Draw a graph and watch these economists react. Brilliantly executed Flash.
|W|P|89897559|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comConservatives accuse the media and academics of liberal bias. I think they're right. But doesn't that mean that the best-informed, best-educated people in our society tend toward a liberal mindset? I can think of only three reasons why that might be:
- Coincidence. Unlikely.
- Liberals choose these professions. Well, maybe, but then why isn't the market compensating? If there's a big undocumented demand for "balanced" reporting and education, why don't Fox News and conservative universities make a mint?
- Fair-minded people join these professions, and their experiences lead them to adopt a liberal view.
Is there another possibility? I can't think of one.
|W|P|89869662|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAbout about:
Religion isn't about intelligence, it's about guilt.
I read that in a newsgroup last week. I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I'm really starting to hate the way it's expressed.
A fable is "about" something. An author sets out with a point to make, and contrives a series of events to illustrate it. It's made up, and it's made up to communicate a specific point. Other interpretations are just wrong.
Phenomenal experience is not "about" anything. To say that religion is "about" guilt implies that someone created the very potential for religion in order to make a point about guilt. It also implies that nothing else valid can be said about religion, and that anyone who disagrees is wrong.
What's most disturbing about this is that it confuses subjective opinion with objective reality. It would be just as easy to say, "I think religion springs from guilt" or "Religious feelings can be neurotic." To say "Religion is about guilt" is not only sloppy thinking, it's so emphatic as to prevent discussion or inquiry. I wish people would stop talking like that.
|W|P|89796683|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
McSweeney's presents a list of Library Science Jargon That Sounds Dirty:
Access point
Authority control
Broad classification
Closed stacks
Coextensive subject entry
Collocation
Colon classification
Cutter number
Date stamp
Depth indexing
Descriptor
Dewey
EAD header
Exhaustivity
Full entry
Fuzzy set
Information package
Location device
Main entry
MARC record
Open stacks
Scope note
Subject entry
Subject heading
Surrogate Record
Syndetic structure
Technical service
Title entry
Tracing
Union catalog
User file
Vertical file
Warwick framework
Weeding
Work mark
Ha! 46% of all duct tape sold in the USA is manufactured by an Ohio-based company whose founder donated over $100,000 in the 2000 election campaign cycle to the Republican National Committee and other GOP committees.
|W|P|89638714|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI watched the Grammys last night. They were an embarrassing disaster, as usual, but they finished on time. For the first time in 45 years there was no host, which made the whole thing disjointed and inconsistent, and the producers insisted on bizarre pairings to showcase the breadth of the music, which always makes everyone uncomfortable.
Part of the fun is in comparing the performers. It's like a little science experiment. They're all performing live in close succession, in the same venue, before the same audience, with the same production and sound system. Simon and Garfunkel were stiff and badly off-key; Avril Lavigne's band was surprisingly good; and the various hip-hop artists seemed stupid, illiterate and tiresome (cf. Nelly's "Hot in Herre").
The evening's only really interesting performances came from Norah Jones and John Mayer, both of whom played good material with some real musicality. Both seemed flabbergasted to have won, which is apt and sad.
One final note: Rock looks dead as a doornail. It's good to see hip-hop, bluegrass and country take flower, but it's kind of scary how a 50-year-old idiom became irrelevant overnight. It's not because of the aging performers—Springsteen did a competent job, though his band sucks. It's just that the whole idea of rock and roll somehow seems tame and quaint. I don't know when that happened, but it definitely did, and it surprised me.
|W|P|89650580|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Casey is sick. She threw up five times on Friday, so we bundled her up and took her to the animal hospital. The vet's first question was "Are there any toys missing?" Hmm.
The thing is, that night she was playing with string and seemed happy. We came home with all kinds of medications, and it's hard to know what to do now. Is she fine? Cats are so inscrutable.
|W|P|89611931|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comQuotes from George W. Bush's speech in Kennesaw, Ga., on Feb. 20, 2003:
"But as we insist that Congress be wise with your money, we're going to make sure we spend enough to win this war. And by spending enough to win a war, we may not have a war at all."
"Well, I agree with Zell, with this economic theory—that when a person has more money in their pocket, they're likely to demand somebody to produce them a good or a service. In other words, you get money in your pocket—you say, well, I think I'd like this product, or I'd like this service. [Five minutes pass. ...] You'll hear in a minute what people do with extra money in their pockets. You know what they do? They invest, or they hire."
