Planetary news

Despite losing one of its stripes, Jupiter will remain a planet.

Even if Pluto gained one, it still wouldn't be.

Apartment dwelling woes....

Some of my friends have had difficulties with their neighbors when they lived in apartments (yes, I'm thinking of YOU, professor!), but at least none have ever complained to me about being kept awake by exorcisms.

Things gone terribly wrong

"You shoot two dogs in front of a seven year old--who could have been killed by a stray round, and at the very least will carry this hideous recollection to the grave. And why? For misdemeanor pot possession?"

- Megan McArdle

Hairdressers and transvestites saving the environment

in a rather unexpected way....

Quote of the day

"Do we really want to live in a country where when someone busts into your house at night you're supposed to assume they might be cops?"
- Megan McArdle's Quote of the Year, by unnamed commenter.

"Remind me to never be the first one who falls asleep in this crowd"

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, riffs on the news that a Chinese man who "died after his friends inserted a live eel into his rectum as a practical joke when the man was asleep". What cards!

As he phrased it, "With friends like that, who needs enemas?"

You must consider daughter-cattle ratios

Always, in my ignorance, somewhat preferred shorter girs, but it turns out tall girls fetch more cattle.

"Slip and fall down carefully"

...an article on Chinglish, via MR.

The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”

The same link collection also takes us to this:

That zooming in bit especially frosts me.....

This article on "Top 10 things Hollywood thinks computers can do" hits a couple of my pet peeves. As you can tell, my single biggest irritation has been that in almost any movie you can take a grainy security video frame and "enhance" it to see a bacterium on the skin of an intruder. The other one is about guessing passwords, although for me it hasn't been just the EASE of guessing, it also has been how there often seems to be some sort of special hone-in-on-the-password interface that computers are equipped with.

OK, I'll play along....

...with this game:


First thing I ever ordered from Amazon -
April 5, 1999 - Agatha Raisin and the Wizard of Evesham (Agatha Raisin Mysteries, No. 8)

Quote of the Day

To cure political correctness, we must commit to being more intellectually shameless.
- Dave Marney, commenting to the Volokh Conspiracy

Bitch-slapping the educated

Language Log had a couple of interesting items recently (granted, not much different than saying "The sun rose this morning!")

One was about "begging the question", a phrase more often used these days to mean "raising the question" than what it used to mean, which was something like "assuming your conclusions" or "arguing in a circle". Anybody employing the more common usage is liable to be corrected by some pedant who wants you to know he knows the "correct" usage, but this item goes into the whole history of the item. The recommendation is just to avoid using the phrase completely to deprive pedants of their target.

The other is another rant directed at Strunk and White, which I've always enjoyed because I've been irritated myself by editors that take their mostly useless advice far more seriously than either Strunk OR White did.

Interesting point for entrepeneurs

MR points to an item by Paul Atkins that indicated Apple Computers was considered too risky to do an IPO in some states.

Stories from my life

A guy with whom I'm playing an online computer game commented to me: "As a programmer you already know, there is no such thing as a "random" glitch".

There may be a cause, but things can look pretty random. I had to fly down to North Carolina once because a system we had written for a large company (controlling vending machines that took credit cards) started randomly charging customers $0 for some of the purchases (which were NOT $0).

I remember the flight well, because I had a cold and the cabin was unpressurized, and I arrived weak and pale with blood trickling out of my ears after some of the worst pain I've ever experienced. The guy in charge of the computer that was running my program whom I was rushing to see was unable to see me at first because an Ebay auction on some collectible was in the end stages, but finally I got to see the system.

After hours of comparing my input logs to the output we were generating, and trying to figure out HOW my program could possibly produce such nonsense - and running the program in a test mode with the same input to try to reproduce the problem - I was ready to tear my hair out.

I wrote a quick test program that did simple arithmetic and logged the output. It worked fine. I went to my hotel room in despair and left it running.

The next day, I checked the output log of the test program and found that for several minute-long periods the computer would add 1 and 1 and arrive at 0.

The computer they were using to run my program was really a collection of a large set of processing units, and processes could be run by any one of these - when my process was run on a defective unit, it produced defective results.

When I asked them how this could possibly have been going on undetected, they explained that the system ran diagnostics continuously, but the results were sent to a display that was itself no longer working, so they hadn't checked in months. Probably higher priority Ebay auctions.

Our president explained to me that it would be bad for company relations if I killed anybody. In retrospect, it might have been worth it.

One of the downsides of not having gay marriage....

