Administrivia

I predict blogging will be light-to-non-existent this weekend due to all the blowing up pieces of America to celebrate America we'll be doing. That, and getting slightly drunk while tubing.

Of course, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe some of our nomads that will be unable to join in the festivities due to the ridiculously large diameter of this planet will take up the slack.

I'm not gonna hold my breath though. Happy 4th everyone.

Phoblog

Here are some pictures I took this week. Let me know if they're too big so I can scale them down in the future:

Continue reading "Phoblog"

Urinals Galore

Via Random Pensées, I give you Urinal Dot Net, "the best place to piss away your time on the Internet."

Into the Blogosphere

This looks interesting:

This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities.

(via Language Log)

Underempolyment

It looks like underemployment hasn't improved yet, a key factor to consider when discussing the economy. A key excerpt:

[U]nderemployment in the form of involuntary part-time work, discouraged workers, and other marginally attached workers (i.e., those who have looked for work in the last year but are not counted as unemployed) has increased. Specifically, the total underemployment rate was 9.6% in June 2004, up from 9.4% in November 2001 when the recovery began, and far higher than the 7.3% in March 2001 when the recession began.

There's also this nifty graph. Anyways, just some numbers to keep in mind next time you hear Bush and his supporters trumpet the job growth numbers.

UPDATE: Brad DeLong gives us his economic talking points, dealing primarily with the job situation.

UPDATE: Pejman Yousefzadeh provides a link that might be cause for some minor optimism.

Human Evolution

The recent discovery of small hominid fossils prompted an article about human evolution that discusses the competing theories of how we evolved. One, which the author terms "March-of-Progress", fits nicely with the much parodied picture by the same name. However, a more modern theory suggests that "a number of different species seemed to have lived side by side" which seems to fit the given evidence better.

UPDATE: PZ Myers has lots of pictures of the fossils in question, as well as other Homo erectus specimens.

Tips for Photographing Fireworks

If you want to take a bunch of pictures of explosions this weekend, read this.

Cosby gets busy

Bill Cosby made a pretty controversial speech at the ceremony for the 50th anniversary of Brown V Board of Education. Some excerpts are here. I thought a lot of the points hit the mark, but I guess I am not really in a position to judge such things. I just have to give him credit for stepping up and saying what he felt. His story is one of great success at a time when it was much harder for African-Americans to get ahead. Man I loved "Himself."

Behold, My Super-Insight Ray!

If you've missed my contributions today, I apologize. I've been obsessively reading Quarter Bin, which contains perhaps the best writing on comic books that I've ever encountered. The author deftly weaves together some truly important history (both of the books and the industry), humorous light analysis, and some deeply savvy explications of the cultural and artistic influences that have shaped comics in certain eras, as well as over time. Sadly, it looks like the site is not regularly updated, but you can still enjoy the astonishingly prolific Ouzomandias's musing on, say, the temporal boundaries of the Silver Age of comics, overviews of non-superhero comics genres, the worst superhero costumes of the 1980's, or why (the generally inconsequential) Cable is the most representative superhero of the 1990s. This index page is fun - click on any random one of fifty articles, and I guarantee you'll come up with something good.

Why I Hate America

Lyrics like this:

To each his own it's plain to see
To walk alone you have to be
It's all for you and all for me, you'll see

I’m gonna miss you, yes, I will
No matter who you are, I’ll love you still
For my life is my conscience, the seeds I sow
I just wanted to let you know

Familiar faces that I’ve seen
Turnin’ red and turnin’ green
They just got caught with writing on their sleeve, I guess I’ll leave

That's crap. It doesn't even make any sense—that's why I hate America. But if you disagree, you can book them for your next backyard barbecue.

Ken Jennings, Jeopardy Player Extraordinaire

I blogged a little about this about a couple of weeks ago and guess what? Ken Jennings is still winning. He's now won 22 days straight and should break $700,000 today.

History of the Universe

Not quite Stephen Hawking, but I found a pretty coherent and interesting history of how the universe was created. It's also capped with some fascinatingly plausible speculations as to what forms intelligent life may have taken on other planets. This one is my favorite:

On some planets, there are underwater civilizations built by aquatic primates who returned to the sea as the ancestors of elephants and whales did on our planet. Aquatic primates with hands with opposable thumbs created tools then technologies, and finally civilizations.

It's pretty long, but well worth reading the whole thing.

Death to the Death Penalty

Prompted by comments in a previous thread, I've decided to write about why I'm opposed to the death penalty in order to, hopefully, prompt a debate on the matter.

One of the best and most eloquent defenses of capital punishment in murder cases is John Stuart Mill's "Speech In Favor of Capital Punishment".

