Every year, Wisconsin's Beloit College releases a "mindset list" that describes how its new freshman class sees the world.
The latest list is for the class of 2008, who were born in 1986. For them:
- Desi Arnaz, Orson Welles, Roy Orbison, Ted Bundy, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Cary Grant have always been dead.
- Large fine-print ads for prescription drugs have always appeared in magazines.
- Alan Greenspan has always been setting the nation�s financial direction.
- Robert Downey Jr. has always been in trouble.
- They have always been comfortable with gay characters on television.
- Computers have always suffered from viruses.
- Network television has always struggled to keep up with cable.
- Oliver North has always been a talk show host and news commentator.
The list is distributed to Beloit's faculty and staff, in part to prevent "hardening of the references"—i.e., no more bewildering analogies to All in the Family in sociology class. I wish they'd had this when I was in school.
|W|P|110412015355298273|W|P|Tempus Fugit|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWilly Wonka + Francis Ford Coppola = Chocolypse Now
|W|P|110418585225508599|W|P|"He's a Genius, Man!"|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWhat We Know explains the human condition in six pages:
Many people think that we may get rewarded when we die if we do the right things when we are alive. Unfortunately, there is some confusion as to what things we are supposed to be doing.
It's actually scarily accurate.
|W|P|110411885313017800|W|P|Beckett With Stick Figures|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Check your wallet.
If any of the bills has been marked "www.wheresgeorge.com", then you're an unknowing participant in a great national experiment in economics and social psychology.
Since 1998, Where's George? has been quietly hijacking the nation's currency to see how money is spent, where it travels and how long it remains in circulation.
Users log their bills' serial numbers with the site, then write the web address in the margins and spend them.
It's a bit like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the sea. Curious people "downstream" who receive the message can log into the site, look up the bill's number and add their part in its story.
So far, about 2.7 million people have done this, most logging just a few bills out of curiosity. But for some people, it has evolved into a sort of religion.
Jim Sisson, the top user in Washington state, has entered 80,000 bills into the site, some at the wild pace of 7,500 a month.
That fervency is paying off. To date, about 55 million bills, totaling $317,672,801, bear the wheresgeorge.com stamp.
That's still a tiny fraction of the $682 trillion in circulation, but people do notice the marked bills. About 10 percent of the site's logged bills have developed a "history." Sisson told the Longview, Wash., Daily News that about 26 percent of "his" bills have been found by other users.
The findings, updated daily on the site, are revealing. The bill with the longest history so far is a 1999 dollar: In two years it's traveled almost 7,000 miles through nine states, averaging 7.8 miles every day.
Unfortunately, the technology that made this possible is also killing paper money. Some experts predict that credit cards and other digital payment methods will overtake cash and checks by 2007.
"When it comes to payments, consumers want a currency as mobile and as global as they are," Visa's Wayne Best told ABC News. "Paper money simply can't keep up."
|W|P|110418615265993605|W|P|Follow the Money|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Ultimate Collection of Murphy's Laws lists more than 1250 laws, postulates, axioms, and corollaries. Samples:
- Maytag's Rule: Washing machines only break down during the wash cycle when they are full of water.
- Morley's Conclusion: No man is lonely while eating spaghetti.
- Van Roy's Law: An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys.
- Johnson-Laird's Law: Toothache tends to start on Saturday night.
- Paul's Law of Drinking: You can't fall off the floor.
One of my favorites is Durant's Discovery: "One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say."
|W|P|110434221321965023|W|P|Any Fool Can Make a Rule ...|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBad Scrabble Hands records "real, unmanipulated examples of Scrabble-tile-choosing ineptitude."
Check out number 10.
|W|P|110420589582835267|W|P|MPKRDLS|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Half of all scientific discoveries ever made were made in the 20th century. Creation is accelerating, and even the acceleration appears to be accelerating."—John Templeton
|W|P|110359372693610779|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn opposing the invasion of Iraq, Colin Powell cited the Pottery Barn rule: "You break it, you own it."
The good news: "This is very, very far from a policy of ours," says Pottery Barn public relations director Leigh Oshirak.
The bad news: When something is broken, "it's written off as a loss."
|W|P|110410910348994217|W|P|Oops|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
This is Albert Einstein as seen by a honeybee.
Actually, it's a picture of Einstein as processed by B-EYE, a computer program designed to mimic the optics of a honeybee's eye.
What's the difference? That's actually a pretty deep question. Can we ever really know how another creature sees the world, subjectively? And can studying the brain answer that question?
B-EYE was written by Andrew Giger, a neuroscientist at the Australian National University who wanted understand how bees perceive images.