...that I've heard described has been that married couples get fewer restrictions when visiting each other in a health care situation. But I never quite thought that a couple that was not married would be separated like THIS.

"According to the suit, when Harold, Greene’s partner of 20 years, fell ill, the county refused to let Greene visit him in the hospital, despite the couple’s meticulous efforts to name one another in their wills, powers of attorney, and medical directive documents."

One wonders whether even if there HAD been a marriage whether things would have gone any better...but in any case, it is shocking that this sort of thing could be going on even nowadays.

A soul is a terrible thing to waste....

....but to promise it in exchange for a computer game is pretty reasonable.

The April Fool's joke made the point that nobody actually reads those online agreements. Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.

Quote of the day

Blonde chick to friend: So I ran into that guy and confronted him. I was like, "why didn't you say hi to me last Friday? I know you saw me, but you didn't say anything. Listen, if you're going to sleep with me Thursday night, you can't just not say hi to me on Friday. I know it's common for a lot of businessmen to sleep with prostitutes and then ignore them the next day when they see them on the street, but they pay them. If you're going to ignore me, fine... but I expect a check in the mail."
- Overheard in New York

How happy is happy enough?

Well, if you're not there yet, Badakesuyo tweets how to move in the right direction.

How gay is gay enough?

In a bizarre development, 3 athletes ruled insufficiently gay are suing to have the determination overturned, as well as reinstatement of their standing and money damages.

At one point during the proceedings, the lawsuit alleges, one of the plaintiffs was told: "This is the Gay World Series, not the Bisexual World Series."

Quote of the Day

"Learning Icelandic is like getting a tattoo on your arse: it’s time consuming, painful, and you rarely get a chance to show it off."
- via Language Log

Don't try this at home!

MR always has the best links, and this one to "20 Homemade Things That Shouldn’t Be Home-Made" is well worth a look. The scaffolding and the child seat are especially cringe-inducing.

Other recent posts and links by MR include hiring an evil clown to stalk your children, porn magazines for the blind, the fact that a fat "freak" of the past who toured the world because of his size would look unexceptional today, John Cleese explaining the advantages of extremism, and a look-back at last years "hard" words from the New York Times (Maybe next year's will be out soon?).

Not to mention an interesting look at the unexpected directions causality can take.

Update: And, of course, unconventional but respectable names for beer.

Cliff Notes for Movies!

Via Prettier Than Napoleon, who used "ALIENS: An unplanned pregnancy leads to complications." as her post title, Uncomfortable Plot Summaries tells you everything you need to know about the movies, but you might not recognize the movie without thinking a bit.

My three favorites:

BATMAN: Wealthy man assaults the mentally ill.
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: Mel Gibson fulfills fantasy of showing a Jew beaten to a bloody pulp and killed on-screen.
TWILIGHT: Girl gives up college for stalker.

King Kong Theory - book review

A short read, and I recommend it - an interesting view on rape, pornography, prostitution, and gender roles from a woman who has had experience with all of these. Her name is Virginie Despentes, and she writes "as one of the leftovers, one of those weirdos, the ones who shave their heads, those who don't know how to dress, those who worry that they stink...", and for "men who don't want to protect, men who would like to be protective but don't know where to start, men who don't know how to fight, those who cry easily...." The translation from the French was obviously done by a Brit, where "pissed" means "drunk" rather than "angry", and "fag" means "cigarette".

She was raped by three men while she was hitchhiking with another woman. Part of her concern afterward was how unmentionable it was:

The few times - mostly very pissed - when I have wanted to tell this story, have I used the word? Never. The few times I have attempted to talk about it, I'd skirted around the word "rape": "assaulted", "mixed up", "in a tight corner", "hassled"....whatever. As long as the aggression is not called "rape", the attack loses its specificity, can be compared with other attacks, like getting mugged, picked up by the cops, held for questioning, beaten. This short-sighted strategy does have advantages, because as soon as you name your rape as a rape, the women-controlling mechanisms suddenly swing into action: do you want everyone to know what happened to you? Do you want everyone to see you as a woman who has been subject to that? And in any case you must be a total slut to have escaped alive. Any woman who values her dignity would rather die.

Beyond the actual fact of the rape, she felt oppressed because she felt that society would place a greater importance on "the thrusts of those three idiots" than on her fear for her very survival. Not until four years later, when she read an interview with Camille Paglia, did she appreciate her own strength. She doesn't remember the exact words, but Paglia said something like "It's an inevitable danger, a danger that women need to take into account and run the risk of encountering, if they want to leave their homes and move around freely. If it happens to you then pick yourself up, dust yourself down and move on. If that's too scary for you, then you'd better stay at home with Mummy and manicure your nails." Her reaction was negative at first, but when it sunk in, "For the first time, someone was valuing the ability to get over it, instead of lying down obligingly in the anthology of trauma. Someone was devaluing rape, its impact and consequences. This did not invalidate any part of what happened, or efface anything of what we learnt that night."

