The great legend of cuisine, Julia Child, passed away today in her sleep. She was three days short of her 91st birthday.

In the last half century, it would be hard to pick anyone who has had a greater influence on cooking and food than Julia. Her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking introducted a generation to French cooking, and her early appearances on public television helped to further expand the culinary notions of a country for whom meatloaf and boiled vegetables were all too common. She always retained a sense of humor, and was eager to promote good food as something you shared with family and friends. I have recently enjoyed watching her interact with other chefs in her Master Chef series, as famous chefs interact with her she showed no fear in in expressing her opinions, and most would defer to her judgement.

I suspect the angels are dining well tonight.

Reuters is reporting that the FCC has granted approval to Tivo for their scheme to allow people to share Tivo’d shows with their friends. The NFL opposed such a notion, since they can obviously charge relatively large fees for the showing of games which are normally not available in different markets.

Ironically, the FCC said in their statement:

“Each of these technologies has been exhaustively reviewed to ensure contention protection systems prevent the mass indiscriminate redistribution of digital television programming,”

I bet the maker’s of the DVD encryption standard said the same thing. After giving us these uncopyable bits, next they will be giving us non-wet water.

The Arizona Daily Star reports that:

A rally organizer for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign asked Teri Hayt, the Star’s managing editor, to disclose the journalist’s race on Friday. After Hayt refused, the organizer called back and said the journalist probably would be allowed to photograph the vice president.

Today is brainwagon’s 2nd anniversary. Over the last two years I’ve made 403 posts, which I hope that some people have found entertaining. Wherever you are, have a slice of cake, or if you are trying to lose weight like me, perhaps some extra carrot sticks.

I am actually looking to boost my readership, so if you have a weblog and would like to cross link with me, try dropping a comment below.

Wildfires near the Mount Graham International Observatory in Arizona are threatening the as yet uncompleted Large Binocular Telescope. The area immediately surrounding the complex has been evacuated. The flames are about three miles away.

CNN.com – Firefighters defend $120 million telescope – Jul 5, 2004

Sorry to my two or three readers, who undoubtably were devastated to find brainwagon off the air earlier today. I had a brief outage while my domains were shifted to GoDaddy and the name serves were updated. All should be well now.

The Supreme Court handed down its rulings on rights of detainees. You can listen to some commentary on NPR if you are streaming enabled.

The basics of the decision as I absorb them now is that the court found that Bush’s claim the he could classify people as enemy combatants and hold them indefinitely without access to lawyers or a day in court was extraordinary and in the words of Justice O’Connor would “condense power into a single branch of government” and that “war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.”

It is good that the Supreme Court saw fit to exercise their powers to protect the right of habeus corpus. I was frankly amazed at the absolutely brazen nature of the Bush administrations assertions that American citizens could be held indefinitely merely by virtue of executive privilege. Of course, the Supreme Court got it wrong before, so perhaps they thought they could set the clock back sixty years and relive the glory days when the government could deprive American citizens of their liberty without cause or appeal.

The Supreme Court also handed down rulings on the status of detainees at Guantanamo, finding that despite their detention in Guantanamo, they cannot be held without the protection of the judicial process. Again, the Bush administration brazenly held them there in their own private gulag, and argued that they need never give them any ability to argue their cases before an impartial judge.

I’ll try to provide links to the text of the actual decisions as soon as I can find them online.

CERT has suggested that users stop using IE because of a serious conjuction of two security flaws: one in IE, another in IIS.

If there weren’t enough reasons to hate IE, try searching Google to find some more. Me, I just hate it because of all the bugs in their CSS implementation.

Some people want you to use buttons to advertise your distaste. I like their advice:

I’m using Mozilla on my FreeBSD and Linux boxes, and Firefox on my XP laptop. I couldn’t be happier.

On May 6th, 1937, the German airship Hindenburg had just completed its 21st crossing of the Atlantic. While approaching it’s landing field in Lakehurst, New Jersey, it burst into flames and crashed, killing 35 people aboard. Ironically, 33 of the victims died from injuries sustained while jumping from the airship, not from the resulting fire.

The airship exploded because it was filled with explosive hydrogen gas, rather than the safer but vastly more expensive helium. This disaster effectively ended the era of airships.

This picture served as the basis for a fark Photoshop contest, but I think it stands on its own. It’s good to see that our politicians now clearly express their view of people from other countries and cultures.

Soren Ragsdale apparently got himself a press pass and recorded his impressions of the event on his weblog.

Charles Darwin was born February 12, 1809 in Shrewsbury England. In addition to being the world’s greatest barnacle expert of his time, he also took time out to write the rather famous
On the Origin of Species, which
laid out his theory of evolution. I think strong arguments can be made is history’s single
most influential scientist: his keen insight into the relationships between living things continues
to aid in understanding the biological world around us.

Surprisingly debate over evolution continues, not in the scientific arena, but in the religious and political world. Many are offended to believe that they owe their existance to descent from
other primates instead of divine creation in a magical garden. I won’t debate them here (you can
examine talk.origins for that) but I will respond with a quotation:

How so many absurd rules of conduct, as well as so many absurd religious beliefs, have originated, we do not know; nor how it is that they have become, in all quarters of the world, so deeply impressed on the minds of men; but it is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, while the brain is impressionable, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.

— Charles Darwin