A USAToday article, “Terrorist watch list hits 1 million,” mentions the possibility of petitioning the FBI to have one’s name removed from the “no fly list.”

There have been 830 redress requests since 2005 where the person was, in fact, confirmed to be on the watch list, and further review by the screening center led to the removal of 150, or 18% of them.

So. Were the remaining 680 immediately apprehended and brought to trial, despite being unafraid to petition to have their name removed? WTF, FBI?

Take a look at this really neat interactive map of where immigrants were and when, from the New York Times. Be sure to try the “number of residents” option.

Anybody who’s wondering what Craig might like for early birthday/anniversary/Christmas has an answer here.

The Washington Employment Security Department has a handy list of layoffs (past and future) in the state (involving companies with 100 or more employees).

If you follow this link, you’ll see a control panel (you can also get to it by right-clicking on the Flash player (when you’re visiting a site with a Flash component) and selecting “Settings…”). You will likely be surprised at how many sites are listed there, and you may be somewhat alarmed to find them there at all (as I was) if you have instructed your browser to clear cookies on close, or you otherwise remove persistent tracking information. This site information is, in every way that matters, a persistent cookie. I discovered this cache of data after wondering how it was that Pandora knew who I was after I cleared all offline data. Adobe doesn’t exactly hide it (and once you’re on the page where you can make the adjustments, there’s a decent explanation of what they mean), but they sure don’t make it easy to find, and they absolutely don’t do what I would consider the right thing; i.e., to respect my browser’s privacy settings and delete site-specific data per my instructions. There’s another page in the settings manager where you can deny any or all sites permission to save information, but Pandora (at least) refuses to operate without the ability to save data on my machine, so the only way I’ve found to keep my machine clear of Flash-based tracking cookies is to manually clear them using the control panel (which I have bookmarked for convenient access).

Nuclear Archeology has confirmed that a bottle found in a safe found in a trench found at the Hanford site contains radioactive material from Hanford in 1944! Neat!

You don’t have to read the article, because the story is quite sad. A few excerpts, however, from the 14 year old girls who are the subject of the article:
“We were like wicked tired and we didn’t really mean to,”

“‘Cause you’re sleeping and then you wake up under the train and you’re like, ‘What?'”

“When your bones that have never touched the air touch the air, it’s like putting a Popsicle on your bottom teeth,” Rachel says.
“Except for times a million,” Destiny says.

“I was like, ‘Whatever, I lost a leg, it will grow back.’ And then I was like, ‘Wait a minute. No, it won’t.'”

“It’s like I lost a part of myself. … It feels like a part of me is dead, because it’s gone.”

Now I am sorry that it never occurred to me to make commemorative tablets for those especially “hard working” patrons.

Lifehacker yesterday posted an item about yourfonts.com, where you can make a TrueType font out of your handwriting. Here‘s what mine looks like
The yourfonts site was overwhelmed yesterday, but is probably settling down somewhat now. One font aspect that they don’t let you build is ligatures, which is a bummer for me because I’m terribly fond of my “th” ligature.

Thanks for the Julia Nunez CDs, whoever sent them!