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July 31, 2008
Neat indeed
Imagine if you set made a reenactment of the movie The Thing. Except instead of people you used stop motion GI Joe figures and instead of vocal you made it into a great rock instrumental music video.* Then you'd have this fantastic piece of art:
The song is "Driving this road until death sets you free"
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:54 PM | Comments (0)
World's oldest joke
Perhaps unsurprisingly the worlds oldest joke is about farting. Because farting is hilarious.
The world's oldest recorded joke has been traced back to 1900 BC and suggests that toilet humor was as popular with the ancients as it is today. It is a saying of the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern Iraq and goes: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap.World's oldest joke traced back to 1900 BC
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)
Heard of Evernote?
I just learned about Evernote which seems really cool. There are any number of applications on the web that allow you to clip websites and take notes on them. For example, I use Furl for that purpose because I like that it keeps an archive copy of the entire page. But ever note seems a lot better, at least if you have an windows smart phone or a Iphone. That's because Evernote not only allows you to clip from websites, it allows you to clip from photographs taken by your smart phone. Then it uses optical character recognition to allow you to search the text contained in the picture, say a business card, or even a neatly handwritten Post-it note. That strikes me as a killer application. I remain firmly grounded in pencil and paper note taking is that I can paste whatever I want into it and can bring it everywhere. This product seems to allow your electronic notebook to be everywhere and store everything. It even has both a desktop and a browser based applications for viewing your saved content.
This is what it looks like in action:
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:37 AM | Comments (0)
July 30, 2008
A new word for today
"Thirteen percent of U.S. adults are "semivegetarian," meaning they eat meat with fewer than half of all their meals."
The Great Vegan Honey Debate
I certainly qualify under this rule. I probably eat meat 2-10 times in a given week, but the idea that I'd qualify for any back-formed variant of vegetarian is astonishing. I've always thought of myself as firmly omnivorous. What's even more astonishing in is that it is only 13% of the population that meet this standard. Add in the 3.2% that are actual vegetarians and you find that about 84% of Americans have meat at half their meals or more! I'm honestly having a hard time wrapping my mind around that. I mean, most people have vegetarian breakfasts (at least most days of the week) -- right? People eat a lot of pizza, baked ziti, and other vegetarian pastas like those with pesto. Does fish count? It is hard to tell, but for the sake of American health I hope so. The idea of having pork, chicken, lamb, veal, and beef for 11 or more meals a week seems unbelievable.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:47 PM | Comments (0)
Snag-It tangling with Microsoft Word 2007
It seems that certain plug-ins and templates into Microsoft Office can cause Microsoft word to be unable to select text with the mouse and have it crash on exit. I'm grateful to the posting Annoying Word 2007 problem: can’t select text for helping me to understand and solve the problem.
First disable the add-ons in word using regedit:
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Word\Addins
Then change the value of the LoadBehavior key from 3 to 0 for each add-in.
That should take care of the selection problem. Then to solve the crash on exit, Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data, rename this key to Old_Data.
and Restart Word.
The problem plug-ins and templates all appear to be from Snag-It, an otherwise excellent application for taking screen shots in windows. If you use that application, avoid installing the plug-in functionality.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)
Big Families
I've mentioned the Duggar family and their 17 kids before (their 18th is due in January). It turns out that there is competition for the biggest family in North America. Canadians Alexandru and Livia Ionce just had their 18th child. I wonder what Alexandru does for a living and if the grown contribute to the family budget. It seems that Jim Bob Duggar is a motivational speaker on financial independence.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:15 AM | Comments (0)
What has Obama acomplished?
"Just tell me one thing Barack Obama has done that you admire," I asked a prominent Democrat. He paused and then said that he admired Obama's speech to the Democratic convention in 2004. I agreed. It was a hell of a speech, but it was just a speech.
Richard Cohen at Obama the Unknown
A president Obama would surely get a lot accomplished and rack up many achievements. But who wouldn't, given the power and profile of the job? Given his legislative and personal record, it seems fair to worry how little he'll achieve. And if I take him at face value on what he'll do about NAFTA and taxes, I have to worry about how much he'll archive.
Looking at the current electoral estimates, it appears that I will have my curiosity satisfied.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:06 AM | Comments (0)
July 29, 2008
My first earthquake
I just noticed my first earthquake of my west coast experience.
It was a 5.8 magnitude according to the NY Times but the USGS says Magnitude 5.4
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)
Don't be so judgemental
Have you ever noticed that when people say not to be "judgmental" they never say it after they are judged to be something good? This is because they don't care about being judged, they just care about being judged poorly. This is related to the "I don't care that you did X, just that you lied about doing X", which is also not true, and almost always in a circumstance where X is in fact the thing that made them angry.
It is almost as though the more intense and important the argument the less likely the stated subject of the argument is the actual cause.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:12 AM | Comments (0)
July 28, 2008
NYC is hard to leave but it is nice to be home
I wanted to say thanks to all my great family and friends in NYC who made my visit to New York a fantastic one. I ate at some of the best pizza places in NYC (Artichoke, Una Pizza Napoletana, Bleecker Street Pizza, Strombolis) , Korean in Park Slope, French in Cobble Hill, Vietnamese In Jersey City, Indian food in Chelsea, hot wings and bagels on the Upper West Side, Turkish food in Forest Hills, Kabobs in Astoria, East Village Ethiopian, ate homemade ice cream in Jackson Heights, and several great home cooked meals in queens . I visited upstate twice, DC, the beaches of Long Island, Queens about 6 times, Brooklyn twice, and Jersey City. I saw a year's worth of movies, visited a new museum (The New Museum), did some freelance work, read six novels, sweltered in the heat and froze in the AC, saw almost all my siblings, and celebrated the wedding of two of my best friends.
It was a great time. Thanks to all.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:05 PM | Comments (0)
July 26, 2008
Misattributed
Truman wasn't the first to say "The buck stops here."
Everett Dirksen didn't coin "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it begins to add up to real money."
"There’s no such thing as a free lunch” was in use before Milton Friedman made it popular
Nor did Benjamin Franklin’s originate that "Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."
Even Tip O’Neill didn't come up with the saying that "All politics is local"
Otto von Bismarck’s comment on how "Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made." wasn't said by him at all.
