Gulfstream: 2002

O Canada! “A loon appears on Canada’s one-dollar coin because the original dies, featuring a different design, were lost in transit.”

Review of The Two Towers:

[Gollum] gives the movie a chance for psychological inquiry—the one thing it doesn’t require. “The Lord of the Rings” is an epic, and one of the defining restrictions—not to say pleasures—of epic is that it both predate and outwit psychology. Motives, good and ill, may be thwarted or confounded, but you don’t read Tolkien for the niceties of tangled minds; you read him for pace and wonder, and the virtues of Jackson’s trilogy, thus far, have been pace and astonishment, which is almost the same thing.

Is Tolkien read “for the niceties of tangled minds”? I haven’t read him, but readers of the trilogy have told me that this is one aspect of the books missing from the movies—in book form The Fellowship of the Ring is not one great big chase scene, for example. I am quite content for the movies to be (merely) thrilling, though.

(By the way, I do enjoy Anthony Lane’s movie reviews, but his writing does remind me of Strunk and White’s advice to look out for words (or phrases) that “at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning but that soon burst in air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.”)

Battling UV in southern Chile: “On a typical day here this month, the solar stoplight was set at orange, the second highest of four levels, and people were warned to limit their exposure to the sun between noon and 3 p.m. to 21 minutes at most.” (Despite the precision, it seems that they’re more being careful than responding to any science in particular.)

What’s the EFF’s position on digital rights, copyright and so forth? (I’m trying to work out whether or not I should (can) support the EFF.) This page looked promising but it turns out to be real light on detail.

The first “Guiding Principle” is: “Creators should be paid for their work when appropriate. Copyright holders have the right (and responsibility) to make sure that their works are protected from piracy.” Huh? What does this mean? When is it appropriate for creators to be paid for their work? Why can’t you just tell me which currently illegal acts should be legal? Putting lyrics on-line? Books fifty years old? Books that sold less than five thousand copies? MP3s of concerts? MP3s of albums? Movies?

Fun little interview with Alain de Botton, author of The Art of Travel.

(Australia) Many Australian conservatives (including Tim Blair) were once not.

“As visionary as they were, the framers of the Constitution never could have foreseen, for example, that our government would one day need to jail someone indefinitely without judicial review. There was no such thing as suspicious Middle Eastern immigrants back then.”

Hitchens: “unilateral” = bad; “multilateral” = good? Why does the addition of a country or two to an idea’s boosters turn a bad idea into a good one?

Hullo due process! “Bali bombing suspects will be found guilty: police chief” You wouldn’t be trying to jeopardise the trial, would you General? (Anyway, haven’t some confessed?)

Heartening as well as amusing: how seriously librarians take civil liberties.

More testing edge cases: Afghan men bothered by photo showing US soldier searching an Afghan woman—the soldier is female.

Hitchens summarises the events of the last few days, demonstrates the art of spin: “Henry Kissinger prefers his client list to the solemn promise he made to the murder victims of Sept. 11. / Sen. Trent Lott in retrospect thinks that voters were dumb to vote Republican in 1948. / Cardinal Bernard Law asks a foreign potentate if it’s OK to obey the laws of the United States.”

So very beautiful: Katinka Matson’s scanned flowers.

With great power comes great responsibility: on all political and social issues, Google’s policy is Don’t be evil, where evil is whatever Google co-founder Sergey Brin thinks is evil. So when Chinese users were blocked from Google, Brin

ordered a half-dozen books about Chinese history, business, and politics on Amazon.com and splurged on overnight shipping. He consulted with Schmidt, Page, and David Drummond, Google’s general counsel and head of business development, then put in a call to tech industry doyenne Esther Dyson for advice and contacts. Google has no offices in China, so Brin enlisted go-betweens to get the message to Chinese authorities that Google would be very interested in working out a compromise to restore access.

Making weapons and armour for The Lord of the Rings. (10,000 buckles were hand-forged for the Orcs alone?!)

What rules govern a “just society”? Political philosopher John Rawls believed that a thought experiment known as the “original position” provided the answer this question. The experiment runs like this: if you were given the power to choose how society was to run, but you weren’t to know what what place you would eventually take in that society (that is, you had to decide not knowing whether you would be rich or poor, Christian or Muslim, young or old), what rules would you choose? Rawls felt that you would decide on a society in which: (1) individuals were granted every possible freedom compatible with freedom for all; and (2) economic inequalities did exist, but only if they were of benefit to the worst-off. In other words, you’d attempt to maximise the minimum.

Jim Holt here discusses the expected value objection to this argument, which I suspect is related to the observation that an individual’s objectives and those of a society often conflict. For example, though one’s death, or the death of one’s family is (usually) the worst thing that can happen to an individual, it’s by no means the worst thing that can happen to a society. Practically every day a society is given the chance to save a life; instead it fritters money away on sports stadiums, zoos, galleries…

William Saletan tries to make sense of Bush’s vow to topple “every terrorist group of global reach.”

Fun puff piece on the recommendation engines of TiVo, Amazon, etc. running amok. “After Mr. Meyer ordered a documentary about New York from Amazon.com, it pitched him countless documentaries—even one on the history of the thimble.” At least Amazon has a “Why was I recommended this?” link; Mark Pilgrim’s “Recommended Reading” system doesn’t, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s not doing much more than serving up the highest-linked weblogs I haven’t read.

US$100m was recently bequeathed to Poetry, which currently operates with four staff and an annual budget of US$600,000. One writer quips, “That’s probably more money than poetry has gotten, in total, since Homer.”

Electrical engineering for grown-ups: a very big cable shorts out in LA. (Note date—this is ten years ago.)

I quite like the Australia voting system: electorate-wide preferential voting for the House of Representatives and state-wide proportional representation in the Senate. (Voting is also compulsory.) But the details of the Senate’s voting system are insanely complicated! Part of the procedure, for example, involves calculating a figure “to the eighth decimal point, without rounding.”

The declining shock-value of fuck. Some miscellaneous quotes:

“Ethnic slurs are regarded as the taboo,” agrees Ayto. “Nigger is far more taboo than fuck or even cunt. I think if a politician were to be heard off-camera saying fuck, it would be trivial, but if he said nigger, that would be the end of his career.”

...

Further verification that fuck is, well, fucked, comes from Andrea Wills, the BBC’s chief advisor on editorial policy. “In research, 50% or more people said the words that should never be broadcast are cunt, motherfucker, nigger, Paki and spastic. Young women also don’t like whore, slag and twat. But fuck wasn’t on the list.”

The final line in the story (from a “middle-class west London mother”): “I’d rather my children said fuck than toilet.”

A 1977 documentary, Pumping Iron, showing Schwarzenegger winning the 1975 Mr Olympia title, is being re-released.

A right to die edge case: Ian Brady was jailed for life in 1966 after being convicted (with Myra Hindley) of “abducting, torturing and killing children.” He has no hope of parole and has been asking for some years that he be allowed to die. But (this is probably customary) the prison won’t allow it. So, three years ago he began a hunger strike; since then he’s been fed through a tube. Should he be allowed to die?

Old-style cargo pilots: “There are four basic food groups: nicotine, caffeine, chocolate and sugar. I carry a thermos of coffee when I get on the plane. I refill it at our hub and buy two packets of Oreos—first pack’s gone in an hour; the second takes me two hours. Oreos work the best—they’re chocolate and sugar. Mix them with coffee, that’s three out of four. What more do you want?”

Strange, energetic, clumsy account of Hewitt’s victory in the Masters Cup: “Throughout, Hewitt repeatedly found angles so sharp that Ferrero could have shaved with them had the Spaniard not put his ablutions on hold for the week.”

This is messy: Hitomi Soga, kidnapped in Japan by North Korea two decades ago Korea, was recently permitted to visit Japan. She now wants to return home to her husband and children so that they can together discuss where to live—but the Japanese government won’t let her, saying that she’s been brainwashed. To make things even more complicated, Soga’s husband is an American, Charles Jenkins, a US Army deserter who defected to North Korea in 1965. And since the US military police still want him, he could be extradited if he goes to Japan… (Pictures.)

Like something out of Monty Python! R. L. Graham proves that a particular math problem has a solution, and that the solution is less than Graham’s Number—a number so large that a special notation is required to write it down. (According to this page, “if all the material in the universe were turned into pen and ink it would not be enough to write the number down.”) Graham’s Number is an upper bound. What do experts suspect (but can’t prove) the actual solution to be? 6.

(Rad big number notation.)

Mad Magazine parody of The Onion. (According to jwz, Mad was provoked.)

Interesting discussion of fashion and fame via a careful day-by-day chronicle of the clothes Winona wore.

“One of the things I’ve been vaguely aware of for a while now is that for the person who understands fashion, it is the breaking of the rules (always, though, within carefully circumscribed boundaries) that makes the difference between a merely acceptable appearance and one that gets talked about (in a good sense). At a certain point, the difference between accident and artifice vanishes, and I’m pretty sure that for Winona and clothes, at least, that point has long since been passed.”

More on the Bogdanov affair:

Igor’s thesis had many things [referee] Dr. Jackiw didn’t understand, but he found it intriguing. “All these were ideas that could possibly make sense,” he said. “It showed some originality and some familiarity with the jargon. That’s all I ask.”

In the letters section a day later, two physics professors protest a little too much: (1) journals (especially those journals) don’t count anymore; and (2) it doesn’t matter if journals sometimes publish rubbish because nowadays it’s too hard to tell what’s rubbish and what’s not.

(According to ISI’s Journal Citation Reports, Classical and Quantum Gravity is ranked 10th out of 66 “multidisciplinary” physics journals in its “impact factor”; the Annals of Physics is ranked 11th—so I don’t think it fair to say that these are obscure.)

Candid Camera was a “gentle, joyful study of human nature”; its successors are meaner, harsher, more humiliating.

How to’s of the entertainment industry: how to shoot a nude scene/maintain continuity/shoot in the middle of Times Square.

How to avoid an R rating: “What the M.P.A.A. is looking for is responsibility from characters. If they feel that drug use or drinking is being glamorized, they’ll have a problem with it. They are going to respond more favorably if the person who is doing drugs or drinking pays a price for it. They’re also more comfortable if sexualized situations are more played for laughs than for realism—if you’re going to have a condom in a film, it’s better to have it stuck to someone’s foot than used as a birth-control device. And I’ve discovered that it really helps if the guy makes the first move in a sexual encounter.”

Fascinating reverse-Sokol? Two brothers write nonsense physics papers, get them published in peer-reviewed physics journals. It now appears that this was not actually a hoax—the Bogdanovs were at least trying to do proper physics, although their papers should have been rejected for being crap. (Which, from the point of view of the physics community, is an outcome almost as bad.)

A long Usenet thread started on the 23rd of October with a post from the respected John Baez. Among the messages is an amusingly cautious reminder from Alan Sokol that “from the mere fact of publication of my parody … not much can be deduced.” (This is a real quote, but it’s quite a contrast to the first few paragraphs of his Lingua Franca article.)

(Update: French TV Stars Rock the World of Theoretical Physics.)

Vinyl-look CD-Rs! Is there any place in Melbourne that makes CDs from vinyl?

About voting systems.

