Stirling Newberry on the lesson learned from Iraq and Saddam.#

The capture of Saddam is not even a boost for international justice, since the high profile apprehension of one criminal, while leaving others on the streets, promotes the sense that Saddam's crimes were not in liquidating his enemies, gaining weapons of mass destruction - since Israel, Pakistan, North Korea, India and South Africa all have, or have had atomic weapons, and Iran is openly pursuing them - but in annoying the Bush family. The situation is far more analogous to one drug dealer gunning down another, than to some kind of orderly process of justice - since the selection of the target was hardly objective, and the cost of the process makes it unlikely it will be repeated. Dictators around the world can sleep more easily, knowing that it is simply too expensive to deal with them under the model the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan present - with their indefinite commitment of US troops and high levels of danger for uncertain reward.

Sarcasmo comments on freezing light.#

The Speed of Light: Now Less Constant Than Ever: Some scientists have managed to make light stand still (for a very short period of time, but you know, pretty fantastic), and maintain it's energy. The article claims this may someday help in the production of so-called Super Computers.

Is it just me, or does Matthew Bigelow's calling this feat "very clever" strike anyone else as the scientific community's way of saying "That's nice, dear...but can it do my dishes?"

My friend's band Air Hockey Champion has posted MP3s.#

TWO MP3's AVAILABLE NOW!
Air Hockey Champion would like to give you a little present for the holiday season, two mp3's from the February release of their yet to be titled enhanced CD. The first song is "Diane Court" which you may recognize from the first show, it was the opening song. Ever have a crush on someone so much that your palms are sweaty and you have to work up the nerve to call that person? There was this guy Lloyd Dobler who felt that way and the girl was Diane Court, but everyone has had those feelings, so you can probably relate.

To help celebrate the release of the new Lord of the Rings movie "Return of the King", Air Hockey Champion decided to show their appreciation by playing a completely rocked out medley of themes from the trilogy. The combination of AHC and LOTR can not go more hand in hand, this mp3 will be sure to pump you up into a frenzy.

It's encouraged you burn these mp3's to a CD-R and play them loud through your home or car stereo. Rock music was meant to be played loud! Make sure you purchase the CD in February, which will include more songs!

Jakob Nielsen lists the top ten web design mistakes of 2003.#

2. New URLs for Archived Content
Archives add substantial value to a site with very little extra effort. Although more and more sites are archiving old content, most sites still fail to maintain good archives. Some sites treat archives as a separate site area, assigning pages new URLs when they move them from the main area into the archive.

Changing the URL when archiving content causes linkrot. It also makes other sites reluctant to link to you. Although sites might consider linking to a current article, if they've been burned by linkrot in the past, they'll often pass you by because they don't want to bother with having to update their own pages when you move yours.

8. Products Sorted Only by Brand
Sites that offer many items ought to provide winnowing and sorting, which is a highly useful way to deal with lists and is fortunately fairly common. Unfortunately, many sites only let users sort items by brand. So you can find, say, all Armani products, but not all red sweaters. To support sorting by attributes of interest to users, the obvious first question is "What attributes do users value?" The answers will differ by product category, but user research can help you discover them, as can a good sales person.

Joshua Koenig writes some strong preaching in favour of a better future.#

This movement is about the redistribution of power. Centralization of authority is not helping us solve our problems. It's not making the country any more safe or any less racist. It's not creating meaningful jobs that pay a living wage. It's not making education more educational or affordable. It's not helping to unite the world to combat disease, systemic poverty and terrorism. It's not cleaning up the environment. It's not giving us something better to pass along to our children. These are things we care about, and we're tired of waiting, wishing and hoping for people in decision-making positions to spontaneously begin caring about them as well. At the very best, the people in power seem content with the status quo.

