Gulfstream

http://www.sparklet.com/~royce/trams/hair/ An unusual false beard. (Note: inclusion in this blog no guarantee of authenticity!) 16:34

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/
2003/08/04/do0404.xml 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.” 14:37

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2003/08/25/nhist25big.jpeg 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.) 11:23

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/24/magazine/24NORWAY.html 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.” 12:35

http://www.noonrecallyesonbustamante.com/ Horrible, horrible, “garden path” domain name. And this is the official site? 10:37

http://www.livejournal.com/users/kim_jong_il__/4660.html “I think the magic box used to belong to Chairman Mao.” 09:47

http://slate.msn.com/id/2087206/ “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.) 11:49

http://blogs.salon.com/0001772/thebibleandhomosexuality.html 17:06

http://www.clevescene.com/webextra/2003-02-05/derf.html Cartoon: The Muslim World. 16:50

http://www.thebodyshop.com.au/ourValues.cfm?valueID=4 “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.” 00:05

http://issho.net/ Site of small fonts & great charm. 23:17

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/08/18/1061059778054.html 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.’” 10:06

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/features/story.jsp?
story=433675 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.” 11:21

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/
08/14/MN249939.DTL (Reasonable summary of Schwarzenegger’s campaign.) 16:18

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-fg-collapse11aug11000416,
1,6561673.story 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. 16:39

http://slate.msn.com/id/2086729/ 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.) 12:50

http://slate.msn.com/id/2086742/ “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?) 11:08

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~fajans/Teaching/Steering.htm 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.” 16:25

http://www.oed.com/public/inside/funfacts.htm 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.) 13:31

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond_pr.html 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”…) 10:29

http://www.suntimes.com/output/answ-man/sho-sunday-ebert10.html 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.”) 14:17

http://www.nature.com/nsu/030804/030804-10.html 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.” 12:36

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/05/opinion/05KRIS.html 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.) 17:18

http://amysrobot.com/files/mobs.php Why flash mobs are stupid. 13:14

http://slate.msn.com/id/2086490/ Why Charles Taylor’s miltiamen are cross-dressers. (I don’t watch the news so I hadn’t noticed…) 11:49

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/magazine/03LEVITT.html 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.” 11:02

http://slate.msn.com/id/2086511/ 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.) 11:10