Gulfstream: 2003

“The smiley is an attack on writers and readers alike. If it is funny, it doesn’t need a smiley. If is not funny, a smiley won’t help it. The smiley teaches writers that anything they write will pass as humor as long as it is punctuated properly. It teaches readers that they must ignore their better judgment, and look only at punctuation to determine intent.”

Lynne Truss has written a book called Eats, Shoots & Leaves: “She writes for those who winced at the posters advertising the film Two Weeks Notice and who felt real pain when they saw in print the name of the pop group Hear’Say.”

Dick Cheney uses the verboten “empire” in his Christmas card.

“Honda CB500T rolling chassis - horrible.”

On releasing the news of Hussein’s capture: “Iraqis were to have a role in announcing the news and that the images of the quarry were to be broadcast worldwide as quickly as possible, to leave little time for conspiracy theories to course through Iraqi towns and villages.”

(I’m travelling at the moment, and found out about it via spam: a message with the subject “News Flash - Saddam Hussein Captured! Get the Cards Before They Sell Out!”)

“The only presidential candidate with a truly coherent position on President Bush’s Iraq policy is President Bush. He supported it before the war started, he supports it now, and he thinks or pretends to think it’s working well. … Like mice frustrated in a maze, the [Democratic] candidates seek escape routes out of this logical trap. Sometimes they say that the current mess is not the result of the decision to go to war. It is the result of Bush’s inept leadership during the war and/or the postwar occupation. … But the resolution these gentlemen supported gave war-making authority to George W. Bush, not to some idealized, all-knowing president such as themselves. … If Bush bungled this authority, entrusting him with it was a big mistake.”

“French Panel Recommends Banning Head Scarves in Schools.” (Typically good, broad coverage.)

FindArticles has been redesigned, and now lets you browser magazines issue by issue. (This is the page for Harper’s.)

Leader of the Democrats (Australia’s third party) assaults a Liberal Senator, apologises, stands aside, then declares: “If anything good can come of this incident, it’s to reinforce the fact that behaviour such as this is unacceptable.”

Graphical comparison: is Beijing looking more and more like city depicted in Blade Runner? (The National Stadium, particularly in this rendering, does have the same look.)

President Bush at Whitehall Palace: “We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East. Your nation and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. Longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold.” There’s other interesting bits in here too; it’s basically a summary of why the US went to war with Iraq. (Does Bush present a logically consistent case, or are other factors (e.g. oil) involved?)

“At one point my roommate called me while we were at the concert and asks me how my date was going. I turn to my date and say, ‘how’s the date going’ and she says, ‘I’d say its going pretty well.’” It gets worse.

John McWorter has a shot at Mark Abley, who goes a bit gaga over the Mohawk language, which uses the same word for goodness and law. Abley: “I had the impression that a three-hour philosophy seminar had just been compressed into a couple of minutes.”

McWorter: “Abley marvels that the Boro language has words that mean specific things like ‘to love for the last time’ and ‘to feel unknown and uneasy in a new place.’ Okay—but English has a word for when two acquaintances, through sharing an experience or reminiscence, experience a sense of deeper connection for the first time: BONDING. How spiritual we English speakers must be … then—get this—we have a word for the first time a couple has sexual intercourse: CONSUMMATE.”

“The subtext of Abley’s approach here is a school of thought that proposes that indigenous people are ‘realer’ than we are, more in touch with spiritual realities that ‘civilization’ has long wrested us from to our detriment. I understand that a good while ago, this notion was a useful way to counter the myth that indigenous people are ‘savages.’ But I wonder how many people who read a book like Abley’s need to learn that in 2003, and in the meantime the tradition too often smacks of clapping wildly when a child manages not to spill any of her food.”

Peter Jackson comments on goofs made in the first two movies of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Newsweek: When Arwen and Frodo are being chased on horseback by the Ringwraiths, the soundtrack to the scene is a cantering horse. A canter is three beats, whereas a gallop—which is what the horses on screen are doing—is four very fast beats that often sound like a single beat.
Jackson: I should’ve—well, it’s too late to fire anyone. The damage has been done.

Daily newspapers, unlike magazines, don’t directly respond to the letters of disgruntled readers. Jack Shafer says that a paper’s silence may sometimes give readers the impression that it is conceding error, and argues that they should mount a more active defence. (The Washington Post ombudsman’s report mentioned here is also worth reading.)

Irving Tobin reads every page of the Times (save the sports, Escapes and Circuits sections), and is one year, five months, and four days behind in his reading.

(Irving buddy, there’s a way out: “Select All” / “Mark All as Read.” It’s gonna hurt bad, you’ll wonder if you’ve done the right thing, if you’ve missed out on something terrifically important, something you needed to know, something that would’ve made you laugh, but you’ve gotta bury those doubts deep. Just blow your papers away my friend, blow them away. Tomorrow there will be more news.)

The EcoSphere: an air-tight glass sphere containing sea water, red shrimp and algae. Give it sunlight, and it goes for two years or more.

The politics of protest: “So long as the protesters look like the usual suspects—multiply pierced, Genoa-style activists in torn clothes and mohican haircuts—then, I’m told, the White House will not worry. They will be able to say Bush enjoys the global support of all but a few anarchist weirdos. If the demonstrators look like the UK equivalent of America’s ‘soccer moms’, regular people of all ages, including plenty of women—tricky to bring out on a weekday—then Washington may have to rethink.”

(Guy-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance Of Gays Back 50 Years (The Onion): “‘I’d always thought gays were regular people, just like you and me, and that the stereotype of homosexuals as hedonistic, sex-crazed deviants was just a destructive myth,’ said mother of four Hannah Jarrett, 41, mortified at the sight of 17 tanned and oiled boys cavorting in jock straps to a throbbing techno beat on a float shaped like an enormous phallus. ‘Boy, oh, boy, was I wrong.’”)

“Media Criticized For Biased Hometown Sports Reporting”:

“Photos almost always featured the home team, usually in a moment of victory,” Wilborough said. “When the players and coaches of the opposing team were discussed, it was usually in the context of how they were ‘destroyed’ or ‘stomped.’”

“Airpower’s Century.” (Interview with Walter Boyne.)

“This is getting ridiculous. I think it’s high time we all agreed on some common standards for use of the M4W and W4M postings.”

“The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick.”

Conversation between screenwriters Quentin Tarantino and Brian Helgeland. I think I’m beginning to like Tarantino more than I like his films.

Tarantino: “… that’s all I could do in school, just write new scripts. Eventually, the teacher complained to my mom. And at some point, when my mom was mad at me, she said: ‘Oh, and by the way, this little writing career of yours? It’s over!’ And I thought, This little writing career? This little writing career? You have no vision. I will never buy you the house that Elvis bought his mother. And to this day I have not bought my mother a house. And I never will!”

On New York’s Chinese-language dailies. (Interesting tidbit: the text runs left-to-right on each, which makes it easier to incorporate English text—though isn’t the text on Chinese website left-to-right as well?)

The most valuable & most desirable privately-held works of art in the world. (Somehow a Rembrandt is still in private hands.)

On states offering incentives and subsidies to companies in order to get them to relocate. Indiana Governor Joseph E. Kernan says: “I understand the argument that taking jobs away from Boston and putting them here is nationally a zero-sum game. … But Indiana, like virtually every other state, is not going to unilaterally disarm.”

Richard Stallman has a solution: “… the states should increase their bargaining power against companies by forming a union. We could call it the ‘United States of America.’ …”

On the changing meaning of “media bias”: “In fact, ABC or CBS is far more likely to be described as biased than Mr. Limbaugh—or for that matter, the very liberal Michael Moore. That would have puzzled Harold Ickes, who reserved his most caustic attacks on 1930’s press bias for partisan columnists. But today bias is applied only to those who won’t own up to having an ax to grind.”

Sometimes, Google lets me down: full-text search of 3 billion documents is a wonderful thing, but if you only have generic keywords, Google isn’t able to do its thing. This article, which summarises two papers on the amount of pollution ships emit, contains a graphic showing pollution levels over the Atlantic; the shipping lanes are clearly visible. I’d like to see a similar map of the whole world, but specific searches (for the authors’ names, etc.) produce nothing useful, and all other search possibilities are hopelessly generic… (The “large image” link doesn’t work.)

Good article on PETA and its savvy founder Ingrid Newkirk. (“I am not only uninterested in having children. I am opposed to having children. Having a purebred human baby is like having a purebred dog; it is nothing but vanity, human vanity.”) I can’t figure out PETA’s line on pets; PETA believes that animals are not ours to use “for entertainment” (among other things), which would seem to preclude pet ownership in itself, but their site has numerous factsheets on how one should behave toward “companion animals.”

A poll found that 59 percent of Europeans think that Israel is a threat to world peace; no country polled higher. This does not mean that Europeans think that Israel is the greatest threat to world peace, as many of these headlines insist. (“Israel No. 1 Rogue State: EU,” “Israel is No 1 threat to peace, says EU poll,” “Israel biggest threat to peace: EU poll.”) A country can be a threat without being the greatest threat.

The wording of the question is important, too. Were the respondents asked whether the existence of Israel posed a threat to world peace, in the same way that the existence of, say, nuclear weapons pose a threat to world peace? Newspapers often don’t cover polls well, I find.

“You would think the following scene occurs every day: Cops pull over a speeding vehicle and search for drugs. Crack is found. All three passengers insist the drugs are not theirs. So the cops arrest them all. The constitutional dispute today is whether the cops had probable cause to arrest everybody, or just the driver, or just the guy next to the wad of bills in the glove compartment, or just the guy in the back seat with the crack. All of which is interesting. But even more interesting is that this is a case of ‘first impression’ for the high court—meaning no one has brought this kind of challenge before. Apparently, in every other car ever stopped, someone has cheerfully admitted to owning the drugs.” Great article. The justices are in fine form for this one too.

Indian Casinos and Californian politics: “Public support for the tribes has also been undercut by revelations that profits from casinos have flowed to so few Indians. The financial rewards of casino ownership are greatest for tribes with the fewest members—which, perversely, assures a concentration of gambling wealth in a very few hands. Among tribes that have done well for the very few: the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, whose casino generates $100 million a year for only about 110 tribal members ($900,000 each); and the Table Mountain Rancheria tribe (Sacramento), whose 100 members each receive approximately $350,000 per year.”

The State Library of Victoria is currently running an exhibition of Lewis Morley photographs. (Morley is most famous for his photo of Christine Keeler seated naked behind a chair.) The photographs are mostly interesting for who they are of—largely celebrities of 60s London—so it’s a good thing that they’re accompanied by decent, often wry, notes. (From one we learn that only two of the many couples that appear in the exhibition are still together.)

(I decided to see Swimming Pool after seeing this photo of Charlotte Rampling —big, on a light box (much better that way)—in the center of the room.)

World Beard and Moustache Championship pictures! “Americans made a stronger showing than expected, capturing four titles.”

Loving Gary Larson box set review (US$135!).

Yes! Celery really does require more calories to eat than it has in it. (Cecil Adams says the energy required to warm up ice-cold cold beer does not, unfortunately, exceed the calories in it.)

Extracts from a few different articles on internet porn and how it might (or might not) be changing men’s perceptions of sex and women.

The Authors Guild (what, no apostrophe?) doesn’t like Amazon’s full text search.

“Whether your works should be in the program is hard to say. This program will likely prove to be useful in promoting certain titles. Midlist and backlist books that are receiving little attention, for example, may benefit from additional exposure in searches. For other titles, the program may erode sales. Most reference books would be at clear risk in such a database. So would many (if not most) travel books and cookbooks. Most fiction titles are not likely to be greatly threatened.”

(The Guild’s argument that, with effort, you can read most of the book without paying for it needs to be refined: this is true of books as well, which can be borrowed, photocopied, transcribed, thumbed through in bookshops, and so on.)

This might be a case in which the public’s interests are aligned with those of publishers and retailers, but not with those of the author. (c.f. digital music, where the prevailing opinion seems to be that the interests of the public and musicians (and possibly retailers) are aligned, and in opposition to those of the publisher.)

