Gulfstream

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/28/magazine/_28BELLER.html Video of Alexandra Beller dancing. (Believe me, I'm as surprised as anyone to learn that I find dancing pretty.) 14:38

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/29/business/media/29SLATE.html Jacob Weisberg is the new editor of Slate. 11:08

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.05/longbets_pr.html Story on the Long Bets Foundation I linked to earlier. “Cosmologist Stephen Hawking has made a number of high-profile wagers on future discoveries. In 1975, he bet Kip Thorne a subscription to Penthouse (the loser would get it mailed to his home) that a celestial mystery named Cygnus X-1 would turn out to be a black hole. It didn't.” 17:01

http://www.scientificamerican.com/explorations/2002/041502lomborg/
rennie.html Scientific American editor John Rennie responds to Lomborg's rebuttal. (Background)

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

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

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

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

(By the way, I don't like the way Lomborg is usually described as an “ex-environmentalist.” It doesn't mean anything, and it certainly doesn't add credibility. (The title of his book has the same problem.) This form of argument is almost always wrong. “I'm not sexist, my own mother was a woman.”) 12:55

http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/the_wall_street_journal/
12:25

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200204/25/eng20020425_
94700.shtml 12:04

http://www.sellsbrothers.com/fun/msiview/default.aspx?content=question.htm “…actual questions from actual interviews conducted by Microsoft employees on the main campus.” 17:12

http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.peasant.html Russian Peasant Multiplication. 11:58

http://slate.msn.com/?id=2064544 What philosophers think: can the killing of non-combatants be justified? (The linked Michael Ignatieff story is also worthwhile.) 10:15

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,5500,684671,
00.html What you learn about the middle east conflict from the TV news. (Also: “Connections back to how the present intifada began, when Ariel Sharon walked through the most holy Muslim sights…” Uh.) 10:13

http://www.scotlandonsunday.com/spectrum.cfm?id=411792002 About Ultimate Frisbee! 15:39

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=25962 00:48

http://www.michaelspecter.com/ny/2001/2001_11_26_nokia.html Nokia phones are designed in California by a Californian! 23:28

http://www.666.com/stories/ 15:21

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,4146710,
00.html Theodore Dalrymple is very, very upset at the state of Britain. “There is hardly a British city or town of any size in which to open one's eyes is not to experience one's retinas being attacked by a scouring pad.” 01:04

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/01pdf/00-795.pdf The Supreme Court rules that fake child porn is protected speech. It's fifty pages or so but it's good reading.

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

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

I think that this is largely right: it's sometimes necessary to prohibit or control a certain activity or product not because it's inherently wrong, but because they're easily confused with something that is. It's not inherently wrong to wear a helmet into a bank, for example—banks prohibit it though because it's impossible to distinguish the helmet-wearing motorcyclists from the bank-robbing kind. (A tax is levied on blank media (at least cassette tapes) for a similar reason.) 18:04

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_
1936000/1936241.stm “It was then that the couple decided to call off their trip to one of Christianity's holiest shrines.” 17:14

http://www.sorabji.com/2002/april/16/ 12:19

http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Cocoa/TasksAndConcepts/
ProgrammingTopics/BasicEventHandling/Tasks/TextDefaultsAndBindings.html OS X: emacs-like keyboard shortcuts that use Control (ctrl-a, ctrl-n, etc.) work, by default, in Cocoa apps. Following the instructions half-way down this page (find “Key bindings”) will get you the Alt shortcuts too. 12:03

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/
story/0,6000,683900,00.html Christopher Hitchens. 17:25

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020422fa_FACT2 Lowest Ebb: “In the spring of 1970, when I was twenty-two, I was arrested by the Orono, Maine, police. After a traffic stop, I'd been discovered in possession of some three dozen rubber traffic cones.” (Stephen King) 15:25

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/15/opinion/L15CLON.html (Last letter: Bush says (in relation to stem-cell research) “no human life should be exploited or extinguished for the benefit of another”; how is this to be reconciled with his views on capital punishment?) This argument was initially appealing, but now I'm not convinced it's viable. Incarceration has four aims: deterrence, protection of society, punishment, rehabilitation. But is capital punishment meant as a deterrence or punishment? I think Bush means it to be a punishment.

