MrZaius.com

I am now down to my last month in Kathmandu, Nepal – Month 23 of 24/Nearing the end of a two-year stint. Thanks to excellent support from the local staff at my employer, a massive house, and a quite helpful household staff, I’m among relatively few of my colleagues who’d still willingly stick around for a third year at the end of my tour. Unfortunately, I cannot, but if I ever return to here or a post with the same following problems, here’s what I’d do differently:

1: Hire a driver

Partly due to cost, partly due to the difficulty of scheduling occasional work, partly due to my own desire for control, I repeatedly shied away from hiring a driver. I’ve been aware for months that this decision, or failure to decide, was a mistake. My father drilled into us stories of how people would intentionally incite an accident with a western driver in the least developed nations out of desperation, hoping to hold the driver liable for far more than they could earn in their defunct economy. I ignored that lesson, as it didn’t seem immediately pertinent, but was foolish to ignore the frequent protests, burning of vehicles, and savage beatings of drivers when the idle crowds on Kathmandu streets decide to hold one accountable for an accident, often for reasons that so defy logic as to deeply offend any rational person. I’ve been lucky so far, but still made the wrong call. Even worse, every day the commute from home to work requires passing two to five vehicles, over a tiny 3km length of road, due to incompetent local bus drivers and their ilk constantly stopping in the middle of the road, to say nothing of the myriad pedestrians walking three abreast down the street, ignoring a perfectly good sidewalk to their left. In addition, this city stretches even the most highly tuned sense of direction to the snapping point due to the local’s failure to name their roads and post signs, instead navigating solely by unlabeled landmarks and poorly defined neighborhood boundaries. Between all of these factors, I feel as though my blood pressure drops 20 points every time I leave the Kathmandu valley and part with my trusty car for a few days. The stress, the absence of a Nepali-speaker in the car, and the incredible amount of time necessary to find any new destination should have been more than ample reason to deal with the stress of keeping a driver in my employ.

2: Buy an inverter or massive UPS, and a real phone

There is no moral way to run a generator enough to live a western lifestyle in Kathmandu during the dry season. The mere 8 hours of power accorded the city during this season, combined with the simply incredible pollution, makes contributing to the problem on the scale required to run a generator 16+ hours per day simply unfathomable. While I felt strongly that this was the case, my wife was far more insistent, pushing for a continued decline in usage throughout our tenure in country. We found that a 700VA UPS proved adequate to run a wireless router and a DSL modem for roughly an hour when fully charged, and that it would be fully charged after 4 hours on city power. Even so, living offline and in the dark proved difficult until I grabbed a Nintendo DS and a handful of lengthy RPGs for the platform. Were I to return to Kathmandu, I would not hesitate to build a far larger battery backup system to run a light or three, my data circuit, and intermittently charge a laptop enough to run for 4+ hours a day and, in addition to that, a 3G phone (or really any phone with a decent browser and long battery life – Perhaps a solar-powered, Webkit-enabled PUMA?) to take advantage of initially wretched but now much improved wireless data quality. Given that, living off the grid for 16 hours a day at the dust-choked peak of the dry season would seem much more an achievement than a burden.

3: Pick a freezer and cram it full

That thing I said about 16 hours a day of load-shedding? Turns out a freezer and fridge deals with the problem and holds its temperature remarkably well under those circumstances, assuming you’ve got sense enough not to open them more than once or twice per blackout. I did, however, lose a fair bit of food in the freezer over our fridge in the first year. Eventually moved everything, and I do mean everything, over to our freestanding freezer and made a conscious effort to keep it as full as possible, thanks to this Instructables piece. Between that, moving the ice cream off the door, and moving the refreezable Flavor-Ice to the door, I’ve saved hundreds of dollars in my second year. Definitely a lesson worth taking home, and definitely a lesson I wish I’d learned a year sooner.

