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We "discovered" the Junie B. Jones books earlier this year and have had a lot of fun reading through the entire series with Charlotte as her bedtime stories. We've read almost all of the books that take place in her kindergarten, and have even jumped ahead a few to read several of the first grade adventures. Charlotte gets a lot of enjoyment out of the stories, and I get to have fun coming up with all the voices of the characters.
When we first learned about the series, I believe it was Charlotte's kindergarten teacher who told us about them. Right off the bat she let us know that sometimes Junie B. does not use correct grammar or correct words. Okay, fine. Five-year-olds are not known for their impeccable grammar or grasp of English verb tense exceptions. It's to be expected, particularly in the context of being used in a novel where the main character is the narrator AND a five-year-old to boot. But who knew this was such a heated battle among parents?
Frankly, I don't expect every single thing my child encounters to have to be a formal learning experience. I suspect that a lot of the people who are so upset about Junie B. Jones are also the sort of people who feel their children should wear a helmet at all times and never eat anything that wasn't personally hand-grown by their own private organic farmer. Indeed, isn't one of the ways we improve our command of the language through being exposed to its improper use in a way that helps us understand the errors being made? We're already turning into a society full of illiterate morons, drowning in an ocean of bad grammar, bad taste, and bad judgment; you would think that people could see this as an opportunity to point out the errors and share a little one-on-one parent-child education.
It's not that I don't have a few criticisms of the books myself. It's pretty obvious to me that Barbara Park, the author, is writing for theparents as much if not more than the children who hear these stories. Sometimes too much so. A lot of Junie B.'s speech affectations and word choices are meant to deliberately draw a laugh from the grown-up reader and are somewhat lost on the child. It's okay in small doses, but as the cumulative effect of reading the books builds up, it gets old. If she really wants to write to the adults, then the affectations do not need to be so in-your-face, and some attention should go to developing the adult characters who appear routinely in the books but as little more than flabbergasted foils. Character development of everyone other than Junie B. is pretty much non-existant. But I think those are minor quibbles.
Permalink | Comments (0)Now here's something you don't see every day: it has been ten years since David Shenk's book "Data Smog" first appeared. Today, at Slate, the author himself revisits the book, acknowledges where he was wrong, and considers how much (and how little) the information overload has changed since 1997.
It's refreshing to see someone who wrote a book that was so fixed to its own moment in time and yet made so many assertions about the future willing to sit down for a few mea culpas. Of course, a lot of what he wrote was spot-on back then and only continues to be all the more real for us now, so he doesn't have to backpedal or equivocate at all; he can just admit to the few overblown assertions and/or bad predictions, confident that he did make his point the first time.
Permalink | Comments (0)Sorry to be a bit delayed with today's posts, I found myself caught up in some mid-morning meetings just at the point in my day where I usually post.
Besides which, all anybody can seem to post about today is the Rhode Island Death Cat. I found him here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and, of course, here. And those are just the sites I visit regularly.
That sumbitchin' cat gets around!
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Okay, some of these stories are not new, and I suspect some of them aren't even true, but this page has a pretty good collection of stories about the idiotic things people are capable of. I especially enjoyed the first one.
Strangly, there are no mentions of the TSA anywhere on that page. Maybe whoever put up that page is afraid of being blacklisted.
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A laurel and hardy handshake to my former co-workers at IDEO Boston (which, for the moment, is still technically IDEO Lexington, but is soon to be IDEO Cambridge). They picked up four of this year's IDEA Awards for their work on the new Eclipse 500 Very Light Jet.
It's nothing new for IDEO to win a pant-load of IDEA Awards, but since I know some of the people involved, I just wanted to offer them my personal congratulations.
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Just when you think every possible bit of fanboy appreciation has been milked out of "Star Trek", somebody manages to find ONE MORE ARTICLE. At least this one is entertaining: the folks at Modern Drunkard magazine have put down their drinks long enough to write an article about what a bunch of boozehounds Captain Kirk and Crew were back in the day, and what a load of tea-drinking posers the ST:TNG crew were by comparison (via)
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Yesterday, our dear friend Suzette was complaining about people who say that New Jersey is a Zone 6 climate. She says it's more like Zone 7, similar to the weather found in North Carolina.
Today, Joe at bookofjoe has a post about the northward creep of the hardiness zones from 1990 to 2006, which seems to prove her point. It might be a little hard to see in that picture above, but if you look at a larger version, you can see that much of New Jersey has seen a +1 change of zone.
Eastern Massachusetts has remained a Zone 6 area (the warming effect of the ocean making our climate much milder than the rest of New England), but over the last 16 years the rest of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island have also warmed up to Zone 6, and now even much of New Hampshire and Vermont have warmed up to Zone 5, which is more typical of the Upper Midwest...or what used to be typical 16 years ago, I guess.
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It might be a little difficult for you to make out, but that picture is a screenshot of a video of a seagull stealing a package of Doritos from a beachside convenience store in England.
According to the Daily Mail article (via), the bird always takes the same flavor -- Chili HeatWave -- and does this on a daily basis. His M.O. is always the same: he comes in when the door is ajar, looks to see if the store owner is paying attention, grabs the Doritos, and hightails it. Once back outside, he enlists the aid of the pigeons to open the bag and gives them their cut of the action.
Don't believe it? Watch the video!
I wonder if he's part of a sort of bird mafia, working along with those coin-thieving starlings
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This short American Heritage web article (via) talks about the rise and fall of one of the first major national retailers in the United States: F. W. Woolworth's.
The American Heritage article doesn't go into a lot of detail except to point out that the culprit behind Woolworth's demise was suburbanization. The actual discount retail concept itself hasn't even remotely gone away, it has just reshaped itself into Wal-Mart and has even found a niche in the flourishing "dollar store" retailers. Some local "five and dime" stores remain even to this day, particularly in towns that go out of their way to retain "local character".
Among my own earliest memories is being taken to Woolworth's by my grandmother and riding the escalator. Sometimes we would even eat at the lunch counter. Marcel Proust would be pleased to know that my strongest memory of the place is the smell, which includes the unmistakable aroma of stale buttered popcorn, the mingled perfume of hundreds of old ladies, and a je ne sais quoi that I can only call "department store". I've never been in a Wal-Mart that smelled like a Woolworth's, although I have found the same aroma in other department stores.
Even though Wal-Mart seems invincible, I think the take-away from this article is that all things must pass, and the greatest giants are often humbled even as they seem most powerful. Nice to know that insignificance is an equal-opportunity effect.
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You know who else is rapidly approaching complete insignificance? Newspapers, that's who.
They may put a brave face on it -- they alternatingly talk smack about bloggers and then try to suck up to them, they've tried to recapture younger readers with targeted mini-papers, and so on -- but this WSJ article lays it on the line. The newspaper business is getting measured for its coffin and the undertaker is not the blogs but Craig's List, abetted by eBay and similar online venues for selling your junk.
Why, it's so bad that even REAL newspapers like the Weekly World News are going under.
(graph and WSJ link via Tom McMahon)
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Back in 2004, in the wake of George Bush's narrow (and most likely fraudulent) defeat of John Kerry, author and historian Garry Wills famously wrote in the New York Times about the clouds of a new "Un-Enlightenment" amassing over us.
In the three years since, the whirlwind of willful ignorance and public denial of nearly every facet of reason, science, and empiricism has only gained strength. It's really hard for me to even begin to understand what is driving this wholesale rejection of the amazing discoveries and additions to human knowledge that are perhaps the only positive hallmark of the 20th Century, but there's no denying that the people who push for a world-view based on fear, ignorance, and the rejection of empiricism in favor of blind faith have gained far more support than I (or anyone else, for that matter) could have possibly imagined when I read Wills' op-ed then.
This Guardian article reviews a new book by Natalie Angier called "The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science", and in the process considers a fundamental problem that may go a long way to explaining our culture's breathtaking abandonment of reason: our society relegates almost all of our basic education of science to our earliest years of education, turning away from science, math, and other "hard" topics to "softer" ones when children reach their teen years (literature, art, music). As a result, we are left with a decidedly imperfect understanding of even the most basic tenets of science and math, which, if we do not pursue them ourselves in college, become dim and only vaguely understood at all. Consequently, it's all too easy for the current crop of demagogues, charlatans, and evil-doers to swoop in and convince people with anything that sounds remotely plausible like "intelligent design" or even totally implausible like miracles, faces-in-pizza-slices, hurricanes "punishing" people for "evil", and so on.
Even people who might otherwise know their stuff about their own area of expertise are not immune to this -- see the quiz the Guardian gave to some notable public figures in Britain about basic science facts, and see how poorly they did. In our daily lives, it might not matter if we know why salt dissolves in water or what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is, but our collective ignorance weakens our ability to resist the charismatic lures of the Willful Ignorant.
Check out this web page with a whole list of common misconceptions about basic science -- stuff you thought you knew, but you really don't. Or maybe you did when you were 8 or 9 years old, but have long since forgotten. I have to cop to not knowing the first one on the list myself, and these are all pretty obvious items.
Al Gore's new book "The Assault On Reason", takes on some of the other culprits -- our over-entertained culture, the information overload from corporations and agenda-driven media organizations, and others -- but I find a lot of power in the argument that we simply waste the power of education by misdirecting it. And I think it extends beyond the current battleground of science -- how many Americans never learn a shred of history beyond what is taught to them in elementary school, with the result that the overwhelming majority of Americans do not have a realistic picture of the root causes of the Civil War, the political context of American intervention in World Wars I and II, or the misguided foreign policies of the Cold War that have led us to our current disastrous situation in Iraq.
Collectively, we're getting more and more ignorant with each succeeding generation, and the damage is beginning to show. I'm on hiatus from heavy-duty ranting, so I'll share this blogger's screed with you because he sums it up so well.
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The Three Gorges Dam project is slated for completion in 2009 (the dam itself was finished last year), but this Discovery Channel story says that local climatological and meteorlogical changes caused by the dam are already observable -- noticeable changes in rainfall now are expected to increase in magnitude as the project completes.
If you read that first linked page all the way to the bottom, you'll find some more links to environmental changes that are likely to occur because of the dam: a loss of silt deposits at the mouth of the Yangtze near Shanghai, and the likely disappearance of a major fishing area in the East China Sea are only two of the larger threats being monitored.
Today is the 38th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. I was not quite Charlotte's age in July of 1969, but I remember watching as much of this as my parents would let me, hunkered down in their bedroom in front of the little television they had in there.
Funny, I don't remember it happening like this (YouTube, lots of profanity), but I was pretty little at the time.
Relatedly, this story talks about a recent meeting-of-minds among various engineering and science teams who are contributing to the early phases of designing a manned mission to Mars. It's the first time anyone hs gotten them together to talk about the difficulties in designing the landing system that will be required. Mars presents some challenges that previous space programs haven't had to deal with -- primarily, landing a very heavy orbiter in a very thin atmosphere and getting everybody inside the craft safely on the surface. The fact that 60% of all unmanned missions to Mars have failed to land successfully isn't terribly encouraging, but they've got some interesting ideas.
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My friends at The Big Red House Forum and I have been entertaining ourselves for the last few months playing a variation of the board game "Scrabble" that I devised. They're very good at the game, so I have to keep ratcheting up the difficulty level to keep it challenging. This week we added Triple Word and Triple Letter scoring bonuses, and it has everybody working a little harder to make sure they're getting every possible point.
So, I just had to post this link to this craft blogger who makes rings out of old Scrabble tiles. (via) She also makes these Scrabble tile knitting markers
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Vanity Fair editor Cullen Murphy is only the latest person to consider the obvious comparisons between the United States and the Roman Empire in his new book "Are We Rome", but I liked this interview with him on The Atlantic Monthly's website (prior to joining Vanity Fair, Murphy was the editor of The Atlantic for many years). Compared to the pro-empire voices of people like Niall Ferguson, it's worth having someone remind us that being the "New Rome" isn't entirely a good thing.
Permalink | Comments (0)By now most everybody has had the chance to try the Simpsons avatar generator at the movie's official website. Now, Burger King has a "Simpsonize Me" site where you can upload a photo of yourself and have it automagically generate a Simpsons caricature of yourself. (bonus points to Burger King for the pun on "SuperSize Me", which was the Morgan Spurlock film that bashed fast food)
I guess I am just not meant to be part of some Simpsonian universe, because I tried both of these doodads and could not get an avatar that I thought looked the least bit like me at all.
My wife tells me I look like Hermie The Elf from "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer". Personally, I don't see it.
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2007 is the 75th anniversary of the publication of Aldous Huxley's novel "Brave New World".
Like me, you probably read the book in high school English class, along with the other two Big Novels in social allegory -- Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm". Somehow over time, these books, along with other "Big Idea" books like "Atlas Shrugged" went from being serious literature to hoary standards fit only for naive and idealistic teenagers. And so they are foisted on a generally unappreciative audience, where they are woodenly transformed into lifeless book reports and essays or breathlessly embraced by teenage minds aching for philosophical explanations of the world that they can grasp.
We are reminded almost daily of the continuing relevance of "1984" in the context of our doublespeak public sphere, in the "endless war with Eastasia", and the intrusion of "Big Brother" into our lives. But "Brave New World" is often overlooked, lumped together with science fiction novels, even though the technological elements we all remember are really just decorative trappings for a more serious consideration of what it means to be human.
This essay from the conservative-leaning technology journal "The New Atlantis" revisits the book's themes and considers them in the context of our own times, as they prove to have a great deal of resonance with current social issues.
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So, I just read this post by one of the contributors at Mental Floss, where she did a little quick figuring to address the question of how likely it is that anyone from a given state in the U.S. will be from that state's largest city. In other words, if you're from New York, how likely is it that you're from New York City?
In the case of New York and NYC, it's actually almost a 50-50 proposition that a New Yorker is also a New Yorker, if you follow me. But she looked at a bunch of cities and has posted the results for your interest.
Somehow, she left Boston off the list. Tragic oversight, obviously. So here I am to fill in the gaps for you.
The City of Boston's estimated population as of 2005 is roughly 559,000 people (and you thought Boston was A LOT bigger, didn't you?). The population of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was 6,437,193 in 2006. you can do your own math, but the answer is that only 8.68% of the people who live in Massachusetts are residents of Boston.
Which seems to fly in the face of reason, right? Well, that's because most of us who "live in Boston" actually live in the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area, our grandparents having had the good sense to flee the city decades ago in favor of such charming burbs as Everett, Randolph, and the like.
According to that Wikipedia link, these days the reach of the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area extends to about 30% of the total area of the state and has a population of 4,411,835. That's 68.53% of the total population of Massachusetts, meaning 2 out of every 3 people in Massachusetts are "from Boston" in the larger sense. If you fold in some of the satellite cities that are also considered part of the total statistical area such as Manchester NH, Providence RI and Worcester MA, the overall population is 7,427,336, or 115% of the population of Massachusetts.
That's a lot of Massholes.
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I'm sure you've probably read or heard about the flotilla of thousands of rubber duckies that have been drifting around the ocean for the last 15 years and are set to make landfall on the western coast of Britain this summer.
Maybe they're headed back to the mothership. This massive rubber duck is spending its summer in the Loire River estuary in France, patiently waiting for all those little duckies to swim home.
Permalink | Comments (0)a.k.a My Childhood Treasures!
This blogger has thoughtfully put together a list of toys he called the "most dangerous of all time." Of course, most of them come from the 1960s and 1970s when disfigurement, mutilation and risk of death were all just part of an afternoon's fun. And we LOVED it! Who cared if little Jimmy lost an eye, or if the kid we all knew as "Lefty" had to spend six months in the hospital!
Of the toys this guy has listed, I don't think we actually owned any of them ourselves, but my brothers and I definitely played with some of them. My grandparents owned a set of lawn darts for years, and we used to love to go out into their front yard and throw them as high up into the air as we could and watch them auger into the ground. We must have known someone with the Creepy Crawlers set, too; I can vaguely remember making them or something similar. If you were old enough to play with a toy like that, you were old enough to know not to eat them, but i suppose that didn't stop younger siblings. I also had a chemistry set, even though it did not contain anything radioactive. We sure used to mix up some pretty nasty stuff in the little test tubes, though.
Given that our entire society lives in a total state of panic about anything the slightest bit dangerous, you'd think that toys today would have had all the fun...I mean risk...engineered right out of them. Nevertheless, this list of recent toy recalls from the Consumer Product Safety Commission shows that there are still plenty of ways for kids to jeopardize life and limb. Hooray!
Like a lot of IT guys, I work in a very small office, surrounded by lots of computer hardware, much of which runs 24/7, cranking out a lot of heat. Even with the office HVAC, the ambient temperature in my office hovers just below 80 degrees Fahrenheit almost all the time. My den at home routinely gets up into the mid-80s in the spring and summer unless I keep the door shut and the AC cranked. It's not unbearably hot, just a little warmer than you might like to be unless it's the dead of winter.
Now, thanks to the Miracle of Technology, all that has changed! An ingenious inventor from Japan (of course) has developed a shirt with it's own built-in ventilation system -- a fan powered by one of the USB ports on your computer! (via)
If you're like me, you're already sitting at the damn thing 16 hours a day, so there's no problem at all just plugging your shirt right into one of the ports while you're at your desk to stay cool and comfortable all day long! Then, when it's time to leave the office, you can even plug into the power socket (formerly known as the cigarette lighter) for some ventilation in your sun-baked car. Plus it comes in both short- and long-sleeved styles, so you can dress up for those long, airless meetings or go biz-cazh.
As those animated fellows in the Guinness commercials say, "Brilliant!"
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My child is terrified of bugs. Doesn't matter what kind of bug -- ants, flies, mosquitoes, midges, or those creepy hairy-legged things in the corner of the bathtub -- she freaks out if she so much as THINKS one is in her vicinity. The other day, on the way home from day camp, a fairly large moth got in the car as we were getting in, and I could not get it to fly back out when I opened my window. No matter how many times I told Charlotte that the moth wouldn't hurt her, she shrieked every time it flew into the backseat area as though she were being attacked by Mothra.
After the moth finally got sucked out the window, we had a long talk about the harmlessness of moths and butterflies as compared to bees and mosquitoes, but I don't think it will really change anything. This morning she came screaming to me about a bee in her room, which turned out to be a dead midge blown from the window fan onto her bed. Oh, well.
So I am not ever telling her about this website, which ranks the relative painfulness of insect bites and stings and which puts the very common paper wasps and honeybees right near the top. On the upside, though, I don't see any moth species listed.
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Artist Zeev Zohar has designed this lovely handmade pencil that has a seed embedded at the very top so that when you've used up the pencil, you can stick the remaining nub into the ground and grow something. (via)
No, pencils do not grow ON trees. Pencils ARE trees. Spaghetti grows on trees, silly.
Permalink | Comments (0)For quite a long time, we used to have a cleaning service that came in every other week and cleaned our house. "Clean Day" was as close to a religious experience as I think I will ever have; there was such anticipation and joy at the thought of coming home to a house that seemed to magically clean itself. Even after I started my "sabbatical", we kept the cleaning service as long as we could afford to (which, in retrospect, was probably too long). Eventually though, we had to give it up and shoulder the burden of doing our own scrubbing, dusting and vacuuming. Which is, of course, why The (Real) Big Red House looks like a disaster area these days -- we SUCK at house cleaning. Lately, we've even taken to watching the BBC show "How Clean Is Your House", just so we can feel like SOMEBODY is worse than we are (and, believe me, they are).
Discipline is part of the problem for us -- our intentions are good (aren't they always?), but we're easily discouraged and always ready to procrastinate. I think if we could break things down into more manageable chunks rather than having to face an entire weekend of housecleaning, we might be more likely to do it. Or not. Who knows.
Apart from wanting to have a clean house again, we also have this notion about getting Charlotte to do some household chores. She's old enough now to be able to pick up after herself, put away her clothing, etc. But convincing her that it's worth doing includes getting ourselves back on the straight and narrow. I ran across this website at the very useful Lifehacker site a couple of weeks ago: it promises to help you devise a cleaning schedule, assign jobs to specific indivduals, and let you break down big tasks into individual steps. I don't know that lazy housekeeping can be solved with online software, but you never know.
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Continuing on our Japanese Cuisine theme from yesterday, here is a great food blog post about a visit by the blogger to one of the premiere soba noodle makers in Japan. The post has a lot of large images in it, so it will probably be quite slow to load for you, but be patient because it's worth it.
It's typically not too difficult to find packaged soba noodles in supermarkets these days, but you can also buy them online readily. As the blog post makes clear, making them by hand takes a fair amount of skill and practice compared to, say, Italian ribbon-shaped pastas, which are much more amenable to beginner cooks. The traditional recipe of soba served with a little soy-mirin dipping sauce is a great accompanyment as part of a Japanese menu. I usually stir-fry up some veggies (whatever is on hand) and toss plain, cooked soba with the veggies in a sauce of soy, rice wine, chili garlic sauce and hoisin; I know that's sort of a mish-mash of Japanese and Chinese, but the end result is pretty damn good.
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Do you remember a few years back there was a bit of a panic about a nasty fish called a "snakehead" that had been illegally dumped into some rivers and lakes and was spreading quickly? I definitely recall blogging about it at the time (my archives from that period are all offline, sorry). There were even stories that the fish could survive out of water and "walk" from one body of water to another like lungfish and mudskippers and the like.
Well, proving once again that you cna always take lemons and make lemonade, the Washington Post had this feature article in their Sunday magazine about a couple of enterprising individuals who are trying to find a way to drum up a business out of sport fishing for snakeheads. First, though, they have to figure out how to catch the damn things, but once they've got that down, they're sure they can interest the hard-core sports fishing enthusiasts to have a go at it.
(Oh, and the snakeheads can't really walk out of the water. But they have spread all up and down the Potomac. I suspect they came from Washington D.C. in the first place)
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I really like wasabi. To me, one of the signs of a superior sushi place is the sinus-clearing, head-rushing quality of the little dollop of wasabi paste they give you with your order. If I have to trowel on a big layer of wasabi paste on my nigiri sushi just to taste it, then I probably won't be buying sushi from that particular place again.
You may or may not know that most of the wasabi powder used to make the paste in sushi restaurants in this country has very little, if any, real wasabi in it at all. Usually, the powder is just extra-strong white horseradish with some green coloring added. Other times, there will be a miniscule amount of real wasabi included as well.
Apparently, the wasabi rhizome is difficult to grow, difficult to harvest, and extremely perishable, which explains why we don't get a lot of real wasabi. But this company grows "sawa" wasabi in places like Oregon and Washington and Tennessee (!), and sells whole fresh rhizomes online as well as wasabi powder and a few wasabi-based food products. (via)
Since the rhizomes sell for $45 a pound and you have to buy at least one pound, I don't suppose it's terribly likely that anyone other than a high-end sushi restaurant buys much fresh. A pound of fresh wasabi probably makes enough processed wasabi to last a lifetime. Luckily, the powdered variety comes in a more manageable and affordable amount.
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If, like the Snickers ad says, you're not going anywhere for a while, maybe you might like to try some of these guaranteed time wasters that you can do by yourself, with a friend, or with whatever you might happen to have on your person.
Or not.
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Today is the 50th anniversary of the day when two teenage boys from Liverpool -- John Lennon and Paul McCartney -- first met. The rest, as they say, is history. If you happen to be in Liverpool, there are celebratory events all weekend.
(via)
Permalink | Comments (0)About a year ago, I posted about a broadcasting industry news story that said Clear Channel was going to roll out a sort of "micro-commercial" on its radio stations.
Flash forward to yesterday: the Boston Globe reports that the four Clear Channel radio stations in Boston -- WKZS AM and FM, WJMN, and WKOX (no, really) have been using the two-second and five-second ads for some time.
Of course, they don't call them "blipverts". The two-second spots are called "blinks" and the five-second spots are called "adlets". This media blog says that they know why the 2-second spots are called "blinks": because the advertiser's money is gone in a blink, with nothing to show for it.
As this October 2006 WSJ article (reprinted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) notes, radio ad revenue has been flat for several years even as stations have added more and more time for commercials into their programming. So the underlying idea behind these extra-short ads is to let the stations cut back on time given over to ad spots, but still cram in as many spots as possible, and hope that they don't lose any more money in the process. Of course, in the interim since announcing the "blinks" and "adlets", Clear Channel has decided to get out of the radio business entirely in the wake of being bought out by Bain Capital, so who knows what will happen to these formats.
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Last week it was a story about a white whale in Australia. This week it's a pink dolphin in Louisiana!
Permalink | Comments (0)This article at MSN.com (via) has a list of ten things you may or may not already know about your supermarket, but which they'd really rather you didn't.
Some of them are kind of nasty: I really didn't need the image of my broccoli sharing territory with some toddler's poopy butt. Lately I notice that some supermarkets are putting big dispensers of anti-bacterial wipes right at the entrance to the store so you can wipe down your hands and the shopping cart before you put anything in it. By the same token, though, collectively we are WAAAAAAAAY too obsessed with the idea of germs these days, and all these anti-bacterial products are beginning to have a backlash.
Some of the others were definitely old news to me. Is there really anybody who doesn't know that end-cap displays are there to try to get you to make an impulse purchase? Is it news to anyone who ever takes their child into a supermarket that the candy and cereal aisles are stocked to put everything at kid's-eye level?
They missed out on a few other obvious things, too. For example, the rotisserie chicken ploy: you're supposed to be driven nearly mad for those overcooked birds by their enticing smell as you walk past them. Ditto for the "fresh-baked" bread. And how could they overlook the little old ladies passing out samples?
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Just over a decade ago, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts found itself with a couple of newly arrived transplants: me and purple loosestrife.
As far as I know, the state hasn't developed an eradication program for me yet, but they would really like to get rid of the loosestrife. It's a particularly aggressive invasive species and can completely take over any wetland or open field it happens to find itself in, choking out every other plant that lives there. And it spreads quickly -- it has moved north into New Hampshire and Maine faster than a weekend's worth of tourists.
Via Adam at Universal Hub, here's a link to a blog by a post-doc student named Jennifer Forman Orth who is working on one of the projects the state hopes will curtail any further spread of loosestrife. In the post, she describes releasing 7500 European Galerucella beetles, who dine almost exclusively on purple loosestrife. The Galerucella beetles have been used in loosestrife eradication projects all over the United States since 1995, with a high degree of success.
I realize that loosestrife is a pest plant, but I actually think the big fields full of the tall stalks covered in purple blossoms are very pretty when they're in bloom. When I worked in Lexington a few years ago, there were several large marshy fields right near the on/off-ramps to Rt. 128 that had been completely dominated by the loosestrife, and I used to look forward to the middle part of the summer when they would explode with color.
If my house is suddenly overrun with little beetles, though, it can only mean one of two things: either the state needs to develop a follow-up eradication plan to get rid of all the beetles...or they're out to eradicate ME.
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Try to say that five times fast, I dare ya!
Crotchy is a warm and cozy....er, crotch-thing with long skinny legs, a puffy crotch panel and...ahem...a pink button anus! Plus, check out that awesome tattoo!
I'm not exactly sure what you're supposed to do with Crotchy, but I'm sure you'll figure out something...
Permalink | Comments (1)I have to apologize for not picking up on this Wall Street Journal article about baby names while we were railing on about them last week.
This article is talking about the rarefied social strata of super-rich New Yorkers, not the trailer-park trash crowd. While the lower class kids are getting the crap names like "Nevaeh" (that's "Heaven" spell backwards, thank you, and Number 43 in the popularity list), these yuppie puppies are getting only the most fabulous and prestigious names possible thanks to a variety of baby name consultants.
Baby name consultants!! Kee-ripes! I am missing out on a perfect business opportunity here. I can offer a near 100% guarantee that if you let ME choose the name of your Precious Little Thing, they will have nothing but the BEST. NAME. EVAR. No Caden/Jayden/Hayden/Zaden nonsense, no sirree! No Madison/McKenzie/Hartford/New Haven place name for your daughter, I promise.
Plus, there's the whole unexplored sideline of being a pet naming consultant. All those commitment-phobic 20-somethings who can't bring themselves to reproduce but treat their pets like surrogate children would be all over a pet naming consulting business!
I'm going to be rich, RICH I tell you!
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Powells.com, the online version of the famed Powell's Books in Portland, OR reprints this Atlantic Monthly book review by Caitlin Flanagan of the recently published Generation MySpace.
The review really only glances at the book and also the recent book To Catch A Predator (based on that unbearable "Dateline NBC" feature of the same name) and instead the reviewer talks about her own experiments in social networking websites. She posed as a "tween" girl on a social networking site called Club Penguin to see if she would be singled out by potential pedophiles, but her results were inconclusive. She also played the role of stalker by singling out a young girl on MySpace.com and seeing how easy or difficult it would be to target her in "real life". It turned out to be extremely easy, but, as she writes, teens seem to be very aware of what they are doing by engaging in the strange public exposure of social networking websites. The review is well worth reading. The book might be, as well.
Meanwhile, via The Good Reverend, who got the story from Bruce Schneier, comes this very interesting first-hand account about how Disney tried to implement a variety of restrictions on their Toontown Online MMORPG website, only to have ingenious kids figure out several ways to defeat the restrictions in order to have open chat.
Ladies and gentlemen, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Because we are the lucky ones who get to live with the Internet as a first-generation, we're all going to be the ones who get exposed to the pluses and minuses of reinventing social communication. The 20-somethings and their younger siblings are doing the reinventing, and so they have a much better ability to negotiate the pitfalls, but some of them are nonetheless going to end up victimized by it. That's the way the world has always worked, technology notwithstanding.
Consider this recent infographic from the New York Times about how the Internet is used by different age and psychographic groups. Those of us beyond the magic age of 40 are mostly viewers and consumers, not creators or interactors. We can't help it, we were raised during the Age of Television and were completely acculturated into being passive consumers of media. The smaller subset of "older" people who ARE less passive would have been the fringy element of people who published zines, made their own home video productions, organized theater groups, etc. (you know...people like ME) Among the "younger" groups, that sort of active engagement is now the norm, not the exception.
By the time my own child hits her teenage years, a lot of the initial bumps and bruises of social networking should be gone, as the 20-somethings find themselves "grown up" and able to exert better methods of control over the interactions compared to our present dysfunctional ones. Not that everything about it will be sunshine, lollipops and roses -- every social adaptation brings with it genuine dangers and unintended consequences -- people will just be less agog about it.
Permalink | Comments (2)So I ran across this wire story the other day touting a recent opinion poll by British pollster YouGov. The story claims that the poll identified "the least popular buzzwords" of Internet culture, such as the odious "blogosphere".
Well, I am always good for a post about hideous neologisms, so I was raring to go. But when I went to YouGov's website, I couldn't find any links to the poll. So I decided to sit on the post until I could find the original source material.
Just as well, it turns out, because on Monday, A-list blogger Anil Dash had a post about it on his own blog, wherein he revealed that the entire thing was a hoax to see how many news organizations would pick up the bullshit story and run it without doing any fact-checking or real reporting.
Well, here's the answer to THAT question. Pretty much all of them, it seems.
And yet journalists are constantly belittling bloggers for not using "proper" journalistic methods in their work. Hmph.
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Looking for a little summertime weight-loss, ladies? The new diet drug Alli would love to help. It apparently works by giving you uncontrollable diarrhea; so much so that the makers recommend carrying a spare change of dark-colored clothing around wherever you go.
Not to worry, though, becuase now there's Clincal Strength Secret deodorant to help you avoid the inevitable stink.
Eeeuw.
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Of note at several news/comment blogs today is the observation that recently the Bush Administration and other spokespeople for the military in Iraq have made a shift in their rhetoric: they've taken to describing ALL anti-coalition forces in Iraq as "Al Quaeda", where previously they distinguished between Sunni, Shi'a and other factions individually.
Given their past performance, I would expect to see this trend continue, expanding to replace the names of other groups opposed to the Bush Administration such as "liberals", "the Democratic Party", "Massachusetts", and so on.
Well, I suppose Dubya was right after all when he said he was a uniter, not a divider.