We can have any kind of future we want; all we need to do is realize that the ultimate power -- whether it's how we spend our dollars, use our time, or cast our votes -- is in our hands. The country is beginning to wake up, beginning to realize that waiting for someone else to fix things itsn't really getting the job done. And the joy of a free society is that change is imminently possible. The world will be better if you choose for it to be.

Jay Rosen writes on Everett Erlich's "three-party" meta-narrative on the 2004 campaign, theory in journalism, and Jeff Jarvis on Howard Dean.#

The three-party meta-narrative can be summarized as: Dean is creating a new party to hijack the prestige and history of the Democratic party and he really represents a "threat" separate from both the GOP and the "old" Democratic party. Jay doesn't necessarily subscribe to this, but he think it is important to consider how journalists react to it...

How does campaign reporting by the national press--let's say at the Washington Post--absorb this possibility? Covering a three-sided race is different, more complicated. It demands a different deployment of people and use of news space. And yet it might be a more accurate picture--a savvier read on the situation--which means it would produce better coverage.

But this would require acceptance of a thesis, Erlich's thesis. The trouble there is the press does not ordinarily choose between one thesis and another in setting its sights for campaign coverage. It has a third choice, which is to say: "Thesis? What thesis? We don't do that. No sir. Our job is to report the campaign, not to theorize about it." I said this was a choice, but it might also be a style of decision-making that is common in journalism. Not recognizing an issue can be an effective way of handling it.

Later, Jay reports Jeff Jarvis' thoughts on Dean. (Buzzmachine currently crashes my browser so I don't read it directly.)

Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis wants to cool down some of the passions for Dean's distributed model of campaigning and its "two way" features. He's in a contrarianmood about it. His three theses:

1. In terms of policy and substance, presidential campaign weblogs are not two-way. They are necessarily one-way. 2. In terms of policy and substance, presidential campaign weblogs must be essentially propagandistic. 3. In terms of organization, presidential campaign weblogs and community effectively exploit their participants.

He also says there is nothing scandalous about this, it's just the reality of trying to win. Now you have to watch journalists--well, everyone, but especially journalists-when they set out to debunk. Not always but very often, the debunker will first inflate the claim, and then write 800 words about how ridiculously inflated the claim is.

Christopher Lydon interviewed Larry Lessig recently about Creative Commons and the "New" politics.#

On Creative Commons and his "Free Culture" movement I like this point that he makes:

Not about being better, about being Free. We're not promising competition Hollywood, we're promising freedom.

CC is working for something greater than just the satisfaction and satiation of people, it is pointing out that while right now there is a short-term benefit in betraying everyone else that will slowly turn into a large problem. If we embrace the great ideal of freedom now, the end result will be best and not fraught with coercive government influence.

On the blogosphere and the Internet with relation to politics, Lessig has some strong preaching. He talks about how what is most important is the essential ingredient of democracy being reinvigorated: participation.

Blogs worry about the truth, not the hipness and ripeness of an idea or story. When you criticize and think you become a better citizen.

What's important is that people participate in the creation of the political structure around them.

In talking about how Dean will be able to win and what the problems facing the country today are, he says:

Can Dean characterize the money of Bush and the rest of the political system as a corruption of democracy. The idea that the one with the money wins is blood boiling to a real believer in democrats.

I'm a capitalist, but the idea that our government is control by those with money is completely ridiculous to any semblance of a belief in democracy.

Reclaim democracy from the Enrons.

Our children will ask, who were we to allow our system to become corrupt in this way.

And all though Larry is a profession pessimist, the following he thinks should be clear:

"I'm a pessimist who wants to be proven wrong!"

The Captain paraphrases Clark as "We'll Give Up Our Sovereignty If I'm Elected."#

Let's just mull that over for a while. America was founded on the principle of self-determination, a concept still held to be valid today. We've fought wars to ensure our self-determination and to ensure that right for other peoples. Wesley Clark led an occupation to ensure that right for Kosovars and Bosnians. But now he proposes to eliminate 200 years of independence from Europe by allowing France, among others, the "right of refusal" over our national security policies. It's simply breathtaking, and it's even more so when you read the transcript and realize that Chris Matthews never followed up on this statement.