(The Authors Guild has previously urged members to not link to Amazon because Amazon sold second hand books; a subsequent clarification maintained that they have nothing in principle against the selling of second-hand books, only with systems that make buying them really easy to do…)

Obscure Economic Indicators: the Baltic Dry Index measures the cost of shipping raw materials, which makes it a good indicator of “economic growth and production.”

“After all, it doesn’t deal with container ships carrying finished goods. It deals with the precursors to production: bulk carriers carrying building materials, cement, grain, coal, and iron. Unlike stock and bond markets, the BDI ‘is totally devoid of speculative content,’ says Howard Simons, an economist and columnist at TheStreet.com. People don’t book freighters unless they have cargo to move.”

Seems like one of the reasons why some TVs shows aren’t available on DVD is that it’s difficult to acquire the rights to the music. (And other TV shows released on DVD have different music.)

It’s called the “Tiananmen Square massacre,” but did anyone actually die there? There’s astonishingly little evidence that anyone did. (Responses are unfortunately a little out of sequence.)

New York is replacing WALK/DON’T WALK signs with signs that display either a large white figure in mid-stride or a large orange hand. (Paumgarten snidely describes this as the “Zurichification of our street corners.”)

The hand has always seemed to me a little disproportionate in comparison to the walking man; here we have beautifully-proportioned green walking men and red standing men. (I was once irritated when someone complained that they’re all men, partly because I couldn’t defend the practice…)

The use and development of weapons of war is shaped and influenced as much by the glory they confer as their actual (or potential) efficacy. Examples given: lancing foot soldiers from horseback, hunting U-boats (instead of escorting conveys), strategic bombing in daylight without fighter escort, national missile defense.

(Note also the huge list of “reviewed” books—it’s basically a bibliography…)

What the 191 members of the United Nations have “pledged to do” “by the year 2015.” A good list. Specifically environmental goals (e.g. taking measures to prevent global warming) are not included—perhaps because they were too controversial, but also, possibly, because they don’t score very highly on the cost/benefit equation.

(The much longer Millennium Declaration, I now notice, does include some environmental aims, such as ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.)

The Japanese love affair with French fashion (and in particular, A.P.C.). A.P.C. is one of my favourite retailers; I’ve always wondered how they could afford to exist since discovering that their (I supposed) flagship store, in Paris, was about the size of a basketball court. (The store in New York is about the same size.) As it turns out, they have about five in Japan; I guess they do most of their business there. Still, one does wonder how a fashion retailer can afford to produce lavish catalogs, etc. on the back of about 10 stores world-wide.

“Do Good Looks Equal Good Evaluations?”

According to Mother Teresa, abortion is “the greatest destroyer of peace today”: “Many people are very, very concerned with the children in India, with the children in Africa where quite a number die, maybe of malnutrition, of hunger and so on, but millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today.” (She says almost exactly the same thing at two other points in her speech.)

Her lecture also contains a baffling story: she once took rice to a starving Hindu family; instead of eating it all themselves, they shared it with their starving Muslim neighbours. Mother Teresa approved, commenting: “I didn’t bring more rice that evening because I wanted them to enjoy the joy of sharing.” How thoughtful. In Mother Teresa’s world, it seems, starving families prefer “the joy of sharing” to “more food.”

(Via Christopher Hitchens, who says she was not a friend of the poor, she was a friend of poverty.)

Kids review classic computer games.

Haruki Murakami, “Birthday Girl.” (Also: “All God’s Children Can Dance,” “Blind Willow, Sleeping Girl.”)

The parallels between environmentalists (particularly radical environmentalists) and the religious (particularly early Christians). (Pole sitting, asceticism, belief in and fear of things that can’t be measured, etc.)

“From emails exchanged last year between David Armstrong, a former English teacher, and employees of The Coca-Cola Company.”

The “Barefoot Doctor”—a proponent of alternative medicine, apparently—answers hostile readers’ questions…

Linus Torvalds interview.

“If directors really wanted authenticity, gunfights would be short and lethal and a lot of guys would fire without looking. A person might not even know he’s been hit until after the fight is over.”

Cute personal ad. (Mouse over the “elements.”)

“Marketers Turn Monks Into Product Pitchmen.”

Savvy Michael Kinsley piece on Clark, the nature of politics, and “youthful political swoons.”

“Alaskan pilots have a one in eight chance of dying during a 30-year career…” (What’s the chance of a waiter dying through passive smoking?)

Small-business marketing: how to sell pizza.

“NTEU National Council rejects the university industrial relations package announced on September 22nd … The package is ideologically driven and will promote confrontation …” I’m guessing the package itself is bad news, but what’s wrong with it being “ideologically driven”? Why shouldn’t ideology guide policy?

I’m not surprised the Vatican doesn’t like condoms; I am surprised their argument is that condoms are ineffective. (And not just ineffective because they come off, break, etc., but ineffective because the AIDS virus can pass through latex.)

Why isn’t it acceptable for the Church to say yes, people will die because of this policy, but to not use condoms is God’s wish? Is it these days unacceptable for monotheists to do something they’d rather not do because God wills it? (e.g. sacrifice your son on a mountain, fly a plane into buildings.)

Suicide, and the Golden Gate Bridge. “Several people have crossed the Bay Bridge to jump from the Golden Gate; there is no record of anyone traversing the Golden Gate to leap from its unlovely sister bridge.”

(The four-foot rail. The article doesn’t mention it, but there are also signs on the bridge giving a number to call if you “need help,” or similar.)

Someone else dislikes Elizabeth Spiers and gawker.com. This June piece is more pointed: “Her self-defense is her own shallowness, and gives her motivation as ‘invitations to better parties.’ The most cynical shallowness is the kind that announces itself as ‘honesty.’”

(The other problem with Spiers’s Gawker is that it is (was?—there’s a new editor now) really poorly written (comparison).)

Upcoming Supreme Court cases. This is worth it just for the line: “In the mid-1950s, Congress responded to the villainous spread of ‘godless communism’ by building more nuclear bombs to protect our shores and by adding the phrase ‘under God’ to the pledge to protect our souls.”

Oh, wow! Wonderful photographs by Guy Bourdin. (Got here via the a page documenting some suspicious similarities between his photographs and Madonna’s video for “Hollywood.”)

Rather nice rant about Microsoft Word embedded in this Louis Menand piece about writing, citations, and style guides.

(Which reminds me: what’s the right way to nest <cite> and <a> tags? <cite><a href="…">The New Yorker</a></cite> or <a href="…"><cite>The New Yorker</cite></a>?)

RealAudio archive of KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic.

For some reason Nic Harcourt’s guests do really good, interesting covers when they appear on KCRW. A few years ago, Travis did their famous cover of Britney Spears’s “Baby One More Time” (starts at 27:20), and more recently Ben Lee did Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” (13:15) and Dido did James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” (25:30). (The audio quality of the newer shows is pretty good, too.)

Michael Kinsley: In defense of hypothetical questions. (It’s not valid to dismiss a question as hypothetical.)

… doesn’t exist; VeriSign suggests www.masterkill.com…

Level-headed analysis of the Valerie Plame affair.

“The issue can be especially complicated when the deceased has prepurchased a site, but cannot fit in it.”

John Buchan: not just the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps.

“… I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors.” (Background.) TPM running hard with this.

The “Kaleidoscope I,” one of Nokia’s very strange new imaging products. (The Kaleidoscope stores and displays about 20 270x228 images.) The Medallion I and II are digital photoframes on a necklace.

These products would work so well as works of sci-fi futurism (check out the ad—cool, huh?), but as actual real-world products to sell?

Christopher Hitchens’s very nicely worded appreciation of Edward Said.

“I’m tired of all ye Medieval freaks trying to tell me how great the Medieval times are.”

Profile of Bernard Lewis (he’s 87!). This is mostly here for its mention of a compliment Lewis considers “amongst the finest he’s ever received.” It appears in the preface to a fundamentalist Muslim group’s Arabic translation of one of his works, and runs: “I don’t know who this man is. He is either a candid friend or an honest enemy, but in either case, one who refuses to deal in falsehoods.”

(Another nice compliment (of Richard Posner): “If he did not exist, it would be hard to believe that he could.”)

How to untangle telephone cords!

Michael Moore’s response to his “Bowling for Columbine” critics.

Book review: Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life. Authentic, in this sense, seems to mean stuff you couldn’t possibly be accused of wanting because you saw an ad for it.

An authentic life, then, is a life supposedly free from marketers’ manipulations. But can this be achieved? It seems to me that an “authentic” life is as studied a life as anything else: it requires that you be just as aware of what you wear, eat, drink and listen to as anyone else—probably more so. (If my father buys white Nikes, it’s because that’s what they have at the shop. He didn’t not buy white Nikes because he saw an ad for them during Friends, or because he knows they’re a multi-national organisation.)

(Rob Walker makes a similar point in a related article in Slate.)

“Hello. I just downloaded some illegal MP3s and my friend told me that the RAII is going to sue everyone who downloads music. What should I do?” (There’s a few pages to this.)

Nice philosophical exploration of the WSJ’s argument that the poor should be taxed harder, lest they forget just how naughty taxes are.

What fifth-graders think of Radiohead.

Jenna and Barbara’s Bush’s Friendster “profiles.” (Unfortunately Barbara’s not within reach of my “Personal Network”…)

Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler are only 24 (profile).

What is says on the box. (How can you know the bear’s okay?!) (1.8Mb)

How generals get elected President. “Wesley Clark, as pundits have noted, faces many obstacles if he wants to be president, including the lack of a campaign team and a late start in fund raising. But he has mastered the two historical requirements: He doesn’t act as if he needs the job, and he doesn’t act as if he wants war. For a general, that’s a good start.”

Steven Waldman says: (1) even if Jews weren’t complicit in Jesus’s death, the Bible says they were (so don’t complain about Gibson’s Passion!); and (2) whether they did or didn’t is theologically irrelevant. (Issue is surely very complex; this seems a little too glib a summary.)

High court transcript (involving dividing and multiplying by zero, somehow): “Now, I required to increase the speed of light within a fusion engine so as to fuse the four hydrogen atoms which I claim become susceptible to fusing through the increased speed of light. Now, I have given no credit to—”

Gibson retires from blogging: “I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing a novel.”

I’d wondered about this: if nuclear bombs are so bad, why do people still live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Dahlia Lithwick suggests that the Supreme Court debate over the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act sets two elements of democracy—equality and freedom—against each other. (Never really considered this conflict.)

(c.f. www.monash.edu.au.) The perils of stock photography…

The ABS has removed historical estimates of the number of Aborigines in Tasmania from their website because “the historical context in which the articles were intended to be viewed was not in all cases made evident to people accessing the site”; this “may have offended some people.”

Professor Bunyip believes this has something to do with Keith Windschuttle’s dispute with various historians over (among other things) the number of Aborigines living in Tasmania at the time of British colonisation—Windschuttle believes that there were about 2,000; others believe the number was between 4,000 and 10,000—and, according to one of Professor Bunyip’s readers, the missing articles support the lower estimate. (Geoffrey Blainey review of Windschuttle’s book.)

Fortunately, Google’s cache holds one of the articles: The Aborigines of Australia, contributed by W. Ramsay Smith. This makes clear what is meant by the “historical context” not being “made evident to people accessing the site”: for some strange reason, the fact that this article appeared in the Year Book Australia of 1910 is not immediately apparent. The only date that appears on the first screen is 2002, and it’s only by looking at the Bibliography that it becomes clear that the article was written a very long time ago. (Unsurprisingly, the article contains quite a few dodgy statements about the physical characteristics and customs, etc. of Aborigines that the ABS is not prepared to stand by in 2002.) Evidence of a conspiracy against Windschuttle? I don’t think so. (Though the ABS certainly could’ve been clearer about why they were withdrawn.)

(I do hope the ABS puts puts the articles back (though hopefully with better presentation): it is important that everything they’ve ever produced is available to the public, for all time—for some purposes, the wronger they were, the better.)

Fred Kaplan says the U.N. U-turn signals a comeback for Colin Powell.