Michael Moore tries out moral equivalence: Washington sniper was no big deal, etc. because every day “at least eight children killed by gun violence in the United States.” What the fuck?! I can’t imagine this position has much support now; how pissed would people have been if he had had the intellectual honesty to run it whilst the sniper (snipers) was (were) still loose? (Also: I can’t be bother checking his figures, but I can’t believe that there’s never been a day with, say, seven deaths.)

“If you want to do something to make our children’s lives a bit safer, one thing you can do is to participate in one of the various demonstrations taking place this Saturday around the country protesting Bush’s war against Iraq.”—what does one have to do with the other?

The Economist argues for some controversial approaches to immigration, including the idea that “countries should give preference to those who seem to integrate most readily.”

Two other difficult issues:

1. Why do we not allow two equivalent individuals (an Australian journalist and an American journalist, say) to swap countries, leading to a net gain of two satisfied individuals? (That is, allow unlimited migration between countries with the same income per head—actually this is suggested.) It is because not many Australian journalists want to swap jobs with Indian journalists?
2. How much is lost (in human capital) when an educated individual leaves a poor country for a rich one?

A companion article contains some interesting figures and graphs.

Clive James argues that “the true instigation for terrorism might not be the vices of the liberal democracies, but their virtues.” Had to read this twice to realise that amongst it all he advocates … nothing much in particular.

Zac Unger, a firefighter who last year wrote a terrific Slate diary on his job, is this week writing about the birth and first days of his daughter, who was born three months premature (and to a surrogate mother). Fascinating and provocative: in her first ten days of life, Percy ran up bills of $380,000.

What’s art? jwz’s link to that site about the 1988 MacSE with a 1923 Underwood typewriter as its keyboard generated these comments:

atakra: yet another “artist” with too much time on his hands.
jwz: Can I be as cool as you someday?
baconmonkey: you see, a true artist, one who doesn’t have a lot of time on their hands, merely uses photoshop to lift a concept from a movie, as opposed to engineering something physical, tangible, and functional based loosely on something from a movie.

Is something more (or less) like art if it actually works?

(I think jwz considers this a cool hack, not art. I have a blurred memory of jwz posting a comment to slashdot in which he expressed his disgust that something very similar to his webcollage was being exhibited as art. Then there’s this helpful infographic.)

This is kinda crazy: some dotcom companies are repurchasing their own shares for less than their cash value. (The “cash value” of a share is equal to a company’s cash holdings divided by the total number of shares—to repurchase shares for less than their cash value the total value of a company’s shares must be less than what the company holds in cash.) In other words, investors now not only don’t believe that some dotcom companies will never make money, they believe they’ll waste the money they’ve got!

Curiously straight-forward and (mostly) non-hagiographic official biography of Saddam Hussein. Actually the whole of Iraq’s official website is quite interesting. For example according to the notes of the October 2002 cabinet meeting, Saddam Hussein believes that Zionist interests (not “real American interests”) are behind America’s “hostile policy”: “the American people’s interests lies in dealing with peoples in the world peacefully so as to make its trade interests stable and achieve prosperity with the whole world.”

Delivering bad news: “There were several ways that I could answer Peter’s question. I could give the bald statistics—that more than fifty per cent of people with cancer like Maxine’s die within two years—or I could put it more gently, and say that she had a chance, if a low one, of surviving for more than two years. I could even say, somewhat vaguely, that she was young and strong and had as good a chance as anyone of surviving, on the principle that she would benefit more from encouragement than from statistics. As I looked at Maxine, I sensed that she preferred neither the extreme of ignorance nor the extreme of excruciating detail but some middle ground.”

(I sometimes get annoyed when people complain about how politicians spin facts, or how advertisters spin facts—because the thing is, we all spin, all the time. There’s always lots of different ways to tell the whole truth—spin is the approach least upsetting, most comforting, most reassuring.)

Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush arrange a duel.

Why UN weapons inspectors left Iraq four years ago: what the media said then, and what the media say now.

Eldred v. Ashcroft primer.

On balance, copyright terms should be shorter I think. (Probably much shorter.) But I think some of Eldred’s supporters are a little blind to some of the (not so beneficial) implications of a shorter term. Would the public benefit if Mickey Mouse were in the public domain, for example? I’m not sure that we would. What would it be like to live in a world with a Disney Mickey, a Fox Mickey, a Nickelodeon Mickey? Would this be confusing? Or would there be no Mickeys, because no network would be prepared to bear the risk of him being subverted, distorted, smeared by another?

I can only think of a few high-profile fictional characters in the public domain—Santa Claus, Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula… Why are there so few? Why is Ulysses not as famous as Superman? Is it because no-one owns him? (Alternatively: is this a problem?)

I also think Jack Valenti is right in suggesting that some old films won’t get restored if no-one owns them. Why would you spend money restoring (and promoting) a film if the theatre next door can show their own copy for free if yours proves successful? (Similarly, drug companies have no incentive (economic) to investigate the possibility that existing (but out of patent) drugs can be used to treat novel illnesses.)

There are advantages and disadvantages to a longer copyright terms; I do think the advantages do outweigh the disadvantages. But one should acknowledge that just as it is true that some “moves” are only likely under short copyright terms, some “moves” are only likely with long.

(These arguments have not much to do with whether the case itself succeeds since that depends on matters of First Amendment law.)

iBrotha: a short film about a Malcolm X-like revolutionary who has a lot of love for Apple computers. The official site contains some interesting images from the film, as well as a fascinating list of four future projects: “The features and short are about reuniting the lost elements of hip hop, exposing the class bias of Harry Potter, a punk organic farming [farmer?] in the Hindu Kush faced with saving his consumerist family and the world-saving chutzpah of showbiz journalists.”

Onion’s Magnetic Headline Kit. Gives you Area, Man, Clinton, Masturbate, Shittier, etc.

Fantastic Columbus biography, provides interesting additional similarities between internet pioneers and Columbus: Columbus was an incorrigible optimist; to his investors he willfully (and wildly) underestimated the difficulty of the voyage (he reported that the estimated distance from the Canary Islands to Japan was a manageable twenty-seven hundred miles—it is in fact over thirteen thousand); he overestimated his own technical abilities.

“Preserving The Islamic Identity in The West” (And Australia in particular.) This is actually a little disturbing. The aim of the article is “to expose some of the sources of misguidance for Muslims living amongst the Kuffar, as well as some solutions and defences we can employ.” So, for example, one must be wary of schools for within them “the mixing of sexes is not only tolerated but encouraged through the placement of children in multi-gender sporting teams and class groups.” And television shows give the impression that “in some sort of sick way … zina [sex] equates with love and is a ‘natural’ behaviour.”

“It is a fact of life that we must, to some extent, keep close company with the Kuffar. This is almost unavoidable given that we work, study and, unfortunately, play with them.” What, I wonder, is meant by unfortunately here? Is a distaste for other Australians compatible with a successful multicultural society? I hope these sorts of beliefs aren’t widespread.

Nida’ul Islam is billed as “A Comprehensive Intellectual Magazine.” It is produced by the Islamic Youth Movement (which is associated with Australia’s largest Mosque) and has a readership of over 4,000. (More articles.)

Oh to be blessed with an ego such as this!

Plot of the blogosphere’s distribution of urls. 84% are linked only once.

A working Lego harpsichord! (Harpsichord because a piano involves 40,000lbs of tension.) Plus: Lego model of Escher’s “Ascending and Descending.” (More on index page.)

“My Experience with Google Answers.” Jessamyn says she enjoyed her time at Google Answers, but complains that the researchers are mistreated and poorly paid. (The question that led to the “jarring episode.”)

What I want to know: why aren’t movies priced according to their running time and production cost?

L.A.’s D.A. wants to put Winona Ryder away for three years: “an exposé conducted by the entertainment tabloid Extra, Celebrity Justice … revealed that in court records of all 5,000 grand theft felony cases filed in Los Angeles County last year, not one defendant was facing penalties as harsh as Ryder’s.” (slate.com not redirecting to slate.msn.com anymore either—?)

DVDs aren’t the pure source I had imagined them to be: because movies are displayed at 24 frames per second (24Hz) and the PAL TV format is 50Hz, PAL DVDs play 4% faster than they did in the cinema. (The sound is usually about a semitone higher too.) The NTSC format (North America) is 60Hz: the process of turning 24 images into 60 results in some judder and blurring. I suppose this must apply to movies shown on TV too.

(Strictly speaking the DVD’s region has nothing to do with this: it just so happens that Region 4 DVDs are PAL-encoded because the TVs in that region are.)

(Democracies are fragile and easily manipulated.) Göring: “Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. … the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

(Influencing public opinion is somewhat easier under a dicatorship though.)

Compare this to the political philosophy of Lee Kuan Yew: “when people say, ‘Oh, ask the people!’, it’s childish rubbish. We are leaders. We know the consequences. … They say people can think for themselves? Do you honestly believe that the chap who can’t pass primary six knows the consequences of his choice when he answers a question viscerally, on language, culture and religion? But we knew the consequences. We would starve, we would have race riots. We would disintegrate.” (source)

“Libertarian candidate Stan Jones, 63, first discovered his skin was turning blue last year. …”

Ads produced by the Center for Consumer Freedom. They’re, uh, a little heavy handed.

Hitchens, in his final “Minority Report” column, wearily argues for war with Iraq.

Plus: “Moreover, it’s obvious to me that the ‘antiwar’ side would not be convinced even if all the allegations made against Saddam Hussein were proven, and even if the true views of the Iraqi people could be expressed.” I have this problem too: neither the pro- nor anti-war sides make clear the limits to their support. If it is right to wage war against Iraq, how would the circumstances have to change for this to be wrong? (If it were demonstrated that Iraq is not trying to acquire nuclear weapons? What would constitute evidence of this?) Contrariwise, if it is wrong to wage war against Iraq, under what circumstances would it be right?

This applies to any issue: if you cannot imagine a situation in which the opposite action to that which you advocate is warranted, then you lack sufficient imagination to make your argument in the first place. You have an irresponsible argument if you can only bound it on one side.

This is an amazing illusion. (A proof.)

I HATE THE LITTLE BASTARDS: THE INVENTOR OF THE CAESAR SALAD DIDN’T BELIEVE IN THIS ANCHOVY NONSENSE EITHER.

A real nutty story about children in East Timor learning Finnish (!) because “Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesian, English, and French are all associated with colonialism.” This is proving hard to verify. A story in The Australian (not online) says that “The World Bank donated Finnish picture books for children in Year 1, and Portuguese texts for Year 2.” After this the kids get mostly Bahasa Indonesia, with Portuguese “reintroduced in the final years of high school as a foreign language, along with English.”

“God bless your pure, innocent love of databases.”

The Sunday morning extreme sports show this week interviewed a Mike O’Meally, a photographer for Skateboarder Magazine. I’m quite taken by his stuff. (The samples here are a little weak and, well, small but Mike does good shit, I promise.)

This is so strange: North Korea kidnaps Japanese citizens in the late 70s and early 80s, forces them to teach Japanese language and culture to spies. Most have since died, but four are still alive, and are living (some married, with children) in North Korea.

The “Forbes Fictional Fifteen”: the fifteen richest fictional characters. Lex Luther was elected President of the United States in 2000? When did this happen?

