Vietnam War Memorial Digitized

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Vietnam Veterans Memorial (The Vietnam Wall)
Footnote has taken the initiative to digitize all 58,000 names inscribed into the Vietnam War Memorial. It has also correlated them with military personnel records from the National Archives and made this information searchable from within an interactive Flash application.



The project started by hiring a National Geographic photographer to take over 2,000 high quality photos of the wall. The company then stitched them together, indexed the names, and pulled out information about each person from two major national databases: one for casualties and one for personnel. The whole process took about four months to complete and the end result is being provided for free.


Giving it the finger

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Medicine's Cutting Edge: Re-Growing Organs, The Future Is Here: Regenerative Powder, Ink Jet Heart Cells And Custom-Made Body Parts - CBS News

There's a big fuss being made, apparently, about a guy who's severed fingertip grew back when he sprinkled some special powder made from pig's bladders that his research scientist brother sent him.

If that's a miracle then what happened to me 25 years ago must be even more miraculous because my fingertip grew back without the use of any magic powder at all. After severing the tip of my finger in a bakery machine the doctors decided to leave it and see if it would grow back by itself. It's a process known as 'granulation' and only occurs on fingers and toes. Sure enough, with nothing more magical than twice daily dressings by the district nurse and some vitamin E cream the entire fingertip, skin, nail and fingerprint, grew back perfectly.


Just call me Winston, bitch!

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Modern men feel emasculated, study claims - Telegraph
Asked what it meant to be a man in the 21st century, more than half thought society was turning them into "waxed and coiffed metrosexuals", and 52 per cent say they had to live according to women's rules. What they apparently want is what some American academics have dubbed a "menaissance" - a return to manliness, where figures such as Sir Winston Churchill were models of manhood.
Sounds good to me. An overweight, ageing depressive who liked good cigars, a drink, plenty of cheap drugs and packed a gun. My fucking hero! And not a waxed scrotum in sight. Mmmm, seems like I've already had my 'menaissance'.

Food Porn

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Photojojo: The Ten Tastiest Food Photography Tips
We’ve all heard the rumors about the terrible things food photographers do to make food look good. Horror stories about food stylists with their cans of shoe polish, burnishing raw turkeys to make them look roasted. Scoops of mashed potatoes glistening atop ice cream cones, covered in chocolatey-looking motor oil. Fortunately, few of us know how to accomplish styling atrocities of that ilk. We’re just ordinary Joes, trying to make restaurant food look as good as it smells, or capture the deliciousness of Aunt Sally’s fresh-baked biscuits. It takes a little doing to make food photogenic, but it’s easy once you know how.
I'm not much of a photographer but I'm a bloody good baker so while this home-made crusty loaf may not qualify as food porn it certainly tasted bloomin' good.





And now over to our MI5 newsletter...

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The Spectator:  Al-Qa’eda’s secret UK gangs: terror as a ‘playground dare’
After 12 thwarted plots and three failed ones, the picture of the enemy has never been clearer. The typical British terrorist is not angry about poverty (as Cabinet Office guidance suggested four years ago) but is usually an apparently well-integrated Muslim who is likely to have a degree, often in engineering. Frequently, however, he will be in a relatively low-prestige job and may find a macabre attraction in the profile of a suicide bomber. What is common to all is a psychological trait it is all but impossible to screen for: the need for a substitute family, a willingness to be brainwashed by al-Qa’eda. (emphasis mine)
This MI5 puff-piece was supposedly 'written' by Fraser Nelson. I think in this case 'written' means the same as 'photocopied'.


See no evil

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Canadian government denies torture in Israel
"The Israelis tied my hands, blindfolded and then beat me all the way to the interrogation center. I was then cuffed to a chair for four days where interrogators prevented me from sleeping. I was tied in painful stress positions, and on one occasion the agents grabbed me while I was cuffed to the chair and shook me severely, I passed out when they started shaking me by the head," says "Samer" a former student activist at Birzeit University who was arrested in 2006.

Nonetheless, this isn't torture according to Canadian foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier and the Harper government. After it was exposed that Canada had Israel and the United States listed as offenders in a training manual for diplomats about torture, the two countries were promptly dropped on 19 January with Bernier's expression of regret and embarrassment.