Gulfstream: 2004

Nice Jerry Orbach encomium.

When adjusted for improvements in medical care, Iraq is about as dangerous as Vietnam.

Chinese property developer builds replica of 17th Century French chateau in suburban Beijing, names it after himself, and declares, “it cost me $50 million … but that’s because we made so many improvements compared with the original.”

Countries in which a small minority holds much of the wealth. (In Indonesia, the Chinese (3% of the population) hold 70% of the wealth—though the credibility of these figures is somewhat undermined by the peculiar claim that Bill Gates has 40% of America’s wealth…) The preceding Q&A with Amy Chua is worthwhile too.

Conservative group explains how to legally celebrate Christmas (in the USA). I don’t really understand the point of trying to avoid Christianity at Christmas when Christmas happens to be a national public holiday, and only Christian holy-days are so recognised. (That is, Christianity is clearly given special treatment.) Both Singapore and Malaysia, for example, have national public holidays that observe Christian, Hindu, and Muslim holy-days, as well as Chinese New Year.

Intriguing (if condescending) social engineering experiments in Bogotá: mimes mock jaywalkers; citizens respond to the behaviour of others by flashing “thumbs-up” and “thumbs-down” cards at them…

“But can a community govern itself by Jesus’s teaching of mercy alone? It is sinful for the Amish to withhold forgiveness—so sinful that anyone who refers to a past misdeed after the Amish penalty for it has ended can be punished in the same manner as the original sinner. ‘That’s a big thing in the Amish community,’ Mary said. ‘You have to forgive and forgive.’”

Backgrounder on the UN’s oil-for-food scandal.

BBC gets suckered by pranksters pretending to be Dow representatives who claim that Dow is offering $12 billion in compensation; this is Dow’s response. “Dow shareholders will see NO losses, because Dow’s policy towards Bhopal HAS NOT CHANGED. Much as we at Dow may care, as human beings, about the victims of the Bhopal catastrophe, we must reiterate that Dow’s sole and unique responsibility is to its shareholders, and Dow CANNOT do anything that goes against its bottom line unless forced to by law.” (No! No! No! Not sure where I got this, or why I believed it—in fact this response is another Yes Men prank.)

Michael Ignatieff: “the promotion of democracy by the United States has proved to be a dependably good idea.”

The first few (amazingly small) capitals of the United States.

Left-handers exist because they’re better at fighting?

“How To Govern From the Clink.” (Two Indian MPs are currently in jail.)

Wow! Radiohead mixed with the Beatles. (more)

“This is rock-and-roll.”

Dahlia Lithwick on the Supreme Court’s take on medical marijuana.

Yale get Harvard fans to hold up signs saying “WE SUCK”? But their “WE SUCK” photo looks way better than the one in the video. Photoshop?

“i’m turning into a dude.”

“Head of the state’s crime command Graham Morgan says computer problems have meant that in some cases the entire pornographic image was revealed when the email was opened.”

Breakdown of votes in the Ukrainian Presidential election. It would have been nice if the media had made it clear that there’s, uh, a PERFECT DOWN-THE-MIDDLE SPLIT.

“Just as him, ‘Which are you?’” (I like the piano!)

Review of The Pope in Winter. The Pope wears contacts! (Reviewer remarks that this “hints at personal vanity.”)

Why is all the media complaining about the NBA brawl? Fans loved it! “At this exact moment, millions of people were talking, probably for the first time in history, about a regular season NBA game.”

A 55 year sentence for selling pot? Even tough-on-crime judges think it’s too much.

On the digital art market.

“JFK Reloaded is just plain creepy.” (“thanks for doings this important research and sharing your controversial conclusions.)

The future of public transport? Looks like proprietary cars on a proprietary road. This company is trying to do the same thing.

Business people who box.

Nice meeting-Radiohead story.

Going home to fix our parents’ computers.

Interview with a cocky Shin Bet interrogator.

Seinfeld donates his puffy shirt to the Smithsonian.

Why European support for the US has waned (for some reason described in terms of “legitimacy”). “U.S. legitimacy among Europeans rested on three pillars, all based on the existence of the Soviet communist empire. The sturdiest pillar was Europe’s perception that the Soviet Union posed a strategic threat to the West—a reality made manifest by hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops parked in the center of Europe—and its understanding that only Washington possessed the power to deter Moscow. Europeans also perceived the Soviet Union as a common ideological threat. The United States prided itself on being the “leader of the free world,” and most Europeans agreed. Finally, Cold War bipolarity conferred what might be called ‘structural legitimacy’ on the United States. The two superpowers’ roughly equal strength meant that U.S. might, although vast, was kept in check.”

Er, maybe it’s not a good idea to get theater critics to write reviews of math books. “An accumulation of random data always generates this curve of probability, as if conjuring it out of the air.” No, it doesn’t. The means of sets of samples do, but the samples themselves don’t. (And what is a “curve of probability,” anyway?) He also seems to think that the results of flipping a coin are pre-determined: “And yet, as Aczel illustrates, after about the first 120 tosses, the results begin to come up 50-50 (though not all at once: for example, from roughly 250 to 550 tosses, the coins will mostly land heads-up, a lead that tails will catch up to later).”

Human being are built for running? “Our poor sprinting prowess has given rise to the idea that our bodies are adapted for walking, not running, says Lieberman. Even the fastest sprinters reach speeds of only about 10 metres per second, compared with the 30 metres per second of a cheetah. But over longer distances our performance is much more respectable: horses galloping long distances average about 6 metres per second, which is slower than a top-class human runner.”

Music video for “Encore,” from DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album.

Dahlia Lithwick: what the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court does.

A mostly sensible review of Wikipedia, from a former Editor in Chief of the Britannica.

How to figure out whether you have an HP iPod.

Article about Pixar, including brief discussion of the “uncanny valley.” (The way in which near-photorealistic images are somehow more creepy than both real images, and less-realistic images.) A Pixar executive also wonders why people are so interested in how many days it takes to render their images: “Great ceiling [Michelangelo]—how many brushstrokes?”

Jonathan Franzen like Alice Munro a lot. (He uses also uses “I” a lot in the review, and tells a lot of jokes that are more about himself than the book, but whatever.)