Related: The Founders’ Club, the 58 Americans who’ve made the Fortune 400 every year since 1982. Forbes argues that “the high churn rate is due mostly to the dynamic nature of American capitalism, which never settles into the sort of equilibrium that would give rise to a permanent aristocracy of wealth.” Is there a British equivalent? Is the churn rate there any different? The piece also explains that the list is limited to 400 names because:

“The Four Hundred” was a familiar shorthand term for high society during the Gilded Age, when Mrs. William B. Astor Jr. was the social arbiter and only 400 people could fit into her Fifth Avenue ballroom. Well, times change: The non-exclusive Empire State Building now rises where Mrs. Astor’s mansion once stood, and not a single Astor, Vanderbilt or Morgan rates a mention on the current Forbes Four Hundred.

(Three Rockefellers made the list.)

Fun little “Amelie” tour of Paris. Found through a google search for link:http://www.mirrorproject.com/.

I was searching for this because in the article below I’m quoted as saying: “Have you noticed that one of the more popular sites amongst webloggers is the Mirror Project—mirrorproject.com—made up of webloggers’ self-portraits? … Not at all the sort of thing that appeals to geeks.”

I didn’t think this was very controversial (neither that nor the argument that webloggers are more image conscious than geeks) but it appears a few don’t agree! I think we’re talking about different sorts of geeks—by geeks I mean people like Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox (Linux), Brian Behlendorf (Apache), Larry Wall (Perl), Guido van Rossum (Perl) and Richard Stallman (the sort of people who fit the Jargon File’s A Portrait of J. Random Hacker)—but just to check I did this search. Are there many geeks on this list? I don’t see many, although Tantek (funnily enough) qualifies. (Dave Winer is another example.)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-founder of San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore: “When the picture was taken, I was thinking, Are these the best minds of our generation? ‘Howl’ starts with that phrase. I’d say it was a bit of a satirical question. I am the only one in the picture still alive, because I work out all the time. They didn’t work out except raising the elbow or rolling joints. … I think they [the Beats] would have said that I was a jovial bookstore owner—not really a poet. I hadn’t published anything yet. I just wanted to be considered a poet. I did get my wish. My book of poems, ‘A Coney Island of the Mind,’ sold about a million copies. That’s more than ‘Howl’ sold.”

“Exposed: my life as a blog” (I’m quoted in this.) Soft, supportive, focuses on the traditional, “old-school” bloggers. The Australian media—even though Australian political blogs seem to be pretty tight with Media Watch—doesn’t seem to know very much about blogging: I got a few calls from radio stations yesterday.

(The printed version sports a screenshot of this site in which the cursive Beebo in the header has a grey, not white background. It’s fixed now: cross-browser compatibility testing via the newspaper!)

Paul Sahner will make you a personal OS X icon (from a photograph) for US$15. They’re quite cute. Why is this less tacky than mall cartoonists? (Also: real stupid lead.)

Fuse 18: Experimental typography.

A thrilling mix-up in the Washington D.C. Democratic Mayoral primary: incumbent Anthony Williams for some reason failed to get his name on the ballot which meant he had to run as a write-in candidate. But there’s nine Anthony Williamses in the phonebook, and four Tony Williamses, and each could claim to be the Anthony Williams people actually voted for! And they can do this up to three days after the election! (In Slate, Timothy Noah is trying to get each of the Anthonys to promise they won’t try to make themselves Mayor.)

Hip-Hop Goes Commercial:

Dr. Dre protégé Xzibit is wary of liquor companies that openly court him—though he proudly sports a Hennessy logo tattooed on his arm. “They offer you free bottles, but what the fuck is that?” asks Xzibit. “They try to get you to [drop their name] by giving you a bottle or two. I’m not stupid. [Hennessy] don’t pay me shit. I just love the product.”

“My Adidas” is a great song, by the way.

“Does Globalization Cause Terrorism or Cure It?” Robert Wright, often wild, is doing a good job with this series.

“Only Mac OS 9 users see anything to complain about with Mac OS X, because they’re the only people accustomed to something even more polished.”

There’s a print of this fantastic photograph (by Rosemary Laing) in the building I work in. (It gets better if you imagine it 8′ wide…)

Donne: “No man is an island…” I saw About a Boy a few weeks ago. It’s based on a Nick Hornby book and it’s a pretty good adaptation, and a good movie. In it, Hugh Grant carries on about how it’s not true that no man is an island because he is an island an so on. (I don’t remember this being part of the book.)

But this is not what Donne meant! In his essay, “no man” refers to other men. Donne wrote: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main … any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Andrew Sullivan and Kurt Andersen talk about weblogs! Andersen once wrote a sublime piece on the irrational exuberance that drove “new economy” for Inside.com called “The Revolution Is Glorious, and the Sky Is Falling. Get Used To It.”

Relying on journalists and stock-market professionals for one’s view of the Internet’s future is like relying on a referendum of sugared-up 11-year-olds for an assessment of the Jolly Rancher and Pokemon industries. In the mid-’90s, no two groups of high-end professionals had migrated more swiftly or come to depend more absolutely on PCs and the Internet to do their work. No two occupational groups have a more highly excitable, adrenaline-addicted nature, or a greater tendency to skitter along in unthinking packs, sheep-like.

In the same article Andersen declared that we are living in an age of paradox—one in which it was possible to be simultaneously successful and unsuccessful—and famously compared internet pioneers such as Jim Clark and Jeff Bezos to Columbus:

… Christopher Columbus Was a Failure. His business model did not pan out: no western route to Asia, hardly any gold, abandonment by his investors, not much of an enduring first-mover advantage for Spain … but he fucking discovered America. Netscape is vestigial and may cease to exist before long, and Amazon.com may or may not be a Fortune 500 company a decade from now, but Jim Clark and Jeff Bezos will always be Columbuses.

(The article costs 40¢, but I don’t think they actually bill you until buy $2.00 of stuff.)

“Reparations for the Descendants of Women”

A Containerized Chapel! Fits in a standard shipping container! “The container includes a 30kw tactical quiet generator, heating/cooling units, an additional heater, fluorescent lighting, 100 chairs, sound system, keyboard, hymnals, literature and everything needed to provide religious services for Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or Muslim personnel.”

Army responds to soldiers’ “needs, wants and desires,” produces a sandwich that lasts three years. The bread completely encloses the filling.

Wasabi is almost always horseradish, Argentinian beef is never Argentinian, camembert isn’t camembert because it’s not made from fresh milk: these are some of the lies (American) menus tell.

Managing traffic in New York. Sam Schwartz, who was NY’s traffic commissioner through most of the nineteen-eighties, took his job seriously:

Schwartz ticketed Mayor Koch’s car for illegal parking while they were having lunch together, revoked the parking spot of the archbishop of New York, which was next to St. Patrick’s Cathedral (it caused backups on Fifth Avenue and East Fiftieth Street), and had a TV-news van towed while the crew was interviewing him. But his finest hour was his assault on illegally parked cars with diplomatic plates. Not only did Schwartz ticket these cars; he began towing them, which caused an uproar in the diplomatic community. A special session of more than a hundred delegates to the U.N. was convened to meet with the traffic commissioner. The Russians cited the Geneva Convention, which they claimed guaranteed the right to free parking. The French said it was possible that the entire U.N. might move to Vienna if the diplomats didn’t get their parking privileges back. But Schwartz was unmoved, and kept up his assault until, a week or so later, the United States State Department informed him that American diplomats in Norway and Togo had lost their parking privileges, and that to avert an international crisis Schwartz should consider refocussing his energies. “What I’ve learned from experience,” he told me, “is that in New York people will go a long way to keep their parking privileges.”

(Schwarz also created the “Don’t Even Think of Parking Here” and “Don’t Block the Box” signs.)

The Bush Administration’s corporate credentials? It’s stacked with lots of savvy CEOs, sure, but they’re big government capitalists: almost all were at companies whose success depended on “regulatory approval, government largesse, or cartel-like machinations.”

Seemingly decent, honest (non-breathless) OS X 10.2 review. (Compare: David Pogue.)

”Smoking and venting.” Sean Coffey, 70, factory worker: “The Irish built this damned city—the subways, the sewers. The only thing we have is bars. I work all day for $8 an hour, and if I can’t come to a bar and smoke. …”

The cover letter and strips that made up Scott Adams’s Dilbert proposal. The rejection letters are much more polite (and complimentary) than I had imagined—but I suppose this is only smart … who’s to say they won’t end up, 15 years hence, on the website of the successful cartoonist you rejected? (One suggested that he improve his drawings and write in capital letters, two changes which are, I suppose, amongst the most obvious differences between then and now.)

Hullo font geeks! Adobe’s OpenType User Guide describes some of the features of the new OpenType format (which was developed with Microsoft). Microsoft’s pages have some wild examples of the things you can do (and need to do) to properly set Indic and Arabic scripts. And the freetype project has some screenshots of Arabic text set with an oblique baseline on each word. Us Romans have typography easy!

“Ali Bakhtiyari, the refugee accused of having fraudulently obtained a temporary protection visa, has admitted to the The Age that he spent two years in the Pakistani city of Quetta before paying people smugglers thousands of dollars to get him to Australia. …” (The Age)

I don’t think it very good form (or a good tactical move) to make much of Ali Bakhtiyari’s lies. (Blair probably shouldn’t have paid much attention to him in the first place.) Bakhtiyari may have lied, but others, without doubt, didn’t, haven’t and aren’t: Blair would get more mileage from his point on the political spectrum by sticking to its traditional strongholds of principles, consistency, fairness, the rule of law, etc.

“A strange transformation is afoot in the consumer landscape of food products. The meat has found its way out of the refrigerator.”

Sub-editor attacks a Giles Coren review, changing the lazy dog to a lazy dog, rendering his “All 26 letters of the alphabet in a 35-letter sentence” remark incorrect. This is his angry email. Not quite sure why he the instead of a but anyway.

I found some cute pangrams in font samples somewhere:

We took a breezy excursion and gathered jonquils from the river slopes.

Sweet marjoram grew in luxuriant profusion by the window that overlooked the Aztec city.

Jaded zombies acted quickly, but kept driving their oxen forward.

What it’s like to have sex in a metal tube with an MRI machine looking on. (The account is “charmingly though imperfectly translated.”)

Calvin Trillin tracks down a fondly-remembered legend: when poured into black glasses, you can’t tell the difference between red and white wine.

Sub-editor attacks a Giles Coren review, changing (in the familiar pangram) the lazy dog to a lazy dog, rendering his “All 26 letters of the alphabet in a 35-letter sentence” remark incorrect. This is his complaint. (Not quite sure why he used the instead of a but anyway…)

The type samples at fonts.com incorporate some nice pangrams:

We took a breezy excursion and gathered jonquils from the river slopes.

Sweet marjoram grew in luxuriant profusion by the window that overlooked the Aztec city.

Jaded zombies acted quickly, but kept driving their oxen forward.

Problems with IE’s SSL implementation, etc. You can count on Slashdot to jump up and down about any security problem that Microsoft pooh-poohs—but I think this one is fairly serious.

