Gulfstream

http://www.prodikeys.com/products/prodikeys_DM/watch/5_Drums_
Low.wmv “This is rock-and-roll.” 21:00

http://slate.com/id/2110204/ Dahlia Lithwick on the Supreme Court’s take on medical marijuana. 20:28

http://www.harvardsucks.org/ Yale get Harvard fans to hold up signs saying “WE SUCK”? But their “WE SUCK” photo looks way better than the one in the video. Photoshop? 08:56

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/nyc/48675443.html “i’m turning into a dude.” 01:30

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200411/s1251674.htm “Head of the state’s crime command Graham Morgan says computer problems have meant that in some cases the entire pornographic image was revealed when the email was opened.” 02:30

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/40563000/gif/_40563403_
ukraine_election2_map416.gif Breakdown of votes in the Ukrainian Presidential election. It would have been nice if the media had made it clear that there’s, uh, a PERFECT DOWN-THE-MIDDLE SPLIT. 01:09

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/49245827.html “Just as him, ‘Which are you?’” (I like the piano!) 01:04

http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/
2004/11/14/bocor14.xml Review of The Pope in Winter. The Pope wears contacts! (Reviewer remarks that this “hints at personal vanity.”) 00:59

http://slate.msn.com/id/2110079/ Why is all the media complaining about the NBA brawl? Fans loved it! “At this exact moment, millions of people were talking, probably for the first time in history, about a regular season NBA game.” 21:01

http://slate.msn.com/id/2110067/ A 55 year sentence for selling pot? Even tough-on-crime judges think it’s too much. 20:59

http://slate.com/id/2109908/ On the digital art market. 01:35

http://slate.com/id/2110034/ “JFK Reloaded is just plain creepy.” (“thanks for doings this important research and sharing your controversial conclusions.) 01:35

http://www.skywebexpress.com/ The future of public transport? Looks like proprietary cars on a proprietary road. This company is trying to do the same thing. 09:47

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_48/b3910087.htm Business people who box. 08:17

http://www.planetsimpson.com/radiohead.aspx Nice meeting-Radiohead story. 22:52

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6522314/site/newsweek/ Going home to fix our parents’ computers. 01:07

http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp?id=ns24741 Interview with a cocky Shin Bet interrogator. 04:01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61463-2004Nov18.html Seinfeld donates his puffy shirt to the Smithsonian. 00:20

http://www.cis.org.au/Events/JBL/JBL04.htm Why European support for the US has waned (for some reason described in terms of “legitimacy”). “U.S. legitimacy among Europeans rested on three pillars, all based on the existence of the Soviet communist empire. The sturdiest pillar was Europe’s perception that the Soviet Union posed a strategic threat to the West—a reality made manifest by hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops parked in the center of Europe—and its understanding that only Washington possessed the power to deter Moscow. Europeans also perceived the Soviet Union as a common ideological threat. The United States prided itself on being the “leader of the free world,” and most Europeans agreed. Finally, Cold War bipolarity conferred what might be called ‘structural legitimacy’ on the United States. The two superpowers’ roughly equal strength meant that U.S. might, although vast, was kept in check.” 00:12

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52946-2004Nov15.html Er, maybe it’s not a good idea to get theater critics to write reviews of math books. “An accumulation of random data always generates this curve of probability, as if conjuring it out of the air.” No, it doesn’t. The means of sets of samples do, but the samples themselves don’t. (And what is a “curve of probability,” anyway?) He also seems to think that the results of flipping a coin are pre-determined: “And yet, as Aczel illustrates, after about the first 120 tosses, the results begin to come up 50-50 (though not all at once: for example, from roughly 250 to 550 tosses, the coins will mostly land heads-up, a lead that tails will catch up to later).” 00:40

http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041115/full/041115-9.html Human being are built for running? “Our poor sprinting prowess has given rise to the idea that our bodies are adapted for walking, not running, says Lieberman. Even the fastest sprinters reach speeds of only about 10 metres per second, compared with the 30 metres per second of a cheetah. But over longer distances our performance is much more respectable: horses galloping long distances average about 6 metres per second, which is slower than a top-class human runner.” 20:57

http://www.greyvideo.com/largemov2.html Music video for “Encore,” from DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album. 19:28

http://slate.com/id/2109807/ Dahlia Lithwick: what the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court does. 21:00

http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html A mostly sensible review of Wikipedia, from a former Editor in Chief of the Britannica. 01:03

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93960 How to figure out whether you have an HP iPod. 10:29

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,
1348748,00.html Article about Pixar, including brief discussion of the “uncanny valley.” (The way in which near-photorealistic images are somehow more creepy than both real images, and less-realistic images.) A Pixar executive also wonders why people are so interested in how many days it takes to render their images: “Great ceiling [Michelangelo]—how many brushstrokes?” 04:01