Later she worked for a while as a prostitute, which she rated as an overall positive experience - the biggest negatives were the expectation of society: "I am not trying to argue that in any conditions, and for any woman, this kind of work is innocuous. But with the modern-day economic world being what it is - cold and pitiless warfare - banning the practice of prostitution within an appropriate legal framework is actively preventing the female class from making a decent living and turning a profit from its very stigmatisation."

Her take on pornography is also pro-sex and anti-society: "Pornography hits the blind corner of reason. It directly addresses our primitive fantasies, bypassing words and thought, The hard-on or wetness comes first; wondering why follows on behind. Self-censorship reactions are shaken. Porn images don't give us any choice: here's what turns you on, here's what makes you respond. Porn shows us the buttons to press to turn ourselves on. And that is porn's greatest strength, its almost mystical dimension. And also what literally horrifies the anti-porn crusaders. They reject being told directly about their own desire, reject being made to know things about themselves that they have chosen to suppress and ignore."

While I don't always agree with her beliefs (she ascribes almost all our constraints to our society, and I believe that there is a biological component to all this that she seems to reject), she is willing to look at facts and feelings straight on. An honest look like that is worth sharing.

And if you buy it from this link, I'd actually earn a few pennies:

Quote of the day

"Iceland's last wish: to have its ashes scattered all over Europe"
- a tweet

Update: Do you know how to pronounce that glacier? Apparently nobody else outside of iceland does, either!

Obama pardons Bernie Madoff!

I wouldn't believe this if it were from any source less reputable than Forbes!

Yet one more reason to diet?

Wish I remember how I got this link to give an appropriate hat tip, but it looks genuine.

Funny in hindsight....

The sign is pretty good, but I like the commentary even better.

The perils of superstition....

I am sometimes concerned that some of my friends put too much faith into romantic little oddities such as astrology. But at least they don't usually perform human sacrifices in order to improve their product, although I suppose one should admire the dedication....

"Living with crazy buttocks"

In a previous year's "Oddest Book Title" contest, the winner was the title above. This year it is “Crocheting Adventures With Hyperbolic Planes”.

HT MR

Towards a richer vocabulary.....

Isn't that what they called it in the Readers' Digest? Anyway, I don't think they had
prostidude a male prostitute

If you follow the link to Language Log, you will also learn why you might enjoy "warmed spring salad greens with prostitutes".

Quote of the day

"Applying for my first job, I realized I had to be creative in listing my few qualifications. Asked about additional schooling and training, I answered truthfully that I had spent three years in computer programming classes. I got the job. I had neglected to mention that I took the same course for three years before I passed."
- Chi Flat Iron

Linked by the captivating Penelope Trunk...

... who was herself linked by the legendary MR.

Although her link is about pig sex, so what with that and bouncing nude, it is probably a very good thing I am not actively trying to shape a personal "brand".

Best idea EVER.....

Marginal Revolution points out the service every man should have...appropriately enough called Manpacks.

Yes, you too can have socks and underwear delivered to you on a regular schedule now, to avoid that all-too-familiar nothing-in-the-drawer-without-holes-in-it syndrome.

The question is: now that this is available, will men continue to get married?

Quote of the Day

"That's a husband's FUNCTION!"

-- me, responding to a protest about mussing my wife's lipstick

Credited for bouncing nude.....

Pointed out an interesting case where a spellchecker caused some confusing to some linguistics professors whose blog I enjoy (and whose books I have bought), and got credited for the pointer. Thrilled!

Church-based pornography

As though Africa didn't have enough problems, there is a movement to make homosexuality a capital crime with previous convictions (also for offenses involving minors or being HIV positive).

What makes this especially newsworthy is that a minister promoting this bill actually tried to persuade people by showing gay porn in his church.

Apparently, g-d indeed works in mysterious ways.

Quote of the Day

"My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone."
— Leonard Cohen

Quote of the day

"I'm a miracle of thermodynamics! I'm both extremely hot and extremely cool at the same time!"
- Overheard in New York

Health R&D

Interesting graph suggesting our non-military government research spending is VERY heavy on health compared to that of other countries.

