chattr +a -V

Testing new hover properties. Again. Again.

Listening to the BBC this morning on WUNC, I heard an interview of Dr Ralph Dean, professor of plant pathology and director of North Carolina State University's Center for Integrated Fungal Research. He's the lead author of "The Genome Sequence of the Rice Blast Fungus Magnaporthe grisea", published in Nature yesterday, April 21, which announces the DNA genome mapping of the rice blast fungus.

Rice blast disease is caused by the fungus Magnaporthe grisea, and it's the plant's most destructive enemy. Sequencing is determining the nucleotides of a DNA or RNA strand (source: Sequencing). The genome of an organism is a complete DNA sequence of one set of chromosomes (source: Genome).

It is estimated that rice blast, the leading cause of rice loss, is responsible each year for killing enough rice to feed 60 million people worldwide.

Researchers Uncover Genome Sequence of Major Rice Pathogen, the press release from North Carolina State University announcing the genome sequencing of M. grisea and the Nature article.

The fungus gets its name from the way it blasts its way into the leaves of rice plants by growing a small 'bubble' that sticks to the plant. Pressure inside the bubble builds up until it bursts, allowing the fungus to push through the leaf's protective surface and into the plant.

The fungus can then invade the plant tissue, reproduce and infect other plants. When the fungus infects young rice seedlings it often kills the whole plant. Older plants infected yield little grain.

(Source, the excellent SciDev.net article Genetic secrets of rice's worst fungal pest unveiled, which provides information on Dr Dean's team's work on the fungus enzymes that break down the waxy coating that protects rice leaves, the unusually high number of rice blast fungus genes that help it to respond to changes in the environment: some of these genes are 'switched on' when the fungus attacks plant leaves, allowing the rice blast fungus to respond to its environment better than other fungi, and that viruses that effectively live inside rice blast fungus make it more difficult for the plants to recognise the fungus, meaning that both fungus and virus have a better chance of reproducing.)

Scientists sequenced rice's genome in 2002, so 'we now have crucial data for both the host (rice) and the pathogen (rice blast fungus). This will lead to a new way of tackling the fungus,' according to team member Lee Yong-hwan, of Seoul National University (source: Genome on Rice Killer Unveiled at The Korea Times)

M. grisea is highly adaptable, making it difficult to use fungicides and chemicals to control the disease.

Our team created about 20,000 genetically-engineered mutants of the rice blast fungus to get an insight into which gene should be killed to prevent its infection of rice.

said Prof Lee.

Both Dr Dean on the BBC and Prof Lee in The Korea Times said that perhaps in five years, 'a genetic solution of keeping the rice blast fungus at bay' could be developed.

I blogged about Pharmacist's Mate Wheeler Lipes at Former sub pharmacist's mate to receive Navy Commendation Medal, performed appendectomy when 23 years old in WWII. He's gone to his reward, two months after he received the Navy Commendation Medal at Camp Lejeune Hospital: Former submariner will finally be recognized.

Speaking carefully, since it could be geologically and not biologically alive, Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center drew this inference from data analysis of Martian atmospheric methane and water concentrations. The data were accumulated by infrared spectrometers at NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (javascript instrumentation link in left-side column) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and the Gemini South telescope (link to South's instruments here) on Cerro Pachón mountain, Chile. NASA Scientist: 'Mars Could be Biologically Alive'. Methane spectral lines of Martian equatorial regions are 'very strong indeed' and are 'consistent with "enhanced local release"', with '"a major source"' of methane over Valles Marineris.

Valles Marineris, the 'Grand Canyon of Mars'; the Astronomy Picture of the Day for August 27, 2002, image from Astronomy Picture of the Day, from NASA's Viking Project

Areas east and west of the huge Hellas Basin impact crater showed strong methane concentrations as well, areas where NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter found subsurface hydrogen in high abundance.

Hellas Basin

Hellas Basin contains the lowest point on the Martian surface.

Regional Topographic Model of the Hellas Basin, from Views of the Solar System.