How fascinating that such famous maxims have ahistoric origins
Quote . . . Misquote by Fred R. Shapiro.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)
July 25, 2008
Baby journals come to economics
Long ago BlueEyedGirl taught me that in Biology the top field journals have launched what she called "baby journals" to capitalize on the value and prestige of their flagship journals. These journals focus on specific specialties and are more focused and less prestigious than their parent journals. For example, Cell gave birth to Cancer Cell, Cell Host & Microbe, Cell Metabolism, Cell Stem Cell, Chemistry & Biology, Current Biology, Developmental Cell, Immunity, Molecular Cell, Neuron, and Structure.
A friend tipped me off to such journals spreading to the field of economics. The American Economic Review has launched several child journals including AEJ: Applied Economics, AEJ: Economic Policy, AEJ: Macroeconomics, and AEJ: Microeconomics to join the The American Economic Review, The Journal of Economic Literature, and The Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Given that such a decision stems from a basic understanding of marketing and brand valuation, I'm surprised that that it didn't start with economics (or at least arrive their earlier than it did). I guess this is a case of doctors making lousy patients.
Also, it becomes a bit of a commentary on what schools are home to the best faculty in economics. A classmate looked at the editorial boards of the various journals to compile of how many top faculty were housed at each school. This is what he found.
School # of Faculty
MIT: 9
Harvard: 11
Chicago: 7
Stanford: 5
Princeton: 4
Yale: 3
Berkeley: 10
Penn: 1
Northwestern: 6
UCSD: 5
UCLA: 1
Michigan: 2
NYU 4
Columbia: 5
Wisconsin: 0
Minnesota: 0
Duke: 3
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:58 PM | Comments (0)
Randy Pausch lecturer in famous "Last lecture" has died
Randy Pausch was the fascinating CMU computer science professor who, upon learning that he had terminal pancreatic cancer decided to give a final lecturer on the lessons he learned in life. He died today at an age of 47.
In May, Dr. Pausch spoke at the Carnegie Mellon University commencement. He said a friend recently told him he was "beating the [Grim] Reaper" because it's now been nine months since his doctor told him he would die in six."But we don't beat the Reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living well," said Dr. Pausch, who urged the graduates to find and pursue their passion. He put an exclamation point at the end of his remarks by kissing his wife, Jai, and carrying her off stage.
Randy Pausch, noted CMU prof, succumbs to cancer
The Video:
The Book: The Last Lecture
And if you can choose to be a Tiger instead on an Eeyore, be sure to do so.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)
A cool word I learned today
Pseudocide: faking one's own death
How to disappear without a trace
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)
A car to change the world
Somehow, I missed that the Chevy Volt is posied to be the sort of car that will completely change the way we consume oil. We'll have to keep an eye on this project. If they pull it off, oil isn't going to be a problem by 2020.
When one of the world’s mightiest corporations throws everything it’s got at a project, and when it shreds its rule book in the process, the results are likely to be impressive. Still, even for General Motors, the Volt is a reach. If it meets specifications, it will charge up overnight from any standard electrical socket. It will go 40 miles on a charge. Then a small gasoline engine will ignite. The engine’s sole job will be to drive a generator, whose sole job will be to maintain the battery’s charge—not to drive the wheels, which will never see anything but electricity. In generator mode, the car will drive hundreds of miles on a tank of gas, at about 50 miles per gallon. But about three-fourths of Americans commute less than 40 miles a day, so on most days most Volt drivers would use no gas at all.Because it will have both an electric and a gasoline motor on board, the Volt will be a hybrid. But it will be like no hybrid on the road today. Existing hybrids are gasoline-powered cars, with an electric assist to improve the gas mileage. The Volt will be an electric-powered car, with a gasoline assist to increase the battery’s range.
Electric drive is as old as the automobile itself. Anyone who has ridden in a golf cart has experienced it. Compared with the fire-breathing internal combustion engine, an electric motor is simple, quiet, and clean, and it provides marvelous acceleration and torque. For a century, though, the deal-breaker has been the battery. Any battery with nearly enough power to drive a full-size car was prohibitively large and heavy, prohibitively expensive, unable to go more than a few miles on a charge, or (usually) all of the above. Only recently has the advent of lithium-ion batteries brought a full-range electric car into the realm of the practical. Even so, the battery for the Volt doesn’t yet exist, at least not at a mass-market price, and building it poses formidable challenges. Loading enough energy into a sufficiently small, lightweight package is hard (the battery isn’t much good unless it fits in the car); keeping it cool lest it burst into flames is harder; making it durable enough to last 10 years on bumpy roads is harder yet; manufacturing it in high volumes and at mass-market prices may be hardest of all.
Given the challenges, standard procedure dictates first building and testing the battery, and only then designing a car around it. That process, however, would take until 2012 or 2013—time GM does not have if it wants to beat Toyota. The only hope of meeting the 2010 deadline is to invent the battery while simultaneously designing the car. Just-in-time inventory is common now in the car business, but just-in-time invention on the Volt’s scale is new to GM and probably to the modern automotive industry.
Electro-Shock Therapy
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:59 AM | Comments (0)
July 24, 2008
Bias is everywhere
I just saw a cool example of how insidious bias in writing can be. Check out this list of quotations (!) from today's WSJ. Each one is a verbatim quotation of a Democratic US President or cadidate. That should be an uncontroversial presentation of fact -- right?
Great Orators of the Democratic Party
• "One man with courage makes a majority."--attributed to Andrew Jackson
• "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."--Franklin D. Roosevelt
• "The buck stops here."--Harry S. Truman
• "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."--John F. Kennedy
• "So the point that I was making at the time was that the political dynamic was the driving force between that sectarian violence. And we could try to keep a lid on it, but if these underlining dynamic continued to bubble up and explode the way they were, then we would be in a difficult situation. I am glad that in fact those political dynamic shifted at the same time that our troops did outstanding work."--Barack Obama
I can thank the Index from Harpers Magazine for teaching me that even the blandest presentation of facts can be firmly biased by selection, wording and other attributes of presentation. In the interest of fairness I thought I'd show an example from the right instead.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
Sounds like a fun thing to do
The 75 Things Every Man Should Do by Esquire
No. 12: Leave yourself a letter in a library book. Look for it twenty years later.
Pick an obscure biography in a college library, since no one there wants to insult obscurity by decataloging a book, and the library will most likely always be there. One page. Be discreet. Type it on erasable bond, tuck it in the back, and hope that no one ever notices. As for content, skip the hopes and dreams. Mention the weather, tell yourself what you ate that morning, make a list of your friends, note how much you weigh and whether you feel fat, remind yourself of a secret you want to keep.