Quote of the day

"When we show a friend a city one has already visited, we feel the same pride as when we point out a woman whose lover we have been."
- Alexandre Dumas, pere (from "The Count of Monte Cristo")

"...he couldn't stop thinking about one day resuming his daily regimen of sexual intercourse with random women who look vaguely like his wife, only skankier."
---

The Onion

Quote of the day

"Mammograms are very uncomfortable, and of course, you don't want to shoot any more radiation into yourself than necessary, so women should have been excited by the news that you probably don't need one until you're fifty. Instead they were outraged. Since this was about spending other peoples' money, naturally we want the right to spend as much of it as possible, even if it's not very useful."
- Megan McArdle

Hagging in the Marriage Market

This post modeling how a small change in sex ratios (20:20 -> 19:20) can have large effects on what people might do to hook up is interesting, even though I'm pretty sure lifetime companion decisions aren't actually made that way.

Although I'm not sure the way we do it actually gives better results.

Webinar on Twitter on Vokle

...was given by Penelope Trunk of Brazen Careerist.

From my point of view it was a bit chaotic, but then I pretty much
only use Twitter to update my Facebook status - so maybe a good bit
was over my head.

I got a clue about "@", which I'd seen before but didn't understand.

Also a pointer to a couple of services, such as Buzzom, not that I'm
likely to use it.

Best advice: don't be boring. But I already knew that.

The deadliest mittens.....

A couple of years ago, somebody I didn't know walked up to me in a bar and asked "What can you tell me about the Soviet-Finnish war?"

An unusual greeting, and all I could think of on the spur of the moment was "I believe that is when the Finns invented the biathlon, except that they used Russians as the targets."

He grinned and explained that a girl he knew had said he could ask me a question on any topic he could think of and I'd come up with an answer (not true - he just got lucky).

Recently I saw an article explaining the success of one of these early biathlon practitioners, Simo Häyhä, who reportedly took down about 800 Soviets. I'm sure there was more to his success than just his mittens, but it is interesting to think they were a contributing factor.

An excerpt of an excerpt:

One of the reasons Häyhä was so successful, believe it or not, was because of his mitten ensemble. They consisted of three layers: the bottom layer was an incredibly finely knitted tight-fitting glove made of handspun yarn, finer than commercial woolen knits could be found at that time. The second layer was a fingerless mitt that stopped short of the base of his fingers, while covering his wrist and the first joint of his thumb. The outer layer was made of heavy, thick wool, in a technique unique to scandinavia called nålbinding, which was looped rather than knitted. This nålbinded mitten, in addition to being virtually impervious to cold, also had a split in it for his trigger finger, so he could fire his rifle without taking them off.

The underglove was fine enough that he could reload his rifle without taking THAT off, drastically reducing the amount of time that his hands had to be exposed to the cold. And if he did have to do maintenance on his rifle that required the underglove to come off, he could put the wrist-covering mitt back on; because that covered the pulse point in his wrist, it kept his blood warmer longer and kept feeling in his fingers.

I could use something like that in Rochester even when I'm not in a mood to kill people!

Quote of the day

“It’s hard to believe President Obama’s now been in office for a year. And you know, it’s incredible. He took something that was in terrible, terrible shape and he brought it back from the brink of disaster: The Republican Party."

Jay Leno, courtesy of the Volokh Conspiracy

Quote of the day - how to become a great poet

I wrote notes to women so as to have them. They began to show them around and soon people started calling it poetry. When it didn't work with women, I appealed to God.
- Leonard Cohen

Quote of the day

Natural selection, it seems, often smiles on strumpets.
Barking Up The Wrong Tree

Random Cultural Allusion of the Day

Actually, there IS a spoon.

Quote of the day

Lies were also categorised as to whether they were self-oriented or other-oriented with men telling more self-oriented lies than women. Overall, though, men and women told about the same number of lies, contrary to the popular conception that men are bigger liars than women.
- Feldman et al

All science aside, men are still more likely to lie about the size of their sexual organs.

Quote of the Day

But Lady Gaga is a more or less average-to-petite young woman, and she totally rocks the weird fashion. She makes me want to run around in a PVC bodysuit with a rooster hood, or no pants with giant hoof-heels, or whatever weird thing you can imagine. She is really inspiring.
- Prettier Than Napoleon

Chess versus poker

I stopped playing chess on a regular basis a long, long time ago.

When I DO play abstract strategy games, I usually play go.

Once upon a time, though, I was a serious player: a member of the United States Chess Federation (USCF), a player in tournaments, even a (losing) contender for the run-off to challenge for the championship of the US Virgin Islands.

