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I was reading comments about the Woodruff story (the ABC anchor who got injured in Iraq). Currently his name is associated with what Americans call ‘The Cronkite moment’: particulary, since more reporters have been questioning their own reporting about Iraq. CNN’s Amanpour, for example, offered this (chilling) point of view of the state of Iraq:

“The war in Iraq has basically turned out to be a disaster and journalists have paid for it, paid for the privilege of witnessing and reporting that and so have many, many other people who have been there.”

Over in the right corner of the blogosphere, it appears that the best defense in this matter is to attack the messenger, as for example Hugh Hewitt did a couple of days ago. Some word of advice:

But courage is not an indication of intelligence or depth of character. A thick passport and an accent may impress the Davos gang, but really, read her work or listen to her speeches. They are at a level of a college kid blissfully unaware of the world he or she has not personally seen.
Travel can blind and often does the traveller the key admonition to know what you don’t know.

I just missed the logic: Courage != intelligence. Travel == evil. Somebody should have warned Columbus in 1492: What’s the point of exploring and reporting about the shape of the earth and overseas continents, if you can do it from your comfortable deskchair in your pyamas?

I see that Microsoft released the second beta of IE 7, this time open for the public. Many others have commented on the release: some extremely pleased (‘RSS Platform’), others received the news with plenty of skepticism. I’m not impressed, for the simple matter that I do not believe that IE 7.0 is an actual upgrade if compared to Gecko, KHTML or the Opera engine (all three renderers have been rewritten from scratch to accommodate new CSS/HTML/XHTML standards).

The day that Microsoft decides to rewrite the engine might be the big day, but as far as it looks now, IE 7.0 is still a patched up Mosaic browser that was taught to do CSS tricks because it became the next rage after HTML 3.0 died.

Anyways, I took the freedom to put together a map (timeline) of browser. If I forgot things or facts, please fill me in.

Asa Dotzler reviews IE7.0
Cane and Able
“As Long As It Supports RSS 2.0, Microsoft Rules!”
And more reviews

There’s a cheer of happiness going on in the blogosphere: we have a president that supports science. Well, not really, but he is all for alternative energy like, uh:

To change how we power our homes and offices, we will invest more in zero-emission coal-fired plants; revolutionary solar and wind technologies; and clean, safe nuclear energy.

Has there been any new progress in solar or wind technologies? Did I miss something? Or is this the same old solar panels and wind mill stuff people have been talking about since 1970?

Related to this, Cosmic Variance found out that, that John Marberger (the president’s director for the Office of Science and Technology Policy) was going to host an Ask the White House session and answer questions on the SOTU.

CV readers, this is your challenge – let’s mob the White House with questions about funding for basice science!

It appears that one of the C.V. questions actually made it to John Marberger:

Collin, from Chicago writes:

What is the White House definition of ‘Basic Science’ the funding of which the president proposed to double in 10 years? For example, does the definition (and proposed doubling) include particle physics? What about nano technology? And a mission to Mars? Thanks.

With the administration’s renewed focus on fuel cells and nuclear energy, I guess there’s no need for particle physics. We can just continue with our addiction to oil.

I‘ve not really paid attention to the Google China debacle, which reached a climax over at SearchEngineWatch:

By the way, spell tianamen wrong, and you’ll get uncensored results on Google China. Be forewarned, one of these images will be of a dead person in Tiananmen Square after the protest there was crushed.

I’m not sure what the percentage of English speaking Chinese people is (let alone, how much of the population has access to a computer) but I can’t imagine them knowing how to spell Tiananmen in English. Logograms, anyone? And oh: Ever seen a Chinese keyboard?

That doesn’t take away the fact that Google does some censoring: if you use the Chinese literals for ‘Tiananmen’ on both Google.com and Google.cn (images), you’ll end up with two different looking pages with different pictures. But think of it again: If you attract a large audience on your ‘Search Engine blog’, you must be an expert!

¹“The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence”