Sad life of a pig.....

Apparently, with swine flu pigs are even LESS popular in Muslim countries:

The pig is a curiosity in Muslim Afghanistan, where pork and pig products are illegal because they are considered irreligious, and has been in quarantine since Sunday after visitors expressed alarm it could spread the new flu strain.

"For now the pig is under quarantine, we built it a room because of swine influenza," Aziz Gul Saqib, director of Kabul Zoo, told Reuters. "We've done this because people are worried about getting the flu."

One Hundred Days of...Obama

I listened to a good part of President Obama's speech on the radio while driving, and I must confess it sounded pretty good to me. On the whole, I've found his presidency somewhat disappointing so far - he presents himself very well, but hasn't made any of the difficult decisions that seem so necessary these days. On the other hand, Bush had the same problem with the decisions without even presenting himself well, so I guess much more would be too much to hope for.

This article goes into things a bit deeper, describing Obama as "an effective salesman of exhausted ideas".

On the economy, and specifically on the economic crisis, Obama came to office promising a sharp break from the past. Instead, he has added so much fuel to the fires that George W. Bush ignited—exploding already swollen deficits, using TARP monies (which were statutorily provided for banks) not just for auto companies but minor auto parts manufacturers, and giving the federal government more power to seize private companies than even Henry Paulson dreamed of wielding. Such has been the extent of Obama's me-tooism that he's taken to defending his record by pointing out that, hey, Bush started it!

The latter was actually a rare moment of transparency; Obama's typical M.O. is to proclaim a new era of responsibility while ushering in a new era of irresponsible debt, promise to close the revolving door of lobbyists and government while keeping it open, and vow to post all bills online for five days without doing anything of the sort. He says the bailout is "not about helping banks—it's about helping people," then gives more of the people's money to banks. He says he doesn't want to run General Motors, then fires its CEO, guarantees its warranties, and wags his finger about the company's surplus of brands. He says he's taking a battle-axe to the budget, then offers to shave $100 million off a $3.4 trillion tab. At his gee-whiz, interactive, online town hall meeting, he laughed off the most popular question asked by web viewers—should marijuana be legalized—with a lame joke before embracing the status quo like Jimmy Carter hugging a Third World dictator.

Well, it's not as though we had much of an alternative...I don't for a moment believe McCain would have done any better. Nor is the country likely to vote my way in picking somebody of a libertarian bent, whether or not they are a member of the Libertarian party. But one change has been occurring: more and more people are describing themselves as independent rather than Democrat or Republican.

A bosom makes a VERY good pillow....

You've probably heard this song, it got a lot of radio play, but I'd bet you never made any sense of it....the name is Brimful of Asha (click on the link to get a much deeper explanation), but apparently it has been understood as many other possible words, including "Grim Poodle Basher". Pretty much the only part that made sense to me was the "Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow" interjection.

Anyway, I really enjoyed reading the explanation in my link!

Mistresses are most expensive by the hour, wives by the year....

"girlfriends are cheapest all around"

From a comparison of sugar daddy economics highlighted in MR's "Business arrangements I would bet against".

Bonus: one of the commenters points to this arrest in a sex-for-security scam.

Quote of the day

"I am shy with women: therefore there is no God" is highly unconvincing metaphysics.
- Fernando Pessoa

Journalism and Science - Peanutbutter and Chocolate fare much better...

The good professors at Language Log offer us another disgusted criticism of science reporting - this time the headlines pretty much promised us that Twitter would make us evil.

Yes, one more time a minor effect detected in a study is reinterpreted to yield headlines such as Facebook hurting moral values, says study and Facebook and Twitter 'make us bad people'. Not that the study actually involved Facebook or Twitter, read the article for a full description.

Professor Liberman offers credit where credit is due:

Kudos to Ben Goldacre, whose BS detector went off on cue, and who managed to get an early copy of the paper by some back-channel route ("Experts say new scientific evidence helpfully justifies massive pre-existing moral prejudice", Bad Science, 4/18/2009), and to Chris Matyszczyk at CNET, who was suitably skeptical on the basis of common sense ("Oh, so now Twitter is making us immoral", 4/15/2009). Chris also wins Best Line: "Your brain might, at this point, be scanning the thought that if all the subjects of this research were from Los Angeles, it might be surprising that the scientists found any moral compass at all."

And props to the 74% of respondents in that internet survey who weren't persuaded by this fake-scientific morality play.

Absolute zero might actually NOT be as cold as it can get....

At least that is my impression after reading this section of the tax topics.

Overcoming....

.... adversity is always inspirational. Sometimes it can be funny as well as inspirational, like when somebody has a successful life after being a boy named Sue or a girl named Marijuana Pepsi Jackson.

HT Freakonomics

(Shaw) Quote of the day

You have been badly brought up, little darling. Would any lady or gentleman walk unannounced into a room without first looking through the keyhole?
(Potemkin in "Great Catherine")

Smart Slime Molds

Interesting experiment described HERE. (HT MR)

Accentchuate the positive...

As much fun as it is to bash Strunk&White, it leaves people who really want a guideline to good writing stranded. This post spackles that gap.

For my single friends, or those with VERY tolerant spouses...

Will somebody please try this pick-up strategy and report back how it worked?

Judge not lest ye be judged?

I'm generally not a big fan of vindictiveness...the entertainment value of stringing the rascals up on lampposts after you've thrown them out is probably outweighed by the additional evasions and maneuvers that sort of policy induces. But the case of Judge Bybee (HT Uncommon Priors) finds me just a little bit bloodthirsty.

It's not easy going out into the world as a German. Even if you were born well past all the atrocities, and even your parents were merely children at the time, you are still faced with the prototype of the sadistic villain being the sadistic German. This makes it especially painful when your new adopted country stakes out the position that (non-consensual - I have no beef with the consensual kind) torture is really OK when it seems necessary or useful.

I don't know if the man is merely a well-meaning fool, but when Ackerman writes

Under the Constitution, impeachment requires a finding of "high crimes and misdemeanors." This is a high standard. Although Bybee's opinion fails minimum tests of legal competence, he may have acted in good faith. This should protect him from conviction. But his legal distortions might also be evidence of the abdication of his fundamental legal responsibilities. Instead of engaging in a good-faith interpretation of the War Crimes Act and the Geneva Conventions, he may have merely been responding to political pressures from the White House to liberate the CIA and the military from the rule of law.

Bybee should, of course, be given a full opportunity to clarify this matter at the impeachment proceedings. But at present, his only public explanation is his extravagant appeal to executive privilege. This cannot suffice. He should be required to take personal responsibility for his actions and explain why they don't make him into a systematic enabler of the war crimes that have disgraced America.

he has a point. I'd like to see the matter at least considered.

Commenters...

Not actually getting any, I don't really have to distinguish between the types on my own...but this bestiary could be used like your North American Field Guide to the species.

When I comment myself, I usually TRY to be:

The Droll - The mainstay of all fun sites, this poster regularly tosses out clever comments, plays of words, one-liners, amusing pictures. There’s a lot of these characters on places like Fark.com

but I fear that others would tend to classify me as:

The Lecturer - This is the buzzkill pedant who feels the need, even in a casual, light comments section to post a 1,000 word exegesis on what everyone should be talking about. Hey, thanks pal!

Hey, diddle-dee, a pirate's life for me....NOT

The site you reach by clicking the image below puts the whole pirate-killing thing in historical perspective.

Quote of the day - a Shaw quote

Haven't been doing these much...but yesterday's play inspired me.

You don't know what it is to be alone with a woman who has little beauty and less conversation. What is a man to do? she cant talk interestingly; and if he talks that way himself she doesnt understand him. He cant look at her: if he does, he only finds out that she isnt beautiful. Before the end of five minutes they are both hideously bored. Theres only one thing that can save the situation; and thats what you call being horrid. With a beautiful, witty, kind woman, theres no time for such follies. It's so delightful to look at her, to listen to her voice, to hear all she has to say, that nothing else happens. That is why the woman who is supposed to have a thousand lovers seldom has one; whilst the stupid,graceless animals of women have dozens.

(Overruled)

Actually, the conversation is quite necessary...even beauty will only get you to the end of TEN minutes!

Good times with the merry monarch....

Last night we went to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada to see one of the less well-known Shaw plays, "In Good King Charles's Golden Days". To my knowledge there has never been a bad production at Niagara-on-the-Lake's Shaw Festival, and this one didn't change things....although it is the earliest in the season we have ever gone, and there were a few rough spots (several stumbles in the overall elegantly delivered lines, plus a prop falling distractingly at the edge of the stage - the first time I've ever even noticed a flaw).

I had to explain a few things to my wife, as this play in particular is deeply steeped in history - it was meant to be quite obvious that "Rowley" was King Charles II incognito (to the extent that George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), actually addressed him as "Charles Stuart" once), but Jocelyn did not pick up on that at first - even though the first act ended in an angry wrestling match between Isaac Newton and prince James (later to briefly be James II before being replaced, as Charles II had warned him in the play if he insisted on his Catholicism, by the Protestant William and Mary).

Before the play we had dinner at the pleasant (but pricy) Shaw Cafe - can't beat the convenience of eating right across the street, and food and wine were good. Just before the play we went to a wine ship and shared a flight ($10 canadian) of icewine...Jocelyn particularly liked the Cabernet Franc (a red).

Speaking of royalty, but not of stalking them, this little item here deals with the latter part, or the people who do it (HT MR).

Interestingly, one of the first cases of what we now call erotomania or de Clérambault's syndrome, the delusional belief that another person - usually of higher status - is in love with you, featured the British Royal Family.

de Clérambault described the case of a 53 year old French woman who believed King George V was in love with her and would interpret twitches in the curtains of Buckingham Palace as secret love signals from the monarch.

Party time?

(Click on image to get to source of similar goodies)

Bashing Strunk&White

What better way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their pernicious little volume than to give it the smackdown it deserves?

As the co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language summarizes,

So I won't be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I've spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can't even tell when they've broken their own misbegotten rules.

Discount prices

HT for this battle of the champions goes to MR.

Hume versus Brooks

Yes, it is an uneven contest, brought to you by the good professors of Language Log. This is a refutation of Brooks' piece, The End of Philosophy, taking a handicap of over 200 years.

Still....if philosophers had just written in a more readable style, would we still have to be rehashing their ignored ideas today?

For people who like everything about porn ... except the sex.....

...they now have PG Porn right here.

Warning....it's funny, and there is no nudity, but the language is definitely NSFW (Not Safe For Work).

"It's all for your protection..."

Heard this on WBER, liked it so much I tracked down the lyrics, found (with the youtube video) HERE.

Lyric excerpt:

I do not have the things I want but I can’t find,
Just show me something real and make it.
Everywhere begins to be the same,
Other words we use that might contain,
An ounce of truth for every treason.
Where was it you said you had to go?
Life is just a game of ‘who you know’
The ones we love and mostly cherish.

I happen to love the stuff!

Click through image to get to the source of these lovely graphs (now at a new address)

Bob (TM) wins this one hands down....

This must rank on the top ten list of obscure top ten lists: the ten worst Microsoft product names. It says something about the sheer awfulness of Microsoft naming that this was doable, though.

Interestingly, some of the worst names are associated with the words products (such as the inanely named "Bob"). Probably the biggest slap in the face, of course, was "PlaysForSure" - which, as the article points out

they didn't play at all on the world's most popular MP3 player, Apple Inc.'s iPod. For Pete's sake, they didn't even play on Microsoft's own music player when it appeared.

Quote of the day

I’ll get the speech about how wonderful I am. Basic rule, isn’t it? More wonderful you are at the start of the speech, the more dumped you are at the end.
- Coupling

The Economy

Finally it is explained how these decisions are made.

HT MR.

tag briefs subhead large....

Sorry, that header was supposed to be replaced with something that made sense, just like in the LA Times.

HT McArdle

Robot Erotica.....

Or at least this is what they must gaze at in lieu of cuddling under the stars.

HT Coyote.

Toward more picturesque expressions....

Wasn't that a Reader's Digest feature?



(clicking on the picture will take you to the home site of that brilliant strip)

Another viewpoint on AIG....

...and "bonuses".

If this is really on the up and up, some people are really getting burned in a witch hunt.

I don't really have a dog of my own in this race, but I'm distinctly getting the feeling we might have done better letting things run their own course.

Intellectual Property laws abused to absurdity...

Rent seeking often brings out the sleaze, but this one takes the cake.

The Author's Guild is protesting that the new Kindle 2's ability to provide audio output of books is infringing on their copyrights by "performing" the work, thus interfering with the true audio book market. If audio books really didn't sound any better than a text-to-speech program output they simply don't deserve to exist!

Review: Duplicity

If you don't like to spend even a little time reading reviews, just go see it. You won't regret it (unless you absolutely must have car chase scenes and shootings, the movie is kind of deficient in those).

This is a movie about two bad people, but unlike too many movies about bad people these are people you are actually going to care about. It is witty, clever, and complex, but does not insist on leaving you baffled. For example, there is a particular conversation in the movie that you hear four times: the first time, it is just clever; the second time, it is puzzling; the third time, there is a good chance that you have figured it out; and the fourth time it makes complete sense unless you fell asleep during the movie, which isn't very likely.

The performances are uniformly impressive, with not just our stars shining but with their supporting cast fully equal to their tasks. Especially enjoyable are the two executives whose struggle forms the framework for the plot. Another spot I particularly enjoyed was the lady who was cruelly (but enjoyably) used at the airport.

