Bad Space News

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It’s been a bad couple of days for private and public spaceflight. In bullet points:

  • NASA: Drunk astronauts. On some occasions, NASA astronauts consumed heady quantities of alcoholic inebriants during the required 12 hour preflight sober period. This SMH story tries to be witty and say the astronauts were blasted into space on alcohol for fuel, quite forgetting that the Redstone rockets used for suborbital Mercury launches did actually run on alcohol and liquid oxygen.
  • NASA: Sabotaged ISS computer. A NASA subcontractor reports that a disgruntled employee cut electric wiring in a unit made to retrieve truss strain gauge data. No reason given as to why the sabotage was inflicted on a noncritical piece of hardware.
  • NASA: Embezzlement by former employee. A NASA employee whose job was credit card compliance tracking admits to having herself charged over $157,000 in personal expenses to her government credit card.
  • Scaled Composites: Fatal rocket blast. Hybrid rocket test (for SpaceshipTwo?) goes awry, kills workers on the ground. As Bad Astronomer points out, N2O is noncombustible (despite what the news outlets are saying), so some other factor was involved in the actual explosion.

One thing to be grateful for: none of these scandals or tragedies involved an actual spaceflight in progress. With the possible exception of the deadly Scaled Composites accident, all the bad news mostly rises from people behaving like idiots, and people will keep plugging onwards into space regardless.

RoCrHrn.jpg

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RoCrHrn.jpg Just spotted a blue heron wading in Rock Creek under the M St NW bridge between 26th and 27th, but this mobile photo is so blurry it’s probably not visible.

(RoCrHrn.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)

Twitter Spam

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Okay, Twitter, this is just getting ridiculous:

Inbox flooded with Twitter spam

Not content with single friend/follow notifications, Twitter spammers are removing and re-adding and following and un-following people so as to be able to send more notifications. Yes, yes, I know about the block feature, but that’s like the whack-a-mole routine of maintaining an IP deny blacklist on one’s own site — a reactive measure which just hides the spam from individual users’ notice, doing nothing to censure or discourage serial Twitter “followers.” I don’t want to turn off notifications or limit people’s ability to follow my Twitter stream; I just want to deincentivize disincentivize those who mass-add Twitter contacts for no reason other than to fill inboxes and follower lists with self-promotion. A block-list does not send them the message that such behavior is unacceptable.

Update: Twitter has updated their contacts system by merging the “friend” and “follow” functions, but this does not address the spam issue. Twitter is still not doing enough to deter this kind of behavior, and make it not pay off. Look at this flood of follow notifications from a link spammer using multiple Twitter accounts to push links to a dubious online toy store:

Screenshot of inbox showing a flood of Twitter follow notifications

Volt.jpg

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Volt.jpg A new ‘Chevy Volt’ on display at Union Station. I gather from the name that it’s an electric car of some sort.

Update: Volt. It’s just a concept model for a plug-in hybrid with limited electric range, and is only partly “gas-free.” Bah.

(Volt.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)

Caturday!

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IMG_1276.JPG IMG_1272.JPG

Pandora’s current favorite spot is on her scratching mat on the floor behind the video rocker. This is why she has not been on cam too much lately.

Random8

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Russell has “tagged” me with the ubiquitous “Eight Random Facts/Habits” meme. Apparently the meme comes with a stipulation that you must copy and paste a set of rules regarding the transmission of this meme, to which I say, screw the rules! I’ll summarize them how I like! So give eight random facts or habits about yourself, link back to this post, and link to [at most] eight other people whom you would like to infect with this viral concept of transmissive self-revelation. Here are my random eight:

  1. I’ve been baptized no less than three times in my life:
    1. Catholic sprinkling baptism as an infant.
    2. “Born-again” immersion at GCF.
    3. Fundamental Independent Baptist immersion at Berean Bible Baptist in Parañaque because apparently the GCF baptism was an “alien immersion.”
  2. I shot a man in Half-Life just to watch him die.
    • With his last breath he called me “Gordon.”
  3. I once wrote a girl that I loved her before I even knew what the words meant.
    • It was her birthday.
    • She never answered.
    • This was in first grade at a school in Foster City, California.
  4. I enjoy the recreational use of nested lists.
    • Can you tell?
    • Nested lists are awesome.
    • I write the HTML manually in a single line without returns or tabs because I’m so hardcore.
    • Also because Movable Type keeps parsing the line breaks.
  5. The one time in my life I’ve been offered a joint, I turned it down.
    • Everyone else in the circle went except me.
    • I was so uncool.
  6. When I’m bored and have finished reading my feeds, LJ friends, Facebook updates, and Twitter stream, I like to randomly click through:
  7. That’s no moon.
    • It’s a space station.
  8. Whenever I accept “tags” like this I am seized by an overwhelming urge to follow the links as far back as I can.
    • It sometimes gets annoying because a lot of these people don’t know how to link back.
    • But I managed to trace this one back to a loop in May, which can be read after the jump.