A question to ask Alberto Gonzales at his confirmation hearing.

MP3s of the free-to-share, free-to-sample (for most purposes) CD that comes with the November Wired. If you have wget, you can download the MP3s with wget -r --span-hosts --level=1 -nd --accept mp3 http://creativecommons.org/wired/.

Slate is running an amazingly supportive and amazingly uncritical piece on the Marines who pilot UAV’s in Fallujah, calling in air strikes. Still somewhat thrilling though.

“I’m interested to see what all of you crazy people look like. No lj-icons, please. This is not a fucking meme -- I’m genuinely interested.” Strangely captivating.

What 51% Bush/48% Kerry looks like.

“Straight male seeks Bush supporter for fair, physical fight - m4m.”

Why aren’t computer games funny? “One of the difficulties in trying to create funny moments is that gamers aren’t audience members so much as actors. It’s easy for a game designer to make someone feel like Bruce Willis or Sly Stallone by putting a virtual gun in their hand. But how do you go about making someone feel like Charlie Chaplin or Bernie Mac? Can you make a gamer actually commit comedy?”

British reactions to the US election. I want to write properly about this. Many of these reactions (particularly that of the Mirror) strike me as illegitimate. As a non-US person, it’s quite okay to be concerned about the US’s foreign policy (US foreign policy affects the rest of the world like no other country’s does), but there’s basically no legitimate claim on anything else: on gay marriage, capital punishment, the economy… You might not like it, you might think it indicates a moral failing, but it’s nothing to do with you. (Also—and I think this is important to remember—for every putative outrage perpetrated in the US, another country does it better: other countries execute more people, are more racist, have less democratic institutions, have more powerful corporations, and so on. So to improve the lot of humanity, you want to focus on countries other than the US.) A single mother living in rural Arkansas is not likely to be voting on the same set of issues as a Mirror reader—if she votes for Bush, why this this make her dumb?

So great Jonathan Franzen short story … which mostly survives not being a short story at all—it’s more a collection of short paragraphs. (Fortunately Franzen can pack a whole lot more into a paragraph than anyone else alive, but still…)

Reference sites suggested by the NY Times. (Wikipedia not included!)

Kim Jong Il wants to know: “Is your e-mail address still George.W.Bush@whitehouse.org?”

Louis Menand on JFK’s inaugural address.

Looks like Bush will win Clark County…

Making electronics kosher.

How Nike made it in China. (After Liu Xiang won the 110m hurdles at the Olympics, Nike ran an ad: “Asians lack muscle? / Asians lack the will to win? / Stereotypes are made to be broken.”

Man, I would have got more excited if those damn journalists had made it clear that the human-like remains discovered on Flores were not Homo sapiens. Half the time they’re described as “hobbit-like humans” too, which is so not correct!

Weirdness: Slate asks its contributors who they intend to vote for; in reponse, Christopher Hitchens says many garbled things, including “I do think … that Kerry should get his worst private nightmare and have to report for duty.” Slate interprets this as a vote for Kerry, but when it turns out that Hitchens did not intend his message to be construed as support for Kerry or Bush, Slate apologises and blames an editing error!

(Also, Hitchens’s assumption that declaring his support for one or the other constitutes an “endorsement” demonstrates quite some hubris: as Jacob Weisberg explains, the purpose of the exercise was to: (a) replace an official endorsement by the magazine and (b) to “emphasize the distinction between opinion and bias.”)

Andrew Sullivan: Why I am supporting John Kerry.

“… most of us believe, mistakenly, that a poll is a simple tabulation of a random sample of voters. In reality, polls are full of additives and preservatives, subtractions and selective multiplications, none of which are generally published.”

(Note also the less condescending “most of us believe…” instead of “most people believe…” device.)

It’s not “The Ukraine,” it’s “Ukraine.”

(What else (apart from a name) can you change “by deed poll”??)

Apple uses Lucida Grande italic! (“Stream Music Wirelessly to Your Home Stereo”) Looks kinda crappy too. (Oh yeah, this is noteworthy because Apple doesn’t provide an italic version of Lucida Grande with OS X; the “italic” Lucida Grande here is probably Geneva or Verdana italic. As far as I can tell Apple doesn’t use Lucida Grande italic anywhere else on their site.)

Who Slate staffers are voting for. Interesting: Christopher Hitchens (what is he going on about?), Steven Landsburg (idiot—but thinks he’s a contrarian), Robert Neubecker. Dahlia Lithwick is Canadian?

Update: Hitchens went for Bush in The Nation—?

eBay advice (scams, tricks sellers get up to, etc.), from the Museum of HP Calculators, but fairly general.

On temporary, “pop-up,” stores that sell limited edition brand-name gear to generate buzz.

The Long Tail: in an Internet economy, you can make money by selling stuff most people don’t want (e.g. Bollywood films)—because you can find them, or they can find you. True, but is it really the case that “more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles”? This didn’t sound right; I emailed the author who referred me to a paper which estimates that “47.9% of Amazon’s unit sales fall in titles with ranks above 40,000.” (Seems much more likely; am investigating further.)

(Whilst Amazon may have approximately 5% of total book sales, it almost certainly has a much greater percentage of rare book sales; the tail is likely to be “artificially” lengthened because consumers can’t (easily) buy rare books from physical shops.)

Update: Chris Anderson, the author, says that the Long Tail uses the same technique as the paper linked above, but with 2004 data. He’s also suspicious of the figure, though, and suspects that the actual 50% point falls lower in the rankings. If only Amazon would say!

Close & instructive analysis of two versions of a Raymond Carver short story.

The Superficial: “If you’ve ever wondered what a $10 million bra looks like, wonder no more. And if you’ve ever wondered what an armpit vagina looks like, wonder no more as well, because this is an armpit vagina…”

Whether Republicans or Democrats are more civil. The comments are worthwhile too: “Leftists, on the other hand, are raised on viewing any sort of restraint as tantamount to self-censorship, so we tend to speak our minds in public a lot more. I think that leftists are more aggressive and in-your-face in person.”

John McWhorter wonders (in RealAudio) why all the people in New Yorker cartoons are white (text).

