He's a freak.

Is anyone following the adventures of Ken Jennings, the freakish freak who's been ruling the roost on Jeopardy! for months now? Alex Trebek pointed out the other night that because Ken is still playing, he's not eligible for this year's Tournament of Champions, and will wait until next year. But if Ken wins every day until two days before the 2005 Tournament of Champions, he'll be eligible for the Tournament -- which will include just two players.

Anyway, the guy's something to watch. On the one hand, he's a devout Mormon, so he dominates Bible topics. But then, he's apparently done a lot of studying of alcoholic beverages (if not drinking them, since he's a Mormon), because he always does well with "Potent Potables". The other night he ran the table on a Monty Python topic, and he carries a figurine of a Totoro with him as a good luck charm.

He's a freak. But he's fun to watch.

(I hope all the people he beats get T-shirts that read, "I got my ass kicked by Ken Jennings.")

Bait and Switch

Sharon repudiates America's "road map" while copping flack from his own party about the Gaza withdrawal. The whole thing is an exercise in bait and switch, the purpose of which is to consolidate control over the occupied West bank and to accelerate ethnic cleansing there.

Zero-Gravity Flights made Public

At $3,000 it's still a pricey ticket, albeit a bit cheaper than the privatized Space Flights, but if I had the spare cash, I'd happily go on an FAA-Approved Commercial Zero Gravity Flight.

A specially modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft, called G-Force One, will be used during a nationwide tour Sept. 14-24.

"We kick off a two-week tour with Zero-G flights in New York City, Los Angeles, Reno, Dallas, Atlanta, Detroit and Florida," Peter Diamandis, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of the company, told SPACE.com.

The kick-off flights will carry "select consumers and guests," the company announced today. The first flight was slated today to depart from Newark Airport in New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

Trips available for everyone else start in October.

Are you all tempted to raise the $3k so I can go on the Dallas stop? I promise to post a wonderful entry about it!

Oh, and, they teamed up with Diet Rite!? Find out more about the company from their official site.

Here's something that I'm trying to wrap my mind around:

What, exactly, is a terrorist?

It seems like a no-brainer type question, but I keep seeing the insurgents we can't seem to stop fighting in Iraq referred to in the news as "terrorists". Are they terrorists, though? Is guerilla-type action a form of terrorism, then? Certainly, using car-bombs against civilian targets is terrorism, but is doing the same against a military target "terrorism", or just guerilla tactics?

I'm asking because I'm increasingly suspecting that in the War On Terror, we not only fighting the wrong people but we don't know who we should be fighting in the first place.

Thoughts? (Sorry about not linking anything, but this is just half-baked think-out-loud type stuff.)

OK, folks, time for a Dichotomous Poll! Is this whole business about whether the newly-released "Bush National Guard" memos are real, with the whole bit about whether the typewriters in 1971 could do superscripts and nonproportional fonts and cut-and-paste and do PowerPoint and all that stuff (a) a crucial piece of the puzzle about whether George W. Bush can be trusted with the National Security Apparatus and the prosecution of the War on Terror, or (b) a stupid and irrelevant bit of red-herring stuff, and a case of "Ooooooo, a bouncing ball, let's follow it because there's certainly nothing more important to be talking about!" on the part of our national media and political discourse?

I vote 'B', myself.

OK, NFL fans: any football predictions or thoughts on the upcoming season? My personal feeling, icky though it may be, is that the Super Bowl is the Stupid Patriots' to lose.

I want to go to a movie at the theater described here.

(via Tenser, said the Tensor)

Driving back from Tulsa to Dallas yesterday evening, I heard a report on NPR's the World about the massive project in China attempting to divert water from the South of the country up to the North and Beijing. The total budget for the project reaches upwards of $14 Billion and will consist of:

three south-to-north canals, each running about 1,300 kilometres across the eastern, middle and western parts of the country.

The three lines are designed to divert water from the upper, middle and lower reaches of the water-rich Yangtze River into the country's drought-prone north.

Over the past two decades, hundreds of cities in North and Northwest China have been plunged into an ever-growing regional potential crisis of water resources.

The project is expected to be completed by 2007, just barely in time for the Summer Olympics of '08. One commentator on the NPR program said that it was akin to try to divert water from the Mississippi River to Washington DC. Just kind of made me go "whoa".