It it is strange, though, that neither the online retailers nor credit-card companies ever seem to be too concerned by these sorts of security problems either—especially strange in the case of credit-card companies, who would seem to have the most to loose. American Express, for example, offers an Online Fraud Protection Guarantee: “Use the American Express Card online, and you won’t be responsible for any unauthorized charges. Period.” If it really is a problem, why isn’t Amex worried?

Ellen Feiss fan sites.

Anne Applebaum reviews Christopher Hitchen’s review of Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread. She writes: (a) that the “the horror of Soviet camp guards lay not in their sadism but in their total indifference to prisoners’ fate”; (b) that “totalitarianism … was the product of institutions, of bureaucracies, and above all individual choices and decisions of millions of people” (i.e. individual Russians—and not just Stalin—were responsible); and (c) Amis’s decision to criticise Hitchens in particular is peculiar as well as unfortunate since Hitchens, a Trotskyite, well knew the horrors of Stalinism.

Review from 1945: frozen dinners. Lots of (unnecessary?) flourishes. (e.g. “This is all the doing of a New York inventor named William L. Maxson, who has been a grandfather for five months, closely resembles Henry VIII, and is left-handed.”)

(This is by Lillian Ross, who is still writing for the magazine. The latest issue has a “Talk of the Town” piece about “Camp Broadway,” a summer camp for aspiring actors.)

Unwarranted hype? Scientists at Polaroid “reinvent” the principles of photography. Certainly it is surprising how little the technology has progressed over the last 200 years (and the last 100 years in particular). Then: black and white, have to sit still. Now: colour, don’t need quite so much light.

Forceful Francis Fukuyama defence of the West and, I suppose, Occidentalism: “Much as people would like to believe that ideas live or die as a result of their inner moral rectitude, power matters a great deal. German fascism didn’t collapse because of its internal moral contradictions; it died because Germany was bombed to rubble and occupied by Allied armies.” Fukuyama also delivered a John Bonython Lecture.

What scares M. Night Shyamalan: “Freddie Krueger with the blood—that doesn’t really scare me. What scares me is something like this: if I had a photo of my wife on my desk, and it was face down, and I put it up and I walked out of the room and I came back and it was face down again. That’s scary.”

Romanticising the hobo. (Not that I mind.)

Account of the Anna Nicole Smith/J. Howard Marshall courtship, an extract from Judge David Carter’s decision. (Starts half-way down.) “But education is no guarantor of integrity and a discredited profession does not mean a person lacks truthfulness. While Vickie [Smith] certainly drew a more noble image of herself than the facts bear out, her testimony on the statements made by J. Howard are credible.”

Good & fair review of Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontents that ends in a call for a similarly lucid and well-informed book that defends the IMF’s policies. (See also #859.)

Professor Koch has an Apple logo tattooed onto his right arm. (What Dalrymple (my favourite conservative) thinks : “The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man’s existence.”)

Interesting: more and more people are buying organic food than ever before. But consumers appear to only care about the “organicness” of the food they buy—they buy organic food produced by large-scale agri-businesses, not just small-scale farmers, and they buy food produced by energy-intensive means.

Dr Ivo Pitanguy, one of the world’s best plastic surgeons, thinks plastic surgery is a democratic right: “Plastic surgery can be important for self-esteem for anyone and should be available. This is true democracy at work.”

I don’t think the state should pay, but I don’t see anything in principle wrong with (cosmetic) plastic surgery. There’s no substantive moral difference between changes brought about by plastic surgery and changes brought about by, say, waking at 5.00 each morning to go to the gym, eating well, or getting better clothes. Appearance matters, and plastic surgery is a not illegitimate way to effect change.

(Still need to account for: (a) the stigma associated with plastic surgery and (b) the usual failure to acknowledge that one has had plastic surgery—note toupee similar.)

Sony Ericsson is pushing their new phone via guerilla (or undercover) marketing, in which actors pose as members of the public. A NY Times article on the same topic quotes an official from the FTC: “If testimonial is affiliated with you in some way, you have to disclose that.” This sounds about right. Guerilla marketing isn’t quite product placement.

Mathematician fills in blank spot in Escher print. (original, filled in.)

Curious coincidence? There seems to be a correlation between linguistic and biological diversity.

Marx & Spenser: cute. (Also: Groucho Marx and John Lennon, a 1995 postage stamp from The Republic of Abkhazia.)

Gadfly was first a print magazine, then an on-line magazine; now it’s no longer a magazine at all. This story, from the archives, is about Frank Lloyd Wright and his “Fallingwater”—another good piece was Deeper Than Deep Throat, which is oddly absent from the archive.

Is this a warblogger’s straw man—a deliberately weak and easily refuted summary of an opponent’s argument? Ted Rall writes a particularly retarded critique of the “War on Terror.”

Rethinking the US constitution—just how democratic is it? I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong for 12 per cent of the population to control 44 per cent of the senate (through residing in “small” states)—equality of representation was presumably offered to prospective states in an attempt to alleviate concerns that (once incorporated into the Union) their interests would be ignored and I don’t see why this was ever an especially bad deal for anyone.

(Hertzberg tells us Dahl thinks we should not venerate the founding fathers: “If we worshipped the framers a little less, we might respect ourselves a little more.” One of my favourite Emerson quotes is similar: “Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.”)

Did Pius XII do enough for the Jews? ”Perhaps the reason why these charges against Pius XII are so infectious is that they are constructed in such a way that they cannot be disproved. They are what Karl Popper called an unfalsifiable proposition: however many public attacks on Nazism Pius XII did make, one can always say he should have made more. Moreover, the denunciations of Pius today, unlike his own ones of Nazism, are cost-free: unlike Pius’s decisions, on which the lives of millions depended, today’s attacks on him produce a nice pharisaical glow of moral superiority, not to mention extremely profitable book sales.”

Jack Saturn applies for his old Pyra job. (More)

Artists Andrew & Andrew: “For attention-seekers, they were quite reserved, almost shy. They wore the same preppy outfits: red polo shirts, linen pants and yellow sneakers. Their haircuts were cropped short. They drank the same vodka tonics and when they smoked, Andrew lit two cigarettes. Like twins, they finished each other’s sentences.” See their Baked Goods division.

Darius McCollum has an unhealthy fascination with the NY subway system: over the past twenty years he has been arrested nineteen times for various offences, including impersonating subway workers. (From Harper’s; long.)

Ghanians digitise environmental violation tickets written by the NYPD: “… they imagine that the city is sparkling clean. Why else would people be given tickets for not cleaning up after their dogs?” (Also a worthy pro globalisation datapoint.)

Nice journal: True Porn Clerk Stories. (Last Post)

Snopes’ Urban Legends Reference Page combine nice detective work with some good analysis of how and why legends spread. This page, dealing with the rumor that Subway’s pitchman Jared has died, notes that the various false reports of his demise cruelly attribute his 245 pound weight loss “to reasons other than successful dieting and willpower” and that “each of these explanations has a dark component that serves to erode his accomplishment.” (Recent Additions)

On the Womera escapees: “So the guy lies about where he’s from and why he came here, his family arrive knowing they’ll be placed in detention, and his kids get mixed up with morons who use them for anti-government propaganda … and this is somehow our fault?”

I tend to agree with this, although I can see why people who don’t think asylum seekers should be locked up at all (including me) might be moved by this case—though of course this doesn’t change their legal or moral position (compared to that of two brothers who don’t escape, say).

(Compare the brothers’ story to that of two British PoWs, for example, who escape from a prison camp in WWII and who almost make it back home—you feel for them (and want to hear their story) even as you concede that they were acting illegally in trying to escape, and their captors justified in punishing them.)

“Anti-Spam Legislation Opposed By Powerful Penis-Enlargement Lobby”

Frenchman writes wildly popular 62-page pamphlet, Cowardice of Air France, gets canned by reviewer: “Because Lindon, in this context at least, is a repellent human being—no more worthy of respect than the lemmings of Air France.”

Photo: the Mighty Og.

International Blog MEETUP Day. I don’t know about this. Melbourne bloggers to meet at Starbucks? Huh? (Compare: LA.)

Entertaining: Star Wars fan films. Troops won the pioneer award.

Review of Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontents. Stiglitz is an ex-chief economic adviser of the World Bank and a Nobel laureate; his book questions the IMF’s policy of urging greater financial and capital liberalisation upon the countries it deigns to help.

(I find this issue interesting also because the anti-globalisation crowd seem to group the World Bank and the IMF together—here a former World Bank official attacks the IMF in their language. Slate: IMF and World Bank: What’s the Difference?)

”Japanese” movie posters. (Introduction)

Pleasant Nick Hornby summary of the World Cup goings-on. He tries to argue that some of the footballers view the World Cup as “an unattractive alternative to a well-earned beach holiday”—I don’t agree. I actually find it cheering that very rich footballers care so much about the World Cup (for which they are not paid at all): they really want to play, they really want to play well, and they really want to win. So it’s about sport, it’s not about money. I suppose this is the way one has to be, if one is to be a great at (any) sport.

(My) Vice-Chancellor David Robinson is in plagiarism trouble. (The Vice-Chancellor is equivalent to President.)

(Update: the V-C is to leave! I didn’t think this would happen. He is widely hated though. Last night the English department, at least, was celebrating with champagne.)

On that Palestinian toddler dressed as a suicide bomber—what does it mean?

(Going back a few months—I passed up on linking to this when it happened for some reason.) Ann Coulter on Halle Berry’s winning of the Oscar. I particularly appreciate the whining about how Berry is only half black, and the marvelling at how Berry can feel such kinship with black folk when “her white mother … was beaten and abandoned by her black father.”

Reviewer Dale Peck is deeply unhappy with Rick Moody: ”Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.” (First sentence, first paragraph). Thrillingly inflammatory!

1922 review of Ulysses: “Not content with inventing new idioms to reproduce the minds of his characters, Mr. Joyce has hit upon the idea of pressing literary parody into service to create certain kinds of impressions. It is not so bad when in order to convey the atmosphere of a newspaper office he merely breaks up his chapter with newspaper heads, but when he insists upon describing a drinking party in an interminable series of imitations which progresses through English prose from the style of the Anglo-Soxon chronicles to that of Carlyle one begins to feel uncomfortable.”

Running with the bulls at Pamplona. (Click through.)

NY’s top chefs sometimes use pedestrian ingredients in their dishes: “One day at Atlas, which closed this week, David Coleman, the chef, and two of his cooks were putting together an order of arctic char. One cook poached the char in goose fat. Mr. Coleman gently folded together micro-sorrel, fennel seed, shallots, cacao nibs and lemon zest to make a delicate topping for the char. Meanwhile, the third cook prepared the foundation of the dish: Quaker instant grits, stirred over heat with milk, shallots and mascarpone cheese.”

Chomsky describes the US as “the greatest country in the world”:

BENNETT: … why do you choose to live in this terrorist nation, Mr. Chomsky?

CHOMSKY: I choose to live in what I think is the greatest country in the world, which is committing horrendous terrorist acts and should stop.

The Hot-or-Not guys rate women: “ ’Oh my God—these women are all tens,’ James said, looking around the cavernous space. ‘Or at least a disproportionate number of them.’ ”

The Joy of Cooking: “Its breadth and pleasantness are unsurpassed. There is no better first cookbook, and it’s a trusted companion even for amateur chefs who’ve been cooking for decades.” I think mine contains instructions for making coffee.

