Dowbrigade

Ever the pretentious spotlight seeker, Harvard has
jumped into the fray about one of the fundamental questions of our or
any time, "Where did we come from?"

Harvard University is planning a scientific study of
how life emerged on Earth.The study thrusts one of America’s most prestigious
universities into the growing, politically charged debate over an alternative
to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Opponents of the theory of evolution said Harvard’s research project
is proof that science has yet to disprove alternative theories, including
the idea of "intelligent design", which is popular with America’s
religious conservatives.

At Harvard, the "Origins of Life in the Universe" study will
cross various disciplines of biology, chemistry and astronomy to seek
answers to longtime questions about evolution, a Harvard official said
on Monday.

Harvard tried to downplay the timing of the project, saying it was not
in response to the debate over intelligent design theory, which has attracted
so much attention that it was the cover story of Time magazine this month.

"This is not something that began recently or something that began
in reaction to what’s going on in the larger environment," said
Harvard spokesman B D Colen. "It’s a project
that began because scientists are seeking answers to some of the biggest
questions ever posed."

As the great Joseph
Campbell would tell us (were he
still alive) a culture’s origin myth says alot about how it defines itself
and its relation to the world. Who better than Harvard, the preeminent academic
myth-maker of our times, to officially cannonize their version of events.

story from Al
Jazeera (that paragon of scientific rectitude)

from Business Week

In our continual monitoring of the Ecuadorian
blogosphere we have come across some amazing
things, not
least of which is "Manta
y los bases de EE.UU." This one-issue gem is a
blog by a local guy named Edgar Rios,dedicated to monitoring the goings
on at the almost unknown electronic headquarters of the Southern Front
of
the
war
against
drugs,
terrorism,
Communist insurgents and Hugo
Chavez – the US "Forward Operating Location"
(FOL) in Manta, Ecuador.

Although they try to keep as low a profile as possible,
the FOL has been in the news a few times recently (see
below) and if
Venezuelan President Chavez is correct in predicting
American military action, overt or covert, aginst his oil-rich and leftist government,
this is one of the directions it will be coming from.

Here is a translation of a recent posting to "Manta
and the US Bases", about the appearance of some of the Air Force’s biggest
planes in what is still officially just a listening post:

When we saw a plane that enormous on the tarmac at the
Forward Operating Location (FOL), we understood why analysts doubt that
the US enclave is intended solely for the control of drug trafficking
in the region.

Just one of the reasons: the Boeing C-17 Globemaster
III was designed as a cargo and troop transport aircraft, and not as
an electronic observation or monitoring vehicle.

The C-17, in operation since 1994 for theAir Forces
of the US and Great Britian, has a capacity of 167,000 pounds and a range
of 5,400 miles, empty.

Given that, we return to the question: What is an aircraft
with these characteristics doing at the Manta base?

On a related note we would really appreciate if we have
a Spanish speaking reader who can explain how the Latin American name
for "Blog" came to be "Bitacora"….

The
US company Epi Security & Investigation says
it has hired some 1,000 Colombian military and police veterans to work
as mercenaries for the US occupation in Iraq. Epi is operating from a
house near a US air base in the Ecuadoran
city of Manta.

The Bogota daily
El Tiempo reported on Aug. 12 that the Colombian mercenaries receive
salaries of between $2,500 and $5,000 a month–less than half the salary
charged by their US counterparts. Most of the mercenaries are retired
military officers or police agents who were trained by the US military
and are accustomed to working with US troops.

from La
Jornada of Mexico

EPI Web Site
Iraqi Job Center- featuring "Your career
in Iraq starts here"

The Safe Intersections Act, part of the transit bill signed Wednesday by
President Bush, makes it a misdemeanor for unauthorized users to wield
a "traffic signal pre-emption transmitter," a special remote
control used by police, firefighters and ambulance drivers to change traffic
lights to green as they approach an intersection.

Lawmakers took an interest in the devices, called mobile infrared transmitters,
or MIRTs, a couple of years ago, when it emerged that impatient commuters could
purchase rogue boxes online for around $500.

"When you first look at it, you think, ‘It’s not such a big deal,’" says
DeWine spokesman Jeff Sadosky. "But when you realize the possible implications,
somebody using one of these to go 80 miles an hour through rapidly changing lights,
you realize it could be life-threatening."

from Wired News

Market share for the Mozilla Foundation’s open-source browser dipped to
8.07 percent in July from a high of 8.71 percent in June, according to
NetApplications, which gathered the data from the 40,000 websites it monitors.

Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer, on the other hand, increased its market
share to 87.2 percent from 86.56 percent, the Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based,
company, said. The Mac browser Safari showed modest growth to 2.13 percent,
while most other browsers experienced little change.

from Internet Week

Count the Dowbrigade among those who have abandoned Firefox after a
brief fling, and gone back to Safari, like a wayward husband returning
home after
a passionate but ultimately unfulfilling dalliance with a fast and attractive
younger model (in our dreams).

The main reason we went back to Safari was Apple’s quick and elegant
implementation of RSS aggregation directly in its browser. More than
dropping Firefox,
we feel bad about no longer firing up BlogBridge,
an excellent Java-based
aggregator. However, although it is not as powerful or functional
as a dedicated aggregator, the convenience of having one-click access to
our
most frequently consulted RSS collections from within the browser environment
won us back to Safari.

It still seems incredible to us that such a predominant percentage
of surfers use IE, which is waaaay down on our list of preferred browsers.  As
a part-time site designer, we have to take it into account, and view
our product in it to check for the inevitable cross-application idiosyncrasies,
but these occasional exposures only convince us how tasteless and short-sighted
most users must be. May the Browser Wars continue….