You know how at state fairs (and the larger county fairs) they'll have a pavilion or two where you can watch live versions of infomercials, wherein salespeople pitch things like therapeutic massage chairs and space-age cookware? Here's a nifty profile of one member of this special breed of traveling salespeople.

I find sales to be one of the most mystifying of vocations. I spent a year and half doing it (badly), and I can never fathom the kinds of people who can pretty much launch right into an effective pitch within half an hour of seeing the product they're selling for the first time.

Anyone else ever try sales?

Wow, we're posting here again. Hmmmmm....

Well, I might as well bring up a little dust-up in Blogistan regarding the Russian school massacre and the terrorist problem the Russians have in Chechnya. Yesterday, Matthew Yglesias posted as follows:

Worse, even, than the reality of the crime is the knowledge that things will get worse. The situation, clearly, can only be resolved by Russian concessions on the underlying political issue in Chechnya. At the same time, in the wake of this sort of outrage there will not only be no mood for concessions, but an amply justified fear that such concessions would only encourage further attacks and a further escalation of demands. I don't see any way out for Russian policymakers nor any particularly good options for US policymakers. Partisanship and complaints about Bush's handling of counterterrorism aside, this business is a reminder not only of the horrors out there, but also that terrorism is a genuinely difficult problem -- I think we've been doing many of the wrong things lately, but no one should claim it's obvious what the right way to proceed is.

This seems to me to be suggesting that Russia's old policy of scorched-earth, "Kill them all" military incursions into Chechnya hasn't worked worth a damn, so one might conclude that they might try making concessions -- except that this would only encourage further terrorist activity, obviously, since the terrorists would see it as evidence that they can influence policy by killing and violence. Russia, therefore, is caught in a dilemma where one alternative doesn't work and the other simply isn't possible for other reasons. This seems pretty clear to me.

But then along comes Glenn Reynolds, who seizes on Matthew's second sentence quoted above, and only that sentence, in a "Look at the dumb liberal" moment that pretty much completely misreads Matthew's point. (Read the ensuing comment thread as the Instalanche begins.) And then, after Matthew takes strongly-worded offense to this, Glenn retreats into his usual fall-back position of "Gee, I just can't understand why you'd be so mad at me", coupled with "I don't understand your position" (which somehow I was able to grasp in about the forty seconds it took me to read Matthew's entire post) and tut-tut-ing over Matthew's use of profanity. (The horror of it all! Good thing Glenn Reynolds is so gosh-darned consistent about his disapproval of profanity in political discourse.)

Matthew then goes on to clarify his original position here (as if it actually needed clarifying). I found this whole exercise rather illuminating, in light of the "Nuance? We don't need no steenking nuance here!" attitude of today's political commentary.

And here's something that's been bugging me for a long time now: what's the right thing to do if a case can actually be made that what the terrorists want actually is the right thing to do?

Following along with Jason's theme, I'll post this article about the current state of poverty in the US from the Economist. Some excerpts:

Whatever crude logic it possessed at the time, the Orshansky poverty line is by now quite arbitrary. Its originator calculated the cost of meeting a family’s nutritional needs and then multiplied this figure by three, because families in that era spent about a third of their income on food. The Census Bureau does not repeat this exercise to determine today’s poverty line; it does not recalculate the cost of an adequate diet or remeasure the share of income spent on food. It simply adjusts Ms Orshansky’s figures for inflation. Thus today’s dollar thresholds do not tell us how much a family or individual needs to get by in today’s America; they simply restate the cost of feeding a family in the 1960s in today’s prices, and multiply it by three.

As the Census Bureau is the first to concede, the poverty line is not a “complete description of what people and families need to live”. A more complete description would show that poor families now spend a far bigger share of their budget on housing (nearly 33%, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics) than on food (just 13.2%). Child care, done for free by the mothers and grandmothers of the 1950s and 1960s, is now a big expense. Deducting this expense from the measured income of families would add 1.9m to the official poverty figure, according to estimates by Isabel Sawhill and Adam Thomas of the Brookings Institution.