Even the previews of other movies were unusually good last night, but I really don't think I liked it just because I was in a good mood. Go see it.

"another sad example of how the media grossly misrepresents linguistics"

(Click the picture for background info)

Primal Emo...

Apparently, there really is something universal about our music: emotion. A study using Western music and members of the African Mafa tribe who had never heard it before showed that anger, sadness, and fear in our music is understandable even outside our culture.

Fritz enlisted members of the Mafa, one of about 250 ethnic groups in Cameroon. He traveled to the extreme north of the Mandara mountain ranges, where they live, with a laptop and sun collector to supply electricity in his backpack.

Their studies showed that both Western and Mafa listeners, who had never before heard Western music, could recognize emotional expressions of happiness, sadness, and fear in the music more often than would be expected by chance. However, they report that the Mafa showed considerable variability in their performance, with two of twenty-one study participants performing at chance level.

Both groups relied on similar characteristics of music to make those calls; both Mafas and Westerners relied on temporal cues and on mode for their judgment of emotional expressions, although this pattern was more marked in Western listeners.

By manipulating music, the researchers also found that both Western listeners and African listeners find original music more pleasant than altered versions. That preference is probably explained in part by the increased sensory dissonance of the manipulated tunes.

HT Future Pundit

Hmmm

Better than reality : a principle to live by

This article points out the futility of designing web interfaces to "emulate" (more like "mock", which actually works quite well if the intention is humor rather than usability) the real world.

The principle is clear: don't burden yourself with unnecessary limitations just to cleave to the familiar. Transcend.

HT: MR on the Kindle

Economic Stimulus you can believe in.....

Being quite pro-immigration (after all, I am an immigrant myself!), this item struck me as more than just amusing. Why isn't it being done?

To be fair, encouraging immigration of the well-to-do is actually quite common, although typically on the WEALTHIER end of that spectrum. Almost any country is willing to host a billionaire.

Goldfish Memories

I watched an enjoyable movie tonight with Jocelyn. It's a bit slow starting, and it's quite a challenge to keep all the characters straight (no pun intended, since most of them are not "straight"), but it is very sweet and gently humorous.

My favorite exchange (paraphrased from memory)

girl: "He's NOT my type"
friend: "Well, YOUR type is currently making love to another man, so maybe you should expand your range."

Good documentation....

In the computer world, we are constantly reminded of the need for good documentation. This is an extreme case from the non-computer (military) world.

Could there be a more embarrassing lapse?

Previous lives...

Guys will put up with a bit of nonsense if it gets them what they want! Click on the image for more of these fun comics.

New Rochester blog...

Let's see how it goes, only one blog post so far - but it is informative:

Sisters of Murphy

I love the name - apparently an Irish play on the name of the Leonard Cohen song (and the band) "Sisters of Mercy". Playing, appropriately enough, at Murphy's Law (I've seen them at the Krown)

Quote of the day

I’ll get the speech about how wonderful I am. Basic rule, isn’t it? More wonderful you are at the start of the speech, the more dumped you are at the end.
-- Coupling

Quote of the Day

"Wind power has no future on the Moon."
Randall Parker, FuturePundit, in an article on lunar applications of solar power

Making our own romantic night-time sky

According to Slashdot, Venus is no longer going to be the brightest object in our night sky - the International Space Station is going to beat it with the newest set of solar wings.

This will give lovers something a bit more frisky than the typical planet to gaze at (I wonder if this will affect birthrates?) while lying on darkened lawns, but it might peeve astronomers that are already upset at "light pollution".

Quote of the day

"I really quite like being single. Except for the bit about not having a man."
- from the BBC series "Coupling"

Jet city....

Some people view corporate jets as being in the same category as champagne and expensive cigars. Much has been made of the executives flying to their begging session in these jets, but here is a good defense of that "perq", especially the Cessnas that can land in 3250 feet:

That figure — 3,250 feet — means business aircraft can alight on any of the 5,000 or so public-use airports scattered throughout the nation’s suburbs, small towns and back country, as well as land at small city airports abandoned by airlines decades ago. By contrast, the airlines fly to only about 500 airports, and of those, fewer than 70 get about three-quarters of all traffic.

If two companies are competing for business, the one using a business aircraft can fly directly to one of those smaller airports and get to lunch with the client before the other guys taking the commercial airlines show up.

And the business people with the corporate jet won’t just arrive faster; they’ll also show up better prepared. After all, most companies send teams of people, and in their own airplane they’re free to discuss confidential information or polish up that PowerPoint presentation. What’s more, they can use the phones, their BlackBerrys and the Internet en route. In other words, these jets are offices that move.