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"And this part is called the thagomizer, after the late Thag Simmons" -- Gary Larson, 1982
And who says paloentologists don't have a sense of humor? Discover Magazine reminds us that the spiked tail-end of a stegosaurus REALLY IS called a "Thagomizer", in honor of this classic Far Side cartoon.
In fact, here's a message board post that dates back to 1995 citing the use of "thagomizer" in the legitimate academic literature, and you can find it mentioned in other glossaries of paleontology terms
Are you ready for a little cognitive dissonance?
The latest MSNBC/Newsweek poll tracking how well Americans know the facts about current news events is out, and the results confirm that we're getting stupider faster than ever!:
The number of people who think Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 has RISEN since the last time this poll asked the same question. 41% of Americans continue to believe that it was Saddam's evil-doing, up from 36% in October 2004.
A whopping 89% of respondents could not identify John Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. EIGHTY-NINE percent, boys and girls!! The only upside to this is that 81% could not correctly identify who won this year's "American Idol", so at least there's that.
Meanwhile...this article in The Nation by Rick Perlstein uses some findings from a 20-year meta-analysis of opinion polls from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (which many of you will know from their frequent appearances on NPR) to make the assertion that Americans are getting more and more progressive, not less (as the media tend to report).
While Perlstein is making a pitch for the resurgence of the Democratic Party, it's worth stripping away the partisan element of the piece and thinking about the poll data a little. 69% of Americans agree with the statement that "government should help those in need" (even 58% of Republicans agree with this). The same percentage, 69%, believe that the government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep.
More tidbits: 54 percent, think "government should help the needy even if it means greater debt", up from 41% 13 years ago. 75 percent of the population SUPPORT Roe v. Wade. 62 percent support amnesty and eventual legal status for illegal immigrants.
So what can we conclude from this, my friends? As a group, Americans are generally very liberal -- the "liberal" tag has simply come to mean "anything I don't like" because we've allowed the political right and the media to frame it that way. And that's part of the problem -- we're collectively, and dangerous, apathetic and uninformed to the point that a very small, very vocal, and very right-wing minority has been able to dictate the terms of public discourse. The disconnect between the core beliefs of the majority of the American people and the current political powers-that-be is significant to the point that people like Vice President Dick Cheney have been able to all-but-overthrow our representative government and replace it with a plutocratic authoritarian dictat.
Permalink | Comments (0)If you're a regular reader, you know that among my petty annoyances are stupid baby names.
This Guardian story from April talks about a recent University of Florida study which concluded that people do form pre-conceived notions about other people based on their names -- in particular, people will presume levels of competence based on the assumed masculinity or femininity of a name. Moreover, that can actually translate into real performance.
The article goes on to talk about "chav" names ("chav" is a British slang term for lower-class people, somewhat akin to the American term "trailer-park trash" or "wigger"). In a study of 55,000 children, those with "lower-status" names (i.e. made-up names, non-standard spellings of traditional names, etc...you know, the names that drive me batshit) scored 3-5% lower on standardized educational tests.
In other words...if your daughter has a name that's perceived as very feminine, she might find herself trained into thinking she is less able at math or science than if she has a more androgynous name. AND, if your kid is named Mykayla or Kaitlynn or Lemonjello or something like that, she has another knock against her.
My daughter has a name that definitely falls into the "feminine" category, I think, even though it's not listed in that Guardian piece. But one of the common nicknames for girls named "Charlotte" is "Charlie", which is unquestionably more masculine (she is, in fact, named after my father-in-law). So I'll be interested to see if this particular form of gender bias comes her way as she begins her school career in earnest.
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This fellow from Maine has built himself a canoe-sized replica of the German battleship Graf Spee. He can even sit inside the boat himself and pilot the craft around the lake where he lives.
Let that serve as a warning to all you Massholes on vacation with your jet skis.
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Remember the guy who posted the DIY on making your own Green Lantern rings?
He's kicked it up a notch with instructions for making your very own GLOWING Green Lantern ring using molded resin and a green LED. (via)
The poster in question is a professional jewelry maker, so suffice it to say that he has skills, knowledge and tools that 99.999% of us don't. Consequently, I doubt very few people are going to rush right out and do this at home. And he's also put the kibosh on people requesting that he make rings for them because he doesn't want to incur the wrath of DC Comics. If I were him, though, I'd be trying to negotiate licensing with DC so he could sell them. I know I would want to buy one if I could.
Permalink | Comments (1)Not quite six weeks ago, I posted about Electronic Arts hinting that the release of the highly-anticipated Wil Wright game "Spore" was going to be pushed back to late 2008.
Now comes the news that EA has pushed it all the way back to "sometime in 2009". The game industry mags are speculating that the delay is so that the game developers can do console versions, since the market for games that only play on the PC platform continues to shrivel. Given the complexity of the game as it has been demoed to date, that's no small challenge, I'm sure.
There's also the outside possibility that this game will simply never materialize, a la the infamous "Duke Nuke'm Forever" which has been "in development" for 10 years running with no release in sight. Seems to me I have been reading about "Spore" since 2003, and a push-back to 2009 makes for an awfully long development process, even for a game that everyone has already chalked up as "great" before even playing it.
*LE SIGH*
I guess I'll just have to spend more time with my new Nintendo DS Lite (Fathers' Day gift, dontchaknow). I hear Sid Meier's going to make a DS version of Civilization IV!
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Is this REALLY how low political journalists can go? Crooks & Liars posts about MSNBC "pundit" Chris Matthews pratically fawning over Republican Fred Thompson based on how good he smells:
"Can you smell the English leather on this guy, the Aqua Velva, the sort of mature man's shaving cream, or whatever, you know, after he shaved? Do you smell that sort of -- a little bit of cigar smoke?"
Jesus Tittyfucking Christ! It sounds like Matthews is more interested in getting poked by Thompson's cigar (if you know what I mean) than whether or not the man has the slightest qualification to occupy the Oval Office (not that a lack of qualifications stopped the present occupant).
Just when you think the lapdogs of the press can sink no lower in their complete and utter servility to the Republican Party, they find even new ways to drag it down to an even lower level of absurdity. Should we really be basing our voting behavior on choice of aftershave or perfume?
Meanwhile, dear old blog-buddy Suzette (who seems to have rejoined the blogging world after a prolonged absence) reports that she stumbled into a Hillary Clinton campaign event while at a local Chinese restaurant. Among her observations of HRC: her ass is not as big as Suzette expected, but her feet are huge, and she does not stink. Given that Suzette is herself a rabid anti-Hillary Republican, that amounts to high praise as far as I can tell.
If we're down to worrying about how all these people SMELL, it's going to be a looooooooong campaign.
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Tony Blair's permanent summer vacation starts next week, and the British press are indulging in the obligatory "legacy" and "last days" stories.
The overwhelming consensus is that Blair's decision to support George Bush so closely on Iraq has nearly overwhelmed anything and everything else he accomplished as PM. Blair had already been PM for several years when the Bushies stole the 2000 election, and his initial splash on the world stage was very different than the lockstep lickspittle position he found himself in after 2001. "New Labour" and the "Third Way", which had hallmarked his relationship with Bill Clinton, took distant backseats. Still, the overall popular sentiment in Britain is that Blair did a good job on most things EXCEPT Iraq, and he leaves office with much higher public approval ratings than Dubya will.
Here's a piece from 3QuarksDaily contributor Matthias Matthijs that considers the successes and failures of Tony Blair as well as the prospects for his "heir apparent" Gordon Brown (link goes to an interview with Brown in this week's Time Magazine). Matthijs says don't expect much different from Brown.
This brief story from the BBC frames the legacy question in Blair's appearance before the House of Commons liaison committee last week, during which Blair himself was given the opportunity to present his spin on how his administration went and why he did the things he did. Blair said that he always did what he believed was the right thing. It's that very notion of falling back on his own inner sense of "right vs wrong", which, not surprisingly is shaped by his devout Christian faith, that failed him so badly.
This piece in The Guardian by author Martin Amis (one of my favorite writers, BTW), is a much closer look at Tony Blair. Amis was allowed to tag along with Blair recently and get substantial 1-on-1 time with him. Amis writes about the visible ebbing of power from Blair in these final days, and about the strange and rarified world the PM lives in (and, in one of my favorite parts of the article, how incredibly different that world is from the world of the President of the United States). In this article, Blair's own whip-smart mind and his self-awareness come through -- the comparisons to Bush's lack of curiosity and his need to be surrounded by fawning sycophants who keep up the illusion of his imperial throne are powerful.
If you read all three pieces, I think you'll be left with a very good and well-nuanced sense of Blair and his mostly unwanted legacy. Blair is still a young man in terms of political careers, much like Bill Clinton, so it's unlikely that he'll disappear entirely from the world stage. Blair has always had to endure comparisons to Clinton, but most of the time those comparisons are apt. Bill Clinton has done some very interesting tap dancing since 2000, but his circumstances are quite different than Blair's (I don't think anyone expects Cherie Blair to turn up as the next Labour PM), so Blair has the chance to chart a different post-power course. For his sake, I hope he puts as much distance between himself and George Bush as possible and recovers some of his promise.
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This Daily Mail article got a lot of blog coverage last week, but I wanted to write about it myself. The basic premise of the story is that children today are not allowed to wander very far from home and the watchful eye of a parent. The allowable perimeter has been shrinking for nearly a century as the map above indicates (Here is a link to the full-size image at the Daily Mail site in case you want to see much more detail). The reporter also brings up evidence that lack of interaction with the outdoors may be a factor in developing depression and anxiety, as well as the more obvious issues with lack of exercise.
The basic findings of the study cited are a bit self-evident, but the graphic really brings home the drastic reduction in allowable roaming space, I think. What stuck out for me was how much smaller the perimeter had become for the boy born in 1950 compared to his own father's. Usually when this issue comes up, people of my generation (say, anyone between 35 and 55) tend to think that we had a lot more leeway to go wherever we wanted, yet even we were a good deal more circumscribed.
This issue almost always gets played as a contemporary societal issue, but it seems to me that this article and the study it discusses belie that. Clearly, it's a trend that has been going on for a century. The urbanization of the places where most of us hail from is a contributing factor, certainly, but probably not enough to explain the entire reduction. Similarly, this leads me to think that our current fear-driven culture is not entirely to blame; I think it does probably explain the really drastic limitation modern children, but it's just exacerbating an existing trend.
Implied in the article is that because kids don't go out to play, they stay at home and veg out, and I'm not sure I buy that. Unstructured outdoor play has been supplanted with heavily-structured activity schedules, as I can now speak to from first-hand experience. Some of those activities are outdoor, some are not, so it's probably fair to say that contemporary children do spend less time in outdoor play to some degree, but not to the total exclusion of it.
I find myself a bit torn about how to process this information, frankly. It's a little too facile to adopt the "when I was a kid" argument here, for the reason I cited above, but also because it's unreasonable to expect that the world will never change from the way it was when you were a kid (a lesson A LOT of conservatives need to learn). On the other hand, the present-day obsession with unlikely threats coupled with the "nanny-state" response from people who make policy is equally unreasonable. I will say that seeing the graphic has made me start thinking about how we'll apply perimeter restrictions to Charlotte and how other parents' restrictions are likely to have an effect on her.
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NEWS FLASH! President John F. Kennedy is STILL dead some 44 years and 6 months after his assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
Wired has an interview with lawyer-researcher-writer Vincent Bugliosi to promote his new and apparently very exhaustive book about the Kennedy assassination, Reclaiming History.
Bugliosi once again reaffirms the finding of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing John Kennedy. No matter how many conspiracy theories are launched, no matter how many ways people have tried to slice and dice and spin the evidence, Bugliosi says, the answer is always the same. And the net result -- the death of the President -- remains unchanged for all time.
While I note that Bugliosi isn't adverse to cashing in one more time on this, the time really has come to stop with the obsession. Think of it this way -- it'll give people all that much more time to obsess about the 9/11 conspiracy with Rosie O'Donnell.
Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. North America and all the ships at sea...
NEWS FLASH! Paleontologists in China have uncovered the remains of a huge raptor that helps sceintists bridge the evolutionary gap from dinosaurs to modern birds. Gigantoraptor erlianensis was 10-12 feet in height and weighed over 3000 pounds, and sported feathers and a beak.
NEWS FLASH! British researchers have discovered that plants have the ability to detect other plants of the same species in their area through "recognition" of chemical patterns in the surrounding soil. Furthermore, individual plants will respond to this information and change their absorption of nutrients in the soil to benefit the overall survival of their "siblings".
NEWS FLASH! An independent consortium of research agencies studiyng the human genome has released a study which finds that so-called "junk DNA" is actually far more crucial to determining genetic traits than previously believed and may, in fact, be more important to the overall function of the genome than individual genes. These findings challenge much current thinking about human genetics, but at the same time also promise to yield a much better understanding of the biochemical process of life.
NEWS FLASH! A whopping 68 percent of registered Republican voters DO NOT BELIEVE any of the above. This recent Gallup/USA Today poll produced some truly disturbing results that show that in the overall population, 44% of Americans do not believe in evolution. When analyzed for religious affiliation, fundamentalist Protestants and so-called "moderate" Protestants reject modern science in favor of mythology and make-believe by a wide margin, with Catholics only slightly more likely to believe in science. Seculars and Jews were the most likely to believe in science and evolution.
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On his blog "Marginal Revolution", economist Tyler Cowen links to this 2006 speech given by former Soviet Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar about the political and economic collapse of the Soviet Union.
Gaidar says it can all be summed up in three words: oil and grain. The grain problem dated all the way back to the 1950s as the Soviets struggled to increase grain production in the face of a population boom. They failed and went from becoming the largest exporter of grain to one of the largest importers of grain. Meanwhile, over time the Soviet government had come to rely heavily on revenue from selling oil, and even though Soviet oil production had diminished substantially over the years, the high market price of oil in the 1970s kept the overall revenue picture satisfactory.
Gaidar is direct in his analysis:
The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.
The collapse of the oil market was directly responsible for the bankruptcy of the Soviet economy -- without oil revenue, the Soviets could not pay for grain imports, could not continue to funnel cash into the war in Afghanistan, and could not bludgeon international lenders into bailing them out. By 1989, Gorbachev had no choice but to start bargaining away political concessions to the West in hopes of attracting money. By 1991, the political state of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was extinct.
Um, I don't see much mention of The Gipper in that analysis. You remember The Gipper, right? The guy who "won" the Cold War? Yes, the same guy who turned down the ultimate political concession -- total nuclear disarmament -- when Gorby offered it, hat in hand, in Reykjavik.
Good links -- the Gaidar speech is illustrated with some useful graphs and is very accessible even to those of us who aren't economists.
Permalink | Comments (0)Wired game column editor Chris Kohler had this interesting op-ed on Monday. He was writing in response to an interview in USA Today with another videogame industry journalist, wherein the journalist said he thought that the huge success of the Nintendo Wii was a "bubble" that could "burst any day".
Kohler disagrees (as do most analysts), and offers up some thoughts on the four core segments of the videogame market -- who they are, how they influence the game manufacturers, and how likely they are to be affected by a "bubble burst". I thought it was very insightful. The editorial format more or less forces him to skip on fleshing out the ideas, but that's why so many journalists write books based on their articles, isn't it? I'd be very interested to see him expand on the typology of gamers and their relationships to the products themselves.
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No, this isn't about Jack Kevorkian. We'll get to him another time (hint: I agree with him).
Instead, the title refers to a beverage that anyone who's ever spent any time working in a fast-food restaurant is certainly familiar with -- the one where you mix up a little bit of everything in the soda fountain into one strange amalgam of sugary syrup and fizz. Recently at Ask MetaFilter, there was a great thread about this drink where the commenters shared their favorite combinations, and the majority consensus was that the drink itself is called a "Suicide".
You can't really buy a Suicide per se at your favorite QSR, but since so many places now have self-service soda fountains, it's pretty easy to mix up just about anything you have the imagination to devise. (Just don't complain when the drink you came up with tastes awful.)
Now, Bloomberg Media reports that Coca-Cola is gearing up for the launch of a new soda fountain that will feature up to 50 different syrup flavors that customers can mix and match. It's an attempt to revitalize the fountain drink category, which has lost ground to a growing preference for bottled drinks. Fountain drinks are insanely profitable for the restaurants as well as the soda companes themselves; a typical fountain drink might only amount to a few cents in cost to the restaurant, but is routinely priced above $1.00. Bottled drinks, while still very profitable for the bottlers, don't represent the same ginormous profit margin for the restaurants.
The Coke people expect to have the first round of units in behind-the-counter locations by fall of this year, with self-service machines to come in 2008.
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Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame."Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"-- "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus, as inscribed on the Statue of Liberty
Lest you think that the current political brouhaha about immigration is a new-found issue with the right-wing, it's worth remembering that immigration policy has been an ongoing political issue since the mid-19th century. Whenever the United States has faced an onslaught of immgrants, whether they were the Potato Famine Irish, the Gold Rush Chinese, or the huge waves of Italian and Eastern European immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there's always been a political backlash resulting in misguided and flat-out discriminatory immigration policy. When you approach the issue with a little context, it makes it clear that the current bunch of right-wing loonies are part of a very long tradition of conservative bigotry, hate-mongering, jingoism, and politics-of-fear.
The Statue of Liberty, erected in the 1890s at the height of anti-immigrant sentiment in this country, was intended as a direct challenge to those who would shut the door on immigration. Emma Lazarus' famous poem, inscribed on the pedestal of the monument, makes clear the difference between the notion of a country open to all comers, rather than closed to "outsiders".
Our sordid history with regard to immigration has other ways to haunt us as well. A new book that looks at Mexican immigration to the United States in the early 20th century unveils how the federal government processed immigrants in holding camps that Adolf Hitler would later use as models for designing his concentration camps (via Fogonazos, which has a wealth of photographs of these American camps). The U.S. would have another go at concentration camps when they interned the Japanese, but these particular camps were the ones Hitler liked. These camps even made use of the now-notorious "Zyklon B" chemical that the Nazis used to kill millions of Jews -- in the American camps the chemical was used as a fumigant.
Presently, the righties are very enamored of concentration camps and other brutalities. Mitt Romney says he would double the size of Guantanamo. 51% of Americans want to build a giant fence between the U.S. and Mexico. And we are all too well aware of the tolerance for torture.
The one thing you can say about conservatives, they've always got someone to get their hate on for. Maybe we need a new Statue of Liberty along the Rio Grande to remind a few people how we all got here in the first place.
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I've had the same happy little betta fish for just about four years now. His name is Phil E. O'Fish (just Phil for short), and I originally bought him to have as an office buddy at my last job. There was a bit of fad where a bunch of people went out and bought bettas for their desks, and I wanted to be one of the in-crowd. These days Phil is in semi-retirement, sitting on the printer stand in my den. Life for Phil is pretty quiet, although occasionally I have to shoo away the cats -- Harry wouldn't mind having him for a snack, and Maynard just wants to drink all the water out of the bowl. (Yes, Maynard IS a weirdo)
Somebody on Metafilter had a link to this spiffy "fish condo" the other day. I don't know if Phil really needs three rooms, but maybe he'd like the opportunity to move around a bit more, you know, travel, see the sights, that sort of thing.
Permalink | Comments (2)Most social networking sites leave me cold. They get off to a hot start, and everybody and his brother joins up, then nothing else ever comes of it. Meanwhile, the people launching these sites are greedily swallowing all that sweet sweet personal data to mine and/or resell to spammers, junk marketers, and so on.
Nevertheless, I have signed up for a few...usually in the same breathless rush to try the Brand New Thing as all my other online amigos. Inspired by John's post at Ascent Stage, I thought I would let you know which ones I am a member of in the off-chance that you were interested in linking to me.
Here's my list (the links go right to my user home page where possible):
cork'd
del.icio.us
flickr
linkedin
stumbleupon
vox
You'll discover that I don't use these nearly as much as I could. I've recently started uploading more pictures to flickr, but that's about it. If some of you are a bit more active with these networks, maybe adding me to your groups of might help me jump start a little bit.
I'm sure you're aware that Google has recently launched street-level views as part of their Google Maps service.
It didn't take very long for people to start noticing that the roaming vehicles that have been taking the pictures had managed to catch people in some activities they might not have wanted photographed: breaking into stores, urinating on the sidewalk, fighting with their S.O., and so on. One woman was surprised to see her cat sitting in the window of her apartment in one picture and began to wonder just how far Google was going to peek.
For the moment, the street-level views are only available for a few select cities, but Google is pouring it on to photograph quite a few more, including the Boston metro area. Adam at Universal Hub points us to this local blogger who says he's seen a car with a roof-mounted multi-lens camera driving around Cambridge, and, since he just happened to have a camera with him, starting taking pictures of it...which apparently freaked out the driver a bit.
Didn't anyone ever tell them that it's not polite to look into people's windows?
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Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,--
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm."...
Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse's side,
Now he gazed at the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns.-- excerpts of "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
As you know, we take all things Paul Revere pretty seriously at The (Real) Big Red House.
This morning, Adam at Universal Hub had a link to this local blogger and Revolutionary War scholar weighing in on whether or not the now-famous Old North Church in Boston's North End is really the church where the lanterns were hung alerting Revere to begin his ride through the towns west of Boston to alert the "Minutemen" to prepare for the British troops on their way to Concord.
Well, I knew the fellow was on the right track as soon as I started reading his post, because it turns out he had been discussing this subject with a good friend of mine -- a woman named Donna LaRue who gives in-character guided tours of many of Boston's historical sites (among her many, many activities). Donna had tugged my ear with this particular story for a couple of years, so I knew immediately what the blogger was going to reveal: that the Old North Church is actually the successor to an earlier church in the North End that was also called Christ Church, but which had a taller steeple and sat higher up on the hill.
The illustration above gives credence to this. It is dated 1768 and was drawn by Paul Revere himself. The larger of the two buildings is identified as Christ Church, but is located on Salem Street, a few blocks from where the present-day Old North Church stands. The present-day building is on the site of an earlier Congregationalist meeting-house that the British Army demolished at the time of the Revolution and is the smaller, lower steeple in that drawing.
Donna tells me that this is really not uncommon knowledge among local Revolutionary War experts, it's just hushed up by the tourism people who have a lot invested in keeping people coming to the current building and spending money. If you've ever taken a stroll through the North End on a summer Saturday and witnessed the non-stop line of touristas from Paul Revere's House over to the Old North Chuch, you'll understand why she says that.
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I already have my request in for my Father's Day present, but there's always the traditional necktie for you wives and children whose husbands and fathers aren't as forthcoming with the unreasonable demands.
Or maybe this is the year for non-traditional. The giant squids are massing by the thousands just off the coast of San Diego preparing to stage their preemptive strike on the rogue-nation U.S., ridding us of our weapons of mass destruction before we use them to terrorize someone, and bringing democracy and freedom to a people crushed under the heel of a despotic tyrant.
I, for one, well....you know. Having one of these spiffy squid brain neckties might go a long way toward appeasing them once they're firmly in control.
Permalink | Comments (0)Now that the Bush Administration doesn't have Tom Ridge to trot out, waving his arms and screaming "Orange Alert! Orange Alert!" like the robot from "Lost In Space", they've upped their game a little bit by periodically trying to spook everyone with some half-assed terrorist plot they've "foiled in the nick of time".
A few weeks ago it was the guys who were going to shoot their way into Fort Dix, and this week it was the crazed Jamaican Muslims who were going to blow up JFK Airport.
These stories play big for a day or two, and all the networks trot out their "anti-terrorism experts", and the right-wing bloggers get to thump their chests and fling some more poo, and we're all supposed to stay cowering in our bunkers. This time around, in fact, the chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party went on record saying he thought a few terror attacks would prove what a great job Bush is doing keeping America safe.
The spin cycle on this shit doesn't last as long as it used to, but it's still pretty depressing to see that anyone puts the slightest bit of credence into it. I almost punched out my TV when NBC's "anti-terrorism consultant", answering a softball lobbed at him by Ann Curry on the "Today" show, actually said he thought the reason these plots happen is because Muslims hate our American freedoms.
For starters, in each one of these plots that shows up, the ham-handed actions of the FBI turn up over and over and over and over. Some informant bankrolled by the FBI infiltrates the group and practically bludgeons them over the head "urging" them to buy guns and explosives, make plans, and so on. J. Edgar "Madge" Hoover would be so proud of the agents following in his footsteps.
Next, even while the Serious Law Enforcement Officials inevitably say that these foiled plots would cause "massive destruction on an unimaginable scale", once somebody who actually knows what the fuck they're talking about weighs in, the actual assault being planned turns out to be technically impossible, logistically unfeasible, or downright foolish.
Keith Olbermann had a good piece about this the other night (link goes to the always-informative Crooks & Liars, who usually have these video clips first). Even the current mayor of New York City publicly said people should "get over it" (Bloomberg is being touted as a possible 3rd party/independent candidate for President, BTW, and it would be very interesting to see him up against Rudy "I'm The Hero Of 9/11" Giuliani).
On the positive side, though, they didn't really achieve their objective of keeping Scooter Libby's jail sentence out of the media. I also notice that with each new Republican debate, the already-announced candidates look more and more desperate trying to keep on message with this stuff. So maybe even the die-hards are beginning to see that their jig is almost up.
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...and don't pet the sweaty things. -- George Carlin
Keep that in mind if you happen to visit the Andalusia Center of Contemporary Art in Seville, Spain. Because one of the exhibits you'll find there is this globby bit of rubber sculpture that gets sweaty when you touch it. (via)
Eeeuww. Just eeuww.
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Via FARK comes a link to an article in The Sun about a family in England that has been terrorized by locals apparently simply because they're all redheads (or "gingers", as they say in Britain).
WTF?
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Writing in the London Review of Books, magazine editor Mark Greif considers two recent biographies of Walt Disney: Neal Gabler's Walt Disney: The Triumph of The American Imagination and Michael Barrier's The Animated Man: A Life Of Walt Disney. (via)
Greif looks at an issue raised by the glorification of Walt Disney -- is it really legitimate to credit him as an artist considering that he stopped doing any animation himself as far back as the early 1930s? The title of Greif's review is "Tinkering", which is an excellent one-word precis of Disney's actual life's work -- finding a lifetime's worth of things that fascinated him and tinkering with them to exercise his creative abilities. It's easy to see that the success Disney was granted with in his early work enabled him to spend the rest of his life exploring and indulging in various pet projects and hobbies. Some of them contributed directly to the creative output of Walt Disney Pictures; Greif talks about Disney's legendary ability to act out characters and scenes for his animators to provide them with his vision of the stories they would turn into art. But Disney was also personally responsible for developing the multiplane animation camera which created the lush depth of the imagery in the studio's first (and best) feature films. Other obsessions like his backyard train were merely personal indulgences. And his final obsession, EPCOT, transcended art altogether.
The friction comes from many writers, critics and animation buffs wanting to ascribe total creative credit to Walt himself rather than to the "Seven Old Men" and other creative people who were more directly responsible for the Disney "ouevre". Sure, it's his name on the door, but you don't often see much creative genius credit given to Louis B. Mayer or Carl Laemmle. Yet it's undeniable that Walt was a man of vision and talent, even if he sometimes frittered it away. In today's age, we wouldn't really have this dilemma over how to think of Walt. Billionaire amateurs abound. Nobody thinks Bill Gates codes software do they? Or Steve Jobs? (Did Steve EVER code software?) Yet these guys get to be seen as visionaries in their own field and even dabble into other fields -- indeed, these days it's good old Steve Jobs who has the reins over the Disney movie studio itself.
Excellent review of both books. I am very likely to read the Gabler book; Gabler has pretty good cred as a film historian and I have enjoyed some of his other books. Greif takes him to task for some of the writing, but I think the subject material is good enough to overlook the pop style.
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A company called Solar Electrical Vehicles makes solar panels you can install on the roof of your hybrid car to help charge the car's batteries. According to their white paper that details their prototype for the Toyota Prius, using the solar panels to recharge the batteries reduces the gasoline consumption of the vehicle by 17-29%. They also say that with a DC converter to plug in to your home electrical supply and a bigger battery, it would be possible to forego using gasoline as a fuel altogether.
While SEV presently sells the solar roof as an aftermarket item, it would be great to see Toyota incorporate a similar technology right into the vehicle's design.
(via MAKE:blog)
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I have to admit, I wasn't really sure about a couple of these: "Is it a Star Wars character, baseball player, or Thai Food?"
It was inevitable. The LOLCATS meme has entered the mainstream media, including articles where some reporter tries to "explain" the humor behind it to the unwashed masses.
So that's it. Meme over. Sorry. You can't has any more cheeseburgers. Or buckets.
But do not worry for a moment that the Internet's kitty obsession is in any danger of subsiding. This guy took a small digital camera, tinkered with it a bit to fit in a small form factor, attached it to his cat's collar, and let the puss take pictures as he went about his daily business. It's actually fairly interesting to see what results he got.
I would love to put one of these cameras on Harry and see what he does while he's out exploring. Although, knowing Harry, he's probably just mooching for cheeseburgers. LOL.
Permalink | Comments (2)I don't know if it was the heat or the humidity or holiday hangovers or what, but it seemed like I had a significant Asshole Encounter every single day last week. At home, at work, online, even in the parking lot of the supermarket, there was no let up from it. The jerk meter was up to 11 and I never knew where the next one might materialize.
It finally reached the point where I had to ask myself if *I* was the asshole. You know how sometimes you just don't recognize your own unpleasantness until you just can't escape the reality of it any more? I sat in my den last night, watching the torrents of the "This American Life" TV series I'd downloaded, and one of the episodes was about people behaving extremely badly at a hot dog stand in Chicago, and that's when the moment struck me.
(more after the jump)
Sadly, the Showtime site doesn't have a video clip of the hot dog stand segment I can link for you, but you can probably search your favorite torrent site for it (or send me an e-mail and I'll help you out). Because if you could see this for yourself, you would start to question your own degree of assholish behavior, too.
It doesn't help that I live in eastern Massachusetts, which has such a high density of assholes in the general population that the official state symbol is a jumbo tube of Preparation H. We cultivate obnoxious behavior here and burnish it to a high sheen. As a consequence, even people who are not assholes by nature have the ability to switch it on in a moment's notice, because you never know when you're going to have to deal with someone who lives that way 24-7-365, and you have no choice but to fight fire with fire.
After I was finished watching the show, I was just surfing around online and pondering all of this when I just happened to stumble onto this online quiz: Are You An Asshole? No, really. Strictly coincidence. It was like a sign. If you believe in signs.
The quiz is actually part of a website plugging a book about assholes in the workplace and how they impact organizations. To that end, the quiz followed the precepts of the book and the questions were mostly about how you interact with people in the office, but some of it is very generalizable to whether or not you're a jerk in the rest of your life, too.
Is this what you see when you look in the mirror?
I scored an 8 on a scale of 0-15. Leaning towards being an asshole, but not totally unbearable. I suppose if you lived somewhere where people were basically nice (wherever that might be), an 8 would seem pretty bad. But since I live in a state where the residents pride themselves on being called "Massholes", I was actually encouraged by that score. I'd be willing to wager that if you could get everyone in Massachusetts to take this quiz that the overall average would be more like a 10. Maybe a 12 in places like Newton.
While that was reassuring, I'm still left scratching my head a little bit and feeling not a small amount of dread at the week ahead. It's more than a little exhausting to have to view every possible interaction with someone as an angry confrontation, and I am a very confrontation-avoidant person. I have been thinking about going out for my lunch today and finding myself almost physically uncomfortable about going over to the plaza where the supermarket is; the guy who wanted to beat me up because I took "his" parking place probably won't be there again, but there's a better-than-even-money bet that there will be some other asshole on site.
I wouldn't last a minute and a half at that hot dog stand in Chicago.
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June 1st is National Donut Day!
If you don't eat a dozen, you obviously hate America!
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This post at the always-interesting Edge.org (via) is an excerpt from a recent study published in the journal Science by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom which explores why people will go to almost any length to not believe in scientific fact.