But a better measure of poverty would also assess the various weapons the government deploys against it. The current measure ignores non-monetary benefits, such as food stamps. Nor does it count the earned income-tax credit, a benefit paid via the tax code to the working poor, which has become every policy wonk’s favourite way to redistribute money. The Census Bureau has already experimented with such measures, and is probably itching to finally retire the Orshansky line. But its political masters in the Office of Management and Budget may be nervous of any innovation that would raise the official poverty number. To the bureau, the poverty line may be a mere “statistical yardstick”, but to the administration, it is a political stick its opponents might use to beat it with.

But if the level of poverty is fairly arbitrary, changes in the level are quite telling. Poverty fell throughout the long economic expansion of the Clinton years, from 15.1% in 1993 to 11.3% in 2000. Particularly striking was the fall in poverty among single mothers and their families, from 35.6% (4.4m) in 1993 to 25.4% (3.3m) in 2000.

Just some food for thought.

Make with the chit-chat, eh?

So here's an open thread. What'cha been reading? Listening to? Any good movies? Random thoughts?

Devoter

Devoter is a new political community weblog set up by a MeFier as an alternative to the ceaseless politic posts on the old blue. You can read more about it in this MetaTalk thread. I'm just kind of posting this as an FYI just in case anyone around here is interested. You can still get an uber-l33t two-digit user number, and this also means (hopefully) that MeFi will kind of go back to normal. Well, I can hope, anyways.

Hey Look! A Post!

Hey, how ya doin'?

So there's this SelectSmart guide to ethical philosophy, and I'd be interested to see how you all score and your thoughts, you know, assuming you see this and take it and whatnot. Here are my results:

1. Aquinas (100%)
2. St. Augustine (86%)
3. Spinoza (80%)
4. Ockham (64%)
5. Aristotle (62%)
6. Stoics (53%)
7. Jean-Paul Sartre (49%)
8. Kant (49%)
9. Cynics (41%)
10. Ayn Rand (39%)
11. John Stuart Mill (39%)
12. Nietzsche (39%)
13. Plato (39%)
14. Jeremy Bentham (34%)
15. Nel Noddings (33%)
16. David Hume (30%)
17. Prescriptivism (28%)
18. Epicureans (22%)
19. Thomas Hobbes (8%)

Hope everyone's doing well.

Test, One Two...

Nothing too deep, but I saw something that reminded me of Collaboratory, though it was before my time here*. Even taking the "easy" route they had troubles with their encounter with Dostoevsky.

*Come to think of it, most everything was before my time here. Not that I've helped in that regard.

Ugly Zoo


ugly, ugly, ugly zoo...

Andrew Carlssin luvs Lynndie England.

To quote a certain fellow " hello . . . lo . . . lo . . . lo . . . "

Oh well... I'm going to blog here regardless of all that mutinous chatter going on in the comments section (actually its not quite enough to call it chatter exactly).

So one question I have for you. What is so darned good about the Caps Lock key that merits giving it a button larger than than the tab key on most keyboards? Personally I've had ENOUGH OF SUDDENLY GOING IN TO CAPS MODE SIMPLY BECAUSE BY A STUPID SLip of the fingers while looking for the shift key.

So after hunting around for an answer (on Google for about five and half seconds) I stumbled over this little sucker.

No need to thank me.

Somehow I managed to blow away Chris' post (don't ask me how I did it, I have no idea), so anyway I'm reposting it from a copy I found in Google's cache. Apologies, Chris.

Christopher Alvarado writes:
In a Washington Post Writers Group op-ed, Neal Peirce explores the topic of regionalism by reporting on the trend towards City-County mergers and other alternative forms of governance.

Comments

Cruel & Unusual

"That really, really is the worst atrocity. It affects the honour and pride of Muslim people. It is better to kill them than sexually abuse them."

--- Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of Al Quds Al Arabi

I really wonder whether, with the emergence of these photos, the game isn't over for the Americans in Iraq. Is it realistic, after the bloody siege of Fallujah and the Shiite uprising of early April, and in the wake of these revelations, to think that the US can still win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi Arab public?

--- Juan Cole

I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was right . . . I saw SSG Frederick walking towards me, and he said, “Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.” I heard PFC England shout out, “He’s getting hard.”