"I know there's some concern about overstating of numbers, you know, invest in my company because the sky's the limit. We may not be cash flowing much, but the sky's the limit. Well, when you pay dividends, that sky's the limit business doesn't hunt. What only matters is whether or not they can distribute that cash they say they're going to distribute. It leads to conservative business practices. It leads to being people—more businesses being responsible with your money."
"America and our allies are called once again to defend the peace against an aggressive tyrant, and we accept this responsibility."
|W|P|89606071|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comRobert Park reports that Columbia's protein crystallography experiments were pointless:
In the days following the Columbia tragedy, NASA repeatedly cited protein crystal growth as an example of important microgravity research conducted on the shuttle. NASA knew better. It was 20 years ago that a protein crystal was first grown on Space Lab 1. NASA boasted that the lysozyme crystal was 1,000 times as large as one grown in the same apparatus on Earth. However, the apparatus was not designed to operate in Earth gravity. The space-grown crystal was no larger than lysozyme crystals grown by standard techniques on Earth.|W|P|89596083|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
But the myth was born. In 1992, a team of Americans that had done protein crystal studies on Mir, commented in Nature (26 Nov 92) that microgravity had led to no significant breakthrough in protein crystal growth. Every protein that crystalizes in space, crystallizes right here on Earth.
Nevertheless, in 1997, Larry DeLucas, a University of Alabama at Birmingham chemist and a former astronaut, testified before the Space Subcommittee of the House that a protein structure, determined from a crystal grown on the shuttle, resulted in a new flu drug that was in clinical trials. It simply was not true. Two years later Science magazine(25 June 99)revealed that the crystal had been grown in Australia, which is a long way off, but it's not in space. Meanwhile, the American Society for Cell Biology, which includes the biologists most involved in protein crystallography, called for the cancellation of the space-based program.
Hoping to regain some credibility, an embarrassed NASA turned to the National Academy of Science to review biotechnology plans for the Space Station. On March 1, 2000, the National Research Council, the research arm of the Academy, released their study. It concluded that the enormous investment in protein crystal growth on the Shuttle and Mir had not led to a single unique scientific result.
It might be supposed that programs in space-grown protein crystals would be terminated. It was a shock to open the press kit for STS-107 and discover that the final flight of Columbia carried a commercial protein crystal growth experiment for the Center for Biophysical Science and Engineering, University of Alabama at Birmingham. The Director of the Center is Lawrence J. DeLucas, O.D., Ph.D.
"There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust."—Demosthenes
|W|P|89529580|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
The University of Toronto has a pretty good poetry index. Here's Edna St. Vincent Millay:
Grown-Up
Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?
The first job I ever had was in the public library across the street from my high school. I was a page, which meant that I spent a couple of hours every day shelving books for minimum wage. It's not as boring as it sounds—not if you love books and there are a lot of them to shelve.
There were about five pages, and we split up the Dewey Decimal System among us. Eventually I wheedled my way into the 700s, which were shelved in a separate room that patrons rarely visited. The 700s cover the arts, from broad encyclopedias through fine arts, architecture, music, and finally "Recreational and Performing Arts." There's a little sweet spot just before sports, in the low 790s, that's the best part of any library:
791 Public Performances
792 Stage Presentations (Theater)
793 Indoor Games and Amusements
794 Indoor Games of Skill
795 Games of Chance
This includes chess, magic, wordplay, "games not characterized by action," electronic games, cards, and dice. I could stand for hours in the 700s room, out of sight of Mrs. Warner, with my little cart, pretending to straighten the shelves. I still make a beeline for this section, even online. If you cataloged the books I own, I think at least half of them would belong in the 790s.
|W|P|89301528|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMan, I've really fallen in love with this Mike Keneally song, "Live in Japan." Keneally played in Zappa's '88 touring band and cites Todd Rundgren, Steely Dan, XTC, the Beatles, and Zappa as influences. That's just about goddamn perfect.