My other favorites from the list are under the fold:
No. 19: Live in a hotel suite for a week.
Lean into the services a good hotel offers as if it were a way of life and it will be. On the first day, order the same breakfast to be delivered to your room at the same time, every day thence. Tell them you like the newspaper on the cart, with no plastic bag. Take long showers. Stop in at the front desk for messages. Greet the doormen with a twenty. Take walks. Take saunas. Learn the name of the room-service manager. Establish a routine involving a cocktail, the balcony, and a bowl of olives. Tell the concierge to make you seven dinner reservations for seven nights. Tell him to surprise you. After you leave, go back a year later and they will remember your name. At a hotel, it is good to be known.
No. 22: Carry a totem in your pocket.
A watch, a badge, a medal, a poker chip, a silver certificate -- for one year. Then give it away. My dad, whose brothers were tailors, carried a thimble on his key ring for forty years. In our house, where keys were constantly interchanged and lost, it marked the set as his. Several years ago, he gave the thimble to me. He’d had several strokes by then, and he was afraid he was going to lose it. I told him to put it away instead, to leave it on his dresser. He shrugged and asked me why. “I can’t remember anything,” he told me. “And you can. That’s the point of a thing like that.”
No. 37: Get very good at a sport that isn’t a sport.
Horseshoes. Poker. Beanbag toss. Discuss this with no one. Use it when the time comes. Rest assured, the time will come. When it does, don’t take over, don’t push others around. Just execute and dominate.
No. 38: Listen to war stories.
Buy a veteran a beer. Ask your questions.
No. 47: Attend the funeral of someone you didn’t know that well.
Attendance at a funeral registers. You don’t have to stick around. You don’t have to cry. You can just sit there and take some lumps for the copy guy you ignored, or the coworker you basically forgot about, or the neighbor you never properly introduced yourself to. Sometimes the best respect you can offer is the last respect.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:40 AM | Comments (0)
Nothing to add, but this is really cool
Imagine you are standing in front of a bathroom mirror; how big do you think the image of your face is on the surface? And what would happen to the size of that image if you were to step steadily backward, away from the glass?People overwhelmingly give the same answers. To the first question they say, well, the outline of my face on the mirror would be pretty much the size of my face. As for the second question, that’s obvious: if I move away from the mirror, the size of my image will shrink with each step.
Both answers, it turns out, are wrong. Outline your face on a mirror, and you will find it to be exactly half the size of your real face. Step back as much as you please, and the size of that outlined oval will not change: it will remain half the size of your face (or half the size of whatever part of your body you are looking at), even as the background scene reflected in the mirror steadily changes. Importantly, this half-size rule does not apply to the image of someone else moving about the room. If you sit still by the mirror, and a friend approaches or moves away, the size of the person’s image in the mirror will grow or shrink as our innate sense says it should.
What is it about our reflected self that it plays by such counterintuitive rules? The important point is that no matter how close or far we are from the looking glass, the mirror is always halfway between our physical selves and our projected selves in the virtual world inside the mirror, and so the captured image in the mirror is half our true size.
Rebecca Lawson, who collaborates with Dr. Bertamini at the University of Liverpool, suggests imagining that you had an identical twin, that you were both six feet tall and that you were standing in a room with a movable partition between you. How tall would a window in the partition have to be to allow you to see all six feet of your twin?
The window needs to allow light from the top of your twin’s head and from the bottom of your twin’s feet to reach you, Dr. Lawson said. These two light sources start six feet apart and converge at your eye. If the partition is close to your twin, the upper and lower light points have just begun to converge, so the opening has to be nearly six feet tall to allow you a full-body view. If the partition is close to you, the light has nearly finished converging, so the window can be quite small. If the partition were halfway between you and your twin, the aperture would have to be -- three feet tall. Optically, a mirror is similar, Dr. Lawson said, "except that instead of lighting coming from your twin directly through a window, you see yourself in the mirror with light from your head and your feet being reflected off the mirror into your eye."
Mirrors Don’t Lie. Mislead? Oh, Yes.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:57 AM | Comments (0)
What does this argument get you?
If Israel were to stop the settlements, ease the checkpoints, allow people in and out more freely, and negotiate more enthusiastically with Syria over the Golan Heights and with the Arab countries on the basis of the Saudi peace proposal, then peace might still elude the region. But Israel would at least be doing everything possible to secure its long-term future, rather than bolstering Hamas.Tough Love for Israel?
I see this as a fairly typical left of center position on Israel. Kristof may seem reasonable by taking this position, but it doesn't work well for me. I see no value in symbolic gestures of "doing everything possible" when the stakes are this high. Certainly, every strategic action should be weighed as part of a plan to maximize the long term welfare of Israel, but it is hard for me to see his proposals could be those policies. How can free movement of Palestinians into Israel be prudent when they retain a distinct minority which mass murders Israeli civilians? How can peace treaties be made when they require giving up land of great emotional, strategic, and economic value and counter-parties still seek to murder and destory you? Why give moral sanction to countries like Saudi Arabia to facilitate the peace process when they deny Jews the right to visit their country and brutalize their own un-free and terrified people?
Some other comments:
One side is a beautiful, literate, medically and scientifically and artistically an advanced society. The other side wants to throw bombs. Why shouldn’t there be a fence? (Mileway)So, build a fence. But construct it on the 1967 borders, not Palestinian land — and especially not where it divides Palestinian farmers from their land.
The Israeli government should build the fence where it makes the most strategic sense to do so. Deliberately destroying Palestinian communities with the fence without a defensive role is wrong, and where this happened (if anywhere) should be undone. However, Israel has an obligation to her own people, and to sacrifice your own people for the comfort of the farmers and householders of a country with which you are at war seems wrong. One proposal might be to allow farmers with land on both sides of the fence to become Israeli citizens if they like and pass a security check. That way the Israelis reinforce the idea that the fence is the border of Israel.