I'll put it to you this way: Would you feel secure knowing that our national security was in the hands of France? Germany? Russia? If so, vote Clark. If not, welcome to the real world, where France cannot act to protect its own security, let alone guarantee ours. The last time France guaranteed anyone else's security was Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, and look how well that turned out.

While not defending Clark or agreeing that this is what he meant, I'd like to make two points: First, in terms of security and peace, what is good for every nation is good for each nation. So it is important we realize the natural "stake" we have in each other. Secondly, I think it is interesting how the Captain equates "defense and security" with "sovereignty." This makes it much clearer why some people feel that the US has the right to command other nations what to do, because since it provides their defense that must make them no longer sovereigns. I'm glad to understand the root of this now.

The Binary Circumstance responds to Oliver Willis about why homosexual marriage is an important thing to defend and about the nature of religions and governments.#

While I agree that there are far more pressing issues than gay marriage, a government like ours which is based on mystical premises, is really a religion disguised as a government. Religion and manadatory government will in many respects be strong allies as both survive by destroying the basis for rational thought--reality. So I wouldn't expect our government to get out of the religion/marriage issue any time soon.

The expansion of religion and force-based governments is dependent upon destroying the capacity of the human mind to think rationally, and that process must begin with children. It is for this reason that heterosexual marriage and breeding are are so important to both government and religion. Get 'em while they're young.

ScrappleFace writes about a new motion of the ACLU to stop the government from destroying our freedoms.#

The nation's highest court will likely amend the 1st amendment contained in the so-called "Bill of Rights," eliminating everything but the first five words.

Currently, the 1st amendment states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

However, the unnamed Supreme Court clerk said, "In light of some recent federal court rulings, a majority of the justices have come to believe that only the first five words of the amendment really make sense. Eliminating the rest should reduce intolerance and dissent in our country, making us truly one nation under mandamus."

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said it has a team of attorneys searching for a plaintiff whose case would "facilitate" such a ruling.

City Comforts on interpreting pitches.#

I was sitting around with my roommates listening to some of LBJ's too-honest-to-be-good-hacks on a "Meet the Press"-type show. I think it was spring of 1967.(?) The host asked about Vietnam and their answers were lame: "turning the corner," "Vietnames allies" and more cant. You could tell that even they didn't believe it. I was in a tough spot because my roommates were all fervently anti-war and I still wanted to believe that our government was wise, just, effective etc. So it made me squirm to hear the champions of LBJ's Vietnam policy act as if everything was going along totally dandy when it was clear that at the very least there were issues. They were in-credible.

Then the moderator asked LBJ's guys about race relations. And immediately the tone shifted. While defending the administration, they also freely admited setbacks and difficulties. They did not have to obfuscate, exagerate, avoid etc because they were on the side of the angels. They could admit flaws because by-and-large LBJ's team was doing the right thing with race relations and doing it well. They were credible.

So my lesson that day was to listen especially carefully when a speaker refuses to admit any problems. There isalways a problem.

Mitch Ratcliffe writes about the transformation of politics.#

Public debate about the direction government should take has reached a critical mass that could transform the very notion of democratic systems, if citizens take the initiative and seize the reins of power from the professionals struggling to regain control of the process.

Indeed, politics is always changing as society incorporates new technology for disseminating information and connecting people. We have to be optimistic about the trend toward increasingly sophisticated use of technology in government and politics, since it is an inevitable aspect of history. From smoke signals to the press, local canvassing by candidates to nationally televised debates, the acceleration of political discourse through communications technology has been a faithful disruptor of accepted wisdom throughout human history.