�The title of the song was suggested by an album of Chicago�s called Live in Japan," he says. "I just saw that phrase and heard it in my head as live [short �i�] in Japan, for some reason, and I just thought, �That would be kind of a funny, to have a song that looks like live in Japan, but when one listens to it, it�s actually "live" in Japan.' That made me laugh. I got the chorus melody in my head right after that, wrote it down, and it sat there for a few months until I decided to make the idea into a song. The lyrics have to do with somebody making changes in life. It was a song that wrote itself.�
I may have to get this whole album, Dancing. But why is it so hard to find these guys? I'd heard of Keneally before, and he's even a regular on rec.music.progressive, but I hadn't heard his music and of course it's not getting any airplay. There must be some engine that will help like-minded people find each other. If that happened it would completely kill the record industry—artists could record their own music and put it in front of the people who want it. Just a matter of time, I suppose. I hope.
|W|P|89273828|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Who needs sleep?
Well you're never gonna get it
Who needs sleep?
Tell me what's that for
Who needs sleep?
Well you're never gonna get it
There's a guy who's been awake
Since the second world war
—Barenaked Ladies
|W|P|89230493|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
This week Fed chief Alan Greenspan told Congress, "The heightening of geopolitical tensions has only added to the marked uncertainties that have piled up over the past three years, creating formidable barriers to new investment and thus to a resumption of vigorous expansion of overall economic activity."
Which only emphasizes the question: Do we have to do this now? And does it have to be our only priority? Could we make the economy number two? Just for a little while? I haven't heard any non-Iraq news out of the White House in weeks.
|W|P|89139955|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Adversity has ever been considered as the state in which man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being free from flatterers."—Samuel Johnson
|W|P|89116770|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"The American people is this country's greatest asset."—George W. Bush, Alexandria, Va., Feb. 12, 2003
|W|P|89035515|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThis was a good clean game against a slightly weaker opponent. The quality of the moves goes way up with a longer time control, but the game takes forever. Sharon went out and tutored for two hours and came back to find me sitting right here.
|W|P|89004735|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn AP English, I didn't finish The Mayor of Casterbridge. I thought it was badly written. Now, 20 years later, I have taken it up again ...
... and put it down after 10 pages. It's still badly written. Here's the fourth paragraph:
The chief—almost the only—attraction of the young woman's face was its mobility. When she looked down sideways to the girl she became pretty, and even handsome, particularly that in the action her features caught slantwise the rays of the strongly coloured sun, which made transparencies of her eyelids and nostrils and set fire on her lips. When she plodded on in the shade of the hedge, silently thinking, she had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play. The first phase was the work of Nature, the second probably of civilization.
Crap, crap, crappity crap crap McCrap. This is bad writing. Its faults are so numerous that it would be difficult to categorize them all, but chief among them is that he's editorializing. Don't tell us she's beautiful or half-apathetic. Demonstrate it through her actions and those of the other characters.
And for God's sake don't say "the first phase was the work of Nature, the second probably of civilization." That's just appallingly bad. Why tell a story at all? Why not just pull up a chair and tell us what you think?
How can anyone call this a masterpiece when the basic literary technique is so inept? When critics call such a thing great, what on earth are they looking at?
|W|P|88993020|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAnd, similarly, Technorati ranks blogs based on the number of links made to them. This is different from Blogdex because it focuses on those that get a moderate number of links. "It should bring up relatively less-known blogs that have new, interesting content posted on them."
|W|P|88934282|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"The purpose of Audioscrobbler is to analyse the music you listen to, and suggest new artists and songs that you may enjoy." Well, that's good. I was just thinking somebody ought to offer something like that.
|W|P|88852732|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Their 16-day mission held the promise of answering scientific problems that elude us here on Earth. Columbia carried in its payroll classroom experim—experiments from some of our—a—students in America."—George W. Bush, speaking at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md., Feb. 3, 2003
|W|P|88701834|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHere's Albert Einstein's theory of relativity explained in four-letter words. ("To say that we were less than glad to find that out is to be kind. It blew the mind, is more like it. 'What is up with that?' we said. And here is when old Al came in.")
|W|P|88644665|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
In 12th-century Novgorod, a 7-year-old boy named Onfim used to doodle on his homework. Nothing is known about him except what's on these few scraps, found in a Russian archaeological dig in the 1950s.
