NEWPORT, R.I. -- In anticipation of heavy rain from Hurricane Earl, both ends of Hazard Road in Newport will closed to traffic from 4 p.m. Friday until 8 a.m. Saturday, in anticipation of flooding across the road, city officials just announced.

Journal photo / Frieda Squires
Jan Carlson of Attleboro, left, and her sister-in-law, Marge Carlson, of Norton, Mass., must leave Second Beach Campground in Middletown by 5 p.m. They'll head home, they said. Everyone must leave, but they can leave their vehicles and return after the storm passes. There are 46 camping sites at the campground.

A strong earthquake hit near New Zealand’s second-largest city, Christchurch, early Saturday. Authorities reported extensive damage across the city but said so far only minor injuries were being reported.

Today the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the conviction of Daniel Millis, convicted of littering because he left sealed bottles of drinking water in a desert wildlife refuge. He explained that he left them "along frequently traveled routes for unlawful entrants to the United States." He belongs to a group called "No More Deaths," and the opinion quotes his testimony: "humanitarian aide [sic] is never a crime."

The majority overturned his conviction because a reasonable person might not understand that leaving drinking water for people dying of thirst is littering. The United States countered that the water bottles constitute "garbage" in the sense of the statute. After foraging through some dictionary definitions of "garbage" and "discarded," the majority concludes that the regulation is too ambiguous to enforce in this case.

Guess who dissented? Judge Jay Bybee -- the author of the torture memo:

Littering is littering, and Bybee finds that the regulation is as clear as a sunny day in the desert. This is the same Jay Bybee who thinks that terms like "torture" and "severe suffering" are so vague that it would be unfair to apply statutes prohibiting them to interrogators who waterboard people and keep them awake for a week at a time, naked and hanging in chains.

Newt now believes Congress can designate Ground Zero as "a national battlefield memorial because I think we should think of the World Trade Center as a battlefield site." Putting aside whether this is a good idea or not, even if Congress did as Gingrich suggests, it wouldn't make any difference -- because no one is talking about building the community center at Ground Zero.

Maybe Newt means to designate all of Manhattan as a "battlefield site"? That way, his dream of big federal government oversight of local zoning laws would be fulfilled.

Atrios:

It's incredible to me that genius political strategists think that what voters really want are tepid and timid half measures.

Dems are paralyzed with fear. Have been, in fact, for much of the last year and a half.

They were so worried about what ads Republicans would run against them, and in bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship, that now, their worst fears will be realized.

But really, being even more timid ain't gonna cut it.

Those who are paying close attention realize that [Republicans] either care more about destroying the socialist/Muslim menace or they care more about taking back the power they so recently lost. But either way, they do appear to give a damn. The Democrats, on the other hand, rather than coming out with their guns blazing at those who have made it impossible for them to fix these problems seem content with trying to convince people that it isn't as bad as they think it is.

You know --- like when your friend tries to convince you that you shouldn't be upset about something you are upset about. It's annoying. And you realize very quickly that they just don't want to hear about it anymore. That's how the Democrats seem right now --- that they are sick of hearing about it.

Ha ha!

Information designer Jess Bachman has a new piece out which isn't so much an info-graphic as a graphic article. Jess explains: It deals with the nightmare that has become student loans. Default rates on student loans are worse than sub-prime mortgages, and the total debt is bigger than all our credit card debts combined. It's a huge issue than many people are keeping quiet about. College students are a hugely under-represented and unadvocated group in Washington, and what we and the government are doing to them is just wrong. Link to the full-sized graphic on CollegeScholarships.org.

Poster: 389 Years Ago (updated). Infographic: The History of Search Glenn Beck's gold-investment scam/scheme: an explanatory ... One terabuck, visualized Death and Taxes, the 2010 edition Infographic: The history of Google's acquisitions

Here's a timeline:

On August 10 this year I received an e-mail from an employee of People Magazine requesting permission to use my cake resignation photo in an article. This is shortly after the Jet Blue Steward event, prompting many 'Weird ways people have quit their jobs' news stories.