Continue reading "Death to the Death Penalty"

French Without Tears

...is the title of this essay by Luc Sante in Threepenny about the pleasures of the French language.

(via Languagehat)

Another Convert

Paul Boutin makes another case for switching away from IE:

The latest version of Firefox, released this Monday, has a more professional look, online help, and a tool that automatically imports your bookmarks, history, site passwords, and other settings from Explorer. Meanwhile, all-conquering Internet Explorer has been stuck in the mud for the past year, as Microsoft stopped delivering new versions.

The article also lays out the steps you'll need to take to install the browser and your plugins. He does, however, leave out my absolute favorite plugin: mouse gestures. From looking at our logs, I know that most of you still use IE. It's time to get with it, folks.

UPDATE: Even the Department of Homeland Security thinks you should switch.

Saddam in Prime Time

Set your TiVo.

A Bush Comeback Redux

Here's a bit of evidence for my theory that part of Bush's upswing in the polls results from a false sense that our involvement in Iraq will rapidly be scaled down due to the recent power transfer. I expect a mild weakening in Bush's support once those believing this are disillusioned. Of course, it's possible Allawi will defy expectations and successfully and quickly "take full responsibility for the security of [Iraq]" which would be an enormous boost for Bush.

New Webcam Technology

i2i, in development at Microsoft's research lab in Cambridge, UK, is a two-camera system which very carefully follows an individual's movement...

This means it looks as if users are looking each other in the eye.

Although this is pretty cool, I generally don't even look at the webcam image of others when I'm chatting with them, particularly if we're doing a voice chat. I'm usually playing chess or browsing the web while talking, but it'd be pretty cool if they thought I were paying them rapt attention instead.

(via Techdirt)

Evolutionary Pressure

Monkeys and apes who are good at deceiving their peers also have the biggest brains relative to their body size. The finding backs the "Machiavellian intelligence" theory, which suggests the benefits of complex social skills fuelled the evolution of large primate brains.

If this doesn't count, I don't know what does. The best response to this is Warren Ellis's though: "I fucking told you people. The Filthy Monkey, It Plans."

UPDATE: Here's a more in-depth look at the evolutionary pressures leading to our large brains.

What Has Changed?

Juan Cole discusses the challenges facing the new Iraqi government while noting that, given the considerable overlap of officials between the "new" government and the Bremer-appointed IGC, not a whole lot has actually changed. Not only that, but there's a question of exactly how much sovereignty we've granted the new government. However, they do have one advantage: Iraqis support their new leaders. Let us hope that will allow Allawi and the other leaders enough time and goodwill to overcome the many difficulties they face as they prepare the country for elections.

Two Glib Responses to Hitchens

Byron Crawford is easily my favorite blogger, an angry and whip-smart cuss whose analysis is uniformly cutting, and whose wildly offensive digressions into hilarious slander are still somehow insightful. While he currently holds down the grill station at White Castle, he will be famous in about three years (or will at the very least be a writer for the Daily Show). In a great post, he responds to Christopher Hitchens' scathing/babbling response to Fahrenheit 9/11 by both deconstructing his flaccid arguments and accusing him of redirecting at Moore the rage that resulted from a recent dissatisfying blowjob.

Similarly, Ollie Byrd uncovers the shocking truth - Jim Morrison is alive, and he's writing for Slate.

Co-Operation

For the curious, it seems likely that this will be where I’m living next year (in Summit House, apparently the larger and quieter of the two houses). It will be strange to return to life in a co-op, but there’s really no other practical solution for me to find a place without a pricey, otherwise pointless flight back to Iowa City. More importantly, I’m genuinely curious to see a co-op system different from the young, chaotic and populous examples in Austin – in this system, apparently most of the residents will actually be older than me, so hopefully that means I get to be the messy one for once. Read on to learn a little more about co-ops.

Continue reading "Co-Operation"

Five Pounds Silly Putty

You can copy a lot of comics with this.

What you've been waiting for.

ME!!
Well here it is folks, my very first blog entry. No fancy links, no cute/funny/sick pictures, just a few notes to update my fellow Patriots on how I am faring in the Big Apple.
Things have taken a turn for the awesome. I just picked up a fine new corporate job working for JP Morgan/Chase financial management. I get to look cool going into my fancy Fifth avenue high rise with my badge. No one on the street has to know I'm a temp :)
I have volunteered to work at the Republican national convention, and it promises to be interesting one way or the other. If it doesn't get bombed I'll still enjoy hearing the speakers, including McCain, Giuliani, Cuomo, and even Arnie.
Side note: Tammy's director is an ex guitarist from Foreigner. We hung out the other night and I felt like I was witnessing a behind the music, or where are they now.. Will post further developments.
Well lemme know if you have any questions, requests, or other.
Love
me

More on the Economy

Curious why public perception of Bush's economic policies is still poor despite the 1.4 million jobs added in the last ten months? This article has some answers:

Something has plainly broken down in the American job creation machine. The supply of new jobs has been nowhere near sufficient to keep up with the supply of new workers—not for the past three years and not for the past 10 months.