Technology is disruptive in the way it is used not in and of itself, because if it is left unused it has no influence on the organization of society. Technology's social and political meaning is discovered through its application, as humans experience the way a technical hack changes the flow of information and power in a system. Think about any new technology introduced in the workplace during the past 30 years and it is plain that, while the inventor may have had an inkling of the way a product could change an organization, the actual scope and impact of organizational change is the result of people arguing over, evangelizing about, and stumbling to new arrangements of people and resources in a company, an industry or an economy.

People change history and they use tools to do it. This is an important supposition when considering what will happen to politics because of the Internet.

He later mentions Alexis de Tocqueville on newspapers, this is one way that I knew Mitch "got it."

AKMA writes about replacement panic.#

"Replacement panic" is the expression I started using back at the Digital Genres conference that Alex Golubarranged [...]. I use "replacement panic" to refer to the fear — frequently a spontaneous reaction to positive assessments of online technology — that digital media will supplant physical interactions.

I should agree at the outset that replacement panic doesn't arise out of nowhere. some of the techno-romantics have heralded the advent of a dsay when our memories will be downloadable to hard drives, our thoughts presumably assisted by sophisticated applications, our sensations provided by elaborate simulation algorithms. David Weinberger has made a small campaign against such illusions, but they nonetheless play loud in mass media and (hence) the popular imagination.

At the same time, physical interaction won't just go away. [...] If anything, the way that online interaction permits a vehicle for modulated, careful interaction permits increased sociality for introverted people who might otherwise not venture out at all.

Henry Farrell calls Alex Singleton on his shit.#

Yet another post in the "we right-wingers are smarter because we say we are" genre, this time fromAlex Singleton at the Adam Smith Institute. Singleton puts forward the self-evidently preposterous argument that the blogosphere is dominated by the right wing because the blogosphere favours reasoned argument, leaving leftwingers (who are good at chanting slogans and spouting jargon, but lousy at reasoned thought) in the lurch. Weak stuff, which is barely worth jousting against. Indeed, the post effectively furnishes its own refutation; it advances a thesis which is based on...

Peter Guither explains the history behind Why Marijuana is Illegal.#

For most of human history, marijuana has been completely legal. It's not a recently discovered plant, nor is it a long-standing law. Marijuana has been illegal for less than 1% of the time that it's been in use. Its known uses go back further than 7,000 B.C. and it was legal as recently as when Ronald Reagan was a boy.

The marijuana (hemp) plant, of course, has an incredible number of uses. The earliest known woven fabric was apparently of hemp, and over the centuries the plant was used for food, incense, cloth, rope, and much more. This adds to some of the confusion over its introduction in the United States, as the plant was well known from the early 1600's, but did not reach public awareness as a recreational drug until the early 1900's.

America's first marijuana law was enacted at Jamestown Colony, Virginia in 1619. It was a law "ordering" all farmers to grow Indian hempseed. There were several other "must grow" laws over the next 200 years (you could be jailed for not growing hemp during times of shortage in Virginia between 1763 and 1767), and during most of that time, hemp was legal tender (you could even pay your taxes with hemp -- try that today!) Hemp was such a critical crop for a number of purposes (including essential war requirements - rope, etc.) that the government went out of its way to encourage growth.

Brian Leiter links to Noam Chomsky on the Iraq War and the capture of Saddam.#

Chomsky talks about the US's previous support for Saddam and similar relationships to other mass murderers, and how it is all irrelevant now.

Such practices reflect a trap deeply rooted in the intellectual culture generally - a trap sometimes called the doctrine of change of course, invoked in the United States every two or three years. The content of the doctrine is: "Yes, in the past we did some wrong things because of innocence or inadvertence. But now that's all over, so let's not waste any more time on this boring, stale stuff."

The doctrine is dishonest and cowardly, but it does have advantages: It protects us from the danger of understanding what is happening before our eyes.

For example, the Bush administration's original reason for going to war in Iraq was to save the world from a tyrant developing weapons of mass destruction and cultivating links to terror. Nobody believes that now, not even Bush's speech writers.