While I do condemn this type of violence, it pales in contrast to Palestinian suicide bombers, rockets and other acts of terror against Jews. (Jay) B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, reports that a total of 123 Israeli minors have been killed by Palestinians since the second intifada began in 2000, compared with 951 Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces.Do these sorts of statistics really matter? For me circumstances matter a great deal. Does one side use children as human shields, hiding among civilians for cover? Does the other side fight away from their people and in uniform? Are the children killed by accident or are they deliberately targeted? To me, it is these things that matter far more.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:17 AM | Comments (0)
July 23, 2008
How a bad bill becomes a bad law
The NY Times reports that the House has passed and the President will sign the so called housing bill:
In addition to propping up the mortgage giants and helping homeowners avoid foreclosure, the bill creates a new affordable-housing trust fund that will eventually sponsor the creation of rental housing for Americans too poor to buy homes.The measure also creates an independent agency to oversee the mortgage companies and provides an array of tax incentives, including credit for first-time home buyers. To accommodate the rescue for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bill also raises the national debt limit to $10.6 trillion, an increase of $800 billion.
House Passes Housing Bill After Bush Says He Will Sign It
This bill is sloppy, rambling, and poorly designed in a panic. That's just how I like my government's major economic policies to be made.
Disgusting.
We are sowing seeds of economic dislocation and poor incentives that are likely to haunt us for years to come.
Here is my plan.
Do nothing. Cheap, simple, and practical.
Letting the mortgage giants fail would be the clearest signal we could possibly send to investors and corporate managers that the government is not here to protect you.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:13 PM | Comments (0)
Leading commentators
Today Belligerati saw a rash of comments. I wondered who the leading commentators around here were (besides me anyway):
Name Comments
Giblfiz 60
Jess H 41
BlueEyedGirl 32
REggert 14
Thanks for all your interest in my site. Please keep participating. I've also been very pleased to see a few postings from strangers over the years. I hope that continues. I still await the day when my commentators actually talk to each other and not just me. Maybe someday.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:24 PM | Comments (2)
July 22, 2008
Exercise isn't always good for you
As someone with exercise induced asthma, I assumed that top athlete were the sorts of people with much healthier pulminary systems. It turns out however, that Asthma is more common among top athletes that it is in the general public!
One indication of the prevalence of asthma among elite athletes came when researchers tested every athlete in seven sports on the 1998 United States Winter Olympic team — biathlon, cross-country skiing, figure skating, ice hockey, Nordic combined, long-track speedskating and short-track speedskating. Nearly a quarter of the athletes, including half of the cross-country skiers, had asthma. In comparison, about 5 percent of the general population has asthma. ... Asthma is especially prevalent in swimming, distance running, cycling and skiing. That may be because those athletes are exposed to pollutants and dry air, said Dr. Thomas Casale, the chief of allergy and immunology at Creighton University in Omaha. Those who are prone to asthma, he said, can have airways that are especially sensitive to irritants.Asthma Medications: Not a Clear Advantage
Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be evidence that people are taking the asthma medicine as a performance enhancer. Why? Because the inhaled medicines don't enhance performance. Contrast that with drugs like clenbuterol that both treats a medical disorder in horses and is performance enhancing and which have become major problems in the sport of horse racing.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:27 AM | Comments (1)
July 21, 2008
Remarkably similar writing
Maybe this is just a cliche way of sounding novel about the subject of human-monkey similarity but I thought I was weird that I read both these things in the same day:
Consider that chimpanzees share as much as 98 percent of our genetic makeup.... Of course, the reverse is also true: we are 98 percent chimpanzee.
Chimps Aren’t Chumps
Rrhesus macaque monkey share roughly ninety-four percent of their genetic heritage with humans. Another way to put this is that humans are ninety-four percent rhesus macaque monkey, six percent people.Opening Skinner's Box
I think this is a reductive and ultimately false way of equating cross species similarity. Consider the fate of the wolf. A dog and a wolf share a common ancestor at most a few tens of thousands of years ago. Unlike and of the great apes with man, they can still cross breed. Canis Lupus and Canis Familiaris must differ by at most a few tenths of a percent of genetic difference. Yet in size, color, personality, speed, shape,and intelligence there are enormous differences.
Genes vary widely in their impact, and a mere percentage comparison really doesn't do justice to the true overlap. Many genes are widely conserved because they are necessary to higher order life. Those genes are common between man and mouse, but also man and fly. Those genes belong not to the man, mouse, monkey or fly, but to all of multicellular life, and are not useful in understanding the level of similarity between species. Better to ask, what does monkey genetics share with human genetics that they don't share with mice? And what is in human genetics that isn't in the monkey's?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:11 AM | Comments (1)
Some people can't take a joke
They make and use tools, recognize and identify hundreds of individuals in their groups and learn from others skills like termite fishing. Of course, the reverse is also true: we are 98 percent chimpanzee. Would we condone putting funny clothes on human children so that we could laugh at the way they look like subhuman buffoons?A progressive society should weigh the moral costs and benefits of practices like these. Misrepresentations of chimpanzees may not be as repugnant as racism, bigotry or sexism. But they can still serve as a benchmark for our society’s moral progress.
The good news is that a growing number of companies, including Honda, Puma and Subaru, have pledged to stop the use of primates in advertisements. The journal Science recently stopped its promotional campaign featuring chimpanzees in hats reading the magazine. That two consecutive Super Bowls have gone by without a major ad campaign featuring a chimpanzee is reason for optimism. Sometimes, success has to be measured in small increments.
Chimps Aren’t Chumps
What a sad and humorless way of seeing the world. A major reason we like to see monkiys clowning around is because we enjoy seeing animals so similar to us having fun. Bringing media attention to them allows us to share their joy and have them remain in our minds eye. I doubt that banishing them to only sad advertisements would help.
Better, I think, to do what I've been suggesting Exxon do for a number of years. Exxon uses a tiger in their advertisements, and it would be a neat piece of PR if they made special efforts in their philanthropy to help tigers. If tigers are going to make you think of Exxon, better to think of them and protected and prosperous creatures and not sickly, threatened ones. If a large company or organization could use the chimpanzees' image to promote their brand while using a tiny bit of their advertising budget to help them (tag lines on how threatened they are, habitat protection, breeding programs) we could all enjoy the sight of happy monkeys and see them taken care of. Surely it would have been far better for the chimpanzees species for Honda, Puma, and Subaru to have done that then to sign one of these pledges.
