Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Better Late Than Never

As the WTC towers fell four and a half years ago, most of Manhattan was engulfed by dust clouds from the massive amounts of debris pro­duced by the col­lapse. Wall Street was closed on September 11^th and re-opened on September 17^th, as author­it­ies were des­per­ate to limit the eco­nomic dam­age of the attacks. The Environmental Protection Agency, with its his­tory of admin­is­trat­ive sucking-up (cov­er­ing up global warm­ing evid­ence, sup­press­ing reports on car fuel effi­ciency, etc), declared the air in Lower Manhattan, which was loaded with asbes­tos, lead, americum and other tox­ins, “safe to breathe” on September 18^th, and thou­sands returned to work.

Now, nearly five years on, reports of the effects to health of those liv­ing and work­ing in the area are begin­ning to reach the main­stream media. BBC News repor­ted yes­ter­day that the count of those with med­ical prob­lems linked dir­ectly to the 9/11 attacks has reached 15,000, many of whom say they were offered “false reas­sur­ances” by the gov­ern­ment. 5,000 are now seek­ing a class-action law­suit. January saw the first death ruled to be due to 9/11 dust — James Zadroga, who worked at Ground Zero.

A foot­note on the report on the BBC News web­site states that “a spe­cial report on the dust fal­lout from the 9/11 attacks will be fea­tured on BBC World start­ing on Wednesday 3 May at 1930 GMT. The doc­u­ment­ary will also be car­ried on BBC News 24.” I first heard about the dust effects in the “Confronting the Evidence: A Call to Reopen the 911 Investigation” doc­u­ment­ary — and that was nearly two years ago.

Problems mount from 9/11 fal­lout, BBC News, 12÷4÷2006
EPA’s 9/11 Air Ratings Distorted, Report Says, LA Times, 23÷8÷2003
“Confronting the Evidence: A Call to Reopen the 911 Investigation”, Reopen911.org
EPA Controversies, Wikipedia

April Foolishness

The Internet is a dan­ger­ous place at the best of times, but April 1^st is a spe­cial case. If you’re at all given to swings of naiv­ete, com­pas­sion, or self-doubt, the best advice I can give is that you stay off the ‘net for the entire dur­a­tion of April Fools Day, from its narrow-eyed wak­ing begin­ning in Auckland, New Zealand (GMT +12) to its bloody, drunk and sad­istic con­clu­sion in San Francisco, USA (GMT –8). Gone is the safe haven of the over-by-noon con­ven­tion — with the inex­haust­ible and global nature of the Internet as we know it, you can expect to be fooled all day.

Pretty much every major web­site has a piss-around for April Fools, includ­ing Slashdot, Wikipedia, Google, and so on. Other high­lights this year included TuckerMax.com (a story about hav­ing sex with a pig) and WordPress.com. Slashdot is a par­tic­u­larly knarly con­tender, as the major­ity of the gag stor­ies it car­ries on April 1^st require some scru­tiny in order to verify their gag nature. This, espe­cially to a fra­gile I’ve-just-woken-up me, is a stress­ful task.