Of the many world chess championships, many have been spectacular failures. There have been lunatics, apparatchiks, and monomaniacs (of course, being a monomaniac might be a prerequisite for being the world's best at almost ANYTHING). One that I've admired, though, has been Kasparov, who wrote this article about chess and computers:

erhaps chess is the wrong game for the times. Poker is now everywhere, as amateurs dream of winning millions and being on television for playing a card game whose complexities can be detailed on a single piece of paper. But while chess is a 100 percent information game—both players are aware of all the data all the time—and therefore directly susceptible to computing power, poker has hidden cards and variable stakes, creating critical roles for chance, bluffing, and risk management.

These might seem to be aspects of poker based entirely on human psychology and therefore invulnerable to computer incursion. A machine can trivially calculate the odds of every hand, but what to make of an opponent with poor odds making a large bet? And yet the computers are advancing here as well. Jonathan Schaeffer, the inventor of the checkers-solving program, has moved on to poker and his digital players are performing better and better against strong humans—with obvious implications for online gambling sites.

Perhaps the current trend of many chess professionals taking up the more lucrative pastime of poker is not a wholly negative one. It may not be too late for humans to relearn how to take risks in order to innovate and thereby maintain the advanced lifestyles we enjoy. And if it takes a poker-playing supercomputer to remind us that we can't enjoy the rewards without taking the risks, so be it.

HT, again, MR!

Most useless dating advice of the month

I rather enjoyed this article, but there was a glaring omission.

The article describes how men's dance moves were judged by women, and "women gave the highest attractiveness ratings to men with the highest levels of prenatal testosterone." So if you're a guy, and you want to glitter underneath that disco ball, just make sure you are exposed to plenty of testosterone while you are still in the womb.

In case you're wondering, yes, I had a high level of prenatal testosterone (PT). The way they determine this is to compare the length of your index finger to that of your ring finger. If your ring finger is longer, high level of PT. The bigger the disparity, the higher the PT.

Interestingly, and I have no idea what this means - if anything, the difference is greater on my right hand than my left: 1/2 a fingernail compared to 1/4 a fingernail.

Fun article, but couldn't they have given the poor male readers at least ONE dance move guaranteed to look good?

HT MR

Quote of the Day

And if you ever become devout pray for me if I am dead. I am asking several of my friends to do that. I had expected to become devout myself but it has not come.
- Hemingway, "A Farewell to Arms"

Quote of the day

"The way to interpret his intentions is not by his words but by his entrails."
- myself, in reference to a rather duplicitous player

Quote of the day

"As for the calls to treat the would-be bomber as an enemy combatant, torture him and toss him into Guantanamo, God knows he deserves it. But keep in mind that the crucial intelligence we received was from the boy's father. If that father had believed that the United States was a rogue superpower that would torture and abuse his child without any sense of decency, would he have turned him in? To keep this country safe, we need many more fathers, uncles, friends and colleagues to have enough trust in America that they, too, would turn in the terrorist next door."

-- Fareed Zakaria, via MR

Haiti

A bit late on this - but if you're wondering where to donate, Professor Cowen has advice.

Quote of the day

"A Shanghai hospital cultivated and reintroduced human brain tissue in 2002 after taking a sample from the end of a chopstick implanted in a patient's frontal lobe following a disagreement at a restaurant."

HT Marginal Revolution

Quote of the Day

You have a splendid rank. I don't want you to have any more rank. It might go to your head. Oh, darling, I'm awfully glad you're not conceited. I'd have married you even if you were conceited but it's very restful to have a husband who's not conceited.

A Farewell To Arms (Hemingway)

Quote of the day

"I want to tell you I used a calm voice, but I worry I used a psycho, calm-before-the-storm voice."
- Penelope Trunk

Really hitting where it hurts.....

Pretty much the same week we had the underwear bomber, the coffee machine at work failed. This turned out to be failure from ordinary wear and tear rather than sabotage by extremists, but it DID make me think...

The security around coffee machines is so much less intense than we see around airports, and America is so dependent on its caffeine of its productivity - wouldn't it make more sense for terrorists to strike at the coffee machines instead, leaving American workers bleary?

Also, it has the (inexplicable) advantage of not being seen as a capital crime!

Quote of the Day

There's no such thing as a "pretty good" alligator wrestler.

- Book title

A Christmas Carol on the Defense

Finally somebody thinks to defend poor Scrooge.

HT Volokh Conspiracy

Process counts....