Dignity is an emotion of humans. Even though chimpanzees may be similar, things that may violate our sense of dignity do no harm to them, just as seeing children acting playfully is no affront to dignity. Confusing animal dignity with the welfare of the chimpanzee species would be a horrible mistake that is likely to be more harmful to them than the status quo.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:18 AM | Comments (1)
July 19, 2008
Why lefties have an easier time of baseball
I've often wondered why lefties are considered very valuable in baseball. I know that experience in playing against people of similar handedness matters, that's a major reason why left handedness is more common in violent societies (Handedness frequency over more than ten thousand years).
However, it seems that that explains only part of the left-handed advantage. Take a look at this except from a Newsweek interview.
Although only one in 10 civilians are left-handed, one quarter of Major League Baseball players are southpaws. That's no accident, says Washington University aerospace engineer David Peters, who has used math and physics skills to confirm that lefties have a considerable advantage on the diamond. Of the 40 players in Tuesday's All-Star game, 18 are either left-handed batters or switch-hitters
...NEWSWEEK: You argue that left-handers have a distinct advantage in baseball. Why?
David Peters: Twenty-five percent of players are left-handed, where in real life only 10 percent [of people] are left-handed, so that's proof that they are two-and-a-half-times better. There are several reasons why. One reason is that the left-handed batter is closer to first base, so he's got a couple steps advantage trying to beat out a grounder. Over the course of a year, he's going to beat out a few more. Also, as he swings, his momentum is turning him toward first base. But that is not the biggest advantage. The biggest has to do with the angle of the ball. Three quarters of pitchers are right-handed. A right-handed batter has to look over his left shoulder and the ball is coming at quite an angle. The offset of your eyes gives you depth perception. So when you're looking over your shoulder, you have lost the distance between your two eyes quite a bit, so you have lost that 10th of a second to see the ball. That's why batters switch hit.Is the inverse also true?
A left-handed hitter facing a left-handed batter means double trouble. First, it's coming over his shoulder, but second, he hasn't seen that many left-handed pitchers, because he's mostly learned from right-handed pitchers.
Southpaw’s Revenge
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:34 AM | Comments (0)
What really happened to the Baghdad museum
It seems that the Baghdad museum was not as badly looted as it seemed a few years ago:
When looters attacked the Baghdad Museum in 2003, the news media put the number of destroyed and looted objects at 170,000 -- a figure equal to the entire collection. It emerged later that most of the important pieces had been successfully hidden away. Others were soon found. The number of missing objects that is cited has since fluctuated between 3,000 and 15,000, with the figure never taking into account the systematic semiofficial looting and frequent substituting with fakes that occurred in Saddam's time.
It also appears that the major archaeological sites of Iraq are largely unharmed.
The archaeologists' mission to southern Iraq took place in early June. Besides Prof. Stone, the experts included John Curtis, head of the British Museum's Middle East Department; Paul Collins, a Mesopotamia specialist at that museum; a top German expert; and Iraqi experts. It was conducted through the British military, which is in charge of the area, using a helicopter and armed escorts to visit the locations. They included such celebrated "cradle of civilization" sites as Ur, Eridu (the earliest Sumerian city), Warka (Sumerian Uruk), Larsa (a Babylonian city), Tell el-Ouelli (ancient Ubaid) and Tell el-Lahm (an Assyrian site).According to the Art Newspaper article, "The international team . . . had been expecting to find considerable evidence of looting after 2003 but to their astonishment and relief there was none. Not a single recent dig hole was found at the eight sites, and the only evidence of illegal digging came from holes which were partially covered with silt and vegetation, which means they [were] several years old." Furthermore, the most recent damage "probably dated back to 2003," to just before and after the invasion when the Iraqi army maneuvered for the allied attack. (According to other experts, looting probably took place when the Iraqi army first moved out of areas near sites to counter the invasion.)
So Much for the 'Looted Sites' By MELIK KAYLAN
People framed the Iraq war as a failure and the looting came to be seen as one facet of that failure. I'm flabbergasted at how wrong the conventional wisdom was on this matter.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:12 AM | Comments (0)
Making fun of Obama
I believe comedic change is possible. Since the New Yorker dropped a bum joke on its cover this week, comedians have appeared on every news outlet to whine about how hard it is to make fun of Barack Obama. Really? They have an arsenal of jokes to use against a 71-year-old ex-POW cancer survivor and Obama is too touchy a subject?
I'm here to help. I called some comedian friends to compile a guide to making fun of Obama.
...
He's black. Apparently, the differences between black people and white people can be funny. Trust, me I've seen this on HBO's "Def Comedy Jam."
When I called "Simpsons" writer Matt Selman for help on Obama jokes, he came up with this: "A lot of people are worried about Obama being assassinated because he's black. The solution to that is a much blacker vice president. I'm thinking Flavor Flav." Admittedly, Selman nervously said, "Don't make me look racist!" about 20 times before and after telling me his joke.
...
He called his own grandmother a racist. We all have racist grandmothers, but we don't brag about it to everyone. I like to imagine that his granny wasn't that bad and that Obama was just super-sensitive. Like she would tell him it was bedtime and he'd yell, "Oh, I have to go to bed because I'm black!" Or she'd tell him to clean up his room and he'd start yelling, "Oh, clean my room, huh? My people stopped obeying the white woman 100 years ago, Grammy!"
...
His name is weird. The unfunny people beat us to the Osama/Obama bit, which really could have been mined. But Obama also dropped the "Barry" nickname in college. Do you remember those classmates who suddenly found their culture and had to share it with you like they were on the ninth step of AA? You just wanted to trudge through "Portrait of a Lady," but they felt compelled to sit you down in the dorm hallway and explain how they're no longer Susie, they're Mei Mei now. Then they recounted their whole journey of identity by using a lot of words that made it clear that Mei Mei was going to be a lot less fun than Susie was.
Nice to see people are still trying to make fun of him.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:10 AM | Comments (0)
July 18, 2008
The right number of women in politics
The problem, it turns out, is less underperformance than underrepresentation. When women run, they perform at least as well as men. But they don't run nearly so often, and our country -- with its weak party system and aversion to quotas—does nothing to specifically redress the resulting disparity. This might be why the percentage of women in Congress puts us in 68th place worldwide, nestled right between Bolivia and El Salvador, and only a couple of spots beneath famously feminist Tajikistan.Beyond Hillary: By Invitation Only
This could be the difference between the marginal female candidate and the average one. For whatever reason, the US might have female candidates that are on average of lower quality than other nations but the marginal candidate is the same quality as the marginal male one. If you think of the parties as controlling the gender of their candidates by who they nominate, then they should toy with the gender mix until the benefits of getting the best candidate is canceled out by the marginal gender effect. Perhaps in America, the minority of women with the talents and drive to have a successful political careers instead go into the military, education, industry, or the clergy.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:04 PM | Comments (0)
Excluding evidence when the police break the law
Law and Order fans often cheer when the thuggish police violate a criminal's civil liberties and they are found not guilty as a result. I'd never thought about it before, but the NY Times (Should Suspects Go Free When Police Blunder?) reports that the US is the only country that does so.
