June 2009
5 posts
new digs
Change is coming to America. The President gives an unprecedented and pivotal speech in/to the Middle East, Conan O’Brien finally is crowned king of late night TV, and Plato is dead, after an exciting and educational five months at Tumblr, is moving out.
I began this blog merely as a fancier place than my Facebook profile to dump things on the internet I thought were neat. Lately, I have...
The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien - In the Year... →
Conan wins.
“You can make a living thing out of dead stuff; you can make a conscious thing...”
– Dan Dennett
May 2009
56 posts
“Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”
– Paul Saffo
“The future has arrived; it’s just not evenly distributed.”
– William Gibson
http://wave.google.com →
Matthew McCroskey alerted me to this. In his words:
Google just introduced a new product called Wave, which is basically is email, instant messaging, message boards, wikis, and social networks all rolled into one. It’s a pretty fundamentally revolutionary product. Check it out.
The video is of the keynote address to the annual Google I/O developer conference, this year held in San...
there's more
Stephen Greer wrote a great response to yesterday’s “almost right” post (about the Texas Board of Education and it’s debate over teaching evolution), and I did my best to reply to him. What began as a pretty limited criticism of a state senator from Texas has morphed into a broader discussion of the limits of science in general.
I was going to put up both Stephen’s...
more "no god" ads
The so-called “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens) have been consistently criticized as “shrill,” “obnoxious,” and “mean” for their articulate and unashamed spokesmanship for atheism in the 21st century. Whether or not you think that is a fair criticism (I do not, although I dp think Hitchens is a bit of a tool), it...
Foreign Policy Magazine photos: The Land of No... →
Renowned documentary photographer Tomas van Houtryve entered North Korea by posing as a businessman looking to open a chocolate factory. Despite 24-hour surveillance by North Korean minders, he took arresting photographs of Pyongyang and its people—images rarely captured and even more rarely distributed in the West. They show stark glimmers of everyday life in the world’s last gulag.
These are...
almost right
“It is not fair to say that if you don’t believe Darwin’s theory of evolution or accept the argument that global warming is occurring, that you should not be on the State Board of Education,” [Texas State Sen. Steve Ogden, R-Bryan] said.
Change the “not” to “completely” and I agree.
Or, consider this modified version. Would Ogden agree? On what...
FRONTLINE: ten trillion and counting: watch the... →
Finally got around to watching this PBS Frontline episode on the deficit. Like all the others, this one is highly recommended.
Says the internet:
All of the federal government’s efforts to stem the tide of the financial meltdown have added hundreds of billions of dollars to an already staggering national debt, a sum that is expected to double over the next 10 years to more than $23...
equals nothing new
I’ve been pretty disappointed with the recent Garfield Minus Garfield strips.
It’s a shame, because some of the early ones were really brilliant. Removing the silent cat strangely cast Jon in a whole new, pathetic light. It surprised us with something we already knew. These days I feel like he’s just erasing Garfield from strips where Garfield doesn’t add anything anyway -...
Matthew Yglesias - How do you solve a problem like... →
Yglesias:
We have two countries: Iran has a nuclear research program that could be turned to military purposes, and North Korea has one that’s built and tested actual nuclear weapons. Iran is led by people who mouth off but have generally followed a cautious foreign policy; North Korea is led by people who stage repeated deliberate provocations and routinely break deals. For no particularly...
Is God Dead? Or Has He Just Stopped Riding the... →
Atheist bus ads from London hop the pond.
The aim, Speckhardt says, “is to attract the interest of those who already believe as we do. We’re not trying to convert people.” Referring to a recent poll, he notes that more Americans view themselves as nonbelievers than the population of Jews, Muslims and Mormons combined. “Yet,” he says, “you don’t see that...
Grape Plasma - CollegeHumor Video →
yet another installment in the “what happens if we put X in the microwave” saga…
“I contend we are both atheists; I just believe in one fewer god than you do....”
– Stephen F. Roberts
"A Big Victory For Equality?" The Daily Dish | By... →
Today’s CA SC decision = very good thing for gay marriage in California.
aM laboratory →
the “tone matrix”. looks like my week’s schedule just got filled up…
Dear GOP: Please Choose Liberty: How Republicans... →
It is not a coincidence that nativists who hyperventilate about immigration’s effect on American language and attitudes, isolationists who fear that trade agreements will dissolve American sovereignty, culture warriors who regard gay marriage and evolution as a mortal threat to American values, and technological Luddites who rail against advances in bioengineering because they tamper with...
The Green Bubble - Ted Nordhaus and Michael... →
I linked this in passing in the body of an earlier post, but have since decided that it really deserves a post of its own.
Some highlights:
It’s easy enough to point out the insignificance of planting a garden, buying fewer clothes, or using fluorescent bulbs. After all, we can’t escape the fact that we depend on an infrastructure—roads, buildings, sewage systems, power...