4: Never, ever, ever transit through New Delhi (IATA: DEL), especially without a forced overnight

Once was enough to sear this one in. I’ve been through the patently insane process of connecting from Sheremetyevo-2 to Sheremetyevo-1 in Moscow, taking a 30 minute drive through town to get from the domestic airport to the international airport, which have adjoining runways. I’ve been through Siberian airports that looked like they had a staff similar in size to the old gas station I worked at during college. I’ve been through minor African airports, and I’ve been through four hour layovers outdoors in -20C, snow-covered train stops. Still, while I can think of plenty of reasons to do any of those again, I would never, ever transit through New Delhi again. I’d sooner walk to Dhaka than relive this experience:

Flying in, the apocalyptic desert landscape surrounding the massive city is mighty depressing, but I started to feel like the airport might be decent upon landing. Real skywalks, etc. Nope – No such luck. Among the last off our plane, we hopped on some old bus and rode into the terminal. Not the end of the world, but was wondering if I’d died and gone to hell 30 minutes later. Entering the terminal, we saw a crowd of hundreds in the slowest immigration line I’d ever seen. Unfortunately, however, we chose to tag along with the Jet Lite guy that wanted to walk us up to a mysterious “transit lounge” rather than leaving the airport and checking right back in again, going straight to a Subway Restaurant. No, we, like lemmings, were roped into a group and dragged from line to line to line. Finally, some 90 minutes after arriving in the terminal, we reached the “transit lounge.” We were then, upon arrival, told that we were unable to leave. Even with multiple entry, multiple exit visas, even standing not a 3 minute walk from immigration, and even standing not a full minute from the security check before the regular lounge, we were told it was impossible to leave the lounge until two hours before our next flight, meaning we were trapped there, in the transit lounge, for roughly 4 hours. Disallowed to reach multiple tantalizingly close ATM machines, only able to access one Nescafe-branded food stand with cold samosas and day old hamburgers, we were stuck selling a fistful of Nepali rupees for less than half their value to get just enough food to get us through. Bad as it all was, the worst part was the staff – Completely unwilling to help, and often unwilling to even talk to the customers, the staff at the airport were absolutely the most worthless people I’d ever had the displeasure of meeting. If we’d had children, I might well have snapped. Unfortunately, every story I’ve head of the airport from every friend I’ve asked was just as bad. Under no circumstances would I ever transit through Delhi again without an overnight, and even then…..

A couple other quick tips:

• Flying to or from Europe? This is the main way that folks flying from KTM get stuck flying through India, and the middle eastern routes generally don’t sound all that much better. One alternative that popped up before I left, but too late for me to benefit from it: Arkefly’s direct flights to Amsterdam.
• Flying out of KTM? They’re not kidding about the “three hours” warning, but don’t worry – All the flights are always late departing. Oh, and prepare to be groped – I was frisked no fewer than five times between the parking lot and a Jet Lite flight.
• That DS I mentioned? Felt a bit immature buying it, but thanks to Dragon Quest IV, myriad Final Fantasy titles, and numerous challenging strategy titles, I really don’t feel at all bad about owning it now. My Spanish Coach turns out to be pretty decent too.
• Speaking of the DS, the addition of passively powered speakers comme ça to a high battery life MP3 player was probably the most useful piece of tech I brought to Kathmandu, as well as being one of the cheapest. Remember those cheap, crappy, dollar store-style speakers that neither have a power adapter nor a battery slot? Those are made for Kathmandu’s 16 hour blackouts. Yes, slightly louder speakers like these might be a little better, but it was hard to imagine how quiet a house gets without power at the fridge, the whistle of the ventilation systems, etc, etc. Truly passive, unpowered speakers are plenty here, and dirt cheap.
• The Kantipur Post sucks. Gotta subscribe to a paper? Republica wont make you weep nearly as often with horribly written headlines. Heck, Im pretty sure they even have an editorial staff. That shows up at their offices on occasion. And speaks English. Still, these two Twitter feeds are a little more useful:
  • NewsFromNepal & NepalMonitor
• Dish breakage without a dish washer seems freakishly heavy. There’s never enough counter space to dry a post-party load, and with water like this, it’s not safe to towel dry. Plastic cups. Seriously: Plastic cups.
• That thing I said about UPSes? Hard to ship ‘em in, and sadly these guys are the only game in town: Mercantile Exchange on Durbar Marg have an exclusive monopoly on APC UPSes, and there really aren’t any other nice brands available in town. Mercantile’s nice and all, but there’s certainly a sizable markup. Might be easy enough to bring an inverter in from the west, though, as long as you wait and buy the batteries locally.

