The utilisation of the land for national prosperity
It's not clear at all what is going on here. The article says that all farmland is to be nationalized

The Zimbabwe government has announced that all farmland will be nationalised, including all privately owned game parks, and private land ownership banned. The move has been described as the "single biggest shock" of President Robert Mugabe's rule since independence from Britain in 1980.

and criticizes the move harshly, but there's no explanation for why the government would want to take such an action. Apparently it has something to do with the desire to take farmland from white farmers and give it to black farmers, but there's no reason given for why the government doesn't just take this more limited action. Certainly it would be much easier; 200 white farmers shouldn't be all that hard to oppress! This article gives a little more context, but it still doesn't give a mechanical explanation of what this is all about.

Carried away
It's interesting that in all the discussion of the dog with the big vocabulary, nobody's talking about the wide variation in human intelligence. By this I mean: there are a few extraodinary human beings who can do certain things (with language or otherwise) extraordinarily well. This doesn't mean they aren't humans, but it also doesn't have too many implications for the average human being, does it? The fact that one dog can understand severak hundred words doesn't necessarily say anything at all about dogs as a whole. Maybe this Rico is the Nabokov of dogs. He barks like a dog, but thinks like a human!

Uniquely dangerous and creepy
There are a few disturbing facts hidden within the alarmist fearmongering at Gmail is too creepy, but I'm pretty much unfazed. I've been blown away by both Gmail's speed and the elegance of its interface, not to mention the massive storage space. I find the argument that somehow messages sent to a Gmail account have some peculiar expectation of privacy just a little bit bizarre. Aren't people aware of the dangers associated with electronic reproduction by now? I don't see how Gmail changes that picture. And anyway, do you really trust the proprietors of your hotmail or yahoomail account? Google has gotten things right on so many issues, and I trust them with my email. If you don't, there are always alternatives.

All Reagan, all the time
With everybody clamoring to put Ronald Reagan's mug on our money, whether it's the $10 bill, the $20 bill, or the dime, I guess it's time I put in my own two cents. I think Reagan should appear on a new $500 bill.

First of all, we need a $500 bill. Euros come in 200 and 500 euro denominations, which means it's much easier to transfer vast sums of money in euros now than dollars. It also means that euros are starting to overtake dollars as the currency of choice for black market and criminal activity. If you think this is a good thing for the greenback, you're wrong: there's a lot of prestige (read: confidence and stability) associated with being the black market currency...

So, we need a new $500 bill to counteract the effects of the 500 euro note. And who better to appear on it than Ronald Wilson Reagan? It would be the biggest bill, which seems fitting enough -- certainly a $500 bill wouldn't be much use to the poor. Plus there's this whole arms race feel to printing bigger and bigger bills (although maybe printing a $1000 bill would be more Reagan's style).

Passing the buck
It's not clear how much of a connection this really is, but combined with the memos circulating through Defense and Justice, it looks like this fiasco is going to get harder and harder for the Bush admin to defend. Of course, public outcry over the torture seems to have been overwhelmed for the moment by the orgiastic display of nostalgia for Ronald Reagan, and perhaps because no pictures have come out in a couple weeks. (I have to wonder why the government hasn't released all the pictures, given the public's short attention span. Won't this all just come back when more pictures are leaked?)

Venkat Balasubramani thinks this has been a good week for Bush with the UN victory and all the talk about Iraqi sovreignty. This may be right, but I suspect it will be short-lived... the handover is just around the corner, and it's hard to imagine things not getting worse before they get better.

Losing the war on spam
My failure of late to blog consistently has been matched by a similar laziness in prosecuting the war on spam here at locussolus. In the past couple months the comment threads of posts long archived have been overwhelmed with advertisements, mostly for penis enlargement. Barrett of Too Many Chefs wrote yesterday to say he's closed down certain comment threads altogether on order to avoid all the spam, which would be a reasonable enough solution for me if I had the time to go through all 1000+ old posts and "fix" them. But doing so piecemeal just leaves me unsatisfied and depressed.

The latest version of MT might offer a solution, but the free version probably won't meet my needs, and the price is awfully steep for a blog I haven't even been maintaining. Plus I think requiring comment registration is overkill -- wouldn't a global comment editing mode like the current "power editing" for posts or even a feature that automatically closed comment threads after a certain date make all this management pretty easy? Maybe not for the big fish, but certainly for me.

Anyway, the point is that I've mostly given up for now... I'm not going to waste any more of my time cleaning up old comment threads, and I'm not going to worry about what's posted there. If you see an ad for penis enlargement, please be aware that it does not come from me... I'm washing my hands of it.

