Walking around Gay Ottawa

Drolet, who is developing a gay history walking tour of Ottawa (contact him via DanielDrolet.com for updates), says he was the "young kid who hung out with the activists," so he had a chance to witness Ottawa's transformation to a more accepting city.

ABOVE: The post-war era of the 1950s and 1960s was an era of great paranoia. A machine called an “electro-psychometer” (similar to a lie detector) was employed to determine the sexual orientation of civil servants. In this very conservative era homosexuality was a taboo and it was assumed knowledge of that fact could be used against an individual and force this person to collaborate with the enemy. The government intended to protect itself and subjected hundreds of civil servants to tests on this notoriously unreliable device, also referred to as the “fruit machine”. See it at the War Museum, Ottawa.

The Romulans have landed

Invisibility cloaks that are able to steer light around two dimensional objects have become reality in the last few years. But the first real-world application of the theories that made them possible could be in hiding vulnerable coastlines and offshore platforms from destructive tsunamis.

The first working invisibility cloak, built in 2006, guided microwaves around a small, flat copper ring as if it wasn't there. By October 2007, a device repeated the trick for harder-to-handle visible light, and some progress is reported on the yet more complex task of making cloaks to hide 3D objects.

Now Stefan Enoch at the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France, says that established cloaking principles could be applied to ocean waves, which are essentially two-dimensional. Such techniques could be used to render vulnerable coastlines or offshore platforms invisible to damaging waves, he says.

This link will take you to an article about the first cloaking device.

U.S. army deserter, family win stay of deportation

A U.S. army deserter and his family were granted a last-minute stay of deportation Monday by a Federal Court judge while the court decides whether to hear their appeal.

Jeremy Hinzman, his wife and two children were ordered to leave Canada by Tuesday or face forcible deportation to the United States, where the soldier faces prosecution for fleeing to Canada in 2004 rather than deploying with his army unit to Iraq.

The judge's decision will allow the family to remain in Toronto while the court decides whether to review a decision by Citizenship and Immigration officials not to let the Hinzmans remain in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. They are also trying to appeal their pre-removal risk assessment.

RCMP relied too much on Taser manufacturer info: report

RCMP officials relied too heavily on information provided by manufacturers when they developed their own stun gun policies and training programs, an independent review concludes.

The review of the Mounties' policies on the use of electrical stun guns, known by the brand name Taser, was prepared on the orders of RCMP Commissioner William Elliott.

"There was an overreliance on research carried out by [stun gun] manufacturers and/or the views of police services relying primarily on the research conducted or sponsored by the manufacturers," the review states in its conclusion.

Mad Magazine's War on Bush

Mad Magazine's "The Mad War on Bush" gathers a truly superlative collection of parody and satire from eight years' worth of Mad lampoons.

As Jimmy Kimmel notes in his introduction to the book, there are many things to hate about the Bush regime, but it has been very, very kind to political satirists.

Mad Magazine has had a glorious eight years with this presidency.

BoingBoing has added some great links to the story.

Star Trek weapon seized in knives amnesty

This dangerous-looking five-foot-long weapon has been recovered by police in Gloucester. The shocked officers who took custody of it, are using it to publicize a five-week period during which they hope around 30,000 weapons will be handed in.

A spokesman for police said: "It is a particularly nasty blade that can, literally, take someone's head off. We are very glad it is off the streets and we want more weapons handed in."

The blade is believed to be a stainless-steel copy of a Klingon weapon called a Batliff from the science fiction series Star Trek.