Weekend World Watch

The Ceasefire In Lebanon
I love how they propose a ceasfire and leading up to the deadline, both sides try to get as much of their killing in before the sunset clause kicks in.

Israel used the countdown to the ceasefire to try to kill Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, by bombing what it believed was his underground hideout in Beirut.

In the fiercest bombardment that the capital has felt since this conflict began, 23 missiles landed in the southern suburbs within two minutes from Israeli jets and warships.

The main target was an apartment block in the Rweiss neighbourhood, where Israeli officials claimed Hezbollah leaders were using a basement as a command-and-control centre.

Rescue workers clawed at the wreckage of eight buildings and a mosque, which were destroyed in the attacks.

Hezbollah released a statement last night claiming that Sheikh Nasrallah and his key lieutenants were safe and had not been in the area.

After news of the postponement of the Cabinet meeting was announced in Beirut, there were five more strikes on the same area of the capital.

Israel also stepped up its air and artillery blitz against south Lebanon, with Israeli troops pressing to take control of as much territory as possible toward the Litani river before the scheduled truce.

Naturally, Hezbollah says they won't disarm. I have no snarky quip for this. The facts alone are demonstrative of the depth to which humanity can sink.

My Song of the Week


I've done a re-mix of my song 'Miracle of Love'.
I did it because I wasn't happy with the version I put up last year which featured audio I recorded on the PC in 2003. The problem was that the vocal premix was distorted and I could no longer go back to the source to re-do the premix. Also, since then I've been learning a fair bit on how to mix songs on my Mac, not to mention the recent addition of nearfield monitors to my setup. This has meant a wholesale review of all the mixes of my tracks, which inevitably led to a reworking of this track.

The gal in the pickie is Kate Beckinsale who in my opinion looks like she has been lobotomised; or perhaps she's just had the mother of all orgasms and can't string a coherent sentence together as a result. I guess that too would be a kind of miracle of love. Or she was on drugs during the photo shoot, but I kind of like the way she looks totally stunned.

So what's new? The vocals. The rhythm guitar in the left channel, but mostly, the mix has been oveerhauled from scratch. So check it out. Here's the link.

UPDATE:
Woohoo! 25 listeners. Kind of sad, really. I'm really disappointed in iComposition's users sometimes. I guess it's all musicians who want other people to listen to their stuff, but don't want to listen to other people's stuff. Still, the general lack of interest is just awful.

The Pleiades Mailbag
Here's this week's contents of the Pleiades Mailbag:
The ice in Greenland is melting away very fast.

The vast ice cap that covers Greenland nearly three miles thick is melting faster than ever before on record, and the pace is speeding year by year, according to global climate watchers gathering data from twin satellites that probe the effects of warming on the huge northern island.

The consequence is already evident in a small but ominous rise in sea levels around the world, a pace that is also accelerating, the scientists say.

According to the scientists' data, Greenland's ice is melting at a rate three times faster than it was only five years ago. The estimate of the melting trend that has been observed for nearly a decade comes from a University of Texas team monitoring a satellite mission that measures changes in the Earth's gravity over the entire Greenland ice cap as the ice melts and the water flows down into the Arctic ocean.

"We have only been watching the ice cap melt during a relatively short period," physicist Jianli Chen said Thursday, "but we are seeing the strongest evidence of it yet, and in the near future the pace of melting will accelerate even more."

The same satellites tracking Greenland's ice cap also are monitoring the melt rate of Antarctica's ice cover, and there too the melting is adding to the global rise in sea level, according to another team of scientists.

Next to Antarctica, Greenland is the largest reservoir of fresh water on Earth and holds about 10 percent of the world's supply. The increasing flow of fresh water -- most of it from glaciers melting on Greenland's eastern coast -- is already beginning to change the composition of the ocean's salt water currents flowing past Northwestern Europe, the scientists say.

The result could be a critical change in the composition of the main ocean current that flows past Europe's northern edge, blocking off warmer waters that normally flow there and -- ironically -- making Northern Europe's weather colder than normal, at least temporarily, while the rest of the globe continues warming.

That's not very good at all.

Also, do check out this link if you think the war in Lebanon sucks: Electronic Intifada.

On a lighter note, why 'Miami Vice' was shot on High definition Video and not film. This cuaght my attention:

Why bother? One reason is that high-definition allows the image to be manipulated on the set.

"It's like your television set," Mann says. "You can alter contrast, alter brightness." This "makes it into a much more painterly medium than simply recording on film. We alter things all the time."

Beebe agrees: "It's a whole new ball game for filmmakers to have that ability [to adjust] right in front of you."

The high-definition cameras also offer an incredible depth of field, especially at night. One can almost sense the humidity and the highly charged atmosphere of night-time Miami because the cameras capture the billowy clouds, lightning and the city lights.

"You wouldn't be seeing any of those lights beyond [the actors] with a normal focal length lens," Mann says. "It would all be out-of-focus dots."

Now that's interesting.

Here's another article on the Archimedes decoding that we reported last week.

Fantasy Team Report
My baseball Combat Wombats were dethroned from the umber 1 spot his week. This was probably reflective of the 2-4 week the Yankees had.

My AFL teaam was knocked out clean by the 'Happy Hermits' who scored a mighty 1940 points to my 1730.What can you do?
So that is that for the season.