if you read nothing else today, read this.

lady_babalon, I might be joining you in that boycott of air travel. Thanks to ravenia for the link.

Data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau came from respondents to the 1990 census and included "information on both households and individuals," the NASA study said. The NASA experiment used 5 million census records from each of two data sets it created, "one that stores household records and another that stores person records."

... However, Mr. Steinhardt, who sits on the Census Advisory Committee, said releasing information on households and individuals is "a major breach of trust." "The advisory board specifically asked this question, whether they were providing data to any other government agency, and the answer was 'no,' " Mr. Steinhardt said. "We will have to look carefully at what they provided NASA and why."

.... The Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening (CAPPS II) system under development by the Homeland Security Department will use passenger records that include name, address, phone number and date of birth. The information will be used to confirm the passenger's identity and will be compared with criminal and terrorist watch lists. A color-coded threat assessment will be assigned to each passenger: green for standard security, yellow for additional screening and red to prevent the passenger from boarding a plane. Security officials estimate the error rate at 4 percent to 8 percent, which Mr. Steinhardt said "means 4 [million] to 8 million Americans will mistakenly be labeled as terrorists."

from Study used census information for terror profile

(no subject)

Seeing the Valentine's Day stuff in the supermarket has reminded me that I don't know how to act anymore when I'm around Dee. I don't want to be stand-offish, it doesn't feel right, but at the same time, if I act too familiar, I'm afraid of sending her the wrong message. So I've been erring on the side of being kind of stilted and awkward around her.

The problem with the hooptie has resurfaced, which means I can go ahead and put another air filter in there and maybe get a few more days of driving out of it, but whatever is causing the air filter to clog up so badly is just going to continue to get worse.

Actually I'm thinking I might put some money into a bike instead. The only thing preventing me from doing so is the cold we've been having. A bike ride from the apartment to the place in town where I'd catch the Airline bus wouldn't be too bad; New Orleans is all level ground so there are no huge hills to worry about; that bus has a bike rack on it, and I still have the bike-rack-card I got from JeT when living in Jefferson Parish. Plus this would force me to be more active, which wouldn't be altogether so horrible. This solution might be troublesome come summer, (even the mornings would be almost too warm for a bike ride in July and August, without a shower at work) but I'd live.