Nooooooooo!

They be stealin my YouTube!

Google has a

public policy blog.

Spicy Spam Kabobs

I kid you not. I was checking on the contents of the spam folder in my gmail account just now, and this recipe was the featured link.

Those Fantastique French & Their Flying Machines

In my previous post, I got interested in that fighter jet's location, but didn't get very far on its raison d'être.

But a Francophonic friend generously donated a few minutes to co-googling, in which we discovered that the Université de Paris X Nanterre has sites at Ville d'Avray and Saint-Cloud, and the IUT de Ville d'Avray, 1 chemin Desvallières, 92410 Ville d'Avray, France) has an Aeronautiques program and publishes research of the applied physics variety. Call me fanciful, but I'm thinking that aeronautiques = aeronautics. Seems like a reasonable spot for a fighter jet to come to rest.



A couple of Google-y side trips along the way:

• Nicolas Sarkozy attended the University of Paris X Nanterre.


• If you tire of Google maps for some reason, there's always mappy.com. Am I the only person who thinks of Austin Powers when confronted with MappyMe?


• I like the computer-geek-y job that I have now and I work with a congenial group of of folks, but I'd love to join any of the women doing robotics.

I almost hate to do this.

I was only skimming down this list of interesting stuff but I just had to check out Why is a fighter jet parked (Google Earth coordinates 48.825183,2.1985795) in what looks to be a residential neighborhood lot near Paris?

First things first, plug those coordinates into Google Maps, turn on the satellite view, and zoom way in. Yep, there it is.


Hmmm... Certainly looks like it could be a fighter jet, but maybe it's just a mockup of some kind for some reason. Googling fighter jet france leads to a list of what else? Fighter jets developed or used by France. Checking out the links... looks like a Mirage III. More on the Mirage III here.

Zooming in as far as possible, you can just see, down in the lower left corner, that the object of interest appears to be about the same size as that scale bar that says 50 ft, so maybe it's for real.


Panning around from those coordinates in satellite view, you can see that the surrounding neighborhood does look sort of residential, but right here things look a tad industrial to my eye. And those lanes painted diagonally across the parking lot? Doesn't look very residential to me. Wassup widdat?

Well, the Paris Air Show is kind of a big deal, something to do with that maybe? Doesn't seem real likely, given that Le Bourget, site of the Paris Air Show, is 26 km down the road:


Turn on the hybrid view, pan around a bit, and look for some street names.


Googling Chemin Desvallières brings up a list of links:

• Theoretical and numerical study of strain localization under high ...


• Dissociating the effect of different disturbances on the band gap ...


• Optimal Location of Actuators and Sensors in Active Vibration ...


• Threshold Region Determination of ML Estimation in Known Phase ...


• Welcome to IEEE Xplore 2.0: Music and Model-Order Selection for ...


• Energy Citations Database (ECD) - - Document #20685984


• EXPERIMENTAL DEMONSTRATION OF THE DEPENDENCY OF THE NEGATIVE ...

Looks like Laboratoire de Mécanique de Paris X, 1 Chemin Desvallières, 92410 Ville d’Avray, France turns up in an awful lot of those links. I'm thinking that something that looks like "Laboratory of Mechanics" is suggestive, but I didn't find an actual website for a laboratory of mechanics. Google did, however, map out directions for me from 1 Chemin Desvallières, 92410 Ville d’Avray to 48.825183 N, 2.1985795 E, a distance of 50 whole meters.


Not that I've actually figured out yet why they've got a jet fighter parked in their parking lot, but the hunt's been fun so far.

Sermonizing and stuff

• I've added a link in the sidebar to BibleGateway.com. Not to worry, though, I haven't got religion. I just want to be able to recklessly throw around Bible quotes. I used to be able to do this from memory, but have since decided to devote those brain cells to other functions.



• Verse of the Day for today, when I did happen upon BibleGateway.com, was “But the Lord is faithful, and he will strengthen and protect you from the evil one.”- 2 Thessalonians 3:3 I'm not sure if Jesus can save me from Darth Cheney, but Thessalonians is just a fun word to say.



• Speaking of whom, in Ron Suskind's book The One Percent Doctrine, Cheney justifies the GWOT and all of his other actions basically, by saying that if there's even a 1% chance of ___insert fear-of-the-day here___ happening, we must act as if it is true. Not that he ever bothers to show his work on those calculations. What goes into deciding that there's a 1% chance that Saddam Hussein had WMDs? I'm betting Cheney just pulled a number out of the ether.



• Speaking of pulling numbers out of ethers, in that same book, Cheney or some henchperson figures out that if you follow the money, you can maybe track terrorists. Rather than hurriedly cobble together a computer program and/or database, they just went to FirstData and got all their data. Yep, that's right, FirstData would be the company that handles abut half the credit card transactions in the US. Cheney didn't even have to snarl at them to get them to hand over the info, they were plumb tickled to do their patriotic duty and help their country. Nor is this the first-ever time in history that the government has asked a huge corporation to hand over their records of their customers' transactions and the corporation has complied.



• Speaking of credit: a small public service announcement



• Google Street View is still just a fun toy, no way are we anywhere near living in a panopticon society, right? Well, maybe just in New York City and London and a few other places and a few remote spots in sunny Florida.

Dear Google:

found it at the best lolcats site evah of course

If you won't listen to me, maybe you'll listen to the cats. Your slogan, Don't Be Evil, is a good one, but it doesn't go far enough. How about you expand it to include, Don't Facilitate Evil. I'm a believer in Dirk Gently's interconnectedness of all things, and I like having lots of information at my fingertips like this, but y'all are going overboard. If I wanted everybody and his cousin's jackass to know all about me, I'd move back to that small town I left.

Dear Google:

Are you listening? Probably you are. Do you care what I want? Maybe you do. Will you do as I ask? Probably not, but here goes.

Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine
By SAUL HANSELL
Published: June 3, 2007
[NYT article, may require registration to view]

That tweak about the "hot news" for new items is a good one. Keep that one.

Personalized search? Already I don't like it. The whole reason I use Google is to find stuff outside of my own personal realm. If you're restricting what I see based on what you think I want to see, I'll have to go look elsewhere.

Privacy issues. Lots of them, and they're piling up. I'm sure you already know all about this, being the secretive bastards you are when it comes to your stuff. Quit collecting my secrets.