In brief -- we are all born with a "naive" comprehension of natural physics and the world around us that constantly accepts new information as we experience life. However, much scientific knowledge, particularly contemporary science, often contrasts sharply with the intuitive sense of the world we have. Psychology comes into play at this point -- some people simply opt out of having to choose between authoritative scientific information and their own naive beliefs about the world. It's easier to deliberately remain stupid than it is to accept a vision of the world that requires abstraction and imagination.
And it's not a question of being anti-authoritarian, because those same people willingly accept delivered dogma about all sorts of things from other "authoritative" sources like religion and political institutions. They're more willing to accept those messages as "true" because they compare more favorably to their infantile perceptions of the world around them. Bloom also points out that this sort of behavior is not unique to Americans, it's a universal phenomenon; it's just that the anti-intellectualism so rampant in our culture fosters people holding on to their uninformed worldviews.
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Check out this Snopes article: a car wash owner in Maryland was losing money from his change machine and suspected his employees of stealing, so he set up a camera to catch them in the act. Imagine his surprise to discover that it was a gang of starlings!
The Snopes article clears up a few mis-reported elements of the story and has a few more pictures of the starlings in action.
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Next year my wife and I will both turn 45. We're already thinking about taking another trip somewhere overseas to celebrate, just as we did in 2003 when we went to Paris and London for our 40th birthdays.
One destination we're thinking about is Barcelona, Spain. In fact, Bridget has already gone ahead and e-mailed the famous El Bulli restaurant for a reservation for their 2008 season -- they only accept reservations for a brief period each year in advance of the season but accept requests in advance.
Since our chances of getting in at El Bulli probably aren't very good, it's worth looking around for other possible destinations as well. I'd really like to go to Iceland; "The Amazing Race" has sent its contestants to Iceland a couple of times, and it looks like a gorgeous place. It's not a long flight from Boston, and they always have package deals.
But yesterday I stumbled across this website for a guest house in Morocco. It's in the city of Fez, which was the traditional capital of Morocco for centuries. The photos make the hotel look simply beautiful, but in addition to the exotic locale and luxurious setting, the guest house is owned and operated by a Moroccan chef and you can do a day-long cooking program with him as part of the stay. He takes you shopping in the souk for fresh ingredients, and then you go back to the kitchen for a hands-on lesson in Moroccan cuisine.
Of course, if you go to Iceland you can eat some fermented shark, but I gotta think it would be enormous fun to have an authentic Moroccan cooking experience. If I can't get to try some molecular cuisine in Spain, that is.
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A few years ago, we were all very impressed with the guy who created this incredible chart comparing the sizes of various well-known spaceships from science fiction.
But even though that chart has a few contemporary buildings on it to offer some sense of scale, they're so dwarfed by some of the spacecraft that you don't really get to appreciate the effect. So this guy has boldly gone where no nerd has gone before by superimposing scaled images of the Enterprise-D over Google Map images of well-known American landmarks like the Pentagon, the White House, the St. Louis Arch, and others.
I particularly like the picture of the Big E looming over the Seattle skyline (the Manhattan one is good too).
(via a Friend of Torrez)
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I'm a little late to the party blogging this, but you've got to watch this recent "New Rules" segment from Bill Maher's program where he lays down the law about France-bashing.
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Well, that's Juan Cole's theory anyway. His op-ed piece in Salon today compares the underlying liberal ideas of the internal struggle between good and evil as played out through the "special" people on NBC's "Heroes" to the externalized "good Americans vs. evil brown people" rightie wankfest of FOX's "24".
To my own surprise, I got seriously hooked on "Heroes" this year. From the preseason promos, I figured it would last all of about 3 weeks and went about ignoring it. But a lot of my online friends kept raving about the show, especially my friend Solonor, and each week the ratings seemed to back them up. Finally intrigued enough to want to watch, I got lucky enough to find a torrent that had the first eleven episodes (right up to the first confrontation between Peter, Claire and Sylar) all together. It took a week to download, but once I had them I watched them back-to-back over the course of a few days and by the end I was totally sucked in.
Overall, the series is a bit uneven. I am in complete agreement with the general consensus that the season finale was a huge disappointment, especially in comparison to the penultimate episode the week before, which had me literally on my feet and screaming. The show is best when it snakes through the twists and turns of the characters' ambiguous natures, and at its worst when it stops to catch its breath and unload a ton of exposition to help you keep up with what's going on. Similarly, for every fantastic hero character (Hiro, Claire, Bennett) there is usually one unbelievably lame one (Isaac, Mohinder, Nathan), but the villains uniformly kick ass.
It will be very interesting to see if the writers and producers can move the story forward without suffering through the narrative slump that all but ruined "Lost". We already know that there's a villain lurking out there who's worse than Sylar (according to the little girl who can "find people")...so I wonder if he'll be a sneering old man with no heart and a loaded shotgun.
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(Watch the Pyramids live via PyramidCam)
Of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Great Pyramid of Cheops is the only one which has survived into the modern world.
Even after several centuries of earnest scientific study, we still don't have a lot of definitive answers about the construction of the pyramids. There has been a lot of effort given to considering how the Egyptians were able to move the massive stones needed to build the tombs, with theories ranging from space aliens to kites to the somewhat-more-likely use of sleds and rollers. Now, a materials scientist named Michel Barsoum has developed a theory that claims that at least some of the stones were not quarried at all but were poured using an early type of concrete. This allowed the workers to fabricate the blocks on site and helps to explain the incredibly accurate fit between the stones that would have been next to impossible to do with period hand tools (although space lasers would probably work, I assume).
You might also find this 2003 Harvard alumni magazine article interesting. It profiles Harvard archaeologist Mark Lehner's work trying to answer questions about WHO built the Pyramids. Regardless of the methods used, there's widespread agreement that it required thousands of workers to accomplish the construction of these massive tombs, but archaeologists had never found any hard evidence of the living quarters that would have been part of a long-term building project. Lehner, who began studying the Giza area in the early 1970s as a graduate student, eventually uncovered an entire city that provided home and services to the workers and his work indicates that the laborers were not slaves and prisoners but practically every layer of Egyptian society, right up to high-ranking noble Egyptians who were required to perform the labor as part of a sort of feudal system of obligation.
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Hey, you iRobot guys, get on this quick! A Japanese company is developing a snow plowing robot that uses GPS and built-in video cameras to auto-position itself to plow out your driveway. It actually "eats" the snow as it goes along and "poops" out packed blocks of snow, so your kids can have perfect snow-fort building blocks!
The commercial product is still four or five years down the road, which should give the iRobot folks plenty of time to develop a worthy competitor. If they could get a product to market that was about the same size and general price range as a decent snowblower, I would SO buy one.
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How many times have you looked at a piece of modern art and thought to yourself "I could do that!"?
Well, here you go. It's Mr. Picasso Head! Cubist art has never been so much fun!
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As a promotional gimmick for the upcoming sequel to the Fantastic Four movie, 20th Century Fox (who really need to get going on that name change) and the Franklin Mint produced 40,000 quarters each bearing a Silver Surfer sticker (the movie "introduces" the Silver Surfer as part of its story).
As that press release states, the quarters are actual United States currency, not the usual "commemorative coin" that comes from the Franklin Mint. Oopsie. That's illegal, kids, and the U.S. Mint isn't very happy about it.
The solution, I think, is obvious. The Silver Surfer should immediately announce his candidacy for President in the 2008 election and name Ben "The Thing" Grimm as his running mate. They'd win in a landslide, I'm sure, and I can just see Galactus as Secretary of State, can't you?
Permalink |The Boston publishing company Houghton Mifflin and the editors of the American Heritage Dictionary think that every high school graduate in America should know how to spell and define these 100 words (I'll post the list after the jump in case you can't follow that link for some reason).
Out of that list of 100, I can honestly say that I knew to to spell and define all but one word -- moiety. Indeed, I had never seen or heard this word until I read this list, and I have covered a lot of literary ground in the 26 years since I graduated from high school, so I think I can be given a little slack for not knowing it.
How do you compare?
The List:
abjure
abrogate
abstemious
acumen
antebellum
auspicious
belie
bellicose
bowdlerize
chicanery
chromosome
churlish
circumlocution
circumnavigate
deciduous
deleterious
diffident
enervate
enfranchise
epiphany
equinox
euro
evanescent
expurgate
facetious
fatuous
feckless
fiduciary
filibuster
gamete
gauche
gerrymander
hegemony
hemoglobin
homogeneous
hubris
hypotenuse
impeach
incognito
incontrovertible
inculcate
infrastructure
interpolate
irony
jejune
kinetic
kowtow
laissez faire
lexicon
loquacious
lugubrious
metamorphosis
mitosis
moiety
nanotechnology
nihilism
nomenclature
nonsectarian
notarize
obsequious
oligarchy
omnipotent
orthography
oxidize
parabola
paradigm
parameter
pecuniary
photosynthesis
plagiarize
plasma
polymer
precipitous
quasar
quotidian
recapitulate
reciprocal
reparation
respiration
sanguine
soliloquy
subjugate
suffragist
supercilious
tautology
taxonomy
tectonic
tempestuous
thermodynamics
totalitarian
unctuous
usurp
vacuous
vehement
vortex
winnow
wrought
xenophobe
yeoman
ziggurat
Okay, maybe we're not at the top of the heap when it comes to infant mortality, basic educational skills, or freedom of the press, but it doesn't matter because we've got the guns, baby.
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Just in time for Father's Day! Is it me, or do these personalized clocks (via) look like a Terry Gilliam cartoon from an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus?
(And $54.95 for the sort of desk clock you buy from the cheesy gift kiosk at the mall? Do you know how many "I Love My Daddy" custom-photo coffee mugs, or jokey neckties, or "Kiss The Cook" barbecue aprons you can get for that price?)
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San Francisco Chronicle TV columnist Tim Goodman is one of the best in his line of work. I don't read his column as regularly as I should, but I've just added his blog to my RSS feed list to stay on top of his stuff more.
Today's column is particularly amusing, if for no other reason than imagining him dancing in tiny circles of glee like Ed Grimley (YouTube link) over the news that Katie Couric finishes the TV season 5% behind where CBS News was last year before she took the anchor chair.
He's not too enthralled with televised bingo, either.
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I have to admit a fondness for sad songs. The more lugubrious and lachrymose the better. I mean "get out the razor blades and start shredding your wrists" sad. It's the Irishman in me, I think.
Hanan at growabrain has a link to this feature of the so-called "Twenty-Five Most Exquisitely Sad Songs In The Whole World".
Because it comes from a rock music blog, which probably doesn't employ a single person over the age of 25, the list is a little too heavy on songs written in the last five years to really be a comprehensive list. Still, they pick out a few winners: Frank Sinatra singing "In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning" absolutely belongs on this list, though probably a few notches higher than #12. And Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt" really ought to be the top choice, but #4 is respectable.
Some of the omissions are glaring. Bobby Goldsboro's "Honey", cheesy as it is, has got to be one of the saddest songs EVER. Dion's "Abraham, Martin and John" instantly recaptures the confusion and grief of the spring of 1968 and makes it fresh all over again. Eric Clapton's "Tears In Heaven", sad enough as it is, is actually a song I haven't been able to bear listening to since I became a father. Mike And The Mechanics "The Living Years" is another one that is hard to listen to without a Kleenex handy.
What are your favorite sad songs?
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Only in Dubai, I guess...construction continues apace on this new convention center complex.
(That's an actual photograph, BTW, not a "artist's concept drawing")
Do you suppose Dick Cheney will relocate his "undisclosed location" here when it's finished so he can be closer to his Halliburton buddies?
Permalink |Stop yelling at the punks on your lawn for a minute and take a deep breath.
Writing in the libertarian mag Reason, Steve Chapman talks about this recent Wall Street Journal article that takes to task the notion of promoting self-esteem to the youngsters of today, turning them into a generation of self-absorbed narcissists.
As Chapman points out to the geezers who run the WSJ (Who may or may not soon become the minions of Morlock...er...Murdoch.), and the rest of you cranky oldsters out there, every generation has gotten this knock from its elders since pretty much forever (or at least since the 1950s, which is as far back as he goes and is, let's face it, a fucking long time ago anyway). No doubt there are cave paintings in Lescaux by ancient hominids complaining about how worthless the youngsters with their big evolved brains are, and how special they think they are for walking upright.
Chapman then rattles off a slew of statistics about reduced teen pregnancy rates, lower rates of smoking and drug use among teens today, and less juvenile crime. As if FACTS proved anything!!! (Right, Rupert?)
Permalink |Here's a fellow at Georgia Tech with a purpose: he's keeping tabs on various and sundry predictions about the future as they are made by scientists, technologists, the media, and assorted other prognosticators. I guess he's steamed that we don't have tinfoil suits and flying cars yet...I know I am.
This "Roadmap Of The 21st Century" might be pretty interesting as time goes by. So far, the least successful predictor of "the future" is science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. He apparently wrote this piece for a magazine back in 1999, but if you scroll through the "roadmap", he's only gotten a couple things right and nine wrong.
Not everything in this list is technological. Some of the items are political, economic, and/or social. Some are not too challenging (predicting that the Summer Olympics will occur in Beijing next year), but some are a bit provocative (U.S. at war with Syria in 2008, a Third-World city destroyed by the accidental detonation of an atomic weapon in 2009).
Interesting reading, lots of links to the original sources (which should keep people squirming as their predictions fail to materialize), and plenty of things to speculate about.
Permalink |Via Slashdot, I read this BusinessWeek article that talks about a startup company whose idea is to combine your driver's license and your debit card into just one piece of plastic.
While this sets off all sorts of alarm sounds for me, I can't deny that they've got some strong synergistic thinking going on here. Retailers are going to like it for a couple of reasons: first and foremost, the cards are not tied to credit card companies, who charge high fees to process transactions (side note: whenever a local merchant asks me "debit or credit?" when I use my card, I always choose debit because the merchant pays less for my convenience of using the card). Meanwhile, because the financial transaction is tied to a valid ID, the retailer has personal information that they can use for a variety of purposes (not all of them beneficial to the customer, unfortunately).
I hope you can see where the pitfalls are with this idea so that I don't have to go through all of them again. But I think they've probably come up with an idea that's going to go over well with everybody except the credit card companies. They're test-marketing the combo cards now in Texas and have very wisely started out with gas station/convenience stores, which traditionally have very slim profit margins and will see the most benefit from reducing credit card fees. Plus customers have been very receptive to pay-at-the-pump systems -- it's a good introduction of the idea to consumers before it starts to manifest itself in other retail interactions.
At the moment, only 24 states issue driver's licenses with magnetic strips, which is probably the single biggest hurdle to this concept. Their other concept, though, is to offer this same service through loyalty card programs (you know, the cards you use at the supermarket). While this lacks some of the synergy of sharing a payment system with a legal identification system, not to mention lacking the promise of eliminating plastic cards from your wallet, it's still likely to catch on AND has a national market.
What's not mentioned in the BusinessWeek article (or at NPC's own website) is what the impact of the impending RealID program from the Gestapo will have on their business model. On the face of it, it would seem like a standardized national ID card with magnetic striping would give these guys the green light to go big. But there's a lot of opposition to RealID, and backlash could limit them, especially in a state like Massachusetts, where our licenses don't have mag strips and our political sensibilities often determine our consumer behavior.
Permalink | Comments (2)Used to be that advertising jingles were a huge part of our daily dose of pop culture, but they've sort of died off in the last ten years or so. I can remember jingles from commercials I watched in the 1960s, fercryinoutloud, but I'll be damned if I can think of a recent one that was the least bit memorable.
So maybe this link will only be worthwhile for you if you're my age or older: it's a quiz to see if you can match a snippet of a jingle to its advertiser. The only one I didn't immediately recognize was the one for Starburst candy, YMMV.
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Forty-five things you may or may not know about cows.
Historian Chalmers Johnson has recently published the third book in a series that looks at American foreign policy and its consequences going back to the end of the Civil War and extending through the current set of disastrous actions take by the Bush Administration. He is almost singlehandedly responsible for the term "blowback" entering the vernacular in the context of political and military consequences of our generally short-sighted and ill-advised dealings with the rest of the world.
In the newest book, Johnson speculates on the issues raised by our imperial aspirations. This blog features a long excerpt from the book, which is getting a lot of attention on the web today. He not only takes the Bushies to task, he also is 100% correct to point out that the Democrats circling around the dying carcass of the current administration have no interest in rolling back Bush's abuses of power, merely assuming them for their own purposes...which, he suggests, won't be really very much different than the uses Bush, Rove, Gonzales, et. al. have found for them.
Johnson doesn't mince words. He points to the failure of almost every institutional check-and-balance system over the last year, reserving particular disappointment for the media and their complete willingness to abandon their role as advocate for the public. He end the piece wondering if there is any possible way for the public to reverse the direction in which we're headed (he uses the metaphor of liquidating the assets of evil), offering some very specific changes that might be beneficial.
This cynical pessimist sees little chance.
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I come by it naturally, though. Compared to some of the other members of my family, I am practically Pollyanna. I'll grant you that being cynical and pessimistic does have its downside in terms of being able to take things at face value and appreciate them for what they are. Personally, I have to make quite a substantial effort to have any sort of sense of equanimity about almost anything, and that has had consequences for me in a variety of experiences.
But enough about me for the moment. What I wanted to bring to this post are a couple of links I found this morning that aren't strictly related but which I felt combine well as an illumination of the downside of unrealistically positive attitudes.
First, read this Slate article by John Gravois about Oprah Winfrey's latest dabble into pop-psychology, "The Secret". "The Secret" is really just a new way to package "the power of positive thinking", implying that you can realize almost anything if you maintain positive thoughts about it.
Okay, the jokes practically write themselves here, but setting that aside, the Slate columnist has a couple of very salient points about the downside of this school of thought. He refers to a book by another psychologist named Karen Cerulo called "Never Saw It Coming". She argues that American culture as a whole is too optimistic and positive, which leaves us vulnerable to overlooking obvious problems and potential disasters. The result is that we are far too often taken by surprise when bad things happen, and our unawareness leaves us underprepared emotionally AND materially.
Which is where I would like to bring in my next link: today's Wired op-ed by computer security expert Bruce Schneier. Schneier frequently writes about the morass that has become our "national security" response since 2001. Today's piece makes a simple and obvious point -- as a society, we overreact to rare risks, while we ignore huge ones that are staring us in the face. He uses the recent Virigina Tech massacre as a case-in-point, but the last five and a half years have been one massive national overreaction to 9/11, and he points out other areas where we've become collectively unhinged over situations with very low probabilities.
QED, no? We ignore real threats, and then when taken surprise by minor ones, we overreact because we didn't see things for what they were beforehand and can't reinsert them into an appropriate context afterward.
My own pet theory here is that the heart of the matter is denial, and that in our culture the primary agent of denial is religion. The more religious you are, the more likely you are to be able to accept greater and greater levels of denial about the world that surrounds you. Christian fundamentalists have turned this into an art form with their bizarre scenarios of creationism, "The Rapture", and their ability to justify almost anything in the name of Jesus Christ. But even mainstream religious belief revolves around some degree of denial, reframed in a positive spin as "faith". Eighty-six percent of the population of this country self-identifies as Christian, so that's a lot of willful ignorance.
I just wonder what it's going to take for everyone to get their heads out of their asses. You can tell me I'm being cynical and pessimistic if you like -- I accept that about myself -- but we're [] <- this close to fucked and somebody's got to own up to that.
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It's one thing to intellectually understand how something works, but sometimes seeing it for yourself can be an illuminating experience.
This webpage has a fabulous series of photographs showing the development of a chicken from just a plain old egg yolk into a fluffy little yellow chick.
Oh, and did you see the story the other day about the English boy who was able to hatch a chick from a store-bought egg? (His mum bought it from a farm stand that sells fresh eggs, so don't go running off to the supermarket to buy a dozen eggs thinking you can start your own KFC or something.)
Permalink |Interesting story in the NYT yesterday about a double-amputee from South Africa who sprints using those specially-designed prosthetic legs for athletics.
He presently competes in international "paralympic" meets, but he wants to run in the standard men's 100- and 200-meter sprints in the Summer Olympics next year in Beijing. His times do not qualify him yet, but the significant advances in prosthetics that have made it possible for him to even be thinking about competing in the Olympics, may represent a threshold where prosthetics might, in the near future, be seen not as a limitation but as an enhancement for athletic performance.
While the South African Olympic Committee and the governing body of track-and-field sports sort out this racer's qualifications, the bigger questions about technological enhancements are barely being considered. As the article points out, it's possible to imagine a scenario in the future where an athlete might deliberately undergo amputations to use performance-enhancing prosthetics.
Permalink |This story at Wired this morning says there's good news and bad news in store for the burgeoning hybrid car market. The EPA has revised the way it calculates mileage for hybrid cars and is about to issue new figures that will significantly downgrade the predicted mileage for all models.
The Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic Hybrid still come out on top with mileage ratings that outperform any conventional automobile, but even they have been knocked down about 20% from the original estimates. For some of the other hybrids, like the Ford Escape and the Pontiac G6, it puts their estimated mileage in the mid-20s. At that point, there's no point in buying a hybrid at all because the added cost of the vehicle isn't convertible into fuel cost savings. While it only takes about 14 months to recoup the added cost of a Toyota Prius in money saved on gasoline, it would take 10 years to achieve the same break-even point for a Mercury Mariner hybrid.
I'm still considering buying a Prius next year to replace my aging Honda Accord, so I appreciate the more realistic expectation for the mileage, but even moreso the knowledge that the fuel cost savings will be real...probably even sooner than the 14 months currently predicted if the price of gas hits that magic $5.00 mark it seems headed for.
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Direct from Mother Russia, where they just completed a sensational tour of Minsk, Pinsk, Omsk, and Yakutsk, it's the incomparable Moscow Cats Theatre!
They've already sold out their original American tour dates, so they've added more cities and will be in Boston in November. Can you feel the excitement? I know I can.
(Okay, this was just an excuse to post yet another LOLCAT picture, I admit, but c'mon...a traveling show of performing cats from Russia? You gotta love it.)
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According to a video gamer website, Activision may be coming out with a Dancing With The Stars game for the Wii later this year.
So much for "Strawberry Shortcake Dance Dance Revolution", it's time to get ready to rumba!
I want the one that comes with Cheryl Burke included, please.
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We've all asked this question at least once: "Why do men have nipples?" And there's no shortage of people providing answers on the Internet, from Uncle Cecil to evolutionary biologists to Aristotle.
But maybe we're asking the wrong question. This post at Damn Interesting comes at it from a different direction and wonders why women have boobs. You may think you know the answer, but this post offers an explanation that considers another evolutionary purpose.
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There are tons of handy online conversion tables to help you convert English-to-Metric, scientific measurement, and especially cooking measures, but I think this one takes the cake.
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Just to prove you learn something new every day -- did you know that the Swedes are actually the descendants of the Trojans who were chased out of Troy by the Greeks? It's true!
And speaking of Trojans...I got a big laugh out of this video clip on YouTube from an Australian TV show where they tried to see if they could get a giant Trojan Horse replica past various front gate security guards.
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In the latest New York Times Review of Books, critic Robert Gottlieb reviews a new biography of Sarah Bernhardt, the turn-of-the-century actress, and makes the assertion that Bernhardt remains "the most famous actress the world has ever known" (via).
I beg to differ.
I would be willing to wager almost any amount of money that were I to go out into the streets and ask people who Sarah Bernhardt is, almost all of them would tell me it is this woman. And that's not to even remotely suggest that Sandra Bernhard is anywhere near the most famous actress the world has ever known, either (although she seems to think she is); it's to suggest that the enduring flame of fame has flickered out on dear old Sarah, even with the quaint museum-shop merchandising that Gottlieb points to as her continued salability.
Oh, but you argue that in her time Bernhardt was more famous. Hah! I think it's readily arguable that, even when you account for scale, the most disposable of contemporary celebrities is vastly more famous, scrutinized as they are to the Nth degree in almost every avenue of their lives by the media and publicized not just to the cultural elites but to every corner of the globe. While history will probably never remember Jessica Simpson, her recognizability is several orders of magnitude greater than Sarah Bernhardt's could have ever been in her time.
In Mr. Gottlieb's review, he has a telling quote from Marilyn Monroe:
"Every time I show my teeth on television, I'm appearing before more people than Sarah Bernhardt appeared before in her whole career." -- from "The Seven Year Itch"
While he tries to use this quote to demonstrate that Bernhardt is the "gold standard" (my term, not his), it needs to be pointed out that "The Seven Year Itch" was made 52 years ago, and only about 10 years after Bernhardt's death, when she was still a recognizable icon of the past. I'd argue that it's Monroe herself who probably comes the closest to earning the title of "the most famous actress the world has ever known". Certainly more famous in her own lifetime than Bernhardt was in hers, and she continues to be a bankable celebrity: in this 2002 Forbes report, Monroe is #11 in the top-grossing dead celebrity rankings, and the highest-rated female a full FORTY years after her death.
(My challenge to Mr. Gottlieb shouldn't be taken too seriously; after all, I recognize that he's just employing a bit of hyperbole to punch up his very interesting book review. I'm just trying to make a point for the sake of punching up my blog.)
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A random sampling of obesity rates around the world depicted in a telling graphic. (via)
I'm a little surprised to see Mexico at #2, I would have expected the U.K. in the second spot. They're not far behind at #3, though.
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No, not THAT stupid evil bastard, I mean THIS stupid evil bastard, a very interesting fellow named Les, who actually does not seem the least bit stupid or evil.
Aaaaaanyway, the other day Les (or SEB as he is sometimes known) had a post about a C&D letter he got from Visa to take down a picture he had p'shopped of a "World Of Warcraft"-branded credit card. Seems that Les had figured that it would be a perfect branding opportunity for Visa to offer a credit card with a "rewards" program that paid you back not in dollars but in in-game currency. There's a lot of interest (no pun intended) about the viability of in-game currency having a valid exchange rate with real-world currency.
Les was just a little bit ahead of the Visa folks themselves, it seems, because a couple of days later BoingBoing pointed out that, sure enough, Visa was rolling out just such a card. Given the buzz these days about Second Life and its very robust economy, where in-game currency is already convertible, I give it less than three months before an SL branded card is available.
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I found an interesting blog this morning, courtesy of Hanan at Growabrain. The blog is called "The Good Reverend", and a quick perusal of the front page should remind you of a blog written by a rotund little fellow who lives in a big red house. Growabrain was linking to a post called "A Thinly-Veiled Allegory", but the post right before it caught my interest a lot more.
In it, "The Good Reverend" considers the idea that teenagers should be granted status as legal adults if they can demonstrate competency. At the end of the post, he comes down against the proposition, but the post links to a book by psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein which argues in favor of the idea (as well as a similar magazine article that considers the historical context of the birth of "teen culture and a Time article that argues against Epstein's propositions). I am leaving the links out of this post to get you to go read his post, which does link all this material. The blog post is further enhanced by a comment from Epstein himself, who refutes the way The Good Reverend characterizes his ideas and points readers to his own website so they can read about it first-hand.
In his rebuttal, Epstein asserts that his interest is not in giving adolescents legal equivalency to adults, but to acknowledge that by the time most people are teenagers they do indeed possess abilities and competencies suitable for adult behaviors and roles, and, more importantly to use this acknowledgement to break away from our society's infantilization of adolescents. Treating adolscents as incompetent, helpless children undercuts the further development of their adult faculties -- a phenomenon spreading into our culture in general as young adults take longer and longer to assume "mature" responsibilities and roles.
Not long after I read through all the links this morning, I went out for lunch and arrived at a nearby Wendy's to find it overrun with middle-school-aged adolescents out of school for a half-day. With all of this freshly in mind, it was interesting to watch all of these kids and their interactions. I presume the average age of the kids I saw was 13, given that they came from the middle school across the street, and even at 13 they do indeed blur a lot of distinctions between adult and child. One observation I almost always have about adolescents in general is their ease at jumping back and forth across this border as the situation requires -- behaving more childlike for parents and behaving more like adults when on their own. It's not hard to see Epstein's rationales when they're played right in front of your face -- the business of parents keeping their children trapped in childhood teaches the adolescent the value of duplicity and sends harmful messages about the inevitability of adulthood.
The criticism being levelled at Epstein is really aimed at the libertarian political nature of some of his arguments, I think. In the end, I don't think I would agree with formalizing an institutional process for legally recognizing adolescents as adults simply on the basis of competency exams, but I do agree with the idea that our culture as a whole should seriously revisit the way we deal with our older children in a way that stops isolating them and pushing them into maladaptive behaviors that linger into early adulthood.
Permalink | Comments (1)Last week I told you about my decision to bail out on Vonage and switch over to Comcast for our home telephone service. Subsequently, I've come across a couple of things here and there that illuminate the subject, so I thought I'd share them with you.
Over the weekend, Slashdot had a link to this forum thread at Broadband Reports, wherein people are complaining about AT&T's VoIP service. Apparently, AT&T has decided to dump its VoIP service and summarily informed thousands of their customers that the service was being cancelled. However, AT&T is blocking those customers from transferring their phone service to another provider, and they are unwilling to provide a forwarding message for those customers who have abandoned their VoIP phone numbers to sign up with other providers. In essence, AT&T is holding all of their VoIP subscribers hostage.
Meanwhile...today Comcast has announced that they're rolling out a service called SmartZone that will integrate their e-mail and voicemail services. Ooh. Straight out of 1999, you guys. This is a standard feature with most VoIP services. The announcement also goes on to tell us that they won't be charging any extra for this...well, that's mighty kind of you guys. Of course, they always say that at first and then a year or two down the road discover the sudden need to start charging a fee...which then goes up every year.
Meanwhile, telco expert David Isenberg has a post this morning considering this announcement. Isenberg's take is that this is Comcast's lame attempt to re-imagine themselves into a competitor for the likes of Google in the realm of offering value-added services rather than just as the "series of tubes" that gets the services to you.
Isenberg's assessment is that tying services to the tubes is exactly the wrong thing to do. Google, Yahoo, et.al. are not limiting themselves to subscription-only customers and to a single method of distribution. As he says, why limit yourself to 12.5 million customers (Comcast's present install base) when you can market to "1,000 million" customers.
On Thursday, I have to spend my entire afternoon at home waiting for a Comcast tech to show up to connect their VoIP device. I suspect it's just a router, just like Vonage's, but the CSR on the phone who got me to sign up had no clue. When I signed up for Vonage, they just mailed me the router and told me to plug it in. I have no idea why they need to make me miss half a day of work for something I can do by myself in three minutes.
Still no warm-and-fuzzies for me.
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I'm very excited to see the Edward Hopper exhibit that opened at the Museum of Fine Arts yesterday.
We've been MFA members for a number of years, and I'd say the special exhibits definitely have their ups and downs. Exhibits like this one and the inevitable and recurring Monet exhibits are clearly aimed at packing the place with the general public. Sometimes they get it right and the big draw shows are also good shows -- I really liked the John Singer Sargent show a couple of years ago -- but other times the pandering is just too much (hint: if it involved Monet or some other impressionist, it's skippable). I was very disappointed in an Egyptian show they had a couple of years ago, and they had an exhibit of women's clothing that was equally lackluster. But then some of the smaller shows can be really good; I especially liked the Art Deco show and the guitar show. Still, the best thing I have ever seen at the MFA was the traveling exhibit from the Victoria & Albert Museum eight or nine years ago.
Unlike most little kids, Charlotte is actually pretty good about going to art museums. She likes the MFA, as long as she doesn't have to look at the mummies. I think she will probably like this show, too.
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The anvil. One of the standard items in Wile E. Coyote's arsenal as well as a favorite implement of disaster in many a Three Stooges short. Once a commonplace item used not just by blacksmiths but in a number of industrial and agricultural settings, today the anvil languishes in the backwaters of technology.
Here you can learn about the many kinds of anvils and their myriad uses.