'Nearly six miles (nine kilometers) deep and 1,300 miles (2,100 kilometers) across, the basin is surrounded by a ring of material that rises 1.25 miles (about two kilometers) above the surroundings and stretches out to 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) from the basin center.'

Mumma and his team are requesting telescope time at the Infrared Telescope Facility and at the W. M. Keck Observatory (Keck instrumentation link), also in Hawaii.

Initial Reports of Vittorio Formisano's data anlaysis indicating formaldehyde concentration are at Scientist argues case for life on Mars, Martian gases pose life question. The hubub died down, when Formisano made clear that he was not claiming to have detected formaldehyde: And no formaldehyde either, And back from Ischia and Formaldehyde again.

You can 'fly' over a three-dimensional Martian landscape with Mars MOLA Viewer, which runs on Linux x86, MS-Windows 2000 and MS-Windows XP. I have it up right now.

Via Vatican Satellite Images at The Map Room blog: a 1.5 MB JPEG, 2168×2164 resolution image at DigitalGlobe's Vatican Gallery. Clicking zooms in, then zooms out.

From The Revenue Fields in Time Asia via Simon's World's Daily linklets 13th April and Privatising the Killing Fields at Macam-Macam.

According to a contract signed on March 18, the new operator, [the Japanese firm] JC Royal Co., is expected to "increase revenue for the state and develop and renovate the beauty of Choeung Ek killing fields." JC Royal is to pay the municipality of Phnom Penh $15,000 a year. In return, it will be allowed to jack up entrance fees, charging foreign visitors up to $3 instead of the current 50 cents.

The 30-year deal, which came into effect on April 1, was kept secret until Neang Say ['general manager of the Choeung Ek genocide memorial' and 'one of the first people to bring Choeung Ek's horrors to the attention of the invading Vietnamese and the outside world'] , 42, blew the whistle. Sitting in his small office next to the killing fields' souvenir shop, he says: "I want the world to know that Cambodia has become a place where they use the bones of the dead to make business."

The government reacted defensively to news reports about the contract. On Thursday, the country's powerful Council of Ministers released a statement that Chea Vandeth, Cabinet Chief for Prime Minister Hun Sen, was the chairman of JC Royal, and that he would donate any profit from the killing fields to the Sun Fund, a philanthropic organization established by the Prime Minister in 2002.

I'm feeling nauseous.

USMC Cpl Nick Sowers landed at Piedmont Triad International Airport on Saturday Apr 2, probably expecting only family and friends to greet him. But stepping off the plane, he heard the public address system announce 'We'd like to welcome home U.S. Marine Nick Sowers from Iraq', and

Just past the security checkpoint, more than 50 people were waving American flags, holding up welcome home signs and singing the Marine Corps Hymn.

Nick Sowers was enveloped by the crowd. There were tears and shouts from those who knew him best and those who were just passing by.

Everyone wanted a moment with the Marine in his crisp dress blues and regulation haircut.

They said: "Nice to meet you." "You look good." "Welcome home." "He looks like his daddy." "Thank you for all you've done."

From Iraqi sands to loving arms in the Greensboro, NC, News & Record, written by Allison Perkins, who can be emailed at aperkins@news-record.com.

Cpl Somers wrote about the firefight in which their Humvee was destroyed, Lance Cpl Julio C. Cisneros Alvarez was killed, and in which Cpl Somers was wounded, at Almost killed: Soldier writes about deadly battle in Iraq, also in the News & Record.

Images of Cpl Somers, the Humvee and Lance Cpl Cisneros Alvarez:

    

Cpl Somers was awarded the Purple Heart after the firefight and might head back to Iraq. For now, he's on a three week leave, after which he'll rejoin his unit at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, CA (sometimes called 'Twentynine Stumps' or 'the Stumps').

Defense Doctrine Web Site Goes Dark at and Defense doctrine web site goes dark (there doesn't seem to be a link to the particular post) at ISIL's Rational Review News, note that the Department of Defense replaced 'hundreds or thousands of doctrinal and other publications, ... by a single page that reads "File Not Found"'.

