Actionbioscience.org reports:
At a recent Harvard University commencement, an informal poll revealed that fewer than 10 percent of graduating seniors could explain why it's hotter in summer than in winter.
Veritas, indeed.
|W|P|106493664275593686|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWow, George Bush the elder blasts his son's White House:
Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.|W|P|106486552082478960|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
From The Washington Post: "White House press secretary Scott McClellan said yesterday that he knows of no leaks about Wilson's wife. 'That is not the way this White House operates, and no one would be authorized to do such a thing,' McClellan said. 'I don't have any information beyond an anonymous source in a media report to suggest there is anything to this. If someone has information of this nature, then he or she should report it to the Department of Justice.'"
Notice that he never says, "This didn't happen." I noticed the same thing about Condoleezza Rice's appearance on Meet the Press yesterday. She never denied the leaks were made.
|W|P|106485854808501099|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI've never understood the ethical qualms about human cloning. And I still don't. It seems to me that some of them can just be dismissed as superstition ("many in the general public in western nations identified the most important problem of cloning as whether a clone would have a soul"), and the rest are really complex questions that may have answers. "What sorts of boundaries of parenthood and social responsibility are challenged by cloning?"
But surely we need to ask those questions. Any advance will occasion change. We just need to sort it out. And the genie's out of the bottle anyway—evading these questions until they're forced on us will just make the whole process harder.
|W|P|106484807439065879|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHey, if it's illegal to reveal the name of an undercover CIA operative, then shouldn't Robert Novak himself be prosecuted?
|W|P|106479347692077843|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Although there are plenty of exceptions, 'the data show that middle age is the very best time in life,' says Ronald Kessler, a sociologist and MIDMAC fellow who is a program director in the survey research center of the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. 'When looking at the total U.S. population, the best year is fifty. You don't have to deal with the aches and pains of old age or the anxieties of youth: Is anyone going to love me? Will I ever get my career off the ground? Rates of general distress are low—the incidences of depression and anxiety fall at about thirty-five and don't climb again until the late sixties. You're healthy. You're productive. You have enough money to do some of the things you like to do. You've come to terms with your relationships, and the chance of divorce is very low. Midlife is the 'it' you've been working toward. You can turn your attention toward being rather than becoming.'"
|W|P|106460679264760430|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe World Beard and Moustache Championships are set for Carson City, Nev., on November 1.
|W|P|106459106710643644|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWow, I just stumbled on this—an old interview with Douglas Adams, Winter 1998-1999, conducted by American Atheist. Apparently he had pretty strong views about this.
|W|P|106443495820838202|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFrom rotten.com:
"I anchored a program called Inside Edition, which has won a Peabody Award for investigative reporting."—Bill O'Reilly, The O'Reilly Factor, Aug. 30, 1999
"All I've got to say is that Inside Edition has won, I—I believe, two Peabody Awards, the highest journalism award in the country."—Bill O'Reilly, The O'Reilly Factor, May 8, 2000
"We won Peabody Awards. ... We won Peabody Awards. ... A program that wins a Peabody Award, the highest award in journalism, and you're going to denigrate it?"—Bill O'Reilly, The O'Reilly Factor, May 19, 2000
Bill O'Reilly, March 13, 2001: "Guy says about me, a couple of weeks ago, 'O'Reilly said he won a Peabody Award.' Never said it. You can't find a transcript where I said it."
|W|P|106417052056896419|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comO delightful. Nine months after a historic ice storm, Hurricane Isabel is now headed straight for us. Reuters says: "Isabel's sustained winds, which have fluctuated as it moves through the open Atlantic, were at 140 mph, putting it at Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale of intensity. Such a storm is capable of tearing roofs off houses and can raise tides 13-18 feet above normal." We'll go out and buy camping stoves, etc. Last time this happened here they lost power for eight days.