Wow, there exists someone who doesn’t like The Catcher in the Rye! And (partly) because the writing is bad!? I admit the dialog sounds a little odd sometimes (I’d put this down to it being set in America, and in the 1950s), but I have no problem with the other components of his prose.

Richard Posner: Law Reviews suck, because they’re edited by students. For some reason, Posner makes it sound as if Law Reviews are edited with almost no faculty (or professional) oversight at all, which doesn’t sound right. Why is he trying so hard to avoid criticising faculty?

Newton the loser: “Newton never married, apparently never had a lover, and never even had a real friend, as we use the word in our sociable times. He never had a scientific collaborator; indeed, he fought bitterly and ruthlessly with other great philosophers. Having been a fellow and professor at Trinity College, Cambridge, for most of his adult life, he left behind not a single person who claimed to have been his student.”

On censoring textbooks: “Almost two dozen states have state-wide textbook adoption policies, and two of these states, Texas and California, are so large that they represent a substantial portion of the market. Textbook publishers are therefore in thrall to these states. California has strong liberal lobbies, devoted to the idea that no cultural group be discriminated against with regard to language and imagery. Texas is dominated by conservative lobbies that concentrate on moral content. The combination produces textbooks that are severely curtailed in both directions: at once attuned to political correctness and deferential to so-called family values.”

Letters the Guardian received in response to their ill-conceived Clark County project. (… which has now been aborted.)

Nobel Prize for Literature committee is still fucking up citations. The subjugating power of cliches? What? (Compare them to the citations for physics, chemistry, economics…)

Malcolm Gladwell: the high price of drugs is not (just) the fault of drug companies.

Some (non-trivial) percentage of professional musicians on beta blockers?

Cute w4m ad let down by: (a) poor subject line; (b) poor last sentence.

Great headline: “What (Sex) Boys (Sex) Think (Sex) About.” The unusually titled Jennifer 8. Lee on the NY Times’s headline-writing process (first question).

The Poncho: not a good idea. I actually don’t have any great problem with the poncho, especially when worn with brio. (Wearing a poncho to avoid dressing up, on the other hand, is not such a good idea. This encounters a problem similar to that of wearing a No Fear t-shirt during non-hazardous activities, such as mowing the lawn, or shopping at the mall…)

Extracts from jwz’s diary leading up to the Netscape 0.9 release.

Kurt Andersen on why Netscape matters: “Paradox No. 2: Christopher Columbus Was a Failure. His business model did not pan out: no western route to Asia, hardly any gold, abandonment by his investors, not much of an enduring first-mover advantage for Spain ... but he fucking discovered America. Netscape is vestigial and may cease to exist before long, and Amazon.com may or may not be a Fortune 500 company a decade from now, but Jim Clark and Jeff Bezos will always be Columbuses.” (Inside Magazine, 2000-12-13)

ISPs don’t check the legitimacy of takedown notices.

Art in public spaces: Harmen de Koop’s “Sandbox.” (more)

“Dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture.”

Fold a t-shirt in about 3 seconds! This is awesome!

“If you are voting for a leader, why would you pick the LESSER evil? Wouldn’t you want a GREAT evil to lead you? Who wants to be led by a completely mediocre evil?”

A comparison of Bush and Kerry’s logos: “Loose letter spacing between the ‘K’ and ‘e’ communicates inexperience.”

CIA World Factbook entry for “World.” Includes a brief history of the 20th Century, many mentions of environmental/developmental problems, and an unusual map projection.

“The year ahead in the Supreme Court.”

Camper’s new restaurant: “Europe’s craziest company has just opened the world’s weirdest restaurant. … Not because it doesn’t have tables or chairs. It doesn’t. Not because you can bring your bicycle in. You can. And not because–while you eat stuffed rice-balls with your fingers–you’re offered big screen images of, say, sports events or pop concerts. You aren’t. Diners are treated to pictures of donkeys in Majorca. While listening to soothing sounds of the sea.” (Sounds like a McSweeney’s restaurant.)

“Australians hold anti-war rallies.” 1. However messy Iraq might be, the situation doesn’t seem to have reached the level of war. Were any of the protestors actually describing it is such, or is this just the BBC making things up? 2. How does bringing the troops back now help Iraq? Fine, you didn’t want to send troops in the first place. But to bring them back is petulance, not good judgement. (Arguing that it’s to make Australia safer is not only probably factually incorrect, but unbecoming and cowardly—sometimes the right thing to do help others, even if it puts you at risk.) I would still have voted Labor had I been able to, but with less pleasure…

Foreign Aid should preferentially be given to democracies; they’ll make better use of it. Also, according to this piece, the World Bank and the IMF are actually prohibited from “considering democratic legitimacy” in making aid decisions. (They were set up this way to encourage the Soviet Union to participate, and to “minimize the role of politics in macroeconomic policymaking.”)

True: Newspaper photograph shows a pregnant, cigarette-smoking woman worrying about the effect of construction noise on her unborn child.

“Researchers will also be looking for physiological markers that could be humor signatures.”

Why Word, uh, randomly changes text styles. (Still don’t know why it keeps moving my graphics around…)

Features of the new $50. “Your old money will always be good. Every U.S. currency note issued since 1861 is still redeemable today at full face value.” It’s rather brave to guarantee that all notes will be valid for all time, I think. Also odd that this—the official site of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing—is a .com.

“Who Really Deserves a Silver Star? The military’s unfair awards system.”

What was great about 1984.

More plagiarism from Harvard profs…

Fair—and lightly disparaging—story on political bloggers.

Against McDonald’s or against McDonald’s customers?

Exalting prostitution: “But one of the main reasons I enjoy prostitutes is because I enjoy breaking the law—another reason I don’t want brothels made legal. There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it desirable. When I have dinner every evening in Soho I always think: isn’t scampi delicious—what a pity it isn’t illegal. I’m sure I am not alone in this. …”

Dining in the dark in Paris. “Eating is challenging. Scooping a fork across the plate often comes up empty. Celine advises fighting the temptation to eat with your hands—something a blind person tries to avoid in public. But, lowering the head to the plate seems just fine. Nobody can see.”

Strange—and very German—video describing a mechanical version of Pong. (more info)

James Surowiecki: to help poor people, sell them more stuff.