But is that really what we're seeing here? This is the image as it arrives at the bee's retina; it's what a human would see through a bee's eye. But the bee has a bee's brain, and those, though obviously a lot smaller than ours, are surprisingly complex—and alien.
Rodney Brooks, director of MIT's robotics lab, notes that a flying insect can navigate in real time in three dimensions with just a hundred thousand neurons, when our smartest robots can barely drive across a room. Clearly there are some sophisticated things going on in its head, things that studying its eyes won't tell us.
Or even studying its brain. In his landmark essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel says that scientific reductionism won't work here, that ultimately we can't know the mind by studying the brain.
He writes: "Philosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different."
He may be right, but where does that leave us?
|W|P|110411958608682773|W|P|The Eye of the Bee Holder|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comJoachim Verhagen has collected 2,500 science jokes. Sample:
A fellow accidentally ingested some alpha-L-glucose and discovered that he had no ill effects. Apparently he was ambidextrose.
*rimshot* Thanks, I'm here all week. Seriously, try the veal.
|W|P|110411769598897024|W|P|Take My Chromatograph�Please!|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comApartment 42 has a movie image gallery of Harrison Ford making cranky ultimatums.
"Look, I ain't in this for your revolution, and I'm not in it for you, Princess. I expect to be well paid. I'm in it for the money!"
|W|P|110411804845050639|W|P|Hand Solo|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comEvery even number is the sum of two primes.
That's the Goldbach conjecture. Is it true?
|W|P|110374936430818387|W|P|The Grapes of Math|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIf your MP3 collection is a shambles, download the free tagger from MusicBrainz.
It'll go through your whole collection, identifying each file through an online database. And then, with your permission, it'll neatly complete all the metadata in each file and then rename them, changing this:
01 - bridge across forever
to this:
Transatlantic-Bridge Across Forever-01-Duel with the Devil.mp3
Suddenly all your albums appear in tidy listings, and all your applications recognize each file and display the proper information when you play them.
Best of all, if there are any conflicts you can amend the database yourself, so you help others and get into heaven. Or you diminish the moral chaos in an unfeeling universe. Whatever, it's good.
|W|P|110233624870372587|W|P|Cleanliness Is Next to Impossible|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comSecretary: It must be hard to lose your mother-in-law.
W.C. Fields: Yes, it is, very hard. It's almost impossible.
|W|P|110397924401259395|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Because the country's so polarized now, the debate over gay marriage has left us straddling an impossible divide, with little prospect of compromise.
On the one hand, the right's assertion of unthinking tradition seems to fall apart pretty quickly. If marriage is the foundation of society, then permitting more of them would be good, no? If marriage is fundamentally for child-rearing, why do we let sterile couples marry?
On the other hand, the left lacks the power to offer gay couples a realistic solution. Some states offer civil unions or domestic partnerships, but participating couples will still be denied more than 1,100 federal rights and protections (PDF) that married people get, according to the GAO.
Worse, those couples may find themselves trapped in certain locations, since the Defense of Marriage Act lets each state choose whether to recognize a "marriage" performed elsewhere. So now Texas can ignore a Massachusetts marriage. Arguably this a violation of the 14th amendment's equal-protection clause, but right now it's the law.
What's the answer? For one thing, our definition of marriage will have to change to match the current social realities. That means unhooking the sacrament from the marriage license. Sociologists already distinguish between a religious ceremony and the civil marriage sanctioned by the state. They're two different things.
Carrying that further, some libertarians think we should eliminate both of those definitions. They think a marriage should simply be a contract between two consenting people that confers economic benefits.
That may not be a romantic solution, but it could be where we're headed.
|W|P|110057266978498692|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
jomama|W|P|Just make a contract and file with the County Recorder.As far as I know, that should take care of any problems
one might have when questioned about the lack of
a state sponsored marriage.
Nice blog.
Unusual on blogger.com
"Rap music is just computerized crap. I listen to Top of the Pops and after three songs I feel like killing someone."—George Harrison
|W|P|110382263041683483|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHere's a sadly relevant echo from the past. It's Mark Twain, writing in 1906 about the U.S. intervention in the Philippines:
This Republic's life is not in peril. The nation has sold its honor for a phrase ["Our country, right or wrong"]. It has swung itself loose from its safe anchorage and is drifting, its helm is in pirate hands. The stupid phrase needed help, and it got another one: "Even if the war be wrong we are in it and must fight it out: we cannot retire from it without dishonor." Why, not even a burglar could have said it better. We cannot withdraw from this sordid raid because to grant peace to those little people on their terms—independence—would dishonor us. You have flung away Adam's phrase—you should take it up and examine it again. He said, "An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war."