Megan McArdle points out how much damage the effort of forcing a vote on health care did to the actual process of legislation. Her two biggest beefs are writing the bill to fit budget guidelines - this is done as thought trying to solve a puzzle game, with no consideration of what the bill will do to the actual budgets of the future. The other is an attempt to legislate what can be legislated - actually putting a clause into the bill that attempts to make it impossible (or at least difficult) to ever alter the bill in the future.

Looks like I'm NOT the only one!

Running that way.

Quote of the day

Paying lots of money to stop having sex with hot women seems an odd thing to do. From my experience he could take up playing Dungeons and Dragons and have the same result for a lot less money.

- Coyote

Alternative Medical Center

HT Coyote

Diversity in conservatism

This DOES sound like the make-up of one of those super-hero teams.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, as does fighting super-villains.

Definition of the day - schadenhorny

OK, it hasn't made it into the dictionaries yet, but it is the lustfulness engendered by pondering other people's relationship problems.

Park rangers and bear hugs

I love this series, I've read from #1 to #1426 of the archived series, and am reading the dailies as they come.

Sadly, soon I'll have reached the middle, where all the archived ones have been read.
Fortunately, the dailies are still coming in.

Click on the comic and it will take you to the site and it will give you a chance to read them ALL:

Invictus

Normally, you'd find it hard to get me to go to a sports movie with a cattle prod. But with Morgan Freeman playing Nelson Mandela (reportedly, Mandela had been quoted as saying that if somebody were to play him, and he could choose the actor, he'd pick Freeman) and Clint Eastwood directing, I didn't put up much of a fight.

Touching, great performances, not a boring moment. Worth seeing, even if you didn't think the original poem "..I am the captain of my soul..." was all that.

"Captain...the French are about to kick my ass!"

I'm not a lip reader myself, but this is as convincing as it is senseless.



Props to Language Log.

"I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you"

This achievement in the art of ranting was brought to my attention by Megan's blog.

Quote of the day

A good relationship is like fireworks: loud, explosive, and liable to maim you if you hold on too long.
-- Questionable Content

Keeping it simple

Probably not the equitable way to make your point....

Coyote sarcastically points out that the ShowYourVote website, which gives you a chance to show your support a "fair and effective" climate deal at the Copenhagen summit is a rather one-sided approach to voting - there is only one way you can vote.

I commented that this appears to me to be a project by an influential (since he posts on the official Google blog) individual at Google rather than a project BY Google.

It really should have been called "Show Your Support" rather than "Show Your Vote" to avoid the absurdity.

Internet Laws

A friend of mine just fell prey to....well, actually, I didn't remember the name of the Law she stumbled into, but I remembered there was one (the only one I could recall was the frequently cited Godwin's Law, which wasn't the one I wanted), so I took a deep breath, centered my chakras, assumed the appropriate stance, and activated my google-fu:

Internet rules and laws: the top 10, from Godwin to Poe

For those too lazy to click through (just taking the first quote from each, original gives you more background):

1. Godwin’s Law "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."
2. Poe’s Law “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.”
3. Rule 34 “If it exists, there is porn of it.”
4. Skitt’s Law "any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself"
5. Scopie’s Law “In any discussion involving science or medicine, citing Whale.to as a credible source loses the argument immediately, and gets you laughed out of the room.”
6. Danth’s Law (also known as Parker’s Law) “If you have to insist that you've won an internet argument, you've probably lost badly.”
7. Pommer’s Law “A person's mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.”
8. DeMyer's Laws (2nd) “Anyone who posts an argument on the internet which is largely quotations can be very safely ignored, and is deemed to have lost the argument before it has begun.”
9. Cohen’s Law “Whoever resorts to the argument that ‘whoever resorts to the argument that... …has automatically lost the debate’ has automatically lost the debate.”
10. The Law of Exclamation "The more exclamation points used in an email (or other posting), the more likely it is a complete lie. This is also true for excessive capital letters."

Frank Lloyd Wright or Wrong....

Cute bit on architecture and arch parody.

And then you have the mavericks....

Like the ever-so-popular-with-the-press Sheriff Arpaio of Phoenix. Yes, you've heard about him, the tough sheriff that makes sure that jail is no country club, at least for Mexicans.

Makes an orderly bureaucracy sound almost tempting!

If you think *I* hate bureaucracy....

Penelope Trunk really takes it to the limit.

Well....as close as you can get to the limit without risking arrest too much, anyway.

For those who think bureaucracy is new....