I replied to People and said they needed a license to use my photo - meaning they have to pay me to use it. I did not receive a reply.

On August 11 my image was used without authorization and without payment on People.com, in an article titled "Take This Job and Shove It! 8 Memorable Quitters".

I sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding my image be removed from their website. Six days later I receive an e-mail stating my image had been removed from their website. I received an offer at that time of $75 for the use of my image. That may have been reasonable if my photo's copyright had not been willfully infringed and used for six days.

So, today I sent the photo director an invoice for a usage license of my cake resignation photo. This cake was delivered today, September 3rd.
Invoice Cake to People.com (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

Repurposed Antique Tabriz Wool Rug (via Make) Monster skin rug Relief map rug World's biggest handmade rug

East meets west (via Craft) Sofa turns into a punching bag Sofa/bookcase Coffin sofa Sofa modelled on brainwaves Accordioning sofa - mindblowing video Sofa that lets you float in the clouds Doc sofa bed converts into a bunk bed within seconds ...

The extraction of heavy crude oil from oil sands in Canada is releasing as many as 13 kinds of pollutants into the surrounding air and water, according to a study published in PNAS this week. The independent report directly contradicts the results of the government-administered Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program (RAMP) that claimed neither humans nor the environment were at risk from the oil extraction.

Oil sands are swaths of ground that are laced with heavy crude oil that can be extracted and refined into fuel. Development of oil sands in Canada has been taking place since 1967, but scientists have long been uncertain of the production's impact on the environment.

The RAMP study conducted by the government showed no significant ill effects, but another group of scientists decided to double-check their work. They took samples around an oil sands development facility in Alberta near the Athabasca River from the air and surrounding watersheds, and found some highly contradictory evidence.

Summertime water samples downstream from the development area had concentrations of elements like mercury, arsenic, chromium, and beryllium eight times as high as the background levels. Air samples showed concentrations twice that of the late 1970s, and during the winter, the water concentrations were also twice as high as normal.

The authors speculate that the concentration difference results from the snow capturing many airborne particulates and holding them until summer, when it all melts into the ground and water. The researchers also suspect that many of the airborne contaminants are scattered, lowering their local concentrations but spreading their effects over a wide area.

While this single study doesn't automatically invalidate the RAMP study, this data seriously undermine the government's results and methods, and suggests that the long-term effects of oil sands development bear further scrutiny.

PNAS, 2010. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1008754107  (About DOIs).

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Steve Jobs forbids you from building iPhone applications with a language other than Objective C, C, or C++. If that other language is Adobe Flash. What about if it's not Adobe Flash? Are you still forbidden?…

Love Doctor Who, love the theme music - this is hardwired into the DNA of most Brits.…

It was promenade time along the seawall flanking Ocean Drive at midday Friday.

A boogie board and flippers were this surfer's choice.

Spectators crowd the corner near the Towers and the Coast Guard House, at rear.

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. -- They were slow, long and without much of a curl.

But the waves off Narragansett Town Beach were already drawing a crowd at midday Friday, as spectators walked and drove to the popular surfing spot.

Surfers themselves were black specks patiently sitting off shore, waiting for Hurricane Earl to throw them some action. But not even a puff of breeze could be felt, and the few good waves that came along were topping off at about 4 to 6 feet.

More surfers were arriving, throwing themselves and their boards over the sea wall along Ocean Road, where dozens of people stood in a light drizzle, clutching umbrellas and cameras.

Television camera crews were gathered near the stone Towers landmark. The shorefront Coast Guard House restaurant had its lights on. A big sign on its second-floor outdoor bar proclaimed "DECK OPEN." But not a soul could be seen on board.

-- Photos, text by Andrea Panciera, projo.com

NEWPORT, R.I. -- The city has closed Easton's Beach, as Hurricane Earl churns up increasingly dangerous surf and waves.

Emergency management officials are also warning people about hazardous conditions on exposed areas along Ocean Drive and the Cliff Walk, where large waves and riptides could sweep people out to sea.

Both ends of Hazard Road are being closed at 4 p.m. Friday due to expected flooding and will reopen at 8 a.m. Saturday.

