Blog - foXnoMad

American Red Cross Safe and Well List If You’re In a Disaster

by Anil Polat | Jun 4, 2007 | Tech | 0

The American Red Cross has setup a Safe and Well List that people can use to let their loved ones know they are OK in the case of a major emergency.

Concerned family and friends can search the list of those who have registered themselves as ??safe and well.?? The results of a successful search will display a loved one??s First Name, Last Name, an ??As of Date??, and the ??safe and well?? messages selected.?

Hopefully in the event of calamity you’ll be able to access the Internet (or even a computer) and hoaxers won’t put in false names. A good way to quickly relieve the people you care about. Also, an update number of recent posts is displayed so you know if there has been any new updates. [via Lifehacker]

Are Gender Roles Changing?

by Anil Polat | Jun 4, 2007 | Culture | 1

I think it’s very interesting how much attention this fictional character is getting. More intriguing is this analysis from the Washington Post.

If you’re wondering what it takes to be a man these days, check out Johnny Depp’s wrist.

As the unconstrained Capt. Jack Sparrow in the newly released “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” he wears a wisp of white lace tied just above his left hand.

A token of his feminine side? Perhaps. Or maybe it’s just what Depp said it is: a trophy piece from a young woman.

By the way, the movie is horrible.

Sgt. Pepper’s 40 Years Old Today

by Anil Polat | Jun 1, 2007 | Travel | 2

It was 40 years ago today that (another) revolutionary album by the Beatles was released. The first to use dubbing effects (music people help me out here) and toward the beginning of the end.

A hundred years from now, musicologists say, Beatles songs will be so well known that every child will learn them as nursery rhymes, and most people won’t know who wrote them…The timelessness of such melodies was brought home to me by Les Bor�ades, a Quebec group that has recorded Beatles music on baroque instruments.

A great article for those of you around the world who do or don’t get the music or the passion for this band, that made Funkyslide’s Top 10 of 2006, and released a new album decades after their breakup.

Flight Padding

by Anil Polat | Jun 1, 2007 | Air | 0

I’ve been noticing that flights, especially domestic, have been habitually late in the past year or so. It turns out that cutting costs, being under-staffed, and less airplanes may not be the whole problem.

Airlines are now “padding” their estimated arrival times to make it look like less flights are late.

Many delays are now simply being incorporated into schedules, at high cost to consumers and airlines. Congestion at airports and in the sky have forced airlines to pad their schedules more than ever so flights have a better chance of arriving “on-time,” which the Department of Transportation defines as within 15 minutes of the airline’s scheduled arrival time. Flights now arrive technically “on-time,” but with 30 minutes or more of delay written into the flight plan.

Add poor security, long lines, and drunks on top of everything else and you’ll see why the air carriers are struggling.

Tactics, Targets, and Objectives

by Anil Polat | May 31, 2007 | Security | 0

A good article by Schneier on Security.

The key to these countermeasures is to find the pattern: the common attack tactic that is worth defending against. That takes data. A single instance of an attack that didn’t work — liquid bombs, shoe bombs — or one instance that did — 9/11 — is not a pattern. Implementing defensive tactics against them is the same as my safari guide saying: “We’ve only ever heard of one tourist encountering a lion. He stared it down and survived. Another tourist tried the same thing with a leopard, and he got eaten. So when you see a lion….” The advice I was given was based on thousands of years of collective wisdom from people encountering African animals again and again.

Compare this with the Transportation Security Administration’s approach. With every unique threat, TSA implements a countermeasure with no basis to say that it helps, or that the threat will ever recur.

A bit on the long side, but worth the read.

World No Tobacco Day

by Anil Polat | May 31, 2007 | Health and Fitness | 0

Today is World No Tobacco Day, sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO). In an effort to get people to stop smoking and using tobacco products every year themed day is set aside to make people aware of the dangers of smoking.

This year??s theme, “Smoke-Free Environments,” urges the public to go smoke-free which, according to WHO, is “the only effective measure to protect people from exposure to second-hand smoke (SHS) which has been classified as carcinogenic to humans. Going smokefree is the only answer as neither ventilation nor filtration can reduce exposure levels of tobacco smoke indoors to levels that are considered acceptable.”

Tobacco does kill a large number of people each year, but they’ve done a piss-poor job of managing their public relations and could improve. It’s an uphill battle for the WHO since smoking is so cool, even pictures of it are neat.