Does that sound familiar? Twain also wrote: "The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes."
|W|P|110383879723990652|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIf your computer spends a lot of time snoozing, consider joining the World Community Grid, which gathers those unused hours for projects to benefit humanity.
You just install an agent that requests an assignment when the machine's quiet. These days it'll probably be working on the human proteome folding project, which could inform treatments for cancer, HIV/AIDS, SARS, and malaria. Earlier work on a smallpox drug reduced the discovery time from years to weeks.
This sounds like a scam, but it ain't. IBM underwrites the project, providing the software for free, and it makes the grid available only to public and not-for-profit organizations who need it for humanitarian research. If this work produces a Nobel Prize, I wonder who gets the credit?
|W|P|110295438769778870|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comELEVEN PLUS TWO is an anagram of TWELVE PLUS ONE.
|W|P|110368518821181723|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
I'm no fan of George Bush, but I have to give him tremendous credit for confronting the Social Security crisis.
The trust fund will run out of cash in 2016, but Bush is safely in his second term and could have afforded to duck the issue.
The solution he's proposed—partial privatization—is costly and controversial, but at this point any solution will be. What's needed is an executive who insists on a fix.
And did you notice? No one is objecting.
For 20 years, politicians have avoided the "third rail of American politics," fearing a backlash from angry seniors who want their entitlements. All that delay has only increased the cost of fixing the problem.
Now Bush has touched that rail, and it's dead.
The people seem to appreciate the gravity of the problem, and they agree that a solution, however painful, is necessary.
No gray army has descended on Washington, demanding "their" money. Bush even carried voters over 65.
Does this mean that Reagan could have fixed Social Security in 1984? Probably not.
But I think it does mean that—at least on this issue—the American people are wiser than Washington gives them credit for.
|W|P|110373790400691855|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMahatma Gandhi's "seven modern sins":
- Wealth without work
- Pleasure without conscience
- Knowledge without character
- Commerce without morality
- Science without humanity
- Worship without sacrifice
- Politics without principle
"First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."—F. Scott Fitzgerald
|W|P|110363186273309592|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFun facts about π, from Brian Taylor's amazingly comprehensive appreciation page:
- You can find your hat size by measuring the circumference of your head and dividing by π. Round off to the nearest eighth of an inch.
- An elephant's height = 2 × π × the diameter of its foot.
- π has now been calculated to 206,158,430,000 digits, but there's literally no application in existence that requires that much precision. If you calculated the circumference of the known universe using only 39 decimals of π, you'd be off by only one proton.
The school cheer of MIT is: "Cosine, secant, tangent, sine! 3 point 1 4 1 5 9!"
|W|P|110357904740092233|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
"Io, Saturnalia!"
That's the greeting you would have heard 2,000 years ago in place of "Merry Christmas." At the winter solstice, Romans exchanged gifts and generally tore things up for a whole week in honor of the god Saturn.
We don't remember that today. Holidays are arbitrary, but they seem eternal. Christmas is so pervasive that it's hard to imagine a December without it, but, historically speaking, it's a relatively new custom.
And it may not even be authentic. It's been suggested that fourth-century Christians, seeing the partying Romans, claimed December 25 as Christ's birthday in order to co-opt the holiday and convert the pagans.
We'll never know. But it's certain that Christmas will eventually fade away, like its Roman ancestor. People will forget our current holidays, just as they've forgotten Saturnalia, though it was thought immortal in its day.
"For how many years shall this festival abide!" wrote the Roman poet Statius at the time. "Never shall age destroy so holy a day! While the hills of Latium endure and father Tiber, while thy Rome stands and the Capitol thou hast restored to the world, it shall continue."
|W|P|110346511311984801|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWow, this is incredibly depressing. Type in your annual salary and the Salary Clock will show your earnings in real time, second by second. I've made about 40 cents in the time it's taken to type this.
Even worse, you can compare your pathetic scrapings with the torrents of cash earned by Larry Ellison, Charles Schwab, Lou Gerstner and other capitalist oppressors. For every $2.50 I earn, Michael Dell makes about $11,000. I'm better looking, though.
|W|P|110357890356442817|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIf you thought Operation Iraqi Freedom was a grandiose name, consider the alternatives. These are actual names of recent U.S. military and intelligence operations:
- Balance Kayak
- Beady Eye
- Busy Lobster
- Devil's Hat
- Giant Voice
- Prominent Hammer
Culled by Harper's from William Arkin's forthcoming Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the 9/11 World.
|W|P|110346769850484288|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being about how the world registers and processes information. Certainly that's what sex is about; that's what history is about."—Seth Lloyd
|W|P|110346818761154856|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comProperty may make the world go round, but the Internet is still socialist at heart.
