Just another horrifying tale from the country that used to care about human rights. The big news in this story is that the people in the CIA care more about covering their own asses than wrongly imprisoning an innocent man.

In other torture-related news, the Army has cleared the senior officials at Abu Ghraib of any wrongdoing. It’s hard to understand why the people at the CIA would worry about any repercussions for their screw ups in the first place.

Update: Behavior that surprised even me. Apparently we let Libyan intelligence agents question one of our prisoners at Gitmo.

Rogers Cadenhead has a post up about his brief brush with fame. I watched the Today show clip and thought he came off very well. And the whole time I watched it, I was paralyzed by anxiety. The one thing I knew for sure was that I never want to be on TV like that. I think I can hold my own in conversation, and heck, I enjoy job interviews, but the idea of being interviewed by Katie Couric on national television is terrifying. Not that I believe I’ll ever have to worry about it.

Rael Dornfest has a bit up at the O’Reilly Radar about how he’s migrating his computer usage to Web applications, and has a good list of the ones he relies upon. I’ve been thinking of doing something similar lately. The big change for me came when I realized that I strongly prefer Gmail to Thunderbird. I’m not even sure exactly why. I also use del.icio.us, Flickr, Bloglines, and tons of other Web applications, but moving to the Web for your email seems like a particularly big step. Anyway, aside from coding, it seems like these days I use my Web browser for just about everything, and I like it.

Check out this post at Making Light for an explanation of why Thomas Friedman annoys the hell out of me.

Stewart Brand has written an essay predicting what the future of cities and humanity looks like. Definitely worth reading.

Jason Kottke pointed to an old article from Vogue food critic and frequent Iron Chef America judge Jeffrey Steingarten on learning to eat everything. I don’t eat everything (to my continued shame), but I eat many many different things. Until I was 25 or so, I was a very picky eater. I constantly lived in fear of going to decent restaurants, because I often found myself in a situation where there was literally nothing on the menu that I felt comfortable ordering. The idea of any food with sauce was intensely traumatic.

As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up in a small town, and when I went to college, I had never eaten Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Italian (aside from spaghetti or pasta), or plenty of other varieties of food. I expanded my horizons a bit in college (incorporating some Chinese and Vietnamese food), but I was still awfully picky. Then, after I’d moved away for my first real job, I started hanging out with a girl who I really wanted to date. One thing I knew about her is that she was definitely not a picky eater. She ate at all the restaurants in town with no fear at all. And I knew that she would not respect me if I went to a restaurant that she loved and found nothing I was willing to eat on the menu.

It was at that point that I decided that I was no longer a picky eater. I’d eat whatever was put in front of me with a smile. I told myself a lie, that if other people eat something, it can’t be that different from what I already eat. It paid off. Not only do I enjoy all sorts of food today that I couldn’t even imagine eating back then, but I my strategy worked. She wound up marrying me. And to this day she tells people that she can’t believe that I was ever a picky eater.

Rogers Cadenhead posted the other day about how he had speculated on the name the next pope would choose by registering some domain names. One of the names he chose was benedictxvi.com, and lo and behold, he nailed it. This has yielded him plenty of attention, not only among bloggers, but in the mainstream media as well. I’d love to pull off such shenanigans, but my brain just isn’t wired that way.

The New York Times is planning a site-wide redesign. Want to be in charge of it? In a just world, Adrian Holovaty (or perhaps his boss) would get this job.

Blogger has added captcha to the blog creation process in order to prevent spammers from creating spam blogs in an automated fashion.

Flickr has lowered the price for pro accounts. Good thing I didn’t upgrade yesterday as I had planned. (They’re offering free perks for people who paid the higher price already, but I’d still prefer the lower initial outlay of cash.)

Would I take a Pro invitation? Yes, yes I would.

Update: Got an invitation. Thanks!