Where Kerry Stands on Iraq—A Kerry–English Translation. Some of this seems a little inaccurate. For example, I don’t think Kerry is saying that the United States shouldn’t have invaded Iraq full-stop. He seems to be saying that had we known then what we know now, the U.S. shouldn’t have invaded Iraq, which is not the same thing. (“We now know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and posed no imminent threat…”)

Miss Universe before/after. Awful Plastic Surgery has a similar series on Paris Hilton.

“In short, Bush has pulled Guard troops away from their homeland security duties to fight and die in a war unrelated to the service for which they enlisted. A guardsman who did less than he signed up for is coercing other guardsmen to do more than they signed up for.”

Bush and Kerry answer science policy questions—not very informatively, as it happens. (Horrible Flash/HTML version.) The BBC has a rather clumsily-written summary.

Asking for a seat on the subway: “The seemingly simple assignment proved to be extremely difficult, even traumatic, for the students to carry out.”

“It turns out that almost nothing about Borat’s Kazakhstan withstands scrutiny.”

Does God endorse George Bush? “Of course, it’s always possible God did put George W. Bush in the White House. But if He did, it doesn’t theologically follow that He wants him to have a second term. …”

“Sometimes, despite our best efforts, a cow does get sick. When a cow is ailing, we use aspirin, massage and other natural treatments that enhance and strengthen cows’ immune systems to fight off infections. Should a cow worsen to the extent that she needs antibiotics, she is treated and brought back to health but she is not returned to the milking herd.” Where does Daisy go?

“In search of an ex-Liberal who backs the PM.”

Backgrounder on Chechnya. The author speculates that Chechen terrorists are particularly keen on hostage situations because it worked spectacularly well once before: in 1995, after terrorists took patients at a hospital hostage, Russia agreed to pull out from Chechnya and let the terrorists get away in exchange for the hostages.

“My friends are fond of saying that my last words on this earth will be something akin to, ‘hey y’all, hold my beer and watch this!’ Well, I have outdone myself once again.” (Other good posts: 1, 2, 3.)

Interview with Charles Robert Jenkins, the U.S. soldier who disappeared while on patrol in Korea in 1965, and who has lived in North Korea since. He seems a little confused. I’m also surprised North Korea didn’t take good care of him. (He says that a fellow alleged deserter regularly beat him.)

Paul Graham essay on “the essay.” (Contains a typically provocative explanation of how English Professors came to do what they do.)

Vice’s Guide to Everything: “If you are on the train and you see one of those poor motherfuckers in a dead sprint toward the closing subway doors, DO just fucking hold it for them, please. The MTA is lying: It will not delay other trains, and it’s not ‘safer’ just to wait for the next train—the conductor isn’t going to gas it with some woman’s leg hanging out of the car. Plus it’ll give you this really cool man-over-machine triumph-type feeling.”

Excellent (and not too US-centric) “Emotional Moments” photographs from the Olympics.

“E-mail address it would be really annoying to give out over the phone.”

Melbourne Transport Facts from the Public Transport Users Association. These are pretty misleading facts.

“Melbourne has one of the largest rail systems in the world, with 15 lines. The Paris Metro is a third smaller, while San Francisco’s BART is less than half the size.” The Paris Metro is a subway, and is not comparable to Melbourne’s train system. The RER is a more comparable, and it extends much further out than the Metro. What is the point of comparing Melbourne’s public transport system to that of two randomly chosen cities anyway? It’s a simple matter to find cities that are either less well or better equipped than Melbourne.

”We also have the biggest tram system in the English speaking world.” Why the anglocentricism?

“Our motor vehicles produce 81% of those greenhouse gases attributable to transport, while public transport is the source of only 3%.” What the PTUA don’t tell you is that transport accounts for 21.3% of national emissions, and that of this, only 54.9% comes from cars—so overall, cars are the source of about 8% of all greenhouse gas emissions (source). (The PTUA pull a similar trick on this page, which contains a pie graph showing that 49% of household emissions result from transport. It is not at all clear that this is not a per-capita-style calculation.) I’m also suspicious of the 3% figure for public transport—the source linked above provides a category for railways, but it specifically excludes electric rail. (Also, trams burn dirty brown coal.)

“If Melbourne is to cut greenhouse emissions 20% by 2005 (the internationally agreed target), one in every six journeys now made by car will have to be shifted to public transport.” Cars account for only 8% of national emissions, so I don’t see what’s going on here.

Researcher wonders why there’s less coverage of women’s sport than men’s, even when participation rates are taken into account. I don’t know that participation rates are really the right point of comparison here. Why do flyweight boxers get much less media attention than heavyweights? Junior soccer teams less than senior? The drivers of Formula 3 cars get less than those of Formula 1? The sport-loving public seems to have a preference for the strongest, fastest, highest irrespective of age, weight and height. To some extent, the public is probably equally disinterested in a participant’s sex.

Weirdly-written piece on the iPod’s shuffle function: “Dan Cedarholm, a Web designer in Salem, Mass., insists that his iPod has a predilection for the indie punk band Fugazi. Even though he only has two of the band’s albums stored on his ‘vintage’ 5-gigabyte device, the band seems to dominate his iPod to a degree wildly disproportionate to the amount of space it occupies on his player’s memory, he said. ‘It is truly bizarre,’ said Mr. Cedarholm, who no longer likes Fugazi.” Who no longer likes Fugazi!

Louis Menand on democracy and voting. “… my interest in an election is best served if I choose the candidate whose policies are most likely to benefit me or the people I care about.” Is this how you’re supposed to vote?

Anti-IE advocacy via FUD: “Internet Explorer can make your computer unsafe. Why not switch to a browser that’s more secure?”

“Carmen Electra and Dave Navarro are planning on releasing a sex guide featuring their sexy tips on how to have sexy sex. As interesting as a Carmen Electra sex guide sounds, I’d be more interested in a Dave Navarro ‘Land Somebody Way Hotter Than You’ guide. …”

“I Just Landed the Best Fucking Job in the World!”

More great anecdotes in a Talk column. A construction worker goes into an ACLU office to get a political sticker to put on his helmet, and the only one they have is “Marriage for Everybody”?