A year and a half after its official founding, the Wikimedia Foundation has quietly expanded to include seven properties, all built collaboratively by unpaid anonymous contributors:
- Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia whose 1.2 million articles make it three times as big as Encyclopedia Britannica
- Wikibooks, a source of free full-text online books covering everything from Buddhist philosophy to diagnostic radiology
- Wikiquote, an online repository of thousands of quotations
- Wikisource, a free collection of authoritative source texts, from The Book of Mormon to The Hunting of the Snark
- Wikispecies, an open, free directory of all forms of Earth life (!)
- Wiki Commons, a central repository of free images, music, sound and video clips, and written and spoken texts used in the other projects
- Wikinews, a free-content news source
That last one, the newest, actually seems the most ambitious to me. None of the other projects is time-sensitive, and presenting accurate, objective news accounts is a huge undertaking even for massive media corporations. Still, Wikimedia has an impressive record so far. It'll be interesting to see how this one develops.
|W|P|110342410437630096|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Go Problems is exactly that—a database of more than 3,000 problems in the ancient Chinese board game.
I always sucked at go, but I have to say the Java interface here is remarkably well conceived. You can pursue any of several paths in solving the problem, and you can view the solution as a numbered sequence, as an animation, or as a navigable map of colored paths.
Best of all, you can rate each problem's "coolness"—and search problems by theme or difficulty.
Go has become interesting in the AI community because it's one of the last bastions of human superiority in complete-knowledge, deterministic strategy games: Robots have already taken the crown in chess, checkers and reversi.
One reason go is a holdout is that it's freakin' enormous, with 107.49×1048 possible games. For comparison, there are 1043 possible games of chess, and 1090 protons in the universe.
Go players say that level of subtlety reminds them of life: A web of delicate decisions that affect one another in unforeseeable ways. If that's true, then maybe computers won't be taking over the world anytime soon.
|W|P|110338189726009831|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA flight attendant once asked Muhammad Ali to fasten his seat belt.
Ali said, "Superman don't need no seat belt."
The attendant replied, "Superman don't need no airplane, either."
|W|P|110325146545918406|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
James Thurber said, "I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?"
We might enjoy watching the game, but usually we're rooting for one team. Most people show stronger positive feelings for one sex over the other.
And according to a new study from Purdue University, most people prefer women.
The researchers conducted four studies measuring the attitudes of 379 adults. The results, which appeared in the October issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, show that women prefer women, and men, on average, don't have a preference toward either sex.
It's thought that people probably form these attitudes during childhood, through bonding with their mothers, say, or feeling intimidated by their fathers.
If that's true, I wonder how it squares with Berkeley linguist George Lakoff's appraisal of the American political spectrum.
Essentially, Lakoff links liberal morality to a nurturant mother, and conservative to a strict father.
If he's right, then modern parenting techniques might give us a crop of Democrats in 20 years. On the other hand, today's Republicans probably use the same firm hand that their own fathers used.
Either way, it's kind of scary to think that American foreign policy was largely set in George Bush's crib.
|W|P|110306142071665688|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn movies, why does no one say goodbye on the telephone?
In exterior scenes at night, why are the streets always wet?
|W|P|110229676087174146|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe most prolific author on amazon.com is someone named Not Available—he's written 8,472 titles to date.
I wonder if he's related to the writer Anonymous ("You can�t see the future through a rearview mirror"), or to the chessplayer No Name, who has won only 32 games since 1590.
|W|P|110166075177197316|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI don't have satellite radio, so one of the worst parts of long-distance road trips for me is trying to find a new radio station every 50 miles.
Radio Roadtrip solves this pretty neatly. Choose your interstate, identify your origin and destination, and it'll lay out a whole itinerary for you, listing every intermediate city and its stations.
The listings include the stations' formats and coverage areas (day and night). With five minutes and a highlighter, I could map out a whole audio plan, knowing when to switch stations and what frequency to switch to. Good idea.
|W|P|110307322408512192|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comToogle is like Google's image search, but on a unicycle, juggling chainsaws. Enter any search term and it renders a color image produced using the letters of the search term itself. Here are the results for "pyramid":
And it did that in 0.407 seconds. Now, that's just showing off.
