your country can once again be a leading example of democracy and freedom, inspiring a world where terrorism can no longer breed. Your present policy only fosters resistance, more than ever, everywhere. Mr. President – the choice is yours.

Sincerely
Concerned citizens and organizations of Norway