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Back In January, I posted this NYT graphic which demonstrates how George Bush has managed to squander away $1.2 TRILLION dollars with his unnecessary war.
Today at Dangerous Intersection, Erich Vieth posts about some of the other things that could have been done with all that money, such as giving every single man, woman and child in the United States $3,000.00 to reinvest in the economy, or, better still, giving EVERY HUMAN BEING ON THE PLANET $150.00. While $150 might be thought of as chump change in this country, the average Bangladeshi only earns $380 a year, and the average annual income in Ethiopia is only $141.00.
In the comments of that post, "grumpypilgrim" (one of the other regular authors of that site) has a collection of factoids about trying to imagine the sheer amount of one trillion dollars. A one-trillion stack of dollars, he tell us, would weigh more than BOTH of the World Trade Center towers and would be 55,000 miles tall (about 20% of the distance from the Earth to the Moon). One trillion dollars would build more than 200 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers (the U.S. Navy has 10).
Meanwhile, over at the Boston Globe, there's this photo essay that considers what you could do with $456 billion, which is what this group says the war has cost so far. Considering that it's only about a third of the amount John Allen Poulos is citing, the possibilities are still staggering: nearly 3000 first-class high schools, free gasoline for every car in the United States for fourteen months, 30 civil engineering projects of the scale of the Big Dig, feeding and educating the world's poor for FIVE years.
The mind boggles.
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Last week's "Masshole" post at Universal Hub drew a lot of visitors (here as well as there, and probably at the original poster's blog, too), so Adam revisited the concept yesterday with a post called "Ask Dr. Masshole".
(The picture above comes from an earlier post at UH where a local blogger snapped a pair of photos of Massholes parking at the Atrium Mall in Chestnut Hill, a prime gathering spot of spoiled rich SUV-driving bitches if there ever was one).
While the blogger in yesterday's UH post engaged in a little smackdown in the truest Boston tradition, there are other methods of retribution: the Urban Asshole Notification Card not only lets you provide a written reminder to Those People about their parking, but about a whole range of anti-social behavior. Or, if you're not quite up to that level of revenge but still need to get it out of your system somehow, you can take a picture and submit it to YouParkLikeAnAsshole.com, who are more than glad to share your grief with the entire world.
(Frankly, I think you could save a lot of time by just mailing one of those cards to every resident in Massachusetts pre-emptively, because eventually we'll all be guilty of at least ONE of those offenses.)
Permalink |The online version of Newsweek has a fascinating article which says that medical researchers now think the standard procedure for resuscitating non-respiring patients by administering oxygen is EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of what they should be doing.
The research indicates that long-standing theories that cells begin to die from lack of oxygen after only a few minutes are not borne out by current studies. Cells actually go into a sort of "holding pattern" when deprived of oxygen and do not begin to die for several hours. Rapidly refusing the cells with oxygen triggers a different response, causing cell death. In a small clinical test, slowly restoring oxygen to patients suffering cardiac arrest had a significantly better survival rate than the presently standard procedure.
I also read on CNN that the death rate from heart attacks in hospitals has been cut in half over the last six years due to more aggressive treatment. If this new research bears out, it's likely that the rate can be lowered even further.
Permalink |Get your mind out of the gutter.
(via Bifurcated Rivets)
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Via bookofjoe comes this USA Today article about the famous Glass House designed by architect Philip Johnson.
The Glass House will be open to the public beginning this summer, beginning with a gala grand opening in late June (preview dates are already available). Johnson, who actually lived in the house, had always intended the Glass House to be open to the public. He died in 2005, and plans have been underway ever since, including some restoration work to the accompanying Brick House.
The house is located in New Canaan, Connecticut, which is close enough to me to consider a trip down to see it, especially if we could combine it with some other points of interest or a visit to some friends.
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Last Friday marked the 40th anniversary of the opening of Montreal's Expo 67, a landmark moment in modern Canadian history, and ranking right up there with the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the New York World's Fair of 1939 as iconic symbols of their times.
Montreal City Weblog has a post with a few links to some archival material. The Expo and the Summer Olympics nine years later were controversial projects often held with great critical disdain by the people of Montreal, but the balm of time has helped to turn them into proud memories.
(Here's another very comprehensive Expo 67 site I found but it's very slow to load. Worth the wait for the pictures of almost everything, but do be patient.
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Erm...okay, if you want to be technical about it, the 40th anniversary of the release of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is actually May 21.
But I saw this Guardian article yesterday and wanted to link to it while it was still fresh. In it, Beatles expert Clinton Heylin demonstrates his mastery of Fab Four trivia by laying down a few pieces of info you might not have known about the album, even if you are a Beatles fan. Most of it is insider stuff about the making of the album rather than the album itself, but Moptop lovers everywhere will like this. (via mutual Friend Of Torrez, Largehearted Boy)
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MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has turned his Murrow-esque rants into a regular element of his program. Not surprisingly, this takes some of the effect out his words -- powerful rhetoric is only diminished by making it commonplace -- but he can still get a good stemwinder going when he wants to.
If you have not already seen the clip of his piece from earlier this week where he slices and dices Rudy Giuliani like just so much Kobe beef at a Japanese steak house, it is definitely worth watching. The political blog Crooks And Liars is good enough to post downloadable versions in both WMV and QuickTime formats.
I was almost out of my seat and cheering by the time he got to the end of this one. It would do my heart good if just one Democratic presidential candidate would get behind a talking point like this and shut up these bullshit artists once and for all.
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This handy item, called "flickr-blockrs" (via) is intended to help you maintain your anonymity when being photographed by your friends as you commit wild and unhibited acts of youthful indiscretion, so that when the photos inevitably wind up on the Internet, you have some some degree of plausible deniability.
Members of the Bush Administration have been wearing rose-colored glasses with blinders on the side as part of their uniform of the day since 2003, but with the ever-expanding mass of scandals coming to light, I think they should probably trade those in for a large supply of these puppies.
Permalink |Of all the various regular contributors to The New Yorker, I find that I most look forward to articles by the two medical contributors, Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande. They both write with a combination of insider's perspective and outsider's skepticism about the medical profession.
The latest issue of The New Yorker has a piece by Gawande called "The Way We Age Now", which contains a flurry of factoids about the degeneration of the human body as it ages, the latest reconsiderations of the question of the role of genetics in the aging process, some historical consideration as to how both the medical profession and the American public have approached dealing with age-related illness, and a couple of profiles of geriatricians at work (including a doctor who, at 85, is trying to come to terms with his own aging).
For the last few months, I've had a chance to spend a good deal of time with a small number of elderly people whom I've been helping with their computers. It's unquestionably the most contact I've ever had with people over the age of 80, and has heightened my own awareness of the challenges they face constantly re-adapting to the everyday world as their bodies break down. I find it particularly poignant with these people, who are all in full possession of their mental acuity and who spent their lifetimes as artists, writers, doctors, and so on and who try to balance their fading abilities with active and engaged lives.
I don't worry or even think about my own old age, because it's highly unlikely that I'll get anywhere near the age of 80; so it has been a particularly enlightening and thoughtful experience for me to know these people. This article offers some very good context.
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The author of this blog, a fellow named Robert Rittman, has a few things to say about the five kinds of Massholes he encounters on his daily commute. (via Universal Hub)
I can think of a few other types he didn't include:
I'm sure there are other examples.
Oh, and I also really liked his post called "101 Ways To Tell If You're From Massachusetts". I think I need to start reading this guy's blog.
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The author of this Christian Science Monitor article has come up with one of the least necessary Internet acronyms I have seen in a while: WILF
Now, I'm sure I don't have to explain to many of you what a MILF is, so when I first saw the word "WILF", I leaped to some obvious variations on the theme -- wife, woman, wench. But, no, this guy wants it to stand for "What Was I Looking For?"
Yeah, I don't think so, Tom. As you yourself realized about five parapgraphs down, that should be "WWILF", making it a bit more like the Internet meme "WWJD" ("What Would Jesus Do?") and its assorted variations. MILF is already thoroughly ingrained into the consciousness of the online crowd, and no one's going to look at that and think it's about goofing off at work. Sorry, dude.
Permalink |Naomi Wolf's piece "The 10 Steps To Fascism" in The Guardian yesterday is all over Blogistan, so I suppose I should link to it myself.
The general consensus from the assorted political sites I pass through is that she's on the right track, but she oversimplifies and overgeneralizes just enough to make her overall point rather weak. I agree with that. For starters, she's borrowing very heavily from this 2003 Free Inquiry piece by Laurence Britt, which lays out 14 characteristics shared by several 20th century Fascist dictatorships and has often been used as a benchmark to gauge the political swerves made by the Bush Administration over the last few years. She also extrapolates just a bit too far on several of her key points: there aren't really gangs of neatly-dressed Young Republicans going around smashing store windows, or a full-blown "detain-and-release" model of police intimidation, even though there are early versions of both.
Along those same lines, compare this piece by Donna Thorne at Infomation Clearing House.info, which doesn't make quite so many claims as Wolf's but gets to the same basic conclusion: that the American public is being softened up to willingly take on elements of fascist dictatorship through a deliberate effort on the part of the government to undercut democratic institutions.
For all of our rhetoric about freedom and liberty, American history demonstrates that there is a lot of general sentiment for the authoritarian aspects of fascism. Some of that stems from simple human behavior. Fear of the other and the need to create a common identity are just basic responses from our deepest monkey brains present in every single one of us; it takes a degree of enlightenment to work against these impulses and embrace concepts like "all men are created equal". We Americans are fortunate to have had very enlightened individuals involved in the conception of our national identity who encoded these ideals into the framework of our government, but it doesn't mean that the average person has genuinely mastered the degree of consciousness required to make sense of them.
America flirted very seriously with fascism in the 1930s in response to the Depression. A group of corporate executives actively recruited a U.S. Army general, Smedley Butler, to act as the leader of a fascist coup to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt. Butler not only refused, he went public with the details, forcing the capitalists to retreat. Many Americans belonged to pro-Hitler organizations like the German-American Bund, which only died off when key members were imprisoned at the beginning of WWII.
I, personally, have very little doubt that between the rabid zealots of the right who presently dominate what passes for "conservatism" in the U.S. right now, and the broad swath of the American public that is totally politically apathetic, the push to accepting fascism would not take very much. But I also think that the right has been greatly weakened in the last year or so as its failures have come home to roost, and the anti-democratic elements of the Bush Administration simply lack the political power to push any further.
This is where I think we need to be careful: the Democratic Party has had to shift rightward in response to the strength of the Republicans, and consequently has been willing to go along with that agenda, offering minor token resistance most of the time. Though politically emboldened at the moment, the spinelessness of our political class in general assures that were the winds to blow the other way again, they would quickly bend back to the right. Moreover, as is demonstrated time and time again whenever so-called "reformers" take control from an unpopular and corrupt government, the likelihood of the reformers simply becoming just as bad as the deposed regime is very high -- it's hard to imagine Hillary Clinton or Obama Barack, or even any of the "minor candidates" truly discarding the degree of executive control that Bush has been able to accumulate.
Permalink |Restaurant Magazine has issued its annual Top 50 Restaurants list for 2007, and it should come as little surprise to anyone who follows the food world that El Bulli is once again Number One.
Of the seven American restaurants on the list, four of them are in New York City, so they're eminently "doable" for us. We tried to go to Le Bernardin the last time we went to New York, but they screwed up the reservation. I would really like to go to Daniel sometime, too.
We have been to one of the restaurants on this list: Taillevent, in Paris. I notice this is their first inclusion on the list. Our evening there will always be one of the most memorable occasions of my entire life. If that's what #48 out of 50 is like, then I'd say there's quite a bit to look forward to with the four New York winners.
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Most of the coverage of the death of Boris Yeltsin over the last day or so has been prefaced with lofty words of praise about being "the first democratically elected leader" and "leading Russians through tough times" and so on.
This Rolling Stone piece by Matt Taibbi (the son of NBC correspondent Matt Taibbi) offers a somewhat less platitudinous memorial based on his own experience of living in Russia during the 1990s. Best article I have read anywhere lately about any topic, by the way. Go! Read!
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I'm sure you're familiar with the old saw "put a thousand monkeys in a room with a typewriter and eventually come up with Shakespeare." It's basically the working model for hiring screenwriters in Hollywood (which explains how ABC came up with that Geico Caveman show idea)
Aaaaaanyway, it's not working out quite as well as first thought. Some researchers in England got a grant to put a typewriter into a habitat of six macacques at the Devon Zoo for a month and monitor the results. The macacques did seem to like to press the letter "S" more than the others and did eventually type five pages of gibberish (which were immediately overnighted to Paramount), but nothing the remotest bit Shakesperean. They also flung the typewriter around and defecated on the keyboard, demonstrating advanced managerial skills.
The flaw in their experiment design, obviously, was not enough monkeys, but I suppose one must make do with the grant money one has.
There used to be a website called "The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator", but it doesn't exist anymore. As they say in academic circles, "more research is needed."
Oh, and today, by the way, is the traditional day for celebrating the birthday of William Shakespeare himself, even though the date is now considered inaccurate. The day has been credited due to an Elizabethan tradition (now discounted by historians) of baptizing infants three days after birth and documented proof that Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564. It also aligns tidily with the date of his death, which DID occur on April 23, 1616.
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This productivity blog has a list of 17 things you should stop doing RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE!!
Like a lot of productivity blogs, this one puts a lot of faith in the Internet and computer software as a way to make your life easier and, theoretically anyway, more productive. Well, we all know how that plays in real life, don't we children?
In this case, I can claim 11 of his 17 suggestions as already implemented in my daily life, so I will give this list a thumbs up. Of the other six, several don't apply to me (taking online college courses, for example) or aren't possible (telecommuting is not possible at my present day-job), but there's at least one I could implement (switching away from Windows). And, while I may be guilty of many things, I have never actually clubbed a baby seal.
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The E. Guittard Chocolate company is one of the premier manufacturers of chocolate in the United States, with products that compare to such famous chocolate makers as Callebaut and Valrhona.
Now they're trying to organize opposition to a pending FDA rule change that would let American chocolate makers substitute vegetable oil for cocoa butter and "milk substitutes" in place of real milk in their production of milk chocolate. Some confectioners already use these substitutes, but can't call their products real chocolate; they have to call their products "chocolate-flavored" or "chocolatey". I guarantee that if you indulged recently in some Easter candy, you ate some of this inferior stuff.
As it is, the American standard for chocolate is already significantly less stringent than the EU standard, which accounts for the general superiority of European chocolates. In bowing to pressure from chocolate manufacturers other than Guittard, the FDA is giving license to the production of a truly terrible product and encouraging the downgrading of all chocolate -- the big commercial makers will quickly switch over to these formulas because of the cost savings.
Capitalism, my friends, eventually ruins everything in the name of profit. But perhaps we can forestall this very unfortunate action before it ruins the Best Thing On Earth.
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Following up a bit on yesterday's post about the difference between food porn and actual fast food, here's a website from a fellow who has made a habit of collecting McDonald's hamburgers and "preserving" them for years. (via Pop Culture Junk Mail)
I used quotations around the word preserve, because all he really does is leave them out in the open air and let them dry up. The preservatives and such involved prevent the burgers from getting moldy, so that eventually they wizen up and look like "apple doll" burgers, if you will.
The oldest one in his collection is the one pictured above, from 1989. That burger is old enough to vote!
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The BBC had this story yesterday about scientists who would like to use smart dust for extraplanetary exploration.
I think this is an absolutely brilliant idea, eliminating a lot of the issues that have plagued other planetary probes -- particularly the primary problem of getting something the size of a car all the way to the surface intact.
This is the web page for the Berkeley professor who is generally credited with "inventing" the idea of smart dust and continues to develop and refine the technology and research. Their goal is to produce smart dust "motes" that are only 1 millimeter in length.
The BBC article says scientists envision "swarms" of the tiny sensors drfting through the atmosphere of a planet, transmitting data back to a satellite or "mothership" in orbit. The smaller size that Pister is working to develop would be required to deal with the aerophysical issues of distributing the motes into the atmosphere, so it may be a while before any workable systems can be developed.
Permalink |This Psychology Today article reports that a researcher has published a paper that concludes that one male child is the optimum with regard to maximizing happiness for a heterosexual couple. Women with children are happier than women without, and women with only one child are happier than women with more than one child, while men are happier with male children than female children. (link via Marginal Revolution)
That should be great news in China, where the "one child per family" law and the preference for male children has resulted in a generation of Chinese that is overwhelmingly male (aided and abetted by ultrasound technology). They should all be deliriously happy...at least until all those men start looking for wives.
Speaking personally, I can say that my wife and I almost always scratch our heads in bewilderment as to why anyone would want more than one child. I can see the "built-in playmate" rationalization for two siblings close in age, but beyond that you've got me. I do think that if we'd had Charlotte when we were younger, we might have been more open to the idea of a second child based on that rationale alone, but even if we could have a second child now, there's no way in hell I'd remotely consider it.
As to the "males prefer sons" argument, well, I have to say that when we found out that we were having a daughter I was greatly relieved. I was a bit anxious about having a son because I felt (and still feel) that I wouldn't be a very good "boy's dad". Having had a serious disconnect with my own father, I didn't want to visit that on a child. Six years into being Charlotte's dad, I don't feel that my own happiness with being a parent (such as it is) is compromised at all by having a female child.
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The inimitable Kokogiak is a mutual Friend Of Torrez, whom I recently had the chance to meet in person when another mutual friend and longtime blog-buddy adampsyche was in town.
Kokogiak shared some photos of the doomed Russian sub Kursk with us the other day, and I thought I would share them with you, along with a couple of links I dredged up reading up on that disaster. The picture on the left is the Kursk setting out to sea from the Soviet sub base in the Baltic Sea. The picture on the right is what was left of the interior of the sub after the explosion that took it to the bottom of the ocean, along with its entire crew.
At the time of the accident, there was much speculation as to the actual cause. The Russian government offered a number of weak explanations: "minor technical difficulties", a "depth charge", and so on. The Western media speculated that the nuclear reactor had detonated. Eventually, as the Wikipedia article lists, there were a number of theories proffered ranging from a suicide bomber among the crew to mutiny. Eventually, though, the final report concluded that a torpedo misfire was the most likely cause. When one looks at the cut-away of the wreck, it's not hard to make a similar conclusion.
Even now, though, conspiracy theorists remain convinced of other, more sinister events. The leading conspiracy idea is that the Kursk collided with an American or a British sub, since subs from both navies were in proximity to observe the Russian naval wargame the Kursk was participating in. The linked conspiracy site goes to great ends to detail this idea, which actually had some credence initially, but over the course of time since the accident, very little of this theory holds water (pardon the pun).
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It's my assumption that most of us are fully aware of the business of food styling -- the people who are responsible for making food look so damn good in photographs, commercials, and product packaging. It's a speciality business, but a lucrative one, and many people who go through the culinary school process find themselves drawn to it as an alternative to the restaurant business.
I also assume that there are few of us who aren't aware that food stylists use all manner of tricks and tweaks to make the food look like that. Indeed, in many cases what winds up being photographed is often something totally inedible because of the enhancements (the one that always sticks out in my mind is that the "milk" in cereal bowl photos is usually mixed with Elmer's Glue).
But just to give us a reminder of the cognitive dissonance we cause for ourselves when we actually choose to eat the food these ads represent, this website does a little side-by-side comparison of the food porn ad photos and what you actually get (link via The Presurfer). I actually chose one of the better looking ones for this post; just wait until you see some of the other comparisons.
Still lovin' it?
Permalink |Today's shootings at Virginia Tech once again bring to attention the phenomena of our present fear-based culture. The tragedy, unfolding live on television, transcends its own physical borders and becomes part of a national consciousness, even though it directly affects a very small percentage of people. The inevitable deluge of media coverage that will consume this incident ultimately makes use of our willingness to be introduced to, indeed even our active seeking out of, elements of fear. In turn, we internalize unnecessary fears and manifest them in pathological ways.
If you've got some spare time and a thesaurus handy, I recommend having a look at this recent piece by author Frank Furedi at the British political commentary site Spiked Online. It's a handful, drawing from more than a few social scientists, and written in a very academic way, but his points are illuminating, and incidents like the one today simply illustrate his point.
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If you're interested in the history of space exploration, you will thoroughly enjoy this website which has a ton of photos from a museum of the Soviet space program housed at the Energia Space Center in Moscow. Now a private company, Energia was the design center for most of the Soviet-era spacecraft.
(The spacecraft in the photo above is a replica of Sputnik 2, complete with a figure of Laika, the Space dog)
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Remember Afghanistan? Oh, sure you do...that's where Osama lives! That's where we were going in and making the country safe for democracy and Jesus by kicking out the Taliban. Even the Democrats all say "We supported the war on Afghanistan! And we're winning!"
Right. Like John McCain's little stroll on the streets of Baghdad the other day, anyone who's not wearing Dubya's patented Rose Colored Glasses will tell you that the reality on the ground has very little to do with what our Loyal Media tells us.
In fact, speaking of the Loyal Media...the NPR junkies among you will remember a reporter named Sarah Chayes, who covered the European beat back in the 1990s. She left NPR back in 2002 and has spent the last five years in Afghanistan, managing local groups who are actually trying to rebuild Afghanistan rather than pave it over into a landing strip for invading Iran. This Boston Globe story from 2006 gives you some background on how she made that transition in her life.
Now that she's not constrained by her position as a member of the news media, Chayes has turned into a very outspoken critic of the ongoing situation in Afghanistan, which the Bushies have conveniently forgotten about as they've turned their attentions elsewhere. In the latest issue of Boston Review, Chayes writes about the challenges of trying to rebuild a completely annihilated country -- the rampant government corruption that hinders any humanitarian efforts, the continued military actions between the Taliban and "Coalition Forces", and the ongoing fumble-bumbling of the American government. Most Kandaharis, she says, would be happy just for some functional local control, a point reconfirmed in this news article in the British paper The Independent, which says that local sentiment at this point would prefer the return of Taliban control just to improve the security situation that the "Coalition of the Willing" has been unable to manage.
I'd hate to see how bad things were if we weren't WINNING the Global War On Terror.
Permalink |Sticking with today's theme, let's look at the 2008 presidential election and how that's shaping up a bit.
In the current issue of The New Yorker, op-ed writer Hendrik Hertzberg takes a look at the front-loading of fundraising and the juggling of primary elections.
The current situation has seriously thrown the apple cart off the tracks. It's almost assured that the re-organization of primary election dates will result in presumptive nominees being selected before the end of February, stretching the national campaign out for an extra six months. Six months of non-stop squabbling, spinning, oversaturated news coverage, and everything else we've come to dread about elections.
Hertzberg mentions a plan that was offered up by a group of Republicans prior to the 2004 election that would have re-organized the primaries in a way that would put the largest convention delegate grabs at the end of the season, giving all the candidates a fairer shot at winning support. The plan, Hertzberg says, was shot down by the RNC, intent on the coronation of Dubya without any competition.
Meanwhile, while the Democrats and Republicans are running headlong into an electoral debacle, here's an interesting Salon profile of former Republican senator Bob Barr, who has actually left the party and has begun to position himself as a right-libertarian with enough national credibility to mount a third-party presidential campaign. Compared to the other right-libertarian candidate, Ron Paul, who is a first-rate wacko, Barr sounds almost electable. The left-libertarians continue to scurry about in total obscurity, but I hear there's this guy called Al Gore who might be looking to make a comeback. Maybe he should pay a campaign visit to Vermont first.
Permalink |While we're on the topic of left-vs-right today, here's an article worth reading through from last month's issue of the British magazine Prospect: the magazine's editors asked 100 writers and thinkers to consider what political divisions would come to dominate global politics in the 21st Century, superseding the left-vs-right division that defined the 20th.
Most of the opinions boil down to a conflict between the pull towards globalism and the opposite force of localism. This can be expressed in a lot of ways: the present conflict between the Middle Eastern states and the U.S. is, in part, about American global hegemony and inwardly focused Islamism. What we tend to think of as "liberal vs conservative" in American politics also has a dimension of externalism vs. internalism that is far more polarizing than traditional notions of "left" and "right".
Food for thought, anyway.
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Yesterday, I happened upon this Washington Post essay republished at the indy-news site AlterNet.org. In the piece, the authors claim that "the winds of secession are blowing in the Green Mountain State."
Sounds a bit wishful to me, but I didn't know that Vermont had its own constitution and operated independently in between the Revolution and the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Vermont these days is full of "flat-landers" (mostly from New York) who've brought their liberal politics with them to combine with the somewhat contrarian libertarianism of the natives to make for a political environment that supports a Socialist in Congress.
Meanwhile, over on the other side of the Connecticut River, the "Free State" folks haven't given up on trying to turn New Hampshire into a right-wing libertarian utopia. Their idea -- import about 20,000 like-minded right-wing anti-federal types so that they can load up local governments with people favorable to their cause.
I think that would make for an interesting bit of interstate rivarly, don't you? Left-Libertarian Vermont versus Right-Libertarian New Hampshire? It would be great until some splinter faction in White River Junction decided to start an intifada.
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Okay, maybe Keith Richards was just taking the piss about snorting his father's ashes mixed with cocaine, but this is apparently real: British artist/designer Nadine Jarvis will make a set of 240 real pencils using the cremains of your loved one, each pencil stamped with their name and the dates of their life. (She also makes birdhouses out of cremains and birdfood)
(via The Presurfer)
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YesButNoButYes offers the following quizzie: Sex Toy Or Fishing Lure? Can you tell which is which just from the name? (Safe For Work)
Okay, I'll give it to them -- these five roadways are in fact worse than anything we saw in Ireland. But if they were to expand that list to a Top Ten, I'd add Connor Pass to it.
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Not Photoshopped. Kroger Supermarkets are actually selling "Old Yeller" brand dog food.
What market are they trying to appeal to? The pet-owners-with-rabid-dogs-who have-to-shoot-them-in-the-head segment? The I-never-saw-the-end-of-that-movie segment? The Mommy-said-Yeller-went-to-live-on-a-puppy-farm segment?
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Several online news sources had this story yesterday: like most animal noises, birdsong is now generally understood to be linguistic in nature -- birds sing to denote territory, attract mates, spread alerts, and so on. But now it seems that some birds are multi-lingual. In particular, it seems that nuthatches understand chickadee vocalization and know when chickadees are warning each other about predators in the area.
The article goes on to say that it's the number and frequency of the "dee-dee-dee" sound the little birds make when they utter their signature "chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee" call that indicates the threat level; the more "dee-dee-dee", the higher the threat. Not unlike the Gestapo's "Terror Alert" system, except that the chickadees know the difference between a real wolf and a fake one.
Permalink | Comments (1)Estne volumen in toga, an solum tibi libet me videre?
And other useful Latin phrases!
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They must have a helluva time shipping these things without attracting the attention of the Gestapo: it's a USB hub for your computer all dressed up like a Big Red Button, complete with activation key and safety cover.
I think I need one of these.
Permalink |Over the years, I've encountered a few recipes for making ginger ale at home, but none of them have ever been all that great. For the most part, they involve making a ginger syrup and just adding it to club soda at whatever level of concentration suits you. I can see that -- it's basically how soda companies do it (think about the dispenser machines at McDonalds, et.al.).
The DIY site Wikihow has a page with a somewhat different method. You use active yeast to produce the carbonation right in the mixture itself. This should produce a much stronger and fizzier ginger ale than pouring sugar syrup in already-carbonated water. It also produces a small amount alcohol, but not enough to give it a kick unless you let it overferment, and then you're probably not going to want to drink it.
After I get back fromy my trip, I'll give this a try and let you know how it turned out.
Permalink |Okay, anyone who DOESN'T think that today's "news" about Khalid Sheikh Muhammad's "confession" is anything but spin from the Bush Administration to deflect attention from the Gonzales Scandal, please raise your hand.
Yeah, I thought so.
Let's try to turn that spotlight back on the actual fuck-ups. shall we? The latest issue of Rolling Stone (!) has this excellent piece featuring a round-table discussion with a group of national security and military experts who are looking a little further down the field in Iraq and coming up with a very, very bleak analysis.
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The popular nerdtoy website ThinkGeek has this handy emoticon LED sign for the back of your car window.
Just don't plan on ever driving in Boston again if you buy one.
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Via Arts & Letters Daily, here's a link to a review of a new biography of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl in the L.A. Times by film critic Richard Schickel. He begins with a bang:
Leni Riefenstahl was a slut.
A statement which he quickly qualifies, but then goes on to expand. His meaning is more in the sense that Riefenstahl willingly let herself be used by Hitler for his propaganda as a means of making use of the opportunity herself to promote her career. Certainly, she was neither the first woman nor the last to operate along those lines, so I don't think it's any particular revelation on the part of the biographer.
Schickel does point out that the biographer, Steven Bach, has done a good job of digging up plenty of source material that pushes the argument over whether or not Riefenstahl was herself complicit in the evildoings of the Nazis a bit more to the "Ja, mein fuhrer" column. Riefenstahl spent most of her time after the war aggressively denying her association with the Nazis and trying to rehabilitate her image into that of a "pure artist" who was manipulated by politics. Schickel's "slut" comment" summarizes Bach's evidence.
Sounds like a fascinating read.
One thing that Schickel says in the review has me thinking:
...Riefenstahl, it's not an exaggeration to say, created almost every significant visual image that we now retain of National Socialism in all its evil pomp.
Again, not at all a stretch of the truth. Her imagery codified the "Nazi aesthetic", and film and art students alike study it in intricate detail. The Fascist and Soviet Realist art movements of the 1930s are very significant in art history, instantly iconic culturally, and politically powerful even today. The emotional appeal of those works resonates with people very strongly, which was the whole point -- the successes of Hitler and Stalin both came from their ability to manipulate the emotions of their subjects.
So, flash forward with me to the last six years and the plethora of tacky, overwrought, melodramatic imagery that has come out of the American right-wing in response to 9/11 and the Iraq War. Slap a flag or an eagle, or an eagle superimposed over a flag, or put the World Trade Center in the background, and VOILA! instant "patriotic" art. But it's all shit. Pure and utter dreck. There's nothing deeper to the imagery than the superficial emotionality that shoves itself into your face.
Ultimately, I think, that has prevented the right from burrowing into our psyches any further than they already have. The over-the-top histrionics of it all become alienating to people, particularly those of us who are already put off by all the jingoist behavior. As with other elements of the right-wing agenda, embracing this ticky-tacky schlockfest labels you as someone not too discerning or bright. And, while that simply doesn't stop everyone, eventually even the people who might find some initial appeal to it find themselves not wanting to be identified with it. Also, our general level of media sophistication now makes it harder for people to not become detached and cynical about overt propaganda.
Sinclair Lewis was 100% on the money when he said "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." Luckily, they don't seem to have a lot of top-notch graphic artists on board yet.
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Here's a bit of science news that is both amazing and deeply troubling at the same time: the journal "Nature" has published a paper that explains how researchers were able to introduce a memory into the brain of a rat and then use a drug to "erase" that one specific memory. (via 3QuarksDaily)
The memory was "given" to the rat via typical behavioral modification, nothing new there. Being able to map and follow the brain processes for creating a memory is a big deal, too, but it's the ability to deliver a targeted chemical that wipes out a specific memory that should have everyone quaking in their boots. Sure, there are some legitimate and positive uses one can imagine (the article specifically mentions using it to treat PTSD), but it's just waaaaay too easy to imagine this being used improperly against people, especially given the proclivities of the current gang of criminals in Washington. For the time being, the drug in question cannot be used on humans by law, but our dear Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has already made it clear that the rule of law really doesn't matter anymore.
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Me like pie. Me like pi, too.
Permalink | Comments (3)Almost 30 years ago, someone came up with the idea of the International Star Registry -- a gimmick where, for a fairly steep price, you could register one of the gazillion unnamed stars with the name of a loved one (or anyone, I guess) with the International Astronomical Union and get a cheesy printed certificate in return.
