OK, here's a question via Bookslut that I found intriguing. You're on a first date, you go to the person's apartment or home and while they're in the kitchen you glance at their bookshelf. What book's presence on that shelf would make you end the date as quickly as possible, tear up their phone number, and never contact them again?

(Yeah, lots of us here have wives already. Pretend. And if there actually are any women reading this blog still, because we've been so incredibly lax in keeping it up, feel free to answer too. It's not necessarily a "male" question.)

Stolen from MeFi, but an interesting question: What's the biggest mistake of your life so far? Here's how some prominent Brits answered that question.

OK, time for my periodic return to posting here, when I basically go, "Hmmm, I haven't posted to Collaboratory in a while...."

Anyway, there are nine announced Democratic presidential candidates. (Hmmm....nine of 'em....depending on your political allegiance, I guess the Dem Prez hopefuls are either the Fellowship or the Nazgul!) Of the nine, only six apparently have a legit shot at the nomination. (The odd ones out are Kucinich, Sharpton, and Mosley-Braun.) So, for those of you who might lean Democratic, have any of these guys tripped your trigger yet?

Because we all love lists, don't we? The Guardian Observer's list of the 100 Greatest Novels of all time (read about the list here). So, thoughts?

Is here where I fess that I've not read any of the top 16, other than excerpts of Gulliver's Travels? I have read 20 of the overall list though....

One aspect of the American economy that's starting to get a bit more than lip service these days is jobs moving overseas. It's a familiar tale, of course -- we all know about manufacturing companies shutting down factories so they can employ incredibly cheap, non-union labor in another country. But now it's the service jobs, the ones that have been keeping America's economy afloat as manufacturing has declined.

Is there anything that can be done about this? Should anything be done about this?

Put back right good postpones
and you will hear a tale,
a tale of a fateful voyage
which started starting from this tropical port
on board this tiny boat.
The companion was a powerful man of navigation;
the courageous and sure captain.
Five passengers placed the veil this day
for a three hours excursion.
a three hours excursion.

To obtain started in rough weather.
The tiny boat was thrown in the air.
If not for the courage of the courageous crew,
Minnow would be destroyed.
Minnow would be destroyed.

The boat failed on the shore of this
uncharted the island of desert
with Gilligan, the captain, therefore,
the millionaire, and his wife.
The star of cinema,
the professor and Mary Ann
are here on the island of Gilligan.


translation courtesy of Matthew White

TGIF

The Bush administration seems to be following an axiom that guided many of its predecessors: To keep negative headlines to a minimum, release bad news on a Friday.

On a Friday last November, the Environmental Protection Administration said it would relax enforcement of the Clean Air Act so older coal-fired power plants could renovate without having to install anti-pollution equipment.

On a Friday in January, the administration said it would consider removing Clean Water Act protections from up to one-fifth of the nation's streams, ponds, lakes, mudflats and wetlands.

The resignations of Army Secretary Thomas White and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill were announced on Fridays.

Last December, Census officials admitted on a Friday that the 2000 Census undercounted the nation by 3.3 million people.

Busy, busy, busy.

Starbucks Imperialism, the economics of

The ubiquity of American movies, brands and franchises around the world tends to make people draw certain conclusions about America and American power. These range from fanciful myths like "no two nations with McDonalds outlets will ever fight a war" to America as a voracious "cultural imperialist" that is determined to impose its trashy and decadent culture on the rest of the world.

All of these views seek to draw inferences either positive or negative about American cultural "values", either for 'em: they want "our way of life" or their envious of "our way of life" or agin 'em: America and American multi-national corporations are engaged in a war of aggression against "our culture".

There is, however, another interpretation which takes no account of the cultural significance of exporting American "values" and instead looks at the economics of the chains and franchises themselves. Australian economist, John Quiggin blogs that chains require a certain degree of cultural homogeneity in order get established and, to put it simply, the largest and most homogenous market in the world is the United States.

One of the traps for writers on 'soft power' is that, observing the proliferation of McDonalds, Starbucks and so on, they imagine that everyone in the countries they visit is a customer of these enterprises. This is, roughly speaking, true in the US, but the market share for these chains is smaller everywhere else.

I'm really fuzzy as to what exactly this guy's crime was. Are we moving toward prosecuting people for what they think?

(It's a guy who was prosecuted on child-pornography laws for journals he wrote which basically detailed fictional accounts of...well, ugly stuff he thought about.)

Via MeFi: It's Banned Books Week. As always, many of the titles on the Most Challenged 100 Books List are surprising: How To Eat Fried Worms? Well, I recall not liking it in fourth grade, but banning it? Yeesh....anyway, the Judy Blume quote at the top of the page laments books that won't get written because they might end up on this list. Maybe I'm warped, but I'm the type to try to write books that are likely to get on this list.

Anyway, read a challenged book sometime!

MrWong's Soup'Partments






There's more...

I know you're dying to know the answer to this one...

Why don't we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them?

During each hurricane season, there always appear suggestions that one should simply use nuclear weapons to try and destroy the storms. Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.

Now for a more rigorous scientific explanation of why this would not be an effective hurricane modification technique. The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required. A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20x1013 watts and converts less than 10% of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. According to the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a rate of 1013 watts in 1990, a rate less than 20% of the power of a hurricane.

If we think about mechanical energy, the energy at humanity's disposal is closer to the storm's, but the task of focusing even half of the energy on a spot in the middle of a remote ocean would still be formidable. Brute force interference with hurricanes doesn't seem promising. [more]

-- Frequently Asked Questions at the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

It's caption time!

For those of you into the whole ten-plus dimensions thing.

Based on this article, and the one that recently got Sean rather upset, I think we should get a pool going on what will be Christopher Hitchens's next subject. My money's on "Why Not Eat Puppies?"

Media Planning based on a new demographic

"It's not that we're necessarily going to run ads for skinny people on shows that skinny people watch," she explains. "It's more about understanding what the marketing implications are for people of different weight classes and then building a media strategy around that."

For example, she says it would have huge implications for food marketers-particularly fast-food chains-if regulators were to move forward with plans to regulate certain types of food advertising, much the way they did with alcohol and tobacco ads.

Under tobacco marketing rules, tobacco brands are not allowed to purchase ads in magazines that have a significant composition of underage readers. "Let's hope it doesn't get that far, but if it does, we may not be allowed to advertise certain food products on shows that reach a high composition of overweight people," Nathan predicts.

How ethical is this and should it be regulated? To what extent?

Scrabblog. Nice creative use of the medium.

I wonder what kind of conversations might transpire, in the Great Beyond, between the father of the H-bomb and Hitler's personal film-maker.

Land of the Chocolate Makers


Map by uggabugga.