Secrecy News' post states:

One of those publications was a draft entitled "Joint Doctrine for Detainee Operations" (JP 3-63) that was circulated by Human Rights Watch and others and that was widely and critically reported in the press today.Another was a draft "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations" (JP 3-12), that was spotlighted and cleverly analyzed by Jeffrey Lewis of ArmsControlWonk.com earlier this week.In response, the Defense Department removed those draft documents, but also many hundreds of others. A DTIC spokesman was not immediately available for comment.A selection of DoD Joint Publications and other doctrinal documents previously available through DTIC remains available on the FAS web site here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/index.html

Beware the blog, the world's best radio station's blog makes available mp3's ripped from the 1991 fundraising gift, The Happy Listener's Guide to Mind Control, a 'compilation of corporate, religious and political propaganda'. The Happy Listener's Guide To Mind Control. Some selections:

Exxon Singers - America's Way
Pre-Reaganomic trickle-down theory, in song. The LP was titled "the Spirit of Achievement" and was distributed to Exxon employees at some point between the gas crisis of 1973 and the second one in 1979. ...

Jack Van Impe - The Coming War With Russia (excerpt)
The good Reverand [sic] broadcast his creative Bible interpretations out of Detroit, and was syndicated nationally throughout the Sixties and Seventies. Van Impe samples also abound on records from the same era. ...

Radio Moscow - Soviet Putsch
Vasily Strinikov, the Casey Kasem of Radio Moscow, discusses how he first learned of the August 1991 Soviet coup. Followed by Radio Moscow's first announcement of the takeover.

Kinga has some more photos at Around Warsaw. I chuckled when I saw this one:

A photo of the Pope on the former symbol of communism, The Palace of Culture

zl 1 mil prize for the first person to say why the best view of Warsaw was from the Palace of Culture (a zloty a year for a million years).

A Bishop According to John Paul's Heart? by Robert Moynihan (HT A Bishop According to John Paul's Heart?) says:

• the will was written in Polish beginning in 1979 and is now translated into Italian;
• will be made public 'in a few hours';
• 'names the man he believes would make a worthy successor for him, and, that the name mentioned is that of an Italian bishop' (that rules out Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz);
• contains the name of the cardinal named in pectore.

Moynihan's reason for publishing this stuff, which he admits is not news, is not verifiable? 'I am making a contribution to the understanding of Rome's mood on the eve of the release of the contents of the Pope's testament. Historians may be grateful.'

I'll bet it also says that John XXII shouted on his deathbed 'Stop the Council!', Paul VI was kidnapped and replaced by someone who looked just like him, and John Paul I was murdered. Oh, and the Third Secret was 'Don't call a Council.'

What's the Latin for 'I ain't holding my breath'?

googling "Dennis Campbell" "obituary" "carrier" produces no relevant results, as does using dogpile with those search terms. That's a shame, because his modification to carriers permitted simultaneous launch and recovery of aircraft, launch more aircraft in a given time, allowed landing approaches at higher speeds and the possibility of an abort if the tailhook didn't engage the arrestor cable, and eliminating the previous danger with straight-decks, of aircraft missing the arrestor cables and then crashing into other aircraft, vehicles and personnel. A simple idea had numerous benefits. '[M]any self-inflicted near-misses and other close contacts with the Grim Reaper' enabled him to conceive an idea that would forever change Naval Aviation. He had piloted Royal Navy fighters off three carriers in the 1930s. Carrier Design at .

The Royal Navy tested the concept on HMS Triumph in the early 1950s (Reginald Stanley Birch mentions that in his reminiscences and some details are available at Carrier Aviation) and HMS Centaur was fitted with an angled flight deck. The tests on HMS Triumph merely repainted the landing line, and left the arrestor cables in the same locations (!!). HMS Ark Royal in 1955 was the fleet's first carrier to enter service with an angled deck.

