Gulfstream

http://www.hanifkureishi.com/strangers.html "Strangers When We Meet" 23:14

http://beebo.org/audio/i-got-to-tell-you.mp3 Pachelbel's Canon, scratched. This is a great album. (350k) 00:04

http://www.xrefer.com/entry.jsp?xrefid=443583 Only just now figured out that the two ways of ordering quotation marks (either after periods (and commas) or before) are the American way and the British way:

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

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

More examples

(I very much prefer the American way—logic be damned.) 23:02

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/feb02/msteyn.htm (Is it clear that I don't necessarily agree with what's linked here?) 22:38

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020129/nytu036_1.html Everyone can vote on what will be the new M&Ms colour, including those from "nations in which no citizen has previously had the opportunity to cast a governmental vote." 14:33

http://dooce.com/03_26_02.html "Confessions of a Hot Sleeper" 13:56

http://slate.msn.com/?id=2063804 "If the World Trade Center falls on you because of an astonishing plot by a comic-book villain, we give you (or your survivors) a couple million dollars. But if your house falls on you when no one is looking, through nobody's fault including your own, we do not even guarantee you basic medical care." 22:59

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4378766,
00.html Mr Millington's first novel is one of the five best debut novels of the year. 22:59

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/03/mann.htm Were the Americas, pre-Columbus, vastly more populated than previously thought? 01:34

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/nyregion/26BIG.html The gentrification of a neighbourhood doesn't lead to "an exodus of the poor and the working class." (So what does the process involve then?) 00:40

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/2925523.htm?template=contentModules/
printstory.jsp Tips for frugal living. 23:24

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_2/ronfeldt/index.html Amazingly long article on the connexion between game theory and drafting in NASCAR races. The drafting bit is fascinating. (Didn't read the second half.) 12:06

http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html Misspellings of "britney spears." Over 20% get it wrong. 14:05

http://www.nationalpost.com/scripts/printer/printer.asp?
f=/stories/20020319/377974.html Little piece (book review) on indexes and indexing. Good books have good indexes. (I really want to write "indices.") Robert Latham, editor of the 11-volume set of Pepys's diaries, says somewhere that he and his wife spent something like two years on the index alone. And it is a fantastic index. If you look up money, for example, you are referred to all entries that mention his bank balance. (At one stage I wanted to graph bank balance vs. time.)

More indexing trivia: the 1897 Sears, Roebuck and Co. Consumer's Guide says: "If you don't find it in the Index, look very carefully through the entire catalog." (This is the quote that heads the index to Knuth's TAOCP, Volume 3.) 13:39

http://slate.msn.com/?id=2063743 "Awards for self-flattery at the Oscars"--a deconstruction of the Oscar-acceptance speeches. 11:08

http://paulboutin.weblogger.com/2002/03/20 "Bloggers vs Journalists." 15:09

http://www.longbets.org/bet/2 A $2000 bet held by Long Bets, an spin-off of the Long Now Foundation: "In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site."

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

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

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

How are webloggers ever going to cover the war in Afghanistan? Enron? The New York Times has a six reporters working on Portraits of Grief alone: webloggers won't trump journalists by 2007, or ever. 11:47

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=ancient%20Scottish%20tradition%20of%20basing%20your%20food%20on%20a%20dare "ancient Scottish tradition of basing your food on a dare" 18:50

http://www.boardsmag.com/screeningroom/musicvideos/220/ Pretty "Fell In Love With A Girl" video clip done with Lego blocks. 14:47

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992066 Excellent: we're finally on the way to producing artificial meat. Growing meat in a vat can't be all that much harder than, say, cloning animals, and--as a way of producing food--it must surely be more efficient than running minerals, sunlight, water and vegetable matter through a cow. (Also: you don't have to kill the cow.) 12:32

http://www.sonystyle.com/electronics/tps.jsp?hierc=8621&
catid=8621&pno=1 A kinder, gentler, more loving multi-national corporation: the Sony website has an "Employee Pick of the Week." 10:11

http://www.guardian.co.uk/saturday_review/story/0,3605,668039,
00.html Author of the Guardian's famous corrections column: "How dare you, sir. You are speaking to the person who has practically eradicated in the Guardian the misspelling of Lucian Freud. The rogue Lucien, having occurred six times in the year 2000, cropped up only once last year, and so far, only once this year in an item on our website. When people ask me if I have achieved anything in my four years in this job, this is what I proudly hold aloft." 09:56

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/blueplate/washplates11.html The State of Washington complains about the licence plate "CNLNGS." (Defence on the next page.) 10:38

http://newyorker.com/printable/?talk/020325ta_talk_paumgarten "The Basho of Honk" 10:25

http://slate.msn.com/?id=2063153 Dan Nakamura discography. An article in the street press here described his latest project, Lovage, as "camp hip-hop." 17:13

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2002/03/12/watson/print.html James D. Watson's "embarrassing new memoir." 11:46

http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/story.jsp?
story=271283 (Christopher Hitchens and the artful deflection of awkward questions.) Question: "You're a highly-paid newspaper columnist. How do you square this with your left-wing leanings?" Hitchens: "Nothing's too good for the working class." 13:28