The IAU does indeed register the names, but because they refer to all astronomical objects using a specific classification system, it's not like there's some astronomer discovering intelligent life on Buffie Fenwick IV. It's strictly a romantic gesture.
Welcome to the new millennium, where there are now a small handful of companies selling the same gimmick, with prices all over the place. But at least one website will let you do it for free and even let you print out your own certificate. Or, if you REALLY want to impress someone, you can name an entire galaxy after them for free.
Of course, even these guys recognize a money-making opportunity when they see one and offer all sorts of "value-added" services like customized certificates for $2, or (and this is probably a big upsell) for $10 they will let you register a star that is actually visible to the naked eye...oooh, now that's gonna get you laid for sure.
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But it will buy you this: Bling H20, a new "premium" bottled water that comes in a frosted bottle encrusted with Swarovski crystals. The price: $24.00 per 16 ounce bottle.
Because, you know, it's all about the bling.
(via MetaFilter)
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Most movie buffs know that Alfred Hitchcock was fond of making brief cameo appearances in his films, but even armed with a comprehensive list of the cameos, it's often difficult to pick him out -- he's usually only in the shot for a fleeting moment, passing by in the background, included in a crowd, and so on.
This Htichcock fansite not only has a list of all the Hitch cameos, it comes with handy stills to show you exactly when and where the scenes are, and they've even done you the favor of highlighting Hitch, so you can spot him much more easily the next time you sit down to watch "Suspicion" or "Notorious" or any of his movies.
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The cowbird is well-known for pushing the eggs out of other birds' nests and laying its own eggs there, to be reared by unsuspecting parents. (Cowbirds are not alone in this behavior, cuckoos and other birds do this, as well as various insects. The phenomenon is called "brood parasitism".)
This article from the Toronto Globe & Mail says that's not the full extent of the behavior. If a host bird realizes that there has been a switch and tries to get rid of the cowbird egg, a group of cowbirds will come back and damage the nest in retaliation. This deliberate revenge has been dubbed "Mafia behavior" by the scientists who have just published a study of the birds' behavior.
Their first clue was the pinkie rings and loud golf shirts favored by the Mafia cowbirds and the birds' favorite call "Fuhgeddaboutit! Fuhgeddatboutit!"
Permalink |Via 3Quarks Daily, I read this opinion piece in Salon by Glenn Greenwald wherein he tries to offer some deeper analysis into why the Republicans pay even the slightest attention to Ann Coulter and the other poo-flinging monkeys of the right.
His thesis: conservatives are a bunch of pussies. Okay, he didn't actually call them "pussies" the way dear old Ann Coulter called John Edwards a "faggot", but that's pretty much what he's saying. Here's one of the better pullquotes:
That laughable absurdity really reveals the heart of this movement. It is a cult of contrived masculinity whereby people dress up as male archtypes like cowboys, ranchers, and tough guys even though they are nothing of the kind -- or prance around as Churchillian warriors because they write from a safe and protected distance about how great war is -- and in the process become triumphant heroes and masculine powerful icons and strong leaders. They and their followers triumph over the weak, effete, humiliated Enemy, and thereby become powerful and exceptional and safe.
It all falls together, if you ask me. You've got a general populace which has been brainwashed into a near-constant state of fear at the slightest threat: LED signs mistaken for bombs, anybody even remotely swarthy getting on a plane causing panic, people taking pictures of public buildings being arrested as terror suspects, the whole lot. Then you've got the constant media message of machismo driving people into a false sense of appropriate role models and behaviors. Next you've got the perversion of the predominant religion, which consistently reinforces selfishness, self-righteousness, zealotry and bigotry. And stir that all up with a dose of near-constant stupidity on the part of public officials and media mouthpieces.
Another quote from Greenwald:
People who feel weak and vulnerable crave strong leaders to protect them and to enable them to feel powerful. And those same people crave being part of a political movement that gives them those sensations of power, strength, triumph and bravery -- and they need a strong, powerful, masculine Leader to enable those feelings. And they will devote absolute loyalty to any political movement which can provide them with that.
And, there, my friends, you have the "conservative movement" in a nutshell. Emphasis on the "nut".
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Since we've been on the subject of coffee and caffeine lately, I feel obligated to share this news link with you: studies show that smaller doses of caffeine later in the day do more for mental alertness than one big dose first thing in the morning.
In other words, having a couple of cans of Coke in the afternoon will keep you more alert as the day wears on than glugging down a mugful of coffee. This implies, of course, that you want to wait until later in the afternoon or evening to have your burst of alertness. The reasoning for that being that the caffeine works to block the absorption of a chemical your body produces which fosters sleepiness which increases throughout the day. The results also suggest you can ingest the caffeine without disrupting your natural sleep later on.
Well, obviously a big jolt of caffeine first thing in the morning is going to have worn off by mid-afternoon. So, to me this says go ahead and have that big mug of coffee in the morning, but keep your afternoon pick-me-up limited to a caffeinated soft drink, where the caffeine concentration is a lot less.
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Via Universal Hub comes this link to a flickr page from a fellow in Cambridge who has decided to help the local authorities tell the difference between real bombs and not-bombs with the help of some handy stickers.
He's working the wrong side of the river, though. As far as I know, the Cambridge cops haven't blown anything up yet. Boston occasionally has these attacks of insecurity where they feel inferior to New York and have to do something to make themselves feel important. Cambridge has no problem with its own self-importance, so they don't think they have to go looking for bombs. The bombs will find them.
If you'd like to help the Boston Police Department, the stickers are only $2.99 and are available here. They're printed on vinyl, so they won't bleach out in the sun or run in the rain. Get cracking, because there are a LOT of pay phones, mailboxes, parking meters and ATMs, and the BPD Bomb Squad hasn't blown anything up in almost a week.
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What you're looking at right there is a photograph of the corpse of a Buddhist lama named Hambo Lama Itigelov. The lama, who lived in the Russian Mongol territory of Buryatia, died in 1927. He was reasonably well-known in his time and opened the first Buddhist temple in Europe in St. Petersburg in 1914.
Per his last will, they exhumed his body in 1955, 1973, and again in 2002 and discovered that it was almost perfectly preserved 85 years on without any embalming or mummification. That's not terribly unusual in the Siberian territories -- the permafrost keeps bodies well-preserved for a very long time.. What was unusual was that once exposed to the air, the body still did not decompose, and remains in its mostly-intact condition even now. All his soft tissue and musculature remain intact and even pliable.
Meanwhile, just this morning there was this CNN story about the 1950s rock star "The Big Bopper", who died in the plane crash that also killed Buddy Holly and Richie Valens. For years there were rumors that there was a gunfight aboard the plane which caused the crash, and that The Big Bopper tried to crawl from the wreckage to get help. His son recently had the body exhumed and autopsied to settle the rumors once and for all. The ME's findings suggest that he was killed on impact, but the article also goes on to mention that even now, some 50 years after "The Day The Music Died", The Big Bopper's body had suffered little decay and was still recognizable by his son.
Neither body seems to have saponified, which is now generally recognized as the process which has resulted in the so-called "incorruptible saints". In the case of The Big Bopper, I presume it's just the effect of modern embalming practices, but I thought the story of Itigelov was interesting even if the headline "Dead Buddhist Monk Is Alive" was a bit misleading.
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While Our Fearless Leader gets to fly around in his patriotically-painted fancy-schmancy 747 Air Force One, Dark Lord Cheney prefers to use a rather nondescript military transport plane as Air Force Two, in keeping with his low profile.
The photo above is a picture of the front of the plane itself, and if you look closely at the text painted over the door, you'll discover something remarkable.
A little too hard for you to read? Let me help you. It says "The Spirit Of Strom Thurmond".
No, seriously.
(Do you suppose Dead-Eye Dick has ever invited Al Sharpton for a ride?)
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Ever wonder what exactly is in a Hostess Twinkie?
Well, somebody wondered enough to write a book about it.
He had to reverse engineer the Twinkie on his own, though; the Continental Baking people refused to cooperate with the writing of the book.
What it boils down to (mmm...boiled Twinkies...) is that Twinkies, like most snack foods, are mostly made up of chemical products that simulate some of the taste and texture of natural food products so that the snacks can survive through the process of being made, packaged, shipped and left to stale on store shelves. That should come as no surprise to anyone. What's more interesting, as the MSNBC article points out, is how some of those chemicals are used for other purposes that go awfully far afield of food: postage stamp glue and weed killer being just two of the examples.
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A: His ass
Have a look at these super-macro images of bugs who came into fatal contact with windshields courtesy of Der Spiegel (by way of BoingBoing)
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Have a look at this post at Fogonazos. It's about a resort in Canada where you can swim in a pool with real live polar bears. Some of the pictures are great.
Oh, yeah, there's a 9-inch thick wall of unbreakable glass between the swimmers and the poalr bears. These people aren't THAT stupid.
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Is there anything you CAN'T do with Google Maps?
Yesterday everybody was posting about how you can now get real-time traffic data when you request a map of some major cities in the U.S., but a week or two ago I ran across this site, too: a real-time tracker of satellites and other space objects orbiting the Earth.
The traffic mapping is probably a good deal more practical than the satellite tracking, but not nearly as much fun, if you ask me. In the picture above, you're looking at the real-time position of the International Space Station as of about 10:15 a.m. ET this morning. you can track the Hubble Space Telescope, commercial satellites, and even some military satellites (the ones we're allowed to know about).
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Well, now I know what I am going to buy my wife for her birthday. It's this: a velco-covered piece of headgear called the Remote Wrangler that lets you put all of your remote controls in one convenient spot -- your head!
I especially like the "sports" model that looks like an athletic supporter. That's just the thing for my wife, the self-appointed Queen of the Remotes in our bedroom. Who says there aren't any romantic gifts anymore?
(via Engadget)
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Via Universal Hub, here's a link to a webpage from local ABC affiliate WCVB that compares Boston highway traffic before and after the Big Dig. In the picture on the left you can see that most of the major routes into and out of the city were plagued with monumental delays. On the right, the picture shows that traffic problems have not been totally eliminated -- indeed, the web article does a good job of pointing out a few places that the changes from the Big Dig have made things worse -- but that several traditional bottlenecks have been significantly ameliorated, and that the overall impact is positive.
(As long as you don't consider collapsing roof panels, inadequate drainage and ventilation, and potentially catastrophic leaks a problem, that is)
Meanwhile, trying to drive around on the actual streets of central Boston has not improved one iota, and has, in fact, probably gotten worse as a result of the Big Dig's continual process of re-routing the already twisty, narrow and confusing streets of "downtown". We got very lost a couple of weeks ago looking for Locke-Ober. It's one of Boston's traditional old-fashioned restaurants, tucked away on a little alley in between Tremont and Washington Streets, and not even my handy-dandy GPS could navigate us through the labrythine streets. Ain't no tunnel in the world ever going to fix all that.
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Via CoolHunting, have a look at this website for a company called SmartWool.
They've found a way to selectively breed sheep which produce a wool that has thinner fibers than ordinary sheep wool and a high concentration of keratin, then treat it with a proprietary technology (the website doesn't say exactly what, but my guess is some nanotech not unlike the stuff used in my beloved nanopants) which increases the natural insulation value of the wool so that it not only keeps you warm when it's cold, but helps keep you cool when it's hot -- a far cry from wearing regular wool in the warm weather. It also does a better job of wicking away moisture than cotton or synthetics, and doesn't promote the growth of bacteria that produce bodily odors.
There are a ton of products already available that are made from SmartWool, with an obvious bent toward outdoor activewear. Personally, I am thinking about buying some socks for my trip, as we'll be on foot a lot, and it would be a good idea not to stink up the cottage too much with my smelly feets.
As a side benefit, this company is committed to a wide range of green and sustainable practices, and (not unlike a certain Vermont-based ice cream company) they donate a portion of their profits to environmental and other earth-positive groups.
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Let's say you're a millionaire evil genius intent on taking over the entire planet. You gotta have a secret ocean base where you can launch your giant laser cannon and rule over your New World Order, right? Of course right!
So I've got your answer right here! A barge that can be towed out into the middle of the ocean and literally flipped from a horizontal to a vertical orientation to be used as a stationary platform.
Plus, if some sneaky, death-defying British Secret Service agent keeps pestering you, you can just flip the platform back to its floating position and make a hasty getaway before he defuses your self-destruct mechanisms with 007 seconds left on the time.
Be sure to check out this QuickTime video of the FLIP ship in action (including no-spill coffee pot action)
(via Fogonazos)
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The Batmobile may be one of the most iconic objects of the entire 1960s, but ironically the very first one was built from a 1955 Lincoln Futura. By the mid-1960s, the big tail-fin design was out of style and the car was no longer a commercial product. But after it was modded by stylist George Barris, it turned into one of the best-loved symbols of 1960s pop culture.
Ultimately, Barris built six Batmobiles for the show, of which only three were functional road-worthy automobiles. One of those is presently up for auction at the British auto auctioneer Coys. It goes under the gavel today, so you'd better hurry up if you want to get your bid in.
(via MetaFilter)
Permalink |Just a small bit of advice from a fellow cook:
Do spend $8.95 to buy this set of mini colanders -- they're perfect for draining a small amount of something (canned vegetables, et. al.). They stack and are small enough to tote around if you travel from kitchen to kitchen like I do. (via bookofjoe)
Don't spend $370 on this stainless-steel wok from All-Clad (via Uncrate). Only a pretentious foodie idiot would fork over that kind of cash for a shiny show-off toy, when the real thing costs about $10-$20.
(and, yes, most of my pots and pans ARE All-Clad, but this is just beyond ridiculous)
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NASA would like us to know that there's going to be a lunar eclipse on Saturday, March 3.
This will be one of those eclipses where the Earth comes between the moon and the sun, so the moon won't be completely obscured. Instead it will turn a reddish color as it reflects the light from the sun's corona. It might not look as reddish to you as that photograph is -- I seem to recall that the last time we got to see this sort of eclipse, the moon was pale orange.
According to the NASA page, we here in North America will see the eclipse at moonrise. For those of us here in the Eastern Time Zone, that means the fullest extent of the eclipse will be visible around 6:20 p.m. (conditions permitting). The moon usually looks largest to us at moonrise, too, so it should be really something spectacular to see.
(via boingboing)
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That right there is the caffeine molecule. Caffeine on its own can kill you if you ingest 10 grams, so maybe it's good to know just how much caffeine you're consuming on a daily basis.
Via Slashfood, here's a link to a very good database of beverages that contain caffeine -- sodas, energy drinks, coffees, teas, even bottled eater. You can sort by any column in the database to make it easier to find a particular product, a threshold amount, or a particular "dosage".
I learned a couple of new bits of info from looking at the database. For one, it puts the caffeine content of a cup of espresso at 77 milligrams, or a concentration level of 51.33 mg/oz, as opposed to 23.25 mg/oz for a Starbucks grande coffee. I've often read that espresso has LESS caffeine than ordinary coffee because of the darker roast, however this webpage explains the misconception. I also discovered that several sodas I had been avoiding because of their caffeine content don't have anywhere near as much as I thought.
(also notice that caffeine concentrations are measured in MILLIGRAMS. So just imagine how much espresso you'd need to drink toget the equivalent of 10 GRAMS.)
Relatedly, I also ran across this bit of information yesterday: coffee that does not pass through a paper filter has more cholesterol in it. So French presses, percolators, and other coffee-making processes produce a brew higher in cholesterol than coffee made in a drip maker. But, according to the database above, drip coffee has more caffeine than brewed. Damned if you do and damned if you don't, I guess.
Meanwhile, if you're tired of doling out the big bucks to the Starbucks, maybe you need to find a locally owned-and-operated coffee shop. They're scarcer than hen's teeth unless you live in a place like Seattle, but there are still some around. This site, Delocator.net, might help you find a local coffee shop in your neck of the woods (I say "might" because it came up with bupkis for me).
Lastly, the title of this post comes from one of my favorite Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream flavors of all time, but it no longer seems to be available according to the B&J website. If they EVER mess with Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, I *will* drive to Vermont and have a word with someone.
Permalink | Comments (1)I have been an iPod owner for almost three years, and since I started listening to it in the car, I have largely stopped listening to radio. Since sometime in the late 1980s, though, I had always been a devotee of public radio -- not just the news programs, but also many of their other regular weekly shows from "Car Talk" to "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me".
Very honestly, I needed a break from "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered", and so I don't miss those shows at all. But all those other programs still appeal to me. There's no reason I *can't* listen to them on the radio, I just don't. A lot of them are aired on Saturdays in our area, and I'm not in the car at those times like I used to be in the Time Before Charlotte.
Ditto for streaming radio. Both of the two major public radio stations in Boston offer live streams, but it's just not meant to be for me.
So enter the podcasts. It's old news to a lot of people, I'm sure, but NPR makes a ton of their programming available in downloadable form and has a comprehensive listing of them at their website. Their listing includes many programs produced by local public radio stations that are intended mostly for their own listening area, such as Maine Public Radio's "Maine Things Considered" or KQED's "The California Report".
Skimming through the listings the other day, I was tickled to find that several of my favorites offer their entire weekly broadcast in podcast format, such as the news quiz "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me", Fresh Air and "This American Life" (you can get the current week's show as a free podcast, but you have to pay $0.95 per episode to download older shows...or go find them via BitTorrent...shhhh).
Others only give you snippets: While you can listen to "A Prairie Home Companion" as streaming audio on the show's own site, the podcasts are limited to Keillor's "Lake Wobegon" monologues from the previous Saturday night's show. And the Car Talk guys only post their "favorite question" of the week.
My biggest disappointment, though, was to discover that "Says You", which is a word quiz panel show produced here in Boston, is only available via Audible.com, and they charge four bucks an episode if you're not an Audible member ($2.95 if you are a member). Sorry, but that's way too much per episode when other national-caliber programming is available for free.
If you've never listened to a podcast, don't be intimidated by the "pod" part. You don't have to have an iPod or any other music player to listen to them. You can just download the files to your computer and listen to them that way. If you're really clever, you can even fiddle around with an RSS feeder to automatically download the latest ones for you, so you don't even have to be bothered to remember to do it (although you do need to remember to LISTEN to them...).
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There was a brief moment sometime in the early 1980s where it was cool for about fifteen seconds to have one of those "Dixie" horns on your car, just like the Dukes of Hazzard.
I also remember some doodad along the way that you could install in your car and choose between half a dozen or so custom horn sounds (including "Dixie"). By that time, though, it had become the province of mullet-headed man-boys and had lost any semblance of cool.
So welcome to the new millennium, where technology and trailer-trash collide. Now you can buy an updated version of the custom horn tone gizmo that will play any audio file you upload to the box. So now you're not just limited to whatever pattern can be squawked out of the horn itself, but just about any bit of audio you can think of.
And you thought customized cell phone ring tones were annoying? Just you wait until a few of these get installed and people start uploading rap music clips or Homer Simpson dialogue. Or, given the driving etiquette in this particular geography, I can already imagine ten thousand custom horns all honking "Fuckin' Asshole!" as the traffic backs up on Rt. 93 in the morning.
Permalink | Comments (1)While Turner Broadcasting may have gotten a cheap deal for only having to pay $2 million and sacrifice one guy in a suit over the Mooninite Invasion, the over-the-top response from the local authorities is a laughable reminder of a very un-laughable situation that affects a number of major American cities in a very sinister and threatening way: superficial and overblown public security measures that in practice offer almost no real security but transform public life into a series of intimidating encounters that violate the very nature of a free society.
First, just so we're all on the same page, a short lesson I found online the other day: this Flash animation very simply and elegantly explains the whole philosophy of liberty. It's several minutes long, and gets a bit preachy at the end, but for those of you who find philosophy a little thick, this lays out the central ideas plainly. Among them, the one most pertinent to this conversation is the idea that the threat of force or violence to coerce proscribed behavior is inimical to a free society.
Writing at 3QuarksDaily, Michael Blim takes on the intimidation used by the MBTA Police in the form of random bag searches. Though it took a couple of false starts for the MBTA Police to actually mplement the searches as regular policy, it has been in place now for a couple of years. The MBTA Police do not always pay much attention to the policy themselves, but every once in a while something (like bogus LED signs all over the city) jostles them back to attention and they make more of a show of doing some searches.
As Blim points out, in the last quarter of 2006, the MBTA Police detained 2500 people for random searches. Absolutely none of them turned out to have anything remotely dangerous or illegal, and only 27 of them even set off what would turn out to be false positives from their explosive sniffing dogs and machines. There are approximately 1.2 MILLION riders on the various MBTA trains and buses every single day. The MBTA cops stopped 2500 people out of a total possible number of 98.4 million riders in an 82-day period. That's 0.002% of the total ridership. As the Massachusetts ACLU notes, that is an "infinitesimally small" number of searches.
In other words, it's a joke. A complete waste of time and a complete waste of money. Barring the statistical "one-in-a-million" scenario (which they would have to score EVERY SINGLE DAY to be meaningful), there's no way these searches are the slightest bit effective.
So what's the real effect of the presence of the cops and the dogs and the bomb-sniffing machines? Intimidation. Whereas the presence of police obviously on patrol for routine criminal activity can indeed provide some deterrent, these police are not on routine patrol. Their job is to consider each and every person on the subways, buses, and commuter trains as suspect. And because their task is done overtly, the glare of suspicion introduces the element of intimidation into the public space.
Let me quote Blim directly, because he says this well:
Further the court seems unaware of the fear such tactics create in ordinary persons feel when they find cops in their face unexpectedly, dressed in black and equipped with guns, a machine, and a dog, and demanding that they surrender their bags.
Let's be clear -- the fear or expectation of violence or punishment is absolutely equivalent to the violence or punishment itself. Don't agree with me? Ask Dick Cheney or Attorney General Alberto Gonzales about the validity of torture. The threat of torture alone is considered a torturous act in international law. While random bag searches do not reach the same threat level on their own, consider that you can be arrested and detained indefinitely without benefit of counsel or contact with anyone on practically any grounds of suspicion deemed appropriate. And, as Blim points out, the federal courts have ruled that the state has complete and total discretion to determine any action as a threat to itself, trumping the rights of the individual.
Now let's consider that "philosophy of liberty" piece again, shall we? If you accept the premises of this short lesson as valid, then there's no way the current MBTA policies, or any of the other "for show" efforts established by public safety agencies in Boston, New York, London, or anywhere else are in any way tolerable in a free society.
And yet they persist, are given legitimacy by the courts, are aggressively pursued by all levels of government and receive a degree of public support from some quarters of society. In short, we have breached the free society as it was imagined and put into practice for more than 200 years and all we have to show for it is fear itself.
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So they're finally getting a Whole Foods supermarket up in Portland, Maine, but they're fighting over whether or not to sell live lobsters.
In Maine.
Live lobsters.
You can't swing a dead cat without hitting someone selling live lobsters in Maine, so frankly if the Whole Foods people are so against it, I think they could probably skip the whole thing and be none worse for it. Instead, as you've probably read, they're going to give each lobster its own cozy little room in the tank instead of the usual "pile 'em up in one big tank" approach.
Oooookay.
I guess it's okay to be concerned about the suffering of lobsters, though it seems to me we're investing a lot more in their suffering than the suffering of human beings (anyone who's taken a walk down Congress Street in Portland will know exactly what I'm talking about).
Once again the Whole Foods folks are being a bit hypocritical. They don't want to cause suffering for live lobsters and they don't promote boiling them live either -- they will gladly stun them for you using a "humane" device called (and I am not making this up) "The Crusta-Stun". But let's say you are too squeamish to buy a sea mudbug, living or stunned, and instead opt for the convenience of packaged lobster meat. Well, the Whole Foods folks are glad to sell you some of that, too, but this is the big-ass machine they use to get that meat -- a high pressure machine that literally forces all of the meat out of every last nook and cranny of a lobster shell, even the little tiny legs (as every REAL Mainer knows, you always suck the meat out of the legs). I'm not entirely clear on how this is more humane than boiling, or even the infamous ice-pick method of lobster murder. I suspect it's humane the same way we "humanely" slaughter cows, chickens and pigs -- i.e. mechanized to the point that it doesn't seem like slaughter.
Me, I am a traditionalist and firmly believe in tossing live lobsters directly into a big ol' pot of boiling water. It has been my own personal tradition for some time now to kiss each lobster on the carapace before I throw them in the water to let them know that they are loved for their tasty sacrifice. I think that's pretty humane. Maybe the Whole Foods store can hire a lobster kisser to bid each one adieu as they leave the store.
(links via The Secret Life Of Lobsters)
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Very cool website featuring enhanced electron-microscope photography of many different things ranging from fungi to insects to plant structures, and even nano-mechanical devices.
Lots to look and marvel at. You can even buy prints of some of the images.
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While J.J. Abrams is getting ready to "reboot" the original Star Trek with the new movie he's making, which will reportedly star Matt Damon as Captain Kirk, a bunch of comic book guys are bringing out a five-part series of comics retelling many of the encounters between Captain Kirk and his crew and the Klingons from the Klingon point of view.
The series is called "Star Trek: Blood Will Tell" and revisits such notable incidents as the unleashing of thousands of accursed tribbles on board a Klingon starship by the war criminal Montgomery Scott.
But wait, it gets even better...the comics will be published in the original Klingon, with an English translation available so you can read along if you're not quite fluent in T'hlingan.
(Extra geek points available for the first fanboy/fangrrl who can tell me who the three Klingons are in the picture above and how the picture relates to this post)
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Stonehenge, where the demons dwell
Where the banshees live and they do live well.
Stonehenge
Where a man is a man and the children dance to
the pipes of pan.
Stonehenge
Tis a magic place where the moon doth rise
With a dragon's face.
Stonehenge
Where the virgins lie
And the prayer of devils fill the midnight sky.
And you my love, won't you take my hand
We'll go back in time to that mystic land
Where the dew drops cry and the cats meow
I will take you there
I will show you how...
On Salisbury Plain there stands a collection of massive monoliths and other stones that were placed there by the ancient aboriginal Druidic people of the place known now as England. This giant circle marked the passage of the moon, sun and stars across the night sky and gave the ancient ones a way to predict the changing of the seasons, the coming of events, and the favors of their gods.
Which is all well and good, except it's a fake. Oh, sorry, I mean "historical recreation". By the end of the 19th century, the site at Salisbury was nothing more than a ruin, ransacked for its stones for hundreds of years. The Stonehenge we know today is in fact the product of a whole series of rebuilding projects throughout the 20th century, and almost nothing on the site today is more than 50 years old. The massive stones are now kept in place with concrete footings poured in 1958, and can even be seen when too much rain exposes the ground around them. In truth, no one even knows if the current arrangement of stones is historically accurate.
Until the 1970s, the visitor's center at Stonehenge clearly stated that the site was a recreation, but for more than 30 years this information has been kept out of any signage or documents available to the thousands of tourists who visit.
Earlier this week, the National Geographic Society announced that a team of archaeologists have unearthed living quarters near the site that they believe were used either by the original builders or by later pilgrims who came to the site for festivals and worship. Now that they have ruins contemporary with the originakl structure, perhaps it's time to come clean about the circle itself.
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Hey, kids! Check out these groovy sites that feature dozens and dozens of free books and audiobooks you can download and read on your computer or listen to on your MP3 player.
It's like Groucho always said: "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
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In my world, there is no go without the joe in the morning. I am not especially addicted to caffeine -- I don't drink caffeinated soda if I have a choice, I don't find myself craving coffee all hours of the day and night, and the very idea of the caffeinated donut make me shudder -- but I am addicted to my morning coffee. I am very much a creature of habit, and my morning routine absolutely requires two things: a steaming-hot shower and a big mug of coffee. Otherwise, I can guarantee you it's going to be a Bad Day.
I became a daily coffee drinker about seventeen years ago (!) when I started working at IBM in Portland, Maine. There was a Green Mountain Coffee Roasters store right across the street, and everyone would diligently march over for their morning coffee around 9:00, Whirley mug in hand. In fact, I still have the very same Whirley mug -- it is one of three that I use regularly -- which should be a testamonial to how well they work and how long they last.
I bought my first French press pot about five years later. Though I relied on a drip maker Monday through Friday, I would occasionally use it on weekends. I don't recall exactly when I finally moved over to using the press pot all the time, but I think it was right around the time we moved into The Little Blue House. We still own a drip coffee maker, but I only use it to make coffee when there are guests; Bridget does not drink coffee at all, and my daily dose is only what will fit in one mug (about 24 ounces). The medium-sized Bodum Chambord is just the right size.
Press pot coffee is a whole different beast than what you get out of a drip machine. The grounds have a real chance to steep in the water and develop a fuller flavor. The water in a drip machine spends very little time mixing with the grounds. That's why you never want to grab the coffee as soon as it starts to pour out of the drip maker -- it's weaker than the coffee that comes out towards the end, which has had a bit longer to come in contact. But in a press pot, all the water and all the grounds get to commingle for several minutes.
This post from CoffeeGeek.com goes into great detail about the history of the press pot, as well as the proper way to use one. The poster also opines quite loudly about having the right grinder. I have to admit to not owning a burr grinder, just a regular blade grinder. Consequently, my coffee does have its quotient of sludge at the bottom of the mug every morning, but I have learned to stop drinking the coffee before I hit the bottom, so it doesn't bother me. Maybe some day I'll upgrade to a high-end burr grinder.
Even though I now much prefer the stronger brew that you get from a press pot, I don't really think of myself as a coffee snob. I prefer Starbucks' whole bean coffee, but have lately been buying some Peet's "Major Dickason's Blend" now and then, along with the very occasional bag of Green Mountain's 'Rainforest Nut". But when push comes to shove, I don't have any problem buying whatever supermarket whole bean coffee is available. I have never cared for the watery and flavorless coffee from the assorted canned varieties in the supermarket, but I am also not hung up on having to have super-premium hand-roasted coffee beans picked by young virgins either. My friend Shelley recently recommended this coffee to me, and I'll probably give it a try.
I have never developed a taste for black coffee at all. My coffee is always lightened with half-and-half and sweetened with Splenda. Before Splenda, I was a confirmed NutraSweet user, but I much prefer Splenda now. I cannot stand using milk in my coffee, and do not ever offer me Sweet'N'Low if you want to continue to be my friend. I will use real sugar when required.
I don't smoke, drink very little, rarely gamble, and don't chase women, so I think it's okay if this is my greatest vice. Everybody's got to have one.
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This week in January marks not one, not two, but all three disasters that have occurred in the near half-century of America's manned spaceflight program. In fact, this year marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chafee. Yesterday was the 21st anniversary of the Challenger explosion, a day which I will always remember. Finally, Thursday will be the 4th anniversary of the re-entry accident which destroyed the shuttle Columbia -- an incident that seems to have slipped much of the public attention that the Challenger accident received, but has probably had more effect on NASA's manned flights than either of the other ones.
Though the debate over whether or not manned spaceflight is worth the risks and the costs rages on, most Americans still support the idea of sending people into outer space, and NASA is moving ahead with plans for a new set of manned moon expeditions with an eye on eventually sending astronauts to Mars.
They just need to schedule the launches for some other week.
Warpspeed, star sailors.
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This TV Squad post (found via Digg) speculates that Disney might bring back a new version of The Muppet Show to television in the fall. The post says that the Muppet folks have made a couple of pilots of varying concepts, none of which seem to have gotten very far with Disney. This new series would borrow from the premise of The Muppets Take Manhattan: the Muppets have split up and gone their separate ways but now are getting back together to make a new show.
As some of the commenters in the TV Squad post note, the Muppets have never recovered creatively from the death of Jim Henson. Further losses among the long-time Muppet crew -- Richard Hunt, Jerry Juhl -- have also been felt. The Disney acquisition a couple of years ago unquestionably saved the franchise, but the resulting things they've done have been lackluster or, even worse, forced in that artificial Disney way. I don't know that a new series would ever capture the cleverness of the original show.
Still, it would be worth giving them the benefit of the doubt and seeing what happens.
Permalink |Everything you know about food is wrong.
