http://www.nature.com/nsu/040524/040524-5.html Alleged faults of the EU voting procedures. 02:36
Archives
This month: 23 entries.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/international/middleeast/
26FTE_NOTE.html NY Times acknowledges that some of its
Iraq pieces “included incomplete information or pointed in a wrong
direction.” A substantial apology, although it makes a
point of saying that individual reporters (i.e. Judith Miller)
were not at fault. Also interesting is that much is made of
where in the paper an article appeared, and where the later and
less sensational corrections appeared—especially since
the articles that appear on the
Times’s website (unlike those of the
Washington Post) carry no note indicating where
on the printed paper they appeared. (On which page did this
apology run?) 02:00
http://slate.msn.com/id/2100715/ Lightweight description of the “chaotic inflation” theory of the universe’s origin, which apparently has the implication that the universe could have been created as an experiment, and with few resources, and now be so small that the experimenter has lost it… 23:21
http://slate.msn.com/id/2100770/ “How Does a Court-Martial Work?” 23:21
http://slate.msn.com/id/2100437/ Timothy Noah compiles a list of excuses for Abu Ghraib from putative right-wing commentators: it’s the fault of moral relativism, gays, porn, feminists… I would have guessed that the left’s first (or second) thought would have been to offer similar excuses for the involvement of women, but I haven’t seen any of this. Indeed, a remarkably forthcoming Barbara Ehrenreich, writing in the LA Times, admits that the photographs disabused her of the notion that women were morally superior to men (or at least the idea that women have “a lesser inclination toward cruelty and violence”). 22:41
http://slate.msn.com/id/2100683/ Fred Kaplan: “The prison scandal keeps getting worse for the Bush administration.” 22:41
http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/ Looks interesting: generate big (multi-page) images from much smaller images. 01:39
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/local/library/photogalleries/
spl1.html Photos of Seattle’s new public library. The
New
York Times really loves this building. 01:33
http://www.foxtons.co.uk/SS/wimb0063592/large_floorplan Hello London! A wedge-shaped 3.4m x 2.6m studio is selling for US$200,000/AU$280,000! 21:08
http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=211 Pew Research Center get about a 30% response rate to their telephone surveys (I would have guessed much lower); since the overall demographic profile of their respondents matches that of surveys with much higher participation rates (e.g. census data), they consider their results to still be valid. 00:37
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article966.html Interview with (I think one of) the Vatican’s astronomers. Fairly wide-ranging. “… if you’re going to convert somebody, you have to treat them as an equal. There are people, when they came to the Americas, who thought that, well, we can enslave these people because they don’t have souls. And the Church said, “You can’t do that.” If you’re sending a missionary to somebody, you’re implicitly saying they’re equal.” 00:27
http://slate.msn.com/id/2100449/ Surprisingly interesting slideshow: how Helen of Troy has been depicted at different points in history. 22:39
http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/30593810.html “I chased you for 12 years around the world, and I still can’t find you.” 22:37
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/09/magazine/09SLOTS.html On slot machines. This piece is frustratingly vague on just how manipulative slot machines are. Slot machines will apparently deliver an exciting “near miss” more frequently than they should—but is, say, the probability of a win independent of the result of previous games (i.e. how much you’ve won or lost so far)? 22:46
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1103158.htm “Bush ‘sorry’ for Iraqi prison abuse.” And ABC just couldn’t resist! Bush did use the word “sorry,” but to take it out of context and put it between quotation marks casts “doubt on the [word’s] sincerity … [making] something kind of snide and sinister out of something simple and straightforward.” (As Dave Eggers wrote of a similar situation.)
Without: New York Times, The Age, The Guardian, Aljazeera.
The Washington Post—perhaps realising that there was no way to use “sorry” in a headline without either (a) vouching for its sincerity at A1 headline scale or (b) making it appear insincere—sensibly avoided the word entirely and went with Bush Apologizes, Calls Abuse ‘Stain’ on Nation.
(Google News: bush sorry.) 22:48
http://www.ussc.gov/2003guid/TABCON03.htm U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines! (Also available in Palm format!) 20:22
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact Seymour Hersh’s “Torture at Abu Ghraib.” The guards seem to be putting a lot of blame on M.I. Mark Bowden, in an article in The Atlantic wrote that “coercion should be banned but also quietly practiced” because “if you can save lives—if people are plotting mass murder and you have a chance of preventing it—it’s hard to argue against whatever methods work.” I wonder if he still thinks this. (interview) 18:30
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3665735.stm “A renegade New Zealand sheep that managed to evade the shearers for six years has finally had a haircut.” (I thought sheep shed their wool in winter—?) 23:46