FT.com / Companies - Google and Nasa back new... →
Unfortunately, it won’t be a real acredited university…
The new institution, known as “Singularity University”, is to be headed by Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions about the exponential pace of technological change have made him a controversial figure in technology circles.
Google and Nasa’s backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Mr Kurzweil’s views,...
Science-less in Seattle (scienceprogress.org) →
Sub-header, and last sentence:
Tom Paulson, formerly of the Seattle-Post Intelligencer, now a freelance writer, carpenter, and building contractor, epitomizes the story of the science writer in our time.
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In a science-centered age, we’re becoming a society that lacks a professional and impartial means of informing its citizenry about science—and it’s happening one journalist at a time.
Daily Kos: This Week in Science →
goes after the media hype surrounding Ida.
The Good Life | Economics | The American... →
A post about the Human Development Index, and a critical response to the 2009 Jefferson Lucture (another TAS post praises it), given by Leon Kass, University of Chicago professor, controversial chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics (under Bush, 2001-2005), and prominent opponent of both stem-cell research (on the grounds, of course, that it is yucky) and ice-cream cones.
Call me...
"Throwing Away The Key" - The Daily Dish | By... →
A good, concise jumping-off point for the one part of Obama’s speech that has the leftosphere in a fit: the business with “preventative detention” of Guantanamo detainees who probably cannot be convicted, but are still deemed (by someone) a “threat to America.”
I don’t have any conclusions right now. It does seem to me, though, that those most critical of...
Hops freed, beer to flow like wine | Birmingham... →
It must be bad that I’m impressed — astounded — when our legislature passes anything… Even more astonishing: I think they may have even allowed facts into the debate!
Granted, I would have liked them to have dealt with some of the other, arguably more pressing, issues facing the state. But for today, I’ll settle for freed beer.
Cheers!
Dan Froomkin: White House Watch - The Highs and... →
This is a level-headed and fair assessment of Obama’s speech. Critical when appropriate, but not enraged.
WatchThis is about as good of an analysis of yesterday’s Obama/Cheney terror-off as you’ll get anywhere — further confirmation that The Daily Show really is the best news program on TV.
The Unbalanced - The Daily Dish | By Andrew... →
Sullivan again.
Cheney's Speech: Obama "Deserves An Answer"... →
The other speech.
The Re-Balancing - The Daily Dish | By Andrew... →
Sullivan’s take.
"As president, I refuse to allow this problem to... →
The speech.
“And something that the Democrat sponsors do not point out, a lot of the CO2 that...”
– Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX), on the cap-and-trade plan
Think Progress » Inhofe: Terrorists Already... →
In fact, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) says they are “actually criminals” who “actually committed crimes”! Are Republicans deliberately being ironical now?
CHETRY (CNN): There has been, though, here in the United States a number of people who have been convicted on terrorism-related charges in U.S. courts. … They’ve been held in our U.S. prisons. Why can’t that be replicated...
Think Progress » Reid: Guantanamo Detainees Should... →
How’s it go? “With Democrats like these…”
REID: I’m saying that the United States Senate, Democrats and Republicans, do not want terrorists to be released in the United States. That’s very clear.
QUESTION: No one’s talking about releasing them. We’re talking about putting them in prison somewhere in the United States.
REID: Can’t put them in prison unless you release...
Terrorists in Prison: is there anything the Right... →
I recently took a break from Greenwald, partly because I was a little weary of his frothy Liberal vitriol (and partly because my laptop was being repaired…), but now I’m back, and fuming right along with him. Anyway, he really nails it with this one.
Highlights:
[W]e never tire of the specter of the Big, Bad, Villainous, Omnipotent Muslim Terrorist. They’re back, and now...
Does Nuclear Deterrence Apply in the Age of... →
This is a pretty good read. I came across it while snooping around the Googles for an argument that nuclear mutual assured destruction (MAD) does indeed still work against suicidal, non-state actors (e.g. Al Qaeda). Of course, it does not.
Garfinkle spends almost no time at all on that question (because the answer is so obvious), but instead offers a refreshingly straight-forward, serious...
WatchRay Anderson on the business logic of sustainability | Video on TED.com
this is almost too inspiring. anderson is an old, white, southern CEO giving an unassuming talk with three slides about how he made a moral decision to completely reconsider his business model mid-career - and how well it worked. it is one of the best TED presentations i’ve seen.
we need more people with perspectives...
“Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because...”
– Richard Rorty
holding back the tide
Yglesias:
Tactically, a shift in focus away from abortion and toward marriage equality actually strikes me as pretty misguided. You really could imagine the Supreme Court substantially narrowing the constitutional protections of Roe and Casey over the next couple of years or even overturning it on a medium-range time-frame. And if constitutional jurisprudence changes, many states will adopt more...
