http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0423041friends1.html 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. …” 18:12
Archives
This month: 23 entries.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2099514/ “What’s With Our 15 Intel Agencies?” 18:41
http://slate.msn.com/id/2099285/ “How Do They Measure Calories?” 19:50
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1192928,
00.html 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…) 18:17
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3189039958 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.”) 18:04
http://slate.msn.com/id/2099222/ What NASA’s “Planetary Protection Officer” does. 02:13
http://slate.msn.com/id/2099211/ 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.) 02:12
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?040419ta_talk_kurlantzick 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… 18:51
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/3640199.stm 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.) 18:10
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1193886,00.html ”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? 02:20
http://slate.msn.com/id/2098571/ 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.) 18:28
http://slate.msn.com/id/2098672/ On summer-blend gas. 18:19
http://slate.msn.com/id/2098558/ The press was suckered by the Iraqi National Congress’s defectors—who’s apologised for this, and who not? 18:18
http://www.epicurious.com/g_gourmet/g06_feature/james_beard/
dough.html 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.” 00:53
http://www.sistani.org/html/eng/main/index.php?page=4 The Q&A section of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s website. 00:35
http://slate.msn.com/id/2098364/ 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.” 00:18
http://www.formoore.com/wrongbush.html 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.” 00:10
http://slate.msn.com/id/2098431/ 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.” 00:05
http://www.nature.com/nsu/040405/040405-4.html “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.” 23:00
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46404-2004Apr2.html 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.) 20:53
http://www.ramint.gov.au/about_ram/faq.cfm 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.) 21:59