For Cameron:

1: It doesn’t matter where you go to college, unless money is no issue. What does matter is carefully mitigating the insular experience at a liberal arts college through work off-campus and mitigating the lack of a compelling campus-wide social framework at a working man’s community college or satellite school through aggressively pursuing extra-curricular groups. Mitigation. Mmm…..

2: Partake in wine and beer, but never in the same night, and particularly not when shots are on the table.

3: You’re still too poor to experience amontillado and port in a way that won’t ruin it for the rest of your life. Save your money for $20-30/750cl scotch & liquors that you can afford to sip for a while, and save the others for later. Of course, this assumes that I might have eventually actually found an amontillado that doesn’t taste like ass if I’d waited until I actually had cash.

4: Lite beer is to be avoided, life’s too short, yada, yada, yada, but don’t be a jerk about it proselytizing for real beer. Save it for anti-DRM rants or something more productive. No sense giving people too much of a hard time about it, although I was of course correct to advise a poor, poor friend who decided his first legal drink at his 21st birthday should be a Miller Lite. Still, if stuck in a situation where you can only choose a lite beer, here’s the key guideline: To get a beer that’s more of a wheaty and bland alternative to Sprite, intentionally maximize the bland. Barring the presence of Michelob Lite (not Ultra), nothing on offer is actually going to prove an adequate substitute for real beer. Grab a Sprite-like malt beverage with beer flavoring, like, well, Michelob Ultra.

5: There’s a ton of stuff that lasts way too long on the shelf to let you to talk yourself into going with the cheap stuff. Doesn’t always matter, but for seasoned salt go with this: Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning – The Dollar Tree seasoned salt tastes like finely grated paper. Toilet paper isn’t, and life’s too short. Destroy some forests and buy a trunk full of Charmin Ultra when your folks are in town and can run you through Sams or Costco.

6: No, you can’t afford the “Will It Blend?” blender, but you should always have a couple nice things in the kitchen. Those things? I mentioned graters? Cheese graters kick ass. The cheap ones, especially the multi-sided dumbbell/tower/pyramid-type ones, are incredibly time consuming and often painful. These, though, are an absolute pleasure to use. Ditto a nice, heavy, chef’s knife – They don’t actually matter, but it’s fun. Other top priorities? Hard to beat a wok if you don’t know how to cook/make frequent mistakes. The extra space is really helpful.

A year ago I posted a review recommending both Amazon and Rhapsody’s MP3 stores in quite glowing terms. Both seemed to work from Nepal at the time, and Amazon has continued to work up until at least as recently as September 28th. Even the largely CC and globally available work of Jonathon Coulton is blocked. It is unclear whether they’ve gotten to Hulu-esque levels of controls, going out of their way to block proxy servers, but we shouldn’t have to bother – Not for a paid service, with an American address, and American billing information.

• Amazon.com: No mention at all of the policy change on their website until checkout, and nary a word in their customer service help pages. Tested multiple tracks from multiple artists, freebies included, and not a one worked. The actual error message also implies that territories have been stripped of access as well:
  “We could not process your order. The sale of MP3 Downloads is currently available only to US customers located in the 48 contiguous states, Alaska, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia.“
• MP3.Rhapsody.com: Rhapsody tells you they won’t do business with international IP addresses on every page. These guys have always proven to be more expensive than the other vendors, so I’ve never had to make a purchase, but it sucks to lose the option.
  • Caveat: My wife’s subscription to Rhapsody’s DRM-encumbered streaming system is still working, for now.
• eMusic.com: Signups are forbidden from overseas, but they suggest they can make accomodations on their website. More than either of the above offer.
• AmieStreet.com: Hit or miss. Seems to depend on the band and the label. Sadly, that seems to be as good as it gets at the moment.

Still, nasty, brutish, and myopic as it is to cut off access to overseas users, I would encourage people to write in and complain, and on two key grounds:

1. The labels stand to gain next to nothing by blocking American users, or even users with American addresses and billing information. They can already bypass their half-hearted attempts to price fix between markets by shipping CDs across borders, but by blocking access to instant downloads for those same customers, they provide a quite compelling incentive to either not bother with an impulse buy or copy or to go to freer sources like YouTube or seedier places for instant access.
2. We currently have some 300,000-500,000 servicemen and women posted overseas (chart’s a bit vague vis a vis the warzones [via en Wikipedia]), which accounts for a quarter to a third of the entire military, not counting family. Even ignoring civilian USG employees overseas, blocking a quarter or half a million young men and women in the key demographics for their service is obviously far from wise. Regardless, even if they have, again, short-sighted, poorly thought out, blah, blah, blah contracts with the labels that prevent them from opening the service up to all Americans, surely opening up access to users with APO/FPO addresses and posted to civilian missions abroad with 20189 zip codes isn’t a hard sell while we simultaneously fight two and a half wars. (2.6 counting the narco-stuff, eh?) On that tact, sent the following to Amazon, but got only a wee little “thanks for the feedback” formletter. Still, this does seem like the sort of thing we can get around if more people are willing to give ‘em a poke:

“You recently blocked international downloads of your tracks which, though shortsighted and foolish on the face of it, is downright insulting when you include customers with APO/FPO addresses and 20189 zip codes. By doing so, you also block your country’s servicemen and women overseas, as well as the Foreign Service, from the only reliable, timely method of legally acquiring music available to them.
Please reconsider your policies and add exemptions for customers with APO/FPO and 20189 billing addresses post haste. Failure to do so can’t be wise: Given our mail-order heavy lifestyle abroad, we surely purchase far more per capita than any other class of customer.
Flip your patriotism bit back on and undo this, please.”

Will update if I ever get a human-written response.

I’ve been silently fuming for months that the new President hasn’t put pen to paper on the Rome Statute, but felt it inappropriate to call him on it during the middle of the current effort to pull the US back into the first world vis a vis health care as a human right. Well, when you can look yourself in the mirror on a day you accept a Nobel Peace Prize while still clinging to such an outmoded notion of sovereignty that would preclude American support for and active participation in institutionalized court systems styled after the ad hoc courts that we ourselves created in the early post-War era, a reminder of his earlier positions seems wholly warranted.

The following was sent by a less guarded freshman-Senator Obama in 2006, prior to announcing his Presidential bid, in response to an email asking how he’d vote if a future President offered the Rome Statute for ratification. What’s happened since? Not much at all.

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 13:54:10 -0700 (PDT)

Dear Sean:

I want to both apologize for the delay in my response to your e-mail and encourage you to continue to give me the benefit of your thinking in the days ahead. While I have every intention of responding to my Illinois constituents in a timely manner, the reality is that I am still working on the challenge of how to efficiently answer as many as 2,000 letters, e-mails and calls a day from my Illinois constituents.

I appreciate hearing your views on the importance of the International Criminal Court.I share the objective of bringing to justice individuals who have committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. I am supportive of the ICC’s recent efforts to indict Congolese and Sudanese leaders responsible for atrocities in their countries and view this as an important step forward in promoting a strong system of international justice.  My hope is that ICC indictments and prosecutions will continue on in an aggressive, responsible manner.

Also, I regret President Bush’s decision to “unsign” the ICC treaty originally signed by President Clinton. While there are certainly areas in which the ICC can be improved, I feel that the best way to move forward on this issue is to remain engaged with the Court. Signing the treaty, and while simultaneously protecting American interests with respect to the ICC, is the correct approach. Although the Rome Statute will not come before the Senate until President Bush agrees to submit it for ratification, you may be sure that I will continue to discuss this issue with my colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Again, I apologize for the inordinate delay in my response. I hope it will not deter you from staying in touch.

Sincerely,

Barack Obama
United States Senator

I’ve been roundly disappointed by the Xandros Linux build on my 20GB Eee PC 900, but not quite enough to remove it. Ubuntu et al take far too long to boot; Moblin shouldn’t work, given its new Atom requirement; Windows is too bloated and slow to boot, although it would be okay with a conventional HDD & hibernation mode; OpenSolaris is only barely supported; Android’s still rather ugly and limited. None of the options are appealing enough to warrant a switch, but Asus’s Xandros repositories is extremely lacking in timely updates. More importantly, although the device is intended and, in my case, used as a secondary and more travel-friendly computer, it lacks even the most trivial level of data security. Out of the box it supports but doesn’t require authentication for the user, never requires authentication for a ’sudo,’ and lacks any sort of full-disk encryption solution. The first two problems aren’t impossible to remedy, but I’ve had to go back to an unauthenticated state due to the device’s rare, intermittent refusal to recognize its own mouse on boot and refusal to allow a soft-shutdown from the astandard login screen. The lackluster login prompt is simply a screen-blocking application launched after the WM, leaving it open for attack as well. Obviously neither of these are a problem in Ubuntu or Windows, and I’d be shocked if they were issues in Moblin et al.