...another extract from The Inheritance of Rome:

Being a tradesman in Constantinople around 900 was by no means a straightforward process. According to the Book of the Eparch (or the Prefect), a set of official regulations from this period, merchants, shopkeepers and many artisans had to be members of a guild (systma) to operate, and had to sell their wares in specific places, the gold- and silver-dealers in the Mese, the merchants of Arab silk in the Embole, the perfumers in the Milion beside Hagia Sophia, the pork butchers in the Tauros. Ambulant sellers were banned; they would be flogged, stripped of guild membership, and expelled from the city. Sellers of silk could not make up clothes as well; leather sellers could not be tanners. Some guilds, such as the merchants of Arab silk or the linen merchants, had to do their buying collectively, with the goods then distributed among guild members according to how much money they had put in, to keep down competitive buying. Sheep butchers had to go a long way into Anatolia to buy their sheep, to keep prices down; pork butchers, by contrast, had to buy pigs in the city, and were prohibited from going out to meet the vendors; so also were fishmongers, who had to buy on shore, not on the sea. The eparch, the city governor, had to be informed if silk merchants (divided into five separate guilds) sold to foreigners, who were prohibited from buying certain grades of silk. He determined all bread prices, by which bakers had to sell, and the price of wine the innkeepers sold; and he also determined the profits that many vendors made - grocers were allowed a 16 per cent profit, but bakers only 4 per cent (with another 16 per cent for the pay of their workmen), over and above the price they paid in the state grain warehouse.

Some people might think early medieval history is dry....

Well, some parts of it actually are, although The Inheritance of Rome manages to keep the dry parts fairly short. But some parts rival The National Enquirer (or whatever is the most lurid rag on the supermarket shelves these days) in dirt:

All these different trends converged in the great querelle over Lothar II's divorce from Theutberga, in 857-69. This ought to have been simple. Lothar had married Theutberga, from the prominent aristocratic family of the 'Bosonids', in 855 but soon turned against her and sought in 857 to return to his former partner Waldrada, with whom he had had a son, Hugh. Marriage law was tightening up in the ninth century, however; Charlemagne could put away a wife, but Lothar had to have reasons. He came up with the claim that Theutberga had had anal sex with her brother Hubert, had become pregnant as a result (impossibly, of course; his supporters invoked witchcraft), and had aborted the foetus: incest, sodomy and infanticide all at once. Theutberga proved her innocence in an ordeal in 858, but Lothar staged a show trial at a council in Aachen in 860, where she was forced to confess her guilt and retire to a monastery.

His view on Christian festivals:

But people still maintained the 'wrong' attitudes; they treated the new Christian feast-days in the same ways as they had treated the old pagan ones, as opportunities to get drunk and have a good time, as Augustine complained about a local martyrial feast-day. This way of understanding the Christian calendar, through public enjoyment rather than (as Augustine proposed) psalm-singing in church, was pagan in the eyes of most of our sources, but doubtless fully Christian in the eyes of celebrants; and this double vision would long remain.

A life fit for a king:

Cri­th Gablach, the major eighth-century tract on social status, states: 'There is, too, a weekly order in the duty of a king: Sunday for drinking ale . . . ; Monday for judgement, for the adjustment of tuatha; Tuesday for playing fidchell [a board game]; Wednesday for watching deer-hounds hunting; Thursday for sexual intercourse; Friday for horse-racing; Saturday for judging cases'

On diet:

vegetarianism itself, a standard ascetic trait, was a little suspect in Spain because Priscillianists refused meat, and the 561 council of Braga required vegetarian clerics at least to cook their greens in meat broth, to show their orthodoxy.

Maybe it's just as well Rome was replaced by 'barbarians' who know how to party:

Royal and aristocratic courts also had a different etiquette from those of the Roman world. The otium of the Roman civilian aristocracy, literary house-parties in well-upholstered rural villas, and the decorum of at least some imperial dinner parties (above, Chapter 3), was replaced by what sometimes seems a jollier culture. This was focused on eating large quantities of meat and getting drunk on wine, mead or beer, together with one's entourage, usually in a large, long hall.

Not quite ready to plunk down millions of dollars for this, but....

it's a good sign the state of the art in quantum computing is moving up fast; keep in mind we went from house-sized computers affordable only by major governments to desktops in only about thirty years - so I could very well be playing (indirectly) with ultracold beryllium islands in my lifetime (or more likely, some alternate technology that achieves the same effects).

Quote of the Day

Jibun no toile ga ichiban, demo okusan ha hoka no okusan ga ii
(My best man learned this one in Japanese class at the U of R. I'm sure the professor is safely retired now)

Quote of the day

It's easier to replace your rope than your partner.

