The original is here.

Marion Island, South Africa

The original is here.

I can’t resist these pictures from NASA’s Earth Observatory. The original is here.

Another beautiful shot from NASA’s Earth Observatory. The original is here.

Local population of ants had to acknowledge reality too. My friend, a biologist, said that her apartment was invaded by a colony of these little hard-working insects, apparently in search of warmth and humanity. My friend is rather old, so I was concerned about her and asked if she has an anti-ant spray and whether I should get her one. With gentle smile she said, “I don’t want to drive them away,” and suddenly I felt like a genocide perpetrator who has, in an act of inexplicable kindness, been reasoned with. Every time I visit her, I shake my head in disbelief and make a mark in my imaginary notebook,  “Yup. She is still talking to me.”

And it wasn’t - just two lines of JavaScript code will do the trick: first to create a Date object, and then to set a custom variable with the hours value using GA’s setVar call. Here’s the code in its entirety:

<script type="text/javascript">
    var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("......");
    pageTracker._trackPageview();

    dt = new Date();
    pageTracker._setVar("hour: " + dt.getHours());
</script>

A day or so after adding this to your page you should start seeing entries like “hour: 8″, “hours: 17″ etc. under Visitors -> User Defined in your GA reports. That’s all there is to it. If you read the blog post linked above you’ll find mention of how to drill down into this data using GA’s Advanced Segments functionality as well.

If you’re just a bit proficient in JavaScript -particularly its Date object- then it’s easy to change the tracking timeframe from full hours to anything that’s convenient (maybe hour of the day combined with day of the week). You can also pick some other prefix than “hours: ” (but you should use some common prefix so that you can filter the list of user defined variables for just these.)

It really goes without saying, but since the time is recorded on the client, that’s the hour you’ll get in the reports - not the time on your server when the page was accessed. An important difference if your visitors are from timezones other than the one your server happens to be in!

So beautiful, yet so violent. The full-size image is available at the NASA Earth Observatory.

While most people will read this book to learn about the fight against al Qaeda, it leaves me curious about two other areas. Firstly, after seeing the entertaining movie „Charlie Wilson’s War“ about the USA’s arming of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, -and noticing that the facts of the movie are generally not disputed- this book paints a rather different picture. Instead of the origin being a congressman who gets the CIA involved, Clarke talks about Morton Abramowitz of the State Dept., Richard Perle of the Dept. of Defense and himself (of course, he talks about himself and his achievements a lot in the book). The two accounts seem rather incompatible, so whom to believe?

The second point is the response to the bombing of US Army barracks in Khobar in Saudi Arabia, carried out by Iranian intelligence agents in 1996. Clarke is very shy about what the response entailed, only talking about a „worldwide choreographed intelligence action“, later adding that it was directed at the Iranian intelligence service. He’s open about the response to an earlier assassination plot against President Bush Sr. by the Iraqi intelligence service -a bombing of the intelligence service‘s headquarter-, and notes that both retaliations served in deterring the respective countries from carrying out further acts of terror against the USA. So what was the response? Anybody care to speculate?

More info at amazon.com

His Pentagon-appointed lawyer stayed silent during the trial, refusing to even answer questions from the judge.

Read it at Gitmo jury: Life sentence for bin Laden videomaker and weep.