(Kaplan seems to be wrong about as often as he is right (even taking into account the fact that some of the time he’s writing about something he wishes would happen, rather than expecting it to). He was right about Peter J. Schoomaker being named the new Army chief of staff (great article describing Schoomaker’s philosophy when head of special ooperations—he wants “warrior diplomats”), but wrong about James Baker being sent to Baghdad to supervise Iraqi reconstruction.)

“The private dreams of publicly held companies.”

Top private companies in: the US, the world excluding the US, Australia. (The top 50 public companies have revenues exceeding $40bn (see Forbes’s lists); only three private companies do.)

Slate’s “Field Guide” to the 2004 presidential candidates.

Voter registrations in the social science departments of 32 elite American colleges and universities: 1397 registered Democrats, 134 Republicans.

Why is this? Republicans not as keen to enter academia? Discriminated against when it comes to to hiring? Not as smart? (A noteworthy lack of diversity whatever the cause.)

A history of modern Israel, more or less, and how it has featured in European and American foreign policy. (It describes the circumstances that led Israel to be a “great liberal European cause” before 1967, and the U.S. to be an “ever more reliable friend” since.)

U.S. Judge A. Howard Matz issues preliminary injunction prohibiting L.A. real estate mogul Donald Sterling from using the word “Korean” in the names of his apartment buildings: “Use of the word Korean in the names of residential apartment buildings would indicate to the ‘ordinary reader’ that the buildings’ owner is not only receptive to but actually prefers tenants of Korean national origin.”

(I’m wondering if anyone’s gone after the clothing company FUBU (“For Us, By Us”) which—as well as being provocatively named—seems to feature only black models in its advertising.)

An unusual false beard. (Note: inclusion in this blog no guarantee of authenticity!)

Tibor Fischer’s review of Martis Amis’s Yellow Dog: “Yellow Dog isn’t bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It’s not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder (not only because of the embargo, but because someone might think I was enjoying what was on the page). It’s like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating.”

Britons ignorant of their history, the story accompanying this graphic argues—though the questions seem pretty hard… (Three of the four figures respondents were asked to identify appear on the back of banknotes.)

Norway’s defence minister—embracing the idea that “security is no longer just about territorial defense”—is transforming her country’s military. “Put more simply, size doesn’t matter as much in today’s localized and technologically driven armed conflicts. What does matter is speed and the ability to bring narrowly defined skills to the front lines. And this is where small countries like Norway or the Netherlands or future NATO members like Latvia come into the geopolitical picture. The evolving nature of conflict presents opportunities for Davids to fight alongside Goliaths, if they bring the right slingshot.”

Horrible, horrible, “garden path” domain name. And this is the official site?

“I think the magic box used to belong to Chairman Mao.”

“If you had seen all this, you may well have asked yourself: Is this really a matter on which I need to form an opinion?” (On parallel universes.)

Cartoon: The Muslim World.

“Activate” self-esteem? Is The Body Shop distinguishing between self-esteem (“favourable appreciation or opinion of oneself”) and self-respect (“a proper respect for oneself as a human being” / “regard for one’s own standing or position”) here? Self-esteem, as described on this page, ends up sounding a lot like a sort of unyielding self-satisfaction: the state of feeling good about yourself whatever the situation is you find yourself in.

Theodore Dalrymple does distinguish between the two, to some effect: “self-esteem (which is very different from self-respect) is almost always an unattractive quality, whatever a person’s other merits, in so far as it implies self-regard and even self-obsession.”

Site of small fonts & great charm.

Eighty-five, and still pulling beers: “Mrs Byer is working at 8am and seldom goes to her residence upstairs before 11pm. Retirement is not on the cards. ‘Not till I die, dear.’”

Martin Amis’s latest novel is this “summer’s literary equivalent of Gigli”: “In The Daily Telegraph, Amis’s fellow novelist, Tibor Fischer, called the new book ‘terrible’ and said he would be embarrassed to be found reading it on the Tube in case anyone thought he might be enjoying it. He hoped, he said, that a friend would shoot him if he ever wrote a book that was anything like Yellow Dog.”

(Reasonable summary of Schwarzenegger’s campaign.)

Fascinating Iraqi army debrief. Bad leadership and bad communications led to their defeat, ex-commanders say. Some of the quotes are amusing: “The only order I got was to dismantle my airplanes—the most idiotic order I ever received” (Brig. Gen. Baha Ali Nasr); Gen. Omar Abdul Karim didn’t realise the regime had collapsed until looters attempted to break into his headquarters.

I’ve wondered for a while what the statue of limitations was for; apparently, “their express purpose is to protect defendants from having to defend against ‘stale’ charges, since with time evidence degenerates, witnesses relocate, and memories fade.” (I had thought they also served to protect you from charges brought against you decades later, as harassment.)

“Arnold’s Nazi Problem: Why won’t he repudiate Kurt Waldheim?” (Some good comments at the bottom.) I think Schwarzenegger will become the next Governor of California, and for the most part not for bad (i.e. celebrity/fame-related) reasons. Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron: “I don’t have any weak points. …” (Does anyone have a link to the photo of a sadly flabby Schwarzenegger in speedos that ran in People Magazine about a month back?)

To turn a bicycle right, you only need to be able to turn the handlebars left: “Once you begin a right turn by countersteering to the left, you might think that you would eventually turn the handlebars back to the right. Surprisingly, it turns out that you never need to turn the handlebars right. Don’t believe this? Try it. While riding very calmly (perhaps coasting) let go with your left hand and push the handlebars with your right hand. With this handhold, you can only force the handlebars left, but you and your bike will go right.”

Among the “fun facts”: the 2nd edition takes up 540 megabytes. (A life’s work, when expressed in an efficient form (e.g. for music, it would be the score, not the digital recording) fits onto a CD. Even counting stuff like email, you probably produce less than 10 gigabytes of raw data in your life. Your life’s work … fits onto a $100 hard drive. We are minnows.)

Artificial diamonds almost a reality. (Maybe for real this time…) The diamond business is fascinating: whilst gold is both rare and (intrinsicly) valuable (i.e. to industry), diamonds are neither—their value is due entirely to their scarcity and perceived beauty, both of which are, to a great extent, controlled and manipulated by De Beers.

The story doesn’t mention it, but De Beers now has about 50% of the world diamond market; in response to the “threat” from artificial diamonds, they’re giving gem labs machines designed to distinguish artificial from natural diamonds: that is, they’re assuming people want to know what sort of diamond they have, even if a machine is the only thing that can tell one from the other. (Beauty is truth? Truty beauty?) But to some extent, people probably do: “It’s not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week,” says Jef Van Royen, a senior scientist at the Diamond High Council—and he does have a point.

Will artificial diamonds sell? As the article relates, some artificial gems have succeeded (“cultured” pearls), whilst some have failed (“synthetic” emeralds). (To increase the chances of success, artificial diamonds are being marketed as “cultured”…)

Ebert defends his 2.5 star review of Gigli, reflects on why the critics took such pleasure in trashing it (giving, in the process, tacit approval to metacritic and its system of metascores).

(The next letter, from Dave Eggers, got me to “Some Information about Captain Rick’s Booty Cove.”)

Milgram’s “Six Degrees of Separation” experiment replicated with email: “Of more than 24,000 chains started, only 384 found their target. Successful chains were, on average, about four steps long, although this number was biased by the greater likelihood of shorter chains being completed. A typical chain length was indeed between five and seven, consistent with Milgram’s earlier findings.”

Defence of Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan: “the Japanese military ferociously resisted surrender even after two atomic bombings on major cities, even after Soviet entry into the war, even when it expected another atomic bomb—on Tokyo.” (Article needs to be better sourced.)

Why flash mobs are stupid.

Why Charles Taylor’s miltiamen are cross-dressers. (I don’t watch the news so I hadn’t noticed…)

Unconventional economist Stephen Levitt: “he has merely distilled the so-called dismal science down to its most primal aim: explaining how people get what they want, or need.”

Ouch: GM has 2.5 retirees for each active U.S. employee; GM and Ford combined paid $7.8 billion in health care costs last year (on profits of $1.7bn and -$1bn). (They want the U.S. government to pay some of their health-care costs—or, as this article puts it, a European style social-welfare state.)

Canadian Government-sponsored report on “when, if ever, it is appropriate for states to take coercive—and in particular military—action, against another state for the purpose of protecting people at risk in that other state” (synopsis, pdf)—a response to a question Kofi Annan directed at the international community: “if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica—to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?”

“Idiot Legal Arguments: A Casebook for Dealing with Extremist Legal Arguments.” I wish this was formatted better; the table of contents includes:

Objections to name typed in block letters (all-capitals) Insisting on having name typed with strange punctuation Arguments based on fringe on courtroom flag Similarly, on eagle on flagpole Similarly, on so-called “American Flag of Peace”

Great James Surowiecki piece on the Policy Analysis Market that specifically deals with the moral objections: “Let’s admit there’s something ghoulish about betting on an assassination attempt. But let’s also admit that U.S. government analysts ask themselves every day the exact same questions that PAM traders would have been asking … If it isn’t immoral for the U.S. government to be asking these questions, it’s hard to see how it’s immoral for people outside the U.S. government to ask them.”

I don’t quite like the argument that “[allowing] terrorists to bet on themselves, thereby letting them profit from their own misdeeds, [is] a pure red herring.” The problem is not with, for example, a 10 September 2001 bet that two planes would hit the WTC at about 10 o’clock the next day (insider-trading?!), but bets made by terrorists to compensate for the intrinsic “volatility” of their business. There is some small chance that Al Qaeda’s training bases will be, say, decimated by air strikes—so why not manage this risk by betting that this will in fact happen? If it doesn’t, you have your training base; if it does, you have the money to build a new one.

Short and demoralising summary and history of rape laws: “We have created a system that is bad for everyone. The legal rules for rape have been ‘reformed’ to the point that defendants have few of the usual presumptions of innocence while victims are still humiliated and exposed at trial.”

“The Pentagon scraps its startling plan for a terrorism futures market.” “Startling” is about right—politically, there was no way the program could survive. Even Paul Wolfowitz declared: “I share your shock…”

Gross says that though “on its face, the market is not a preposterous idea,” it would ultimately fail because “many of the figures who would have driven the pricing of PAM securities [e.g. Arafat, Bin Laden, suicide bombers] are not what international relations types refer to as ‘rational actors.’” There are two responses to this argument.

First, markets are much better at taking uncertainty into account than he suggests. Though the balance sheets of publicly-traded companies are (thanks to SEC rules, etc.) more open than, say, Hezbollah’s, a company’s value depends on much more than this. Among other things, investors have to be able to predict whether a particular product (Tablet PCs, the new Ford Falcon) or drug (cure for cancer, AIDS) will or won’t succeed in order to accurately value a company—and in this they would seem to have about as much information at their disposal as those predicting the timing and form of terror attacks.

Second, the business of predicting terror attacks is clearly not impossible (e.g. suicide attacks are more likely in Israel than Australia): and making these sorts of predictions is, in fact, exactly what intelligence agencies are supposed to do. Why not force them to quantify the strength of their beliefs by “selling” them in a market? What is the probability that Iraq tried to acquire yellowcake from Africa? If the only odds the CIA will accept are those that imply a probability of less than 5%, then maybe they aren’t so sure after all.

A market would allow decision-makers to separate the experts from the charlatans: if a supposed expert is continually losing money, then perhaps their predictions aren’t so hot after all. (Though in actual fact—if the market ever did run—decision-makers would most likely take their leads from the probabilities the market itself assigned, rather than the predictions of any one analyst.) To some extent, a market would also reduce the influence of ideological biases in the same way that footy tipsters, if they want to win, sometimes have to tip against their own team. Wishful thinking won’t do when your reputation is on the line. James Surowiecki, in an article published in March, put it like this: “Decision markets also skirt the political and personal issues that so often clog the flow of information within organizations. Because people are rewarded only for being right, they have no incentive to hide information, pursue agendas, or go along with the crowd.”