Although the textual argument for excluding the fruit of the poisoned vine may be weak, I have to say that I prefer this rule. In the US Grand Juries, police, and district attorneys have so much power and resources that the dependent has a severe disadvantage. Add in the fact that the police are permitted to lie and mislead suspects and you have a recipe for the state to tread heavily over the innocent. It may not be pretty to free the guilty but we are far freer for it.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:48 PM | Comments (0)
Last Night's Entertainment
I hung out with MelRoseDr last night. We ate at Una Pizza Neapolitan. Although part of my pie was charred, the pizza was delicious. However, each personal pie was $21, so I doubt I'd be returning.
It was a bit of a pompous place, with stipulations on the menu that no condiments, toppings, or customizations to the pies were available beyond those listed. Further, the restaurants had pamphlets discussing the provenience of their ingredients and the authenticity of their techniques. I can't argue with the taste, but the attitude put me on edge.
Reminded me a bit about this espresso story I read yesterday.
Then we went to The New Museum because they have free admission and were open late on Thursday evening. There was some beautiful sculpture there that I really enjoyed, but most of the building was filled with strange modern art that I just didn't get. I'd really like to know how to get more out of modern art, so I keep trying places like The New Museum, but I didn't enjoy that part much. MelRoseDr knew enough to make it more enjoyable, what with her many art history classes.
We finished with cookies from Veniero's which reopened from its heath closure and was yummy.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:58 AM | Comments (0)
Soon there will be war
Two big articles this week on the coming war with Iran over their nuclear weapons development.
Benny Morris at the NY Times says war will happen in 4-7 months in Using Bombs to Stave Off War. He believes that only a successful attack by Israel today with the aid of the US can prevent a nuclear war between Israel and Iran in the coming years.
John Bolton in the WSJ piece, Israel, Iran and the Bomb discusses what everyone's been trying to avoid saying, that since America is going to be blamed for any attack b Israel, we might as well insure that attack is successful.
It is sad to me that Iran thinks that they need these weapons to be safe and in so pursuing them will cause a war that would never had happened and make the people of Iran far less safe.
Hope for a diplomatic solution, pray for the innocents, and prepare for war.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:33 AM | Comments (0)
July 17, 2008
And now for something insane and delightful
Enjoy a few puppets perform that famous aria from Carmen, Habanera.
BlueEyedGirl and Monk, this is especially for the two of you.
Thanks Neatorama
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:39 PM | Comments (0)
Silly and adictive flash game
Upgrade your slingshot and jet pack to launch your hedgehog into space in:Hedgehog Launch
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)
Alternative names for Belligerati
If I were starting this blog today, I'd consider Haskalah as an alternative title.
Haskalah literally means enlightenment and is a late 18th century intellectual movement that sought to introduce secular intellectual life to the traditional Jewish one to enrich both. I benefited from the 19 years of secular and 15 years of formal religious education I've had so far (2 as an adult), and both were better experiences because of the other. They certainly both inform the way I write this blog. And looking back at what I've posted in the last few years, this dual educational path has a lot more to do with what gets posted here than my position on Middle Eastern wars which provided my current title.
It would hopefully not to be confused with The Haskalah Times
I was introduced to the term by The Frugal Traveler over at the NY Times.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:38 AM | Comments (0)
July 16, 2008
A good resource
Cagle Cartoons is an enormous resource for political cartons from around the world and across the political spectrum. The interface could be better, but at least you can search by keyword.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:44 PM | Comments (0)
Good to know
In case you want to retrofit old recipes to your cool, new digital scale, you can start by knowing that on my chemistry-lab scale, a cup of properly sifted flour weighed in the neighborhood of 4.2 ounces, or 120 grams. (In a fully scaled-up world you usually could dispense with sifting except for some sensitive mixtures, such as those with whipped eggs or cream.)There Is No Justice for Scales in the Kitchen (in case you wondered how much a cup of flour weighs)
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:27 AM | Comments (0)
Fascinating, must tuck that away for later.
There is a town in Belguim, Baarle-Hertog, that borders the Netherlands. For obscure historical reasons however, the down has parts that are Belgian and others that are under Dutch sovereignty.
Depending on how good the towns records are (and I bet they are very good) you could make a modest micro-econometrics career using just data from this town. There are so many wonderful natural experiments are facilitated by this that I hardly now where to start.
For example, because "women are able to choose the nationality of their child depending on the location of the room in which they give birth.", you can see the relative value of citizenship in each of these two countries over time by testing the percentage of parents with children of different citizenship. And there are many others. Just to name a few, you could test who's welfare system is more effective, see changes in demand from changes in of postal rates, or see the relationship between the quality of religious education and behavioral outcomes.
And something for the political philosophers too. Perhaps Nozick was wrong to define government as the monopoly over force in a geographic areas:
"The municipality limits are very complicated. Nowadays, each municipality has its city hall, church, police, school and post office. The houses of the two nationalities are totally mixed. They are identified by the shield bearing their number: the national flag is included on it."
On the other hand, maybe that's just a sign that there can be multiple sovereigns in the same area if there are clear and enforced rules about who has authority in each situation.
Source Post
Baarle-Hertog including a town map
Hat Tip
Tiny sovereign Dutch neighborhoods in Belgian town on Boing Boing
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:35 AM | Comments (0)
July 15, 2008
I know I'm about a decade late
I finished reading Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential on the bus back from DC. I'm glad I waited to read it, even if my foodie friends have been telling me to read it since 2001. Now I that I know what chartucerie, bain-marie, poolish and the like are I got a lot more out of the book. I laughed aloud about 10 times which would be worth the $15 cover price. So would the sections on how to become a regular, improve your home cooking, and how to understand specials and fish in restaurants. Combined the book is a great package and highly recommended to those who enjoy profanity, self-deprecation, depravity, and food.
