Write Lightning is a blog from writer Deb Thompson.
Everyone is welcome here.
(Some links or topics may not be completely kid-appropriate.)
Everyone is welcome here.
(Some links or topics may not be completely kid-appropriate.)
Mon, Aug 21 2006
New food (to me)
Spam is a nuisance, but now and then I do learn something from it. I found out this morning that there is a fruit called mangosteen. I doubt that most of us will be growing any of it in our California backgrounds. Ihe tree doesn't like temperatures below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. But the mangosteen has apparently become one of the darlings of the health food industry, along with noni, which has been touted as a curative for everything from ingrown-toenails to cancer.
posted at: 07:45 | category: /Food | link to this entry
Spam is a nuisance, but now and then I do learn something from it. I found out this morning that there is a fruit called mangosteen. I doubt that most of us will be growing any of it in our California backgrounds. Ihe tree doesn't like temperatures below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. But the mangosteen has apparently become one of the darlings of the health food industry, along with noni, which has been touted as a curative for everything from ingrown-toenails to cancer.
posted at: 07:45 | category: /Food | link to this entry
Retro-secrecy
There's a bit of fussing this morning about documents that contained information on strategic weapons from the Cold War era. The Washington Post reports that some folks have decided to treat formerly public information as classified information.
The trouble with government secrecy is that someone still has to know the secret information and someone still has to document that information, particularly in the event that the information becomes not-so-secret down the road apiece. As global relations become more complicated, more and more documentation is required in order to keep things tidy. As more and more personnel are paid by our tax money to do government work—including the secret work of the intelligence community and the military—more and more people end up having to handle more and more secret paperwork over a period of years. After awhile we end up needing a record of whose hands happen to be on any given document at any given time—a documentation of all the documentation, if you will. It might also be prudent to record which person happens to black out information on any given document and exactly what information they blacked out at any given moment.
Of course, there's always the question of what happens if someone goes and blacks out information that is still available on paper copies that were made of the original before someone blacked it out? There's really no end to this sort of documentation. And none of this really keeps anything truly secret, as we're finding out with the above-mentioned story. Sometimes the only thing a complicated process does is give the political folks something to focus on while the real secrets walk in and out the front door in plain view.
posted at: 07:16 | category: /Politics | link to this entry
There's a bit of fussing this morning about documents that contained information on strategic weapons from the Cold War era. The Washington Post reports that some folks have decided to treat formerly public information as classified information.
The trouble with government secrecy is that someone still has to know the secret information and someone still has to document that information, particularly in the event that the information becomes not-so-secret down the road apiece. As global relations become more complicated, more and more documentation is required in order to keep things tidy. As more and more personnel are paid by our tax money to do government work—including the secret work of the intelligence community and the military—more and more people end up having to handle more and more secret paperwork over a period of years. After awhile we end up needing a record of whose hands happen to be on any given document at any given time—a documentation of all the documentation, if you will. It might also be prudent to record which person happens to black out information on any given document and exactly what information they blacked out at any given moment.
Of course, there's always the question of what happens if someone goes and blacks out information that is still available on paper copies that were made of the original before someone blacked it out? There's really no end to this sort of documentation. And none of this really keeps anything truly secret, as we're finding out with the above-mentioned story. Sometimes the only thing a complicated process does is give the political folks something to focus on while the real secrets walk in and out the front door in plain view.
posted at: 07:16 | category: /Politics | link to this entry
