My server host just notified me that it was migrating its servers to a different vendor starting on December 9. So, if masson.us is unavailable in the near future, that’s probably the reason.

Scott Hall, writing for Nuvo, has a review entitled Living Blue: DIY Rock. I offer this link, not because I know the first thing about Living Blue, but because the author of the review is my cousin-in-law. To me, nepotistic blogging seems less something undesirable and more of a sacred duty.

Anyway, check out the review, and if it looks interesting, check out the show. The Living Blue with Red Queen Hypothesis
Sunday, Dec. 11, 9 p.m. The Melody Inn $5.

Give a quick listen to the Living Blue’s fast, raucous, melodic songs, and you might dismiss the Champaign, Ill., quartet as a late entry in the neo-garage sweepstakes.

But given a fair hearing, the band’s new album, Fire, Blood, Water, proves a worthy contribution to the long tradition of do-it-yourself rock with catchy hooks and edgy attitudes.

A tip of the hat to The Right LEFT Story and Blogging For Bayh for adding Masson’s Blog to their blogrolls. Much appreciated and reciprocated.

This is the 64th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese Imperial Navy. Wikipedia has a pretty good entry.

The Imperial Japanese Navy made its attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii, was aimed at the Pacific Fleet of the United States Navy and its defending Army Air Corps and Marine air forces. The attack damaged or destroyed twelve U.S. warships, destroyed 188 aircraft, and killed 2,403 American servicemen and 68 civilians. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto planned the raid as the start of the Pacific Campaign of World War II, and it was commanded by Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who lost 64 servicemen. However, the Pacific Fleet’s three aircraft carriers were not in port and so were undamaged, as were oil tank farms and machine shops. Using these resources the United States was able to rebound within six months to a year. The U.S. public saw the attack as a treacherous act and rallied strongly against the Japanese Empire, resulting in its later defeat.

Since I have been talking about government provided broadband, I thought I’d pass along a BBC News story about the government WiFi project in Philadelphia. That city is taking the position that broadband is an essential service like street lighting or sanitation. “A citizen will pay a base fee of $10 or $20 depending upon their income status, for access to the network,” explained the city’s chief information officer, Dianah Neff.

Verizon came down hard on the cities efforts but was ultimately unsuccessful in stopping Philadelphia from proceeding. It did, however, get a law passed that prevents any other area in Pennsylvania from doing what Philadelphia is doing. There was also an explanation of some of the mechanics:

The routers, usually mounted on street lighting fixtures, can be placed anywhere high up where there is a power supply. Some 3,000 of the devices will eventually make up a mesh network.

“What is very different about a mesh, versus a cellular network, is that we get the radios very close to where the customer is,” said Chris Rittler of Tropos Networks.

“What this does is actually pretty amazing. It enables off-the-shelf devices such as laptops, PDAs and wi-fi phones to connect easily. It also really reduces the requirements on those devices.”

The hardware requirements seem relatively dirt cheap given that existing structures can be used, no right of way or cables seem to be necessary. I don’t know if the radio spectrum is already available. And, of course, security, programming, and the pipes going out of the city to connect to the Greater Internet might be a more significant component of the cost.

The Associated Press has an article entitled More children in special education.

Special education enrollment grew by more than one-third over the decade ending with the 2003-04 school year and at a rate more than eight times that of overall public school enrollment, an annual survey of children’s well being in Indiana reveals. . . . More than a third of those students, 63,093, had learning disabilities, an increase of more than 25 percent over the decade that began in 1994-95; the number of those with communication disorders rose 16 percent to 48,868; students with mental disabilities rose 8 percent to nearly 23,000; and the number of those with autism increased more than fivefold to 5,427.

The article suggests that this increase is because we’re better at detecting kids’ special education needs. I’m no expert, but I have concerns that our schools “over-diagnose” kids and give them special education labels accordingly. I am also concerned that this has implications for how we fund schools. Special needs children, whether diagnosed or not, are more expensive to educate than the average student. Our current system effectively has average students “subsidizing” special needs children. The more we move to a “dollars-follow-the-child” funding system, the more we are undermining that subsidy and are short-changing the schools with harder to educate children.

I’m not necessarily convinced that the subsidy approach is or is not the best policy choice, but if our policy makers decide to implement a dollars-follow-the-child approach, they need to address the subsidy issue.

Just another quiz — came up with this result:

Haymaker

You are one of life’s enjoyers, determined to get the most you can out of your brief spell on Earth. Probably what first attracted you to atheism was the prospect of liberation from the Ten Commandments, few of which are compatible with a life of pleasure. You play hard and work quite hard, have a strong sense of loyalty and a relaxed but consistent approach to your philosophy.

You can’t see the point of abstract principles and probably wouldn’t lay down your life for a concept though you might for a friend. Something of a champagne humanist, you admire George Bernard Shaw for his cheerful agnosticism and pursuit of sensual rewards and your Hollywood hero is Marlon Brando, who was beautiful, irascible and aimed for goodness in his own tortured way.

Sometimes you might be tempted to allow your own pleasures to take precedence over your ethics. But everyone is striving for that elusive balance between the good and the happy life. You’d probably open another bottle and say there’s no contest.

What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.

Indiana Parley has been covering the potential sale of Knight-Ridder. Today’s entry reports that Knight-Ridder’s board has hired Goldman-Sachs to advise it.

We’ll see how it works out, but it seems like a shame that Knight-Ridder may be going under or altered dramatically. From my perspective, it has been the most responsible mainstream media outlet in terms of covering the Iraq War, investigating and challenging the Bush administration’s WMD claims where other media outlets simply acted as administration stenographers.

Dulce et Decorum Est – Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

If we can’t get to where we use alternate energy sources simply because it’s the long term best thing to do generally, maybe we can get there because the U.S. military is a fundamentally pragmatic organization. Darpa funds solar power for battlefield:

The Darpa program calls upon the consortium to develop and produce 1,000 Very High Efficiency Solar Cell (VHESC) prototypes that are affordable and that operate at efficiencies of at least 50 percent.