|W|P|106365932756587961|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"By making the right choices, we can make the right choice for our future."—George W. Bush, Dallas, Texas, July 18, 2003
|W|P|106357474846066147|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA sample result from the Fellowship Baptist Creation Science Fair 2001:
2nd Place: "Women Were Designed For Homemaking" Jonathan Goode (grade 7) applied findings from many fields of science to support his conclusion that God designed women for homemaking: physics shows that women have a lower center of gravity than men, making them more suited to carrying groceries and laundry baskets; biology shows that women were designed to carry un-born babies in their wombs and to feed born babies milk, making them the natural choice for child rearing; social sciences show that the wages for women workers are lower than for normal workers, meaning that they are unable to work as well and thus earn equal pay; and exegetics shows that God created Eve as a companion for Adam, not as a co-worker."
Other winners:
- "My Uncle Is A Man Named Steve (Not A Monkey)"
- "Pine Cones Are Complicated"
- "Pokemon Prove Evolutionism Is False"
- "Using Prayer To Microevolve Latent Antibiotic Resistance In Bacteria"
- "Thermodynamics Of Hell Fire"
Hot? Not? Suffering a temporary crisis of confidence, University of Toronto student Simon Wright cleaned up Hitler and posted both of their photos on Hot or Not.
"I mean, you've gotta punch your weight. I'm not in the same league as most of the people out there, and trying to compete with them is only going to hurt my feelings. But Adolf Hitler? I really think I might be sexier than Hitler."
Unfortunately for Wright, Hitler is currently rated 9.1. Wright is an 8.9.
"For the rest of my life, I'm going to have to live with the knowledge that fifteen randomly polled strangers think that I am significantly less attractive than the single most hated man in recorded history."
For reasons I've never understood, Hot or Not gives no way to search for a particular photo, or to see best-ever or worst-ever galleries. If you're not posting a photo yourself, it's a pretty random, boring visit.
|W|P|106345380153391712|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Why not just write what happened?"—Robert Lowell, quoted perhaps unreliably by Dave Eggers
|W|P|106341170773248377|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comJust a note. Two years ago, as the attacks were happening, on MetaFilter, Rebecca Blood predicted everything:
don't you see that this is a turning point?|W|P|106333290234380860|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comit's going to be one or two. and sure I'm concerned for the next 30,000. but if we give up our civil liberties in response to this, they've won. we lose everything that ever mattered about this country.
- we go on as we have and this kind of thing continues
- we implement some form of police state in order to protect ourselves, thus ensuring our material wealth, but completely renouncing the freedoms that supposedly define us a a nation
- we completely rethink the way we operate in the world in order to make ourselves a less hated entity.
Three excerpts from a FAQ at MIT's Humanoid Robotics Group:
Q: Dude! Did you see that battlebots thing on pay-per-view? Wasn't that totally awesome?
A: Yes.
Q: I'd like to send you a long list of toner cartridge prices. Can I do that?
A: No. Quit it.
Q: Can you stop me?
A: Sadly, no.
|W|P|106320184152323550|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comNASA has just detected sound waves from a supermassive black hole. Apparently God plays bass:
In musical terms, the pitch of the sound generated by the black hole translates into the note of B flat. But a human would have no chance of hearing this cosmic performance, because the note is 57 octaves lower than middle C (by comparison a typical piano contains only about seven octaves). At a frequency over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing, this is the deepest note ever detected from an object in the universe.|W|P|106314070946377893|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
I'm thinking of going into the slogan business:
NPR: Journalism by Dubiously Representative Anecdote(tm)
|W|P|106296047717706403|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Futile Pursuit of Happiness: "A large body of research on well-being seems to suggest that wealth above middle-class comfort makes little difference to our happiness, for example, or that having children does nothing to improve well-being—even as it drives marital satisfaction dramatically down."
|W|P|106287630731028439|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comUniversal Music says they're going to drop the wholesale price of CDs by six dollars. Six dollars! If they can do that and remain profitable, then shouldn't competition have forced the price down about 10 years ago? What happened to the invisible hand? It's nice to see them suffer, but it still doesn't make up for all the gouging they've done.