Michael Kinsley: “Nevertheless, watching on television, I found myself feeling, briefly, that politics mattered to me and I, as a citizen, mattered to politics. These are the feelings that Americans feel the lack of when they complain about politics and politicians. How did Blair do it?”

Wow, Moussaoui trial not going at all well for the Justice Department.

“The deal only applies to Mr Hicks. Separate arrangements will have to be negotiated for Mamdouh Habib if he is named as eligible for trial.” Why on earth would you negotiate trial conditions (i.e. not sentences) for Hicks and Habib separately? They’re both Australian, right? It seems, well, racist.

“Conversation” is … “an exchange similar to conversation”? (Definition 2c.) You can do this?

Blind characters suddenly feature in three different ads. (Interesting side issue about whether blind actors should play the blind characters. I don’t see that they necessarily should (actors do act, after all), though this might not leave many jobs for blind actors…)

A photo of this image, with artist Naomie Sunner standing in front of it, is on the front page of this week’s Yarra Leader: “Sunner’s image of a family sitting down to a meal of over-sized corn on the cob is presently plastered on a billboard on the corner of Smith and Gertrude streets. The billboard art project was funded under Yarra Council’s arts development program and is intended to generate debate about genetically modified food.”

I quite like this picture, though I don’t find it as disturbing as I think I’m supposed to. Does Sunner know that corn cobs were once about half an inch long, and that it is only through selective breeding that they’ve got to the size they are today? That Mexican Indian farmers had developed six-inch cobs by A.D. 1500? (This information comes from Jared Diamond’s excellent Guns, Germs, and Steel, which, even more incredibly, says cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and broccoli were once the same plant.)

About Billboard’s new digital download chart: (1) the top-selling single sold only 1,500 copies, meaning that (2) a great variety of tracks must be being downloaded, since Apple are claiming their iTunes store is selling 500,000 tracks a week.

Nation-building seldom successful (and less so when unilateral). (If anyone wants to organise a rally in support of responsible nation-building in Iraq, I will go…)

New York writers on how they got their start. Jonathan Franzen: “The lamest assignment I ever took was to write a piece for Details about buying my first suit. The deal was for $2,000 plus a free suit. I wrote the thing and got a suit from Barneys which I still wear. The real bonus, though, was that Details never ran the piece.”

Attorney General John Ashcroft: “We’ve become too complacent … We’ve grown accustomed to thinking of criticism as something that only happens to people in other political parties. But this administration needs this funding to counter a very real threat to its reputation.”

The “Corsair,” an erogonomic keyboard for pirates.

“Any smoker is socially allowed to talk to any other smoker at any time, to ask for a cigarette or a light. The most successful opening line in the known universe—male or female—is ‘Can I bum a cigarette?’ It’s non-threatening, instantly personal and highly sympathetic. All smokers know what it’s like to crave a cigarette and be without one, and so they are always willing to help, always empathetic and egalitarian. No other social phenomenon is quite like it.”

“Shocked six-year-old Leah Lowland checked out a mystery bulge on her Incredible Hulk doll—and uncovered a giant green WILLY.”

“Costing an Arm and a Leg: The victims of a growing mental disorder are obsessed with amputation.” The author thinks this is partly a social phenomenon: “What needs particular attention are the reasons why some people come to be sexually attracted to amputees or to the image of themselves as amputees. The form paraphilias take differs not merely among individuals, but from one culture and historical period to another. When Richard von Krafft-Ebing was writing about paraphilias in 19th-century Vienna, he described men who were sexually obsessed with handkerchiefs. That paraphilia has largely disappeared. Yet many others have emerged. What is it about our own time and place that has helped create an obsession with amputees?”

What wants should society encourage, discourage, forbid? Alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, coke? Fast cars, safe cars, no cars? Homosexuality, sex-reassignment surgery, amputation? (Link from the past: “Tiresias redux,” in which my favourite conservative writer, Theodore Dalrymple, complains about Professor Donald N. McCloskey’s decision to become a Deirdre.)

Curious: during WWII thousands of Russians deserted to fight for Germany. “Some say Vlasov and the other Russians who collaborated with the Nazis aren’t worth crying over—they were traitors, after all. But I’d say they deserve a little sympathy. They could fight for either Hitler or Stalin, and life offers few choices more dismal than that.”

I’m getting interested in what various people think of Mao: see Masterkill.

“Chatterbox is a Democrat because (among other reasons) Democrats are the party of toleration. A small but telling illustration is the name of Sen. Joe Lieberman’s new communications director. It’s Matt Gobush. …”

CD of poets reading their own poems. (An Atlantic Monthly article links to some similar recordings, including Sylvia Plath reading “Lady Lazarus.”)

Update: Great review at Slate.

Jurors are increasingly deciding to not execute those convicted of a capital offence, in part because defence lawyers “have become more skilled and resourceful in persuading jurors that the lives of their clients are worth saving.” A jury convicted Jeremy Gross of a particularly brutal murder of a convenience store clerk; but when the defence laid out the circumstances of his life before them, the twelve jurors (who had indicated that they supported the death penalty) sentenced him to life without parole.

Julian Barnes reviews Michel Houllebecq: Atomised/The Elementary Particles “was very French in its mixture of intellectuality and eroticism; it was reminiscent of Tournier in the evident pride it took in its own theoretical bone structure. It also had its faults: a certain heavy-handedness, and a tendency for the characters to make speeches rather than utter dialogue. But, in its high ambition and its intransigence, it was clearly superior to the other immediate contender for the [Prix Novembre], a novel that was very French in a different way: elegant, controlled, and old-fashioned…”

Also: “The literary world is one of the easiest in which to acquire a bad-boy reputation, and Houellebecq duly obliged. When the (female) profiler from the Times visited him, he got catatonically drunk, collapsed face down into his dinner, and told her he’d answer further questions only if she slept with him. Houellebecq’s wife was also enlisted, posing for the photographer in her underwear and offering a loyal quote of treasurable quality. ‘Michel’s not depressed,’ she told the interviewer. ‘It’s the world that’s depressing.’”

Michael Kinsley says: privatise marriage. (I really like this idea—as he explains, it solves a whole lot of problems all at once. True, the institution of marriage is embedded into various laws and regulations, but as Kinsley says, “in all these areas, marriage is used as a substitute for other factors that are harder to measure, such as financial dependence or devotion to offspring.” And since we’re having to figure out how to measure these factors in order to recognise de facto relationships, why not go the whole way and abolish government-sanctioned marriage altogether?)

Bottled water is neither safer nor tastier than tap water. (Also: Coke and Pepsi both “charge more for their plain water than their sugar water.”)

Tony Jones interviews Christopher Hitchens. It’s all interesting (as you might expect)—here’s how Hitchens distinguishes between Iraq and Zimbabwe: “I think in order for international action to be taken … about four things have to happen.” The state must: (1) have “a proven record of attacks on neighbouring countries and the intention to do so again”; (2) sponsor terrorist and gangster groups; (3) be in violation of the genocide convention and/or be a major threat to the survival of one’s own people; and (4) be searching for “weapons that violate all known non-proliferation treaties.”

“What part of ‘I’m f--king sorry’ don’t you understand?”

(I’m sort of glad in a way that Movable Type is finally getting some licensing grief. The software itself is excellent, but it has always irked me that it wasn’t GPL’ed. I use a lot of GPL’ed software, but I use a lot of commercial, non-GPL’ed software too: my problem with Movable Type is not that it’s not Free Software, but that it’s not Free Software despite relying on a large amount of software that is—software (like Perl and its libraries, MySQL, and Linux) that represent many orders of magnitude more work than that which went into Movable Type. Has Movable Type or TypePad contributed to The Perl Foundation? Pledged to?)

The really messy politics surrounding lesbian female-to-male transsexuals: “Having lived through the fiery feminist years, when challenging male power was central to a particular agenda, some lesbians have gone so far as to say they feel betrayed by those ‘transitioning’—the street parlance for crossing genders. Twenty years ago life as a butch lesbian seemed the obvious path for a masculine-identified gay female. Now, young lesbians immediately enter a community in which the option to change genders is readily available—an option that some say they might be taking up too lightly, injecting their bodies with testosterone and having radical breast-reduction surgery before they’ve had time to explore who they might be as adults.”

Twenty questions/answers: the situation in Iraq now. (I wish more papers would run stories like this—updates, backgrounders, and so on.)

Media Watch says Phillip Adams didn’t plagiarise. What Adams wrote (Weekend Australian Magazine, May 31, 2003):

“Jacques amused himself, and others, with automata that played the flute and the organ. And then there was his immensely successful copper duck. History records that the creature would peck away at food, apparently swallow it through a flexible neck and then, voila! excrete it onto a silver dish. First displayed in 1739, the duck was the toast of Paris. ‘Without the shitting duck,’ said Voltaire, ‘there would be nothing to remind us of the glory of France.’”

What Schuessler wrote (New York Review of Books, Feb 13, 2003):

“While he entertained audiences with automata that played the flute and the organ, his most celebrated invention was a copper duck that realistically ‘gulped’ food through a flexible neck and then excreted it on a silver platter. First displayed in 1739, the duck caused a sensation. ‘Without the shitting duck,’ Voltaire quipped, ‘there would be nothing to remind us of the glory of France.’”

“Didn’t make the grade”? Huh? (Parallels spotted by Professor Bunyip.)

(Mich, from a fridaysixpm discussion I can’t manage to link to…)

Anne Applebaum’s exerience: people are much more aware of, and respectful of, differences of (political) opinion in Washington than in New York. “… young people move nowadays not only to find interesting high-tech jobs but in order to live somewhere they find politically and culturally congenial. They look not only for neighborhoods with decent coffee bars, in other words, but for neighborhoods with appealing political attitudes. Increasingly, this country is segregated not by race or class but by politics.”

Artists getting toey about sales of singles (instead of albums) at the iTunes Music Store, etc. (As time goes on, I think it’ll get harder and harder for digital music/P2P enthusiasts to maintain the view that artists’ and listeners’ interests are perfectly, seamlessly, aligned, and that record companies and the RIAA are nothing but a malevolent force.)

Turns out that the “E-Mail This Article” feature of NY Times stories works with articles older than a week (that you otherwise have to pay for). So, if you get a page which links to for-fee Times articles, run this nytimes emailer bookmarklet on the original page, then select the link again. (The bookmarklet converts links to pages to links to “Email This Article” pages, which you can then use to get the article sent to you.)

(Also, if you select the “Send abstract and link to full coverage” option, you might get a link that works forever.)

Update: If all your pages go through an XSL style sheet at some stage, you can add this xsl:template to your code to add an “(email this)” link after every existing NY Times link (example):

<xsl:template match="a">
  <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
  <xsl:if test="starts-with(@href, 'http://www.nytimes.com/')">
    <xsl:text> (</xsl:text>
    <a href="http://ea.nytimes.com/cgi-bin/email?REFURI={@href}">
      email this
    </a>
    <xsl:text>) </xsl:text>
  </xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

(Go XSL!)

Graphic proof: fully-inflated sex dolls look ridiculous.

In the end, they get us all: “The Marketing of No Marketing.” “[Naomi] Klein’s view is that [a grass-roots backlash against the incursion of brands into public life] would feed a new wave of activists who targeted corporations. Stewart’s view is that [No Logo] contains ‘many good marketing ideas.’ He says it ‘really articulated the feelings, the coming feelings, of the consumer out there: eventually people are gonna get sick of all this stuff’—all this marketing—‘and say enough is enough.’”

Tremendous history of music in the Twentieth Century—the technical, economic, legal and social—and how each aspect influenced the others. (Very long.)

Two parts to this Kinsley piece: (1) an argument that it doesn’t really matter whether or not Iraq had WMDs that I didn’t really understand; and (2) more on the futility of polls—among other examples of out-and-out ignorance, about one in three people believe that WMDs have been discovered. (Kinsley is particularly good on the inexplicable reluctance of people to answer “don’t know”—although I would expect that most people would request some thinking time if government policy did in fact depend on their response.)