|W|P|110306134120093377|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFrom the Worthless Word for the Day:
torschlusspanik [G, lit. "shut gate panic"]: a sense of alarm or anxiety (said to be experienced particularly in middle age) caused by the feeling that life's opportunities are passing one by|W|P|110307205562799638|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Once more, science pushes back shadows. Itchy Squirrel suspected that the dimple on the bottom of a bottle of wine varies with its price. So he went to the supermarket with a depth gauge and a notebook, went home and did a statistical analysis. Result:
price of bottle = (dimple depth in mm + £3.49) / 4.3144
He's now auctioning the depth gauge on eBay—it's sure to have some historical value.
|W|P|110282223845784665|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"As a rule, he or she who has the most information will have the greatest success in life."—Benjamin Disraeli
|W|P|110271041063096005|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIf you like KFC chicken, prepare to have your bubble burst: Colonel Sanders was not a military officer, he wasn't from Kentucky, and he didn't even enter the chicken game until he was 40. The whole thing is mostly a put-up job to sell drumsticks.
Harland Sanders was born in Indiana, and knocked around at various jobs before he started his first chicken restaurant. The "colonel" title was bestowed by the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels, "a great non-political brotherhood for the advancement of Kentucky and Kentuckians."
It turns out that being commissioned a Kentucky Colonel is the highest honor in the commonwealth, though it's largely ceremonial. Other Kentucky Colonels over the years have included Lyndon Johnson, Winston Churchill, Mae West, Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, W.C. Fields, and, bizarrely, Pope John Paul II.
Sanders knew a cash cow when he saw one, and he rode this one till he was 90, making millions for his corporate masters as they capitalized on his colorful image. They even buried him in that suit.
So the whole thing is a vast white-wing conspiracy.
That was a long way to go for that punchline, but oh, man, was it worth it.
|W|P|109996715360891425|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
The sexual abuse crisis has bedeviled the American Catholic church since January 2002. Other nations seem to see it as a peculiarly American problem, and discuss it with dismissive pity.
"American have a bad combination of youth, wealth, power, isolation, and very little serious Catholic intellectual tradition," said one Vatican archbishop quoted in John Allen's All the Pope's Men. "It's a recipe for a lot of mischief."
But Allen shows that the problem extends throughout the church's history, and far beyond American shores.
In the fourth century, St. Basil wrote, "A cleric or monk who seduces youths or young boys ... is to be publicly flogged. ... For six months he will languish in prisonlike confinement, ... and he shall never again associate with youths in private conversation nor in counseling them."
That didn't work, apparently. Here's what's going on today in the rest of the world:
- Polish archbishop Juliusz Paetz stepped down in March 2002 after being accused of abusing seminarians.
- Cardian Hans Hermann Gröer of Vienna resigned in 1995 under similar charges.
- The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland paid $110 million in 2002 to compensate thousands of molestation victims in the last century.
- France has convicted 30 priests of pedophile activities, and 11 are in prison.
- On French bishop got a suspended jail sentence for failing to report an abusive priest.
- More than 90 Australian priests and church employees have been convicted of abuse over the last decade.
Ironically, I think the American church may be attracting attention only because it's out front in confronting the problem. It's easy to blame American venality for a sex-related crisis, but it's the American love of openness—and litigation—that exposed the problem first, and it will be the American church that finally transcends it while others around the world are still covering it up.
Allen writes: "My newspaper, National Catholic Reporter, broke a story two years ago concerning the sexual abuse of nuns by priests in Africa and elsewhere. No one whose eyes are open can pretend that the phenomenon of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church is restricted to American airspace."
|W|P|110282158667232323|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWhy do maths geeks always get Christmas and Halloween mixed up?
Because Oct 31 is Dec 25.
That's actually a pretty clever joke, if you don't mind explaining it to everyone.
|W|P|110282256426323918|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWhat is that flagrance you're wearing?
If you strapped Lawrence Lessig to a cot and injected him with crank, he'd see Illegal Art. It's a collection of media files created using deliberately stolen intellectual property—copyrighted and trademarked footage, music and sound.
Everything here is great, but in particular check out Israeli student Michal Levy's video rendering of John Coltrane's "Giant Steps," which manages to convey the song structure, the harmonic relationships, and the glorious solo in Coltrane's masterpiece, all in a language that a deaf Tibetan would understand. Levy shouldn't have to pay a license fee for this—Coltrane's estate should be paying him.
|W|P|110237827165510834|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"You can stay young as long as you learn."—Emily Dickinson
|W|P|110268310888801876|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comCheck out this 30-second Flash summary of the November election, rendered using GIS mapping software. Seen in this light, the Democratic vote really is extremely provincial, representing just a few major cities: Chicago, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle.
It's hard to know how to think about that. Urban voters face a unique set of issues, but that's only because they choose to live in a few concentrated areas. Why should Wyoming voters support tougher law enforcement? There's no crime in Wyoming.