I love these—they're so remote and yet so intimately personal. Here's an anonymous 16th-century English poet longing for spring:
O western wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
Eight hundred years from now, archaeologists will be unearthing our civilization. What scraps of ours will they base their conjectures on?
|W|P|88636759|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comTremendously affecting verse by Paul Monette, from Love Alone: 18 Elegies For Rog:
No Goodbyes
for hours at the end I kissed your temple stroked
your hair and sniffed it it smelled so clean we'd
washed it Saturday night when the fever broke
as if there was always the perfect thing to do
to be alive for years I'd breathe your hair
when I came to bed late it was such pure you
why I nuzzle your brush every morning because
you're in there just like the dog the night
we unpacked the hospital bag and he skipped
and whimpered when Dad put on the red
sweater Cover my bald spot will you
you'd say and tilt your head like a parrot
so I could fix you up always always
till this one night when I was reduced to
I love you little friend here I am my
sweetest pea over and over spending all our
endearments like stray coins at a border
but wouldn't cry then no choked it because
they all said hearing was the last to go
the ear is like a wolf's till the very end
straining to hear a whole forest and I
wanted you loping off whatever you could
still dream to the sound of me at 3 P.M.
you were stable still our favorite word
at 4 you took the turn WAIT WAIT I AM
THE SENTRY HERE nothing passes as long as
I'm where I am we go on death is
a lonely hole two can leap it or else
or else there is nothing this man is mine
he's an ancient Greek like me I do
all the negotiating while he does battle
we are war and peace in a single bed
we wear the same size shirt it can't it can't
be yet not this just let me brush his hair
it's only Tuesday there's chicken in the fridge
from Sunday night he ate he slept oh why
don't all these kisses rouse you I won't won't
say it all I will say is goodnight patting
a few last strands in place you're covered now
my darling one last graze in the meadow
of you and please let your final dream be
a man not quite your size losing the whole
world but still here combing combing
singing your secret names till the night's gone
Swappingtons is the engine of a new barter economy. If you're finished with a book, CD, or DVD, you can offer it for "swap points" and use those to get castoffs from other people. And then you can recycle those when you're done with them. This gets more utility out of each artifact, which seems a lot more efficient than leaving them on a shelf or throwing them in a landfill. In effect, I suppose it's supplanting dollars (and the associated accounting) with an invented medium of exchange. The only drag is in mailing costs, but that's less than the price of buying this stuff new.
|W|P|88589513|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
BigChampagne is the Billboard of MP3 downloads. It shows which songs are most popular and, by extension, which artists and labels are getting robbed fastest. Sadly, the best-marketed acts are still tops: Justin Timberlake, Eminem, Jennifer Lopez, Kid Rock. I wonder if that will change over time. P2P has made production and distribution obsolete, but not marketing. For all the net's meritocratic populism, it's still unclear how an obscure prodigy will get heard.
|W|P|88468882|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comOkay, the Blogger logjam is fixed. The errors were stemming from some upper-ASCII garbage in a chat transcript I'd posted last week, plus some odd login trouble with TWC's web server. Good thing I'm an incredible genius.
|W|P|88440645|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comSeven Americans died yesterday in a very dramatic way.
On the same day, 24,000 people died of hunger or hunger-related causes, 3,470 of heart disease or cancer. Six thousand Africans died of AIDS. In all, 260,000 people died yesterday.
The Columbia crew were not "heroes." They did not give their lives willingly. If they realized there was a problem, I'm sure they were doing everything they could to save themselves. This was not a "tragedy" or a "disaster." It was a photogenic and statistically unsurprising accident.
To say otherwise is to confuse spectacle with substance. Our ghoulish and ratings-hungry media seem to have trouble making the distinction.
|W|P|88424345|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comVanguard's Economic Week in Review says, "In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President George Bush called reviving the economy 'our first goal' and urged Congress to pass an aggressive tax-cut package in hopes of stimulating the listless U.S. economy." It adds drily, "Stock prices declined for the week."
That's because "geopolitical risks are weighing heavily on business spending and hiring decisions. The threat of war with Iraq and tensions with North Korea continued to affect consumer confidence, which fell in January to its lowest level since 1993."
My prediction: We do have compelling evidence that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, but the administration can't make it public, because it would compromise sources or because it was obtained illegally. Five years from now, when Bush has left office, some reporter will do a Sunshine Act search and find the truth.
Of course, by then it might be too late. But I feel like everyone else—we have scant justification now.
|W|P|88370857|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com