Not only that, but "real wage growth has been decelerating since the end of 2001" according to this post. As Ruy Texaira writes, "[t]rust the people: they know what they're experiencing."

Desperation

Only two days left and he hasn't yet had a single bid. It's funny that he doesn't even know if he's going to get a bit of split mutton or have his chimney swept out.

Update: It looks like eBay killed the auction (or the guy may have become discouraged and cancelled it). It was an 18-year-old male selling his virginity to the highest bidder, male or female. I checked late last night and there was one bidder: for a dollar.

Rampant Destruction

Check out these photos.

(via Metafilter)

Pacman: Mon Frère, Mon Semblable!

People like Pacman because the little yellow head reminds them of themselves. Life is a confusing maze with pointless goals. Get as much done as you can without some technicolor ghost named Clyde chomping on your ass.

The Clumsy Grammarian

Louis Menand delivers a furious storm of rabbit punches to the throat of Lynne Truss, author of the recent hit grammar book "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," which, it turns out, has its own share of problems:

"The first punctuation mistake . . . appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma . . . The preface, by Truss, includes a misplaced apostrophe (“printers’ marks”) and two misused semicolons . . . About half the semicolons in the rest of the book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes."

What at first seems like a vindictive and perhaps jealous bit of dismemberment quickly and unexpectedly turns into a nice enough discussion of the phenomenon of writerly voice and its origins - a discussion which I found interesting from my own perspective as a funny person who struggles mightily (and fruitlessly) to be a funny writer. But yeah, the real juicy stuff is in the first three paragraphs.

Via God of the Machine

The Beginning of a Bush Comeback?

As the obsessive poll watchers know, Bush's numbers have been stabilizing lately. I speculate that it's a combination of a mild post-Reagan glow, the slowly improving economic news, and a sense that our involvement in Iraq is coming to an end. However, as Josh Marshall points out, we can expect to keep seeing this sort of fluidity in the polls for several months, so this could be nothing more than a temporary uptick. Given that Bush's job approval is rather low, support for the war in Iraq continues to drop, and any Reaganesque glow Bush may have been illuminated with will quickly fade, I would be a little surprised to see his numbers continue to rise.

Vulgar Poetry

PZ Myers is out of his considerable depth. He suggests that poetry has a habit of avoiding the coarse, preferring instead to describe the clever and inspiring. Of course, his intelligent readers have already disabused him of this notion (I suspect PZ didn’t really think this was altogether the case anyway), but I thought I’d mention it in this space for some more discussion. My first thoughts were of Poe, Simic, and even Whitman—that sagacious old tapette. I’m sure anyone, even readers of Pennywise, could offer a swarm of poets that write censurable stuff, but I’m thinking more of the nature of poetry. As a spoken art form, isn’t poetry vulgarity itself? Poetry has never been written by kings, but by beggars—it is the expression of the people. That’s why Galway Kinnell gets to write things like this:

Continue reading "Vulgar Poetry"

Fun With Politics

Fun? I know many of us are suffering from burn-out, and it's not even convention season yet. Rekindle your love of red-and-blue maps with this game (via Wings and Vodka). You can make your own candidate, use some models, or play with past candidates, like Harold Stassen and Thomas Dewey in 1948, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford in 1976, or that Kennedy guy in, like, 1985 or something.

Thomas Frank is Awesome

The editor of The Baffler and author of perhaps my single favorite book about culture (The Conquest of Cool) has a new book about the red state/blue state divide. A brief excerpt was recently published in (I think) The Atlantic Monthly, and I may break down and buy this one.

(Salon subscription or Day Pass required)

TV Makes You Grow Breasts

Yet another reason to not let kids watch television:

Children who watch a lot of television produce less melatonin, new research suggests - the "sleep hormone" has been linked to timing of puberty.

As a result:

“Girls are reaching puberty much earlier than in the 1950s. One reason is due to their average increase in weight; but another may be due to reduced levels of melatonin,” suggests Roberto Salti, who led the study. “Animal studies have shown that low melatonin levels have an important role in promoting an early onset of puberty.”

