That famous saint named Patrick will have his green-drenched party this year, but it’s unclear when the guests are supposed to arrive. For the first time since 1940, St. Patrick’s Day will fall during Holy Week, the sacred seven days preceding Easter…

A few Roman Catholic leaders are asking for even more moderation in their dioceses: They want parades and other festivities kept out of Holy Week…

The U.S. remains one of the few countries in the world to retain any religious traces of St. Patrick’s Day, Mike Cronin said. In Ireland, where the government sponsors the Dublin parade, the holiday has morphed into an arts festival that draws millions of people, he said.

Recognizing that, bishops there have moved the feast of the nation’s patron saint to March 15 this year. March 17 will remain an official Irish day off work and the Dublin parade will go on as scheduled…

Had Ireland’s bishops shown the same insistence as some of their American counterparts, Cronin said, their comments almost certainly would have been ignored.

“It’d be like the (American) bishops arguing to move Super Bowl Sunday,” he said.

Only a few religious folk have a problem with this. I’m certain they’ll come up with a rationale.

Cnet News

Most folks think of a photo as a two-dimensional representation of a scene. Stanford University researchers, however, have created an image sensor that also can judge the distance of subjects within a snapshot.

To accomplish the feat, Keith Fife and his colleagues have developed technology called a multi-aperture image sensor that sees things differently than
the light detectors used in ordinary digital cameras.
[…]
“In addition to the two-dimensional image, we can simultaneously capture depth info from the scene,” Fife said when describing the technology in a talk at the International Solid State Circuits Conference earlier this month in San Francisco.

The result is a photo accompanied by a “depth map” that not only describes each pixel’s red, blue, and green light components but also how far away the pixel is. Right now, the Stanford researchers have no specific file format for the data, but the depth information can be attached to a JPEG as accompanying metadata, Fife said.

It appears that this new technology will be used to create higher quality images rather than 3D prints.

Space Data pays a $100 bounty for the return of each transceiver package parachuted back to Earth.

Thanks, Helen

Military experts sounded alarm Wednesday over the Japanese military’s ability to defend the country after one of its most advanced naval destroyers crashed into a fishing boat, leaving two missing…

The 165-metre-long Atago destroyer, returning from a visit to Hawaii, crashed into the tuna-fishing boat off the Pacific coast south of Tokyo.

“I may not come off as an expert, but I wonder whether the fishing boat was not detected by the radar,” said Yoshimi Watanabe, Japan’s state minister in charge of administrative and regulatory reforms.

“What if it had been a terrorist boat on a suicide bombing?” he said.

Watanabe probably violated Japan’s Homeland Security laws by even asking that question.

Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.

Like all Congress-critters, McCain paints himself as a paragon of virtue. The article steps back through his political career and points out contradictions to that image – and what the writers consider an inappropriate peccadillo. Insofar as the election goes it is better for McCain that this come out now rather than later as it will be forgotten by October unless he had a love child.

ABC News – Feb. 16, 2008:

A new movie in Iran depicts the life of Jesus from an Islamic perspective. “The Messiah,” which some consider as Iran’s answer to Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ,” won an award at Rome’s Religion Today Film Festival for generating interfaith dialogue.

Filmmaker Nader Talebzadeh spoke to ABC’s Lara Setrakian in Tehran.

LS: What are the key differences between Jesus through Islam’s eyes and Jesus through the traditional Christian perspective?

NT: We are talking about the same beautiful man, the same beautiful prophet, the same divine person sent from heaven. In the Koran, it emphasizes maybe three main points: about the birth, about the fact that he was not the son of God, and then, that he was not crucified. The rest is [the same] Jesus … the sermons, and the miracles, and the political situation.

Found by KD Martin/Cage Match.

An Israeli MP has blamed parliament’s tolerance of gays for earthquakes that have rocked the Holy Land recently. Shlomo Benizri, of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, said the tremors had been caused by lawmaking that gave “legitimacy to sodomy”.

Israel decriminalised homosexuality in 1988 and has since passed several laws recognising gay rights.

Two earthquakes shook the region last week and a further four struck in November and December…

He called on lawmakers to stop “passing legislation on how to encourage homosexual activity in the state of Israel, which anyway brings about earthquakes”.

His sentence construction reminds me of good old Senator Ted in Alaska. Or what’s-is-name in the White House.

In a move that legal experts said could present a major test of First Amendment rights in the Internet era, a U.S. federal judge in San Francisco has ordered the disabling of a Web site devoted to disclosing confidential information. The site, Wikileaks.org, invites people to post leaked materials with the goal of discouraging “unethical behavior” by corporations and governments. It has posted documents said to show the rules of engagement for American troops in Iraq, a military manual for the operation of the prison at Guantánamo Bay and evidence of what it has called corporate waste and wrongdoing…

The order had the effect of locking the front door to the site – a largely ineffectual action that still kept back doors to the site available to sophisticated Web users who knew where to look…

The feebleness of the action suggests that the bank, and the judge, did not understand how the domain system works, or how quickly Web communities will move to counter actions they see as hostile to free speech online.

The site is still available at its IP address and mirror sites.

Obama extends lead over Clinton — This is getting better and better. Clinton is going to have to cheat like crazy now to pull this off.

Barack Obama has gained more ground over his rival, Hillary Clinton, in the contest to win the Democratic nomination to run for US president.

Mr Obama, the senator for Illinois, has won the primary in Wisconsin, and is also projected to take victory in Hawaii – his 10th win in a row.

The Federal Aviation Administration has opened an investigation into whether two go! airlines pilots fell asleep during a flight from Honolulu to Hilo last Wednesday.

go! Flight 1002 was headed for Hilo Airport around 10 a.m. but overshot the airport by 15 miles before returning to land safely…

Air traffic controllers, which had been tracking the plane by radar, were unable to reach the plane for 25 minutes, according to a report by KGMB-TV.

They keep going and going and going…