It's official: The Red Sox-White Sox game scheduled for Friday night has been postponed in advance of Hurricane Earl. The game will be made up as part of a day-night doubleheader on Saturday. Tickets for Friday night's game will be honored for the 1:05 p.m. game on Saturday afternoon.

If Kendrick Meek gets almost every one of Florida's Democrats, he can win the Senate race. But in a year in which polls show a GOP edge in voter enthusiasm, the electorate may not skew Democratic on Nov. 2.

The horrible thing about China's 62-mile nine-day jam was that it destroyed the certainty that travel will inevitably result in arrival

Hold on to your hats – or rather, don't bother, as we shan't exactly be proceeding at a great lick, and could in fact be here for aeons – because the Chinese traffic jam is back! In a metaphysical sense, of course, it never went away … but we shall come to the tailback's status as a metaphor for the soul-sapping futility of all human existence later.

First, a recap. The gridlock came belatedly to international attention last week, when it emerged that vehicles bound for Beijing were sitting in a queue of 62 miles, and that some of them had been there, moving around half a mile a day, since mid-August. Stranded drivers were passing the time playing cards, sleeping in their vehicles or on the asphalt, and being preyed on by merciless local opportunists along the route, who saw a captive, hungry audience to whom they could flog water and wildly overpriced bowls of rice.

I must confess I was going to write about the traffic jam in this spot last Saturday, but then I thought: you know what, why hurry? It'll still be there next week. In the event, it cleared relatively suddenly and mysteriously – only for another, even longer one to form. This latest incarnation of hopelessness made flesh stretched at least 75 miles on the Beijing-Tibet highway at time of writing.

Forgive the fascination, but with the loathsome detachment of someone not cursed with having to sit in the thing, I can't help seeing the Chinese traffic jam as less an infrastructure planning failure and more a global psychological event, whose presumably apocalyptic meaning should soon become clear. The tailback is quite simply the breakout star of summer, more deliciously captivating even than that woman who took three of her kids on a 300-mile coach trip to Raoul Moat's funeral, and pronounced it "better than Legoland".

The Doctor Who fans among you may be put in mind of an episode called Gridlock, set on Planet New Earth, which sees the Doctor and Martha pitch up in New New York, where most of the population has lived for decades in a traffic jam trying to escape the city. The word among the benighted folk is that should you manage to get in the fast lane, you can travel 10 miles in as short a time as six years. It eventually emerges that the motorway's inhabitants – you can't really call them travellers, in the circumstances – are being held in this eternal glacial transit to keep them ignorant of the fact that a virus long ago wiped out the surface populace (the motorway was sealed off). The gridlocked masses are brought together by a holographic newsreader's regular traffic updates.

Among the hapless denizens of the Chinese jam, there is reported to be less camaraderie. This is hardly surprising – though traffic is a manifestly collective activity, we persist in pretending to ourselves that it is something being done to us. We are among it, but not of it. "Have you ever noticed," the American standup George Carlin once inquired, "how everybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and everyone going faster than you is a maniac?" We say we are "in" traffic, dramatising ourselves as a lone vehicle of noble and rational intent, with a sea of malevolent, deadweight antagonists stretching endlessly fore and aft. It was in a bid to highlight the flaws in this position that a German transport campaign erected roadside boards reading: "You are not stuck in traffic – you are traffic."

In his fascinating book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What it Says About Us), author Tom Vanderbilt meets Hans Monderman, the late, radical Dutch urban planner intent on restoring some of the mores of the "social world" to the "traffic world", which has long since dispensed with them. Monderman's redesign of a clogged intersection consisted of removing all the traffic signs, signals and paving markings, forcing the drivers to slow down, make eye contact and co-operate with each other as well as with pedestrians and cyclists – and, as you'll have guessed, the traffic immediately flowed more smoothly.

Vanderbilt's book produces some wonderful statistics, like the study of one 15-block area in Los Angeles, which found that on an average day cars were totting up 3,600 miles in search of a parking space. Why does the other lane always seem to move faster? Why do extra lanes only add congestion? In the nicest possible way, he explains how these things are mostly down to flaws in human nature.