Well, that's what Barry Glassner says in his new book, The Gospel Of Food
I read this interview with him in Salon earlier this week. In the book he takes on a lot of issues -- foodie shibboleths as well as commonly-held notions about food production, the value of fast food, and so on. From the interview it sounds like he's not simply being contrary, he's actually considering some of the conventional wisdom and holding it up to closer analysis -- sometimes the CW is on the money, sometimes it is not.
Adding to my book pile just as soon as I can pay a visit to New England Mobile Book Fair.
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The picture above is what the current-day version of the classic Easy-Bake Oven looks like. I happen to know this from direct experience, since Charlotte is the proud owner of her very own toy appliance. She has become a master of the bite-sized sugar cookie with sprinkles, though I have to say that the little cakes need a bit of work.
As I have just learned from perusing that Hasbro site, the Easy-Bake Oven has been around since 1963, just like me. Anyone whose childhood encompassed the 1960s and 70s will remember the original design of the toy, which somewhat resembled a long countertop with an oven, and sometimes a (decorative, non-functioning) stovetop and was frequently re-styled to match the popular kitchen color schemes of the day. The earliest ones were turquoise blue, but by the 1970s came in the ubiquitous avocado green. In the 1980s and 90s, the toy was remodeled to look like a microwave oven.
The current model abandons all of that to take on the look of the typical standalone range-oven that lives in the majority of our homes, and comes in a pink-and-purple color scheme that probably does not exist in most kitchens (at least I hope it doesn't) but is de rigeur for modern-day girl toys. But the real significant change about this latest Easy-Bake Oven is that Hasbro (which bought out Kenner Toys years ago) has eschewed the 100-watt lightbulb that has baked a zillion cookies and cakes for the last 43 years and replaced it with a low-power electrical heating element. The new design of the toy not only looks like your oven, it works like your oven, too. In fact, I think it's safe to suppose that the new design of the toy is as much about safely enclosing the heating element as it is adapting to appliance styles.
The heating element is well-insulated from the outside world. While we were waiting for Charlotte's oven to heat up enough to bake cookies, both Bridget and I touched the case and found that, though it did get warm, it was never anywhere close to being hot to touch on the outside. The toy also makes use of a special tool for removing the hot baking pans that keeps the pan inside a compartment. The child is not able to touch the pan directly while it is inside the retrieval tool, and a heat-sensitive sticker lets you know when the pan has cooled enough to be safe to touch.
Anything that piques Charlotte's interest in cooking and baking is A-OK with me, even if I have to eat more than my share of quarter-sized sugar cookies and overbaked teacakes.
Knowing that the Easy-Bake no longer uses a lightbulb, though, makes it somewhat wistfully ironic that MAKE:Zine is co-sponsoring a DIY lightbulb-powered mini oven contest. Scrupulously avoiding the "Easy-Bake" brand name, they're calling it a "Dorkbake". It's still not too late to enter -- the deadline is next Friday (Feb. 3), but you have to deliver the oven to the contest holders in Los Angeles. Once all the ovens have been received, they'll be judged by Mark Frauenfelder from BoingBoing and an editor from Craft (a sister magazine of MAKE:Zine).
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The Fab Four managed to define 1960s style in a way that nobody else could. Mop tops, collar-less suits, psychedelic admiral uniforms, mutton chops, there seemed to be no end in their ability to reinvent their image for those few white hot years. Madonna has nothing on John, Paul, George and Ringo. Well..okay, maybe she has better tits than Ringo...but at least his English accent is REAL.
Anyway, if you really want to recapture that time or those looks (I dunno, maybe you're appearing in a local production of Beatlemania or something), all you need is love...and these guys.
Via bookofjoe comes this Washington Post article that gives you all the backstory on how there came to be a demand for these replicas. Seems that most of their customers are women who just want to own a piece of faux Beatle memorabilia, but I think if you went to the bother of having a Beatle suit custom made, you'd have to wear it at least once in a while. Me personally, I like the Hard Day's Night suit the best. It's not quite as twee as the collar-less suits Brian Epstein came up with, but it is still instantly recognizable as "The Beatles". The whole suit is only $395, so it's not even all that expensive.
Permalink |Boston-based consulting company The Yankee Group has published a new report that predicts that TiVo will be out of business by 2010.
Hmmm...while various industry analysts have been predicting the imminent demise of TiVo for a while, I don't think it takes a lot of imagination to come to the conclusion that the business model for TiVo's service offerings has a finite lifespan. Their ability to persevere for as long as they have is testament to the validity of the core concepts of both the technology and the service, but the big dogs of the content provision services have too much leeway not to be able to win out in the end.
So DVRs are here to stay, and the time-shifting service is also here to stay, all provided by the cable/dish companies. But my bet is that TiVo will outlast that 2010 drop-dead date by turning into something else. At the very least, they have the strength of their superior UI and feature sets that leave them in a position to license their software (which, as you'll recall, Comcast has already agreed to buy). That also gives them the wiggle room to continue to develop and innovate in the emerging "home media convergence" space while shedding the cost of running a hardware or service business.
Maybe that's what the Yankee Group report says, too, I don't know. But if they think TiVo can't make it for another three years, I think they're jumping the gun.
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I only wish I had heard about it sooner so that I could have baked a fresh pie from scratch, but I think I'll forgive myself if this time I buy some Pillsbury pie crust.
These guys need to get Weebl signed up as their spokes...er...egg as soon as possible.
Permalink |I came across a cute piece in the Christian Science Monitor last week: a "year-end report" from the CEO of "Sarah, Inc."
Daddy, the CEO, takes a few minutes to review the performance of his daughter, the "joint venture incorporated in 1995". For the year ending December 31, 2006, Sarah showed an operating loss of $10,316.00, with revenue only totalling $43.00 (from selling off some old baby items on eBay). Pet expenses increased dramatically, and further operating costs in the form of MP3s and video games are projected for FY2007.
Very cute.
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The picture above is a cut-away view of a fascinating bit of clockwork -- an automaton built in the late 18th century by a Frenchman named Pierre Jaquet-Droz which could write with a pen-and-ink. Jaquet-Droz actually built three such automatons: the "writer", one which could draw pictures, and one which played music. They were hailed as marvels in their time, and, indeed, they are still very marvelous to watch, particularly when one considers the challenge of devising the mechanisms at that time.
BoingBoing had a link to this blog post from a fellow who in turn links to a YouTube post of a video of "The Writer" in action. (There are also videos of all three automatons in action at the first link in this post)
Permalink |A few recent dispatches from the world of radio worth mentioning:
HD radio is beginning to make serious in-roads into many major markets. For example, in the Boston market, there are now 22 stations offering a total of 34 "channels", where just two years ago there were only a couple.
But HD is small potatoes compared with the booming growth of satellite radio. This Wired article from last week says that there are only a few hundred thousand HD radio receivers in use in the US compared to 13.5 million satellite radio receivers, and even 4.7 million HD radio sets in the UK (where it is called DAB).
The Wired article also points out that in the US, HD radio broadcasters use their sub-bands for multicasting (which is how 22 stations broadcast 34 channels of content), whereas in the UK the BBC and other broadcasters offer a variety of services in addition to the music programming (many of which would face challenges from the RIAA and friends in this country).
Even though satellite radio has the edge at the moment, there is still no guarantee that it will win out over HD radio, which has several advantages including the well-established infrastructure of thousands of radio stations across the country and the value of locally-oriented programming -- even though Clear Channel and Inifnity and the like have centralized much of their programming, it would be easy for them to decentralize it if local content proved to win away satellite listeners).
Despite their relative success as noted above, the two satellite services have still not quite lived up to their own projections. For much of 2006, there was speculation that the two would merge into a single service that would have a much larger audience. But late last week the FCC announced that they would not approve of such a deal. In fact, it was specifically disallowed in the 1997 regulation that licensed the two satellite services.
Permalink |Michael Agger has a piece on Slate this week decrying the ubiquity of camera-phones.
His chief complaint is that by putting cheap-and-easy cameras into the hands of every single yob in the world, the world is now deluged with more crap pictures than ever before. More unfortunately, he says, it also has invented a whole new realm for antisocial behavior that makes use of the simplicity of photographing the event for posterity: the nuisance assaults called "happy slapping" that turned into a bit of an issue in the U.K., the inevitable upskirt shots, and other acts of vandalism. Oh, and the inability of celebrities to go about their daily lives without being photographed (color me unsympathetic on this one).
He only hints at the broader implications of the potential presences of sometimes hundreds of cameras in public situations. The most notable one being the availability of on-the-spot photography of disasters, emergencies, crimes, and other situations that previously required the presence of the newsmedia to capture -- the occasional fortuitous presence of a news photographer at a major unexpected event has allowed history to capture very few such moments as they happened, but for the most part photographic or other recorded evidence has generally been after-the-fact. He acknowledges that this is a generally good thing, resulting in better access to such events without the control mechanisms of journalistic or governmental gatekeepers.
Public officials are beginning to see this for themselves. Earlier this week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a new plan that will allow people to send their own digital images and even video to the city's 311 (city services) and 911 dispatchers (link via BoingBoing). Witness a mugging? See a building catch on fire? Need to prove that your garbage isn't being picked up on time? Send the city a picture or a video to document your issue.
Okay, that sounds good, right? But the downside is that the city is now recruiting its citizens to essentially spy on one another, using a troublesome reliance on the veracity of photography as prima facie evidence. It might not be quite as sinister as the East German Stasi requiring neighbors to report on fellow neighbors, or even former Attorney General Ashcroft's discredited plan to institute neighborhood patrols by mailmen and utility workers, but it's absolutely a first step in that direction. Americans decry the overabundance of CCTV security cameras in Britain, but in the "post 9-11 world" have been more than willing to rat on just about anybody that seemed even remotely out of place. Now they are being given the green light to take pictures of anything they think is wrong and send it to the police. The potential for abuse on the part of camphone wielding panic-mongers AND overly zealous law enforcement and governmental personnel is simply ENORMOUS.
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Life imitates art: a schoochild in Wisconsin stuck his tongue on a frozen flag pole in the schoolyard this week, requiring the fire department to come and unstick him through the application of warm water. (via Obscure Store)
Help me remember something -- I distinctly recall remembering a similar story where the only way to get the kid's tongue unstuck was to use fresh warm urine (i.e. pee on the kid's tongue). Was that how it went in the original Jean Shepherd story, or am I remembering something else?
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Sorry, but the implications of this just aren't good: a biotech company in St. Louis has announced that they've developed a chipless RFID system using ink that can be tattooed onto skin harmlessly. On top of that, the ink can be colorless, creating an "invisible" tattoo. Its signal is not hindered by the presence of hair on the skin, and is detectable without line-of-sight from 4 feet away.
The ostensible use for this product, says the biotech firm, is to provide a less intrusive RFID-based system for tagging and identifying livestock, pets, and even food products. Oh, and military personnel.
Yep, people. Tattooing people with a permanent, always-trackable, "invisible" mark that allows them to be electronically monitored and/or detected by anyone with a scanner capable of picking up RFID signals from a few feet away. The last time there was this sort of systematic plan for tattooing people for easy identification, it didn't turn out so well.
Despite the undoubtedly honorable intentions of the biotech company involved, it is all too easy to imagine that, given the current degradation of civil liberties in this country, the extension of this technology to the general public would be a strong temptation to the evildoers who run the government.
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Any fucking questions?
Via Marginal Revolution, here's a post on Time Magazine's China blog wherein the blogger reminisces about his childhood in Beijing and his family's use of ginger ale as a cold remedy. Nice to know that there are some universals, eh?
But the real point of the post is his description of being introduced to a "tea" of sorts made with hot Coca-Cola and fresh ginger, also intended to be a health tonic. He says the drink is "cola-neutral", so feel free to substitute whatever cola you prefer -- he prefers the local blend of Coke one finds in Beijing. Personally, I think you'd want to find a cane-sugar-based cola instead of a high-fructose corn syrup version. Lately some Coca-Cola bottlers are starting to switch back to the cane-sugar syrup, and I have also seen Boylan's Cane Cola here and there.
Using ginger to settle your stomach or treat other symptoms of minor illnesses is very traditional. I would guess that heating up the Coke to a slightly syrupy consistency works out all the carbonation so as not to introduce more gas into your stomach, and adds the soothing effect of the syrup. Ginger ale does not have the same sort of caramelized sugar syrup, so you probably can't boil it down to the same consistency. Plus, there's the energy boost from the caffeine.
And, if you have any left over, you can use it to glaze a Sunday ham!
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I was absolutely fascinated with this piece in last week's New Yorker. It's ostensibly a book review of a new biography of Lorenzo Da Ponte, who was (among other things) the librettist who worked with Mozart on many of his best-known operas. However, most of the article is mainly a recap of the man's astonishing and adventure filled life -- more of a precís biography than an actual book review. Which is fine, since I had never heard of Da Ponte and am probably quite unlikely to go out and buy the biography being reviewed; when Joan Acocella, the reviewer, does finally get around to talking about this new book, she dismisses it as not very well researched or interesting. Great article, though.
Permalink |Slate has an article today that argues against the current meme that there has been a sharp uptick in the number of autistic children in the United States.
The article draws its evidence from a new book called Unstrange Minds, which contends that the "autism epidemic" is yet another case of heightened awareness of the issue resulting in increased numbers of diagnoses. That's not quite the same thing as the overdiagnosis issue, which has resulted in legions of children being incorrectly labelled as having attention deficit disorders, but it's related. Autism did not even exist as a diagnosis until the 1940s, and so countless numbers of autistic individuals were simply seen as insane, retarded, or as "idiot savants".
The author of the book being cited opines that people want to see autism as something caused by external influences, and thus also potentially curable by external influences. We've turned being fat into a disease, so why shouldn't we turn autism into a "disease", a condition to be identified, studied, given a path of causality, and ultimately "cured". And the only way to get enough resources devoted to the "cure" is to convince enough people that the "problem" is growing. Unfortunately, just as their efforts to place the blame on thimerosal have repeatedly turned up empty, so eventually will the insistance on finding a "cure" for a non-existant "epidemic".
Permalink |Via Obscure Store, I read this USA Today article this morning about people who have chosen not to be caught up in the swirling vortex of "always-on" electronic communication.
The "Tech-No" name is cute (and I wish I had thought of it first), but I'm not sure I buy the assertion that these people are a "small and dwindling" group. The article cites a statistic that 81% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 64 are "Internet users", but that statistic doesn't differentiate between the heavy users and the light ones. It's rather like the statistic that sometimes gets pulled out that claims that 80-something percent of Americans are "Christians" -- it doesn't distinguish between the hardcore fundie freaks and the "Easter and Christmas only" crowd.
Having worked with some seriously high-usage people at my previous job, I tend to think of myself as someone who isn't fully initiated into the cult. Then I interact with my family, old friends, people in my local community, etc. and realize that I have, in fact, consumed significantly more Kool-Aid than most of the people I know. The "digirati" have turned into a self-reflective category of people who can't see beyond their own world. I'd be willing to bet that any serious large-scale examination of the general adoption of contemporary electronic communication in all of its varied manifestations would show significant gaps in "connectedness" in the population at large.
Having said all that, though, I do agree with the proposition in the story that there will be a significant social backlash where "disconnectedness" becomes the new cool. It will begin as a perk of the rich and powerful, who always have the ability to control access to themselves through mediators. As our increasingly security-controlled society starts to push various methods of electronic monitoring onto the broader populace, the desire to be constantly accounted for will drop off dramatically, and the ability to go "off-grid" will take on huge social cache (at least up until the point it become completely illegal to be unmonitored).
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The cutting edge folks at Psychology Today have given us this article which tries to summarize some of the research into the different mindsets of liberals and conservatives. How very 2004.
The results should surprise no one: liberals are open-minded, secure, able to perceive "shades of gray" in decision-making, are creative for creativity's sake, had nurturing parents, and have a more accepting attitude about death. Conservatives were insecure children, rely on external authority for their own internal validation, dislike uncertainty or ambiguity, and have a hard time dealing with the concept of death. Education is a direct predictor of having a liberal viewpoint, but only to a point: MBAs, doctors, and lawyers tend to regress to more conservative stances after their professional training. And everybody gets more conservative if their own personal interests appear to be threatened.
The point of the article, actually, is to try to summarize some of the research in this avenue over the last five years. As the article points out, most researchers were more interested in trying to detail the very apparent "red shift" in the period after 9/11, not trying to add to the noise by laying loads of judgments on liberal vs. conservative. The consensus seems to be that the blunt confrontation with mortality that millions of people experienced by watching the collapse of the WTC towers was the triggering event that drew out latent conservative behavior across society. Now that we are five years beyond the emotional trigger, many people are reverting to their ability to view events through a dispassionate and rational process that favors a more liberal perspective. Which explains the near constant stream of messages from the political right trying to retain a modicum of fear in the general populace.
I thought this was worth reading, but when you strip away the academic mumbo-jumbo, it borders pretty close on your average "Department of Duh" bulletin.
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As regular visitors here know, my anger toward and hatred of George W. Bush has become so visceral that I can't even bear to watch him or listen to his voice except in the smallest of clips without elevating my blood pressure.
So I chose to watch Adam and Jamie blow up a scale model of the Hindenburg on MythBusters last night. I figure if I have to choose between two different flaming Nazi gasbags, I might as well choose the one with some entertainment value.
I also knew that there would be plenty of media coverage to make sure that I would know the content of the speech, even if I didn't watch it personally. And I was right, of course. In fact, the White House was even good enough to give the media a few excerpts of the speech beforehand so they could get their spin machines up to full speed before 9:00 p.m.
As usual, rising to the top of the commentary, is MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. Here's the link to the video of Olbermann's piece at Crooks & Liars (I might change this link to some other source later). And, as I have made it a practice to do in the last few months, here is the complete transcript of the editorial:
President Bush makes no secret of his distaste for looking backward, for assessing past results. But in our third story on the Countdown tonight: too bad.Permalink |Any meaningful assessment of the president's next step in Iraq must consider his steps and missteps so far. So, let's look at the record: Before Mr. Bush was elected, he said he was no nation-builder; nation-building was wrong for America. Now, he says it is vital for America.
He said he would never put U.S. troops under foreign control. Today, U.S. troops observe Iraqi restrictions. He told us about WMDs. Mobile labs. Secret sources. Aluminum tubing. Yellow-cake.He has told us the war is necessary. Because Saddam was a threat; Because of 9/11; Osama bin Laden; al Qaeda; Because of terrorism in general; To liberate Iraq; To spread freedom; To spread democracy; To keep the oil out of the hands of terrorist-controlled states; Because this was a guy who tried to kill his dad.
In pushing for and prosecuting this war, he passed on chances to get Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Muqtada al-Sadr, Osama bin Laden. He sent in fewer troops than recommended. He disbanded the Iraqi Army, and "de-Baathified" the government. He short-changed Iraqi training. He did not plan for widespread looting, nor the explosion of sectarian violence. He sent in troops without life-saving equipment. Gave jobs to foreign contractors, not the Iraqis. Staffed U-S positions there, based on partisanship, not professionalism.
We learned that "America had prevailed", "Mission Accomplished", the resistance was in its "last throes".
He has said more troops were not necessary, and more troops are necessary, and that it's up to the generals, and removed some of the generals who said more troops would be necessary.
He told us of turning points: The fall of Baghdad, the death of Uday and Qusay, the capture of Saddam, a provisional government, the trial of Saddam, a charter, a constitution, an Iraqi government, ¤elections, purple fingers, a new government, the death of Saddam. We would be greeted as liberators, with flowers. As they stood up-we would stand down, we would stay the course, we were never 'stay the course'.
The enemy was al Qaeda, was foreigners, terrorists, Baathists. The war would pay for itself, it would cost 1-point-7 billion dollars, 100 billion, 400 billion, half a trillion dollars.
And after all of that, today it is his credibility versus that of generals, diplomats, allies, Republicans, Democrats, the Iraq Study Group, past presidents, voters last November, and the majority of the American people.
Is there nothing you can't personalize now?
We all know about personalized postage stamps, and personalized M&Ms, even personalized dolls action figures.
Now those fun-lovin' folks at Jones Soda will let you personalize your own soda bottle labels. You can even choose from a number of their flavors, including the now-infamous Turkey & Gravy holiday flavor.
You have to buy at least one 12-pack to make use of this, but I think that's pretty reasonable as these things go.
Sadly, the Brussels Sprout flavor is not available; if it were, I would have most of my Christmas 2007 shopping done by now.
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When I was 8 or 9 years old, my brother Tim and I had a "GI Joe" Christmas -- we got the original foot-tall, nappy-haired, non-Kung-Fu-gripped GI Joe dolls action figures, the "Command Center" action set, the helicopter with rotating blades, the jeep, and a pile of other accessories. We were in hog heaven. We played with those dolls action figured endlessly.
We never had the GI Joe space capsule, but a kid I used to play with did. His collection complemented ours pretty well -- we had stuff he didn't have and vice versa -- so I could haul the toys to his house to play and we'd have an amazingly complete collection to work from.
The "GI Joe In Space" toys are now among the most sought-after collectibles among toy collectors, so if this guy still has the capsule 35 years later, it's worth a lot. The capsule, of course, was just a toy for playing with in your living room, but one thing we used to like to do with our GI Joes was to strap them into a parachute rig and throw them from the ski jump in the park across the street from our house. If we'd tried that with the space capsule, it would have shattered into a pile of plastic space debris on the first trip, I'm sure.
But, for all my fellow 40-somethings who grew up with GI Joe and dreamed of all the cool things we could do with our dolls action figures, here's one fellow geek who has dared to live the dream: he constructed a non-scale (but quite large) working model of a Mercury rocket, using the space capsule as the launch vehicle, and a Space Joe as the astronaut.
His attempt to record in-capsule video with a PenCam failed, but he does have some video and photographs of the project for you to peruse. Warpspeed, Astronaut Joe!
(via MetaFilter)
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No, no, no not the BIGGEST wiener in the country, the BEST wiener...
The folks at Serious Eats asked the authors of the fabulous book Two For The Road, who also run the website Roadfood.com, to pick the best hot dog stands in the United States.
If you're a fan of the documentary maker Rick Sebak, you will absolutely recognize some of their choices from his fabulous film about hot dog stands, A Hot Dog Program.
Though one of their choices is a stand in Connecticut (and was featured in said documentary), New England is decidedly NOT hot dog country. Chicago must have more hot dog joints per capita than anyplace on Earth. Somehow, their Chicagoland choice wound up being Poochie's in Skokie and not the near-legendary Superdawg, but I'm sure they have their reasons.
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One of the oldest jokes on the Internet revolves around what would happen if Microsoft made cars.
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A Treatise on Tobacco, Tea, Coffee and Chocolate
A fine document from the year 1756 considering the effects, both beneficial and deleterious from these stimulants, which were as popular then as they are now. (via bifurcated rivets)
Of course, in 1756, there were no public health killjoys running around trying to legislate away whole categories of food or forbidding gourmet goodies in the name of political correctness.
I, myself, do not use tobacco, but they'll have to pry my coffee and chocolate from my cold, dead hands.
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Just the other night, my charming wife and I were talking about my Dockers nanopants, and she wondered why nobody had been bothered to make underpants using nanofiber-treated fabric. "It's an obvious product idea," she said.
Now if I only knew where to buy some.
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One that looks nice and is not too expensive...or we shall say "Nii!" again!!!
It's an on-demand world these days, and the next two businesses to be sacrificed on the altar of J-I-T production are big-box bookstores and anyone still in the video rental business, including NetFlix.
You've heard it before, right? Well, yes, you have. I have been hearing it for a dozen years at least, but I think this time the predictions may have more than wishful thinking behind them.
This Fortune article from last month says it's the "next little thing", but books-on-demand from a stand-alone kiosk are making their debut in 2007, offering over 2 million public domain titles, and they expect to work out deals with publishers to be able to offer virtually any book in print within the next five years.
Of course, these days big-box bookstores like to sell you a lot more than just books. The also like to sell you DVDs, but, gosh, wouldn't you know it, Sonic Solutions has just announced a DVD-on-demand system that will let people download movies and burn them to their own DVDs -- and they've already signed on all of the major studios so that you won't have to pirate anything in the process (as long as you're okay with whatever copy protection and DRM they build into the system). The resulting multi-fold increase of the number of titles legitimately available for download (whether limited-use or permanent purchase) should be the final nail in the coffin for small video stores, a serious thorn in the side of big-box bookstores, and will probably cause NetFlix to have to completely overhaul their business just to survive.
Along those lines, do take time to read David Denby's piece in this week's New Yorker where he considers the effect of recent technological innovations on the entire film industry. He does have a few decent counter-arguments to the current conventional wisdom, but overall he ends up having to agree with the prognosticators.
Nii! Nii!
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Apparently, when Americans are not obsessing about killer tsunamis or terrorist attacks, they're getting all geared up for the End Times.
A new poll from the Associated Press and AOL indicates that 25% of the American public believe that this is the year Elvis..er, Jesus makes his big comeback.
I wish I could blame this on the poll coming from people who subscribe to AOL, but apparently it was your garden variety telephone poll. The real problem, of course, is that it appears that among the 25% are virtually all the senior members of the Bush Administration (including Chimpy himself) and a fair number of top-ranking officers in the military.
Here's a question for all you Christians out there: at what point do you people give up and admit that he's not coming back? It's starting to look ridiculous. He's already a thousand years overdue. It's like the world's longest production of "Waiting For Godot" ever.
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It's bad enough that before the elections, right-wing dorkwad television blowhard Sean Hannity went so far as to publicly say that preventing Nancy Pelosi from becoming Speaker of the House was "worth dying for". Now, another rightwad radio personality is actively calling for the assassination of Democratic members of Congress.
Personally, I have to say that if all these conservative freaks have this much pent-up need to kill-or-be-killed, they probably ought to go sign up for Bush's "surge" in Iraq. Put all of that repressed rage to use, or at least take it out of the gene pool.
I wonder how long this can keep going on before some halfwit knuckle-dragging freeper-type takes these suggestions seriously.
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What's that you say? Not enough to be scared shitless about in your own neck of the woods? No impending doom and disaster? No scary guys with swarthy looks and unintelliglble speech lurking around your favorite shopping mall? Need to be on top of every single possible calamity this old world has to offer?
Well have I got the website for you! Havaria Information Services in Hungary is very proud to bring you this constantly updating real-time map of the entire world and every known alert-worthy event going on!
Now you'll never have another good night's sleep again! You can thank me after the apocalypse is over.
Permalink |The Boston Globe had this AP story on New Year's Day talking about the boom in popularity of culinary schools and the difference between the promise of being a famous chef and the reality of working in the restaurant world.
For those of you who haven't figured it out here's the short version: restaurant jobs are hard work for usually very little money, and there are only a very few "celebrity chefs" in the whole world, so guess where you're probably going to end up.
As I read the story, I was actually a little surprised that it asserted that people go to culinary school with stars in their eyes. I suppose some people do, but nobody I met when I was in culinary school seemed to be deluded enough to think they were the next Daniel Boulud or even the next Rachael Ray (who, I am compelled to point out, is NOT a trained chef). A fair number were people who did want to start their own restaurants, and another contingent were people who were already working in restaurants and wanted to buff up their career options by having some formal training to go along with their resumes. I, myself, went into the endeavor planning from the beginning to pursue a personal chef business (as did a few others); I had absolutely ZERO interest in working in a restaurant, owning a restaurant, or having anything to do with restaurants. When I left my training program, a lot of my disappointment came from feeling like the program was more about training people to work in restaurants than learning much about cooking. At no point did I ever envision myself being a star.
You know, when I was trying to make some decisions about this a couple of years ago, Jo Horner and I both talked about and seriously considered the possibility of going to the culinary program at Boston University rather than CSCA, and at the time we both decided against it because the CSCA program seemed more "professional". Now I wonder if that wouldn't have been the better choice for me in the first place, and at some point I might revisit the idea to do the 14-week certificate program at BU.
But let's be clear -- the food industry is not the glamour-filled experience of being a television personality (which is also not quite as glamourous as you might want to think). Restaurant workers work insane hours in appalling and generally hazardous conditions and are not exactly paid like kings. There are plenty of good reasons to go to culinary school, but it helps to have a grounded vision of where you're going and why.
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The idea of targeted advertisements is certainly not new at this point, but it's manifesting itself in some very different ways as we give up more and more personal data to companies trying to market stuff to us.
The picture at the top of this post is a screenshot of someone's recent experience with Microsoft's local.live.com satellite map/image service. As he zoomed in on a location in downtown Los Angeles, Microsoft's comibnation of satellite imaging and 3D modeling produced this "fly-over" map which included a billboard promoting the movie "Eragon". The billboard is not there in real life, it has been inserted by Microsoft and the ad is targeted at this particular person based on his surfing habits. Here's a Wall Street Journal story (reprinted from some local newspaper and linked on Slashdot) that describes the new advertising scheme.
Television advertising has had to be very broad by technical necessity, but now that barrier is about to fall by the wayside thanks to your friendly TiVo (and other DVRs that collect viewer data). This New York Times article talks about the ability to create tailored commercials on-the-fly. It's being tested right now on FOX by inserting different elements of a Wendy's commercial that offer "commentary" on the football game in-progress by a bunch of talking raccoons. But that's just the beginning. Two different companies are developing the technology needed to customize ad content right down to the individual household -- you might get to see an ad for your favorite beer, while I might get an ad for a new computer, all because our DVRs and cable set-tops can transmit viewing data back to the cable company, which can then differentiate what ads are sent where.
Permalink |As the news media slowed down for the holidays last week, I noticed that they started trotting out the "We're All Gonna Die!!" stories about the H5N1 avian flu again. Heaven forbid that we shouldn't be kept in a state of near-total panic at all times, you know.
Nothing's really changed since the last time they got everybody freaked out about this except that there have been more bird die-offs and another couple of clusters of human cases. But once again, the human cases occurred among people who raised poultry and lived in tight quarters with the birds. Still, stories that predicts death tolls as high as 80 million people feed right into our seemingly insatiable desire to be freaked out.
Via Marginal Revolution comes a link to this public health report which tries to make some sensible estimates and still manages to come up with a high-end of 81 million deaths within the realm of possibility, but with a more statistically probable figure of 62 million. Cold comfort if the situation really ever does come to pass -- an issue which they don't deal with directly. Of note in this paper is the finding that 95% of those 62 million deaths can be expected to occur in lower per-capita-income countries where public health infrastructures are weak; not a surprising result, actually, but the inference is that the actual impact on developed nations will be relatively minor and probably not worth whipping the public into a frenzy. Efforts need to be made more toward improving public health conditions in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, not stockpiling vaccine for people with little risk of infection, let alone mortality.
In the meanwhile, a MetaFilter post links to this slightly breathless news story from the Daily Mail which proclaims that a new vaccine could prevent "all forms" of influenza, including H5N1. Despite the headline's implication that this vaccine will be available any day now, the details of the article reveal that things are just getting started with testing some very promising results. If the vaccine works as hoped, it would allow people to receive a flu shot once every few years instead of each year and have a broader range of immunity to influenza "A" viruses. The vaccine also holds the promise of being able to be manufactured much more quickly than traditional flu vaccine, allowing a far more rapid response to unexpected breakouts. This would be particularly useful in fighting epidemic occurrences in those very places where the H5N1 avian flu is likely to strike.
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Back in August, I had this post with a pair of photographs taken in Piccadilly Circus in London, one taken in the 1930s, the other taken in 2006. Taken from almost the exact same spot, they made for a fascinating "then and now" comparison of one of the most famous spots in the world.
The picture at the top of this post is yet another shot of Piccadilly taken sometime between 1890 and 1900, but from a different vantage point. But even in this picture, the rounded building that today hosts the massive Sanyo & TDK signs is present, barely visible along the left hand edge.
Technically speaking, the picture I have for you today is not a color photograph, it is a "photochrome", which is a color lithograph made from a black-and-white photograph. That's what accounts for the slightly unreal coloring in this picture, where the 1940s photo in my earlier post was taken with color film stock.
