earlier this morning as a category 4 hurricane south of New Orleans:
NEW ORLEANS – The core of Hurricane Katrina passed about 30 miles east of New Orleans late this morning, but that was small consolation. Several buildings collapsed, the Superdome refuge of last resort lost part of its roof and flood waters rose.
From The Independent:
Coffee might soon be considered a health drink following a study showing it is a surprisingly rich source of anti-cancer agents.A study has found that coffee contributes more antioxidants – which have been linked with fighting heart disease and cancer – to the diet than cranberries, apples or tomatoes.
here, here, here and here. Katrina is due to make landfall, if it doesn’t veer off its course or change speed, in about 6 hours:
At 2 a.m. ET, Katrina was centered about 75 miles south-southwest of the mouth of the Mississippi River and 135 miles south-southwest of New Orleans. The storm was moving to the north-northwest at about 10 mph.
I talked about rural outsourcing? Well, it’s still alive and well, and in the news again. Lots of good stuff on it, and mountain lions, at InstaPundit today.
From Slashdot:
As reported on On the Media and Business 2.0, Google appears to be purchasing dark (unused) fiber optic cable across the United States with the intention of building its own alternative parallel internet that would presumably be called GoogleNet. Possessing such a thing could allow Google to offer internet access in the form of free wifi or other means and create a powerful captive marketing audience which Google could monopolize. Outside of these marketing opportunities, such a development in infrastructure could help reduce Google’s long-term content delivery costs were it to take on more bandwidth-intensive activities in the future.
From the latest issue of Time Magazine:
It was another routine night for Shawn Carpenter. After a long day analyzing computer-network security for Sandia National Laboratories, where much of the U.S. nuclear arsenal is designed, Carpenter, 36, retreated to his ranch house in the hills overlooking Albuquerque, N.M., for a quick dinner and an early bedtime. He set his alarm for 2 a.m. Waking in the dark, he took a thermos of coffee and a pack of Nicorette gum to the cluster of computer terminals in his home office. As he had almost every night for the previous four months, he worked at his secret volunteer job until dawn, not as Shawn Carpenter, mid-level analyst, but as Spiderman—the apt nickname his military-intelligence handlers gave him—tirelessly pursuing a group of suspected Chinese cyberspies all over the world. Inside the machines, on a mission he believed the U.S. government supported, he clung unseen to the walls of their chat rooms and servers, secretly recording every move the snoopers made, passing the information to the Army and later to the FBI.The hackers he was stalking, part of a cyberespionage ring that federal investigators code-named Titan Rain, first caught Carpenter’s eye a year earlier when he helped investigate a network break-in at Lockheed Martin in September 2003. A strikingly similar attack hit Sandia several months later, but it wasn’t until Carpenter compared notes with a counterpart in Army cyberintelligence that he suspected the scope of the threat. Methodical and voracious, these hackers wanted all the files they could find, and they were getting them by penetrating secure computer networks at the country’s most sensitive military bases, defense contractors and aerospace companies.
(Via Slashdot)
Did you know that David Byrne has a blog? I guess that’s not that surprising, seeing as everybody and their brother has a blog these days, but still, it’s always interesting when celebrities take the time to do stuff like this.
Adam Penenberg’s latest Media Hack column talks about a new (available within a few months, apparently) mobile entertainment uber-device offered from Amp’d Mobile (check out their Flash-heavy but cool website).
From Bloomberg:
New Orleans residents were ordered to evacuate the city today as Hurricane Katrina, the strongest storm of the Atlantic season, approached the U.S. Gulf Coast with 160 mile-an-hour winds. [...] Katrina was upgraded to category 5 earlier today, U.S. National Hurricane Center spokesman David Miller said in a telephone interview from Miami. Such storms, with winds greater than 155 miles an hour (249 kph) can tear roofs off homes, blow down all trees and shrubs, and cause flooding. Only three Category Five hurricanes have hit the U.S. since records began.
CNN, on the other hand, is reporting that Katrina has a maximum sustained wind speed of closer to 175 mph:
In worst-case scenarios, most of New Orleans would end up under 15 feet of water, without electricity, clean water and sewage for months. Even pumping the water out could take as long as four months to get started because the massive pumps that would do the job would be underwater.
And read this post from VodkaPundit’s Will Collier on the subject, too.