Iraq’s National Museum is not missing very many items at all. “… I conclude two things from all this. The first is the credulousness of many western academics and others who cannot conceive that a plausible and intelligent fellow-professional might have been an apparatchiks of a fascist regime and a propagandist for his own past. The second is that—these days—you cannot say anything too bad about the Yanks and not be believed.”

Fun “L.A.’s Sexiest” heat report. Heidi Fleiss (a judge): “Some beautiful people are not sexy … George Clooney is not sexy. Benicio del Toro is very sexy. Taschen books are sexy. Sexy is when you stand next to someone and you want to say, ‘Get away from me before I rape you.’”

A strange hobby: Greg Packer shows up to various events, seeks out journalists, gets quoted on just about anything.

[Update: AP tells its reporters to “find other people to quote.”]

How to record a cover song: “you issue the copyright owner a notice of intention to obtain a compulsory mechanical licence” then pay them 8¢, or 1.55¢ per minute (whichever is greater) per copy. (You don’t need the copyright owner’s permission.)

(I suppose this also means that 10¢ is about the least you’re ever going to pay for a track from an on-line music retailer.)

“Top 10 Pictures of Thom Yorke Looking Pretentious.” (Yorke: “We operate like the U.N. I’m America.”)

Star Wars kid parody—?! (adm: “parody on so many levels, I get confused just thinking about it.”)

Michael Kinsley’s gotten a bit wilder since he stopped having to be a cautious, responsible editor, but this is a good article on liberties, freedoms, etc., and how they must be vigilantly defended against incipient threats (such as the Patriot Act). (Ooh, preëmption!) Some good lines: (1) “These violations [immigration violations by non-citizens], by the way, suggest a greater love of freedom than most American citizens have ever had to demonstrate.” (2) “The American Civil Liberties Union is alarmed, but the ACLU’s function, which I admire and support, is to be alarmed before I am, like the canary down the mineshaft.”

Style Wars: “a 1983 documentary about the world of NYC graffiti.”

Fascinating: Tucker Max writes about his sexcapades with Miss Vermont (Katy Johnson), judge issues temporary injunction ordering Max to remove all references to Johnson from his site on the grounds (I think this is right—the article rambles a bit) that he disclosed embarrassing private facts and/or is making commercial use of Johnson’s image without her consent. (For the most part, Johnson doesn’t dispute the facts.)

Is he serving a legitimate public interest? “If Ms. Johnson is selling young girls books promoting abstinence and sobriety and creating and publishing ‘character education’ cartoons, her choice to give drunken blowjobs in a guy’s kitchen, or fuck someone she’s just met in her SUV allows for, if nothing else, an informative contextualization.” I love this legal tactic (from Johnson’s Affidavit): “I fear that more will continue to read these stories, including my father, and associate me with TUCKER MAX and his adult audience.” Max can’t write about you because otherwise your father will find out?!

[“Free speech or privacy?”—IHT report. “Santucci [Johnson’s lawyer] did not respond to an e-mail message asking whether his issuing a news release was at odds with his request to seal the court file.”]

“In Japan, ‘Ringu’ made $6.6 million; ‘The Ring’ made $8.3 million there in its first two weeks.” How’s that for cultural imperialism? (Movie producer Roy Lee hawks Asian movies to Hollywood studios.)

Goody or baddie? Dathar Khashab may have been a member of the Baath party, but, as director general of an oil refinery, he also knows how it works.

Three teenagers who teach FBI agents how to IM like 13-year-old girls receive a letter of commendation from the FBI: “One agent kept insisting that he was right when he answered on a quiz that Justin Timberlake was more popular than Destiny’s Child. Another was miffed when the girls told the class that Led Zeppelin was just not cool. Some kept wondering why ‘l2m’ in instant messaging couldn’t be ‘love to meet,’ instead of ‘listen to music.’”

I was wondering about this: “passive-aggressive” pretty much means nothing more precise than “pain in the ass.”

Pew Center survey of world opinion (chaired by Madeleine Albright!) finds that the U.N. is thought to be less relevant now that before the war, and that people thought more favourably of the U.S. a year ago than they do today. (Though in all cases support for the U.S. has grown over the last three months.) Some results that were surprising/interesting:

• In many Muslim countries Bin Laden rates highly as a “world leader” considered to “do the right thing regarding world affairs.” (In the Palestinian Authority, 71% of respondents think this of Bin Laden, compared to 69% for Arafat and 32% for Chirac.) King Abdallah has the most support (in Muslim countries); Chirac would seem to be second.
• Lots of countries are disappointed by the lack of Iraqi military resistance. In Morocco, 93% are disappointed, but 58% of South Koreans are disappointed, as are 50% of Brazilians (?!).
• Only 15% of Russians feel they have free elections.
• In most parts of the world “the impact of international financial organizations such as the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization is seen as much more positive than negative.” (“Overwhelmingly” so in Africa.) A majority of Filipinos believe that anti-globalisation protestors have had a positive influence on their country; this is not true anywhere else.
• Americans have a more favourable view of ethnic and racial minorities than Western Europeans. “African Americans and Hispanics are viewed much more positively in the U.S. than are Turks in Germany, North Africans in France, and Albanians in Italy.”
• In Canada and Europe, a majority believe that it is possible to be moral without believe in God. In the United States and the rest of the world, “agreement is nearly universal that personal morality is linked to belief in God.” (On this question, Australia wasn’t polled.)
• Of all the countries surveyed, India had the strongest “nationalistic sentiment”—74% believe that Indian culture is superior to other cultures, 61% believe India must be protected against foreign influence, and 60% believe parts of other countries belong to India. (The four next most “nationalistic” countries were Turkey, Bangladesh, South Africa and Pakistan.)

(Is public opinion good for anything?)

Matrix theology: “As the Architect reveals, Neo is not the first One, but rather the sixth. Why the sixth? The answer is that Neo’s five previous incarnations represent the Five Books of Moses that make up the Old Testament. Neo (representing Christ, and thus the New Testament) differs from his five predecessors in his capacity to love.”

Salam responds to claims that his family had ties to the Ba’ath party. (A story in The Guardian contains more backstory, as well as the news that Salam will soon be writing a column for the paper.)

How very strange! “The Florida woman who’s suing for the right to wear a Muslim headdress in a driver’s licence photograph” was: (a) previously known as Sandra Keller, and converted to Islam in 1997; (b) arrested in 1999 for battering a foster child; and (c) photographed (without headdress) as part of the process; TSG have the photo. (She later pleaded guilty; two children were removed from her care.)

There’s a great article in yesterday’s Australian Financial Review about how Washington—which in 2001 convinced Vietnamese officials (“reared on Marxist-Lenist economics”) to sign a free-trade agreement—are now allowing Vietnam to sell only $US1.7bn of clothing to the U.S. each year. (This because whilst in 2001 Vietnam sold only $50m to the U.S., this increased to $950m in 2002, and was expected to hit $2.4bn this year—the author noted that the Vietnamese were simply doing what poor nations traditionally do: “sew their way out of poverty, as quickly as possible.”)

I hope that article makes it to Rushford’s archive; I haven’t been able to find it online anywhere. Anyway, the above article is good too, and describes how many poor countries pay more in tariffs than many rich countries. For example, last year Cambodia paid $152m in tax on exports of $964m, whilst Singapore paid $96m on $14.8bn of exports.

Arianna Huffington’s reasons for being against SUVs—that they fund terrorism—were particularly silly; this is a great take-down.

On the search for an abstract definition of the kilogram. (That is, one that isn’t defined by a (unique) physical object, in this case by chunk of heavily guarded metal sitting in a “château” outside Paris.)

Interesting: “One reason the kilogram has lagged behind the other units is that there has been no immediate practical benefit to increasing its precision.”

(The piece also mentions that Japan had to surrender their replica kilogram block after WWII. So only countries in good international standing get a kilogram of their own? And was it physically (and cermonially) taken from them, or did someone just bounce it down the stairs a few times?)

“The New Yorker Goes to War.” The subtitle—“How a Nice Magazine Talked Itself Into Backing Bush’s Jihad”—neatly captures the tone of this piece. (The author’s first thought, when faced with The New Yorker’s (putative) change of heart, seems to be not that the magazine is wrong, but that it has let him down.)

“The New Yorker may be just one example of a magazine that has lost its bearings, but, given its journalistic track record, its massive circulation (nearly a million) and the remarkable hold it still has on a major chunk of the reading public, it’s an unusually important one. Where once it used its institutional heft to help broaden American politics, now it is helping to narrow them.”

I don’t think Lazare’s problem is that The New Yorker doesn’t broaden like it once did: it’s that the magazine is not as liberal as it once was.

“Actually there was something novel about this occasion, but it passed utterly below the radar. Discretion prevented anyone from mentioning that Bush’s outfit gave him a very vivid basket.”

“Katayama’s interiors are purposefully designed to be experienced independent of what is being sold.” “You’re not just buying the product,” Katayama says, “You’re also buying the time you spend.”

“A six year old has a crush on me…”

Official Matrix website has section on the philosophy of the Matrix, with papers written by real philosophers! James Pryor (Princeton) asks “What’s So Bad about Living in the Matrix?” and gives three reasons for why life in the Matrix would suck (search for “three possibilities”); I’m not convinced! (I remember arguing a similar point with my high-school English teacher over Nineteen Eighty-Four.)

“The 86 Rules of Boozing.”

“Why is it so difficult to provide universal health care?” The U.S. apparently spends 14% of G.D.P. on health care, or twice as much as Britain and Japan. The article doesn’t mention it, but this is despite Britain’s N.H.S. being free to all (and therefore supposedly subject to the problem of infinite demand).

High school senior exhibits life-size self-portrait outside school cafeteria; the painting has her left breast exposed—officials make her take it down.

“Here’s a terrible confession: sometimes I’ll meet someone and think ‘If you were a character in a book I’d probably feel sorry for you. But as a real person, you’re very annoying and I want you to go away.’ ”

Richard Posner on liberalism and conscription. A nice observation: “… since the left has been notably unsuccessful in restricting economic liberty, and the right has been largely unsuccessful in restricting personal liberty, what we have in fact, though it is rarely acknowledged, is an approximation, though a very rough one, to a Millian polity.” (This gets a little weird and unconvincing at the end; I don’t believe that “nation’s admiration for [soldiers] helps to bind the different income classes together.”)

Two parts to this. (1) A nice riff on Maxim, FHM, etc.: “Have you noticed that male chauvinism is making a comeback?” (2) The observation that one particular threat to society—“misogynistic rap culture”— comes not from the progressive’s traditional enemies of the rich, powerful and wellborn, but from the “urban lower class”—and that they haven’t yet figured out how to deal with this. “How do you react when people further down the social pecking order—whether they are disenfranchised whites or underclass urban minorities—are creating a culture you find degrading? How do you criticize that culture without seeming square, elitist, or even racist?”

Curious sort-of defense of Jayson Blair, via charges of hypocrisy and past institutional malfeasance, by the World Socialist Web Site.

Fabulous essay on Milan Kundera. (From Harper’s, Nov 2002.) He’s cashed in on his image as a suffering Czech emigre; why, thirteen years after the Velvet Revolution, has he still not returned to Prague? He humiliates and disfigures his female characters; why has he got a free pass from feminists? (Also: Kundera’s five most recent books are unavailable in Czech!)

(Note that I like Kundera very much—see the Bin Disclaimer!)

What will war do to Iraq? (PDF summary.) (I approve of specific, falsifiable, predictions in the field of political science; they make it more, well, scientific.)

Many of these predictions did not eventuate: the war did not last three months, nor did it claim “48,000–261,000” lives; nuclear weapons were not used, nor was there a civil war; Iraq’s infrastructure did not suffer “enormous damage”; refugees escaping the conflict did not “die in large numbers”; Iraq did not use chemical or biological weapons; oil wells were not set on fire; cities were not destroyed.

My question is (and with reference to a previous entry in which I wondered about the extent to which the disagreement over whether it was right to go to war amounted to a disagreement over the expected results): would Medact have supported the war if the outcome was the outcome the coalition got? Contrariwise, would the coalition have not waged war if the outcome was the outcome described in Medact’s report?