This site, where I found the Piccadilly photochrome, features dozens of other photochromes and original B&W photographs from 19th Century England, as well as many other subjects.
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The Tooth Fairy has visited our lovely home twice now, as you can see in this picture. (Pay no attention to the crayon smeared all over my child's face...we'll talk about that later...)
She'll be a regular guest for the next couple of years, I suppose. The first one that fell out took its sweet time leaving (the dentist noticed it LAST year), but the second one got pushed out in a few days by the permanent tooth behind it, already growing into her mouth as though she were a great white shark or something. Like everything else these days, the Tooth Fairy has upped her ante and the kid gets a buck for each baby tooth. A buck! When I were a wee lad, we only got a quarter and thought we were kings for it!
Anyway, this Scientific American article says that you might want to hold on to any teeth that fall out of your mouth, because those smarty-pants science dudes are working on a way to scrape some cells out of teeth that would let them grow new replacement teeth. It's a technology that would benefit adults, not kids, so I guess the Tooth Fairy doesn't have to start looking for a new job yet, but the ability to replace lost/broken permanent teeth with real ones rather than porcelain crowns would be a significant development for dentistry.
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If you're like me, you get frustrated flipping around the television dial (which, let's face it, hasn't actually been a dial for a good 30 years now), looking for something to watch. Our cable bill (not including the price of the online service) is $120 a month, so you'd think there would be at least ONE FREAKING PROGRAM you could watch on any given evening, but there isn't.
So, like me, you've probably resorted to looking for things to watch on the Internet. (No, not THAT sort of thing, though there's plenty of it...well, okay, maybe once in a while...ahem)
Search no more, my dear friends, because for the next full year we can while away the hours watching this wheel of honest-to-goodness English Farmhouse Cheddar ripening live via webcam!
It's got to be better than the latest installment of "CSI: Iowa City" or "Law & Order: Animal Control Unit" or "Wife Swappers".
(via FARK)
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It's been about six months since we were compelled to give up our TiVo in the bedroom and switch to Comcast's DVR. We've gotten used to using it, even though it sucks like a black hole in comparison. I know several people who've since gotten the Comcast box without having had TiVos first, and they don't seem to mind, but anyone who's first DVR experience is with a TiVo knows exactly what I am talking about.
So I was bit disappointed when TiVo's long-anticipated HDTV-compatible box rolled out this fall with a whopping $800 price tag. All things being equal, I just could not envision spending that much money when the Comcast box was comparatively inexpensive, even for the better interface. Even TiVo had to admit that the price tag put the new box out of the running for anyone other than the must-have early adopter crowd, and the conventional wisdom is that they'll start getting cheaper as soon as the holidays are over (I'll follow up on that in a couple of weeks and let you know what I find).
But last week BoingBoing had a link to this fine looking piece of home electronica: the Hannibal Deuce+ all-in-one media box. Dual HDTV tuner supporting all definitions including 1080i, plays all popular video file formats, has 500 GB storage which you can use for your music collection as well as DVR recordings, includes 7.1 Digital Audio and optical outputs to your stereo receiver, built-in wireless networking, and includes BitTorrent software so you can download and play back movies and music from the Internet. It runs on Ubuntu and uses the MythTV DVR software that is popular with the geek crowd, but comes pre-installed and pre-configured so that all you need to do is hook it up to your other home entertainment components. It can also be easily expanded to include additional tuner cards and up to a terabyte of storage.
It retails for $899.00. Only a hundred bucks more than the new TiVo, but it does SO much more.
This is going immediately to the top of my Drooling Fanboy Wish List, even ahead of the working replica of the Lost In Space Robot. The only downside I can see is that it won't fit in the TV cabinet/armoire in my bedroom, but furniture is highly overrated.
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Because we had to photograph everything we made at cooking school, I got into the habit of regularly photographing just about everything I cook at home as well. Along the way, I progressed from some very unflattering snapshots of dishes to taking fairly competent food photos and the occasional excellent one. I happen to be extremely proud of this particular picture. I even put together a calendar featuring my food photos via CafePress as a bit of schwag to go along with Out Of The Frying Pan. (If you missed it for 2006, you can order one now with all the same photos for 2007)
As with a lot of endeavors, I have been able to teach myself some of the basics of food photography without any sort of reference beyond looking at pictures in food mags, cookbooks and online. What I'd really like to do is take an adult-ed sort of class that was strictly about food photography, but I haven't found one around here. It's the sort of thing I think Cambridge School of Culinary Arts ought to offer as a seminar for its students and also as a recreational class, but they don't. Meanwhile, I ran across this post from a food blogger who is also a fabulous photographer and offers up some of his rules-of-thumb that should help enormously. Even better, he links to this blog by a woman who specializes in food photography and food styling (another thing CSCA is missing the boat on).
My cooking life is about to take another sharp turn, but I expect to continue with food photography as part of whatever direction that turn takes me in.
Permalink |Via reddit.com, I read and completely agree with this blogger's rant about how so many people feel perfectly entitled to treat customer service workers badly and how it has boiled over into the general level of rudeness in just about every avenue of public discourse. (I am trying to use language a bit less rough than hers, but her basic point is "stop being such an asshole")
The blogger credits this sad state of affairs to two popular American aphorisms: "the customer is always right" and "you have to earn respect". I agree with her sentiment, although I think it goes much deeper than that. It's not just a sense of entitlement, it's our willingness to reduce everyone outside of our very small personal spheres into non-entities. Once you stop seeing other people as human beings, it becomes possible to do almost anything to them -- witness the sudden popularity of torture among the general public.
Her method of confronting this when she encounters it in others is to try to publicly humiliate the person delivering the beatdown to the hapless waiter or counter clerk. I am less sure about whether this is a good approach. On one hand, it seems to just extend the cycle of uncivil behavior, but on the other hand sometimes the only way to get people to stop behaving badly is to give them a taste of their own medicine. Just imagine how effective it would be to tie Dick Cheney down to a wooden plank and dunk his head in a bucket of water over and over again (okay, I'll stop drooling over that scenario now, but you see my point).
I always try to remember that telemarketers, retail clerks at the mall, and so on are just people doing a job. One that they probably don't like or want but have no choice about. If a customer service person of whatever stripe is doing their job badly, I think it's fine to call them on it, but not to berate them, blow an air horn into the phone, or have a temper tantrum in the middle of the mall. If the person is taking their bad day out on you, then I think there's some justification in giving it back, because respect is a two-way street. And everybody deserves a margin of respect without having to earn it. Even if you're being an asshole.
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Five feet, four and one quarter inches.
I have been the same height since I was 12 years old. (We won't talk about width right now; let's just say it varies)
To be below average height as a man in our culture is a decided handicap. Not in the same sense as having a phyiscal disability, but rather in the sense of weighting people against you in very subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle ways). Via 3QuarksDaily, I recently read this Washington Monthly review of a new book by Stephen Hall called "Size Matters: How Height Affects the Health, Happiness, and Success of Boys - and the Men They Become ". The review intrigued me enough that I've added the book to my "Must Read" list.
Just as men with insecurities about their masculinity overcompensate with big trucks, guns, motorcycles, and other phallic symbols, it's easy to point to short men who overcompensate for their height by being extra-aggressive or hypercompetitive. The Amazon page for that book has a quote from Iam Fleming about short men as seen through the eyes of James Bond:
"Bond had always mistrusted short men. Napoleon had been short, and Hitler. It was short men who created all the trouble in the world."
I think that sums up both the overcompensation issue AND the deeply-ingrained reaction to short men pretty well.
To be short is to spend a life continually met with amused looks, to have one's opinions and ideas discounted, to be unable to project authority or credibility, and generally to be patronized in an unmistakable condescending way by almost everyone you will ever meet. I used to think it was just me, but now I am sure that I am not the only one.
Not long ago I read this piece in the Times of London about a fellow, taller than me by an inch, who tried out a pair of shoe lifts (now euphemistically called "status shoes") to see if it would improve his luck with meeting women. It did -- by putting some lifts into a pair of boots that already had a 2 1/2" heel, he raised his height to average (5' 9" in the U.K.) and he found himself scoring with the ladies in no time at all. Horizontally, height is a bit less easy to gauge, I guess.
Most people, when I talk to them about this subject will bring up Danny DeVito or Michael J. Fox (provided they haven't already mentioned Napoleon and Hitler). But these are guys who trade on the "cute and lovable" element of being short, and Fox played teenager roles until he was 30. In other words, they're popular because they constrain themselves within the role our culture deems permissible for short men.
Of all the things about myself that I like or dislike, the only one I really wish I could change is my height. In my mind's eye, I am 5'10" or so. That extra six vertical inches would go a long way to putting me on an even footing with people, and I am convinced that many of the difficulties I have faced in dealing with other people would simply never have happened.
Permalink | Comments (5)This consumer news-oriented website has a round-up of the "Top 10 Scams of 2006" being perpetrated on gullible individuals.
You would think that absolutely no one is taken in by any of these anymore, but just recently there was a news item in the Boston Globe about a rich and powerful lawyer who got taken to the cleaners over and over again by Nigerian 419 scams, and this New Yorker article from May about a Boston-area psychotherapist who also was victimized again and again.
Though I have very little sympathy for the garden variety stupid person who falls for this sort of thing, I have absolutely none whatsoever for these supposedly-intelligent, overly-greedy "elites" who think they're getting away with something. They deserve to lose every last penny they cough up to the Nigerians.
So, just to recap for those of you who still aren't sure if you're being scammed:
1. You can't win a lottery you never entered. Particularly if it's in a country you've never heard of.
2. The widows and children of deposed African dictators do not have your e-mail address in their Contact List, unless, of course, you were once employed by the CIA to stage the coup that put them in power in the first place.
3. A "hot stock tip" simultaneously e-mailed to 10 million people is not really all that hot.
4. Jesus does not want you to help your televangelist pastor buy a new airplane.
5. Your cat does not need to be fed seven times a day.
6. Your child is not going to die if you don't buy them all 12 Barbie Dancing Princesses.
7. The Republican Party doesn't really give a shit about gay marriage.
8. It doesn't matter who you vote for on "American Idol" OR "Dancing With The Stars"
9. "Click Here For Barely Legal Teen Sluts"
10. Your dick isn't going to get any bigger, harder, or squirt a gallon of man-juice
The Netherlands officially ended over-the-air analog television broadcasting at the stroke of midnight today. They estimate that all but about 74,000 of the 16 million households in the country get their television service from cable or satellite. Over-the-air digital broadcasting will continue for at least ten years, when the spectrum licensing comes up for renewal.
Meanwhile, it seems that Sony's unhappy because all these new televisions they plan to sell are getting cheaper faster than they'd like. Prices for LCD televisions are now projected to drop 25-30% in the U.S. in 2007. Our own looming deadline for the end of analog TV has been pushed back to 2009 so that everyone involved can eke out that much more profit before the Big Switch, but good ol' Sony's not happy that they won't make quite as many gazillions of dollars as they'd hoped. I'm sure, though, they could crank out a few more PlayStation 3 boxes to more than make up for it, if they really wanted to.
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Someone at one of my online hangouts pointed me to this yesterday: a collection of Mr. Rogers songs performed by various artists.
Those of you who like to diss Mr. Rogers can go do it somewhere else, because I don't want to hear it. When I was my daughter's age I absolutely adored Mr. Rogers. Yes, his style seems a bit affected, but everything I have ever read about him suggests that it was his natural demeanor. There is very little else in the maelstrom of children's media these days that offers a quiet and patient approach to learning about one's self, which is a genuine shame.
This CD/DVD set sounds like a nice idea, even if it is populated with a few too many D-list music celebrities. It reminds me a bit of the utterly fabulous Sesame Street album "In Harmony" from the 1980s, but without the big names. Looking at the tracklist, I'm also a little disappointed in the song selection; several of my particular favorites are not there. I'd much rather have this CD of Fred Rogers singing the songs himself, but I think the idea of this tribute CD is a good one.
I also recently ran across this book called "I'm Proud Of You", a memoir by a man who knew Fred Rogers and carried on a correspondence with him for years. The blurbs I've seen compare the book to "Tuesdays With Morrie", so you have to be prepared for a dose of sentimentalization, but I'd really like to read it.
If you've ever doubted the sincerity of Fred Rogers, I point you again to this excellent film clip of a 1969 Congressional hearing on funding for what was then called "National Educational Television". In the space of just a few minutes, Rogers singlehandedly converted one of public television's biggest disbelievers into a supporter and secured millions of dollars of funding with his own kind words and honest appraoch. It's very much worth watching, even if you've seen it before.
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I haven't been keeping up with RFID news as much as I used to, but I saw this post at BoingBoing last week and thought it was worth noting: a pair of computer security experts recently published a paper outlining a method for implementing a small-scale firewall for RFID tags that would be of enormous benefit by protecting consumers from having their personal and financial data swiped by remote scanners.
RFID tags are already embedded in American passports, and anyone who has ever spent time near a payphone in an airport lobby knows that the place is full of scammers stealing credit card numbers, so the likelihood of people using RFID scanners to swipe identity info that way is very high. Now extend that into the on-coming barrage of credit cards, drivers licenses, supermarket loyalty cards, even those rechargable payment cards you get at Starbucks all with RFID tags in them.
The firewall works not unlike a typical network firewall -- it broadcasts a single "translated" signal based on the signals coming from the tags it is connected to so that the original signals remain hidden to external devices but the actual data from them can be passed to authenticated receivers (such as POS terminals). (Read the original article itself here if you're interested in the hardcore technical details)
It's a bit more high-tech than the solution many people recommend -- keeping all your RFID-embedded items in a foil pouch that bounces off anything trying to receive the signal -- but tinfoil wallets probably aren't all that practical on a daily basis.
Permalink |Yesterday, Bridget and I dropped Charlotte off at a birthday party and took advantage of a kidless hour to rummage through the stacks at the New England Mobile Book Fair in Newton. This store is the very antithesis of the big-box bookstores that have driven so many independent booksellers out of business. There's no plush oversize chairs to sit and browse through books, no cafe selling overpriced lattes and mediocre sandwiches, no music kiosks to pre-listen to CD. There are just thousands upon thousands of books in every imaginable category, from every imaginable publisher. And not just best-sellers (though they have all of those, too). It's hard to imagine not being able to find almost any book there. The cooking section alone could be its own specialty bookstore.
New England Mobile Book Fair is a bit unique in the world of small, local retail, which is what keeps it going so strong after so many years, especially in the face of the relentless competition from the big-box stores. But even here in Greater Boston, with dozens of little downtown districts that are loaded with shops in town after town, the rise of large-scale retailers has taken its toll.
Here are a pair of links to highlight the argument over this reshaping of retail and the changes it brings to every community it touches: libertarian writer Virginia Postrel defends the advent of big-box stores in this Atlantic Monthly article (via Arts & Letters Daily), while James Howard Kunstler tells us "We Got Exactly What We Asked For" in Orion Magazine.
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We paid a visit to the Museum of Science in Cambridge recently. Charlotte got to see her very first planetarium show and got to make her own blob of slime. While we were there, I spent a minute or two looking at this contraption: a computer built entirely out of Tinkertoys that plays tic-tac-toe. I didn't think much about it as I was looking at it -- the museum has so many intriguing things to look at and play with that after a while you get a bit overloaded -- and Charlotte wasn't interested in it at all, so she never even came over to look at it. But I saw this site linked on MAKE:blog and learned more about it than I did while I was looking at it in person. You might also like to take a moment to read this old Scientific American article about it which explains a bit about the design and operation of the machine.
Several years ago, the Museum of Science bought out the Computer Museum, which used to be right next door to the Boston Children's Museum. I'm sure this device used to be on display there. Sadly, many of the things that the Computer Museum had on display did not make it into the exhibition spaces at MoS, but they do have a few interesting bits like this one.
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The always-interesting blog tingilinde has some factoids you might be interested in WRT casualty figures in Iraq:
As of Thursday, there are 2,884 DoD-confirmed deaths of American troops. That's pretty common knowledge.
Steve (the blog author) says that the Environmental Protection Agency values one year of a human life at $172,000, and overall the EPA values an average human life at $3.7 million ($2.3 million if you're over 70, but we're talking about soldiers here). By the way, that's marked down from a previous government estimate of $6.1 million. However, Steve has extrapolated the $172K figure out to $7.7 million per soldier based on an average age of 30 and an average lifespan of 75.
Using Steve's numbers, he comes to the figure of $22.3 billion as the total worth of the lives of troops lost so far in Iraq. Based on estimates that the war costs the American taxpayer roughly $250 millon per day, the cost of those 2884 lives is equal to about 90 days of operations (even less if you use the standard $6.1M figure). As of Sunday, the duration of the war surpassed the total length of American engagement in World War II, and today makes the 1,354th day of the war.
The dead are a drop in the bucket. Unless, of course, they happen to be your loved ones. But tell that to the Decider-In-Chief.
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If you're still wondering what to buy me for Christmas, let me suggest one of these: an actual-size working replica of the "Lost In Space" robot.
The torsos and claws of the robot are reproduced from the original molds used to make the robot for the TV show, and every single part is completely accurate to the original. It even comes with 500 (!) vocal tracks newly recorded by the actor who performed the original voice of the robot AND he will even record custom audio just for you (for an additional charge).
Quantities are limited, so order now! You only pay $24,500.00! (a small price to pay to make a middle-aged man happy at Christmas, don't you think?)
The president of the Canadian Broadcasting Company caused a bit of a stir the other day when he announced at an annual conference that there was no real business model for converting television broadcasting to HDTV in either Canada or the United States. His rationale is that the people who actually pay the money for broadcasting -- the advertisers -- have no intention of paying more money to advertise on HDTV, but the entire television broadcasting industry is being told to foot a huge expense to convert practically every piece of equipment used in television production.
The CBC's suggestion is to stage a gradual shift and pass the broadcasters' costs along to cable and satellite providers, and you know who they'll stick with the bill. Meanwhile, what he's not saying is the *real* force behind HDTV: revitalizing a moribund electronics business by compelling every person in the country to buy a new (and significantly more expensive) television set. (You know, the same way Microsoft helps out the PC makers every five or ten years. Can you say "Vista"?)
In the U.S., some of the cost associated with converting to HDTV is being recouped by broadcasters through leasing their spectrum allocation to other services which want to make use of all that sweet, sweet frequency that will be freed up as standard-def OTA signals go away. They also get to sell back spectrum allocations, which the feds will then turn around and resell. But it took a good twenty years of stonewalling on the part of American broadcasters to figure out some way to stanch the flow of money spent on HDTV gear.
This particular issue is not limited to television, by the way. In the U.K., the government agency that oversees broadcasting has recommended completely discontinuing both AM and FM radio broadcasting. They have a couple of reasons for making this suggestion: one is that most industry predictions indicate that commercial radio broadcasting is losing so much money that it won't last much longer on its own anyway, and the other is that most of the spectrum license renewals in Britain are about to come due and rather than grant the 24-year license renewals the government should take advantage of the window of opportunity to take action now.
In the U.K., digital broadcasting (DAB) has been fairly successful as the successor to the now-century-old terrestrial broadcasting, and the regulators are making the assumption that DAB, cable and satellite "radio", along with the flourishing of MP3 players, Internet music sites, and so on, provide enough service to the general public. Here in the U.S., radio still hobbles along but it's questionable how much longer that can continue. Geography and population density play a bigger role in radio's survival in the United States -- many of the "next-gen" services are not available in some places, nor especially profitable. Even still, the recent news that Clear Channel, the 500-pound gorilla of radio broadcasting, is being sold off and split up, with most of its radio assets sold off, is a clear indication that commercial radio probably has less than ten years to live in this country.
Permalink |We've all done it: bought someone a "gift card" from a retailer to give as a Christmas or birthday present. It's less tacky than handing someone cash, easier than trying to shop for someone whose taste you can't predict, doesn't cost a lot to ship, and so on. Just about every imaginable retailer has them now; even the venerable McDonald's holiday gift certificates we used to love to get as children have been supplanted with gift cards.
The retailers love them too. It's a pure profit center for them. You give them money, they give you a card. Okay, so far so good. But what happens next is this: the person who received the card takes it to the retailer and goes looking for something to spend it on. One of two scenarios then plays out: either they find an item (or items) that doesn't quite add up to the full amount of the gift card and they're left with some unspendable amount on the card which the retailer gets to keep because you already gave them the money OR they find something that costs more than the gift card and decide to pay the difference themselves, earning more money for the retailer. Either way, the retailer is making out like a bandit.
One of the blogs I read regularly, bookofjoe.com, had this post yesterday featuring an article from the Wall Street Journal about gift cards. Among the factoids in the article is the news that retailers make an estimated $8 billion per year on unredeemed gift cards. Think about that -- EIGHT BILLION DOLLARS that people spend on gift cards that never get used to claim merchandise. Why, that's enough to pay for the War in Iraq for almost a whole month!
(and a big thanks to Joe himself for reprinting the WSJ article in full in his blog post, because the WSJ site keeps the good stuff locked away)
Permalink |My brothers and I are planning a trip for the three of us to Ireland in the spring. My brother Tim is a bit obsessed with Ireland and has gone each of the last two years, and this time he wants my brother Dan and me to go with him. I think it will be a lot of fun, as long as I can have a no-smoking room, and am looking forward to it a lot.
But I guess I have to watch my step between now and then, because beginning in January the Department of Homeland Security will be able to decide whether or not you're allowed to leave the country. Expanding on the infamous "No-Fly" List, the DHS (and their goons, the TSA) will have the final say over whether any American is allowed to travel outside the United States whether they have the proper passport and visas or not, even to visit Canada and Mexico.
But, I'm sure the DHS will know who the real bad guys are now, since Attorney General Gonzales assured us that the government will be spying on all of us, and anyone who disagrees is obviously an enemy of freedom. But maybe I've said too much already.
Permalink | Comments (2)IBM Chairman Thomas Watson famously said that there the world only needed about five computers, and Bill Gates is quoted as saying that 64 kilobytes of RAM was enough for anybody's computing needs, so many tech pundits are a bit leery of making pronouncements about technological barriers, but that hasn't stopped New York Times tech columnist David Pogue from drawing the proverbial line in the sand about digital camera resolution.
In this recent column, Pogue put his money where his mouth was with regard to megapixel quantity vs. quality and has decreed that a poster image from a 13-megapixel camera is indistinguishable from an image rendered from a 5-megapixel camera except to the highly-trained eye.
It's worth reading the comments that go along with the post, as many people point out a number of flaws in his testing methods, but by and large his conclusion really stands on its own. For most of us, there is no inherent advantage in buying the latest generation of high-end digital cameras that tout very little improvement over their predecessors except resolution. Instead, he opines, we should be paying more attention to other more salient features like lens quality, shutter speeds, and usability.
Of course, it doesn't matter how many freaking megapixels a camera has if it doesn't work at all, right Sony?
Frankly, I'd go Pogue one further and say that most home photographers would be able to get by with 3-megapixel resolution, because most of us never print photos bigger than 4"x6" anyway, but far be it from me to suggest that tech upgrades are really just a marketing gimmick. That would be un-American.
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The always-popular Junk Food Blog reports that there have been sightings in the wild of these limited-edition Reeses Banana-Creme Peanut Butter Cups featuing the King Himself on the package.
Haven't seen them myself anywhere, but sometimes these sort of products are very regional. I don't know if there's much love for fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches in this part of the country. Now, if they'd do a Fluffernutter peanut butter cup, I bet it would fly off the shelves all over New England.
Thai artist Kittiwat Unarrom makes these extremely realistic looking bits of dismembered human anatomy out of bread dough as part of his work to examine, as he puts it, "whether we eat food or if the food is eating us."
(via The Athanasius Kircher Society)
Which reminds me, I still owe Shelley a trip to the Museum of Science to see BodyWorlds 2 before it closes. Wonder if they'll be selling any of these baked goods in the museum cafeteria?
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There was a lot of panic-mongering last year about Peak Oil (sometimes also called the "Hubbert Peak" after the guy who first predicted such a phenomenon), though the calamatiphiles have seemed to move on to other things. The problem with playing Chicken Little is what to do when the sky does not fall in, I guess.
So here's the thing -- nobody disagrees with the assessment that we're going to run out of oil sooner or later, but there are a lot of people saying it's going to be much later than the Doomsday crowd wants you to believe. Cambridge Energy Research Associates, which has been one of the biggest contrary voices with regard to the Peak Oil scenario, has released a new report that looks at emerging "unconventional" oil supplies (like the one found recently in the Gulf of Mexico) and concludes that available reserves forestall any sort of precipitous drop-off in global oil production for decades beyond the "Peak Oil" scenario.
Of course, that's bad news if your calamity of choice is Global Warming.
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The wife was out with the girls Friday night, so I spent a portion of the evening channel-surfing on the HDTV. Somehow, one of those seemingly infinite WWII documentary shows seemed to have escaped from the television purgatory of The History Channel and was running on New Hampshire Public Television; since it wasn't going to be interrupted by commercials every six minutes, I decided to watch.
The show was about warplanes (in fact, I think the show itself was called "War Planes", originally enough) and I tuned in at the point where they were talking about World War II bombers: the Flying Fortress, the Super Fortress, the Lancaster, and the most versatile plane used in the Second World War, the De Havilland Mosquito. When I coincidentally spotted this post at "Damn Interesting" Saturday morning, I knew I needed to blog it.
As you'll find at those links, the Mosquito was constructed out of a sandwich of plywood and balsa wood, making it incredibly light, and thus highly maneuverable. In evaluations, they discovered that the design of the plane allowed it to carry a much heavier payload than originally estimated, making it possible for the plane to be used for the large-scale bombing missions the RAF flew over Germany, acting both as a pathfinder for the heavy bombers and a precision bomber itself. The Germans were unable to successfully counter the Mosquito with their own planes until late in the war, by which time the tide had been turned and Allied victory was imminent.
Damn interesting indeed. Thanks, guys!
Permalink |That statement is probably truer than most of us realize, even if it was packaged in some of the hoariest clichés imaginable in the book of that name.
Via reddit.com, here's a reprint of an essay by education activist John Taylor Gatto called "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher". Gatto, a former "Teacher of the Year" in New York State, is exceedingly critical of the social control paradigm of contemporary American education. The lessons he and his fellow teachers really give, he aserts, are about conformity, class stagnation, and dependency on/obedience to authority figures.
If you go to his own website, you can read a further refinement of these ideas into a more overtly political interpretation. Our educational paradigm, he says, was a deliberate effort to organize the turn-of-the-century immgrant populations into a functioning, manageable and permanent underclass, which over the last century has succeeded far beyond the wildest imaginations of the 19th-century elites who promoted it.
Very much a libertarian set of arguments, overall, with barbs that strike at both the right and the left of the American political spectrum. It is easy to see how little difference there is between right and left in America when you apply lenses like these. That's not to say that libertarianism isn't inherently flawed itself, because it truly is, but, like Marxism, it offers a different way to look at institutions we take for granted.
His solution, by the way, has its own flaws that promote classism and societal stratification and are a bit contrary to our democratic ideals. It's difficult to imagine any widespread implementation of this sort of educational system that would not be quickly re-interpreted back into a system of social control, even though there would probably be many more children drawn to self-actualized education.
Lots of food for thought in his essays, though, and I think it's possible to counter some of the more insidious effects of contemporary education through the avenue of engaged parenthood. Sadly, parents who engage themselves consciously in their childrens' education are in the minority, and the genuinely engaged parents must be on the lookout for turning into "Helicopter Parents", who are just as deleterious to a child's development as the century-old social-engineer school.
Permalink |The real impact of swapping seats in the Congress probably won't be well-understood for a while. In their quest to regain power, the Democratic Party ran to the right, sometimes offering up candidates just as conservative (or even moreso) than the Republicans they sought to replace, and now those newly-elected individuals head for Washington thoroughly aware of just whom they are beholden to.
So for those of us who were hoping that the Blue Wave would wash away the conservative religious agenda of the last half-dozen years, I am afraid we are going to be sorely disappointed. While some of the more egregious and arrogant moves of the Religious Right are likely to be shut back behind the door of our Nightmare Closet, we are apt to be stuck with almost as much moralizing (or de-moralizing, depending on your point of view) government as we have been for the past six years.
Just before the election, historian and political writer Garry Wills had this essay in the New York Times Review of Books (via 3quarksdaily) outlining how the Bush Administration has used "faith" as a sledgehammer to not just chip away but full-bore blast away at the liberal secular institutions that have defined American culture, education, politics, and justice.
Some of the wind may have been taken out of Bush's sails by the Republicans' defeat, but it will take a lot more than that to push back against the destructive force of "faith-based initiatives" that presently threaten our society. Putting the Democrats in control of Congress is like replacing broken windows with cracked ones. The ill wind still gets through, and it won't take much to shatter them.
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The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has an article in its most recent issue that details where the United States keeps what remains of its nuclear arsenal. Click on the map above to see it in a larger popup window, where you can check out some of the details. The online version of the article does not have the graphic, but here is a PDF version if you want to see the graphic in a larger size.
We still possess about 10,000 nuclear warheads even after two decades of reductions, most of which are naval assets (Trident missile warheads) and thus based in the Pacific Northwest (even though they're probably somewhere underwater most of the time).
Permalink |For the last week or two I have been following a blog called "This Blog Sits At The Intersection Of Anthropology And Economics". Not the catchiest blog name I've ever come across, but it is descriptive. Grant McCracken, the blog's author, writes about popular culture, its economics, and its sociology -- all topics once very near and dear to me.
Yesterday, for example, he set out to parse the underlying cultural significances behind the "artisanal" or "slow" food meme. He does an exceptionally good job of laying bare the shift in cultural value of the notions of "artificial" and "authentic" -- it is not that long ago that our culture placed a higher value on "artificial" as symbolic of man's mastery over the natural world and his distance from his uneducated agrarian past. In the context he lays out for us, the aesthetic of "artisanal" food is unmade into its own version of snobbery and need to distinguish between the common and the uncommon, managing somehow not to see its own ironical position in the process.
Worth reading and considering, especially among the foodie types.
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Now that The Lesser Of Two Evils has been put back in power, you can bet they are wasting no time promoting their agenda.
Personally, I can hardly wait to celebrate Monkey Ancestor Day. In the words of DNC Chairman Howard Dean: "Yeeeaaaarrrggghhh!"
okay, here's the real agenda, but c'mon, Monkey Ancestor Day would be SO awesome.
Permalink |Via MonkeyFilter comes this story from 2003 about the man who wrote the song "Unchained Melody" and his struggle to reassert his authorship rights having written the song decades before it finally became a well-known hit.
Hy Zater, the songwriter, says he likes Elvis's version of the song better than the Righteous Brothers' version (which is pretty much the canonical version now). Here's documentary footage of Elvis singing the song just a few weeks before he died in 1977, which might change Zater's mind if he saw it.
Permalink | Comments (1)
While we're going retro, check out this 1940's style phone handset equipped with a Bluetooth connector for use with Skype, or just as a wireless handset to use with your cellphone.
I don't know which would get you more looks -- walking around with one of those Bluetooth headsets, yammering into thin air, or walking around with a big ol' phone receiver talking to "nothing".
(via tingilinde)
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Excellent steampunk casemod (via MAKEZine).
The smokestack really makes it work, don't you think?
Permalink |I don't usually watch Bill Maher's show on HBO -- I'm an old fart and am usually in bed by 11:00 on a Friday night -- but thanks to the magic of The Internets it's easy to keep up with his regular "New Rules" segment, which is generally the best part of the show anyway. I like Maher better than the "fake news" premise of "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" (even though I do find those both very funny); I think it's a bit more honest to go head-to-head with newsfigures rather than hide behind the safe disguise of a staged bit. Maher also points his monologue at a broader range of subjects than just the usual Washington idiotocracy. It's good to remember that there is a world outside of politics, even if someone is making fun of it.