Turkish coach practises diplomacy, comments on the Rivaldo incident: “We know that players can make mistakes on the field during the game, and they can also make some mistakes regarding fair play.”

The Army Chief of Staff’s reading list. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War: “The story of the Peloponnesian War has many lessons that continue to be valid today: the destructive ‘imperialization’ of an all-powerful democratic state, the arrogance of great power politics, the lure of conquest even when reason dictates otherwise, the cult of personality in a military at war (Pericles and Alcibiades), and the always delicate balance of power between the military and the political structures of a state.”

”… the U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that corporate earnings statements should be protected as works of art, as they ‘create something from nothing.’ ”

The Mets’ pitchers eat Gino’s penne vodka with grilled chicken. “The fact that the Mets have so far been the sole beneficiaries of the penne doesn’t bother Phil Mangiafridda, a lifelong Yankees fan. ‘It don’t matter,’ he said. ‘I root for anyone who comes in here to eat.’ ”

Lennox Lewis profile, by David Remnick.

Handsome version of the “Bill of Rights,” stamped in metal, suitable for use in making political points at metal-detectors.

Edward Said on the Middle-East peace process. He doesn’t like Arafat either.

On the unabridged Kamasutra: “The surprise is that descriptions of sexual positions are a relatively minor part of the Kamasutra; what really matters are the folk recipes (which are nuts) and the moral advice (which is vile).”

Paean to on-line personals.

Mahathir criticises Malays for not making enough of their government-given advantages. Would like to know more about the circumstances of this.

Scott Shuger has died in a scuba diving accident.

“A Father’s Pain, a Judge’s Duty, and a Justice Beyond Their Reach.”

“Uncle Sam Buys an Airplane.” “All this new thinking was in the service of an even blander-seeming, yet revolutionary, concept within the military: CAIV, or ‘cost as independent variable.’ In layman's terms this is nothing more than the idea that the airplane would be held to a cost target. In most military contracting, cost is the dependent variable.”

“Interview with an escalator.”

Contains plausible explanation of the “root of lesbian mystique.”

The Argentinian soccer team models … handbags!

“The key to comfortably using the one-button [Apple] mouse is simple: put the mouse under your palm, not under your fingers.” This is a pleasant way to weild a mouse.

Porn-maker Sam Stern's journal (the contents page) is very good, although it does take a few readings to figure out the right way to approach his writing; a few readings to “get it.” Sometimes he describes shoots he's done, sometimes he talks about his relationship with the porn industry, and sometimes he talks about, well, other stuff.

This paragraph, on why he hates journalism, resonates:

I've thought before that the very essence of reporting, of critiquing and evaluating, even of storytelling, is one of reductionism, oversimplification. I hate most journalism for this reason. Fiction is preferable to me because I never have to question the veracity of the reportage—it's filtered through the narrator, or novelist—it's made up. It's when it comes to telling about life that I start to distrust, not only the actual story that I'm hearing or reading—but the ability of speech and words in general to accurately describe an event or an occurence. People are liars, and even when they're not, they leave a lot out.

(I don't hate journalism, but I do have the suspicion that almost any proposition can be sensibly argued for.)

From the police blotter: “Police said they did not disbelieve people who thought they had been woken up by a chimpanzee. They are looking for a suspect who is three-foot tall with a large amount of luxuriant dark hair.”

Boxers vs. footballers: “why is [it] that Lennox, and Mike in particular in this case, were repeatedly able to take vicious assaults on their bodies and come back for more, while the slightest hint of contact on many players in these finals produces a reaction like they've just had their legs amputated with a light beer for anaesthetic?”

I made a special trip to my local to see that fight. God I love boxing.

Another report—Tyson was remarkably gracious, especially when compared to the Tyson of the past. And in Gadfly, Neal Shaffer explains why we need sportsmen like Mike Tyson.

Gardner Botsford collects unusually-titled books. (Amazon reviewer Henry Raddick (interview) has an eye for the off-beat too.)

“ ‘Listen to this picture’ is the catalogue of an exhibition by the photographer Pierre Bailly consisting in portraits of twelve women, at home, while they are listening to their favorite music.”

“When I grow up, I want to be a principal or a caterpillar.” —Ralph Wiggum

“What kind of reaction do you get when you tell people you design fonts for a living?” Font designers vent. From typographi.ca.

Information Security Begins With You!

Splendidly dogmatic essay on punctuation: “Periods and commas are lovely because they are simple. They force the writer to express his ideas directly, to eliminate unnecessary hedges, to forgo smart-aleck asides. They also contribute to the logical solidity of a piece of writing, since they make us put all our thoughts into words. By way of contrast, a colon can be used to smooth over a rough logical connection.” (The author especially dislikes semi-colons.)

This is one of my favourite colon-droppings ever:

It is possible that there are uglier towns in the world than Walsall, but if so I do not know them: and I consider myself better than averagely traveled.

(From the lead to Crudity beyond belief, by Theodore Dalrymple. I suppose he's “[smoothing] over a rough logical connection” here but goddamn it was worth it.)

Man in charge of important password-protected Norwegian historical documents dies taking the password with him; hackers' help is requested. (Why were they password-protected in the first place?) The story ends with a moving tale of Web designer Kenny LaGuardia's misfortune at the hands of a “Dead Man's Switch”—a program that, if not regularly reset “automatically carries out a series of pre-designated tasks.”

”I went on vacation, and forgot all about the switch,” said Kenny LaGuardia, a Web designer from Los Angeles. “When I returned home, the program had posted, ‘So I guess I'm dead’ messages to all the newslists I subscribe to, and destroyed all my adult entertainment files.”

Woody Allen is suing his “former producer and friend Jean Doumanian”: “He said he had intended that he and Ms. Doumanian would remain friends and actually enjoy the lawsuit, like playful adversaries in a Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn film. He said he thought that she would find the suit ‘amusing’ and that they would be “having dinner at night at Le Cirque and facing each other by day.’ ”

Decent review of Attack of the Clones. (Actually, more a review of the Star Wars universe.)

Two other analyses of Star Wars politics: from Salon (in 1999), “Star Wars” despots vs. “Star Trek” populists (about every third paragraph is readable) and from The Weekly Standard, The Case for the Empire: Everything you know about Star Wars is Wrong. (The premise of the second is rather similar to that of this Usenet post from 2000: “star wars trilogy is vicious rebel propaganda.”)

I quite liked Attack of the Clones. I liked the plot. I have described it as “complicated,” but I've discovered people don't agree with me about this. I think what I really mean is “nuanced.” Sure, the plot can be stated in a couple of sentences, but to stir up universe-spanning conflict (including two entire armies!) to make your request for additional powers more reasonable—now that is fascinating. It's completely unprecendented in human history! Imagine if Napoleon, say, pulled some stunt like that? How intriguing would that process be?

An exchange between Ed Koch, one-time mayor of New York, and Woody Allen. Koch is unhappy that Allen attended the Cannes Film Festival, ignoring the boycott called for by some Jewish leaders.

Perhaps someone can enlighten me: why is France widely considered to be an anti-semitic nation of long standing? There was that Dreyfus Affair, but France provided arms to Israel for much of its first decade. (There was a falling-out after the war of 1967.) What led France to do this? (Even the US didn't become actively involved until later.) Was the move not popular with the public?

(The article linked above is not brilliant, but I can't find a better web resource.)

Found via this sticker:

(The other scenes of people made happy by red meat are: (1) a judge (in wig, carrying book, head thrown back, laughing hard); and (2) a set of four butchers (in aprons, clanking pots and pans and tongs together). Priceless!)

The excerpts used in an English exam taken by New York's public-school high-school seniors have been “extensively altered,” etc. I don't think anybody needs to get very excited about this. It's not first-and-foremost an example of the sort muddle-headed thinking over-zealous liberals get up to, and that conservatives like to mock. It's mostly a mistake. It will be changed. (Slate: the wronged authors can sue. NYT: the policy has changed.)

W. Kip Viscusi says that smokers do correctly assess the risks of smoking. I don't know about this—lots and lots of experiments have demonstrated that people aren't very good at evaluating risks.

Tut, tut, Christopher Hitchens. You repeat the story that the FBI allowed (helped?) the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar, fly several members of the Bin Laden family out of the US on September 11. But they didn't.

Update: I finally found the January 21 Minority Report column Hitchens refers to. There he implies that the Prince's appearance on the Larry King Show of October 1st is the source of his information. But the transcript (Reminder: “It's 2001, and we can Fact Check your ass.”) reveals that the Prince, though he talked of the flight, said nothing at all about the date the Saudis left. Where is Hitchens getting his information from?

I like those I admire to be, at least in matters of simple fact, unassailably correct—in all things, and at all times.

Lowercase sound: small sounds made lounder pose as music. Pretty!

“Thirty-five editors of the international editions of Cosmopolitan were in New York last week for a conference…”

“Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race”

I'm interested in why some cities are seemingly more successful than others too. I had put success down (somewhat imprecisely) as being related to “hustle.” This article (a teaser for a book) ranks cities according to a “creativity index.” I didn't look at the numbers, but these statements were interesting:

“Places that thrive in today's world tend to be plug-and-play communities where anyone can fit in quickly. These are places where people can find opportunity, build support structures, be themselves, and not get stuck in any one identity. The plug-and-play community is one that somebody can move into and put together a life—or at least a facsimile of a life—in a week.”

…

“Talented people seek an environment open to differences. Many highly creative people, regardless of ethnic background or sexual orientation, grew up feeling like outsiders, different in some way from most of their schoolmates. When they are sizing up a new company and community, acceptance of diversity and of gays in particular is a sign that reads ‘non-standard people welcome here.’ ”

…

“A vibrant, varied nightlife was viewed by many as another signal that a city ‘gets it,’ even by those who infrequently partake in nightlife.”

Update: An article in the NYT discussing the book mentions two alternative theories that attempt to explain a city's measure of success: the “social capital theory” developed by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam, which says economic growth is tied to the amount of civic participation and social cohesion in a community and the “human capital theory” associated with Mr. Glaeser and the University of Chicago economist Robert E. Lucas, which says economic growth is driven by concentrations of educated people.” (Florida's theory is described as the “creative-capital” theory.)

Anne Applebaum: “Is India's nuclear rivalry with Pakistan completely unlike the old nuclear rivalry between United States and the Soviet Union—is it so unique, in fact, that Cold-War-style nuclear deterrence between the two rivals is destined to fail?” (She mischievously uses the fact that twenty near-disasters—but no disasters—have occurred as evidence that one won't happen.)

Some people, she claims, argue that the situation is particularly dire because neither Pakistan nor India appreciate the effects of nuclear weapons. She calls this argument “borderline racist”—but I'm sure the people making these arguments were saying the same things—about Americans and Russians—during the Cold War. Anyway, would a nuclear exchange really lead to “the death of the subcontinent”? I mean, people still live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Padraic P. McGuinness: the hunting (he says “fishing”) of whales should be allowed to resume now that the whales are no longer in danger of extinction. (Tim Blair suggests a compromise: “Let's just kill the whales, but not eat them.”)

Are good fund managers simply lucky fund managers? About stocks, Nassim Taleb is sure of only one thing: that the probability of exceptional events—S11, say—is invariably underestimated.

