Unpaid diplomatic parking tickets as index of national corruption
"Cultures of Corruption: Evidence From Diplomatic Parking Tickets," is a paper by Columbia's Ray Fisman and UC Berkeley's Edward Miguel that investigates the number of unpaid diplomatic parking tickets by country to formulate an index of each country's corruption. Diplomats don't pay parking fines, so the only reason for diplomats to follow the law is conscience and respect for the rule of law.
Buddy Jesus:
Sadr City residents found a picture of "Buddy Jesus" from the 1999 film "Dogma" posted in the streets, accompanied by a badly photocopied pamphlet bearing a crude approximation of a US military crest and outlining a US "plan" to subjugate the neighborhood.
"That picture abuses our Imam Mahdi and his holy character, and mocks our sacred figures," said resident Abu Riyam Sunday, apparently mistaking the satirical movie still of Jesus for one of Shiite Islam's historical imams, whose images adopt a Jesus-like iconography.
The grinning, winking model of Buddy Jesus giving a thumbs-up sign appeared in the comedy film as a fictional attempt by the Catholic Church to present a kinder and more accessible image of Christianity.
Police in Poland have launched a nationwide hunt for a man who farted loudly when asked what he thought of the president.
Hubert Hoffman, 45, was charged with "contempt for the office of the head of state" for his actions after he was stopped by police in a routine check at a Warsaw railway station.
He complained that under President Lech Kaczynski and his twin brother Jaroslaw, the country was returning to a Communist style dictatorship.
When told to show more respect for the country's rulers, he farted loudly and was promptly arrested.
Hoffmann was arrested and released on bail but failed to turn up at a Warsaw court early this week to be tried, and the judge in the case rejected an appeal by defence lawyers to throw the charges out.
A court spokesman said: "Such a case of disrespect is taken very seriously."
Instead the court ordered the police to start a nationwide hunt for the man, and interpol have been alerted.
Photos are up of Bohemian Carnival (our new monthly circus party), Terrorfakt + Tonikom, and Triple Cobra at Pop Roxx. I only got pictures of the first half of the night at Bohemian Carnival, so if you have more, please send them... A late addition to the calendar that you shouldn't miss is Flux Capacitor this Thursday: it's a fundraiser for Capactitor, an awesome acrobatic dance troupe who last performed here back in 2002.
I've been working on our kiosks lately; I think they should be a lot less crashy now. I had been running them as independent workstations that just happened to be diskless and boot remotely, but they tended to crash a lot, for no reason I had any luck determining, and any time I update any of the software, they get slower and slower, since here in the Twenty-First Century it appears to be considered right and sensible that a web browser should cause a machine with half a gig of ram to swap. So, screw it, I switched them over to the "thin client" approach of LTSP, where the kiosks are just X terminals, and all the apps run remotely on the central server. (Hello, 1993!) It seems to be working much better so far.
They're still running Red Hat 9, though, because my experiences trying to get anything to function sensibly on either Fedora 5 or on Ubuntu were... I think mind-blowingly intolerable is the phrase I'm searching for. (Please don't hax0r me, I'll just have to restore from backups and that'll make me sad.)