It is true that half of America lives in those urban centers, including me. And many issues, like Social Security reform, have no geographical dimension. But for those that do—pollution, crime, immigration—I'll admit that the red states have the less parochial view.
|W|P|110237897371604308|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI used to work at an aviation magazine. I got to fly around a lot, but mostly it was a boring desk job, transcribing government data. The main thing I remember is the cockpit voice recorder transcripts—the "black box" recordings that investigators retrieve after an air disaster. They record what was actually happening in the cockpit during the crash.
Aviation Safety Network has a whole collection of these, and they're just as hair-raising as I'd remembered. Here's an Air New Zealand flight crashing into Mount Erebus in Antarctica:
FLIGHT ENGINEER: I don't like this.
CAPTAIN: Have you got anything from him?
FIRST OFFICER: No.
CAPTAIN: We're 26 miles north. We'll have to climb out of this. ...
GUIDE ON BOARD: You can see Ross Island? Fine.
FIRST OFFICER: You're clear to turn right. There's no high ground if you do a 180.
CAPTAIN: No ... negative.
GPWS: Whoop, whoop! Pull up! Whoop, whoop!
FLIGHT ENGINEER: Five hundred feet.
GPWS: Pull up!
FLIGHT ENGINEER: Four hundred feet.
GPWS: Whoop, whoop! Pull up! Whoop, whoop! Pull up!
CAPTAIN: Go-around power, please.
GPWS: Whoop, whoop! Pull—
GPWS is the ground proximity warning system, a robot that senses an imminent crash and tells you, in English, to pull out of it.
There's a legend that all of these recordings end with the same four-letter expletive. It's not true—most of them end like this, abruptly in mid-sentence. To me, that makes them even more disturbing.
|W|P|110253605344064392|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIf you're the average Web user, here's how you spent your October, according to Nielsen//NetRatings:
- Total sessions: 30
- Domains visited: 60
- Page views: 1,074
- Page views per surfing session: 35
- Duration of average page view: 45 seconds
- Total time spent on PC: 25 hours, 32 minutes
- Time spent per surfing session: 50 minutes
If this is right, then the average person hits 2 sites a day and views about 18 pages on each one, but zips through most of those pages very quickly. Does that describe you?
|W|P|110234232765857000|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
I don't drink alcohol, for the same reason I don't drink kerosene: It's a poison and a neurotoxin. Generally I don't care what people do in their own privacy, but it's hard to overlook the social costs of drinking. The numbers are just too awful.
Drunk driving kills someone every 30 minutes. That makes it the nation's most frequently committed violent crime. And that's just the average; the numbers go way up on red-letter days and "celebrations." On Super Bowl Sunday 2002, nearly 60 percent of America's traffic fatalities were alcohol-related.
It gets worse. About 40 percent of all crimes are committed under the influence of alcohol. (When's the last time you saw a sober suspect on COPS?) And there's a 30 percent chance you'll be involved in an alcohol-related crash in your lifetime. One emergency-room technician said that if it weren't for alcohol, he'd be out of business.
If alcohol were invented today, Congress would ban it immediately, as a simple matter of public welfare. I doubt anyone would even have the courage to lobby for it. But because it's a popular consumer good, no one seriously thinks of outlawing it today, despite the costs.
Mississippi didn't repeal Prohibition until 1966. I'm a social progressive, but I think they had the right idea.
|W|P|110057253280718012|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't."—Anatole France (attrib.)
|W|P|110254271798736327|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comStarted in Tucson in 2003, Freecycle has become a nationwide network of people and nonprofits who "recycle" items—exchange them for free—rather than deposit them in landfills. "One person's trash can truly be another's treasure."
The network here in Raleigh is organized through a yahoogroup, and the message base has more than 10,000 records. Right now I could get a lawnmower, an answering machine, almond extract or a kitty condo, all just by setting an appointment to pick them up. Good idea.
|W|P|110237848411515883|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comTalk about found art. The folks at The Smoking Gun have taken six months of federal racketing wiretaps and serialized them as WMOB, sort of a reality-radio version of the The Sopranos, without the irony. Here's an excerpt from Episode 40, "Island Hopping":
Frank "Frankie California" Condo: I took this guy down to Giamberto's.
Federico "Fritzy" Giovanelli: Uh-huh?
Frank: Marone. He ate like a duke.
Fritzy: Ya, ya give, did ya sign? I hope ya signed.
Frank: I did.
Fritzy: Good.