This is a New Yorker piece, so as well as arguments you get pretty flourishes:

“He was always so conceptual about what he was doing,” says Howard Savery, who was Taleb's assistant at the French bank Indosuez in the nineteen-eighties. “He used to drive our floor trader (his name was Tim) crazy. Floor traders are used to precision: ‘Sell a hundred futures at eighty-seven.’ Nassim would pick up the phone and say, ‘Tim, sell some.’ And Tim would say, ‘How many?’ And he would say, ‘Oh, a social amount.’ It was like saying, ‘I don't have a number in mind, I just know I want to sell.’ ”

(I suppose a similar observation is behind index funds.)

“Some U.S. Backers of Israel Boycott Dailies Over Mideast Coverage”

Malcolm Gladwell on one the inventors of television: “Philo Farnsworth's travails make a rather strong case for big corporations, not against them.” (Another recent Gladwell article was remarkably big-business friendly—is “capitalism, the benefits of” the subject of his next book?)

“Catherine Millet does not look like a person who has slept with the whole world.”

On patrol with the US Army in Kosovo. (A Humvee's door weighs 400 pounds!)

The Liggett Group is introducing nicotine-free cigarettes. (Made from genetically modified tobacco.)

“The invigilator, maths teacher Richard Jowett, appeared to have been looking at the material on his personal computer, forgetting it was linked up to the monitor.”

Policy statements of the World Medical Association. e.g. World Medical Association Declaration on Hunger Strikers.

Joy Oriola wanted to take out a restraining order against Adam Thaler under California's Domestic Violence Prevention Act (DVPA). Did their four “social outings” amount to a “dating or engagement relationship,” as was required by the Act? And so the court defines “dating”: “It is a social relationship between two individuals who have or have had a reciprocally amorous and increasingly exclusive interest in one another, and shared expectation of the growth of that mutual interest, that has endured for such a length of time and stimulated such frequent interactions that the relationship cannot be deemed to have been casual.” Oriola lost her case. (She was able to, and did, obtain a conventional restraining order.)

Other interesting aspects of this opinion: a section on the history of dating in America (“The practice of ‘dating’ evolved in this nation during the 1920’s…”) and a footnote explaining why Thaler is seeking sanctions against Oriola and her attorney for serving him “in an unduly humiliating manner” (“Respondent was distraught and began to cry in front of his coworkers…”).

In 1978 the Supreme Court decided that affirmative action is legal because it promotes “diversity.” This argument (which was advanced just one judge—the one who broke the 4–4 tie) has over the years become more and more difficult to sustain. The problem, writes Dahlia Lithwick, is that the principle fails to elevate racial diversity above other kinds of diversity—the diversity that would come from admitting Alsation goat herders, for example, or Wiccans.

Banknote folding fun. What country are these from? (From Post No Bills.)

The media couldn't deal with Pim Fortuyn's apparent contradictions. Also: “… Fortuyn was socially tolerant, even libertine, and it was for that reason he felt he could not be a multiculturalist.”

Heh. I'm so proud of the Age for busting out the wood for “gangbusters” on their front page today. (The accompanying article.)

K9 Billboards: “Dogs are magnets; they're ice-breakers—and even the hardest-edged New Yorkers love them.”

“Corporations can be found liable for deceptive advertising if they make misleading public statements about their operations and conduct, the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday.”

The court found that commercial speech—defined as anything “likely to influence consumers in their commercial decisions” (for a long time companies have not been allowed to lie in advertisements)—was not protected by the First Amendment. (The court did not find that Nike had lied, only that it is not allowed to do so—though I don't know would you'd mount a First Amendment defence if the truth would suffice.)

Does this rule apply to religion? Religions are more powerful than the mightiest corporations (and not only economically). How about those marketing campaigns! John 3:16 is: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Is this true? If false, it would surely rank as one of the greatest lies ever told.

(The decision—haven't read this yet.)

A very long, very sad story: forty years ago the Aral Sea was the fourth-largest inland body of water in the world; by 2010, it is estimated, it will be completely gone.

The region has suffered great environmental and economic damage. (Evidence for both: the “fishing town” of Moynaq is now eighty miles from the sea.) And there has been attendant social damage. Even the dogs seem to have lost hope. In one incident, the author sees two boys (brothers) in the street. He asks the younger his name. Before the boy can reply, he is inexplicably set upon by his brother, who hits him from behind; the blow knocks him to the ground. As he tries to rise, his brother again pushes him to the ground, and then walks away, “having satisfied some obscure but insatiable impulse.” This is what happens next:

I waited for tears, the shrieks and cries of fraternal terror. Nothing. The naked dusty child was silent. The dog trotted over, and as the boy picked himself up he searched the ground blindly with a small hand. Finally he stood holding a triangular rock. He turned and threw it at the dog, hitting him full in the ribs; the dog flinched but otherwise took the blow in silence. The boy simply walked away. I made soft kissing sounds to summon the dog, who was understandably skittish. I persisted. I didn't know what else to do. When it slinked over, head lowered and panting, I saw a strange red spiderlike creature embedded in its collarless neck. I extended my hand. The dog bit me and staggered off.

(From the April 2002 Harper's.)

NASA gets spare parts from eBay!

Rats can be controlled by little computers strapped around their heads. Most interesting is the information that the effect is in part achieved through the stimulation of the portion of the brain that mediates pleasure. Is it acceptable to make animals do our bidding because they (in a fairly strong sense) “enjoy” it?

One character in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a pig who, when presented to a table of diners, begs them to eat him. (He nominates his choicest cuts and so forth.) Would it be right to breed animals that behave in this way? They can't be said to suffer—so to what degree is suffering irrelevant?

“In Praise of the Missionary Position.” Nerve's got a lot uglier (and “busier”) since the last time I looked.

Naomi Klein: anti-Semitism pays political dividends to Sharon and so it must be checked.

For Sharon, Jewish fear is a guarantee that his power will go unchecked, granting him the impunity needed to do the unthinkable: send troops into the Palestinian Authority's education ministry to steal and destroy records; bury children alive in their homes; block ambulances from getting to the dying.

This is an extraordinary piece, especially for a Klein. The facade of a synagogue near her house was “just badly scarred by a suspicious fire”; the tragedy (and thus the reason why the globalisation movement should condemn anti-Semitism) is not that it was attacked, but that the attack led to a sign on the door that read, “Support Israel—now more than ever.” (I am also amused by the “just.”)

Doctors who smoke. (A Times article of a few years ago described the smoking culture of Denmark. Dr Bruno Timmerman (presumably a smoker) said: “You have to weigh it up and find a balance between what is dangerous and what your need for relaxation is. I don't see that a few cigarettes a day will harm you. It is better than being stressed.”)

Why does VeriSign's service agreement have its own URL? (Redirects to a netsol.com site.)

beebo.org is coming up for renewal soon; I'm going to move it somewhere else, partly because of the hoopla.com incident and partly because their system for changing DNS entries is really awful. Recommendations?

Any UN inquiry into what happened at Jenin will necessarily be less about facts than it is about analysis and spin:

Israel's critics want the investigation to focus on what Israeli soldiers did to Jenin; Israel wants to include what Jenin's terrorists did to Israel. Critics want to begin with the assault; Israel wants to begin with events that provoked it. In evaluating the Israeli military's behavior, critics want to treat the camp's residents as civilians; Israel wants to treat them as abettors of terrorism. Critics want to ask whether Israeli soldiers distinguished civilians from fighters; Israel wants to ask how the fighters got mixed in with the civilians. Critics say a massacre should be defined by how many civilians were killed; Israel says it should be defined by whether the killing was deliberate.

Jessamyn asks great trivia questions. Hard ones but.

Canadians don't know the difference between right and left. (I was pretty surprised recently to find conservatives and liberals so neatly split over the present Middle East crisis.)

“Want to see a woman go berserk? Try tossing out these tidbits at the next office happy hour: Female fertility begins to decline at age 27.” Michelle Cottle asks why is this an issue for women only: “Sure, we're the ones who carry the babies—but that only lasts nine months.” (Men should take certainly more responsibility; this translates to greater decision-making power; and this, I think, translates to the power to veto a decision to forgo an abortion.)

Video of Alexandra Beller dancing. (Believe me, I'm as surprised as anyone to learn that I find dancing pretty.)

Jacob Weisberg is the new editor of Slate.

Story on the Long Bets Foundation I linked to earlier. “Cosmologist Stephen Hawking has made a number of high-profile wagers on future discoveries. In 1975, he bet Kip Thorne a subscription to Penthouse (the loser would get it mailed to his home) that a celestial mystery named Cygnus X-1 would turn out to be a black hole. It didn't.”

Scientific American editor John Rennie responds to Lomborg's rebuttal. (Background)

His reponse is not very satisfying. A pull-out quote (i.e. one that is designed to serve without the support of context) reads: “The discussion is not about whether his statements are correct; it is about whether his arguments are correct—the plans of thought he develops from those statements.” Does Rennie mean to say that he does not dispute the facts? I'm sure he doesn't, but this goes perilously close.

More interesting is the discussion involving the Kyoto Protocol. Rennie more or less agrees that the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol would only have a “trivial effect” on global warming: environmentalists, he tells Lomborg, only ever thought of it as being a “first step.”

I don't think Lomborg has a problem with the Kyoto Protocol being a first step. What he does have a problem with is the cost—is this the most appropriate use of resources? Lomborg claims it could (if “implemented inefficiently”) cost $1 trillion, or “more than five times the cost of worldwide water and sanitation coverage.” Is this right? (How much does Rennie think it will cost?) Over what period of time?

How much do we value (other people's) lives? How much to we value the environment? How much do we value the arts? (Museums? Libraries?) How much do we value sport? How much do we value health? (AIDS?) How much do we value beer? An environmentalist's list of values has the environment ranked highly—and so they try to persuade others to devote more resources to the environment; others may not rank it quite so high.

(By the way, I don't like the way Lomborg is usually described as an “ex-environmentalist.” It doesn't mean anything, and it certainly doesn't add credibility. (The title of his book has the same problem.) This form of argument is almost always wrong. “I'm not sexist, my own mother was a woman.”)

“…actual questions from actual interviews conducted by Microsoft employees on the main campus.”

Russian Peasant Multiplication.

What philosophers think: can the killing of non-combatants be justified? (The linked Michael Ignatieff story is also worthwhile.)

What you learn about the middle east conflict from the TV news. (Also: “Connections back to how the present intifada began, when Ariel Sharon walked through the most holy Muslim sights…” Uh.)

About Ultimate Frisbee!

Nokia phones are designed in California by a Californian!

Theodore Dalrymple is very, very upset at the state of Britain. “There is hardly a British city or town of any size in which to open one's eyes is not to experience one's retinas being attacked by a scouring pad.”

The Supreme Court rules that fake child porn is protected speech. It's fifty pages or so but it's good reading.

In response to the argument that fake child porn should be prohibited because it is difficult to distinguish from real child porn (thereby making it difficult to prosecute instances of real child porn), the court—disagreeing—notes: “The Government may not suppress lawful speech as the means to suppress unlawful speech. Protected speech does not become unprotected merely because it resembles the latter.”