Of course, only the last part of that applies to landing in Washington to beg, and I'm still not very sympathetic to taxpayer handouts to ANY corporations....but I don't like thoughtless sneering either.

HT MR.

Quote of the day

What we do is never understood, but only praised and blamed.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Quote of the day

"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch."--Jack Nicholson

So I am in the state

...that most people are fleeing.

At least the Californians (#2) have warmer weather.

Quote of the day

"There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL."
--Lynn Lavner

Phrasebooks for time travelers

This news report seemed quite interesting:

What the researchers found was that the frequency with which a word is used relates to how slowly it changes through time, so that the most common words tend to be the oldest ones.

For example, the words "I" and "who" are among the oldest, along with the words "two", "three", and "five". The word "one" is only slightly younger.

Interesting, but a bit dubious. Mark Liberman (HT, by the way!) is inspired to provide a precise distinction between lies and "bullshit" (see original post) and comments:

Though I still hold out some hope that Prof. Pagel is being systematically misquoted, I'm afraid that I'm now reluctantly coming to believe what a colleague of his told me in confidence: "He knows better, but he just doesn't care".

Sense of humor not applicable in this one

Sometimes it is argued that gay marriage is a rather frivolous cause - that pretty much all the important things are available without it. This story emphasizes why it can be important.

The gist?

As her partner of 17 years slipped into a coma, Janice Langbehn pleaded with doctors and anyone who would listen to let her into the woman's hospital room.

Eight anguishing hours passed before Langbehn would be allowed into Jackson Memorial Hospital's Ryder Trauma Center. By then, she could only say her final farewell as a priest performed the last rites on 39-year-old Lisa Marie Pond.

I admire his sense of humor...

The guy in this story might have been a loser, but talk about a good loser!

The prank resulted in him becoming a national laughingstock, an indecent picture of him becoming widely available, and the end of his marriage.

His reaction?

“There’s no doubt I’ve been done good and proper by the lads from Liverpool.

“It was cruel, but I’ll hold my hands up and say they really wound me up.”

Perhaps he is merely trying to lull them into a false sense of security while he thinks up a revenge prank that will top it.

HT The Agitator

Quote of the day

If you suffer from paranoid schizophrenia, i know who you are and what you want. Stay online so i can trace where you live.
- Sharnna Harris

Quote of the day

I’m delighted Kate Winslet finally got a Best Actress Oscar, because she deserves it for being so good for so long but also because now that means, pace Halle Berry and Charlize Theron, that she will now immediately make a God-awful action film in which she wears very tight black latex, and I’m all for that.

- John Scalzi, stolen shamelessly from Coyote's blog. What can you add to THAT?

Moral of the day

Don’t ever take the joy of death away from the public. Because if you don’t see losers in pain, you begin to think the game is rigged.

(as explained by Venkatesh of Freakonomics fame, who offers the services of experienced drug dealers to help out with our financial difficulties)

Quote of the day

Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas.
-Rommel

Does that mean he knows when you've been bad or good?

Courtesy Language Log

This Guideline came too late for me....

...but I still enjoyed it.



Via Coyote

Tough job - and I can't even order that SOMEBODY'S got to do it!

For some unexplained reason, the death penalty was not invoked:

Associated Press Writer= KABUL (AP) An appeals court in Afghanistan upheld 20-year prison sentences Sunday for two men who published a translation of the Quran that drove religious leaders to call for their execution.

Nobody had any beef with the way the translation was done....translating at all was the crime. After all, if god had meant it to be in anything but Arabic, he could have translated it himself.

HT Language Log, which comments "Lucky for Zalmai and Ahmad that Afghanistan now has a democratic government controlled by moderate Muslims rather than the Taliban and other members of the tiny minority of intolerant extremists, hunh?"

Word of the week - synecdoche

When a part is used to represent the whole.

For example, "This rancher can raise 50 hands for the cattle drive", when the rancher can actually raise 50 men that have hands.

"This baron can raise 50 swords for the king" might also be called synecdoche, although some would consider it more properly "metonomy".

Here's Lucy!

Lucy, "the oldest and most complete skeleton of any adult, erect-walking human fossil" (although I am not so sure about the "human" part, her brain wasn't much larger than that of a chimp), is on tour to the United States, according to Physorg. If you are an admirer of ancient fossils, you should be able to see her at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Or you could just buy me a drink.

HT to ArchaeoBlog, which also pointed me to this cool National Geographic article on why the Great Flood might not have been all that great.

Quote of the day

Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move. These are computer bums, compulsive programmers.