The third, however, is a much bigger problem and present not only in my first generation device but in the second and the newly announced third generation, as well. This is more than a little bit disappointing. Given that some tests show up to a 45% performance hit at peak degredation, I understand that the Celeron & Atom class processors probably shouldn’t be expected to do this work and still manage to play SD video without stuttering (HD’s out of the question in the first and second generation, and most of the third). I do not, however, understand why no vendor has whipped out an enterprise-class netbook with hardware-based encryption.

As stated elsewhere, a netbook is a much greater security hazard due not only to configuration-related user behavior, but are designed to be moved about more and to be used in public more often than a normal laptop. Given the massive damage that can be done to a person that just loses control of an email account, much less cached banking passwords and information, this is just simply unacceptable.

Why hasn’t anyone jumped on the opportunity to utilize VIA’s Nano in an enterprise-class netbook for its hardware AES support? Why hasn’t anyone announced a single product incorporating disks with integrated encryption? Why hasn’t anyone linked the prior to options to facial recognition with a preexisting, standard-issue webcam? Why does even Lenovo, who makes it nearly impossible to buy a regular laptop without widely supported cross-platform, biometric full-disk encryption (and single sign-on in Windows – scan your finger once at boottime, and that’s it) refuse to ship even its high-end IdeaPads with biometric scanners, much less their netbooks? Why on earth haven’t the most travel-friendly class of real computers had this feature available, at least as an option, from the beginning?

Samsung and UPEK offer two slight glimmers of hope, but both are long shots. Neither company managed to bring a single vendor in at the initial announcement, and neither has made a single related announcement since. ASUS offers another, but misses the mark. Fujitsu hits it, but in an OS-specific manner and at an incredible cost.

• UPEK, the makers of the biometric scanners found in ThinkPads and a handful of ASUS products, recently announced a netbook-centric marketing push. Announced in February, it apparently missed any mention at all at CES 2009 et al.
• Samsung announced a new class of SSDs with integrated full-disk encryption,but announced it during CES 2009. They get a pass for now, but with no pricing data or announcements of OEM sales, it’s difficult to tell how much hope to pin on this one.
• ASUS’s high end Eee PC 1004DN actually has another vendor’s fingerprint scanner onboard, but they haven’t announced if they’ll half-ass its implementation like the OS authentication-only scanners in HP laptops or if they’ll use it to provide real data security. AuthenTec’s press release seems to imply that that will, sadly, be the case. Note their stress on “file and folder” encryption – Integrating biometric-backed Windows authentication with the per-file encryption already supported by the OS is nice, but doesn’t come close to cutting the mustard in an enterprise setting.
• Perhaps the only option that’s currently on the market is Fujitsu’s old pre-netbook-fad LifeBook P1630, but even its solution is just a fingerprint scanner that can communicate with a Micosoft Trusted Platform Module, only truly useful with high-dollar builds of Windows Vista and Windows 7. The product predates the Atom, and starts at an incredible $1800 USD.

(Quick side note to Fuji and other biometric-friendly OEMs: You people do realize that a thief can have access to all the data on a laptop that only has OS and BIOS level biometric or password authentication through a quick BIOS reset and possesing a LiveCD, right?)

This situation should improve at some point in the not too distant future, but the present outlook is a bit bleak. Until then, I honestly don’t see the point to picking up another netbook until a vendor-supported solution to this problem is made available, although home-partition encryption through DM-Crypt in Ubuntu might work as a stopgap. I will, however, be first in line to order a machine with Moblin or something similarly snappy at boot time that manages to allow for single a single authentication in the boot process, both for decryption and OS authentication ala my old ThinkPad. I’d give my left pinky for a device that pulled that off and gave me an Nvidia chipset or a VIA-compatible chipset with similar GPU performance. Lenovo, are you listening?

PS: One last thing to think about: Would one of the new Tegra smartbooks or other Nvidia-related products have enough of the work of video decoding shifted off of the CPU to allow for software full-disk encryption and HD video playback without a problem? Wouldn’t want to be the first to try and find out, but that’ll be interesting to see as well. Still not adequate for consumers at large, though. We shouldn’t expect a non-system admin to independently install TrueCrypt et al by default.

