From the Washington Post: the US Olympic Committee has eliminated DC-Baltimore from consideration. Why?
"Washington did not fall down," Moore said. ". . . It was very close -- very, very close. We did not make a decision just on raw scoring. We were looking for the city that could win the international competition. . . .
"We felt Washington made an outstanding candidate. . . . On the other hand, it does take that anti-American [sentiment]. [Congress] brought Mr. Samaranch in and grilled him quite a bit. You could say some of that lingers. . . . Washington did all the right things . . . but you have to look at both sides of that coin with how we perceive the IOC."
Because it's the US capital, and some of our international friends on the IOC might reject it just for that reason.
A source from within the Washington-Baltimore bid team said Knise and Morton were frustrated that the USOC site evaluation team had never discussed with them the USOC's political concerns regarding Washington as the nation's capital. "At some point, I would like to know what the deficiencies were, and what we could have done better," Knise said. Washington's bid effort began six years ago, survived a rocky leadership change and cost nearly $10 million. Knise and Morton said they would spend the coming days trying to figure out how to close down the bid group's operations while leaving a legacy to the community -- aside from the legacy of community cooperation they believe the bid effort brought, uniting Baltimore and Washington in a way many once thought impossible.
San Francisco and New York survive in the bid process. Why?
San Francisco, which like Washington put forward a revised bid this spring, apparently profited not only by its bid revision but also by the perception that it's a city on the fringe of America, far away from the seat of power that proved a problem for the Washington-Baltimore bid. New York, meantime, benefited from its undisputed international status and the fact that members compared the cities with an eye to the future, which mitigated the high-cost construction projects that had troubled several site selection team members.
Oh, I see. New York has international status. That's why terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center, right? And I suppose I should be pleased that San Francisco's famous "fringiness" is now working in its favor (although I wonder how some of the more conservative nations will feel about that). Yup, makes perfect sense.
Sorry, this isn't a coherent response. I'm just pissed.
11:23:29 PM
Spotted Cat Not in the House
Grrrr. Stupid Airborne Express. "Delivery Attempted," my ass. I've been sitting here all day. Now they're saying first thing tomorrow morning.
I want my Jaguar!!!
[Update 8/28/02: I called Airborne. Our bad, they said, we will make priority delivery tomorrow, we promise. Guess what? It's 12:30 pm, one Airborne delivery person has come and gone. No Jaguar. Grrrrr. Another call to Airborne. We'll straighten this out, we promise. We'll see...]
For the last week or two I've been getting a lot of Google hits from people searching on some variation of "What is w00t?"
Have teachers been assigning research on this topic? Is it hot over at Slashdot, or what?
Not that I'm complaining about the traffic... still, there must be a bunch of aggravated folks out there who see the site title and think they've hit the jackpot with something really geeky ~ but NOOOooo. It's just me and my Wayback Journal and a bunch of random observations.
5:50:02 PM
I wanna be...
...your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Or woman. Whatever. From The Globe and Mail:
Gecko feet are covered with millions of tiny setae, hairs only twice as long as a strand of human hair is wide. Each seta has 1,000 tiny pads on its tip, a tip that is so small it is below the wavelength of visible light, only 200 billionths of a metre wide.
Studying the Tokay gecko, a native of Southeast Asia and one of about 800 species of the lizard, the team believed that it was the size and shape of the foot hairs that determined a gecko's ability to adhere to a surface, not what the hairs were made of. They then used that knowledge to create synthetic foot-hairs from two different substances.
"Both ... stuck as predicted," says lead researcher Kellar Autumn, assistant biology professor at Oregon's Lewis & Clark College. "Our results provide the first direct experimental verification that ... van der Waals force is definitely what makes geckos stick."
Oh, and I'm not the only one:
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the central research and development organization for the Pentagon, has supported the research, though it has not revealed any plans it might have for it.
DARPA: yesterday the world wide web, tomorrow the spiderweb!
It's pretty simple, really. Anyone who can get me to laugh on a regular basis automatically goes into the blogroll. (And that's not a transitive property, by the way. You don't HAVE to make me laugh, nor does your presence on the roll imply that you DO make me laugh.)
Write to me!