How attractive you’re considered to be depends on your name … maybe. (More information from the researcher. Seems like a useful followup study would be to compare “Tim” and “Tom.”) A few years ago a psychiatrist discovered that his fellow psychiatrists were more likely to diagnose a “Matthew” as having schizophrenia than a “Wayne.” (Waynes were more likely to have a personality of substance disorder.)

Australians being encouraged to give up plastic bags for a week; the event is called the plastic bag famine. Way to minimise the real thing, eh?

Web site for London’s (fairly hard-core) campaign to get people to not give money to beggars.

“Don’t give to people begging on the street; you could be killing with kindness. … those begging are unlikely to be homeless … 62% of people arrested for begging in Camden and 42% in Westminster gave fixed addresses when charged. … Money given is likely to be spent on drugs and/or alcohol … Those arrested for begging in Camden: 80% tested positive for Class A drugs 62% have a conviction for Class A drug offence 83% had a conviction for acquisitive crime offence.” (What proportion had none?)

(Questionable language used in the FAQ: “Beggars can gain fast access to a hostel bed in Camden & Westminster and it does not cost them a penny”; “It is rarely residents who give but they are the ones that suffer the most from the problems of persistent begging in their neighbourhoods and the anti social behaviour that goes with it.”)

There must be an interesting story behind all this. It appears that only one charity is a “partner” in the campaign; I think St. Mungos was once, but they now say that whilst they “broadly support” the campaign, they “would never say that people should never give to beggars, it is up to individual and the circumstances at the time.”

“The Virtue of Idleness.”

Profile of Brad Stine, a Evangelical Christian standup comic.

I’d like to know more about some of the astounding disaster-recovery efforts described here. (1) In 1977, a factory that was Toyota’s sole supplier of a valve used in the breaking system in all its cars burnt down; Toyota had only three days’ worth of supplies but was able to get production going at pre-fire levels within a week. (2) A company lost all the people who knew the passwords to their off-site backups when the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center came down, but were able to get access after going through everything they knew about the people who died, and trying variations as passwords. (This surely can’t work very often. I don’t think it would work with mine! Knowledge of past passwords probably helps quite a lot.)

On coaching Indian call-center operators to be more, uh, American. After I got some cards stolen in St Petersburg, I called American Express to see how I could get some money out on the Amex card I still had. (I couldn’t, incidentally; if you want support when you’re travelling overseas, get a regular Amex card, not a blue one.) The guy I spoke to explained that in order to do something-or-other, I would have to call back during “business hours.” So I asked what time it was now (to work out the time difference) and then there was a pause, and then he said he didn’t know…

Circle Line Party set to roll this Friday!

“The Religification of John Kerry.” It still surprises me that more Americans are prepared to vote for a gay candidate (59%) than an atheist (49%).

Profile of Estee Lauder, Helena Rubinstein, and Elizabeth Arden; each was “a short, hyper-ambitious, social-climbing saleswoman who loved wealth, invented her past, dumped her husband when he seemed a drag on her career, peddled emollients and powders that promised eternal youth, and dined out on her aphorisms.”

Two brothers (out of a set of triplets) need kidney transplants; since they’re almost genetically identical, they’ll both be suited to the same kidneys, meaning that someone (doctors, fortunately) needs to choose one to get a transplant first.

This is excellent: a United LA–Sydney flight returned to LA after “B-O-B,” used by air crews as a code to signal the best looker on board, was found written on an air-sick bag and interpreted as meaning “bomb on board”! (The main story addresses the problem of how much information should be disclosed to passengers while the aircraft is in flight.)

Sveasoft have produced a new firmware for a Linksys wireless router. The software, like the original software, is based on Linux, and is licensed under the GPL: once you own a copy, you’re free to give it to anyone you want. However, Sveasoft themselves will only give you a copy of “pre-release” version of their software if you pay to “subscribe” to this service. Ordinarily they wouldn’t be able to charge very much for their software, because once one person has a copy of the software, they are legally allowed to give it to all their friends. (They could also sell it for less than Sveasoft charges.) However, the deal with Sveasoft is that if you do this, they won’t sell you newer versions of their software. According to the FSF, this is quite okay.

Bad words once in the Mozilla source.

Rather comprehensive survey of which countries drive on the left, and which on the right, and associated issues. (Discussion of Sweden’s 1967 switch, what pedestrians do.) I can confirm that on London’s tube, you are instructed to stand on the right on escalators (and overtake on the left) but otherwise walk on the left.

BBC radio bloopers. Try Brian Johnston’s giggly attempt at the cricket score!

Great pictures from Vice. “I don’t think the fat (glandularly challenged) kid’s a poser. Look at the bottom of his deck.”

Spammer-baiter gets Nigerian spammer to send him $80, draw on his chest with a marker.

If you accuse the California Education Secretary of being racist … and you feel so strongly about this that you plan a civil-rights demonstration against him … then surely you should at least apologise when it turns out that you were wrong?

Who’s hotter: Kerry sisters or Bush twins?

“My dog the nihilist.”

McCain: everyone’s first pick for VP.

How does the Smoking Gun get Kenneth Lay’s (private) letter to Governor Bush? It can’t be the case that all letters sent to Governors automatically become public property.

A 1995 review of a collection of Pauline Kael essays. The overall angle seems to be that neither the New Yorker nor Pauline Kael is as good as they are made out to be. (This is by Louis Menand, who now writes for the New Yorker (maybe he did then, too); he recycled his Auden/Agee anecdote in a recent review of Eats, Shoots & Leaves.)

On the surprising connections between Fascism and homosexuality. (Some of the organisations mentioned here don’t check out—whilst they do seem to exist, they’re insignificant.)

On writer’s block.

William Saletan: “This is why Kerry had to pick Edwards: Kerry sounds so much more attractive when Edwards is doing the talking.”

The text of the Freedom Tower’s cornerstone is set in Gotham.

Pedestrian gets whacked by a car! (More info.)

Princess Diana memorial: a ring of flowing water, £3.6m. A co-worker noted that this would make a wicked Pooh-stick course…

Timothy Noah wants Barbara Ehrenreich to keep writing for the New York Times.

Text message “synonyms.” (“Do you want to in out?” vs. “Do you want to go out?”, etc.)

Don’t trust Islamists? (A surprisingly one-sided piece for Slate.)