The US Navy quickly adopted the design:

From 26 to 29 May 1952, the feasibility of the angled deck concept was demonstrated in tests conducted on a simulated angled deck aboard Midway by Naval Air Test Center pilots and Atlantic Fleet pilots in both jet and prop aircraft.

The History of Midway's Magic and A Brief History of U.S. Navy Aircraft Carriers Part IV -- Korea and the 1950s

The US Navy converted USS Antietam (CVA 36) in December 1952 and fourteen carrier Essex and Ticonderoga class aircraft carriers got angled flight decks between 1954 and 1959. SCB-125 modernization of Essex/Ticonderoga class aircraft carriers, (CVA/CVS 9-12, 14-16, 18-20, 31, 33-34, & 38)

• Shangri-La(CVA/CVS-38). Received SCB-125 concurrently with SCB-27C, recommissioning in January 1955 with steam catapults.
  
• Lexington(CVA/CVS/CVT/AVT-16). Received SCB-125 concurrently with SCB-27C, recommissioning in August 1955 with steam catapults.
  
• Bon Homme Richard(CVA-31). Received SCB-125 concurrently with SCB-27C, recommissioning in September 1955 with steam catapults.
  
• Bennington(CVA/CVS-20). Hydraulic catapults. Received SCB-125 refit in 1954-55.
  
• Yorktown(CVA/CVS-10). Hydraulic catapults. Received SCB-125 refit in 1955.
  
• Wasp (CVA/CVS-18). Hydraulic catapults. Received SCB-125 refit in 1955.
  
• Randolph(CVA/CVS-15). Hydraulic catapults. Received SCB-125 refit in 1955-56.
  
• Essex (CVA/CVS-9). Hydraulic catapults. Received SCB-125 refit in 1955-56.
  
• Hornet(CVA/CVS-12). Hydraulic catapults. Received SCB-125 refit in 1956.
  
• Hancock(CVA-19). Steam catapults. Received SCB-125 refit in 1956.
  
• Kearsarge(CVA/CVS-33). Hydraulic catapults. Received SCB-125 refit in 1956-57.
  
• Ticonderoga(CVA/CVS-14). Steam catapults. Received SCB-125 refit in 1956-57.
  
• Intrepid(CVA/CVS-11). Steam catapults. Received SCB-125 refit in 1956-57.
  
• Oriskany(CVA/CV-34). Received SCB-125A refit in 1957-59, replacing hydraulic with steam catapults.

SCB-125 modernization of Essex/Ticonderoga class aircraft carriers. The three Midway-class carriers, USS Midway (CVB41), USS Coral Sea/Franklin D. Roosevelt (CVB-42) and the second USS Coral Sea (CVA-43) all were retrofitted with angled decks and the CV-59 Forrestal class carriers all had angled decks from the beginning.

(I also blogged about this on in illo tempore at 'The Hunt of the Unicorn' tapestries' renovation reveals ....)

A 15th Century Find in Manhattan at Steve Goddard's History Wire points to Capturing the Unicorn by Richard Preston, also available in the April 11, 2005, issue of The New Yorker. From Capturing the Unicorn:

At some point, the backs of the tapestries had been covered with linen. The backings, which protect the tapestries and help to support them when they hang on a wall, were turning brown and brittle, and had to be replaced. Using tweezers and magnifying lenses, [lead conservator Kathrin] Colburn and her team delicately removed the threads that held each backing in place. As the conservators lifted the backing away, inch by inch, they felt a growing sense of awe. The backs were almost perfect mirror images of the fronts, but the colors were different. Compared with the fronts, they were unfaded: incredibly bright, rich, and deep, more subtle and natural-looking. The backs of the tapestries had, after all, been exposed to very little sunlight in five hundred years. Nobody alive at the Met, it seems, had seen them this way. ...

Philippe de Montebello, the director of the museum, declared that the Unicorn tapestries must be photographed on both sides, to preserve a record of the colors and the mirror images. Colburn and her associates would soon put new backing material on them, made of cotton sateen. Once they were rehung at the Cloisters, it might be a century or more before the true colors of the tapestries would be seen again. ...