A slaughter-house HR manager interviewed in Gig (wishlisted to me by the delicious Rebekah Jude!) said that at her work everything’s recycled, including the cow magnets. Cow magnets? Apparently, they’re fed to cows to collect the pieces of scrap wire they ingest (which would otherwise slice open their stomachs). (More on cow magnets.)

Harrowing IRC log of Brandon Vedas’s final moments as he overdoses on methadone, vicodin, klonopin, restoril…

Urinal design/where you should pee.

The importance of email: “I mean to say, I enjoyed the boy a great deal in person, even if his email skills were lacking.”

Dealers, don’t forget to purchase your drug tax stamps from the Kansas Department of Revenue!

Surprising: Warren Buffet “still lives in the grey stucco house he bought in 1956 for $31,500.” (Most of this article is about Buffet’s criticism of Bush’s planned tax cuts—but is the world’s second richest man really a credible champion of the poor?)

On Bush’s carrier-top speech: “A U.S.-based British journalist told me that he and his colleagues had laughed through the whole scene. If Tony Blair had tried such a stunt, he said, the press would have demanded to know how many hospital beds could have been provided for the cost of the jet fuel.”

“An Open Letter to Myself”: why you might not want to move to NYC.

“A Guide to Menu English.”

Interview with an N.B.A. camera operator. (Also: nice introduction to the expression “really bringing it.”)

The Be Good Tanyas (awful name for a band), “Ship Out on the Sea.”

Should graduate students be unionised? Pro: they’re not treated very well, and competition between universities will only make things worse. Con: they are treated well, and the relationship between graduate students and faculty is not the same as that between sanitation workers and management.

U.N. diplomats loot cafeterias after food workers call wildcat strike! “The mob then moved on to the Viennese Cafe, a popular snack bar in the U.N.’s conference room facility. It was also stripped bare. The takers included some well-known diplomats who finished off the raid with free drinks at the lounge for delegates. When asked how much liquor was lifted from the U.N. bar, one U.S. diplomat responded: ‘I stopped counting the bottles.’ He then excused himself and headed towards the men’s room.”

Jane Juska’s personal ad: “Before I turn 67—next March—I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.”

“The Rich Dialog of Neo.”

“You ruined my poo.”

Slate is now making money. (Also discussion of how being an arm of Microsoft helps, general analysis of the economics of web publishing.)

(I’ve always liked Slate, and was a subscriber during its “dalliance with subscriptions.”)

Conceptual artists accuse each other of plagiarism, etc.

Gentle narrated walk-through of Grand Theft Auto’s Liberty City.

If gay sex should be legal because it harms no-one, why not incest? (Followup.)

Wow! 8 Mile DVD has featurette “showing Eminem is a series of spontaneous, real-life rap battles” against extras from the final battle sequence.

Wal-Mart’s way of doing business. Apparently Wal-Mart is good for manufacturers: their profits are up, and a survey declared Wal-Mart “the best retailer with which to do business.” Apparently Wal-Mart is good for consumers: low inflation is in part due to Wal-Mart’s low prices, and the company accounts for one-eighth of the growth in US productivity between 1995 and 1999.

I didn’t realise this: it’s in fact not okay for the US government to prefer US companies when spending to US tax-payers’ money (e.g. in rebuilding Iraq) because WTO rules “forbid governments to discriminate against the companies of fellow members when they are looking to spend some money.”

Interactive North African/Middle Eastern geography test.

Roger Ebert interview covering Michael Moore, “progressive” movies, politics…

(I almost always find Ebert interesting (and by “interesting” I don’t mean “provocative”). He’s also the source of one of my favourite thoughts that one can contemplate: what would you most like to see again (or do again, or hear again) for the very first time? Another favourite (from Hanif Kureishi): when the phone rings, who would you most like it to be? And who would you least like it to be? … a third (this one not a question): that out hundreds of millions of potential partners, you seriously consider maybe 1,000. (Herbert Simon.) You can love someone very much, and do much to be with them, and find it inconceivable that you could love anyone else—and yet they were chosen from a set of 1,000 out of a million.)

Why are vibrators more socially acceptable than the male equivalent (whatever that would be)? (I love it when people get all intellectual and thoughtful about sex!)

About Honda’s “cog” ad. (Not fake; it took months to develop and test, and 606 takes over four days.)

New Yorker article on the ethics and economics of AIDS research. This is blurbed as being on whether it’s appropriate to subject AIDS research to the same constraints that govern other medical research, but it actually covers a lot of subjects (and doesn’t actually cover the ethical issue in much depth).

“In 2001, less than two per cent of the twenty billion dollars spent on aids prevention, treatment, and research across the world was devoted to the search for a vaccine.” (Apparently there’s not much incentive to find a vaccine because the ideal vaccine is cheap, and administered once. Also, finding a vaccine looks to be very hard.)

Bush’s subtle discrimination: calling the Iraqis “good and gifted” marks them as special—Americans don’t get such “compliments.” (There’s a great Chris Rock rant about how white people’s idea of a compliment to Colin Powell is that “he speaks so well.”)

rja is back!

On the Marines having second thoughts about draping an American flag from the head of Saddam’s statue: Fred Kaplan speculates that someone back at Centcom watching the toppling on CNN told them to remove it, which would make it a demonstration of both what shouldn’t happen, and what can and should—provided the coalition is pressured enough. (The comments, at the bottom, are interesting too.)

Hitchens gloats: “The next mass mobilization called by International ANSWER and the stop-the-war coalition is only a few days away. I already have my calendar ringed for the date.”

Only 4% of Hollywood’s directors are female.

Why are there still anti-war protests going on? Protests made sense before the war started in that they revealed, to the decision-makers, that a large number of people opposed war. But now that it’s started, it’s not going to stop before Saddam is gone. (And as Marc Cooper writes, “To call off the tanks at this juncture, thereby saving Saddam’s skin, would be a double betrayal of the Iraqi people.”) How do protests, right now, serve the Iraqi people? For protesters to vent their spleen whilst bombs fall is a great extravagance.

What the anti-war protesters should do is not plant banners on warships, but work to ensure Bush, etc. sticks to his promises. Cooper again puts this well: “The responsibilities of the peace movement are far too weighty to be squandered in sputtering and ultimately politically irrelevant feel-good acts of blocking traffic or ripping down fences at military bases. … The peace movement should take an active role in debating and trying to shape the post-Saddam outcome by fighting, first of all, for a thorough roll-up of the Ba’ath regime, for indictment and prosecution of Hussein and his gang, for the fullest democracy possible, respect for the Shiahs and Kurds, for a postwar government that respects human rights. That formula includes an authentic U.S. and international commitment to fund reconstruction and development. And let’s not forget the Bush-Blair promise to finally get serious about the Palestinians.”

William Saletan is more direct: “If you want to minimize the killing, stop resisting the war. Instead, do what you can to make the war transparent and to hold your government accountable for unnecessary deaths. Help the media and human rights organizations monitor the battlefield. Help them get reports and pictures to the people of your country and the world. Build an incentive system that will strengthen your government’s will to spare lives. Its ability will do the rest.”

Timothy Noah solicits advice from PR professionals on behalf of Iraq’s Information Minister. (I’m surprised so many replied actually, but I suppose they know what they’re doing…)

(More of the Minister’s fine work.)

On affirmative action, and college admissions policies: “… This means that colleges like Harvard and Yale can cherry-pick their classes. If Harvard needs an outside linebacker, it can probably choose between an All-Division player with 1450 combined S.A.T. scores and an All-State with 1350. Yale can choose between a legacy [the child of a graduate], a Latina, and a national-science-competition finalist, depending on which hole needs another pigeon, each applicant with two 800s on the S.A.T.s (a credential known as dialling toll-free).” (Harvard apparently rejects twenty-five per cent of its “toll free” candidates.)

Wonderful Mousetrap-style ad for the Accord. (Nice work with the music, too.)

Japanese Adult toys. Hello Kitty “shoulder massager” only $21.50!

How SARS spread from the Metropole Hotel.

McSweeney’s and the short story. McSweeney’s, supposedly an outlet for stories not fitting the mould of the “New Yorker short story” (described by Michael Chabon as a “contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story”), now just as sharply defines a short story genre of its own: the “McSweeney’s short story,” which “substitutes nihilism for epiphany” and rejects “conventional notions of structure, character, or coherence.” (I think another defining (and regrettable) characteristic of the McSweeney’s short story is irrepressible whimsy. A McSweeney’s story can never be too cute, it seems.)

Actually, I’m not very fond of either type of short story. I don’t agree with all of it, but B.R. Meyers’s “A Reader’s Manifesto” goes some way toward explaining my problems with modern fiction.

“More than half a century ago popular storytellers like Christopher Isherwood and Somerset Maugham were ranked among the finest novelists of their time, and were considered no less literary, in their own way, than Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Today any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to be ‘genre fiction’—at best an excellent ‘read’ or a ‘page turner,’ but never literature with a capital L.”

Classic books sell well—over 100,000 copies a year, which is many times more than the best-sellers of a few years ago.

Lt. Col. Tim Collins’s address to the Royal Irish Regiment’s 1st Battalion. c.f. Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech.

(Curiously, there’s several different versions of this speech going around: this one, from the BBC, another at the Weekly Standard, and another at NPR. NPR specifically says that the “sleeping bags” line concludes the speech, but the Weekly Standard puts it at the beginning, and the BBC in the middle…)

How “Shock and Awe” was supposed to work, according to its inventor. (No mitigating circumstance!)

Dahlia Lithwick’s summary of the two University of Michigan affirimative action cases argued before the Supreme Court Court yesterday. “The affirmative action camp is for ‘critical masses’ that look like quotas and for ‘diversity’ that may not bring about diversity. The anti-affirmative action camp is for pretending that other remedies work when it’s clear that you can’t fix race problems by ignoring race.”

What will happen to Iraq’s debt? James Surowiecki argues that “odious debt” should be forgiven—which I approve of, although I hope this won’t make it too hard for poor countries to secure loans. (Countries with high credit ratings (like the US, for example), already pay far less to “service” their loans than countries with low credit ratings—meaning that it costs the US less to borrow the same amount of money.)

International finance is screwed up. Over the last five years, for example, Mexico paid $6bn to the World Bank, India $1.5bn, Indonesia $4.7bn and Nigeria $1.7bn. (See the “net transfer” tables of the “About the World Bank” chapter from their 2002 Annual Report.)

“The Experience Machine.” A strange little video. Not sure what to make of this—is it cute, cool, indulgent, what? (It’s probably important to note that oblivio.com is a website other websites look up to.)

Notes on personal websites: “A very consistent voice cropped up among the new writers: casual, chatty, inoffensive, usually a dash of false self-deprecation, and a kind of subtle condescension—the sound of someone who has been chosen to pass along valuable information to others. This tone of I am interesting, right? was underscored by the guestbooks and comments and karma points and permalinks and trackbacks and referer logs.”

Really … odd: “In response to increasing requests from our viewers, the ‘Big Single’ is made into Realistic Paper Craft at last. Enjoy the authenticity of the model duplicated in the smallest details possible within the limitations of craft paper.”

“All I have to say is, once this is over, the Iraqi people better be the freest fucking people on the face of the earth. They better be freer than me. They better be so fucking free they can fly.” I’m getting a bad feeling about this war.

Zadie Smith’s “Alphabet”—free association on 26 topics. “Girls, (Pretty): … Pretty girls lie at the centre of straight culture, dyke culture, fag culture. They sell everything, they buy everything, they ruin great men and women, and finally they ruin themselves, accidentally, simply by getting old. I think about them. Sometimes I want them and sometimes I worry about them—even though it’s not my business to do so. I wonder about them. …”

“Dead Iraqi Would Have Loved Democracy.” Actually the entire Onion is pretty good this week, right down to the Guide to Prescription-Drug Safety. (“If your pharmacist doesn’t offer to have one with you right there in the store, the shit’s probably no good.”)

About the XM29, the weapon scheduled to replace the M16 in 2008. Fires 5.56mm rounds and 20mm high-explosive rounds—the HE rounds can be set to explode in the air above the target, go through windows and then explode, etc.