--- Specialist Matthew Wisdom

Specialist Charles A. Graner and Private Lynndie England give the thumbs up to the Abu Ghraib facility.

[warning: more hideousness here]

Doing the rounds at the moment

http://karmann.goonsquad.net/img/boudreauxs.jpg

Or is it a hoax? No... but these are.

http://www.imagedump.com/pics/59682.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~shrapnill/BoudreauxBetter.jpg
http://www.sgtstryker.com/pictures/gluesniff.php
http://www.sgtstryker.com/pictures/clay.php
http://www.glennbeck.com/picoftheday/04-15-04-pod-3.jpg
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/images/soldier3.jpg
http://photopile.com/photos/dead/auctions/112062.jpg

Morning Edition without Bob Edwards?!

This is....well, it sucks, really -- especially with Edwards saying that it was a case of "management wanting to move in a new direction", which is basically management-speak for, "Hey, here's something we haven't done before, let's do it!"

Ugh.

I always get mad when I hear people cite some scientific study somewhere that has received a chunk of government funding, and then follow it up with something like "Who on Earth needs to know that?!" The reason I get mad is that you never know what bit of scientific knowledge from one field is going to prove useful in another, such as this: findings from astronomy and particle physics could help archaeologists learn if there are secret burial chambers in the Mexican pyramids at Teotihuacan.

Interesting survey of Iraqi attitudes one year on about the occupation and the future. PDF, really worth a read.

Janet Dilbeck clearly remembers the moment the music started. Two years ago she was lying in bed on the California ranch where she and her husband were caretakers. A mild earthquake woke her up. To Californians, a mild earthquake is about as unusual as a hailstorm, so Dilbeck tried to go back to sleep once it ended. But just then she heard a melody playing on an organ, "very loud, but not deafening," as she recalls. Dilbeck recognized the tune, a sad old song called When You and I Were Young, Maggie.

Maggie was her mother's name, and when Dilbeck (now 70) was a girl her father would jokingly play the song on their home organ. Dilbeck is no believer in ghosts, but as she sat up in bed listening to the song, she couldn't help but ask, "Is that you, Daddy?"

She got no answer, but the song went on, clear and loud. It began again from the beginning, and continued to repeat itself for hours. "I thought, this is too strange," Dilbeck says. She tried to get back to sleep, but thanks to the music she could only doze off and on. When she got up at dawn, the song continued. In the months to come, Dilbeck would hear other songs. She heard merry-go-round calliopes and Silent Night. For a few weeks, it was The Star-Spangled Banner.

--- Can't get it out of my head: Brain disorder causes mysterious music hallucinations

The new Iraqi constitution is an exquisitely crafted piece of work and a total balls up.

Two tidbits for those that love the funny pages:
Martijn Reemst has now added a search function to his comprehensive Calvin and Hobbes directory, allowing the visitor to recall the best of Spaceman Spiff.

Worth100.com has entered round 5 of the Far Side Photoshop Contest, where participants flex their image manipulation muscles remaking classic Larson creations as real-life, full color, multi-dimentional representations of the original pen and ink creations.

I'm not at all sure that if I didn't see my daughter from ten days after her birth until six years later, I would recognize her.

But this mother did, and she was calm enough to create a ruse by which she could obtain hair-samples from the child for DNA testing purposes, thus exposing a pretty brazen kidnapping/faked death. Wow.

Yet another author whose works I keep meaning to read has died: historian Daniel Boorstin.

Did Dean give the Dems back their party?

Whether or not you supported him, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.

I'm inclined to think he was helpful in that regard.

Jon Cusack is cool.

(No, not that Jon Cusack -- this is some other Jon Cusack. But this is still hilarious.)

Kevin Drum on the economy:

The sign of of a healthy economy is not so much that living standards are high for the middle class, but that they are getting higher — that people believe their children will be better off than they are. But as income inequality increases and income mobility decreases that's increasingly not the case, and the question at hand is whether we ever plan on doing anything about it. How long does the middle class have to stagnate in the midst of ever more stratospheric wealth for the rich before even conservatives finally admit that we have a problem?

It's a long post, but a good one, with quite a bit of information, such as this depressing nugget: Every state in the United States, except Nebraska and Nevada, has seen an overall shift of jobs from high-paying industries to lower-paying industries over the last three years.