“Can you really review a 957-page book in 24 hours?” (re: Clinton’s memoirs.)

Rather cute pixelated musician caricatures. (Are just the images available anywhere?)

The best bits from Clinton’s autobiography. He thinks Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is “he greatest novel written in any language since William Faulkner died.” I’m with Andrew Sullivan on the couch question though: I find it very unlikely that he slept there for months.

The McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act makes it illegal for foreign nationals to promise to contribute money to candidates—?!

Destructive review of Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves. (Louis Menand)

“Separately, there was an indication yesterday that Google’s vaunted corporate culture may be under stress as a result of competition and the stock offering. As of yesterday afternoon, typing the words ‘out of touch management’ into Google caused the search engine to list as its first result a page describing the company’s top management.” (Google: out of touch management.)

(Kottke update.)

Long Christopher Hitchens piece on Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11.

Fascinating account of an upcoming Metallica documentary that evidently focuses on their therapy sessions.

Ha: Missy Elliot cancels tour dates because “due to the unusual number of artists presently touring Europe,” there are not enough tour buses available.

Firefox advocacy: “Why Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox are good porn browsers.” (See also the Pornzilla project’s bookmarklets, and the “list of bugs that impact porn surfing.”) “Pornzilla is not an official mozilla.org project. Since nobody has contributed to our testing budget, these tools have only been tested with free porn sites.”

The surprisingly interesting 20th century social history of milk.

“And the most wonderful thing about beer is that it has that ability to ‘reset’ your palate. Take cassoulet, for example: Rustic southern French reds are good, but French beer is a much better choice. Cassoulet can be like cement, but beer busts it up and makes it seem so much lighter.” (“When the Right Wine Is a Beer.”)

Weather forecasting for the tube!

At age 10, Fidel Castro, wrote to Roosevelt and asked for a ten dollar bill…

Americans are adopting British idioms?

“Had I actually killed myself, I can only imagine what the local papers would have said: Local Man Runs Self Over.”

Researchers can’t do stats right: study finds that the reported probability that a result was due to chance is wrong 11% of the time.

Interesting Straight Dope on military budgets. (Not mentioned here is that Australia, for all the fears about being attacked by Indonesia, etc., spends far more on its military than any other country in the region: more than twice as much as Singapore, and probably as much as everyone else combined.)

Gambling machines are better regulated than voting machines (editorial). (Why aren’t the makers of gambling machines in the voting machine market? It would seem that similar (and simpler) technologies are involved: they count things, they report things, and even better, they probably also have reasonable security given that they also have a great incentive to detect cheaters…)

Reagan and the market for “Russian” pro-wrestlers.

The National Enquirer doesn’t make stories up (anymore), but still few people believe that what it prints is true.

Graphs and tables from the EPA’s National Air Quality and Emissions Trends Report (2003). Comparison of 1970 and 2002 Emissions.

Panel of economists performs cost-benefit ranking of proposals for improving the lives of people in developing countries. The four ranked highest: HIV/AIDS control and prevention measures, combatting malnutrition, trade liberalisation, and malaria control. (See also the UN’s development goals.)

“A bad week for the Bushies”: even Abu Ghraib has disappeared from the front pages.

Like the Free State Project (motto: Liberty in Our Lifetime)—but Christian! (I’m tipping the Christians get their state going first.)

“The Stalinist roots of John Kerry’s new slogan.”

US politics: pander to interest groups by suggesting that you’re considering “their” candidate as your running-mate!

On flag design.

Alleged faults of the EU voting procedures.

NY Times acknowledges that some of its Iraq pieces “included incomplete information or pointed in a wrong direction.” A substantial apology, although it makes a point of saying that individual reporters (i.e. Judith Miller) were not at fault. Also interesting is that much is made of where in the paper an article appeared, and where the later and less sensational corrections appeared—especially since the articles that appear on the Times’s website (unlike those of the Washington Post) carry no note indicating where on the printed paper they appeared. (On which page did this apology run?)

Lightweight description of the “chaotic inflation” theory of the universe’s origin, which apparently has the implication that the universe could have been created as an experiment, and with few resources, and now be so small that the experimenter has lost it…

“How Does a Court-Martial Work?”

Timothy Noah compiles a list of excuses for Abu Ghraib from putative right-wing commentators: it’s the fault of moral relativism, gays, porn, feminists… I would have guessed that the left’s first (or second) thought would have been to offer similar excuses for the involvement of women, but I haven’t seen any of this. Indeed, a remarkably forthcoming Barbara Ehrenreich, writing in the LA Times, admits that the photographs disabused her of the notion that women were morally superior to men (or at least the idea that women have “a lesser inclination toward cruelty and violence”).

Fred Kaplan: “The prison scandal keeps getting worse for the Bush administration.”

Looks interesting: generate big (multi-page) images from much smaller images.

Photos of Seattle’s new public library. The New York Times really loves this building.

Hello London! A wedge-shaped 3.4m x 2.6m studio is selling for US$200,000/AU$280,000!

Pew Research Center get about a 30% response rate to their telephone surveys (I would have guessed much lower); since the overall demographic profile of their respondents matches that of surveys with much higher participation rates (e.g. census data), they consider their results to still be valid.

Interview with (I think one of) the Vatican’s astronomers. Fairly wide-ranging. “… if you’re going to convert somebody, you have to treat them as an equal. There are people, when they came to the Americas, who thought that, well, we can enslave these people because they don’t have souls. And the Church said, “You can’t do that.” If you’re sending a missionary to somebody, you’re implicitly saying they’re equal.”

Surprisingly interesting slideshow: how Helen of Troy has been depicted at different points in history.

“I chased you for 12 years around the world, and I still can’t find you.”

On slot machines. This piece is frustratingly vague on just how manipulative slot machines are. Slot machines will apparently deliver an exciting “near miss” more frequently than they should—but is, say, the probability of a win independent of the result of previous games (i.e. how much you’ve won or lost so far)?

“Bush ‘sorry’ for Iraqi prison abuse.” And ABC just couldn’t resist! Bush did use the word “sorry,” but to take it out of context and put it between quotation marks casts “doubt on the [word’s] sincerity … [making] something kind of snide and sinister out of something simple and straightforward.” (As Dave Eggers wrote of a similar situation.)