(Atul Gawande and Natalie Angier discuss these questions in Slate.) 11:22

http://www.bricklin.com/segwayride1.htm 18:38

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020414.html How kids use websites. They click advertisements (!), because they “cannot yet distinguish between content and advertising.” I also like the story of the six-year-old who complained, “This website is for babies, maybe four or five years old. You can tell because of the cartoons and trains.” We once had a houseguest called Marcus (age six) who once spoke proudly of the enormous size of his bike:

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

(I liked Marcus; he was a good kid.) 11:35

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020422&s=silverstein The US chases oil in Equatorial Guinea—human rights be damned. 23:24

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_1915000/1915335.stm The Windsor boys remember their great-grandmother. 15:15

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020415fa_FACT “For years, a rule against copying your neighbor's order was observed fairly strictly. Customers who had just arrived might ask someone at the next table the name of the scrumptious-looking dish he was eating. Having learned that it was Burmese Hummus—one of my favorites, as it happens, even though it is not hummus and would not cause pangs of nostalgia in the most homesick Burmese—they might order Burmese Hummus, only to have Eve shake her head wearily. No copying.” YOU HAVE TO READ THIS. 14:18

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/561962 Amazon's top free Indie Music downloads. This is actually worthwhile. I used to have a link to the top Rap & Hip-Hop downloads but I can't find it now. (e.g. Kristin Hersh, “Your Dirty Answer”; Tanya Donelly, “The Night You Saved My Life.”) 12:48

http://slate.msn.com/?id=2063972 “Vogue's pathetic attempt at body-type diversity.” 15:04

http://newyorker.com/talk/content/?020415ta_talk_radosh 14:52

http://slate.msn.com/?id=2064121 “Pro-Palestinian” or “peace activist”? 14:15

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38888-2002Mar30.html Ghostwriting vs. plagiarism. “Dan Rather and other journalists have put out ghostwritten books—in effect, claiming to be the authors of books they didn't actually write—without losing credibility. But when Joe Klein wrote the best-selling novel “Primary Colors” and published it under the name “Anonymous,” he was accused of dishonesty for claiming not to be the author of a book that he did write.” 14:06

http://www.pulitzer.org/2002/2002.html How long till a weblog gets one of these, eh? 12:20

http://www.truetype.demon.co.uk/tthist.htm History of TrueType. 14:48

http://members.aol.com/JesusImages/ “With you always.” e.g. Truck driver. Artist woke in the middle of the night “with a clear, vivid impression that the Lord wanted me to do some special drawings” … but wait! Larry had never drawn before. 11:17

http://timblair.blogspot.com/?/2002_04_07_timblair_archive.html#75130464 10:01

http://www.bep.treas.gov/store/section.cfm/364 Lucky number freaks: the US Government is offering you the chance to buy bills bearing your favourite serial numbers. 14:09

http://www.ms-studio.com/typecasting.html "L.A. Confidential (1997, Warner Bros.). A highly regarded film, tightly written, well-acted, beautifully filmed, but pretty mediocre in its use of type." 14:27

http://www.nature.com/nsu/011011/011011-14.html (1) Arsenic contaminates (many) water wells in Bangladesh. (2) UNICEF sunk some in the 70s and 80s; the British Geological Survey in the 80s and 90s. The government is suing the BGS--but not UNICEF--because UNICEF could not have been expected to have anticipated the problem. (Huh?) 11:00

http://newyorker.com/printable/?talk/020408ta_talk_friend Another improbable story: Hollywood, TiVos, and the unexpectedly long Oscars. 16:20

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23194-2002Mar27.html Deaf couple wants to have deaf children. (Interesting: how the other unusual attribute of the couple is dealt with—c.f. the National Post.) There's a followup article at the BBC. 14:10

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/letter_from_america/
newsid_1799000/1799872.stm "In fact Geneva now had to act on the unpleasant new discovery that whereas formerly civilians went off to war now the war came to them." Alistair Cooke: the Geneva Convention should be revised--as it has been four times before--to reflect the changing nature of war. 00:29

http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i26/26b01101.htm "The 'TLS': a 100-Year Love Affair" 23:54