Guantánamo for kids

Anna Perera’s book Guantánamo Boy is the fictional account of a teenager from the UK who is abducted from his relatives’ house in Karachi and sent to the detention camp.

It sounds unlikely but, according to Perera, it is well-established that juveniles have been held at Guantánamo, although the numbers are disputed. Reprieve, the charity for prisoners from death row to Guantánamo, has recorded that 22 under-16s have been held at the camp. The youngest juvenile still in custody is Mohammed el Gharani, who was 14 when picked up in a random raid on a mosque by Pakistani bounty-hunters and “sold” to the American authorities for $5,000.

It was stories like these that Guantánamo Boy is based on, although the book itself emerged out of just one line delivered by the human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith at a benefit event for Reprieve in 2006.

“At that gig Clive Stafford Smith simply said ‘children are also held in Guantánamo Bay’ and that one statement inspired this novel,” says Perera.

The book is available at Amazon UK.

Good Grief, The Victory Of Eve's Space Goons

All hell breaks loose when a key leader of the most powerful in-game alliance defects to the arch-rival.

Metafilter: It’s as if Apple dissolved Microsoft.

Recreation at highway speeds

More than 100 years ago, [the] Hudson River made the sport of ice yachting famous. Now, as the river freezes less frequently, a small but dedicated group of enthusiasts sail to keep history alive.

This collection of photographs from the Times’ Nathaniel Brooks also includes some plans for building your own ice yacht, excerpted from an article in the September 1881 issue of Scribners Monthly.

Unlike the folks who reenact Gettsyburg each July, the ice yachting reenactors feel the same emotions—the fear of crashing at highway speeds, for one—as their historical counterparts. It’s easy to replicate the same uniforms and equipment, impossible to simulate the same fear.

What was the last major war involving the United States that still elicits serious reenactment? World War II? Vietnam?

One-hundred and fifty years from now, will middle-aged men gather outside Fallujah in antique humvees? Will War on Terror buffs waterboard one another in suburban basements? (Are they already?) And if they do, will military reenactment have finally found a way to simulate the same fear as felt by historical participants?

What happens when we recreate war at highway speeds?

Pseudoscientific submission slips into science journal, Swedish stealth ships not suspected

Creationism Slips Into a Peer-Reviewed Journal
[via nielsen]
The submission was a review paper of some of the recent literature on mitochondrial interactions but the paragraph that gave it away was just a hodgepodge of lyrics from DC Talk’s Jesus Freak album.

Swedish Visby-Class Corvette Is First Operational Stealth Ship in the World

[via hawktrainer]
The ship looks really, really cool. Except for that protrusion at the top. It’s probably called a radar cone but I can’t help but think of a dunce cap, which might be a good thing. Dunce caps are named for John Duns Scotus, a 13th-century Scottish philosopher, who accepted

the wearing of conical hats to increase learning. He noted that wizards supposedly wore such things; an apex was considered a symbol of knowledge and the hats were thought to “funnel” knowledge to the wearer.

The ships are also said to be equipped with a particularly sharp version of Occam’s razor.

Charles Avery’s altermodern island
[via rodcorp]

8. When The Guardian wrote about Avery they put one of their little Bluffer’s Guide quizzes at the end, which said: “Move over YBA: He is part of a new generation of artists practicing under the banner of Altermodern. Alter what?: A term coined by the French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, meaning art made now in response to a global society and as a reaction against standardisation and commercialism.” (The Altermodern was covered on Click Opera here.)

I carried over the links in the original post; both are worth a visit.

Preoccupations
[via jbushnell]

A blog, just added to my NetNewsWire. See also: delicious.com/Preoccupations.

Bird strikes, pneumatic tubes, failed states & tweeting MPs

Don’t blame Mother Nature for the crash

[via nautical2k]
In the wake of the US Airways crash-landing on the Hudson, author Bruce Barcott offers one explanation for the increasing rate of airplane–bird strikes:

“We traded the meadowlark for more houses and big-box stores. The gaining species are terrifically adapted to the human landscape. Turkey vultures dine on roadkill. Gulls and pigeons eat our garbage. To a Canada goose, every golf course is a grassy smorgasbord.”

Pneumatic post in Paris

[via cityofsound]
“Introduced to combat the shortcomings of the telegraphic network in Paris, the subterranean Poste Pneumatique (Pneumatic Post) moved written telegraph messages from 1866 until 1984.”

The new ecology of war: An interview with Mike Davis

[via bfunk]
“When one talks about ‘failed states’ one often means ‘failed cities’, such as Gaza, Sadr City or the slums of Port-au-Prince.” — Mike Davis

Tweetminster—Members of Parliament who tweet

[via rodcorp]
A forward-thinking and well-designed public service website promoting increased transparency and more direct communication between elected officials and their constituents.

Cars parked illegally in bike lanes in Washington D.C.

[via cityofsound]
Another public service website, with a searchable map and listings of the top offenders by license plate. Other cities are available.