Because the callers were careful, there's no discussion of actual crime, but that's okay—the florid Sicilian self-stereotyping still comes through. TSG aren't saying where they got the tapes, but they're airing a new episode every Wednesday.
|W|P|110237851136276065|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFrom alt.quotations this morning:
A survey was undertaken among the Nordic countries. They asked the Finns, "If you couldn't be Finnish, what would you like most to be?" The Finns replied, "Finland is the finest country in the world, and we are the best people, but if we couldn't be Finnish I suppose we'd like to be Danish." They asked the same question of the Norwegians. The Norwegians replied, "It's great being Norwegian and living in Norway, but if we couldn't be Norwegian we'd like to be Danish."|W|P|110251029764988052|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
They asked the Swedes, and the Swedes replied, "We Swedes are the most sensible and democratic of people living in the most beautiful country, but if we couldn't be Swedish we'd like to be Danish." They asked the Danes the same question. The Danes responded, "Denmark really is the best country in the world with the nicest people, but if we couldn't be Danish we'd like to be Danish."
Belgium is the most kid-friendly major nation in the world, according to Population Connection, which evaluated 80 countries by population change, contraception, health, education, economy and the environment.
The United States is number 7, which is actually pretty shameful, considering we have a higher GDP per capita than anyone but Luxembourg.
And that's telling: "A good indicator of a country�s quality of life is the way it treats its most vulnerable members," the report says. "Short-changing kids today almost guarantees a world that is more turbulent and unsafe tomorrow."
Appalling factoids:
- Nearly 1 billion people are illiterate.
- One child in eight is engaged in child labor.
- Every year 1.2 million children are trafficked or sold for prostitution, rebel militias, or domestic servitude.
- 300,000 children are in military service.
- The mortality rate for children under age 5 is the same in Malaysia and the United States (8 per 1,000 live births).
- At 19 percent, the United States has the highest level of births to teens in the developed world.
- More than 13 million children 14 or younger have been orphaned by AIDS.
Compared with adults, children under 5 consume more air, food and water per unit of body weight, so they're at greater risk from pollution and pathogens. If all of that is not enough to sway you, consider this: "The well-being of a child is also a good indicator of the well-being of the parents."
|W|P|110057256895966644|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThis is absolutely brilliant: Someone has created a blog for Samuel Pepys, the English civil servant whose revelatory diary has became a historical window into the Great Plague, the Great Fire, and daily life in 17th-century London.
It's very well realized, too. That's one of the best ideas I've seen all year.
|W|P|110237875820697125|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Actors are crap."—John Ford
|W|P|110236921106836417|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI know I keep quoting Edna St. Vincent Millay, but she's just really good. Thomas Hardy once said that America had two great attractions—the skyscraper and her poetry:
Old Letters
I know not why I am so loath to lay
Your yellow leaves along the glowing log,
Unburied dead, that cling about and clog—
With indisputable, insistent say
Of the stout past's all inefficient fray—
The striving present, rising like a fog
To rust the active in me, that am a cog
In the great wheel of industry today.
Yet, somehow, in this visible farewell
To the crude symbols of a simpler creed,
I find a pain that had not parallel
When passed the faith itself,—we give small heed
To incorporeal truth, let slack or swell;
But truth made tangible, is truth indeed.
That's the first sonnet she ever wrote. She was 15—"somewhat young, perhaps, to be burning in my lonely grate packets of letters yellow with age."
|W|P|110229710667124591|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
If there's one thing that never goes out of style, it's bashing lawmakers. "Politicians are not born, they are excreted," wrote Cicero two thousand years ago, and if anything we're even more cynical today.
But the older I get, the more I wonder: What are the odds that everyone in Congress is a scoundrel? That blackguards and criminals are the only ones attracted to office, and the only ones who win? And that this happens term after term?
I think it's more likely that people arrive in Washington with the best intentions, but they find themselves trapped in a bad system.
When today's Mr. Smith arrives on Capitol Hill, he's met by a political aide who explains that he'll need to raise $5,000 a day, every day, for his entire six-year term if he hopes to keep his seat and do some good.
That's an impossible moral situation. If he takes the high road and disdains fundraising, his party and his colleagues won't take him seriously. But if he takes contributors' money, he gives his future opponent a free campaign issue, and he's somewhat beholden to special interests.
I don't know what the answer is, but I know it's not to "throw the bums out." Increasingly, I think it's best to keep the bums who have shown they can get some bills passed in between PAC luncheons.
|W|P|110220792891407400|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHere's a flat-out plug: Read Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. It's smart, funny, savagely incisive pop culture criticism, delivered in a wonderful conversational voice:
I never enjoy the process of buying anything, but I get the impression that most Americans love it. What The Sims suggests is that buying things makes people happy because it takes their mind off being alive. I would think this would actually make them feel worse, but every woman I've ever dated seems to disagree.