But then we're cussed old things. Strictly speaking, the word traffic should mean movement, but we have commandeered it to imply sitting still. And if semantic progress has to take the place of physical progress round the North Circular, then do allow us to throw ourselves a bone.

What we've always comforted ourselves with, however, is the idea that we'll get out of this jam eventually. The grimly hilarious thing about the Chinese gridlock is that it has appeared at times to be undermining this last psychological defence against the fear that we are all eternally trapped on a journey going nowhere. "Who knows when it will end?" one driver was quoted as asking. Another, more to the point, wondered: "Who knows if it will ever end?"

I trust you've been following to some extent the Jonathan Franzen-New York Times-chick lit debate. If not, it is summed up well here, in this Slate piece in which the authors counted up every piece of adult fiction reviewed in the NYT over the last two years and found that men get reviewed about twice as often as women.

Of course the book-reviewing trade discriminates against women. Why should it be any different from anything else? I say that derisively, you understand, not with approval.

I've never read Jodi Picoult or Jennifer Wiener, the two "chick-lit" authors who kicked this off (and by the way, as literary feuds of the past go, this one ranks way way down the list). I have nothing bad to say about Franzen. I haven't read the new book but think I will. I did buy Gary Sheyngart's new one, also being beatified right now, and it's not really up my alley, although I see that he is immensely talented, and I wish him every success.

I'm a believer in lessening the distinction between serious and unserious writing, or music or anything. Shakespeare wrote things for money. Mozart wrote music he thought his paymasters would enjoy. Dickens? Please. He wrote magazine serials, placing his craft in the distinctly anti-aesthetic service of pumping up circulation. And I see nothing wrong with caring about how well one's product might sell. Another way of saying that: how many lives and hearts it might touch.

The image of the lonely creative genius in his (no; her!) garret, caring not about recompense and wanting only to share with the world what is in his (no, dammit; her!) heart is the image to which we all pay the greatest obeisance. And maybe on balance that does make for the greatest art. But if a writer or painter or musician happens to have a commercial touch in addition to being able to make art, that's certainly nothing to hold against anybody. The more I read about the matter, the more I conclude that most yes most of history's creative geniuses were indeed trying to be commercial, in many cases trying very hard. And bravo for them. Or brava.

Where is the art-commerce line? Discuss.

Two crew members from UPS cargo plane believed dead after crash near Dubai airport

Two crew members aboard an American UPS cargo plane are believed to have been killed after the aircraft crashed in Dubai today.

According to a United Arab Emirates official who appeared on local television station al-Arabiya, the plane was attempting to land at Dubai International Airport when it crashed due to technical problems. Witnesses reported seeing the aircraft setting fire to vehicles as it crashed and going up in a fireball. Some witnesses told Al-Jazeera that they had seen a fire on the aircraft before it crashed.

UPS spokeswoman Kristen Petrella said the Boeing 747-400 went down at about 8pm and was en route to the UPS hub in Cologne, Germany. Although the company has not officially confirmed casualties, it said two crew members were on board. "This incident is very unfortunate and we will do everything we can to find the cause. Our thoughts go out to the crew members involved in the incident and their families," UPS said in a statement.

Although local reports said the plane had come down near a busy highway intersection south-east of the airport, posters on the Professional Pilots Rumour Network (PPRN) suggest the aircraft went down near an area known as Silicon Oasis. The state news agency, Wam, reported the crash in an unpopulated desert area.

One poster on the PPRN said: "Just five minutes ago. I heard and saw an aircraft, possibly an airliner going down in Dubai near Silicon Oasis. It has just over-flown my house and [there was] a big fireball."UPS, a courier company based in US city of Atlanta, confirmed in a statement that one of its cargo planes had been involved in an accident in Dubai and said it was working to obtain more details.MrMachfivepointfive wrote on PPRN: "UPS. Declared Mayday. Was on approach 30L and then veered off course. Last radar hit showed descending through 500' doing 250kts."