Joseph Weizenbaum 1976

"Yesterday in a naked way"

The best part of this Language Log post about words and phrases that are spelled the same (but mean different things) in different languages are the examples in the comments.

(The title happens to be what the Dutch "hier en nu" (here and now) would mean interpreted as French)

Another example was a Danish freight elevator titled "Godsfart"

Stimulate me, Uncle Sam!

Not that we don't get enough ads for "Get YOUR share of the stimulus" on Facebook, but this transparent bid (or, to be fair, parody of such) for loot is actually funny.

Yes, all of the economic stimulus should go to bloggers.

Especially me.

HT MR.

Say it, sister!

Megan McArdle points out a class action suit settlement that could have been made by Solomon.

Instead of the "plaintiffs" of the suit getting some coupons, and the attorneys collecting huge wads of cash - the judge had the attorneys paid in gift cards as well!

Quote of the day

Executives are generally happy to take risks but only with other people’s money (people who take risks with their own money are called entrepreneurs).

- Coyote

Keeping it real....

Fantasy has always been a tempting escape....sometimes healing, sometimes soothing, sometimes addicting, sometimes obsessive.

I enjoy it quite a bit myself...not only traveling through worlds described in books and movies, but interacting with worlds built with human rules and with computer programming. My first experience with virtual worlds involved no computers at all: Dungeons and Dragons with other members of my college dorm. The adventures are in the imagination, but these are social games, and the bonding that occurs can be very real.

In a later game, The Fantasy Trip, I actually developed a romantic interest in the girl who was running a campaign (we both played in each other's fantasy world)...had things worked out differently it could have affected my life in a major way. Another person who played in these worlds would later be the best man at my wedding.

For people who are disabled, the computer versions of such games can do a lot to bring elements into their lives they might otherwise have given up on: romance, struggles, travel.... I have played many of these games myself.... Everquest (affectionately known as "Evercrack" for its addictive nature), World of Warcraft, Maplestory, silly Facebook games, and Second Life. Second Life, in particular, gives me a chance to use my programming skills to craft things in the virtual world that make the game more fun. Some people actually make a "real life" (or, in gamer-speak, RL) living doing things in the virtual world.

On the balance, I am very pro-gaming but here are some examples of people who take their fantasies too far: computer fraud, attempted kidnapping, even murder. People to whom gaming seems odd will blame the games, just as people who've never fired a gun will blame the guns. People with some experience realize that there are individuals who will make a mess wherever they go, however they do it.

Paying dead farmers not to farm....

Not such a silly idea AFTER ALL!

Quote of the day

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

- Rich Cook

The bowels of goofy translations....

Apparently, the Russians have a word like our "bowels of the earth" that sounds odd in translation:

The main task of the public energy policy in this sphere is the reproduction of the mineral-raw base of hydrocarbon and other fuel-energy resources and rational use of Russian bowels for providing the stable economic development of the country.

The original post has a link to a sort of top ten list of hideous translation errors.

Most impressive inauguration picture ever!

Here.

HT Coyote.

Where does she find this stuff?

McArdle points out a site for "Dating A Banker Anonymous", which has posts like God, You are so 24.

A heartbreaking story, beginning with the ominous:

Charles treats me just as well as, if not better than, many of the unmarried bankers I’ve dated in the past. I would call myself his “girlfriend” in the sense that I receive constant attention via text messages, emails and phone calls, fabulous vacations while he is on “business trips” and a never ending supply of gifts, gourmet meals and affection. I get all this AND I get to leisurely continue to date in search of my own Mr. Right. Win-win, don’t you think? I certainly did… until the mortgage meltdown.

Quote of the day

You know "that look" women get when they want sex? Me neither.

--Steve Martin

My best man once discussed the song Woman, Woman (as performed by Gary Puckett) with me, and pointed out he didn't quite agree "A woman gets a certain look when she is on the move, and a man can always tell what's on her mind." Or maybe he was COULD tell what's on her mind, but hadn't been around women on the move. Yup...me, neither!

Quote of the day

A hacker on a roll may be able to produce, in a period of a few months, something that a small development group (say, 7-8 people) would have a hard time getting together over a year. IBM used to report that certain programmers might be as much as 100 times as productive as other workers, or more.
- Peter Seebach

Just in case you think it's only the right wing....

...that goes off the deep end, here is an example where a liberal would approve of an act of war against the UK.

OK, my friends in those British Isles, I really don't think that just because a country relies "on the Royal Navy for protection" that means it is OK to invade it.