(Sometimes I wonder if my (weak and reluctant) support for the war is tainted by my interest in the military, and weapons. I was recently assured that this is okay because I’m a boy but … I still have my doubts.)

Inventor Woody Norris has made a device that can project sound … and some other things too.

Problems of diacritic design for Latin script text faces. (Diacritics are accents, umlauts, and so forth.) A fascinating 30-page thesis detailing the difficulties involved in designing a multi-lingual typeface. Does the dot over the i harmonise with the two dots over the ï? What happens when a î is set next to a f? How should diacritics be aligned?

(The thesis is set in the author’s own Gentium.)

Seems a little broken right now but even the headlines are instructive.

Nate Thayer’s Baghdad diary. Bagdad is seems to be getting more volatile, and more defiant. (Thayer seems to specialise in “extreme” journalism—it was he who in 1997 interviewed Pol Pot in northern Cambodia just before he died.)

Michael Ignatieff: “It is impossible to be certain that improving the human rights of 25 million people is worth the cost because no one knows what the cost will be.” True, no one can know exactly, but it’s certainly possible to assign probabilities (or probability distributions) to the potential outcomes.

Actually, I wonder how much of the disagreement between the pro-war and anti-war camps is over matters of principle, and how much is over matters of fact. Does the pro-war side think the war will be over in 3 weeks, with 1,000 casualties? Does the anti-war side think the war will be over in 3 months, with 100,000 casualities? (I am simplifying; there are certainly many other factors.)

The Red Cross, for example, has medical supplies for 180,000. Does the military think 180,000 will require medical treatment?

How to pronounce “Qatar”: something between “cutter” and “gutter.”

Route 23: Creeps & Weirdos. A questionable anti-public transport ad for Chevy’s Cavalier.

Review of Thomas Struth’s photographs, including comparisons to Andreas Gursky (my love!), Gerhard Richter.

Turkey to send troops into Northern Iraq. Can’t Nato do something about this?

How the Tomahawk cruise missile is changing the nature of war, to the extent of making previously impossible wars (or strikes) possible.

Blair’s speech to the House of Commons. (1) The first quarter or so deals with Iraq’s well-documented breaches and violations of various resolutions and agreements over the past decade and isn’t very revealing or interesting. (2) He claims that a second UN Resolution could have been negotiated had France not indicated that it would be vetoed “whatever the circumstances.” (If this is the case, why could the coalition not offer Iraq (independently of the UN) the resolution that could have been negotiated?) (3) He positions the UN’s response to Iraq as a test of how the UN will deal with other situations in the future. (For example, North Korea.)

Dropped propaganda leaflets. Strange: Arabic doesn’t appear to use Arabic numerals—? (leaflet)

[Arabic Arabic numerals don’t look like English Arabic numerals.]

Sometimes the media, for unfathomable reasons, don’t ask, or don’t answer, obvious questions. Like: were the missiles fired on Kuwait supposedly banned and/or destroyed? (The ABC is reporting that at least two were Scuds, which are definitely banned.)

High stakes Rock, Paper, Scissors: “‘Rock is the aggressive way to go, Martinez said, adding that she plans to use her $1,000 winnings ‘to go someplace warm.’”

Circle Line Party: partying between stations in the back carriages of a tube train.

“A month earlier, in Mexico, Leon Trotsky had had his head split open with an ice axe.”

Was Trotsky killed by a mountaineer’s ice axe or a bartender’s ice pick? I have wondered about this for years. What would an assassin be doing with a (mountaineer’s) ice axe in Mexico City? (Is there some special significance to death-by-ice-axe?) Does a (bartender’s) ice pick split a head open? This is driving me crazy!

“Death to Death”

A Baghdad blogger: “There is no person inside Iraq (and this is a bold, blinking and underlined inside) who will be jumping up and down asking for the bombs to drop.”

By this I think the author means that Iraqis are not excited by the prospect of war because war is the lesser of two very great evils (war is a lesser evil than living with Saddam)—and you can never be excited by the prospect of any sort of evil, especially when you know that it should never have come to this. (That is, Saddam should have been dealt with, over the past decade, in other ways.)

Fuel cells likely to power portable electronics gear before they power cars: fuel cells are cheaper and last longer than batteries, but (at least for cars) gas is better than both.

Commentary from a “lifelong lefty of the commie- pinko-faggot variety”: “But what right do we have to impose our values on them? About as much right as we had to impose ‘our’ values on them Germans. There’s also the small matter of our values being superior—can we lefties get behind that concept?”

Where Kevin Mitnick, convicted computer hacker and neophyte web surfer, went first. (“Don’t be freaked out by advertising,” Goldstein told Mitnick. “It’s everywhere. So is pornography.”)

Historically black university gets Russian students as part of diversification program. (“It’s worse than the education we had in Russia. But it’s America.”)

Interview with Asya Schween, creator of disturbing self-portraits. (Scroll to bottom to see samples.)

“Unofficial” list of British demands—what’s with the “will promise to”/“will pledge to” shit?! How about “will destroy”?

A veto is the same as a “no” to the U.N. Security Council. (Also some Security Council veto history—U.S. and the U.S.S.R. have together vetoed 185 times, France 18.)

Concert-goer hit in head by … the head of a sheep.

On the House of Representatives’ “Freedom Fries.”

“Why are we in space?” The Stennis Space Center FAQ explains that NASA’s funding represents a penny out of every dollar in the U.S. federal budget and that “diverting this money into social programs would provide a very minimal increase for those immediate needs, while eliminating resources devoted to the future and new solutions to problems.” (I don’t think NASA itself is necessarily bad value, though sending people into space might be.)

(NASA used to have a more official “justification” page on one of their sites but I can’t find it now. It was pretty weak, I recall.)

Mel Gibson and Catholic traditionalists. Catholic traditionalists more or less reject the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. (That mass should be conducted not in Latin but in the popular language of each country, etc.) Story also has some information on Gibson’s $25m movie on the life of Jesus, which is being filmed entirely in Aramaic and Latin, without subtitles.

“Think about F.D.R. He had just won World War II. America was at the apex of its power. It didn’t need anyone’s permission for anything. Yet, on his way home from Yalta, confined to a wheelchair, F.D.R. traveled to the Mideast to meet and show respect for the leaders of Ethiopia, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Why? Because he knew he needed them not to win the war, but to win the peace.”

American books are better made than British books. (I will vouch for this.)

“On a round trip from New York to London, according to the calculations of the Edinburgh Center for Carbon Management in Scotland, a Boeing 747 spews out about 440 tons of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.”

I screwed up here before in saying that since a 747-400 carries only 170 tons of fuel (215,000 liters) it can’t produce more than twice that in carbon dioxide. But it probably can: I forgot about the oxygen it takes from the air.

What disturbs me more, though, is that the amount (mass) of gas produced is greater than the amount (mass) of fuel burnt. So a car filled with 40 liters (30kgs) of petrol produces at least 30kgs of (mostly harmful) gas. (Petrol has a specific gravity of 0.75, so a liter of petrol weighs about 750g.) How many tons of petrol do you burn each year? For how long have you been driving?

Also: it’s the Edinburgh Centre, not the Edinburgh Center! You can’t Americanise the spelling of a name!

www.ready.gov caption contest. (Sample of originals.)

British museums, though now largely free (because of lottery money?), still only attracting the rich.

Bill Clinton is apparently being considered for jury duty in Manhattan. (“Apparently” because most of the details were overheard by a court reporter.)

“The Canadians have a sensible proposal for a compromise resolution that could lend some political legitimacy to the coming war against Iraq. …” I quite like this idea, for all the reasons mentioned. Michael Kinsley also has a good piece on various war topics (not just on human shields).

“I’ve Got This Great Idea for a Bold New Ad.” She’s talking about a Levi’s ad (find “buffalos”) … which actually I like.

Strange “dating” system in L.A.’s Korean clubs: “This is how it works: at a guy’s request, a waiter approaches a girl’s booth. He might ask politely if she’d like to be booked. More likely, he’ll grab her by the arm, drag her to a table and force her to sit down. Boy offers Girl a shot of Crown Royal and small talk ensues. But before Boy can offer another drink, Girl blurts, ‘I should get back to my friends’ and leaves. Boy shrugs it off, knowing that another struggling girl will be delivered to his table within minutes.”

Australian P.M. John Howard in the WSJ: “The cost of doing nothing is infinitely greater than the cost of acting.” (You need to register; fake details will do.) A clumsy, not a very powerful piece—for some reason he seems to think that the idea he most strongly needs to defend is that this time a Cold War-style containment policy won’t do—but it’s not too bad, and is at least useful as a clear and for-the-record account of his beliefs.

“I tell Burrows that if he is willing to submit to an interview, I am willing to review his book at length in The Washington Post. The only catch, I said, is that I am going to say that it is, in my professional judgment, the worst novel ever published in the English language.”

“The unhappy truth is that, if the Bush administration wins the war but betrays the peace, the political consequences for the president will be small.”

“Have You Ever Tried To Sell A Diamond?”—how the De Beers cartel created our love for diamonds. (An article in the March 2002 National Geographic discusses “conflict diamonds” (not very revealing extract); Salon summarises the issues.)

Clare Kimmerle is 79 and has worked at the same McDonald’s for nearly 33 years.

Nauru loses contact with the outside world and now no-one even knows who the president is?

Update. Because this story is weirding me out big time, I called the Nauru Consulate-General to find out what was happening. Apparently it really is impossible to call Nauru at the moment, but the woman couldn’t tell me how long this has been going on for, when it will be possible to call Nauru, or what the exact political situation was. Apparently her boss knows more, but she wasn’t in, though she is expected some time this afternoon…

A Fijian website is carrying recent Nauru news about the island’s airline.

Story from the Independent.

Google News search for Nauru.

Using aerial photographs to produce estimates puts number of people at S.F. peace rally at 65,000, not the 200,000 claimed. (Also, why are police estimates generally thought to be underestimates? Why are they biased?)

Some guy interviews protestors at a peace rally. (View for some of the reasons for my post below—in relation to which, I got a complaint: “Your lack of comments drove me craaaazy today!” I’ll add comments soon!)

Heh: 0.7% of English and Welsh (is there a name for England plus Wales?) give “Jedi” as their religion on census, census takers strike back with: “Whatever its motive, the Jedi campaign may have worked in favour of the Census exercise. Census agencies worldwide report difficulties encouraging those in their late teens and twenties to complete their forms.”

Cypriot politics quite interesting at the moment. (Greek side recently elected anti-reunification president.)

“Tell people the truth. Saddam does not threaten us today. He can be deterred. Taking him out is a war of choice—but it’s a legitimate choice. It’s because he is undermining the U.N., it’s because if left alone he will seek weapons that will threaten all his neighbors, it’s because you believe the people of Iraq deserve to be liberated from his tyranny, and it’s because you intend to help Iraqis create a progressive state that could stimulate reform in the Arab/Muslim world, so that this region won’t keep churning out angry young people who are attracted to radical Islam and are the real weapons of mass destruction.”

I didn’t attend any peace rally last weekend because, well, I don’t think I support the same sort of peace that the peace movement seems to want: the temporary and cheap peace wrought by appeasement, lack of courage, an unwillingness do very much about other people’s problems, and so forth. (Pastor Niemöller’s “First they came for the Jews…” is an argument for preëmptive action as much as it is an argument for the spirited defence of persecuted minorities.)

(Actually, I’m not sure if I completely agree with Friedman on the need for war but I think I am closer to war than no war. Christopher Hitchens has more on France’s deceit.)

Profile of architects Diller + Scorfido. (Of the previously linked Blur Building.) They’re including a wall cut from MOMA (the site of Duchamp’s urinal) in their Whitney retrospective.

Marketing news: pros and cons (mostly cons) of Ford’s effort to make the name of every Ford car an F-word.

BBC Lomo documentary to air 19th February. Site has some very odd videos of random people describing Lomos: “Gnome,” “Biscuits.”

Several photos of the same thing, taken with Lomo and Coolpix, to facilitate comparison.

(The photos that appear at the top of this page are all Lomos.)