Quote of the day

If the LHC had a sense of humor, they would announce that they are indeed going to try to create a man-made black hole and that the test is currently scheduled for December 21, 2012.

Coyote

Quote of the day

I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one's self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one's own powers.

"Sherlock Holmes"

Recommendation: I Am A Strange Loop

This book by Hofstadter (best known for Goedel, Escher, Bach) pretty much means I don't have to write it. If you are interested in the nature of the self and the meaning of consciousness, this book is for you. You might not agree with it, but you should be aware of that point of view.

Quote of the day

Every industry or occupation that has enough political power to utilize the state will seek to control entry - Stigler

The Leonard Cohen concert

My brother Joerg encouraged me to post a review of the concert from last weekend.

It seems a bit silly to review it - as long as Leonard Cohen was there, he could pretty much just sit on the stage and grunt, and it would still be one of the high points of my life.

He didn't just sit and grunt, though, his performance was jaunty. He skipped onto the stage and trotted his way right into "Dance Me To The End of Love". This is a song that my wife Jocelyn first heard on a Madeleine Peyroux album, without knowing that it was a Leonard Cohen song. I guess that is how most people hear their Leonard Cohen songs, at least those who haven't been privileged to see him in concert.

Considering he is 75 years old, the physical approach to his performance might be a bit ostentatious - there is just NO WAY he is in as good a shape as he wants us to believe. Nevertheless, you can only fake so much, and it is clear that it is not only women who have been exceptionally kind to his old age (for non-Cohen afficionados, that is a reference to his "Because of a few songs/Wherein I spoke of their mystery/Women have been exceptionally kind to my old age").

I suppose when you are Leonard Cohen, you can pretty much pick which musicians you want to tour with, and his picks were impressive. My friend Matt (who accompanied us with his wife Colleen) commented that there were a couple of instrumentalists on stage that he'd be willing to go to a separate concert just to hear them alone. Cohen gives them due credit, introducing each at least twice, with some idiosyncratic words of praise. Javier Mas appears to take precedence, but each one gets an opportunity for the spotlight, and makes good use of it. The angelic Webb sisters even presented us (as LC put it, "on voice, harp, and gymnastics!" with synchronized cartwheels.

Having seen another performance in Canada a few months ago, I can testify these are not "cookie cutter" presentations....this time there was a song ("Darkness") I had NEVER heard before (yes, turns out it was new). "Ain't no cure for love" was launched without the narrative lead-in I heard in Canada (and that is present on the album, with a catalog of drugs taken and a mention of the study of religions, "but the cheerfulness kept breaking through") - in fact, he didn't seem to be in a chatty mood that night, but he really gave the performance his all.

At our hotel, Jocelyn met a man who was also there for the concert and was following LC to see another concert in a few days. He mentioned that next spring LC planned to tour in France. Jocelyn, a recent convert to Cohen, would be willing to travel that far!

Prescription for ME?

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=995

RIP Lévi-Strauss

I actually missed the news of the death of the father of anthropology at the age of 100, but there is a rather nice post in memoriam for him at Language Log:

Ultimately the work of Lévi-Strauss was as seminal as the work of Freud and Chomsky. It matters little whether any of these three is correct. In fact they are probably all wrong about their views on what is universal in the human psyche. But progress in the mind is not so much finding the truth as learning to ask useful questions that bring new rigor and satisfaction to research and researchers.

Quote of the day

The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom. -Milton Friedman

My first comment spam!

Most bloggers consider this sort of thing an annoyance. OK, it really IS an annoyance of sorts. But since it is my first, it's kind of interesting.

Even if I HAVE no use for Viagra.

Vegan or Carnivore?

It is still funny.

HT AI

A job saved is....what?

It's no great secret that I'm not very impressed by most government programs, and the latest ones have been among the least impressive, struggling to save a dime by burning a dollar. You can always try to make it look good by fudging up some numbers, like here in the "jobs saved" category.

Obama seems to be following quite capably in Bush's footsteps.

For those interested in blood spatter....

There is an interesting tutorial by Slemko Forensic Consulting here. Don't ask.

Science fiction - so yesterday!

If you don't follow him regularly yet, click through and start

Quote of the day

", when preceded by itself in quotes, is unprovable.", when preceded by itself in quotes, is unprovable.

(A Quine)

Quote of the day - quoting myself

A girl should have a hot ass and a cool head.
- me, to a girl who was runnin a fever (no, I did not personally check the temperature of either end)