I've mentioned before that I like WIRED because it's really optimistic, a lot of the time, and sometimes I just plain need a good, stiff shot of such optimism. But their unbridled "happy view", in which just about anything that happens in the tech industry is A-OK, sometimes gets cloying -- such as their current issue, which seems to argue in this article that outsourcing is just ducky. A representative exchange, in which the author interviews someone who wants to make outsourcing more difficult:

"But isn't part of this country's vitality its ability to make these kinds of changes?" I counter. "We've done it before - going from farm to factory, from factory to knowledge work, and from knowledge work to whatever's next."

She looks at me. Then she says, "I'd like to know where you go from knowledge."

Anyone else enjoy brain teasers and IQ-type tests? Here are a few from the International High IQ Society. I've taken several of these types of tests online, but never an "actual" IQ test administered and scored by a human. Have any of you been given an IQ test? If so, how do your scores compare with any you have taken online?

BTW, I was a member of International High IQ Society when it was free. They had some great puzzles and an interesting newsletter, but I just can't bring myself to pay for membership without thinking about Peggy Hill and the "150 Smartest People in Texas."

I know that my sense of humor tends toward the demented, but this picture really made me laugh. (But then, I just can't get enough of this whole Howard Dean thing.)

(Link edited)

OK, who's planning to see this?



I want to, although I'll probably wait for the DVD.

Reactions to the Moon-Mars thing, nicely collected in one place.

(via Paul Riddell, my source for pithy science commentary)

Rolling Stone has a story about Justin Frankel, the inventor of Winamp and Gnutella (via kottke). I didn't know he wrote both of those. My thoughts:

- this guy's value on 'what he wants to do' is too high.
- AOL does stink.
- like Jaq has said, you can't be naive enough to think that, by empowering people you're not gouging the recording industry. Surely most of Gnutella's traffic is illeagal.
- there should be ways to listen before buying. But music that you keep listening to should be paid for.
- however, the current industry is messed up and charges too much.
- some of his motivations sound noble, down to 'taking the wind out of Napster's sails', but, again, it's naive to think there won't be abuse and to take no responsibility for the abuse, isn't it? What would the analogs with guns or cars be (oh, wait. Those industries shirk responsibility, too.)
- more naivete: AOL pays you 100 million dollars, they own you What'd you think? If you don't want them to own you, give some of the money back or negotiate a buy out or something.
- re: Frankel's question at the end, for my part, I think people tend to do what they want, even if it hurts others. We need structures in place to discourage some of those hurts, to keep all of us reined in a little. The tragedy of the commons seems obvious to me.

I've got a post on Metallica, too, that I'm going to put up on interact.

We now have an RSS feed for Collaboratory. Blogger added the feature this morning. I'm hoping it'll start showing up on BlogRolling as recently updated, but it has other advantages as well, like RSS readers. Any of y'all use those?

Did we get our first comment spam?

Futility has nagged at Caroline for a long time. Four years ago, at the dawn of the new millennium, she sat at her kitchen table in Claremont, N.H., and added up her life. It was the height of the economic boom. The nation wallowed in luxury, burst with microchips, consumed with abandon, swaggered globally. Everything grew larger: homes, vehicles, stock portfolios, life expectancy. Never before in the sweep of human history had so many people been so utterly comfortable.

Caroline was not one of them.

Crooked Timber's Harry Farrell has some pointed commentary regarding comments made on other weblogs regarding the New York Times article, "A Poor Cousin of the Middle Class", a vignette about one member of the working poor.

"You want to convince me of something, give me numbers." - young Jed Bartlet in the episode "Two Cathedrals" from The West Wing.

Filched from MeFi, here are some numbers on the Bush Administration.

Keep up the good work Start up the good work anytime now, Mr. President.

Collaboratory demographic survey time:

How many of you have taken the Best Places quiz before? I took it several years ago, but then again this morning.

What do you all consider the most important aspects of places to live, according to the categories they use? If you got to pick exactly where you lived, where would it be?

WE'RE GOING BACK TO THE MOON!!!!