Quote of the day

"I suppose counsel have a penumbral constitutional right to regard each other as schmucks, but I know of no principle that justifies litigation pollution. … This case makes me lament the demise of dueling. I cannot order a duel, and thus achieve a salubrious reduction in the number of counsel to put up with."

- U.S. District Judge Wayne Alley

Rules to blog by....

I'm not sure whether this guy is from the right or from the left (no hat tip because I forgot how I got there), but these rules would make anybody's political writing more palatable.

Is that rape included in the price?

OK, this question does not rank high in the annals of good taste, but I really did wonder about it while reading the article "Alien World" in Reason magazine, about a theme park that let you try out the experience of being a Mexican immigrant trying to make it across the US border.

Women and children are tossed into Border Patrol vehicles and driven off into the night. M-80s stand in for shotgun fire. Then there are the female screams in the distance, a soundtrack of rape.

Reassuringly (I suppose), actual rape does not take place in the theme park as part of the regularly scheduled entertainment. A couple of pages later, the article explains how it is done:

Then there are the screams that come from behind the bushes. During quiet lulls in the walk, female park employees periodically issue blood-curdling cries that echo through the mountains. It is not an overly histrionic touch. Rape has become so endemic to the border crossing experience that women often start taking birth control before making the trip, expecting abuse from coyotes or the bandits that travel with them.

Note that "coyotes" refer to the "businessmen" whose job it is to smuggle immigrants across the border. I guess you've got to really want to be an American!

Quote of the day

Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.
--Billy Crystal

Education and Tea Leaves....

Megan McArdle chimes in with her thoughts on wasted education dollars and hours...in this case her own. This one focuses on Sallie Mae, which makes education loans that in many cases are never paid off, for an education that never benefits those who work to get it.

Who benefits? Unscrupulous schools, especially those taking advantage of dreamers:

I don't know how I ended up at Career Blazers (yes, I cringe myself at the name). It was like one of those plucky, poor-but-honest people you read about in Victorian novels--everything clean, freshly painted, and nonetheless falling apart. But I was too desperate to get out of that secretary's chair to be picky. I gave them something like $5,000, in 1995, to teach me to be a Certified Netware Engineer--an administrator of Novell's corporate networking software.

The technies in the audience are wincing, and believe me, I am too. As I found out after I'd wasted thousands of dollars and three months, a CNE was a necessary, but not sufficient, credential to get a job in IT. The minute anyone tells you that he has one (or an MCSE, the Microsoft equivalent), any seasoned professional will bar that person from touching his equipment. Anyone who would actually mention his CNE is definitionally too ignorant to be useful, and just knowledgeable enough to be dangerous. Of course anyone competent usually had the credentials--but all the credentials proved, by themselves, was that you could breathe and answer a multiple choice test.

Bad Boyfriend Bonus

Professor Drezner comments that Obama will be benefiting from a phenomenon apparently oft witnessed on Sex & the City (never seen the show myself): the boyfriend after a really bad one gets an extra dose of benefit of doubt.

Never trust a live Jedi

It always amuses me when something as frivolous as Star Wars is treated with mock seriousness. This item does a marvelous job of that.

So much for that newspaper theory. In "Another Roadside Attraction", Marx Marvelous chooses his name to be the most loathsome possible, and

What do they most loathe? The answer I arrived at was Communism and homosexuality. Communists and homosexuals are the targets of the majority of the normal male's fear-honed barbs. Thus you can see how I in my rebellion selected the given name of 'Marx'. The surname was more difficult. Obviously, I couldn't ccall myself Marx Homosexual or Marx Queer or even Marx Fag. But I remembered having read in a syndicated newspaper column that the one word no red-blooded he-man would ever ever utter was 'marvelous.'

Since I am the epitome of the red-blooded he-man, don't trust syndicated newspaper columns any more than you would trust a Jedi!

Most repulsive gift ever?

About a week after Christmas, I came home, and there was a package on the front step, in the snow.....marked "Open immediately - live". My wife thought maybe somebody sent you lobster. I thought, maybe poisonous snakes! There was no indication of origin on it, other than the name of the company that sent it, so I opened up VERY carefully.

It was filled with mostly moist straw, and some paperwork. About 5 gallons of moist straw, which was, according to the manual, impregnated with fungal spores. It was a "grow your own mushrooms" kit, mushrooms of the kind you find growing on dead, decaying logs. The manual showed pictures of what, with proper moisture and care, I could hope for.....the bag of straw, with holes in the plastic, would grow tumor-like bulges......

Possibly the most repulsive present I have ever received, but kind of fascinating nevertheless. I still have no idea who sent it...to the best of my knowledge, I have no serious enemies.

