It’s odd to recall that back in 1982, when the film If You Love This Planet came out and I was 16 years old, we were all living under the very real and present fear of nuclear war. While I am too young to have lived the “duck and cover” drills, my childhood was very much lived under the specter of the Cold War.

The movie, by Dr. Helen Caldicott, was controversial when it came out: it was “officially banned in the U.S. Justice Department for being foreign propaganda” (reference, reference). They showed it at our high school.

The part of the movie that stays with me to this day is Caldicott’s commentary on Nagasaki. Here’s a more contemporary quote on the same theme:

Some people who escaped Hiroshima migrated then to the only Christian center in Japan, Nagasaki, thinking that it would never be bombed by the Americans. They arrived three days later, just in time to receive the second bomb. Many Japanese will say, if you visit there, “We can sort of understand the first bomb, but why the second?” One of the physicists who celebrated at the party the night after Trinity, recounted in “The Day After Trinity” how he felt after the bomb in Hiroshima was used. He said, “I was so nauseated that night I had to go to bed, and I was profoundly depressed. We are scientists. We never thought of human beings as matter.”

The threat of nuclear destruction is still here today (nuclear powers would have you think it’s from terrorists; my money is on the nuclear countries themselves, through accident or intent), it’s just faded into the background.

Oliver is almost four years old now. He doesn’t know about Hiroshima or Nagasaki or the Holocaust or the Bataan Death March or any of the innumerable other inhumanities we have committed on each other. I am stymied when I think of how to begin to tell him. “Sorry, Oliver, humankind isn’t as great as I led you to believe originally…”

Today is the 59th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan. The Exploratorium has an online exhibition of photographs.

(Corrected anniversary date from 50th to 59th, thanks to a note from Edward Hasbrouck)

Will Pate came up to me on Friday with a good idea: aggregate the weblogs of independent world travelers in the same way we’re already aggregating the weblogs here in our workspace.

The result is BlogAroundTheWorld.com.

I’m gathering feeds, and trying to weed out people who have ended their travels, so it can be marked “experimental” for now.

I have an iMac at work, an iBook for the road, and an iMac at home. I run Firefox on all of the machines. And I want to have my bookmarks in sync across the three machines. Bookmarks Synchronizer (FTP) is the solution. I’ve installed it. And it works.

The ‘FTP’ in the title is something of a misnomer: you can sync using an FTP server, but you can also use WebDAV over HTTP or HTTPS, which is what I’m doing.

From Ben comes a link to Type, handwriting, and lettering. I’ve only begun to plumb its riches.

Workers at Aliant, our local [sic] telephone company, have been on strike since April 23. That’s 107 days. Everything I’ve read about the effects of the strike suggests that that managers/scabs who are attempting to keep the company operating are completely consumed with the everyday. In other words, Aliant is either standing still or moving backwards in terms of keeping up with the pace of telecommunications technology.

For example, back in December we had a meeting with Aliant Mobility here in the office. One of the things that came up was the possible availibility of the Treo 600, and we were assured that we would see this available “first quarter 2004.” First quarter has come and gone, and presumably any work on qualifying the Treo 600 for Aliant’s network ground to a halt on April 23.

Look at this sort of thing spread over all of the technologies Aliant deals with, add in the relative technology eternity of 107 days of not paying any attention, and I start to wonder whether the company is digging itself into a hole from which it might never emerge.

If this strike goes on much longer, Aliant is going to be fixing Model T’s while the rest of us are busy driving jet cars. Provided by someone else.

This is a problem for Aliant. But it’s also a problem for us. Like it or not, Aliant has its tentacles deeply embedded in almost every facet of life here in Atlantic Canada. When Aliant falls behind, we all fall behind.

I related here how many words I had written here over five years. You in the readership have written even more: 546,536 words. Including over 10,000 words on that whole Toby McGuire thing alone.

From my expert on the local graveyard scene, G., comes news that there are in the neighbourhood of 10,000 people buried in the “Elm Avenue Cemetary” on University Avenue in Charlottetown just down from the Metro Credit Union. This news came as a big shock to us: I would have guessed there were, say, 150 people buried there. But we did the math: 10,000 people taking up 12 square feet is 120,000 square feet. The lot is 350 feet square, or 122,500 square feet. Crowded, but possible.

By the way, courtesy of the Travel Channel, I just learned the meaning of “Potter’s Field” — a graveyard for “unknown or indigent persons.” I always thought it was a field where people working with clay hung out and made pots and mugs together.

The Duluth News Tribune is reporting State Rep Rukavina pleads guilty to drunken driving. Minnesota is a prominent Rukavina stomping ground.

It was Rep. Tom Rukavina’s father Martin’s funeral that Senator Paul Wellstone was on the way to when his plane crashed in 2002, killing Wellstone, his wife and one of his daughters. The result of his death was the senate run of Vice President Walter Mondale in 2002.

The second interview I did with Deutsche Welle at the Democratic National Convention has been used as part of a story on bloggers at the Convention for Spectrum their weekly science show. You can listen to the show in RealAudio, or listen to a local MP3 of just that piece.

My favourite part of the bit I taped was my description of bloggers as offering “opinionated narrative.” I think the introductory description of what blogs are by the Spectrum host is pretty good too: it’s a hard concept to sum up, and he did it pretty well. You can read the Dinner for America blog that’s mentioned here.