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.01/standards_pr.html "A case study in the power of standards." (Questions: Do standards always evolve? Is government involvement always unwarranted? Does the best standard win? Is it important that it does?) 12:43

http://www.rebeccamead.com/2001/2001_09_17_art_italy.htm Luigi Miraglia sees Latin as a (the?) language of intellectual inquiry and argument; in a hotel confiscated from the Mafia by the Italian government he wants to set up an institute for the study of Latin. 09:42

http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/print/0,1643,38604,
00.html The 101 dumbest moments in business of last year. 16:25

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,1-236031,00.html UK government advisory council recommends that cannabis "be reclassified from a class B narcotic to a class C." (How does the media spin stories? Compare The Times story to the one at thisislondon--where does this site come from, anyway?--which is headlined "Cannabis is given health all clear," and contains the line, "In healthy young people, cannabis is even said to have a similar effect on the heart as exercise." The BBC takes the middle ground.) 11:51

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,665861,00.html Patents don't matter (much): Switzerland and the Netherlands had no patent system at all for the last half of the 19th Century, but companies still prospered. (I am not convinced.) 11:19

http://slate.msn.com/?id=2063086 "Women do not, by and large, make terrific criminals. In the United States, women commit only two crimes as frequently as men. The first is shoplifting. The second is the murder of their own children." Why are mothers who kill their children thought mentally ill, whilst fathers who do the same are considered violent criminals? 10:39

http://timblair.blogspot.com/?/2002_03_10_timblair_archive.html#10617171 Tim Blair asks why the anti-free-trade left isn't vigorously defending Bush's right to impose steel tariffs. Part of the answer, I think, is that the left is more interested in results than general principles; contrariwise, the right is more interested in general principles than results. Of course, results and principles both are important: so the left elevates measures designed to alleviate poverty, suffering, and so forth to the level of principles, whilst the right argues that policies derived from general principles--"all men are created equal," for example--also lead to better outcomes.

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

(I'm still writing this...) 13:15

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1866000/
1866286.stm "A mentally-ill gunman apparently unhappy with widescreen televisions has shot himself dead in an Amsterdam office building after a seven-hour siege." 12:36

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12543 "Faking It: Sex, Lies, and Women's Magazines" 10:01

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/16/books/16LEON.html Ten rules for writing, by Elmore Leonard. "5. Keep your exclamation points under control." 16:44

http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?talk/020311ta_talk_eskin Dave Bayer was the math advisor to, and Russell Crowe's hand double in A Beautiful Mind! I saw this with Brad on Friday night; it's rather good. Are schizophrenics happy with the way their illness is portrayed? The movie suggests that it can be at least partly overcome through the application of conscious thought. I suspect this is not a terribly helpful idea. (Blake Eskin also wrote one of my favourite ever "Talk of the Town" pieces: "Dirty Furniture.")

[Oh, okay, they are happy. Er, maybe not. ... I don't know why I'm still looking into this. John Nash himself, in his Nobel autobiography, says "... gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation." Now, is it helpful to have this as a widely accepted belief?] 14:42

http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?talk/020311ta_talk_birnbach Another improbable "Talk of the Town" piece. This time on a dance organised for sixth-graders. 14:35

http://brucedale.com/Farrell%20Home%20page.htm Mr. Eaves dropped his Nikon 990 into a pond, dried it out, and took some amazing photographs. 10:29

http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary/columnists/story.html?
f=/stories/20020219/20020304story2.html More examples of irresponsible whining about how great things were in the past. (This is sort of for my own reference.) 23:50

http://dooce.com/03_05_02.html A bird story. (I am sorry for Dooce, but she did deserve to get clunked for her indiscretions.) 10:16

http://www.ifoce.com/ "International Federation of Competitive Eating" 01:25

http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/print/0,1643,37712,
FF.html "My Life as a Nontraditional Ticket Reallocation Special." The alternative economics of ticket scalping. 14:35

http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24605.shtml Interview with Jové Bové, French farmer famous for busting up a McDonald's. I like this interview. Bové is principled, intelligent, consistent. I agree that most of the things he identifies as problems are problems, and with many of his suggested solutions.

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

Sometimes the problem is NAFTA, sometimes it is short-sighted and naive governments, sometimes it is the power difference between companies of the developed world and the people of the developing, sometimes it it something else again. I wish Klein would acknowledge the situation's complexity. In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King explains why he is willing to break some laws (parading without a permit) whilst at the same time insisting that others should be obeyed (the Supreme Court's decision to outlaw segregation in public schools). This is a difficult intellectual course to navigate; he manages it reasonably well. Klein, meanwhile, pretends there is no problem. 18:18

http://stripper-faq.org/ On the internet you find the strangest stuff. "One thing that I cannot emphasise enough--NEVER ever wear an asymmetrical dress ... It may look nice but you can actually chart the drop in earnings on a night to night basis." 15:35