In October 2009, a Sudanese Boeing 707 cargo plane crashed in the desert outside Dubai, killing six crew members. Emirati regulators have since banned Azza Transport, the plane's Sudanese owner, from operating in the country.

The horrible thing about China's 62-mile nine-day jam was that it destroyed the certainty that travel will inevitably result in arrival

Hold on to your hats – or rather, don't bother, as we shan't exactly be proceeding at a great lick, and could in fact be here for aeons – because the Chinese traffic jam is back! In a metaphysical sense, of course, it never went away … but we shall come to the tailback's status as a metaphor for the soul-sapping futility of all human existence later.

First, a recap. The gridlock came belatedly to international attention last week, when it emerged that vehicles bound for Beijing were sitting in a queue of 62 miles, and that some of them had been there, moving around half a mile a day, since mid-August. Stranded drivers were passing the time playing cards, sleeping in their vehicles or on the asphalt, and being preyed on by merciless local opportunists along the route, who saw a captive, hungry audience to whom they could flog water and wildly overpriced bowls of rice.

I must confess I was going to write about the traffic jam in this spot last Saturday, but then I thought: you know what, why hurry? It'll still be there next week. In the event, it cleared relatively suddenly and mysteriously – only for another, even longer one to form. This latest incarnation of hopelessness made flesh stretched at least 75 miles on the Beijing-Tibet highway at time of writing.

Forgive the fascination, but with the loathsome detachment of someone not cursed with having to sit in the thing, I can't help seeing the Chinese traffic jam as less an infrastructure planning failure and more a global psychological event, whose presumably apocalyptic meaning should soon become clear. The tailback is quite simply the breakout star of summer, more deliciously captivating even than that woman who took three of her kids on a 300-mile coach trip to Raoul Moat's funeral, and pronounced it "better than Legoland".

The Doctor Who fans among you may be put in mind of an episode called Gridlock, set on Planet New Earth, which sees the Doctor and Martha pitch up in New New York, where most of the population has lived for decades in a traffic jam trying to escape the city. The word among the benighted folk is that should you manage to get in the fast lane, you can travel 10 miles in as short a time as six years. It eventually emerges that the motorway's inhabitants – you can't really call them travellers, in the circumstances – are being held in this eternal glacial transit to keep them ignorant of the fact that a virus long ago wiped out the surface populace (the motorway was sealed off). The gridlocked masses are brought together by a holographic newsreader's regular traffic updates.

Among the hapless denizens of the Chinese jam, there is reported to be less camaraderie. This is hardly surprising – though traffic is a manifestly collective activity, we persist in pretending to ourselves that it is something being done to us. We are among it, but not of it. "Have you ever noticed," the American standup George Carlin once inquired, "how everybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and everyone going faster than you is a maniac?" We say we are "in" traffic, dramatising ourselves as a lone vehicle of noble and rational intent, with a sea of malevolent, deadweight antagonists stretching endlessly fore and aft. It was in a bid to highlight the flaws in this position that a German transport campaign erected roadside boards reading: "You are not stuck in traffic – you are traffic."

In his fascinating book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What it Says About Us), author Tom Vanderbilt meets Hans Monderman, the late, radical Dutch urban planner intent on restoring some of the mores of the "social world" to the "traffic world", which has long since dispensed with them. Monderman's redesign of a clogged intersection consisted of removing all the traffic signs, signals and paving markings, forcing the drivers to slow down, make eye contact and co-operate with each other as well as with pedestrians and cyclists – and, as you'll have guessed, the traffic immediately flowed more smoothly.

Vanderbilt's book produces some wonderful statistics, like the study of one 15-block area in Los Angeles, which found that on an average day cars were totting up 3,600 miles in search of a parking space. Why does the other lane always seem to move faster? Why do extra lanes only add congestion? In the nicest possible way, he explains how these things are mostly down to flaws in human nature.

But then we're cussed old things. Strictly speaking, the word traffic should mean movement, but we have commandeered it to imply sitting still. And if semantic progress has to take the place of physical progress round the North Circular, then do allow us to throw ourselves a bone.