Oh, and one other thing. I happened on this bit of information via a friend in the business -- it's the phone number of Scott Richter, who I'm told is responsible for a lot of the email spam having to do with penis enlargement. I've never called the number, but I publish it here for your personal edification, and as compensation for my unwillingness to delete comment spam in the future: (303) 464-8164. Have fun...

Voiceovers and alter egos
Brad Neely has taken the original Harry Potter movie and created a whole new soundtrack with a completely different story:

As imagined by Mr. Neely, the three main characters are child alcoholics with a penchant for cognac, the magical ballgame Quidditch takes on homoerotic overtones, and Harry is prone to delivering hyper-dramatic monologues.

But the best part is this paragraph about the industry's response:

"The long-term strategic threat to the entertainment industry is that people will get in the habit of creating and making as much as watching and listening, and all of a sudden the label applied to people at leisure, 50 years in the making — consumer — could wither away," [Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School] said. "But it would be a shame if Hollywood just said no. It could very possibly be in the interest of publishers to see a market in providing raw material along with finished product."

It would indeed be a shame. Creating and making as much as watching and listening? This could be the perfect remedy for our passive, bloated, consumption-driven culture. I'm not vouching for the quality of this particular film (which I haven't seen), but the idea that the ease of digital capture might lead to a legal remedy that restricts creative production (speech) where it wasn't restricted before is extremely disturbing.

Ronald Reagan
Everybody is doing it, so I might as well link to a couple of pieces on Reagan. First is Timothy Noah, who takes some of the cuddliness out of the Reagan legacy by picking at the unkept promise to decrease government spending. Then there's Juan Cole, who takes apart the Reagan legacy piece by piece with some much needed attention to Reagan's tragic, reductive dismissal of the effects of poverty during the 1980s. Finally, Slate republishes a great debate between EJ Dionne and Dinesh D'Souza about whether credit for the 90s boom belongs to Clinton or Reagan.

My own take on Reagan is mixed up with the nostalgia of growing up in a Republican household -- I can't help but rememeber him fondly because he was my father's hero. Our dog was even named after the man. Of course, a little education has helped me understand what his policies and ideologies (more the latter, I guess) meant, and what their consequences have been -- I'm certainly very sympathetic to the critiques above, especially those levelled at his handling of American poverty and the gross inequalities that have arisen in the past 20 years. (The revolution is coming.) I also blame Reagan for much of the disaffection Americans have today for American politics; running against Washington has had profoundly negative effects on the way Americans approach their government, and this is probably for the worst. In this context at least, his optimism failed.

By the way, I've been somewhat awed by the wall to wall coverage of Reagan's death, but (and not to say the coverage isn't deserved) there's a reason for it. Reagan's death has been anticipated by the media for years, and this content has been ready to go for some time. Similarly, when I worked at the Social Security office, I remember several of the employees complaining that Ronald Reagan was still alive. This was during that long stretch early in the year when there are no federal holidays, and they were hoping he would kick it so they could get a day off of work. I guess now they'll get their wish...

Criminel de guerre
Roger Cohen has a comforting piece about the sohpisticated view in France that George W. Bush doesn't represent the true America -- the America honored today for its contributions sixty years ago to the freedom of Europe. Cohen treates every side to a healthy dose of sarcasm, but I think there's something to this -- certainly Bush doesn't have the strong support of the people today. The other side of the coin is that if we reelect Bush, it will legitimize every action he has taken in the past four years and marry America to that grand strategy in the eyes of the world.

To the nines
Michael Quinion has an article in the Telegraph (it looks like it will be a recurring feature, too) debunking some myths about the provenance of certain idiomatic expressions but not necessarily clearing things up. It's from a British perspective, which means I wasn't even familiar with all the expressions, but the historian in me still found it amusing.

Popular science
Sean Carroll had a couple of great posts up last week about alternatives to general relativity. I've been reading a lot about string theory lately (popular stuff, not the math!) but I wasn't aware of these other (less sexy?) approaches to reconciling GR with the rest. Anyway, Sean/Prof Carroll (?) does a great job of explaining these things for the lay person, and he certainly is an authority on it. I hope he keeps it up...

TravelBlog
My sister Jackie has set up a new TravelBlog as part of her online travel magazine The Long Trip Home. I believe she is looking for contributors, as well as other blogs that focus on travel. And of course, they're always looking for more polished stories, essays, and photojournals for the magazine itself.

The new standard
Geoffrey Pullum has suggested some further standards for the use of the term Ghits (referring to Google hits), and the other folks at Language Log seem to have jumped on board. Mark Liberman also suggests a relative measure that expresses the number of Google hits in terms of the total number of documents in the search pool, which will take some of the error away when dealing with changes over time.

