US and China Staging Cyber War Games – Together

There has been a great deal of tension apparent between the U.S. and China, the former accusing the latter of repeated instances of electronic espionage and the latter fearing the former as an aggressive power in the mold of the Opium War powers.

Well, apparently the distrust between the two countries isn’t as deep as common wisdom says it is or the actors on each side are a bit less strident and uncooperative than they are thought to be, because last year the two countries staged online wargames with each other, according to reporting by the Guardian.

The games were designed “to help prevent a sudden military escalation between the sides if either felt they were being targeted.”

Liquid Armor

Liquid armor from BAE

This is a story I got half-written before I realized the accounts I was reading referenced a story several years old. Still, it’s interesting so I finished it and here it is. You’re welcome.

The British defense and security company, BAE Systems, has announced “shear thickening liquid.” The name’s no great shakes but apparently, this is a gel that can stop a bullet. The liquid has been designed to provide armor that is much lighter and easier to wear than the traditional Kevlar fabric and ceramic plate outfit that is de rigeur among the world’s armed forces today.

The Svalbard Vault is Giant Computer Made of Seeds

User interface

The Svalbard Seed Vault, a global biodiversity storehouse for three-quarters of the world’s crop diversity, recently received a new shipment of seeds for 24,000 more species. This brings the hoard stored at the northern Norwegian facility dug out of the Arctic permafrost, to 740,000 seed types in a million-and-a-half samples. This is news, and good news.

But one aspect of it that has fascinated me is how closely the activities of the vault and its partner, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, parallel IT. In the Associated Press’ story on the new delivery, the writer said, “With the shipment from the Syria-based International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, almost its entire collection is now backed up in Svalbard.”

Nairobi: Making the Jump-Off the Destination

View from iHub

I have been trying to place this article for months. It is poison. It’s simply a destination travel article about the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. Perhaps the utter lack of fly whisks, safaris and bloated children made it unpublishable. But I like it. So here it is, a guide to Nairobi, a surprising city, fun, energetic and accented with local color, full of nerds and excellent restaurants.

Sometimes a jump-off area is just that, a place to provision or transfer to your real destination. But sometimes it’s a destination in itself, one that is glossed over by travelers intent on getting the journey over with so the trip can begin. Nairobi is one of the latter places. Inauspiciously founded where two train lines met in a marsh, it has transitioned into a fascinating, and underappreciated city.

Adiós, Motherfuckers

I’ve left ReadWriteWeb, where I worked, on piece-work and freelance, for two years, in order to pursue my dreams of health insurance and unclenching my jaw.

For now, I’m fielding a gratifying number of inquiries about my next step. I will continue to write for The Christian Science Monitor, where lately I’ve covered technology, business, Africa and human rights in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia; as well as for a variety of other publications.

If you’d like to talk about other opportunities, feel free to contact me.

Happy Saint David’s Day, You Mutants!

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant, you monsters, Cymry and non alike.

St. David, Wales’s patron saint, was famous for inventing the scooter, the daffodil, rounding up all the snakes and sending them over to Ireland and tricking the Scottish into playing the bagpipes. So give thanks unto him.

By today, the daffodils are usually blooming and this year is no exception. So for me St. David’s Day always marks the start of that wonderful part of the year between pistol-kissing weather and the blooming of Satanic lung-weed.

In honor and imitation of Dewi Sant, may you ram a wad of leeks in your trousers. As was the custom at the time.

Photo by Bill Frazzetto

New Rules for Hunting

If anyone wants to go hunting in order to get meat for their family, I don’t have any problem with that. Better to shoot a buck in the wild than hire someone for minimum wage to fire a bolt into a cow in a factory.

Anyone who wants to go hunting for “sport,” however, should be required to agree to the following three conditions.

1. You can only hunt wild animals, and only in the wild. Hunting livestock, domestic animals or animals in a “hunting preserve” is a capital offense.
2. To hunt for sport, you must agree to be hunted in turn. The pool of those who will hunt you consists solely of vegans, the meanest people on earth.
3. You must agree to hunt with a weapon that makes it a fair fight. The animal-to-weapon chart follows.

Rumor of News from Tech Sites Reported as News of Rumor on Tech Sites

Today, news broke that there was a rumor.

The stories on the rumor outlined how one unreliable foreign source of rumors, a microblogging site, used a term usually associated with rumors that don’t bear out. Then, another domestic source of rumors, another microblogging site, also repeated the rumor.

Clown Suit, Cross and Flame Thrower

From my brother, who lives in a wind-swept rural ranching and university town in central Washington state.

“You should be aware that when we moved into our house in the country two and a half years ago, D. was exploring the barn when he found the (disturbing) following.

Babar the Applesauce

Capitulate why don’t you? Dos figuratives
met in the garden of my villa at Caesarea.
Speak softly to the applesauce in my lumberjack boots.
She dealt her dark sticky card on the white
table of the sheet: Van Sant traps, she thinks.
Wo doggies! My buttcheeks are twitchin’ like
3 sheep in a rain storm—
Bellbottoms are my mom.
The ocean broke loose from its sockets and
bent us like coathangers. Phonecians.
Fetch me my monk frog, Donate my liver,
the potted meat plant rang me like a
windchime. Guatemalan lunch bucket