What we've always comforted ourselves with, however, is the idea that we'll get out of this jam eventually. The grimly hilarious thing about the Chinese gridlock is that it has appeared at times to be undermining this last psychological defence against the fear that we are all eternally trapped on a journey going nowhere. "Who knows when it will end?" one driver was quoted as asking. Another, more to the point, wondered: "Who knows if it will ever end?"

Axe is for wimps. Hai Karate: "Be careful how you use it." (Thanks, Mark!)

The news of an upcoming announcement at PAX, followed by a tweet that showed the image of a flying pig. These were the hints pointed at a momentous occasion in gaming history: Duke Nukem Forever will see release late this year, or maybe next year, on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. Gearbox Software will be taking over development from the now-defunct 3D Realms.

After the studio's closing, litigation began between 3D Realms and Take-Two Interactive, the publisher of Duke Nukem Forever. According to the Wall Street Journal, the suits have now been settled and neither side was willing to discuss terms. The game has not sat still, however:

The game is actually playable at PAX, for both the press and the general public. If you're there and you get to play, send in your report. We'd love to hear what it's like to finally put your hands on it.

If the release slips into 2011, we won't exactly be shocked.

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A Nigerian man has been sentenced to more than 12 years in US prison for orchestrating an advance payment scam that bilked victims out of more than $1.3m.…

BOSTON -- All ports in southeastern New England were closed Friday, ahead of Hurricane Earl's approach by nightfall.

The ports of Narragansett Bay, Mount Hope Bay, Buzzards Bay, Cape Cod Bay, Vineyard Sound and Nantucket Sound were closed at 2 a.m., in anticipation of sustained gale force winds, according to a statement from the Coast Guard.

The ports will stay closed until after the hurricane passes, sometime early Saturday morning, and the waterways are determined to be suitable for navigation.

No commercial vessels are allowed to enter, leave or move within any ports in the region without permission of the captain of the ports.

PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- A Pawtucket Fire Department official alerted residents of a three-story house that it was on fire, and evacuated them - before fire trucks arrived.

At 12:30 p.m., Capt. Steve Parent, the city's fire marshal, was conducting an inspection in St. Anthony's Parish, just down the street from the house at 60 Lawn Avenue.

"He heard smoke detectors going off," said Battalion Chief Steve Tanguay. "He's the one who identified the fire. He rescued two adults and two toddlers before anyone else got on the scene. He was in the right place at the right time."

Journal photo Kathy Borchers


Parent took the fire escape to the third floor to alert the residents.

"The stairway to the third floor was impassable because of the smoke coming up from the basement," Tanguay said.

There were no occupants on the first or second floor at the time of the fire, Tanguay said. The fire department did not have the names or ages of the third-floor occupants, who were unaware of the fire until Parent's appearance on their fire escape.

"They became aware as he arrived," Tanguay said.

The fire caused about $80,000 of damage to the basement and the first floor, according to Tanguay. The house was deemed not habitable and its electricity was turned off.
The cause of the fire is under investigation.

A man and a woman convicted of torching an apartment building in a lovers’ spat — badly burning two young girls — apologized in court today, but still received long prison sentences.

I drove south last weekend to a predominantly Indian suburb of Los Angeles to catch Peepli Live at a movie theater that plays only films from India.

Its was terrific, a poignant and LOL-filled commentary on the state of Indian news media, and the injustice and tragedy that rural communities face. Unsurprisingly, the soundtrack was full of great tunes. My favorite was the song embeded above, "Chola Maati Ke Ram," performed live here by Nageen Tanvir at a launch event for the film.

The lyrics of this song speak to human mortality. Loosely and imperfectly: Time spares no one... death spares no one... our bodies are clay robes that will eventually disintegrate, so it is best to dedicate our lives to honoring Lord Ram, and all that is eternal.

Incidentally: Kamla Bhatt will be interviewing "Indian Ocean," who performed several songs in the Peepli Live Soundtrack, at 12.30 pm PST on Stanford radio station KZSU. Listen online here.