Chemical weapons

"The US is preparing to use the toxic riot-control agents CS gas and pepper spray in Iraq in contravention of the Chemical Weapons Convention, provoking the first split in the Anglo-US alliance. "Calmative" gases, similar to the one that killed 120 hostages in the Moscow theatre siege last year, could also be employed.

The convention bans the use of these toxic agents in battle, not least because they risk causing an escalation to full chemical warfare. This applies even though they can be used in civil disturbances at home: both CS gas and pepper spray are available for use by UK police forces. The US Marine Corps confirmed last week that both had already been shipped to the Gulf."

Thanks to insomnia and The Independent.

The thing that puzzles me, aside from the obvious hypocricy of the US planning to use chemical weapons on a country which it is invading because that country supposedly possesses chemical weapons, is why chemical weapons are so much worse than other weapons. A weapon is, by definition, a tool to kill or incapacitate another person. From that person's point of view, what matters is whether they are dead or not, how badly they are incapacitated if they aren't killed, and how much pain is invlved in the process. He or she is probably not overly concerned about the technology that causes death, injury or pain. It is obviously prefrable to be attacked with CS gas (a chemical weapon) than with a hand grenade (a conventional weapon). If you want to give someone a slow, agonising death, one of the best methods is a simple bullet to the stomach. Your victim can take up to three days to die, and the pain, I'm told, is excruciating. Shrapnel can do the same job just as well. So what's the big deal about chemicals?

Türkiye'nin sorunlarını çözdüm

Türk gençlerini gerçekten çok severim. Bugün Zaga'yı seyrettim; genç seyircilerin coşku ve hoşgörünü beni etkiledi. Konuk ne kadar bayat, salak v.s. olsa, yinede gayet güzel bir şekilde karşıladılar. Aynen, kendi öğrencelirimi severim. Bazılar tembel, şimarık, kopyacı filan falan, ama genelde akıllı, ahlaklı, terbiyeli ve çalışkan insanlar.

Yaşlılar da severim. Sokakta yürürken, birşey sormak istesem, yaşlı birine sorarım. Hem cevap bilme olasalığı daha yüksek, hem de benimle daha kibar konuşur, hem de sorduğumdan bile memnun olur. Mecburi aile görüşmeler gelince, ya yaşlılarla, ya da çocuklarla sohbet etmeye tercih ederim. Cumhürriyetin ilk mücadelerini hatırlayan, Nazım Hikmet gibi insanları tanıyan, köy enstitütlerinde çalışan insanlar.

Ama ortasında, acayıp bir boşluk var. Kapitalist olan komünistler, mafya olan ülkücüler, feminist olup aile anneleri, tarekat üyeleri, ve daha çok, "fırsatçı" sözcüğü bir iltifat zanneden Özal çocukları, ülke yönetiyor.

Çözüm basit. Yirmibeş ile altmış yaş arasındaki butün vatandaşları, Amerika'ya gönderelim.

Geek post - anti-javascript rant

I spent several hours today trying to make sense of a bunch of javascript I downloaded which adds dropdown menu-style navigation bars to your site. After tweaking persistently, I got the effect I thought I wanted then decided it wasn't worth trebling the size of my code for. I mean seriously, what kind of language has syntax like this?


}
if (isDOM) {
var newDiv = document.createElement('div');
document.getElementsByTagName('body').item(0).appendChild(newDiv);
newDiv.innerHTML = str;
ref = newDiv.style;
ref.position = 'absolute';
ref.visibility = 'hidden';
}

This makes Perl seem positively transparent.

Dropdown menus aside, are there any really useful uses for javascript? A glance at any website offering downloadable javascripts is full of scripts to make the mouse cursor turn into an animated head of George Bush, draw Christmas tree decorations round the edge of the browser window, or find out what browser your visitor is using and manipulate the content accordingly (as if it makes any difference - write your pages in clean, W3C-compatible HTML, and if they can't read it, it's their own sodding problem). OK, there's the famous javascript mouseover effect, which can be useful sometimes, but most of the time you can do it with CSS, and most of the rest of the time, it's just tacky. I've seen a few sites use it to good effect (e.g. www.whatisthematrix.com ) but usually it's just another way for webmasters to annoy people with low bandwidth.

As for Flash animation - no, I won't go into that.

A many splintered thing

I just caught an epsiode of a BBC series called "A many splintered thing" which presented a normal tale of marital infidelity redeemed by some witty dialogue. The thing I found totally unconvincing was that our adulterous hero was married to Simone Bendix. I would have thought that in itself would be a sufficient disincentive to adultery, but then "baldan yiyen, baldan bıkar" ("he who eats honey, gets sick of honey").