“When a passenger check-in desk at Terminal  Two,  Heathrow Airport,  shot up through the roof engulfed in a ball of orange flame the usual people tried to claim responsibility.”

-Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul

It’s that time of year again. The Bullwer-Lytton Awards have been published, and, nice though the winner is, Jeff Eller the Louisianan was robbed.

I recently made a purchase from ThinkGeek, shipped to my diplomatic pouch address at the relatively isolated, xPO free post in Kathmandu and was *gasp* charged Virginia sales tax in spite of the pouch zip code’s long-standing exemption. They deserve kudos, however, on three points:

1: Unlike most of their peers, they had a clear email address listed in the email invoice. Doubly nice, the email address was the reply address for the invoice itself. Beats the hell out of trying to get in contact with Buy.com, Amazon, or any number of others.

2: While I did receive one automated message acknowledging my message, everything else received was very clearly and professionally human-written. Not a single form letter or incoherent brush off from some outsourced, illiterate ticket monkey. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a ticket monkey – The devil’s in the “illiterate” detail. A refund was quickly offered and every message was written in a manner that demonstrated a complete grasp of a not at all common complaint.

3: Although it did take one additional poke to get to this point (rather than a half dozen emails to management), the customer service rep promptly and professionally acknowledged that the problem should be brought to the attention of their developers. Gotta love a customer service or tech support rep that’s not above pestering the people who built their systems.

Kudos, kudos, kudos.

PS:These things are great: Utili-Key 6-in-1 Tool — Bought a couple at the Spy Museum in DC before coming out here, as I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get them shipped to me in time. Regretted it ever since, though, as the newer model sold in shops has had its bottle opener filed down to a useless little stump. Granted, OSHA probably wouldn’t be a huge fan of a device where you have to hold firm to the saw blade to use the bottle opener, but you wouldn’t believe how annoying it is to lose that feature once you get used to working around the safety flaw.

I decided to move when my employer’s money ran out after a two-day training session in Bangkok, seeking lower rent and an internet bill I could pay without feeling sick with rage. What follows is a comparative side-by-side review of the Chateau de Bangkok and the Conrad Hilton:

From el Reg:

Colonel: US Army has working electropulse grenades

From The Washington Post:

Lost U.S. Weapons May Be Going to Taliban, GAO Says

Is this what safety feels like? Brings to mind an awesome idea for a finale to Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Using time travel, future humans who were somehow affected by the events of the first three Terminator films (for continuity’s sake) return to the past and loot US Army munitions stores, feeding the Taliban and leading to an Afghan-led victory over the machines. Yay!

(To the overly pedantic: Yes, I’m aware that the latter is about lax controls over gifts of arms to tribal militias. Still, these stories make for one hell of a set of neighbors sitting one tab apart in Firefox.)

Ship stranded by the retreat of Kazakhstan's Aral Sea

NPR reports that a scientist at NOAA, Susan Solomon, says that the damage done by our CO2 emissions has already reached the stage that a considerable amount of future damage is unavoidable, going so far as to use the term “irreversible” to win some new and much needed press coverage. While the soundbite above hardly breaks new ground, one must wonder if Solomon studied active methods to combat this phenomenon. She seems to have a lot to say about the relative inadequacy of cutting emissions now, but I wonder what she’d say if queried about the possible role of devices like those used by the fictional teraformers of Mars in Kim Stanley Robinson’s award winning novels? What possible role should orbital mirrors and the like play in trying to mitigate the impact of these changes?  To tone things down to the realm of something not just possible and plausible but something that she might feel free to approach with more of a straight face, what role can solar radiation management in the broad, general sense play in mitigating the impact of global warming? These questions really need to be asked more often if the necessary but apparently grossly inadequate cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that currently drive international debate ain’t going to cut it.

Anyone know enough to simply dismiss those options out of hand? I’m not familiar enough with the topic to tell the crazy fringe from the unpopular fringe. They do seem to get some coverage in the pop-sci press, ala New Scientist. See Sunshade’ for global warming could cause drought by Catherine Brahic.

Via: Global Warming Irreversible, NOAA Scientist Finds on Slashdot.org