I especially liked this recent "New Rules" segment wherein he pulls no punches about the "We're Number One!" chest-thumping that permeates American society. We ain't Number One in much any more, and he's got the statistics to prove it.
Studs Terkel is still going strong at 93 years of age. It must be all the cigars. Here is an excerpt of a recent interview with him in The Sun (PDF file).
I've read several of his books over the years, most memorably The Good War and his best-known book, Working. He's an old-time pinko of the best kind, never afraid to tell people right to their faces what he thinks is wrong with them.
I literally bumped into Studs one time in Chicago when I was a graduate student. I was walking downtown, headed to the Chicago Public Library on some academic wild goose chase, and paying more attention to looking around than at where I was going. Crossing over the river by the Sun-Times building, I brushed shoulders with an old geezer in a trenchcoat, his wispy hair caught in the breeze. "Oops, sorry," I said, but got no reply. He kept right on going, walking at a pretty good clip, much faster than I was going, and it took me a good 10 or 15 seconds to realize that it was him. Not my best "brush with fame" story, I guess, but it's all I've got for you.
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The Guardian reports that scientists believe that a recent spell of significant seismic and volcanic activity in a region of East Africa called Afar is similar to the sort of tectonic activity that happened millions of years ago to cause the Atlantic Ocean to form.
Scientists watching the activity say that only the coastal highlands of Eritrea are holding back the waters of the Red Sea from flooding out the Afar region, creating a new body of water. The ground in the area has sunk 100 meters below sea level in some places. Much of this seismic activity has occurred within a very short period of time (weeks), though it's expected that the actual formation of a new ocean will more likely take about a million years (still, small change in geologic circles).
(via MonkeyFilter)
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The historian William E. Leuchtenberg has a piece in the most recent Smithsonian Magazine that recalls the 1946 midterm election to remind us of some of the parallels to the present political season (and also some of the significant differences). The Republicans, effectively locked out of power since the 1932 election, rode a wave of dissatisfaction with Harry Truman to take control of Congress that year, only to be swept back out again two years later. Control of Congress swung back and forth through the 1950s before the Democrats could hang on and retain control for another 30-odd years.
Which brings me to my second link, an op-ed piece by journalism professor Robert Schmul in today's Christian Science Monitor which recalls the midterm year of 1994, which ushered in the present era of Republican control of the Congress. The political landscape of 1994 had some interesting similarities to 1946 -- Bill Clinton's first couple of years in office were rocky (though not nearly as rough as Truman's), and there was a lot of dissatisfaction with a well-entrenched Democratic majority in Congress.
Schmul's assertion is that the poignant "sunset of my life" letter from Ronald Reagan which revealed his Alzheimer's Disease publicly was a strong emotional touchstone for Republicnas especially, but Americans in general, and helped swing the election for the GOP. I'm not sure I really agree with that, but it seems pertinent to remember going into the last weekend of this midterm election with this Kerry brouhaha overshadowing things.
I, for one, would not be at all surprised to see the next decade of American politics play out like the realignments of the 1950s, with Congress rendered practically worthless as it gets treated like a football. But I can also see a similar scenario to the 1994 example: one of the last great liberal warriors of the recent past makes one more splash on the public stage to great fanfare and warm memorializing, re-energizing a Democratic party that has been moribund for the last dozen years.
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The New Yorker has a profile of legendary game designer Will Wright in its latest issue.
Wright is the creative genius behind one of the best computer simulation games of all time, SimCity. (You can play the original version of SimCity online at the SimCity website), as well as the immensely popular follw-up game The Sims.
For the last several years he has been working to develop a game of immense scope where you begin playing as a single-celled organism in a primordial ocean and evolve all the way to become an interstellar race bent on conquering the universe. The game is called "Spore", and it's safe to say that there's a pretty large contingent of computer gamers (myself included) who cannot wait to get their hands on it. If the game is even half as good as it has looked in all the online previews, it promises to keep us going for a long, long time.
The New Yorker article also has some decent background on the history of computer gaming. Overall, though, it lacks focus and takes a few too many detours away from the main subject. Nonetheless, I appreciated the rare peek at Wright and his creative process, and now I'm drooling all over again for Spore, which is due out sometime next year.
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Click picture for larger popup
Please don't.
Yeah, this was clever 'n shit back in 1999 or something when the Internet was still shiny and clean and everybody thought it was cool when you could convince a whole bunch of people to do random stuff just because they could. But after several years of spending each November reading bloggers alternately whining about not writing enough and crowing about their hopeless logorrhea, I think it's done. Seriously. Think of the children.
Not everyone has the Great American Novel hiding deep inside their soul, waiting to be set free. Though these days I am cursed with terminal writer's block, I have done a fair amount of writing in my life, and long ago I came to terms with the honest assessment that I was not cut out to write novels. So I am not saying this out of some secretly-harbored desire to be a novelist or some bitter resentment that you're a lemming with a word processor and I'm not. I am saying this in hopes of sparing you, me, and everyone else a month's worth of pointless effort when you could be doing something so much more worth your while like polishing your shoes or raking leaves.
Maybe you could use November to READ novels. Good ones. Or at least entertaining ones. Skip Dickens, though. He got paid by the word and it shows. Plus, he probably did write a couple of those in a month, and I wouldn't want you to get any ideas. Try "War And Peace". That wasn't dashed off in between watching YouTube clips and IM-ing with your cow-orkers, you can bet. Or "Gone With The Wind". Hell, the MOVIE took three years to make, so imagine how long it took Margaret Mitchell to write.
When you do finally sit down to write your novel, promise me you'll take longer than a month to do it. And promise me you won't post some running commentary about it on your blog every single day, especially when all you have to say is "I didn't write anything today". Be like President Bush and use The Internets and The Google for something useful, like downloading porn. At least that way you can masturbate in private and not in front of everybody.
(Here's the blog I swiped that image from. Very funny stuff and oh so true.)
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I know just where I want to put this in my house: a bookcase with a hidden door, just like you've seen a million times in the movies.
I'm hoping that maybe this guy will also show how to install one of those sliding rock walls that reveals the evil scientist's secret laboratory, but I gotta get a secret laboratory first.
(via MAKE:blog)
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Bridget and I were avid viewers of Discovery Channel's "Deadliest Catch" a few months ago. Though Season 2 lacked the "competitive" angle of the first season, it is surprisingly compelling to watch those men and boats out in the harshest conditions imaginable, hauling up massive traps brimming with squirming King and Opellio crabs.
(As it happened, right after "Deadliest Catch" finished up its season, there was a nearly identical series about New England lobstermen, and it was almost laughable to watch because by comparison the conditions that the lobstermen work under seemed like a luxury sea cruise...but I digress...)
Hanan at growabrain had a link to the website of crab fisherman and freelance photographer Cory Arnold. Arnold was one of the crew aboard the "Rollo", one of the boats featured in the series, and among the photos on his site are some simply awe-inspiring pictures from the deck of the boat that give you a taste of what the TV show featured week after week.
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Our old friend, historian Niall Ferguson, is back with another piece of neo-con wankery in the latest Vanity Fair magazine.
His thesis is that Western Civilization has been in decline for the last century or so, slowly giving way to the rise of the East, and he illustrates that by making some comparisons to the Roman Empire through the lens of the classic "Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire" written by Edward Gibbon in the 18th century. Some of his comparisons rely on some torturous logic to work, but he also makes some interesting observations as well.
The part that will have Uncle Dick and his cronies creaming their gabardines is the part where he ascribes the cultural decline of the West to its embracing of secularism and its disdain for the "hard-working values" of Christianity -- that's why America is a nation of lard-asses and why Europe is a continent of layabouts in his opinion. Oh, and he has a particularly dismissive swipe at the liberal crowd who have been engaged in so much hand-wringing over the imminent demise of our (small-r) republican values -- get over it, wuss-bags, because the Republic has been dead for a long, long time. In other words, we're already the Evil Empire and we'd all be better off if we acknowledged that and got back to being hard-working Puritans.
Weeeeeeellllll, Niall, old chap, I'm not sure I can go with you down that path, but I did enjoy most of the article. At least the first half, which shows some semblance of non-wankery. I do think this article is worth reading for those of you who are "serious" history readers like me; at seven pages online, it's a long article, but not hard to get through.
Permalink |Okay, next time I can convince some of you to come to town, we're doing this: "Ghosts of Liberty", an "interactive adventure game" that sends you scouring the city for clues and contacts to solve a puzzle rather like "The Amazing Race" and it's competitor "Treasure Hunters".
You get clues via cellphone, you have to find actors playing various roles in the game, and you get to explore all over Boston in the process. Winners get real prizes, and nobody has to eat seven pounds of raw haddock or rappel down the face of the Prudential Tower to win.
Back a few months ago, my blog-friend Mig and some of his friends actually did something like this on their own: they arranged an entire mystery adventure for his teenage daughter's birthday and she and her friends got to have their own incredible adventure in Vienna, Austria, where they live. He asked me to join in as one of the co-conspirators in setting it all up, but I had to beg off. I was quite impressed with what they were able to do, though, and how well it went over with a bunch of teenagers.
Mig, if you read this post, maybe you might offer your services to these guys for a Vienna game for travelers...
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For a number of years now, Williams-Sonoma has been featuring various decadent old-timey confections as Christmas gift offerings. We've tried and enjoyed several -- the peppermint bark, the peppermint patties, and, most notably, the giant s'mores (which they have retired, I am sad to say).
Bookofjoe noted the other day that this year they're pitching what they call "The World's Finest Marshmallows". I'm trying to recall if they've had these in the past or not -- I don't recall seeing them last year, but by the same token there's a lot of things I don't remember from last year, so don't go by me.
Anyway, I thought those were looking pretty good and thought about buying a box until I saw this post at Slashfood which tells you how to make them yourself. Notice that the homemade ones are virtually indistinguishable from the boxed ones, plus they significantly less expensive AND haven't been sitting in boxes in a warehouse for who-knows-how-long.
Definitely on my list of things to try in my kitchen soon. If they work well, I'll probably send some to various friends and relatives as Christmas gifts. Heck, I could even undercut Williams-Sonoma and charge $15 a box and make a tidy profit!
Permalink |Just about everybody recognizes the unmistakable voice of the "You've Got Mail" guy from America Online. He's right up there with the Voicemail Lady who tells you "If you'd like to press 1, press 1 now" and the inescapable Outlook "beep-boop" noise that rings through the corridors of Corporate America.
Well, never let it be said that America (Online or Off) wasn't the land of endless opportunity, because the real person who "performed" that piece of undying dialogue, a fellow by the name of El Edwards, has his own web business on the side making customized versions of the assorted AOL .wavs: not just "You've Got Mail", but also those other classics "Welcome!" and "Good-Bye!" all for the low, low price of $10 a piece (or 5 for $25, such a deal!)
For a little bit more, he'll do other vocals you can use on your computer. Maybe you could have him say "BZZT!" instead of the annoying error beep, or "I don't THINK so!" when you try to access a website that your employer doesn't approve of.
(via growabrain)
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Great Googly-Moogly that looks good!
Someday, when we get to go to Barcelona, I am getting one of these for myself. It's called a flauta d’ibéric, a ham sandwich made with the best Iberico ham - Jabugo. (You'll remember that not long ago I posted about being able to buy your own Iberico ham imported directly from Spain, and this is like the Chateau Margaux of Iberico).
(via bookofjoe)
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If you occasionally find yourself in need of some blank graph paper or calendar pages, this site might be useful for you. They have a number of different blank forms, some of which (like the Smith chart) are very specialized, and others just for fun (print out some blank Sudoku sheets), all in PDF format.
(via Bifurcated Rivets)
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As fellow blogger Linkmeister noted, it didn't even take 24 hours for the Justice Department to assert its new-found authority to remove 196 habeas corpus cases from the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. under the terms of the "Military Commissions Act". The detainees in question will now be tried before military commissions in secret.
Supporters of the Bush Administration like to point out that the MCA is written to apply only to "non-citizens of the United States". However, as legal scholars point out, the protections of habeas corpus have been extended to citizens and non-citizens alike since first enacted, and with those protections removed for one group, there is genuine concern that protections could be and will be removed for everyone given the administration's zeal for extending its unilateral authority.
Motions are in the works to bring cases to the Supreme Court to test the constitutionality of this law, but with a stacked court controlled by justices who seem to hold little interest in preserving individual freedoms, the outcome is not certain, and should they uphold the law as it is written now, that only increases the likelihood of the Executive Branch seeking to extend its reach.
If you like your editorializing a little less hyperbolic, then read this New York Times editorial which plays up the domestic political aspect of the situation, but does not shrink from the real concerns at hand.
Permalink |I had the usual selection of assorted links all ready to post today, but when I went online this morning, I caught Keith Olbermann's latest monologue speaking out against Bush's signing of the "Terror Act" that wipes away nearly 1000 years of the rule of law, 230 years of American democracy, rejects the Geneva Convention and turns every person in this nation into a political prisoner whether they realize it yet or not.
And so again, I feel that it is important to post this for you today; there will be plenty of time for frivolities another day. For now these words need to be seen and heard. "The Beginning of the End Of America", indeed. If you are not willing or able to watch the embedded streaming video above, here is the complete transcript:
And lastly, as promised, a Special Comment tonight on the signing of the Military Commissions Act and the loss of Habeas Corpus.Permalink |We have lived as if in a trance. We have lived as people in fear. And now, our rights and our freedoms in peril, we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing.
Therefore, tonight, have we truly become, the inheritors of our American legacy.
For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering: A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.
We have been here before, and we have been led here by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.
We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives -- only to watch him use those Acts to jail newspaper editors.
American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote, about America.
We have been here, when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives -- only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as "Hyphenated Americans," most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.
American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said, about America.
And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9066 was necessary to save American lives -- only to watch him use that Order to imprison and pauperize 110,000 Americans, while his man-in-charge, General DeWitt, told Congress: "It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese."
American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did -- but for the choices they or their ancestors had made, about coming to America.
Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And each, was a betrayal of that for which the President who advocated them, claimed to be fighting.
Adams and his party were swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.
Many of the very people Wilson silenced, survived him, and one of them even ran to succeed him, and got 900,000 votes, though his Presidential campaign was conducted entirely from his jail cell.
And Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese was not merely the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate a formal apology from the government of the United States, to the citizens of the United States, whose lives it ruined.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
In times of fright, we have been, only human. We have let Roosevelt's "fear of fear itself" overtake us. We have listened to the little voice inside that has said "the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass." We have accepted, that the only way to stop the terrorists, is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists.
Just the way we once accepted that the only way to stop the Soviets, was to let the government become just a little bit like the Soviets. Or substitute the Japanese. Or the Germans. Or the Socialists. Or the Anarchists. Or the Immigrants. Or the British. Or the aliens.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And, always, always wrong.
"With the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?"
Wise words. And ironic ones, Mr. Bush. Your own, of course, yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act. You spoke so much more than you know, sir. Sadly, of course, the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously was you.
We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
But even within this history, we have not before codified, the poisoning of Habeas Corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.
You, sir, have now befouled that spring.
You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order.
You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom.
For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And -- again, Mr. Bush -- all of them, wrong.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done, to anything the terrorists have ever done.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that "the United States does not torture. It's against our laws and it's against our values" and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghreib Prison and the stories of waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens "Unlawful Enemy Combatants" and ship them somewhere -- anywhere -- but may now, if he so decides, declare you an "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" and ship you somewhere - anywhere.
And if you think this, hyperbole or hysteria, ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was President, or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was President, or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was President.
And if you somehow think Habeas Corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an "unlawful enemy combatant" -- exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this Attorney General is going to help you?
This President now has his blank check. He lied to get it. He lied as he received it. Is there any reason to even hope, he has not lied about how he intends to use it, nor who he intends to use it against?
"These military commissions will provide a fair trial," you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush. "In which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney, and can hear all the evidence against them."
'Presumed innocent,' Mr. Bush? The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the point just before they sustain "serious mental and physical trauma" in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even invoke The Geneva Conventions in their own defense.
'Access to an attorney,' Mr. Bush? Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this program, sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to his detainee defendant, on the promise that the detainee would plead guilty.
'Hearing all the evidence,' Mr. Bush? The Military Commissions act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the defense.
Your words are lies, sir. They are lies, that imperil us all.
"One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks," you told us yesterday, "said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America." That terrorist, sir, could only hope. Not his actions, nor the actions of a ceaseless line of terrorists (real or imagined), could measure up to what you have wrought.
Habeas Corpus? Gone. The Geneva Conventions? Optional. The moral force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection? Snuffed out.
These things you have done, Mr. Bush, they would be "the beginning of the end of America."
And did it even occur to you once, sir, somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11, that with only a little further shift in this world we now know, just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died, did it ever occur to you once, that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future President and a "competent tribunal" of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" for, and convene a Military Commission to try, not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?
For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And doubtless, sir, all of them -- as always -- wrong.
State fair season is winding down all over the country, and in the last few years there's been some fairly earnest competitions between some of the largest ones to see which one could come up with the most over-the-top deep fried food product. The Minnesota State Fair, for example, is notorious for the breadth and depth of their deep fried offerings and they usually get the nod for their gut-busting fryolator foods.
This year it seems that the price goes to the Texas State Fair, where the death-snack-du-jour was Deep-Fried Coke.
Yes, that's right, fried Coca-Cola. They do it by using Coca-Cola syrup in place of water in funnel cake batter, so that the Coke bakes right into the deep-fried funnel cake strands. Then it's topped with whipped cream and a cherry and a little powdered sugar for effect.
But word of success travels fast -- this Charlotte Observer article mentions that Deep-Fried Coke was also one of the attractions at this year's North Carolina State Fair
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Because I realize this information is considered critical to millions of Americans, I am glad to present you with a comprehensive compendium of celebrity bra sizes. You just never know when you might be called upon to inform others that Oprah is a 36-C, and you wouldn't want to look like a boob, now would you?
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This Christian Science Monitor story made me a little happy and a little sad at the same time:
Some original Muppet Workshop folks have teamed up with an group called "No Strings International" to produce a film to be shown in villages throughout Afghanistan to help children learn how to be safe around the thousands upon thousands of land mines buried throughout the country.
British actor Hugo Speer is touring the country via motorcycle with a projection kit that lets him set up and show the film almost anywhere. (You might remember him as "Guy" in "The Full Monty")
A very thoughtful approach to international aid and relief, even if it is a bit depressing to think that it's a necessary subject to teach children about.
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This is an electron microscope image of a fossilized embryo estimated to be nearly 550 million years old.
According to the linked article, that puts it at 10 million years BEFORE the "Cambrian Explosion", which is the point where most complex life forms begin to appear in the fossil record. At this point, the scientists studying this fossil aren't even entirely sure of what sort of creature it might be (a simple sponge is one conjecture), but the mere existence of this embryo suggests that the formation of complex multi-cellular organisms is even older than originally thought.
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Friday the 13th isn't particularly scary to me, but I'm not superstitious. Superstitions, however, never die, they just morph to fit their times. Frankly, who needs any more shit to panic about, especially this?
Here's a piece from today's Wall Street Journal that explains the religious (naturally) origins of the Friday the 13th superstition.
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New Scientist magazine's cover story this month takes a speculative look at what Earth would be like if all of humanity simply vanished.
They're not saying we'll all die from bird flu/tsunamis/killer earthquakes/global warming/reality television, they're just imagining what would happen to the planet if humans simply disappeared, leaving behind all of our material objects. How long would it take, then, for nature to reassert its own order? How long would it take for all of the outward signs of human existence to vanish from the face of the planet?
As an example, the piece points to Pripyat, the region of the Ukraine where the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster happened twenty years ago. People are no longer permitted to live within the region most affected by the escaped radioactive gas, and in less than two decades the buildings have begun to crumble, animals have returned in greater numbers, and nature seems able to recover from the damage. But our building materials and construction methods are such that signs of human habitation will most likely linger for centuries, just as we are still finding ruins of human civilizations from 5000 years ago.
We have indeed left a lasting mark -- some endangered species would not survive even if we did disappear because we have pushed them too far, and other species that exist today only because we carefully maintain them would also likely die out without our intervention. Our effect on global climate might also be next to irreversible.
Great article, with lots of things that will leave you thinking for a bit.
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This Washington Post story yesterday about the impending demise of cursive handwriting got lots of notice at some of the usual places like Reddit.com and MetaFilter, and even though I try not to be a "me-too" blogger, I thought it was interesting enough to post about here.
The consensus at those forums is that cursive is antiquated at best and generally obsolete, and I really have to agree. Cursive handwriting comes from the need to write with a steady hand using a very unreliable writing instrument (the dip pen) and has been sliding toward obsolesence for the last hundred years or so anyway. It's not the computer that put the handwriting on the wall, so to speak, for cursive script, it was the ball-point pen. To borrow a metaphor from that evil Mr. Darwin, cursive writing represents the Neanderthal, and the ball-point is the Cro-Magnon which co-existed but ultimately co-opted it, while the computer is the resulting homo sapiens -- an evolution, not a revolution.
A lot of the arguments in favor of cursive writing that get mentioned in the article are simply bullshit -- the one that particularly galls me is the one where the "expert" asserts that we won't have meaningful authentic records of modern history if people don't write things in longhand. Here is a guy who clearly needs to get his head out of his ass and take a look around. The Nazis, for example, were big on typewriters (no doubt supplied by IBM), and we have plenty of authentic historical documentation from them. A certain former Republican congressman from Florida can tell you about the permanence and authenticity of certain forms of electronic communication as well.
Some of the arguments pose more intriguing ideas. One critic claims that writing in cursive develops cognitive skills that help children learn to become more verbally expressive. It would be interesting to hear a bit more about that; if it's true, then there might be some justification to including longhand script in creative writing curricula rather than pushing it into general knowledge. Reframed as a creative tool, cursive could gain a whole new cachet just as its predecessor, calligraphy, has.
Implied throughout the piece is the idea that all forms of handwriting are doomed because of technology, but I find that notion a bit presumptive. We've discovered that computer and other electronica simply are not the one-size-fits-all solution to every problem, and indeed often turn into the classic "hammer looking for nails" scenario. Being able to write in any manner with pen-and-paper has significant advantages over electronic writing, and is likely to survive our current romantic obsession with computers.
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In brightest day, in blackest night
No evil shall escape my sight
Let those who worship evil's might
Beware my power, Green Lantern's light!
-- The Green Lantern's Creed
I was never a huge comic book fan, but as a kid I liked some of the "second-tier" superheroes a lot better than the "star" superheroes like Superman and Batman. I liked Captain America and Thor on the Marvel side, and on the DC side I liked Flash and Green Lantern. This was back in the 1970s, of course, before comic books turned into soap operas and every two years they had to "retcon the universe" to make up for crappy and out-of-control storylines. It was also before every superhero male looked like a billboard for steroids and before every female superhero had boobs the size of propane tanks and costumes that would never possibly fit a human being.
Anyway, Green Lantern was the shit. The comic books were very sci-fi compared to some of the others, and that was cool. Then there was the ring. I was always a sucker for a superhero with props (hence my interest in Cap and Goldilocks, too). And the poem. Much better than "SHAZAM!" or some other catchphrase. And the green motif was VERY popular in the 1960s and 70s -- Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Green Hornet, the Hulk, etc.
So, MAKEblog has a link this morning to a guy who can make his own Green Lantern rings. It's not something you will necessarily rush right out and do yourself; he obviously knows more about casting metal and such than the average comic book geek. But don't you want one reeeeeal bad? I do.
Permalink |(No, this is not a post about golf, I am just borrowing the title of the book. Sorry, duffers.)
When you think of fall activities, no doubt the first thing that springs to your mind is apple picking. Once Labor Day has come and gone, we always make a point of trying to keep a weekend afternoon in mid-to-late September open so that we can engage in the annual ritual.
For a number of years, we've gone to Honey Pot Hill Orchard in Stow, but after last year's experience there we decided we would never go back. (The original blog post I made about that experience is now offline, but the gist of it is that the folks at Honey Pot Hill turned a quaint apple orchard into a huge "event venue" and ruined the whole thing in the process) So this year we found a place near home to try -- they're on the same path to the Dark Side as Honey Pot Hill, I fear, but for now their operation is smaller. In the end we didn't pick any apples that day; instead we picked tomatoes, peaches and raspberries and chose to save apple picking for a trip we were planning to Maine. That's another story, and I'll tell you about it another time, I think.
Annnnnnywaaaaay, the point of the post is this: I read this piece in Slate this morning that has about umpteen different reasons why the pick-your-own apple business is evil in the first place. He might as well have been writing about Honey Pot Hill, because they fit the model to a tee: old farm with a small orchard transforms into profit-hungry pick-your-own as a way to oversell apples at a steep price and lure you into buying other crap, while simultaneously undermining the whole concept of getting a nice walk in the fresh autumn sunshine and picking healthy fruit. Just one more way our commodity-driven economic system takes something special and turns it into yet another half-assed imitation of itself.
*SIGH*
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Mysteries of the Universe Revealed!!
Wired offers this exclusive exposé of what cheese-like substances and assorted additives and preservatives go into that classic American snack product Kraft "Easy Cheese" Spray-On Cheesy Food-Like Product.
Contrary to decades of rumor and myth, there are actual cheese-like ingredients lurking inside every can, not just Play-Doh and smoky flavorings. It's also chock-full of emulsifiers, preservatives that give each can a shelf-life approximating that of Uranium-240, and salt. Lots and lots of salt.
I was interested to discover that "Easy Cheese" does not use ozone-depleting aerosols to force the highly emulsified quasi-queso onto your Nabisco Triscuit™. Instead, it uses nitrogen to push a plunger in the can, very much like the Play-Doh pumper except with inert gas.
Permalink | Comments (1)It's not too late, you still have the rest of today and tomorrow to take part in the Christie's auction of authentic Star Trek memorabilia.
Sadly, despite the "40th Anniversary" designation Christie's has given to the catalog, most everything is from the film "Star Trek: Nemesis", one of the TNG cast films (and one of the worst of the entire ST cinematic series).
But I have to tell you that if I had a spare $5000 sitting around right now, I would be sorely tempted to bid on this particular lot and score on two fanboy wetdreams at once:
Click photo for larger popup
It's all five Royal Navy costumes worn by the crew of the Enterprise in the holodeck "H.M.S. Enterprise" sequence of "Star Trek: Generations". Frankly I'd settle for one. Make it so!
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I've written here in the past about my interest in and feeling of deep connectedness with the "7 UP" series of documentaries by the director Michael Apted. Beginning in 1964, Apted has followed the lives of a group of people who represented a cross-section of British society, visiting them at seven-year intervals to chart their ups and downs, their successes and their failures.
The latest film in the series, "49 Up", is making its U.S. premiere this week (the films have traditionally been seen in the U.K. first, usually on television but also theatrically). The New York Times has this review of the new film today.
Boston is one of the cities where the film is premiering, showing at the Landmark Cinema at Kendall Square in Cambridge. I have been waiting with great interest since the last film, and as soon as we heard that it was opening here Bridget and I made plans to go see it. We very rarely get to go to "grown-up" movies these days and usually wait until there are movies we're seriously interested in before making a stab at getting a hard-to-come-by babysitter; this movie absolutely qualifies.
Even though the NYT review is a bit unenthused, I have to say that these films collectively are one of the most significant things I've ever seen on film. I happen to own the DVD box set which includes all the films from the beginning through "42 Up", and watching them in a "marathon" sequence really drives home the simple brilliance of the original idea, the strong committment Apted has to his subject and the "children", and, of course, the ebb and flow of life. When you connect with people only once every few years, you notice dramatic changes but not necessarily subtle ones, and sometimes you miss the overarching themes of a person's life. But compress half a century into a few hours' viewing and everything is laid bare.
I'm even more sensitive to this now because over the course of the summer I was able to reconnect with some of my old high school friends in the context of our 25th reunion. Age-wise, we are just about 7 years behind the people in Apted's films, so on some level there's a "peek ahead" feel to watching them. Some of us have begun to make an effort to see one another more regularly, which has been very gratifying to me, and which also broadens my understanding of those subtle effects in their lives and in my own.
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The California Academy of Sciences reports that a team of archaeologists at a dinosaur dig were forced to split a T-Rex bone in half to get it to fit on a helicopter, and when they did they discovered actual soft tissue from the animal inside the bone.
The tissue (blood vessels, bone cells and possibly blood cells) is estimated to be 70 million years old and is nearly identical in makeup to the tissue of modern-day ostriches, almost certainly cementing the theory that dinosaurs evolved into birds. Because the tissue is so old, scientists don't think they'll be able to find any usable DNA in the tissue sample, so I guess we don't have to worry about cloned T-Rexes just yet.
This is certainly going to put a dent in the nonsense from the "Intelligent Design" idiots, too.
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Perhaps it's not quite as cutting edge as tattooing a notepad to the back of your hand, but the Inka Pen certainly is one handy little writing implement. Small enough to fit on your key ring, the pen is made out of steel and carbon fiber, has a stylus for use with your PDA, can expand to full-size length in case your big mitt can't wrap around a little pen, and is pressurized like the famous Fisher Space Pen so it can write at any angle, under any condition (even under water). (via Andre Torrez)
This pen may not be quite as rugged, but maybe you don't need MacGyver's pen, maybe you just need a little soothing music to accompany your writing. It's got a built-in FM radio with electronic tuning. Plus, it's only five bucks, so if it craps out in a couple of weeks you haven't sunk all your fortune into it. (via bookofjoe)
I hasten to remind my family, friends, loved ones, and other assorted sycophants that Christmas is coming and these items would be perfect stocking stuffers for the likes of someone like myself. Ahem.
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I don't know how common this bumpersticker is outside of the northeastern U.S., but I have seen this on cars here for decades. Even though I consider myself fairly well-informed about most tourist attraction places all over New England, I'd never heard of an actual Bertha or her mussels and figured the bumperstickers were just a mild double-entendre joke.
So imagine my surprise as I read the food blog "Too Many Chefs" yesterday and learned that there is, indeed, a real restaurant called Bertha's and their specialty is, of course, mussels.
As it turns out, Bertha's is in Baltimore, which explains the bumpersticker's popularity in the northeast and why I'd never heard of it anywhere in New England. It was my faulty and somewhat provincial assumption that a place that specialized in mussels would have to be a New England coastal attraction.
Those of you who have followed my cooking adventures know that I am very fond of moules mariniere, but I also love a steaming bowl of rich mussel stew, and I also have a good recipe for mussels in fresh tomato sauce with pasta. I don't know if there's any chance of me ever actually getting to the real Bertha's, but if I ever find myself in Baltimore, I definitely will have this on my list (along with the original diner from the movie "Diner", which I believe is in the same area).
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Check this picture out. The guy in the photo has tattooed some evenly spaced lines on the back of his hand so he can use his hand to jot down notes. It's a brilliant, if odd, idea: it's very difficult to lose (providing he doesn't juggle chainsaws for a living or something), the lines won't smudge or smear off, and there's no chance of his hand running out of batteries and losing all the data.
The fellow in question is a fashion designer, and this picture and the explanation about his unusual tattoo appeared in a New York Times story a couple of weeks ago during Fashion Week. (You'll need to go down about 3/4 of the way through the article to see the picture and read the bit about his hand)
For his next trick, he should have a fountain pen nib replacing the nail on the index finger of his other hand so he always has a pen!
Permalink | Comments (5)If you are old enough to remember prime-time television from the 1970s and early 1980s, you may remember the somewhat controversial sitcom/soap opera "Soap" and the supporting characters of Chuck and Bob. Chuck (or was it Bob?) was the stepson of one of the main characters and had a ventriloquist's dummy, Bob (or was it Chuck?) that he used as his "alter ego". Bob was sarcastic and vicious, while Chuck was mild-mannered. It was just one of many outrageous elements to the series.
The guy who played Chuck is a performer named Jay Johnson, and though he's not often on TV anymore, he's put together a one-man show that is scheduled to open on Broadway in October</
