http://www.snopes2.com/business/money/loonie.htm O Canada! “A loon appears on Canada’s one-dollar coin because the original dies, featuring a different design, were lost in transit.” 15:43
Archives
This month: 18 entries.
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/?030106crci_cinema Review of The Two Towers:
[Gollum] gives the movie a chance for psychological inquiry—the one thing it doesn’t require. “The Lord of the Rings” is an epic, and one of the defining restrictions—not to say pleasures—of epic is that it both predate and outwit psychology. Motives, good and ill, may be thwarted or confounded, but you don’t read Tolkien for the niceties of tangled minds; you read him for pace and wonder, and the virtues of Jackson’s trilogy, thus far, have been pace and astonishment, which is almost the same thing.
Is Tolkien read “for the niceties of tangled minds”? I haven’t read him, but readers of the trilogy have told me that this is one aspect of the books missing from the movies—in book form The Fellowship of the Ring is not one great big chase scene, for example. I am quite content for the movies to be (merely) thrilling, though.
(By the way, I do enjoy Anthony Lane’s movie reviews, but his writing does remind me of Strunk and White’s advice to look out for words (or phrases) that “at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning but that soon burst in air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.”) 00:47
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/27/international/americas/
27CHIL.html Battling UV in southern Chile: “On a typical
day here this month, the solar stoplight was set at orange, the
second highest of four levels, and people were warned to limit
their exposure to the sun between noon and 3 p.m. to 21 minutes at
most.” (Despite the precision, it seems that
they’re more being careful than responding to any science in
particular.) 20:28
http://www.eff.org/cafe/threesom2.html What’s the EFF’s position on digital rights, copyright and so forth? (I’m trying to work out whether or not I should (can) support the EFF.) This page looked promising but it turns out to be real light on detail.
The first “Guiding Principle” is: “Creators should be paid for their work when appropriate. Copyright holders have the right (and responsibility) to make sure that their works are protected from piracy.” Huh? What does this mean? When is it appropriate for creators to be paid for their work? Why can’t you just tell me which currently illegal acts should be legal? Putting lyrics on-line? Books fifty years old? Books that sold less than five thousand copies? MP3s of concerts? MP3s of albums? Movies? 01:31
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/28/books/28BOTT.html Fun little interview with Alain de Botton, author of The Art of Travel. 00:31
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/12/23/1040511005690.html (Australia) Many Australian conservatives (including Tim Blair) were once not. 12:06
http://www.theonion.com/onion3847/bill_of_rights.html “As visionary as they were, the framers of the Constitution never could have foreseen, for example, that our government would one day need to jail someone indefinitely without judicial review. There was no such thing as suspicious Middle Eastern immigrants back then.” 17:00
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2075659 Hitchens: “unilateral” = bad; “multilateral” = good? Why does the addition of a country or two to an idea’s boosters turn a bad idea into a good one? 12:27
http://abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s750246.htm Hullo due process! “Bali bombing suspects will be found guilty: police chief” You wouldn’t be trying to jeopardise the trial, would you General? (Anyway, haven’t some confessed?) 12:11
http://www.librarian.net/technicality.html Heartening as well as amusing: how seriously librarians take civil liberties. 12:47
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia_china/story.jsp?
story=361411 More testing edge cases: Afghan men bothered by photo
showing US soldier searching an Afghan woman—the soldier is female. 17:02
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2075467 Hitchens summarises the events of the last few days, demonstrates the art of spin: “Henry Kissinger prefers his client list to the solemn promise he made to the murder victims of Sept. 11. / Sen. Trent Lott in retrospect thinks that voters were dumb to vote Republican in 1948. / Cardinal Bernard Law asks a foreign potentate if it’s OK to obey the laws of the United States.” 11:48
http://www.katinkamatson.com/exhibits.html So very beautiful: Katinka Matson’s scanned flowers. 13:23
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/google_pr.html With great power comes great responsibility: on all political and social issues, Google’s policy is Don’t be evil, where evil is whatever Google co-founder Sergey Brin thinks is evil. So when Chinese users were blocked from Google, Brin
ordered a half-dozen books about Chinese history, business, and politics on Amazon.com and splurged on overnight shipping. He consulted with Schmidt, Page, and David Drummond, Google’s general counsel and head of business development, then put in a call to tech industry doyenne Esther Dyson for advice and contacts. Google has no offices in China, so Brin enlisted go-betweens to get the message to Chinese authorities that Google would be very interested in working out a compromise to restore access.
http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0211/Byko-0211.html Making weapons and armour for The Lord of the Rings. (10,000 buckles were hand-forged for the Orcs alone?!) 14:27
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2074780 What rules govern a “just society”? Political philosopher John Rawls believed that a thought experiment known as the “original position” provided the answer this question. The experiment runs like this: if you were given the power to choose how society was to run, but you weren’t to know what what place you would eventually take in that society (that is, you had to decide not knowing whether you would be rich or poor, Christian or Muslim, young or old), what rules would you choose? Rawls felt that you would decide on a society in which: (1) individuals were granted every possible freedom compatible with freedom for all; and (2) economic inequalities did exist, but only if they were of benefit to the worst-off. In other words, you’d attempt to maximise the minimum.
Jim Holt here discusses the expected value objection to this argument, which I suspect is related to the observation that an individual’s objectives and those of a society often conflict. For example, though one’s death, or the death of one’s family is (usually) the worst thing that can happen to an individual, it’s by no means the worst thing that can happen to a society. Practically every day a society is given the chance to save a life; instead it fritters money away on sports stadiums, zoos, galleries… 10:41
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2074822 William Saletan tries to make sense of Bush’s vow to topple “every terrorist group of global reach.” 10:41