|W|P|106278006396625615|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFinally, exobiology realizes that life doesn't have to look like us:
"Ice on Mars, with the water beneath it, is a huge empty niche for life to form in totally new ways," [NASA Ames researcher Christopher] McKay said. "What we need to do in future Mars missions is to drill beneath the permafrost, beneath the frozen sediments and find a totally different watery niche—cold gazpacho instead of warm chicken soup.|W|P|106269067314470783|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
"Instead of hunting for fossils in the rocks of Mars, we should be looking for corpses in the cold water—bodies that started out as entirely different forms of life. It would tell us immediately that genesis is easy everywhere."
Lavish weddings on the rise at home and abroad, authors say: "Magic, as it happens, comes with a price. From 1984 to 1994, the average cost of a formal U.S. wedding rose from $4,000 to $16,000. Last year, consumers paid $22,000 on average; the average cost of second and third weddings also rose—to $12,000. "
|W|P|106267962400001864|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comForthright's Phrontistery now includes a Compendium of Lost Words.
|W|P|106267518462156657|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAnother oasis in a desert of bad music: Jellyfish. I'm actually about 10 years late here—the San Francisco quartet broke up in 1993 after their sophomore effort, Spilt Milk, soured on the shelf. I'm listening to their debut, Bellybutton, now. It reminds me a lot of Squeeze somehow—canny pop delivered with such insouciance that you miss its brilliance on the first listen. They also recall the Beatles in disregarding convention without making a big show of it. For instance, so far I've noticed calliope, pipe organ, harmonica, bells, string bass, and trumpet among the guitar/bass/drums on this disc, but there's no look-ma about them.
The songs are melodic, with enough interest in the lyrics and harmonies to keep them interesting for a while. No real technical chops, but that's not what they're trying for. The one weak point is Andy Sturmer's voice. He does his best, but it's just too thin to support songs this good.
|W|P|106261757978846890|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA radio advertiser this morning says, "Diabetes is not just our business—it's our passion."
Well, let's think about that. The people in your company, in any company, have little in common except their employer. Does the company have some means for detecting diabetes passion in interviews? Do they fire people who fail to display passion? I think it's much more likely that it's just a motley group of people who need to pay the rent.
I wish advertisers would stop trying to convince me that their employees care more. They don't. They can't.
|W|P|106258819907694876|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAs a chessplayer, I've often been glad to be alive right about now, when humans and machines are neck-and-neck in vying for the top spot. It's like John Henry's historic contest with the steam drill. Twenty years ago the prospect of a computer world champion seemed unlikely. Twenty years from now the world's top 10 will all be machines.
I'm starting to notice an unrelated but analogous watershed with much larger historic significance—the death of religion in the West. The United States is still the most pious developed nation in the world, but increasingly it's becoming acceptable to mock religion outright.
So, for example, Christopher Hitchens can write in Salon about the ten commandments:
One is presuming (is one not?) that this is the same god who actually created the audience he was addressing. This leaves us with the insoluble mystery of why he would have molded ("in his own image," yet) a covetous, murderous, disrespectful, lying, and adulterous species. Create them sick, and then command them to be well? What a mad despot this is, and how fortunate we are that he exists only in the minds of his worshippers.
Twenty years ago this would have been outrageous, unprintable. Twenty years from now ... well, who knows, but it seems unlikely that religiosity will increase without some divine revelation. Anyway, I'm glad to see it.
|W|P|106253557909475100|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comNewsday reports on Port Authority transcripts from September 11:
|W|P|106241306620387986|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comOfficer John Kannuzo tells his son, "A terrible thing happened, Anthony, some very sick people." When the son asked him how many people were dead, the man answered, "Thousands."
"Daddy, what will happen?"
"Will you do me a favor, Anthony? Daddy's not home, so you are the big man in the house. So you help mommy and keep her happy, okay?"
Kannuzo made it out alive.