Thursday Miscellany!

• 40,000 Yazidis are trapped on top of a mountain with no water; their alternative is to go down to ISIS-controlled territory and face almost certain death on account of their religious beliefs. Many more Yazidis --- 130,000 --- have fled to the Kurdish area. This as been a problem since the invasion of Iraq (I remarked in 2006 that our choices in Iraq were bankruptcy or genocide), but now with ISIS it's coming to a head. The United States, for its part, is considering military intervention to save the Yazidis from genocide.


• Ebola is spreading at an exponential rate. The good news is that a man in New York who exhibited symptoms of Ebola tested negative. The ugly news is that there are five more cases reported in Nigeria, mostly among staff that treated Nigeria's Patient Zero, Patrick Sawyer. All five cases are in Lagos, a city of 21 million. So, yeah.


• Chinese investors are working on a second canal to rival Panama's, this one through Nicaragua. One environmental hazard of this project is that it might wreck the surfing. (Cue Sacred Reich.)


• Why I will never, ever vote for Rand Paul, even if he's right on foreign policy. More here and here.
  This really isn't up for debate for me; access to safe, legal abortion and birth control is, for me, a core issue.


• This post on "Computer Dating Linux Style" is a great example of a lot of what's wrong
  with the sexual politics of the open source community. (Sweet baby Horus pecking at the eyes of baby Jesus...)


• I've heard of Linux distributions, and I've heard of Hadoop distributions. Algorete Python might be the first case I've heard of a Python distribution.