This tag needs to take a jump to Southeast Asia. I’m sending it to: Scrufus, Noelle, Angie, Trixia, Gail, Arnold, Keren, and Migs.

Continue reading Random8

Harry Potter and the Scholastic Infringement Notice

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Harry Potter doing a Gyakuten Saiban Objection Two days ago I wrote a “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” parody in which I jokingly claimed to have an advance copy of the book, and proceeded to “spoil” the story by revealing an outlandish and badly written Scooby-Doo-like ending in which Voldemort is unmasked as Professor Flitwick, whose attempt to steal Harry Potter’s gold is foiled by “meddling kids.” It seemed an obvious enough parody, what with the additional “Jinkies,” “Zoinks,” and image of Velma Dinkley. As you might see from the comments, the humor may have been a bit too subtle for some. Even legal counsel at Scholastic Inc., the U.S. publishers of Harry Potter, was taken in, if this email I received from them is any indication:

From: Baender, Margo

To: Paulo Ordoveza

CC: Dev Chatillon, Mark Seidenfeld

Date: Jul 20, 2007 12:02 PM

Subject: FW: Notice of Infringement/Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

Dear Sir/ Madam,

I, the undersigned, certify under penalty of perjury that the information in this notification is accurate and that I am authorized to act on behalf of J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books and owner of copyright rights therein, and Scholastic Inc., exclusive U.S. publisher of the Harry Potter books, including without limitation the cover and all other art incorporated therein (collectively, the “IP Owner”). I have a good faith belief that the materials identified below are not authorized by the IP Owner, its agent, or the law and therefore infringe the IP Owner’s rights according to state and federal law. Please act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material or items claimed to be infringing.

I may be contacted at the below address/phone/email. Thank you in advance for your immediate attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Margo Baender

Counsel | Scholastic Inc. | 557 Broadway | NYC NY 10012

[contact info removed]

I had heard about Scholastic going mad over the book being shared in advance via the internet, but I certainly did not expect to be hit by their scattershot approach to suppressing the leak. Baender, Chatillon, and Seidenfeld seem to be running simple searches for spoilers and shooting off boilerplate “infringement notices” willy-nilly, without regard for actual content. Here is the reply I sent back:

Dear Ms. Baender,

I’d like to know if you took time to read the “infringing” piece in question before sending me the standard Scholastic/Harry Potter legal notice which is currently being strafed across the internet by Scholastic legal counsel. Here is the link again. Please read it very carefully, taking note of words and phrases such as “jinkies,” “zoinks,” and “meddling kids.”

I know you have little time as you are busy sending infringement notices to the rest of the internet as well, so to make it quick and easy for you, what I posted was a joke thinly disguised as spoilers; a deliberately badly-written Harry Potter/Scooby Doo “mashup” parodying both franchises, as well as fanfiction culture in general. This falls well within the definition of fair use.

I hope you will not mind too much that I am also forwarding this notice and my reply to Chilling Effects, Consumerist, and to my peers and editors at my workplace, [prestigious news magazine with a blogging policy]. I am retaining the material on my website at this time.

Sectumsempra,

Paulo Ordoveza

We’ll see what they say, if they reply at all. I must admit, this makes me rather less amenable to patronizing Scholastic Inc. with my business, whether for Harry Potter or for other paper publications. I’m mostly with Ms. Rowling on wanting to keep the book a surprise for its fans, but when a publisher’s lawyers send clueless “infringement notices” because they can’t tell the difference between Scooby-Doo and Sirius Black, well, that makes me feel like the book is being sold to me by Dementors rather than wizards.

More info: Notes on fair use as applied to parody, and other incidences of infringement notices received from Scholastic Inc.

Standard disclaimer, of course, the opinions presented here are my personal opinions and in no way reflect the opinions of [prestigious news magazine with a blogging policy]. I did copy some of my coworkers in my reply for their own amusement.

Update: Also on Chilling Effects.