Girth is Good

In a further sign that we're living in the End Times, Ball Park Franks are now tapping into the repressed homosexuality of beer-drinkin', red-meat eatin', NASCAR-watchin', Bush-lovin' men to sell hot dogs. Giirrrrthy.... mmmm!!

Hot Potato

We just couldn't wait:

The United States handed sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government two days earlier than expected Monday, aiming to forestall guerrilla attacks with a secretive ceremony formally ending 14 months of occupation.

How stable can things be if we have to do this in secret? Also, one thing that I have yet to see mentioned—these Iraqis willing to risk their lives in order to help run the country deserve some praise. Certainly many, if not all of them must have a significant desire for power, but I would like to think that they also have an honest desire to see Iraq become a stable, democratic nation. Maybe if our politicians had to risk more we wouldn't need to so regularly bemoan their ridiculous partisanship, pettiness, and small-minded proclamations. Of course, I know very little about the character or motives of the new Iraqi politicians, so this is all speculation. My inner cynic tells me they're all just as bad as our politicians, if not worse.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, I'm not criticizing the administration for turning over sovereignty early. It's a pragmatic decision motivated by a recognition of the danger to Iraqi government officials. However, along with being a bit surprising given the administration's tendency to prefer ideology to reality, it's still indicative of the instability and fighting plaguing the nation.

2ND UPDATE: The news looks like it was broken by a blog. So, now blogs are scooping mainstream news media?

3RD UPDATE: Juan Cole speculates that "the Americans must have developed intelligence that there might be a major strike on the Coalition Provisional Headquarters on Wednesday if a formal ceremony were held to mark a transfer of sovereignty."

Large Sodas, Small Bladders, and Long Movies

For anyone who's ever held it in until their bladders almost burst just to see every scene, this should be funny. Actually, it's funny to everyone*, so go read it.

*with a properly calibrated sense of humor

The First Anti-Aging Drug?

According to this article, resveratrol, a compound found in red wine, has the potential to become the first effective anti-aging drug. Even so, I think I'll just continue drinking mine. It's a lot more enjoyable than taking a pill.

Farenheit $22 Million – A Review of the #1 Movie in America

First, let's get one thing straight – this film is a documentary. Those who have argued, in the runup to the release, that it was not, that it was some other manner of creature, made the assertion on the grounds that Micheal Moore produces biased films designed to advance his own political agenda. Even before the film's release it was painfully obvious that these arguments were, first and foremost, based on elaborate and counterintuitive convolutions of the word "documentary," interpretations that would have essentially required any film worthy of the label to be made by throwing a dart at a map, setting up a camera at that location pointed in a random direction, then releasing two hours of the unedited footage: anything else apparently constitutes bias, and no documentary can, according to the anti-Moore camp, be influenced by its maker's opinions. These theories were, equally obviously, motivated by a political agenda at least as overbearing as Moore's own. By saying "It's not a documentary," what those who originated the argument (and equally those who fell victim to and repeated it) were really saying was "This film is nothing but the rambling fantasy of a liberal nut – there's no need for you to pay attention to it or take it at all seriously."

Continue reading "Farenheit $22 Million – A Review of the #1 Movie in America"

Vintage Album Covers

Check out these vintage jazz album covers. It interesting that they're all from a rather limited palette—lots of cyans, blues, and reds—but still very cool. Being a chess nut, I really like this one.

(via Conscientious)

Clinton's Presidency

There have been two excellent posts about Clinton's presidency recently. The first, from Mark Schmitt, discusses the shift in strategy between terms, arguing that he didn't start triangulating until the second. The other, from Randy Barnett, points out the failed potential for a transformation of the Democratic Party Clinton represented.

Another Reason IE Sucks

Users are being told to avoid using Internet Explorer until Microsoft patches a serious security hole in it.

If you're still using IE, this is one of many reasons to switch to something better.

Comparative Statistics

Via BoingBoing, here's a fun site called NationMaster:

a massive central data source and a handy way to graphically compare nations. NationMaster is a vast compilation of data from such sources as the CIA World Factbook, United Nations, World Health Organization, World Bank, World Resources Institute, UNESCO, UNICEF and OECD. Using the form above, you can generate maps and graphs on all kinds of statistics with ease.

Enjoy.

Guys and Gals

As usual, 2blowhards has a great discussion going. This time, it's one that classifies men into two types: those that love women for being women and those that consider women as something of an accessory. It started with some off-hand comments in this post about "Neuromancer", which prompted a followup. That post has now been replied to by an even longer post.

Continue reading "Guys and Gals"

The Science of Baby Supermen

One of my favorite science bloggers, PZ Myers, discusses the mutation relating to the child's condition.