(butwe'regonnacanceleverythingnotrelatedtothemoonormarsincludingkeepingHubbleworkinguntilareplacementisready! Shhhhhhdon'ttellanyonehaveaniceday)

Via Bookslut:

1. Someone named Caitlin Flanagan somewhat-favorably reviews Dr. Laura's new book.

2. Someone named Maud Newton isn't impressed.

3. I'm not sure why I'm posting this, but it struck me as interesting. I find Dr. Laura to be one of the most nauseating people in American life, and pretty much purely on that basis I tend to desperately want to ignore everything she does, which is pretty much what I do. Oh well.

Darn, I'm so easily amused. At the moment I'm collecting interjections which do a fairly bad job of masking swear words or mild blasphemy.

I'm looking for ones that are fairly well known although I know that many of these are actually obsolete and tend to only be used in ironic contexts. They also tend to be identified specifically as American, British or Australian words.

Here's my current list, I've grouped them around their root cuss word.

Christ	Jesus	God	Damn	Hell
crikey cripes crums	gee jeez sheesh bejesus (scared the...) heeby jeebies (gave me the...) jiminy (Jesu Domine?) jiminy cricket jingo jeepers creepers	golly gosh gadzooks (god's hooks) drat (god's rot) zounds (god's wounds) begorra (by god) strewth (god's truth) cor blimey (god blind me) by gum (by god)	darn durn dang dashed dog gone (god damn)	heck (Surely there are more of these?)

Can you think of any others?

When we think of Internet geeks, we often think of people like the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, right? Big fat shut-ins who are social misfits?

Well, according to a new study, that's not accurate. Among other things, your typical Net geek has an active social life and shuns television.

Keeping with the air-related theme as of late:

It begins with an idea. The idea becomes a sketch. Which becomes a blueprint. Which becomes a wind tunnel model. Which becomes a prototype...

...and sometimes it just stops with the sketch.



Concept Aircraft of the past.

A day on Earth is roughly 24 hours. A day on Mars is roughly 24 hours, 40 minutes. The difference doesn't sound like much, but it adds up and it's screwing up the sleep patterns of the scientists in charge of the Spirit Rover.

The sacrifices for science, eh?

(Free LA Times registration required)

If this article is to be believed, the RIAA has come up with some new strategies to deal with "pirates" whom they think may not have as much knowledge of US legal procedures as others. Hmmmmm.

(Talk about losing in the court of public opinion, eh? I wonder sometimes if the RIAA sits around saying, "Hey, this ought to make people hate us even more!")

(via Lynn Sislo)

I got 10/10 on this space quiz. I'm something of a space buff, but this one's still pretty easy, I thought.

At the end of this blog post, I found the following generalization of what differentiates liberals from conservatives:

Conservatives measure how far they are from the bottom and are mostly satisfied. Liberals measure how far we are from the top and think we need to work harder.

Anyone agree? Disagree?

Here's an interesting thought experiment/parlor game question, via Terry Teachout: You have a lot of money -- a seven-figure amount -- that you're can donate to one arts institution in the United States. Who gets your money? Just one. (And no "Arts Councils" who will spread the money around to a bunch of artists!)

I'd give it to the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, myself.

So what do you do when a President you really don't like proposes something you really want? Like Bush's impending space policy announcement?

I'm a bit surprised by this, because Bush has never struck me as the kind of President who's remotely interested in science or much else in that realm. It's an election year, and obviously they kept this in a drawer just in case the Spirit Rover mission failed. But, I've long felt dismay over the "ho-hum" attitude toward space we've pretty much embraced since the Apollo missions ended, so if he's sincere, well -- it's not remotely enough to make me vote for him, but I'll be sorely disappointed if the eventual Democratic nominee pooh-poohs the idea.

Yet another variant of the "Geek Quiz", this one focusing on "nerdiness". I got fifty percent, which I gather is a decent score. This one's actually kind of fun, because the questions don't identify the subject matter -- you're just supposed to know.

La Befana, the Christmas witch. This is a really fine piece of writing, and a lovely fable.

This is in breathtakingly poor taste, but that's probably to be expected, given the source. I'm an animal lover, but I think PETA is just plain nuts. Anyone else?

(Although I must confess that given my particularly dark sense of humor, I found the picture of the psychotic knife-wielding June Cleaver-esque mommy rather amusing.)