Of course, there's still all that rot out there on the internet that's being measured by Google -- usage that's several years old by now and will probably never drop out of Google's search pool. This isn't a serious problem now, but twenty years from now Google won't be so great for measuring current usage if it's still jammed up with all that turn-of-the-century slang. Then again, we'll probably have an updated search tool by then, Google or otherwise, which will render all this Ghits business obsolete anyway.

Now you're playing with power
I can't help but boast about my new Gmail address. I'd been worrying for some time now about what I was going to do when my subscription to uchicago.edu ran out, and then my friend offered to pull some strings for me with his friends at Google. I was a little skeptical about going to a web based format (that live Unix server running Pine can be intoxicating) but I think I'm going to be pretty happy with Gmail... the speed, storage space, and sorting capabilities are pretty much unparalleled.

Gift horse?
I've never been a fan of WalMart -- in fact, I have a pretty suspicious view of their business practices from top to bottom. However, it's not clear to me what Chicagoans are trying to achieve by preventing WalMart from coming to the Windy City. The two planned WalMart stores would be on the south and west sides of Chicago, in places where the communities can use every extra job they can get. The economic development these stores can generate would be a fantastic boost for residents of these areas. The notion that somehow workers in these areas are going to be exploited with low-wage, low-benefit jobs is preposterous -- did anybody stop to look up the employment rates in these areas?

Of course I believe WalMart's use of market share to bully small producers needs to be countered, but is this really the place to do it? The south and west sides of Chicago need every bit of development they can get, even if it comes in the form of WalMart.

UPDATE: PG points me to this article.

Games with numbers
Some disgruntled academic is auctioning off (through eBay) his name as a co-author on an academic paper, apparently along with at least some of the research assitance co-authorship implies. No surprise here: there've been any number of more bizarre auctions on eBay, and I even have some sinister schemes of my own to use their service for profit and amusement. What caught my eye was this amusement having to do with Paul Erdös:

The idea builds on the reputation of Erdös, a Hungarian mathematician who died in 1996. A prolific researcher, with more than 1,400 published papers, he spent the last several decades of his life moving from one colleague's house to another's, staying for extended periods at each place and collaborating on solving problems.

In honor of the eccentric researcher, many mathematicians started calculating the intellectual connections that separated them from Erdös -- the scholarly equivalent of the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game. A person who has written a paper directly with Erdös has an Erdös number of 1. A researcher who published with an Erdös co-author would have an Erdös number of 2, and so on.

These numbers are taken quite seriously. The winner of the auction bid more than $1000 to prevent the devaluing of Erdös numbers. The fellow auctioning his name and services has an Erdös number of 4.

Political idealism
There is an inspirational piece in the New Yorker today about Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for Illinois's open Senate seat. I feel like I'm parroting the article when I say he's going to be a major force in American politics over the next 20 years, but I've actually been saying so for a while now: he's one of the brightest and most effective political speakers I've ever seen. And he brings a fresh optimism. The article points out that he has tremendous respect even from his political opponents, and that his support often comes from those who disagree with him -- the latter especially is quite a trick.

Revelations
Obviously the big news today was the release of new prisoner abuse photographs by the Washington Post, but the Post also has the translated sworn testimony of some of the Abu Ghraib detainees. It's truly appalling stuff -- somehow I was more affected by these firsthand descriptions of what went on than I was by any of the photograps that have been released. This is probably because the the testimony of the prisoners themselves very overtly juxtaposes the cultural background of the victims against the sadistic acts of their American captors.

By the way, the administration is making a huge mistake by not releasing all the photos, videos, and other materials at once. The justification they've given is a legal one -- somehow it will help guarantee the relevant MPs a fair trial. But this is a political scandal, in America of course, but even more importantly abroad. The standard Bush administration approach of secrecy and denial will not work here; the stakes are too big. They should get out in front of this and take sweeping action to bring those responsible (at every level) to justice. Only then can they get on with their mission in Iraq.

Publish or perish
Todd Price of Frolic has a freelance piece over the Chronicle of Higher Education about the job market for humanities PhDs outside the academy. It's a good read, albeit a lttle depressing. I hope the article opens new doors for him...

Obama blog
The Barack Obama campaign has a new blog up, and it appears to be spearheaded by Rick Klau, the same evil genius who got Howard Dean's pathbreaking blog up and running. Rick recently came to one of my classes to give a fascinating and inspirational talk about the Dean campaign's organizational innovations and his pivotal role there. I'm thrilled to see Obama has tapped him for this.

Automated grouping process
Whoa. I was flipping through Google News and a link to this came up on the main page. I don't think I've ever seen a blog entry come up before, even if it is part of a magazine. Did this just slip through, or has Google News classified Shane Cory's blog as a legitimate news source?

I hadn't thought about it before, but there's nothing quite like Google News for blogs, is there? Google should do it... it wouldn't be too much of a departure from what they've already done, and it would add a lot of value for bloggers.