It took two weeks to photograph the tapestries. When the job was done, every thread in every tile was crystal-clear, and the individual twisted strands that made up individual threads were often visible, too. The data for the digital images, which consisted entirely of numbers, filled more than two hundred CDs. With other, smaller works of art, Bridgers and her team had been able to load digital tiles into a computer's hard drives and memory, and then manipulate them into a complete mosaic -- into a seamless image -- using Adobe Photoshop software. But with the tapestries that simply wouldn't work. When they tried to assemble the tiles, they found that the files were too large and too complex to manage. ...

Two mathematicians, brothers Gregory and David Chudnovsky at first used a 'cluster of nodes' supercomputer they had assembled from mail order parts, in an attempt to join the tiles. But they wouldn't match: 'the warp and weft threads didn't run smoothly from one tile to the next. The differences were vast. It was as if a tapestry had not been the same object from one moment to the next as it was being photographed.'

Because the tapestry had been hanging vertically for centuries, but was photographed flat on the floor of the museum's lab, the threads began to relax, 'breath[ing], expanding, contracting, shifting. It was as if, when the conservators removed the backing, the tapestries had woken up. The threads twisted and rotated restlessly. Tiny changes in temperature and humidity in the room had caused the tapestries to shrink or expand from hour to hour, from minute to minute. The gold- and silver-wrapped threads changed shape at different speeds and in different ways from the wool and silk threads.'

How to solve the problem of calculating changes in the tapestry, in order to match the image tiles? Here the article is maddeningly terse, referring to calculations of each pixel's relationship to all nearby pixels, billions and billions of calculations. AFAICT, The New Yorker doesn't disclose Preston's email address, so surface mail or a telephone call are how to contact him for further information.

Another 'wonderful thing' a la Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon.

Forty years ago, a Delta D launcher took off from Cape Canaveral with the 85 pound Intelsat I, the first commercial telecommunications satellite, headed for geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above the Atlantic Ocean. Capacity: one televison channel or 240 voice circuits.

For a while, AT&T planned a a privately owned satellite system of between 50 and 120 satellies orbiting 7,000 miles up. Bell Labs used AT&T money to build the first private spacecraft, Telstar 1, and I remember the 'Live via satellite' words at the bottom of the screen from the July 23, 1962, event. But the Communications Satellite Act of 1962 (pdf file) pushed by President Kennedy prohibited private communications satellites, instead setting up the Communications Satellite Corporation or COMSAT to 'plan, initiate, construct, own, manage, and operate itself or in conjunction with foreign governments or business entities a commercial communications satellite system.' COMSAT spearheaded the formation of the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, which operated international communications satellites.

Global coverage requires three satellites.

Delta D (Thrust Augmented) launches Early Bird



Three geosynch satellites cover the Earth





COMSAT In Orbit Test software running in CDE (Solaris? anyone?)

Kinga at Kinuk has some images from the Mass in Pilsudski Square, Warsaw, for the Pope, said by Jozeph Cardinal Glemp, the Primate.

Polskie Radio's story says 300,000 attended (Mass for the Pope) in Warsaw, and that 150,000 marched in Krakow, where Wojtyla was the cardinal archbishop (Poles remember the Pope).

Gazeta Wyborcza's site has commentary by Adam Michnik, Leszek Kolakowski, and Jan Turnau, which I'd love to be able to read, but haven't been translated, AFAIK. Gazeta Wyborcza is the largest circulation daily in Poland. It began in May 1989 when the Communists dropped press licensing in the run up to the elections to the Sejm and Senate in which Solidarity candidates won all races for the Sejm they were allowed to contest and 99 of the 100 Senate seats ( Central Europe, June 1989).

A digression: in 1947, when three questions were put to a vote by the people, the third question was whether the Senate should be abolished, and the opposition ran a 'No on three' campaign, which failed.

From the Red Ferret Journal, xtragoogle:

Enter a search string, click on a google service icon.

cspan has the Medal of Honor award ceremony from yesterday archived. The direct link (javascript and opens Real player) is here.