Of all the crap I ever had to endure in grade school, I am firmly convinced that the diagramming of sentences was the most spectacularly useless. But it evidently occurred to someone that, since the Preamble to the United States Constitution is a single sentence, well by golly, it should be diagrammed!

Oy.

(via TNH's Particles)

So, did anyone else despise diagramming sentences the way I did?

OK, that last post obviously didn't take. Let's try another Wired article (though I'm dubious about y'all's love for Wired):

Memo
To: The next head of the Motion Picture Association of America (to be opened upon arrival)
Subject: How Hollywood can avoid the fate of the music industry

Do you dream of movies on demand over broadband?

From the latest issue of Wired (this was a good one): 101 ways to save the Internet.

Do you agree that the Internet is in danger? What are your favorite suggestions for saving it? Discuss.

FBI Issues Alert Against Almanac Carriers
I thought that this was a joke when I saw it in my in box. I guess not.

Hey amigos, it's been a long time, but I finally returned to blogging, maybe for good this time.

Since I know how much folks like the maps, I thought I would share this:



With the 2004 Presidential Election fast approaching, we might ~look forward~ to the onslaught of maps that paint the U.S. red and blue, illustrating which states lend their political support to Bush, and which states will back the Democratic Challenger To Be Announced. CommonWealth Magazine takes a more nuanced view of the American Electorate, and has divided the country into ten regions that spread beyond state boundaries, using counties as their unit of analysis. Although it will take quite a while to truly absorb the methods CommonWealth used, much less understand the ramifications for the candidates vis-a-vis campaign strategy, I highly recommend taking the time to read about our fractured electorate.

(via Sennoma's newly-created, terribly promising Malice Aforethought)

I'll probably have more to say about this on my own blog, but I thought I'd send up a trial balloon here. In the course of the Lord of the Rings films over the last two years, I've seen the sentiment often expressed that the movies aren't merely excellent tellings of Tolkien's story, but superior tellings of Tolkien's story. For example, here's a representative quote from John Scalzi:

The filmed version of the tale is a better film than the book version is a book, because the storyteller in the film tells the story better. Middle-Earth is undoubtedly Tolkien's world. But Jackson is the better teller of this particular tale.

Part of Scalzi's argument is that the books are not great literature, an idea which I reject utterly, and in fact I've been holding off on responding to this because I don't want to foam at the mouth. Anyone else want to say anything on this? Are the books great literature? I, for one, think that they indisputably are, and as much as I love the films, I don't think for one second that they tell the story better than the books.

"Why I Hate The Lord of the Rings", by some hack Hollywood writer. How much of a hack is he? He uses two different spellings of "Isildur" within three sentences of each other, and neither is correct. And more hackery on display, too!

And to think, this guy got paid for this piece.

Yeah, I'm pretty geeked for Wednesday

Some links in the meantime: What not to do during Return of the King, A Peter Jackson version of the Hobbit?, and Fellowship of the Nitpickers. Anyone else already got their tickets? I got mine this morning for an 8:30 showing Wednesday night at a Digital theater.

I won't pretend to understand everything about it, but frozen light seems awfully cool to me.

I've been enjoying quite a bit of historical fiction lately. I just read 'Gates of Fire' by Stephen Pressfield about the stand of 300 Spartans against thousands of Persians at Thermopylae. It was excellent. One of my favorites is 'Shogun'. I recently read 'Horatio Hornblower' and enjoyed them.

Do you read historical fiction? What are your favorites?

The FDNY's "Dirty Little Secret": At least a dozen of New York's Bravest - some of them assigned to look after Sept. 11 widows - have left their wives for the spouses of their comrades killed in the terror attacks, sources told The Post.

"It's disgusting, heartbreaking what they've done," said Mary Koenig, whose husband, Gerry Koenig of Staten Island's Rescue 5 squad, ditched her and their two kids for Madeline Bergin, the widow of his friend and firehouse mate, John Bergin, after the World Trade Center attacks.

An insider who has worked with firefighter families and a counselor who worked for one of the FDNY services told The Post there are about a dozen cases similar to the Koenigs.

I can kind of see how this would happen, but it's pretty sad. I'm not sure that better counseling for surviving firefighters and widows would have a great impact, but I don't know what else could possibly work.