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/books/review/14COVERFR.html Jonathan Franzen like Alice Munro a lot. (He uses also uses “I” a lot in the review, and tells a lot of jokes that are more about himself than the book, but whatever.) 03:50

http://slate.com/id/2109623/ A question to ask Alberto Gonzales at his confirmation hearing. 00:53

http://creativecommons.org/wired/ MP3s of the free-to-share, free-to-sample (for most purposes) CD that comes with the November Wired. If you have wget, you can download the MP3s with wget -r --span-hosts --level=1 -nd --accept mp3 http://creativecommons.org/wired/. 00:53

http://slate.com/id/2109447/entry/2109448/ Slate is running an amazingly supportive and amazingly uncritical piece on the Marines who pilot UAV’s in Fallujah, calling in air strikes. Still somewhat thrilling though. 19:36

http://www.livejournal.com/users/shmivejournal/97510.html “I’m interested to see what all of you crazy people look like. No lj-icons, please. This is not a fucking meme -- I’m genuinely interested.” Strangely captivating. 07:05

http://www.68k.org/~jrc/blog/archives/000476.html What 51% Bush/48% Kerry looks like. 07:21

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/nyc/47785163.html “Straight male seeks Bush supporter for fair, physical fight - m4m.” 23:02

http://slate.com/id/2109202/ Why aren’t computer games funny? “One of the difficulties in trying to create funny moments is that gamers aren’t audience members so much as actors. It’s easy for a game designer to make someone feel like Bruce Willis or Sly Stallone by putting a virtual gun in their hand. But how do you go about making someone feel like Charlie Chaplin or Bernie Mac? Can you make a gamer actually commit comedy?” 21:22

http://slate.com/id/2109242/ British reactions to the US election. I want to write properly about this. Many of these reactions (particularly that of the Mirror) strike me as illegitimate. As a non-US person, it’s quite okay to be concerned about the US’s foreign policy (US foreign policy affects the rest of the world like no other country’s does), but there’s basically no legitimate claim on anything else: on gay marriage, capital punishment, the economy… You might not like it, you might think it indicates a moral failing, but it’s nothing to do with you. (Also—and I think this is important to remember—for every putative outrage perpetrated in the US, another country does it better: other countries execute more people, are more racist, have less democratic institutions, have more powerful corporations, and so on. So to improve the lot of humanity, you want to focus on countries other than the US.) A single mother living in rural Arkansas is not likely to be voting on the same set of issues as a Mirror reader—if she votes for Bush, why this this make her dumb? 21:10

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/content/?041108fi_fiction So great Jonathan Franzen short story … which mostly survives not being a short story at all—it’s more a collection of short paragraphs. (Fortunately Franzen can pack a whole lot more into a paragraph than anyone else alive, but still…) 20:57

http://tech.nytimes.com/top/news/technology/cybertimesnavigator/
Reference sites suggested by the NY Times. (Wikipedia not included!) 20:48

http://www.livejournal.com/users/kim_jong_il__/8919.html Kim Jong Il wants to know: “Is your e-mail address still George.W.Bush@whitehouse.org?” 03:41

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?041108crbo_books Louis Menand on JFK’s inaugural address. 02:42

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004//pages/results/states/OH/
P/00/county.000.html#39023 Looks like Bush will win Clark County… 23:37

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/kosher_pr.html Making electronics kosher. 06:09

http://www.time.com/time/globalbusiness/printout/0,8816,
1101041025-725113-1,00.html How Nike made it in China. (After Liu Xiang won the 110m hurdles at the Olympics, Nike ran an ad: “Asians lack muscle? / Asians lack the will to win? / Stereotypes are made to be broken.” 09:11

http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041025/multimedia/4311043a_
m1.html Man, I would have got more excited if those damn journalists had made it clear that the human-like remains discovered on Flores were not Homo sapiens. Half the time they’re described as “hobbit-like humans” too, which is so not correct! 08:38

http://slate.com/id/2108966/ Weirdness: Slate asks its contributors who they intend to vote for; in reponse, Christopher Hitchens says many garbled things, including “I do think … that Kerry should get his worst private nightmare and have to report for duty.” Slate interprets this as a vote for Kerry, but when it turns out that Hitchens did not intend his message to be construed as support for Kerry or Bush, Slate apologises and blames an editing error!

(Also, Hitchens’s assumption that declaring his support for one or the other constitutes an “endorsement” demonstrates quite some hubris: as Jacob Weisberg explains, the purpose of the exercise was to: (a) replace an official endorsement by the magazine and (b) to “emphasize the distinction between opinion and bias.”) 03:54