Believe it or not, I made the required "humidity tent" from clothes hangers and the enclosed plastic sheeting.....it is in my basement, only about 10 feet from where I blog. The bottom of the straw is in a bowl of water I boiled and cooled for the purpose (to remove any chlorine that might be in the tap water)....I have been using a spray bottle of the same stuff to periodically "mist" it inside the moisture tent.

Less than a week after I started the process, I had this (moisture bag removed to make picture):


By today, I had this:


With the moisture bag removed, and the wife giving the shroomie a kiss (for scale), this is what it looked like:


(Note: this was the wife making a sacrifice to please her husband. Don't get the idea she has some kind of mushroom smooching fetish)

To sample the goods, and to be able to get the moisture tent back on, I harvested the largest of my mushrooms and boiled it up. Subtle flavor, a bit like crab. Believe it or not, it looks beautiful to me now. My family, however, still finds it repulsive (although they did sample the simple soup).

Thinking of calling in sick?

Perhaps nobody at your work place has called in with the hockogrockles before!

Health care costs...

Coyote has a blog post which discusses health care plans and prices.

One interesting item I had not known is that price increases have been smallest (lower than inflation) in cosmetic surgery - which is generally not covered by insurance.

Style and Condoms

I don't know whether this really is the "best condom commercial ever", but it has got to be the most stylish

Stupid human tricks

Trying to see what you can get past airport security.

I'll stick with amusements less likely to lead to an enthusiastic cavity search. Not that there's anything wrong with you if you like that sort of thing.

Form vs. Function

Language Log has an inspirational post about politics, presidential phrasing, and "prescriptivist poppycock".

I won't have to pee again for a week now.

Quote of the day

In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them.

New Yorker

I'm guessing this subsidizes the padded bra manufacturers....

This is actually supposed to be a safety measure.

"Klingon Urethra Gutting Device"

Actually, it's a spaghetti fork.

The next crisis....

It's probably not a good idea to take your financial advice from a cartoonist, but here Dilbert's Scott Adams speculates about the next big ripoff.

I freaked out and cried when my mom went shopping for a cute pink skirt....

Yup, that's what my titles would probably look like if I were a woman blogger, at least according to this table of word frequencies by sex. You know, actually it DOESN'T read like my typical title.

On the other hand, I've never blogged about "gb", whatever the hell that is.

Constructive Criticism....

"Stimulus" spending has been in the news lately (seems to me like the crisis has yet to appear that can't be simply solved by the politicians spending more of our money!), but I did not realize the Japanese have been outdoing us all along: apparently Japan spends "three to four times more than what the United States, with twenty times the land area and more than double the population" spends on construction.

Lasered fighting woman ...

Nope, this is not a B movie. We've known that those lovely white statues from antiquity were originally painted, and we have just found an actual example (head of an Amazon warrior) in Herculaneum.

The video here shows how it is laser scanned to capture the geometry.

HT Archaeoblog

Common Writing mistakes...

... are humorously summarized here.

They are self-illustrative: "Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors."

Hat tip: Volokh

OK, Pumpkinhead!

This is too weird NOT to point out.

We all want our kids to go to college....

...but Coyote makes a good argument that this is not always wise.

Back when I was still in Germany, there were 3 tracks in education: Volksschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium. You were routed to one of these tracks based on a test you took in 4th grade. Maybe this is a bit early to decide the rest of your life (actually, this was not final, there ARE ways of switching tracks), and Germany has abandoned this system, but it did have its advantages.

Volksschule was for the worker bees. School was only mandatory until you were 14 years old (plenty of time to get a grounding in literacy, math, and civics), and then you were expected to move on. This didn't mean your education was OVER - typically you moved into an apprenticeship that prepared you for a trade.

Gymnasium was a college preparatory school, and the track you took if you wanted to be a teacher, a college professor, a doctor, various highly respected professions.

Realschule I don't really understand that well, but apparently it was a middle ground between the two.

This satisfied both an egalitarian ideology (everybody had the same fundamental first four years of schooling, everybody had a chance at ANY of the tracks) without forcing everybody to sacrifice a large part of their life on preparation they did not want - in the American system there is no way these days to opt out before you are 22 without being labeled in some way a failure.

In Germany, a kid who attended Volksschule and went on to become a Master at his trade was STILL a highly respected person (qualified to lead and teach others - my own father was a Master in 2 different trades (metalworking/plumbing and heating/cooling) and an advanced Journeyman in one other (electrician) although he never finished Volksschule) with no history of failure behind him, even though the respect was of a different flavor from that accorded an intellectual.

In retrospect, I mourn the demise of that system. It should have been improved rather than abandoned.