With quotes: BBC, Xinhuanet.

Without: New York Times, The Age, The Guardian, Aljazeera.

The Washington Post—perhaps realising that there was no way to use “sorry” in a headline without either (a) vouching for its sincerity at A1 headline scale or (b) making it appear insincere—sensibly avoided the word entirely and went with Bush Apologizes, Calls Abuse ‘Stain’ on Nation.

(Google News: bush sorry.)

U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines! (Also available in Palm format!)

Seymour Hersh’s “Torture at Abu Ghraib.” The guards seem to be putting a lot of blame on M.I. Mark Bowden, in an article in The Atlantic wrote that “coercion should be banned but also quietly practiced” because “if you can save lives—if people are plotting mass murder and you have a chance of preventing it—it’s hard to argue against whatever methods work.” I wonder if he still thinks this. (interview)

“A renegade New Zealand sheep that managed to evade the shearers for six years has finally had a haircut.” (I thought sheep shed their wool in winter—?)

Friend’s writer’s assistant Amaani Lyle claims that she was subjected to “sexual-gender harassment in the workplace.” Many funny and/or weird incidents laboriously enumerated (not all of which sound illegal, actually): “… 59. Greg Malins would take a copy of the ‘Friends’ script cover and blacken out letters to make it say penis. 60. When he would blacken out the letters to say penis, Malis would say, this is the most important thing you’ll learn on ‘Friends’. … 81. Andrew Reich made a nasty calendar where he made the calendar state rude and obscene things. … 83. I can recall sitting around waiting to go home while writers were sitting around pretending to masturbate and continually talking about schlongs. …”

“What’s With Our 15 Intel Agencies?”

“How Do They Measure Calories?”

Martin Amis short story: “As one of the doubles of the son of the dictator, I am often to be found in the Palace of the End.” (The body doubles have to look exactly like their dictator, and the dictator is subject to rather many disfiguring assassination attempts…)

Auction for Erdös number 5 up to $152.50! (My father-the-mathematician emailed: “This is weird, because there are a couple of thousand people with Erdos number 2 (mine is 3), so an Erdos number 5 must be as common as dirt.”)

What NASA’s “Planetary Protection Officer” does.

Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” and Pound’s parody. (Shame the parody doesn’t do anything with the “bee-loud glade.”

(I first saw this on the Underground— Transport for London sometimes puts up pleasing poems in place of ads.)

John Kerry speaks French, but (at least recently) hasn’t been flashing it. (Just how good is his French, anyway? A French journalist gives Kerry a pat on the head by praising his word choice…

Interesting: someone has been caught and convicted of a crime through a relative’s DNA. So having some proportion of the population’s DNA on file gives you at least some of the “benefits” of having everyone’s. How much DNA do you need for, say, 90% coverage? Do collection rates (through differing rates of incarceration?) vary across communities? (e.g. Black Americans versus White Americans.) And is DNA profiling possible? (Suspect is white, possibly bald, has Tay-Sachs disease.)

”Tony Blair rejected George Bush’s offer of keeping British troops out of Iraq, it emerged yesterday, as the two leaders mounted a united front on the year-long campaign.” Huh? What is the Guardian on about? Blair is the leader of the United Kingdom. He can send or not send his troops wherever the fuck he wants, irrespective of what Bush may have “offered.”

“Mr Blair will be asked to justify a decision to go to war when he had a chance to keep British troops out of harm’s way with no political sanction.” What is meant by “had a chance”? How does rejecting this offer make Blair any more (or any less) of a bad person?

Article on civilian military contractors good in own right, also illuminates a few related issues. (Legally, the’re unlawful combatants, like those detained at Guantanamo Bay.)

On summer-blend gas.

The press was suckered by the Iraqi National Congress’s defectors—who’s apologised for this, and who not?

Tipping your way into fine restaurants. “Outside, I realized I had just witnessed the gold standard. The maître d’ turned down the money when it was a bribe, gave us the service anyway, then accepted the money as a well-earned tip.”

The Q&A section of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s website.

What makes an Ayatollah? “The route to becoming an ayatollah (‘sign of God’ in Arabic) is quite unlike the path toward becoming, for example, a Catholic bishop.”

Reasons to not like Bush (and vote for Roy Moore). (“After September 11, 2001, George W. Bush has engaged in a silly ecumenical project to try to pretend that all religions are really the same and equally valid.”) Timothy Noah remarks: “This veers so close to self-parody that Chatterbox wonders whether the site was put up by a partisan Democrat.”

Rwanda history recap. Writer is prepared (refreshingly) to hold the Rwandan government to Western values: “The RPF uses the genocide in much the same way that the Bush administration wields the emotional power of 9/11 to justify its actions and paint its critics as unpatriotic.”

“The warning comes after a group of ‘mud football’ players in the rural town of Collie, Western Australia, were struck down by Aeromonas hydrophila. The water-borne bacterium infects open wounds, causing pustules. … Fresh water is the key to safer mud, says Vally.”

Isn’t science wonderful? Imagine explaining this to someone from another planet: to test a theory about how things move (Einstein’s theory of general relativity), earth people have spent about 40 years designing a device containing four small spheres (supposedly the most perfect spheres ever made). This device will be strapped to a rocket and shot 400 miles out into space whereupon the balls will be made really cold and then spun at 10,000rpm. If the balls slow down, or tilt, or something Einstein wins.

The main project page has a good pdf (note that superscripts are missing) describing the science involved, including how they’re going to suspend, spin and measure the sphere-gyroscopes. (Another page briefly describes the three (small) ways in which the predictions of Einstein’s and Newton’s theories diverge within the solar system.)

Royal Australian Mint FAQ. Noteworthy is the one-word answer to the question “Does the RAM provide free samples of coins?” as well as the fact that there’s a limit on the number of coins that you can hand over at shops. (From reading the linked act (I am not a lawyer), it seems that this is done via the definition of legal tender—more than 20¢ in 1¢ and 2¢ coins does not constitute legal tender, and thus shops aren’t required to accept it. US comparison.)

“Coach Fitz’s Management Theory.”

