The Phantom City

I subscribe to a feed that supplies one page from The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci each day. At that rate, they’ll have the entire work done in about four years. I was struck by today’s selection:

I reveal to men the origin of the first, or perhaps second cause of their existence.

Fascinating.

Lorrie and I walked into our new neighborhood Urban Outfitters last night, and I immediately felt I was in another world…one where I had no clue about fashion, or actual clothing sizes. That’s not much of a stretch, but the feeling passed. I started to notice there’s still an underlying, mundane mall-ness to it all. Not much different from the food court, if the food court had books about sexual positions.

Anyway, I was thinking about that because it inspired me to go to their website and look at their Men’s Jackets & Coats section. Notice anything interesting about the men in the pictures? They seem a little thin, almost unhealthy looking, as if they had some sort of eating disorder…Ah, wait…I think they’ve contracted Photoshop disease. I’ve seen a few other places where models’ pictures were stretched vertically and narrowed horizontally, and this page looks like a prime example. I guess it’s not enough for hipness to look like Beck; He’d also need to be six feet tall. Of course, looking at the clothing sizes last night, I’m just glad I’m not a woman.

Update: Hey, HP is selling cameras so everyone can slim down the digital way.

A synopsis of The Adventures of Rex the Wonder Dog #21, in which a boy and his dog parachute into a forest fire, kill the last surviving wooly mammoth, and learn valuable lessons about how to properly dispose of matches. Oh yes, and they’re also attacked by a cougar. All in a day’s work for Rex…truly a Wonder Dog.

Something Awful is running a series of motivational posters for super-villains. The quality is up and down, but these are some good ones.

Link courtesy of X-Ray Spex, which has good posters featuring the Red Skull and Magneto.

“It’s devouring the planet, even as we speak!”

The New York Television Festival has some featured animation pilots on the web, including Squid Dragon Legend. It’s a decent sendup of anime, featuring the same sorts of thoughts you probably had the first time you saw it. It’s at its weakest when it strays from that into conventional jokes.

Great line: “Or maybe he’s seen the future in some sort of crystal skull, with skulls all over it?”

The unfortunate bit is that the NYTF site, hosted by MSN, requires Internet Explorer to work correctly.

Link courtesy of TV Squad

Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, dead at 44 from a stingray’s barb.

Should we treat terrorists as pirates?

What is needed now is a framework for an international crime of terrorism. The framework should be incorporated into the U.N. Convention on Terrorism and should call for including the crime in domestic criminal law and perhaps the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. This framework must recognize the unique threat that terrorists pose to nation-states, yet not grant them the legitimacy accorded to belligerent states. It must provide the foundation for a law that criminalizes not only terrorist acts but membership in a terrorist organization. It must define methods of punishment.

Coming up with such a framework would perhaps seem impossible, except that one already exists. Dusty and anachronistic, perhaps, but viable all the same. More than 2,000 years ago, Marcus Tullius Cicero defined pirates in Roman law as hostis humani generis, “enemies of the human race.” From that day until now, pirates have held a unique status in the law as international criminals subject to universal jurisdiction—meaning that they may be captured wherever they are found, by any person who finds them. The ongoing war against pirates is the only known example of state vs. nonstate conflict until the advent of the war on terror, and its history is long and notable. More important, there are enormous potential benefits of applying this legal definition to contemporary terrorism.

Doesn’t seem like a bad idea, but I wonder what would actually change? Piracy was used as a strategic tool by states, which then united against pirates when their activities came to be viewed as threatening common order and commerce in an intolerably uncontrollable fashion. That seems to me to be similar to the journey the world is taking right now in regards to terrorism. One dissimilarity is that pirates committed many of their crimes in a commonly held geographic area. However, the idea of “lawless places” where pirates dwell and can be hunted down legally seems to be a common thread in our current actions.

Link courtesy of Bruce Schneier