Clarence Thomas—though he voted with the majority—wrote a separate opinion in which he questions this argument. Thomas: “if technological advances thwart prosecution of ‘unlawful speech,’ the Government may well have a compelling interest in barring or otherwise regulating some narrow category of ‘lawful speech’ in order to enforce effectively laws against pornography made through the abuse of real children.”

I think that this is largely right: it's sometimes necessary to prohibit or control a certain activity or product not because it's inherently wrong, but because they're easily confused with something that is. It's not inherently wrong to wear a helmet into a bank, for example—banks prohibit it though because it's impossible to distinguish the helmet-wearing motorcyclists from the bank-robbing kind. (A tax is levied on blank media (at least cassette tapes) for a similar reason.)

“It was then that the couple decided to call off their trip to one of Christianity's holiest shrines.”

OS X: emacs-like keyboard shortcuts that use Control (ctrl-a, ctrl-n, etc.) work, by default, in Cocoa apps. Following the instructions half-way down this page (find “Key bindings”) will get you the Alt shortcuts too.

Christopher Hitchens.

Lowest Ebb: “In the spring of 1970, when I was twenty-two, I was arrested by the Orono, Maine, police. After a traffic stop, I'd been discovered in possession of some three dozen rubber traffic cones.” (Stephen King)

(Last letter: Bush says (in relation to stem-cell research) “no human life should be exploited or extinguished for the benefit of another”; how is this to be reconciled with his views on capital punishment?) This argument was initially appealing, but now I'm not convinced it's viable. Incarceration has four aims: deterrence, protection of society, punishment, rehabilitation. But is capital punishment meant as a deterrence or punishment? I think Bush means it to be a punishment.

(Atul Gawande and Natalie Angier discuss these questions in Slate.)

How kids use websites. They click advertisements (!), because they “cannot yet distinguish between content and advertising.” I also like the story of the six-year-old who complained, “This website is for babies, maybe four or five years old. You can tell because of the cartoons and trains.” We once had a houseguest called Marcus (age six) who once spoke proudly of the enormous size of his bike:

Marcus: … and I also have a bike.
Me: You do?
Marcus: It's a really big bike.
Me: Really?
Marcus: It looks like it's for a seven-year-old.

(I liked Marcus; he was a good kid.)

The US chases oil in Equatorial Guinea—human rights be damned.

The Windsor boys remember their great-grandmother.

“For years, a rule against copying your neighbor's order was observed fairly strictly. Customers who had just arrived might ask someone at the next table the name of the scrumptious-looking dish he was eating. Having learned that it was Burmese Hummus—one of my favorites, as it happens, even though it is not hummus and would not cause pangs of nostalgia in the most homesick Burmese—they might order Burmese Hummus, only to have Eve shake her head wearily. No copying.” YOU HAVE TO READ THIS.

Amazon's top free Indie Music downloads. This is actually worthwhile. I used to have a link to the top Rap & Hip-Hop downloads but I can't find it now. (e.g. Kristin Hersh, “Your Dirty Answer”; Tanya Donelly, “The Night You Saved My Life.”)

“Vogue's pathetic attempt at body-type diversity.”

“Pro-Palestinian” or “peace activist”?

Ghostwriting vs. plagiarism. “Dan Rather and other journalists have put out ghostwritten books—in effect, claiming to be the authors of books they didn't actually write—without losing credibility. But when Joe Klein wrote the best-selling novel “Primary Colors” and published it under the name “Anonymous,” he was accused of dishonesty for claiming not to be the author of a book that he did write.”

How long till a weblog gets one of these, eh?

History of TrueType.

“With you always.” e.g. Truck driver. Artist woke in the middle of the night “with a clear, vivid impression that the Lord wanted me to do some special drawings” … but wait! Larry had never drawn before.

Lucky number freaks: the US Government is offering you the chance to buy bills bearing your favourite serial numbers.

"L.A. Confidential (1997, Warner Bros.). A highly regarded film, tightly written, well-acted, beautifully filmed, but pretty mediocre in its use of type."

(1) Arsenic contaminates (many) water wells in Bangladesh. (2) UNICEF sunk some in the 70s and 80s; the British Geological Survey in the 80s and 90s. The government is suing the BGS--but not UNICEF--because UNICEF could not have been expected to have anticipated the problem. (Huh?)

Another improbable story: Hollywood, TiVos, and the unexpectedly long Oscars.

Deaf couple wants to have deaf children. (Interesting: how the other unusual attribute of the couple is dealt with—c.f. the National Post.) There's a followup article at the BBC.

"In fact Geneva now had to act on the unpleasant new discovery that whereas formerly civilians went off to war now the war came to them." Alistair Cooke: the Geneva Convention should be revised--as it has been four times before--to reflect the changing nature of war.

"The 'TLS': a 100-Year Love Affair"

"Strangers When We Meet"

Pachelbel's Canon, scratched. This is a great album. (350k)

Only just now figured out that the two ways of ordering quotation marks (either after periods (and commas) or before) are the American way and the British way:

She starts calling him “boss.” — New York Times

During this time of “might made right”, excess among the rich was thoroughly encouraged. — Economist

More examples

(I very much prefer the American way—logic be damned.)

(Is it clear that I don't necessarily agree with what's linked here?)

Everyone can vote on what will be the new M&Ms colour, including those from "nations in which no citizen has previously had the opportunity to cast a governmental vote."

"Confessions of a Hot Sleeper"

"If the World Trade Center falls on you because of an astonishing plot by a comic-book villain, we give you (or your survivors) a couple million dollars. But if your house falls on you when no one is looking, through nobody's fault including your own, we do not even guarantee you basic medical care."

Mr Millington's first novel is one of the five best debut novels of the year.

Were the Americas, pre-Columbus, vastly more populated than previously thought?

The gentrification of a neighbourhood doesn't lead to "an exodus of the poor and the working class." (So what does the process involve then?)

Tips for frugal living.

Amazingly long article on the connexion between game theory and drafting in NASCAR races. The drafting bit is fascinating. (Didn't read the second half.)

Misspellings of "britney spears." Over 20% get it wrong.

Little piece (book review) on indexes and indexing. Good books have good indexes. (I really want to write "indices.") Robert Latham, editor of the 11-volume set of Pepys's diaries, says somewhere that he and his wife spent something like two years on the index alone. And it is a fantastic index. If you look up money, for example, you are referred to all entries that mention his bank balance. (At one stage I wanted to graph bank balance vs. time.)

More indexing trivia: the 1897 Sears, Roebuck and Co. Consumer's Guide says: "If you don't find it in the Index, look very carefully through the entire catalog." (This is the quote that heads the index to Knuth's TAOCP, Volume 3.)

"Awards for self-flattery at the Oscars"--a deconstruction of the Oscar-acceptance speeches.

"Bloggers vs Journalists."

A $2000 bet held by Long Bets, an spin-off of the Long Now Foundation: "In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site."

This question is not at all well put--is Google going to be around in 2007?--but, procedural issues aside, if the question is whether the New York Times will decline significantly in importance in response to pressure from weblogs, my answer is a firm no. Especially if we're talking about the "top five news stories."

A professional journalist is not an amateur journalist whose work just happens to be distributed to a few hundred thousand people every day. This is a weblogger's conceit. The work of professional journalists has prominence for several reasons: (1) they are professional writers and researchers; (2) they are paid to spend every hour of every day on their stories; (3) they know how to get and how to deal with sources; (4) they have significant resources at their disposal; (5) their stories are invested with the authority of their employer.

Dave Winer, who proposed the bet, carps that reporters sometimes get their facts wrong. This is true. But the New York Times is much easier to trust than some guy with a website. (Why should I trust what this guy Dave says? Who is he?) People like brands, because they provide some guarantee of quality (deliberately provocative link). In my city, now even tradespeople have brands.

How are webloggers ever going to cover the war in Afghanistan? Enron? The New York Times has a six reporters working on Portraits of Grief alone: webloggers won't trump journalists by 2007, or ever.

"ancient Scottish tradition of basing your food on a dare"

Pretty "Fell In Love With A Girl" video clip done with Lego blocks.

Excellent: we're finally on the way to producing artificial meat. Growing meat in a vat can't be all that much harder than, say, cloning animals, and--as a way of producing food--it must surely be more efficient than running minerals, sunlight, water and vegetable matter through a cow. (Also: you don't have to kill the cow.)

A kinder, gentler, more loving multi-national corporation: the Sony website has an "Employee Pick of the Week."

Author of the Guardian's famous corrections column: "How dare you, sir. You are speaking to the person who has practically eradicated in the Guardian the misspelling of Lucian Freud. The rogue Lucien, having occurred six times in the year 2000, cropped up only once last year, and so far, only once this year in an item on our website. When people ask me if I have achieved anything in my four years in this job, this is what I proudly hold aloft."

The State of Washington complains about the licence plate "CNLNGS." (Defence on the next page.)

"The Basho of Honk"

Dan Nakamura discography. An article in the street press here described his latest project, Lovage, as "camp hip-hop."

James D. Watson's "embarrassing new memoir."

(Christopher Hitchens and the artful deflection of awkward questions.) Question: "You're a highly-paid newspaper columnist. How do you square this with your left-wing leanings?" Hitchens: "Nothing's too good for the working class."

"A case study in the power of standards." (Questions: Do standards always evolve? Is government involvement always unwarranted? Does the best standard win? Is it important that it does?)

Luigi Miraglia sees Latin as a (the?) language of intellectual inquiry and argument; in a hotel confiscated from the Mafia by the Italian government he wants to set up an institute for the study of Latin.

The 101 dumbest moments in business of last year.

UK government advisory council recommends that cannabis "be reclassified from a class B narcotic to a class C." (How does the media spin stories? Compare The Times story to the one at thisislondon--where does this site come from, anyway?--which is headlined "Cannabis is given health all clear," and contains the line, "In healthy young people, cannabis is even said to have a similar effect on the heart as exercise." The BBC takes the middle ground.)

Patents don't matter (much): Switzerland and the Netherlands had no patent system at all for the last half of the 19th Century, but companies still prospered. (I am not convinced.)

"Women do not, by and large, make terrific criminals. In the United States, women commit only two crimes as frequently as men. The first is shoplifting. The second is the murder of their own children." Why are mothers who kill their children thought mentally ill, whilst fathers who do the same are considered violent criminals?

Tim Blair asks why the anti-free-trade left isn't vigorously defending Bush's right to impose steel tariffs. Part of the answer, I think, is that the left is more interested in results than general principles; contrariwise, the right is more interested in general principles than results. Of course, results and principles both are important: so the left elevates measures designed to alleviate poverty, suffering, and so forth to the level of principles, whilst the right argues that policies derived from general principles--"all men are created equal," for example--also lead to better outcomes.

Tim Blair--who values consistency highly--can't understand why the left isn't interested in steel tariffs. But the left just don't value consistency to the extent that he does. The imposition of tariffs on steel won't affect the lives of those most in need, the left have decided--and since they weren't actually particularly interested in general principles in the first place, steel tariffs in the USA isn't something they care about.

(I'm still writing this...)

"A mentally-ill gunman apparently unhappy with widescreen televisions has shot himself dead in an Amsterdam office building after a seven-hour siege."

"Faking It: Sex, Lies, and Women's Magazines"

Ten rules for writing, by Elmore Leonard. "5. Keep your exclamation points under control."