Is too much choice a bad thing? “It helps explain why so many people at age thirty are still flailing about, trying to choose a career—and why so many marriageable singles wind up alone.”

Michael Ignatieff reassesses his support for the war. He doesn’t get to the point of regretting it, but he does come close. (“… I supported an administration whose intentions I didn’t trust, believing that the consequences would repay the gamble. Now I realize that intentions do shape consequences.”)

“How did movie zombies get so fast?” (Short answer: special effects.) See also Standards for Vampires.

Fun piece on accents in film.

Splendid book review: Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. The reviewer (following his source) argues that modern demonisation of masturbation began during the Enlightenment. Because it was in its climactic moments deeply private, because it dealt with fantasy, and because it was thought to be insatiable it defied reason—and therefore was to be distrusted. (I don’t quite follow the argument here, but it’s worth reading anyway.)

“Do Unbuilt Architects Get Paid?” (Re Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born architect who just won the Pritzker Prize (she’s always described as Iraqi-born) had, until five years ago completed just one building—a fire station.)

Short piece on the preparer of last meals for those about to be executed.

A few interesting issues here: standard British sign language apparently has such gestures as a hand miming a crooked nose for “Jew,” a limp wrist for a homosexual. A TV show for deaf people recently decided to change these signs to some less offensive whereupon the acting chairperson (note chairperson!) declared that the changes were a form of discrimination, in part because the changes were made without consulting deaf people, I think. (Also: the sign for a Chinese person changed from pulling the eye into a slant to miming some sort of Chinese national dress, which doesn’t seem all that much better.)

Project to find two strings with the same MD5 hash, I think. This is quite irresponsibly described, because they give the impression that internet commerce is doomed if a collision is found; it’s not. (About cryptographic hash functions: a hash function has the form y = f(x). That is, the function is given some number (x) as input (or file; files can be considered to be one big long number), and it returns some other number (y) as output. In the case of the MD5 hash function, the number returned is always 128 bits (about 30 digits) long. Cryptographic hash functions are supposed to have the feature that given y, you can’t figure out what x might have been. (Compare to y = f(x) = x + 1; with this function you can easily determine x if given y.) Because the number returned is 30 digits, and there’s very many more numbers more than 30 digits long, the MD5 hash function must produce collisions. This project is effectively trying to find two numbers that have the same hash value, which is not the same as being able to efficiently find x given y.)

Been on: Singapore, New York, Paris, Moscow, London, Washington D.C., Barcelona, St Petersburg! (Not listed: Boston, Bilbao, Shanghai, Prague.)

Artificially created cities (i.e. cities built recently, to be capitals).

Are you a member of an Indian Tribe? (System seems dehumanising, reductive, silly.)

Somewhat cheeky article on Schwartzenegger, civil disobedience, gay marriage, and Cuban cigars.

Insanity: five linked roundabouts make up Swindon’s “Magic Roundabout.”

The Grey Album is actually pretty damn good, although I’m sure it’s naughtiness is part of its charm. However, the existence of one or more pieces of good-though-illegal art is not, in itself, an argument for invalidating the laws that made them illegal in the first place. The greytuesday site argues that the Grey Album should be legal. And perhaps it should. But what should not? What is sampling? What is music? If I lay a few tom toms over the White Album is that sampling? Is adding background music to a recorded speech sampling? I can’t support a movement to reform music law before knowing what the desired reforms actually are: and the greytuesday site has precious little to say about this.

The differences and similarities between what San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom and Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore have done (and their respective attorneys general).

Font news: the U.S. State Department changes it’s font from Courier to Times New Roman.

Roy Moore: a third-party candidate who’ll take votes from oBush?

The decline of Colin Powell.

On adjectives. (Piece misses my favourite line about the (mis)use of adjectives: “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.”—The Elements of Style).

“My cat is Paranoid Scitzophrenic. He is Biploar. Manic Depressive.” (Another crazy craigslist animal: a fish.)

President Bush has asked that America spend about as much on the military next year as it did in 1968. I’d like to know the percentage-of-GDP comparison but I’m in St Petersburg right now and can’t be bothered checking… I’m guessing it’s not quite so exciting, though. Maybe 5% then, 3% now?

Why the intelligence community thought Iraq had WMDs (partial reason): “Prior to 1991 the intelligence communities in the United States and elsewhere believed that Iraq was at least five, and probably closer to ten, years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Of course, after the war we learned that in 1991 Iraq had been only six to twenty-four months away from having a workable nuclear weapon. This revelation stunned the analysts responsible for following the Iraqi nuclear program. The lessons they took from it were that Iraq was determined to acquire nuclear weapons and would go to any lengths to do so; that in pursuit of this goal Iraq was willing to use technology that Westerners considered crude and obsolete; that the Iraqis were superb at concealment and deception; and that inspections were inherently flawed—after all, there had been inspectors in Iraq prior to 1990, and they had been completely fooled.” (This is a very good piece.)

“Are there senior citizens who need prescription drugs on the Moon? Does the religious right favor a Moon base? How about illegal immigrants, would they be willing to take Moon jobs that Americans don’t want?”

Great interview with Anthony Lane, movie critic for the New Yorker. “I tend to send my copy in on deadline, which by New Yorker standards is tacky. It has to go through three or four proofs. The fact-checkers proof; the grammarians proof. And it is amazing. Someone does go to see the film, to make sure I’m not lying. If I’m reviewing a Tim Burton film and I say that Ewan McGregor’s wearing a bright blue shirt, they’ll say to me, ‘It’s more like bright turquoise’. But you should get it right, especially if you’re going to have some fun with it. Otherwise it’s cheating. The New Yorker is the only place in the world where you can pull a piece to change a comma to a semi-colon. It’s a haven for the pedant. I love it.”

Fur boots start out as gigantic fur boots that are then shrunk?? (See picture.)

On “Top Ten” lists. (Louis Menand)

“Free Trade Butters”—are they really for free trade at all? (Michael Kinsley)

The ingredients necessary to get married in a Las Vegas chapel. (“Lots of alcohol, a weakness for extreme experiences, and some dirty nasty porn-star-like fucking-sex.”)

Kurd Sellout Watch, Day 310. (Kurds have been very lucky so far.)

Is child molesting a sickness or a crime? (Dahlia Lithwick)