Satellite images of Manhattan and the Pentagon

(note: the "Pentagon: After" picture isn't up as I write this. It's possible they took it down at the request of the State Department. We'll see if it goes up later.)

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9/13 12:16am: Pentagon 'after' pic is up now. Looking at it, I would never have guessed that a plane hit it, much less a 757 (which, FYI, holds roughly half as much fuel as the 767s that hit the WTC).

Tired of CNN video loops? Check out some editorial commentary...

As your prophecy-buster for the day, I point you to the Nostradamus/World Trade Center Meme.

"In the City of God there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb" , "The third big war will begin when the big city is burning"

This pair of 'Nostradamus quotes' being propagated via email and web pages, isn't what it appears to be at all. On one hand, by taking two separate brief prophecies, one can form any kind of after-the-fact prediction that one wants to, magnetic-poetry-style, but more importantly, the first quote wasn't written by Nostradamus at all but was written five years ago by Neil Marshall [9/13: The site is apparently pulled down now], a Canadian high school senior in his Critical Analysis of Nostradamus [9/13: Google cache copy].

In his paper, Neil talks about the 'infinite monkeys principle'...

"If I make say a thousand prophecies that are fairly abstract for example:

'In the City of God there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb'

and goes on to talk about all the ways his own example could be interpreted, basically saying that of 1000 random prophecies like the one he wrote, some are bound to come true. It's just amazing coincidence (or a great cosmic gift, you decide) that the single example he made up for his paper happened to be so appropriate today.

For those naysayers, note that (until today's blogs get indexed by Google) a search for 'brothers torn apart by chaos' retrieves only one entry, the paper mentioned above, while an actual Nostradamus prophecy segment such as 'that which is enclosed in iron and letter in a fish' retrieves nearly 40, all from Nostradamus sites, several of which have the full translated texts.

As for the other part, "The third big war will begin when the big city is burning," well that doesn't appear on the web at all (again, until google indexes the new blog entries).

It's just another urban legend, only operating on Internet time: Shaped, propagated, and publicly debunked, all on the very same day.

Pearl Harbor, Kennedy, Challenger, the WTC,

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Everyone keeps comparing this to Pearl Harbor, and I understand that: A relatively unprovoked attack, surprise, devastation.

But I start thinking about the Cuban Missile Crisis and though the events are very different, the sense of defenselessness is similar.

Ammy brought up a good point: that if the death-toll is near 50,000 (unlikely, but possible, depending on what was going on when the towers collapsed, we'll see) then the casualties exceed those of the entire Vietnam conflict. All in a couple hours, and all civilians.

Also for comparison (not political comparison, but for scale) Hiroshima and Nagasaki are each estimated to have killed between 60,000 and 90,000 people.

As I said before: fuck fuck fuck fuck.

I'm convinced that the Who's My Weblogger Twin? project is really just a ploy to boost the specially-selected 20 bloggers ratings on Blogdex sky-high.

Due mostly to it's meme presence it's obviously already working.

So I've been participating in An Exquisite Corpse, completing my first slice last night, and getting my next 'assignment' this morning. The 'starter slice' intrigued me, and I was looking forward to working on it (if this makes no sense, visit the site and read about it. Basically someone makes a 450x200 graphic and gives the bottom 15 pixel slice to the next person on the list, and they build off it to make their own panel, and so on) as soon as I got off work.

Since there was an A's game starting at 7, and the stadium is on my way home, I thought it might be a good day to stay late, and miss the traffic. Anyhow, now it's nearly 10, the panel is done and sent, and I just finished watching the Java Appletted webcast (Oakland beat Texas 7-1. Woohoo!). It's a bit late to drive an hour home just to come back as soon as I wake up so I'm crashing at Rick & Ammy's tonight.

Anyhow, just checking in with that life stuff. I'll have to write about Fray 5 and last night's Blink 182 concert later... Hasta!

Two cool infobits today. The first is a compendium of web-based color pickers. All my favorites are there plus a bunch I've never seen.

Next up is a tool showing the number of posts on craigslist, by category, over time. Two favorite graphs are the frequency of various job-type listings over the past three years and the same graph, with the addition of apartment for rent listings. Lastly, it seems that along with moving to different digs, everyone is selling their stuff. The exodus continues...

Do people become famous to make lots of money? Maybe, but more do it to feel popular and desired. Once you've got the celebrity status, the bodyguards, and the big mansion with a 600 foot guarded perimeter, how can your adoring fans tell you how much they care? By buying stuff from your wish list.

It's a little bit ironic that the only thing in Liz Phair's wishlist being a copy of Positive Thinking Every Day : An Inspiration for Each Day of the Year.

I'm working on trying to finish Metacookie before Fray Day 5, as well as working on a big ol' headache and some other issues, but I wanted to share an interview with Joss Whedon from this week's Onion (The A/V club part (the part that's not all about fake news)).

The interview was trimmed from 9500 words down to 5500, but the link is to the unedited source, for your reading pleasure. It's quite a long read, so wait till you have time to sit down.

Only a few more weeks 'till things start up again in TV land. I'm thinking about upping my TiVo from 30 hours to 108 by way of a cheap $125 60 gig drive and the glorious TiVo FAQ.

Oh, and I've also let one more show into my television pantheon. I gave Gilmore Girls a try and I'm completely taken with it. I feel like these people have been in my life for ages, though I'm not sure why. But I have a life! Really! Now, to bed, for tomorrow we code.