Until now, the three US Air Force Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle squadrons have operated out of Nevada, at Nellis AFB and Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field. The USAF will add 12 squadons, including Air National Guard units in Arizona, Texas in 2006 and 2007, and New York State in 2009 ( Predator Fleet to Expand and San Diego company makes spy plane).

The propeller-driven Predator has a 49 foot wingspan which at first required a line-of-sight radio link for the operator, but which now are being piloted remotely in Iraq from Nellis, in eight hour, six days per week shifts. Predators can remain aloft for up to 24 hours. The USAF plans to have ANG and Air Force Reserve operate all Predators. First generation Predators were retrofitted with two Hellfire (helicopter launched fire and forget) antiarmor air-to-ground missiles; the Predator B can carry up to 16.

The Air Force acknowledges that the Arizona, Texas and New York State units could 'be deployed domestically for homeland security missions' (quoting USAF spokeswoman Capt. Shelley Lai, from a Los Angeles Times article no longer on line, but cited in Big Boost for Predator Fleet (military.com) and Big Boost for Predator Fleet (defensetech.org)).

The Predator, with a 49-foot wingspan, is among the remotely piloted aircraft sending data from Iraq and Afghanistan back to crews in Nevada.

J.J. McCullough's cartoon for today: 'Who will prevail?'

The Raleigh/Cary Bloggers Meetup is this evening at 6:30 pm, at Cafe Cyclo in Cameron Village (another review of this Vietnamese restaurant is here). Free WiFi (has a map). I should get off work around 6 pm, so I hope to make it.

Anton Zuiker blogged about the March 29 meetup at Triangle-wide Meetup 3/29 notes.

Like Arthur Chrenkoff (My Pope), my primary view of John Paul II is in his political achievements, in helping liberate the Poles and the rest of eastern Europe from Bolshevism. (Interesting that the etymological root of 'liberate' is liberatus, past participle of liberare "set free," from liber "free", so we pray 'sed libera nos a malo', i.e. 'deliver us from evil'.)

Anyway, it seems as if people have forgotten, willfully in some cases, that the Soviet control of eastern Europe was viewed as permanent, enduring (especially as something the people there had to endure), particularly after the Helsinki Accords ratified the postwar national boundaries, boundaries which the Polish government in exile objected to after Yalta. Foolish predictions about 'convergence' of the Free World and the Communists abounded. Poles frequently understood that they had been abandoned by the West, and the impotent frustration built up, expressing itself when the Communists raised food prices.

But Wojtyla's election and visit home some eight months later were 'detonators' ('[T]he Pope and his teachings served as a detonator which liberated the spirit of society and gave it strength ...': General Wojciech Jaruzelski's quote, at Angus Roxburgh's BBC article Pope's role in Communism's end), beginning something no one viewed as possible, much less inevitable. That cannot be emphasized enough: there was no chance, no hope, of the Captive Nations' liberation, never.

Chrenkoff says he gave the Poles hope. At first, i wanted to say 'yes, and courage, too', but that's not a virtue in short supply with them, though it has often been expressed in glorious, foolhardy and suicidal gestures: as part of a saying goes about the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, 'the Hungarians behaved like Poles ...'

The visit changed many things in Poland: the government was forced to broadcast the events on the monopoly media, the arrangements were largely done by citizens acting together, not the State, the cooperation between the workers, farmers and intellectuals which had begun a decade or so earlier, received a big boost, shows of support en masse took place without serious retribution, emboldening the populace, and people heard truth being spoken, live, by their Church, to the entire nation. What a cliche that last has become, but that's because we in the West could not imagine the 'contaminated moral environment' (Vaclav Havel's phrase):

We fell [not 'felt'] morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships.

The Czech Republic - Part III - Vaclav Havel's speech in 1990.

Another quote from the Roxburgh article, this one from Lech Walesa: 'The Communists were as frightened of those [moral] values as the devil is of holy water ...'