One caveat: Don't judge this book by its cover, a horrid combination of milk, pills, and generic-brand typography. I get the references, but it ain't very appealing.
|W|P|110228036538884244|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"My relationship to power and authority is that I'm all for it. ... People need somebody to watch over them. ... Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave."—Arnold Schwarzenegger, U.S. News and World Report profile, 1990
|W|P|110220817256585562|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMiss America by hair color, 1921-2003:
- Brunettes: 70 percent
- Blondes: 24 percent
- Redheads: 6 percent
What do you say when an atheist sneezes?
|W|P|110218811588112319|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
People worry about the Internet corrupting America, but TV is still by far the nation's most popular medium. In 2003, 98 percent of U.S. homes had a television set. Of those, 41 percent had three or more sets, and 70 percent got basic cable, which itself has exploded since I was a kid. Between 1982 and 1997, the number of cable TV systems in this country doubled.
Will all those flickering screens seduce our children? No, for two reasons. First, it's not the kids who are watching. American children and teens watch only about 20 hours of TV a week, well below the 2002 national average of 30 hours. Women over 55, on the other hand, watch a staggering 44 hours, or six hours a day. (And that's the average—some are watching far more.)
The other misconception is that all these new channels will drive up competition, forcing networks to program more filth and bloodshed. Actually, the opposite may happen, according to a recent Iowa State University study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
In that study, participants who watched violent or sexually explicit programs had more trouble recalling advertised brands than those who had watched a "neutral" show. "Violence and sex impaired memory for males and females of all ages, regardless of whether they liked programs containing violence and sex," the authors concluded. "These results suggest that sponsoring violent and sexually explicit TV programs might not be a profitable venture for advertisers." If Hollywood follows the money—as it always has—our kids will be fine.
|W|P|110057261474193219|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBenjamin Franklin's "thirteen virtues":
- TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
- SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
- ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
- RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
- FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
- INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
- SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
- JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
- MODERATION. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
- CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.
- TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
- CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.
- HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
"It may be well my posterity should be informed that to this little artifice, with the blessing of God, their ancestor ow'd the constant felicity of his life, down to his 79th year, in which this is written."
|W|P|110211065020546016|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFrom the Dr. Seuss Bible:
His name will be Christ
and he'll never wear shoes.
And his pals will all call him
the King of the Jews!
—The Kids in the Hall, season one
|W|P|110211005017560275|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comOkay, here's the thing:
That's the transition between the second chorus (in D flat) and the bridge (in Bb minor) in Andy Sturmer's song "Baby's Coming Back." Here's what I love about it: the craftsmanship. Not just that the bridge is in a different key, but that Sturmer wrote a specific little phrase to accomplish the modulation. It shows that he takes music seriously, and that he knows you take music seriously, or at least that you might. I love that. It's a compliment.
Craft should matter. In music and in everything else, craft should matter. A songwriter who writes a phrase like that is like a cabinetmaker who conceals all his screws. Part of what makes his work beautiful is the obvious care that goes into making it, the fact that the craftsman takes pride in his work.
If you love music and you don't care about this stuff, then fine, you're probably happier than I am. But if you really love music, how can you not care about this stuff?
|W|P|110169534171105957|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMan, to judge from this list, I can see why stars use stage names. Ted Knight's real name was Tadeus Wladyslaw Konopka, for crying out loud. Doesn't quite fit on the marquee.
Bizarrely, sometimes an actor's given name is already "taken" by another well-known actor. Stewart Granger's real name was James Stewart. And Michael Keaton was born Michael Douglas.
But Albert Brooks had the best reason to take a pseudonym: His real name is Albert Einstein. Seriously. Talk about high expectations.
|W|P|110143578574141311|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBesides last.fm, here are a few handy tools for finding good music recommendations online:
- Music-Map is a new front end for gnod's self-adapting artificial intelligence system. Type in a band you like and watch a universe of suggestions cohere around it, based on other users' preferences.
- Musicplasma uses the same idea, which makes it interesting to compare the two. Where Musicplasma relates artists by genre and time period, Music-Map goes strictly by user input, which is surprisingly successful. When I typed in Jellyfish, one of the closest matches was Living Colour. Those bands have nothing in common, but I do like both of them. So musical tastes may not fit into neat boxes, but they might still be predictable.
- There's also this anonymous scrobbler, which is perversely hidden inside a PubMed browser. It includes links to Audioscrobbler, Google and AllMusic, which is handy, but I don't know how big the user base is.
"If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call to make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?"—Stephen Levine
|W|P|110161285052506273|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com