PS
In years of watching the man on TV and reading casual blog stuff about Anthony Bourdain, I never found out he was a recovering heroin addict and crack user. He says that he's done enough to stupid stuff to kill himself twice over, and since I'm sure the book leaves out the most painful and nadir-ish moments and is still horrifying at times, I believe him.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:20 PM | Comments (0)
July 13, 2008
A great wedding
Em and M had a great wedding on Saturday night and I was glad that I could be there to share their joy. They both looked happy and snappy, and everyone I spoke to had a great time.
How fun?
Monk had a broken foot and still was moved to dance.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:31 AM | Comments (0)
July 9, 2008
Ever wonder why your cell phone works inside but its GPS does not?
M and I were having dinner last night and he remarked that while his Blackberry worked inside, the GPS function typically did not. I wondered why that might be, and my RSS feed serendipitously brought the answer today.
At a receiver's antenna, in the open air, their strength is about -160 dBW or 1 × 10-16 watts. Compare this to a cell-phone signal, which might be -60 dBW or 1 × 10-6 watts -- 10 billion times stronger! While code correlation in the receiver lifts the GPS signals above the background noise floor, the signals are still relatively fragile, and building walls and other obstructions can significantly attenuate the received signal power so that they cannot be tracked by a conventional receiver.
Source
Innovation: Interference Heads-Up Receiver Techniques for Detecting and Characterizing RFI
Hat Tip
GPS jamming
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)
July 8, 2008
Humor explained and it isn't funny.
Clarke claims it is all about the juxtaposition of ideas in unfamiliar ways.
The Humor Hypothesis
All it seems is that he has identified is a common feature of things that people find funny, and attributed an explanation from evolutionary biology of how that commonality might be the mechanism of causality. Which would be fine if it had testable consequences to allow distinguishing correlation from causality.
Unfortunately the explanation has a large caveat.
"Pattern Recognition answers how and why we find things funny, but it cannot say categorically what is funny since no content can be inherently more or less funny than any other. The individual is of paramount importance in determining what they find amusing, bringing memories, associations, meta-meaning, disposition, their tendency to recognize patterns and their comprehension of similarity to the equation. But the theory does offer a vital answer as to why humor exists in every human society," Clarke concludes.
Therefore, no such causal experiment is possible. Clarke seems to have set himself up an irrefutable hypothesis. All data are compatible with his claim because of the role he allows for the individual to make anything funny or not, regardless of the juxtaposition.
If the theory cannot predict if anyone will find anything funny, in what way does it explain humor?
Instead I prefer The Funniest Joke in the World by Monty Python, which I predict will be funny to all my readers.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:19 PM | Comments (0)
Free Russians make silly music
A ridiculous musical tribute to the freedom that Gorbachev brought the Russians.
GORBACHOV: THE MUSIC VIDEO - BIGGER AND RUSSIANER from Tom Stern on Vimeo.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)
July 7, 2008
Price elasticity of oil
What do you make of the argument that the only way to lessen our dependence on foreign oil is to tap more oil wells here — in Alaska and off the coasts of Florida and California? When you consider that the oil we pump goes into a global oil market, offshore drilling makes no sense. We take the environmental risk, but we’d have to share the negligible price gains with Chinese consumers and every other user around the world.Questions for Robert Reich: Short-Straw Economics
A smart guy but no economist. Oil demand is highly inelastic over the short term. That's why the addition of a relatively small additional consumption from population growth, India, and China combined with basically flat levels of production created the enormous spike in the price of oil. So bringing more oil to market can have a huge impact on the price of oil even if it is a small fraction of current consumption.
Plus, even granting that it does only have a small impact it still raises a lot of money. Money that can be used to offset the enormous imports of oil into the US and pushes down the value of the dollar. The US is currently the 3rd largest producer of oil, about 7.6 million barrels a day. If we could boost that by 1 million day (the high end of the ANWR estimates) and it had no price impact then at today's prices could save on the order of $52 billion a year from leaving the country.
If so desired, that buys a lot of aid to poor Americans harmed by high fuel prices.The federal fuel tax raises about $30 billion a year and adds 18.4 cents to a gallon of gas. Using the revenues from the ANWR to replace this tax would be one method to do so.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:24 AM | Comments (0)
July 6, 2008
What to do with voice mail
Think Before You Voicemail is a selection of strategies to reduce your voice mail load by a series of unprofessional and rude techniques in the guise of productivity enhancement.
When you work in an organization, unless you are the boss, you do not get to decide that certain forms of communication are inconvenient for you and so you'll ignore them.
More specific comments:
"It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it."
This is true, but it is much shorter to leave a voice mail than it is to listen to it. For one-on-one messages this is for sure a time saver. Also, most modern voice mail systems allow you to speed up message playback, and certainly trained listeners can listen to books at high speed.
"And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily."
This is bogus. Again modern voice mail has a forwarding and reply system, and there is no need to exit the voice mail system to respond.
"Typical voicemail messages today include things like "Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com" Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally - let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back."
Do not do this. Senior people hate hearing things like this and they will be angry or annoyed if they get it. Your responsibility is to be available through the voice mail system if they provide it. A full mailbox or one not setup makes you seem lazy or incompetent.
One particular strength of the voice mail system is the way it reduces email. Because communication by voice is so much faster than by email, on the margin organizations should promote systems that discourage the later and encourage the former. Get people to call each other to hash out business problems,and leave messages for each other, encouraging call backs and rapid problem solving.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:22 AM | Comments (1)
July 5, 2008
Incomprehensible sentence of the day
"Montauk this year has become the alternative to the anti-scene scene kind of thing," Mr. Kasuba said. Many locals, however, are anti-alternative to the anti-scene scene.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)
Travel cheap and in style
Yesterday I flew across the continent on coach on Continental. It was the nicest flight I can remember.
I set my Continental preferences to give me a kosher meal (I finally remembered after years of flights) and it was the tastiest, most healthful airline meal I can remember. Ratatouille, eggplant tapenade, BBQ chicken, rice pilaf, non-dairy chocolate mouse, and a roll. I had an exit row all to myself. I sat across from an interesting property developer and had a long and multi-topiced conversation about golf courses, luxury marketing, Tiger Woods, theology, missionary work, and interfaith marriage.