Chrenkoff was six when Wojtyla became Pope; I was 27, and he 'can still remember first the disbelief and then the euphoria that after four and a half centuries of Italian pontiffs the cardinals have chosen an outsider, and not just any outsider but one of ours'. I was in Fairbanks, Alaska, and had left the Church a dozen years earlier. I did wonder what the effect would be on Poland and Russia, though I cannot claim to have predicted 1989.

On another note, Patrick Sweeney posts an image of the Pope as he leaves Auschwitz. I want to draw attention to the Nazi's vile slogan 'Arbeit macht frei' ('Work liberates') in metal above the guard post. ( "The Holy Father died this evening at 9:37 p.m. in his private apartment."). He doesn't comment about that slogan; he uses the image to illustrate how John Paul II changed relations between Jews and the Church and Catholics. But how ironic, that the Pope is associated with the twisted Nazi phrase, the Pope who understood, from his own labor in a quarry and a chemical factory under the Nazis, and who proclaimed in Gdansk,

There cannot be a struggle more powerful than solidarity. There cannot be an agenda for struggle above the agenda of solidarity ... That's exactly what I want to talk about, so let the Pope speak, since he wants to speak about you, and in some sense for you ...

(quoted in A Christian Athens: The Rhetoric Of Pope John Paul II And The Political Transformation In Poland, 1979-1989 by Cezar M. Ornatowski of San Diego State University). This was the extermination camp where Fr Maximilian Kolbe stepped forward to die in place of Franciszek Gajowniczek. Gajowniczek recalled:

I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me - a stranger. Is this some dream? ... For a long time I felt remorse when I thought of Maximilian. By allowing myself to be saved, I had signed his death warrant. But now, on reflection, I understood that a man like him could not have done otherwise. Perhaps he thought that as a priest his place was beside the condemned men to help them keep hope. In fact he was with them to the last.

That was the depth of Kolbe's solidarity.

I don't think I'll blog more about John Paul II. This post has forced me to put down in writing some of my my thoughts, and I haven't time on most days to delve into something quite this much.

The Cranky Professor notes in Pray for the Cardinals, that The Teaching Company has made available for free, audio files of two lectures by Prof Thomas F. X. Noble of Notre Dame University, How to Elect a Pope and Papal Elections: Then and Now, in mp3, Real or MS-Windows media format.

Is he quoting another blogger? He links to The Anchoress's Live blogging the Lion's last breath..., but the blockquoted bit on Cranky Professor's blog isn't from hers.

Cranky Professor has an interesting set of links on his main page, as well.

ReliefWeb has a pdf map showing global tectonic activity map of the earth over the last 1,000,000 years, tectonism and volcanism, acquired from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. There's a high concentration of volcanic activity along the Java Trench, where the recent Christmas and Easter earthquakes occurred. Most fault zones include volcanic activity, of course, but there are points of volcanic activity not associated with fault zones as well.

Heh, I just had a power outage here at home, but my APC UPS saved this post and ssh session from dying.

And the DVD will be released when?

Right after the Mahler post, we see that the usually reliable pestiside.hu trumpets the news that, selloff efforts having failed, 'the Hungarian State Privatization and Holding Company (ÁPV Rt) yesterday announced that it was canceling the privatization of Malév Hungarian Airlines, and would instead use the debt-ridden flag carrier's fleet of 27 aircraft as fodder for an unparalleled reality entertainment spectacle expected to raise hundreds of millions of euros for Hungary's cash-starved central budget,': Malév to Demolish Fleet in "Fireball Extravaganza".

'[O]ur entertainment and tourism practice in London believes there is literally hundreds of millions of euros in consumer appetite for a spectacle in line with what Malév is offering, in terms of gate receipts at the crash site, pay-per-view and other add-on revenue streams,' said Dr. Egon Wachler, management consultant from McKinsey and Co. 'Eurocrash will offer five hours of mind-blowing mayhem, capped off by a low-altitude mid-air collision of our two jumbo 767-200s, each with a wingspan of almost 50 meters, and carrying upwards of 90,000 liters of high-octane jet fuel.'

What day is it?