Doing dishes by hand vs. the dishwasher: more energy, more water, and not as clean. (How is “energy” calculated?)

“Over the next two and a half years, Güntürkün recorded 124 scientifically valid kisses in public places across the United States, Germany and Turkey.” Hooray for scientifically valid kisses! (People kiss to the right, apparently.)

“You Can’t Beat Off with Nuclear Arms”

Chirac’s preuves indiscutables: undisputed proof or indisputed proof?

Dump of translation-related stuff:

• A few months ago news organisations reported that North Korea had admitted, in a radio broadcast, that the country posessed nuclear weapons. South Korea said that the broadcast was unclear, that a syllable was missing, and that North Korea merely said that it was “entitled” to nuclear weapons. I suppose they were wrong about that.
• In a foreword to the 5th “definitive” edition (and 5th translation!) of The Joke, Milan Kundera describes his rising exasperation with the unexpectedly grueling process. (Amazon’s review: “Translators, writers, readers, all can be offended by the authorial gracelessness, publishing astigmatism, and general waste of paper this amounts to. Buy someone’s first novel instead.”—I found his earnestness charming.)
• Translating Ulysses into Chinese.

(Timothy Noah’s I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-A-Hawk “confession” is also good.)

Hajj scaling problems: “The most hazardous part of the hajj is the stoning of the pillars at Mina, which is where Tuesday’s catastrophe took place. The ceremony, in which Muslims symbolically rebuke the devil by throwing 21 pebbles at three pillars, has changed little over the past 14 centuries. What has changed is the number of participants.at least 2 million people a year now partake, according to unofficial estimates. That’s thought to be a fourfold increase over the number of pilgrims who made the trip in 1970. The pillars, of course, have remained the same size, making access more difficult.”

Shane Warne’s mother gave him a diuretic… (1) When you’re being tended to by some of the best sports doctors in the country, why take a tablet from your mum? (2) What is Warne’s mother doing with a diuretic anyway? Panadol I could understand. (3) He should know to not take anything without running it by his doctor first! Surely! I am suspicious.

Reebok to parody Nike “streaker” ad. (Which is fake, apparently.) Has anyone seen this? [Update: Terry Tate, Streaker Tackle.]

Swap DVDs for a dead raccoon! Buy human breast milk!

What’s happened to Free Willy’s Keiko: he’s in Iceland, and being taught how to behave like a wild killer whale. (This seems to be an unseemly amount of money to spend on single whale.)

Quintessential “Talk of the Town”: the sculptor of “Crouching Man” is now a ninety-three-year-old retired farmer.

Percentage of the $1.1 trillion in Iraqi oil contracts that are held by French or Russian companies: 69. “Curiously free of the usual conspicuous liberal bias” the Smarter Harper’s Index remarks.

Was the Space Shuttle useful? Columbia’s main contribution to human knowledge: “By the end of this year, we will know more than we ever did before about how to collect, catalog, and analyze the debris of a space-flight disaster.”

Some human space flight advocacy: (1) “What can a man do on Mars that a robot cannot?” / “PLANT A FUCKING FLAG ON THE PLANET.”; (2) John F. Kennedy, 1962: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…”

(But I think putting humans into space is too expensive. Can’t we wait 50 years for cheaper and better technology?)

“What’s so controversial about Picasso’s Guernica?”

“But diversity, or rather, affirmative- action- as- diversity, is not good for all. In addition to the longstanding problem of disadvantaging some in order to advantage others, the diversity rationale also insultingly assumes that black students bring a black ‘point of view,’ Asians an Asian one and so on, thus reifying the very barriers of race and ethnicity that affirmative action is meant to erase. And why should racial and ethnic ‘points of view’ outweigh those forged by class or culture? Why, as a professor recently suggested to me, shouldn’t the presence of the R.O.T.C. on campus be seen as a means to ensure representation of a ‘military’ point of view otherwise absent from elite universities?”

Sophie Dahl before and after shots.

Spam detection with gzip. (Tech-ish.) Note gzip has 32k buffer—see comments.

“No one is saying that the hiring of Chef Bobo by the Calhoun School, on the Upper West Side, was an intentionally provocative gesture, but clearly it puts the onus on Manhattan’s other private schools to respond…”

How should we use our power? Iraq and the war on terror. Christopher Hitchens and Mark Danner at Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, this Tuesday.

A history of conscription in the USA: until WWII, individual rights trumped the responsibility to serve your country.

Ideology and Sustainability: “For many, prophesying doom if we don’t change our ways, is a signal of virtue.” Part of a set of pages on progress and sustainability. (The author is, on this issue, pleased to be an “extreme optimist,” which is “a person who believes his country will probably survive even if it doesn’t take his advice.”)

A fine, fine, use of the internet: man records 4,788 dreams had since 1972, types out most of them. They’re cross-referenced: Iran, Bonnie, Danny DeVito, mirrors…

I’m in San Francisco now and guess what, they have Starbucks here too. Got here on Sunday afternoon and ran to the supermarket first thing to see if they still had egg nog. (It’s Christmas-only.) Nope. Today I trailed my parents to the City Lights bookstore, Ghirardelli Square (has great architecture/design bookstore) and bits of downtown. Rode the cutest little tram! They have trams, buses, trolley buses, cable cars and two varieties of train here.

Glenn Reynolds profile.

A decidedly Orwellian turn: the Economist reacts to the DCSD’s poorly written anti-Lomborg judgement (see bottom).

(Lomborg has taught me not that environmentalists can be ignored (they can’t) but that environmental problems represent just some of the problems the world faces, and in deciding where to allocate resources, these concerns must be set against each other. What is the cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol? What are the benefits—and are they guaranteed? Does it make more sense to immunise children against disease, eradicate malaria, provide fresh drinking water to those without it, save the whales? I think it fair to ask these sorts of questions of those soliciting donations: if you’re from, say, Save the Children, why does your charity deserve my money over AI, the Royal Children’s Hospital, Greenpeace, the local school?)

One Look At My Music Collection Will Show You How Much I Respect Women

Medical products and drugs are generally built for white people. (For example, the colour of the (original) Band-Aid is the colour of white people.) I’m somewhat sympathetic to both sides here. (Although I don’t think it’s reasonable to regard peachy-beige contraceptive patches as an affront to your race. Surely it’s more an irritation or annoyance?) Companies can’t produce a different version of their product for every possible group. Sometimes it’s possible to cater to only one: park benches and stairways, for example, are designed (and can only be designed) for people of normal height.

Paying for Moveable Type: “… I feel that $65 is insignificant compared to the value I’ve received over the last nine months.”

I find it quite fascinating that people are very much willing to pay for MT, but not for any of the software that MT depends on. To run, MT needs Perl and lots of Perl libraries. It may also need MySQL, and it probably uses Linux or FreeBSD. Each of these pieces of software is the product of several orders of magnitude more work than that which went into MT. (Even the Perl libraries that come with MT are bigger than the whole of MT: the MT “with libraries” distribution is 3.8Mb, of which 1.8Mb is in the extlib directory (non-MT code); 0.7Mb is in the lib directory (MT code); templates and other bits and pieces make up the remainder.) What’s more, these programs (but not MT itself) are Open Source.

So why do people pay for MT, but not for the other bits of software responsible for getting their writing out onto the web? Is it because MT is the visible front-end to all the bits, whilst the back-end stuff is not? Do the people behind MT seem to deserve it more, or need it more? (It is their full-time job.) Is it because MT is written by two identifiable people, rather than hundreds? Is it simply because they directly ask for money? It’s a mystery to me, but the answer is surely worth knowing for all sorts of reasons. (For example, if it turns out that people are willing to pay money for good front-ends, it might be possible to do something about free software usability (more).)

On Arianna Huffington’s really silly terrorist-linked campaign against SUVs: “The Detroit Project anti-SUV ads let all other drivers off the hook. Is somebody who uses an SUV to cart their family around town really that much worse than a joy rider in a sports car? Is there some minimum miles-per-gallon threshold we can cross and be absolved from all complicity in global terror?”

A cynical Mac lover reports from MacWorld SF. (I’m a little late posting this I suppose.) “Because the Mac Culture is dynamic and constantly changing, except for CPU speeds…”

The Triumph of Hope Over Self-Interest: “People vote their aspirations … none of us is really poor; we’re just pre-rich.”

The mathematics behind the tiling pattern used on the exterior walls of Melbourne’s new Federation Square buildings. The pattern is aperiodic (it doesn’t repeat) despite being made from identical triangles.

Odd little Q&A with Frank Gehry: (1) he didn’t submit a proposal for the Twin Towers site because the sponsoring body was only offering $40,000 per team, and he felt this wasn’t enough; (2) in January 2002 he considered asking Guiliani up to Yale to meet his class, who had been considering how to build an extraordinary public space.

Coke is experimenting with a smaller, slimmer, Red Bull-style can.

Recently I’ve been writing some log analysis code to produce detailed page-level statistics, but a side-effect is that it’s now possible to illustrate what I call the “deformed people” effect.

Basically, it so happens that inserting the terms used to find a page into the page itself increases the ranking of that page. Not so unexpected, I suppose, but the size of effect was a little surprising.

The graph below shows hits per week to the “Meet the Cripples” page linked above; the extra hits in recent weeks came via Google:

This page quite suddenly became popular because:

1. until recently the page contained the words deformed and people—though not next to each other.
2. the previous iteration of my statistics software included referrer information on the page itself (mirror).
3. searching for deformed people (used to) suggest this link a few pages into the search results.
4. a persistent few clicked this far into the search results, and then view the “Meet the Cripples” page, which
5. (through the stats software) added the text deformed people to my page.
6. Google, now seeing the phrase deformed people on my page, increased its ranking to #1 (mirror).

So, it seems that it’s possible to boost the rank of some pages (note that no page directly links to “Meet the Cripples,” so the probably more reliable PageRank technology isn’t involved) by tuning the text so that it better matches the sort of things people are looking for. (Which you can easily determine by looking the page’s referrers.)

The speed of gravity is experimentally determined to be the same as the speed of light, meaning that “if the Sun suddenly disappeared from the centre of the Solar System, the Earth would remain in orbit for about 8.3 minutes—the time it takes light to travel from the Sun to the Earth. Then, suddenly feeling no gravity, Earth would shoot off into space in a straight line.”

Update: Nature has the same story, but told more professionally. (I don’t like New Scientist much.) The second paragraph states that the measurement is only approximate (as opposed to the third-from-last), and it also tells in more detail how the measurement was made. There’s no equivalent of NS’s nice Earth- shooting- into- space visual image though.

Analysis of Bush’s Presidency. “George Bush’s party is less economically libertarian than the Republican Party of the 1980’s and 1990’s.” Not a libertarian? That’s because he’s a socialist—at least according to Jane’s, who are taken by his bailout of the airline industry.

retronyms: once guitar, now acoustic guitar; once watch, now analogue watch; once movie, now silent movie. (Not recognised by OED, M-W.)

Pepys’s diary, known as a “diary” for almost 200 years, is now being repositioned as a weblog... First webloggers declare newspapers’ days are numbered, now it comes to this? Just leave Anne Frank the fuck alone, okay?

“I couldn’t believe I was alone in thinking this [you weren’t], so I didn’t tell even my closest friends about it.” With friends like those…

The New Yorker will apparently make money this year (i.e. 2002), for the first time since 1985. Experts in magazine finance are unconvinced.

“The New Yorker under Mr. Remnick remains the magazine world’s rough equivalent of doing the Lord’s work…” So sad to see such a beautiful sentiment lodged in a sentence as screwed as this. (“Working for The New Yorker …”? Or is editing the magazine itself the rough equivalent of the Lord’s work?)

I’m reading the letters of Harold Ross at the moment. They’re fascinating, as are all pieces of writing originally intended for none (like diaries) or one (like letters) that find their way to the general public. Ross was keen on Dorothy Parker: “The verses came and God Bless Me! if I never do anything else I can say I ran a magazine that printed some of your stuff.” (Another reason, I think, was that Parker was the sort of person who needed compliments delivered often, and delivered well.)