The flight attendants were nice and attentive. Airport security was a breeze. There literally was no line. I even had an exit row all to myself. The flight was so empty that we couldn't change our seats until after take off or we'd throw off the plane weight.
Once in the right coast the Airtran was on time and arrived 5 minutes after I got to the platform.
It was great. If flying were more like that I'd do it more frequently and happily.
I strongly suggest flying on the 4th of July if you can work it out.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:35 AM | Comments (0)
Labor productivity of government workers in Utah
I read today on CNN that Utah goes to 4-day workweek to save energy next month in a year long experiment for state employees. Four 10 hour days will replace 5 eight hour ones which has big expected savings in fuel, energy, and commuting time. More than 2/3 of state employees are effected.
I am curious how they are handling vacation. Under the old system a typical state employee worked something like 230 days a year (260 work days less 10 days of holidays and 20 of vacation). Under the new system the base number of days is just 208 days, so if they still get the same holidays and vacation then they work 178 days. The old system would be 11.5% vacation and the new system would be 15.5% vacation. That's a lot more. It is hard to imagine them cutting down on the number of holidays, but I could see them cutting the number of vacation days by 25%. That would be equivalent to saying you have a certain number of vacation hours, (8 * old number of vacation days) and you can use them to buy new vacation at the rate of 10 hours per day or 5 per half day. I find it hard to imagine any way that this works out where state employees don't end up working significantly less in total.
In customer / taxpayer facing work I see this as some benefits. For example, earlier and later DMV and permit granting hours for example could help working folks avoid missing work to do government work. But for government employees who don't punch a clock and never see anyone other than other state employees, monitoring costs of work shirking are already high and this would further raise them. To the extent that the 8 hour day made sense before, surely it had to do with some estimate of when a typical employee's productivity began to decline from fatigue. Yes, an extra day's rest on Friday would help with that, but not fully. For that reason in a private business I would expect this to lower productivity, but more complicated factors dictate government hours. They may only have eight hour days to match conventions of the private sector and thus longer days allow more project work and deep thinking, raising productivity. We'll have to see. This is an interesting natural experiment and I'll be curious to follow this and sees what happens to the number of forms, licenses, and other measurable aspects of government activity.
Of course, if this works, maybe they'll try 13 hour and 20 minute 3 day a week jobs if gas goes even higher.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:29 AM | Comments (0)
July 4, 2008
Comic Distance
I love a serious conversation about a ridiculous subject.
Over at the sci-fi blog io9, they diccuss How Far Is Gotham City From Metropolis? and many people offer their reasoned arguments.
Given how little effort is expended in cross-comic-continuity and the sheer magnitude of material written about Metropolis and Gotham, there is likely no correct answer.
My two cents is that it is definitely wrong that Metropolis is Chicago and Gotham is New York. Yes, they were based on those cities, but the comics make reference to NYC and Chicago as well as Gotham and Metropolis, and so there simply are more big cities and the DC world.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)
Happy Birthday America
She's 232 years old and looking great. I'll be reading the Deceleration of Independence this morning, as is my tradition. This afternoon I will be flying across her great expanse on my way to NYC.
When founded she was alone among the nations as a republic, an infant among ancient empires. Now just a few countries, notably England, Iceland, and Japan are older, and Republican government (at least in name) is the most common form of government on earth.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:53 AM | Comments (0)
July 2, 2008
Is waterboarding torture?
Christopher Hitchens tries waterboarding and decides that
1) It is drowning, not simulated drowning
2) If water boarding isn't torture than nothing is.
Believe Me, It’s Torture
A very interesting and eye opening article. The first claim seems well established, as they time their techniques so as to minimize the danger to the recipients. The later seems weaker. If he hasn't been really tortured (fingernails torn out and the like), he doesn't seem to be in a good position to compare. But scary and ugly business it certainly is.
See video of the water boarding here:
On the Waterboard
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:56 PM | Comments (0)
Strange lives
So you think your life is weird? How does it compare with the life of Edward Charles Henderson Jr., a 51 year old homeless man who drives a pedicab he built himself and who's regular passenger is the sister of his estranged common law wife. Not feeling as weird anymore -- I imagine.
Checking Back In With June Bug
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)
An idea for Facebook
For very good reasons, Facebook doesn't tell you when someone removes you are their friend. But all you have to do to see that someone is no longer your friend is check your friend list. So if you want to know you can find out.
This strikes me as a natural idea for a Facebook Plug-in Defriendster. It shouldn't be hard to write a plug-in that compares your friend list to older versions of that list and notes anyone who dropped off.
I think it could be popular. It would help keep track of your frenemies.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:35 AM | Comments (0)
July 1, 2008
What if anything can be done about demographics?
From No Babies?, an interesting piece in the NY Times about the low birthrates throughout the developed world. Their conclusion:
So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. Aassve put it to me this way: "You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted."
I don't buy it. From a few paragraphs higher in the article we see that the Scandinavian have a birthrate of 1.8 (where the population shrinks) to the US's (a sustainable level) 2.1 per mother. That means American women have 17 percent more children! In any case, these European success stories still don't generate enough children to sustain each country's population. Slowing down the demographic collapse of Europe has value, but unless the technique actually results in a stable or growing population, it cannot be called a solution.
I see this as a process that will sort itself out. As I mentioned in The theists will out breed the rest, we will see conservative, faithful, male-headed households supply a disproportionate fraction of the next generation, and these people will choose family lives and political strategies that will reflect their values. Then we will see a less populous Europe with lower housing prices and shorter commutes (from lower population) allowing these people to have larger families.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:41 PM | Comments (0)
Success for the pajama media
A military blogger noticed what eluded the supreme court and her many researchers. The court noted in their ruling on the death penalty that for child rape that there was no federal death penalty for child rape. But it seems that there is. Congress revised the sex crimes section of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 2006 to add child rape to the military death penalty.
Caught by a lawyer blogger and not even one working on the case. Just an expert stranger with a passion for blogging.
Two interesting facts from the NY Times article: In Weighing Death Penalty, a Flaw in Fact
1) The last execution by the US military was on on April 13, 1961, when Pvt. John A. Bennett was put to death by hanging. His crime: the rape of an 11-year-old girl.
2) Any losing party in the Supreme Court can file a petition within 25 days asking the justices to reconsider their decision. Granting such a petition requires a majority vote.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:34 PM | Comments (0)