Dave Bayer was the math advisor to, and Russell Crowe's hand double in A Beautiful Mind! I saw this with Brad on Friday night; it's rather good. Are schizophrenics happy with the way their illness is portrayed? The movie suggests that it can be at least partly overcome through the application of conscious thought. I suspect this is not a terribly helpful idea. (Blake Eskin also wrote one of my favourite ever "Talk of the Town" pieces: "Dirty Furniture.")

[Oh, okay, they are happy. Er, maybe not. ... I don't know why I'm still looking into this. John Nash himself, in his Nobel autobiography, says "... gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation." Now, is it helpful to have this as a widely accepted belief?]

Another improbable "Talk of the Town" piece. This time on a dance organised for sixth-graders.

Mr. Eaves dropped his Nikon 990 into a pond, dried it out, and took some amazing photographs.

More examples of irresponsible whining about how great things were in the past. (This is sort of for my own reference.)

A bird story. (I am sorry for Dooce, but she did deserve to get clunked for her indiscretions.)

"International Federation of Competitive Eating"

"My Life as a Nontraditional Ticket Reallocation Special." The alternative economics of ticket scalping.

Interview with Jové Bové, French farmer famous for busting up a McDonald's. I like this interview. Bové is principled, intelligent, consistent. I agree that most of the things he identifies as problems are problems, and with many of his suggested solutions.

The same magazine also ran a not-so-good article by Naomi Klein. "Does Mexico have the right to deny a permit for a hazardous toxic-waste disposal site? Not according to Metalclad, the US company now suing the Mexican government for $16.7 million damages under NAFTA." Klein argues that countries should be allowed to arrange their own affairs, and not be forced to obey laws laid down by higher powers such as NAFTA or the WTO. But wasn't the government of the Philippines practising self-determination when it set up the Cavite export processing zone (EPZ), the tax-free, union-free, factory-worker hell-hole described in her book No Logo? Wasn't this the product of a more-or-less democratically elected government that decided its affairs for itself?

Sometimes the problem is NAFTA, sometimes it is short-sighted and naive governments, sometimes it is the power difference between companies of the developed world and the people of the developing, sometimes it it something else again. I wish Klein would acknowledge the situation's complexity. In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King explains why he is willing to break some laws (parading without a permit) whilst at the same time insisting that others should be obeyed (the Supreme Court's decision to outlaw segregation in public schools). This is a difficult intellectual course to navigate; he manages it reasonably well. Klein, meanwhile, pretends there is no problem.

On the internet you find the strangest stuff. "One thing that I cannot emphasise enough--NEVER ever wear an asymmetrical dress ... It may look nice but you can actually chart the drop in earnings on a night to night basis."

"10 things Google has found to be true." I think I would personally pay at least US$10/month for Google, and my employer would probably pay more. How much is Google, the company, worth? Why are searches free? Will the free Google one day end?

Everyone's talking about the "weblog revolution." Webloggers, please, you're not changing the world. If you're already a journalist--meaning that you're a great writer, like Sullivan is--a weblog can offer you new opportunities. But to everyone else: settle the fuck down. You're doing something fun and rewarding that couldn't be done even five years ago. This isn't enough for you? Why is it necessary to invest the weblog with qualities of greater significance? Is it because your weblog soaks up hours and hours of your day, and you need some way to account for the time spent? (Note also that this article, like most of Sullivan's longer stuff, was originally published somewhere else.)

Diary of Avery Brott, navigator of an ultra-deepwater drill ship.

"10 Things I would say to Paul Ford if he was the receptionist in my office." Huh? What? I don't get it.

Reviews of the boardgame "Chess."

Another story on pedophilia amongst Afghanistan's Pashtuns. I posted a link to a similar story in The Times a little while back and questioned its accuracy, in part because the story wasn't being reported anywhere else. This article also claims that the pedophilia "played a part in the Taliban's rise in Afghanistan": the Taliban gained support when they freed a young boy over whom two commanders had fought.

"In Failed States, Can Democracy Come Too Soon?" (Why is this in the "Arts" section?)

A not-annoying story about the internet romance of Dean Allen and Gail Armstrong. Great URL, guys!

A breathless profile of a Special Forces team and their operations in Afghanistan. (e.g. (first sentence) "They landed in darkness on an early November night, deep in the mountains of northern Afghanistan. ...") Apparently, Special Forces soldiers are typically in their mid 30s and have college degrees. They also know four languages--though I don't know why this particular team tried to communicate in Arabic, French, Chinese then Russian. (Note: 0+ level proficiency is not particularly high.)

I saw Black Hawk Down last night. It was reasonably thrilling, but it's basically a big gun battle, without structure, meaning or narrative. (This is real life, I suppose.) "What Black Hawk Down Leaves Out" covers some of the political background.

Article by Bjorn Lomborg summarising his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. The book argues that: (1) the threat to the environment isn't as serious as environmentalists have been making out; and (2) that some of the money spent on the environment might be better spent on other things, such as providing clean water to those that don't currently have it.

Of course, not everyone agrees with his conclusions. What's inexplicable, though, is the character of the responses. Scientific American's contribution (a special section in the January 2002 issue) was titled "Science Defends Itself Against the Skeptical Environmentalist"--as if science was one thing, and Lomborg was another. This is very unbecoming. Lomberg may well be wrong, but he's certainly following scientific method. And today, on the Science Show, one anti-Lomborgist asserted that Lomborg must be wrong about the environment, simply because there were 2 billion people in the world in 1950, and 6 billion today... How can 6 billion fit where 2 billion were before?

No-one seems to want to grapple with his statistics, which are in many instances taken from UN publications. One of Lomberg's most surprising claims is that even if the Kyoto Protocol is ratified by the entire world, we'd still, in 2100, get to the same point, in 2094, that we would have had it not been ratified. (In terms of temperature change, at least.) Is anyone disputing this? Because if it's true, it's not worth the money.

Book review: The Story of How Tobacco Seduced the World. "Without coming to the defense of [Tobacco] companies--they are in all respects indefensible--it needs to be said that smoking is an act of individual volition for which the individual ultimately must accept responsibility. However much pleasure may be derived from watching the companies take it on the chin in court, this evades the larger truth that people smoke mainly because they want to." I smoke for political reasons.

The Red Cross is giving money to (rich) Tribeca residents.

Very beautiful high-resolution images of earth.

For Swiss Expo 2002, a building covered in a cloud-like mist will hover over a lake. This is excellent!

"Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad" Troubling: the Pentagon is planning to make up news. [Update: this Slate article equates the plan to the spreading of false information about the location of the D-Day landings.]

"Dear Prudence", the last question: is this not a ridiculously overwritten? ("If the measure of love is loss ...") Why does the advice giver, writing in the third person, conclude with, "She also thinks you're a hell of a writer"?

Are your beliefs about the world and God consistent?

Fascinating: contrary to his post-war suggestion that he simply wasn't trying very hard, it appears that Heisenberg was working hard on the atomic bomb. (And he thought he would succeed, too.)

Can Muslim kiddies wear a tudung--a traditional headscarf--to school? The Singaporean government says no: to maintain harmony, all kids must dress the same. An editorial in The Straits Times ("Tudung: It has to be") weirdly insists that "nothing is gained by harping on the exception made for Sikhs to wear the turban in school."

real strange countries have an official google server. (Scroll down.) Burundi? Montserrat? Is this a joke?

ancestralscotland.com hosts a party to celebrate the opening of their website (which encourages Scottish Americans to visit Scotland); the New Yorker attends. (The New Yorker gets excellent stories, improbably, out of the most ordinary events--would you have thought to write about this?)

Portrait photographs, taken on NYE. Character captured, effortlessly. Elsa Dorfman also does an incredible job but she also charges about $2000 for a portrait, so she'd better be good. (Her results are also remarkable in that they're the best of only two photographs.) This is Allen Ginsberg, naked, with Peter Orlovsky.

True: Kurt Warner, quarterback of the St. Louis Rams, has an interesting life story.

A successor to toilet paper? Uh...

People don't think rationally about money. This stuff is all extremely interesting.

Wall-to-wall carpets are coming back. (Plus: stupid headline.)

Disturbing: with the Taleban now gone, men and their ashnas--"young boys they have groomed for sex"--are once again on the streets of Kandahar. But I don't completely trust this article. It sensationalises: "Kandahar's Pashtuns have been notorious for their homosexuality for centuries, particularly their fondness for naive young boys. Before the Taleban arrived in 1994, the streets were filled with teenagers and their sugar daddies, flaunting their relationship." I also question this: "... the rape of young boys by warlords was one of the key factors in Mullah Omar mobilising the Taleban." Article also doesn't take great pains to distinguish between homosexuality and the apparent fondness for "naive young boys." Has this story run anywhere else? A google search for ashna indicates that the term isn't very common.

woo, back!

"There are many besides Al Qaeda prisoners who are forced to wear humiliating clothing, gloves, and hats" Unfair possibly, but, well, clever.

"Australia gets drunk, wakes up in North Atlantic"

Tyson gets rowdy again. Interesting style ... it's almost a "Talk of the Town" piece.

the hardware and software behind the Wayback Machine

profile of black ex-conservative Glenn Loury.

why there's a "Fifth Third Bank"

"Thank you James Earl Ray for keeping the dream alive"

opening remarks of Robert Jackson, US Chief Prosecutor, at the Nuremberg Trials. This is an amazing address. I am in delight, and awestruck.

the Earth at Night

cute article: free-thinking liberals get laid more often than libertarians

The Elgin Marbles are to stay in the UK, apparently. I saw these about a year ago, when I was in London. (I stayed in a hostel directly opposite, and a good hostel it was too.)

They're busted up, and not in very good condition, but still affecting. But more interesting was the justification for keeping them there. Various bits of text describe how their condition had declined in the centuries prior 1799 (when they were removed from the remains of the Parthenon). The Turks, for example, stored gunpowder there, and once upon a time it--oops!--went bang. The Greeks can't take care of their own relics, the exhibition argued, and so we have to do it for them.

Lots and lots of people are not very happy with this situation. In the picture below, the banner wrapped around the building at the right reads "Parthenon Marbles / It's time they were returned home". (This of Melbourne.) A little way up the street, at 258 Russell, is Cafe Baloo, which serves Indian curries and Italian pasta (!). Recommended, although it was better a few years ago.

what happened to the "brutal Afghan winter"? I don't agree with the second half, and don't appreciate the tone, but it's a good question.

the word and concept: "meritocracy"

Simpsons' quotes, by theme

what laws should apply to Americans serving their country overseas? Lt. Col. Martha McSally wants to wear regular clothes off base, a cause supported by both conservative Republicans and liberal feminists.

Peter Singer is guilty of "the ignorant denigration of chickens"?

will those Brits ever stop whining? Now *The Times* tries to tell us that the high nickel content of euro coins will cause eczema...

wild, cute

cigar FAQ. "How far down do you smoke a cigar?"

"The backing arrangement is astounding. Coupled with the earnest if lugubrious vocal performance you have a piece of art that I couldn't have conceived of, even with half of Colombia's finest export products in me." -- David Bowie

the credit ratings given by Moody's, S&P's, etc. have immediate fiscal implications