(via anil)

Hmmmm....here's a brief movie called iPod's Dirty Secret. Interesting....for iPod users, is the "Dirty Secret" true, and if so, isn't this the kind of thing that usually draws accusations of Evil Incarnate if Microsoft happens to do them?

(via The Punning Pundit.)

OK, as long as I'm dusting the cobwebs out of here, I should direct any readers with connections to small liberal arts colleges located in Northeastern Iowa to check out Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column, which is now hosted at NFL.com. Scroll down to "Obscure College Football Score of the Week #2".

1. CBS makes a movie about Ronald Reagan.

2. Said movie isn't sufficiently fawning about Reagan for conservative tastes.

3. Said conservatives scream bloody murder about the "liberal media".

4. CBS caves; moves movie to Showtime.

So, is this the liberal media run amok, trampling the memory of a great leader? Or is this thin-skinned conservatives unable to stand the slightest criticism of their sacred cows?

Time for the ever-popular "Where are you on the political spectrum?" quiz, which has me being pretty liberal and pretty libertarian. My results, and link to the quiz, here. (It takes five to ten minutes.)

Timothy Noah on Amazon's new "search inside the book" feature. Is this feature useful? I'm really not sure that it is, and I definitely think that it needs an off-switch. For instance, if I just want to get a Stephen King book, should I be forced to wade through every book that somewhere in its pages includes the words "Stephen" or "King"? This thing strikes me as an example of rolling something out before it's ready. Thoughts?

Kevin Drum posts a couple of excerpts from the President's news conference yesterday.

It's probably a given that George W. Bush is not the best speaker out there -- he's adequate with a prepared text, but in my ears he's dreadful off the cuff. Is this important? What should be our reaction to a President of the United States who uses words like "unsticker"? Should we be amused, mortified, ambivalent? Does this indicate anything?

Russia has a new clinic for alcoholics.

Children alcoholics.

Oops!.. I did it again

Ever get an earworm? You know, those songs that get stuck in your head, sometimes for days? For the longest time Ms. Spears had a strangle hold on my brain. Chili's jingles also often plague me. For the exorcism of these malevolent musical maladies, I usually try to get a more appealing song to force the worm out. Too often though this humming to myself will not work, and I am stuck with it until I can gain access to a more apt aural antidote. The most persistent may require a full dose of Beck's Odelay.

Most of the time though, I don't mind the infestations, as they tend to be songs I enjoy (Mitsubishi commercials usually fall into this category). They can even help when there is no stereo around. Friendly earworms are always welcome on long motorcycle rides.

So what are some of your earworms, and how do you get rid of them?

(cross-poted to ABOHO)

Speaking of book clubs, do remember to complete this (inevitable) Brothers Karamazov Personality Test on your way out.

A blogger named "Slacktivist" has decided to do an exhaustive review of the Left Behind books -- start here and move forward. What's interesting is that Slacktivist is doing this not a book at a time, but a page at a time. Of course, I don't expect him to get all that far into the project.

Has anyone here read these? I haven't, but I've scanned them several times in bookstores, enough to be turned off by the prose and the ragged right-hand margins in the copies I saw.

The people have spoken. Well, the Brits anyways. In April, the Beeb's "Big Read" began the search for the nation's best-loved novel, and we asked citizens to nominate their favourite books. Find the results here and here. Top 21 are here and you can vote if you fake being across the pond.

And is this just an excuse to bump the Collab Book Club discussion up a little bit? You're damn right! So, I Claudius or Brief History of Time?

OK, folks, is Mother Teresa worthy of Sainthood? (Depending, of course, on your level of hostility toward the whole idea of Sainthood in the first place.) Here's a MeFi thread about her.

Time for the ever-popular "Caption This Photo of the President"!

Keeping with the automotive theme, is anyone else here, like myself, a big fan of Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers? I love their show, especially the Puzzler and "Stump the Chumps!" Here are some of their classic clips.

Here's an article (a fairly commercial article, but an article nonetheless) about the return of the station wagon. So, what do we all drive, would we drive a station wagon, are minivans really inherently uncool, and what vehicle did we hate the most?

For the Cubs-fans among us: stuff that's happened since their last World Series championship. Wow.

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?"