The new reason is that we invaded Iraq to establish a democracy there and, in fact, to democratize the whole Middle East.

And even supposing if these intentions were "true," Chomsky has this to say...

Throughout history, even the harshest and most shameful measures are regularly accompanied by professions of noble intent - and rhetoric about bestowing freedom and independence.

An honest look would only generalize Thomas Jefferson's observation on the world situation of his day: "We believe no more in Bonaparte's fighting merely for the liberties of the seas than in Great Britain's fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations."

Lisa Rein covers the truth behind Saddam's capture.#

An article:

Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was captured by US troops only after he had been taken prisoner by Kurdish forces, drugged and abandoned ready for American soldiers to recover him, a British Sunday newspaper said.

Saddam came into the hands of the Kurdish Patriotic Front after being betrayed to the group by a member of the al-Jabour tribe, whose daughter had been raped by Saddam's son Uday, leading to a blood feud, reported the Sunday Express, which quoted an unnamed senior British military intelligence officer.

The newspaper said the full story of events leading up to the ousted Iraqi president's capture on December 13 near his hometown of Tikrit in northern Iraq (news - web sites), "exposes the version peddled by American spin doctors as incomplete".

Lisa Rein's comments:

I hope this is getting as old for you as it is for me. I want a President that can tell the truth at least part of the time. How about once. I'd like to go a day or two, or maybe a week even, without hearing a lie from my President. I don't think it's too much to ask.

Well, at least now we know what the new terror alert level is all about. It's all about diversion: "Pay no attention to the information coming in from the rest of the world. Just be afraid and keep watching the box for further instructions."

Will R. writes about blogging students.#

I was thinking more about my journalism class and blogging last night. While many of my students are getting the hang of this, just as many aren't. I'm sure it's that some are simply more motivated than others, some feel more comfortable writing for an audience, others are more passionate about their topics, and some are just more confident in their abilities in general. But what those of us using Web logs are trying to articulate now are the strategies that will help students make the most of their blogging efforts while at the same time envision the ways in which they might be included in the curriculum. Here are a few that I've collected but not committed to blogemory...nothing earth-shattering I'm sure:

Blogging works best for students when they write about topics about which they are passionate. This is true of all of us, and of writing in general. Problem is, some of my kids really don't have a true passion (sad), can't articulate it if they do, or can't write about it in a school setting. I think job #1 is to help students find good topics to write about.

Student bloggers need to be student readers of blogs, and they need to interact with the writers they read. We all know this; if you want to be a good writer, you have to read good writing. Web logs allow us to take the next step and join the conversation, which leads to better blogging, I think.

Jessica writes about a Dean speech she heard. (Note: Jessica is a Dean supporter. :P )#

Then, he expounded on the difference between Republican campaigns and Democratic campaigns. He emphasized that Republicans often focus on negative things: things that scare people or things that divide our society. He wants to focus on challenges we have in common, namely jobs, education, and health care. He mentioned that these were all things that we've lost or that have been compromised under the Busn administration.

[...]

When asked how he is going to convince Republicans to vote for him, Dean opined that honest explanations appease and convince people about whom to vote for. He hopes that voters will weigh the importance of a stand he might take that they like versus a position he holds that they may not agree with and decide what is more important.

Dave Winer comments on the same visit.

I went to see Dean speak yesterday. I wonder how many people who support him have. Then I stumbled across an essay I wrote in 1998, about the Vietnam War and Clinton, and how we got to this place where we elect people who are "Successively better airbrushed, more and more tuned to polls, fighting for the center, telling us what they think we want to hear, trying to nudge the numbers up, but not relying on the minds of the electorate. They were smart not to rely on our minds, because there was no evidence that we wanted to use our minds." That was totally consistent what I saw with Dean last night. There were 150 people in the room, mostly it was about lies, bedtime stories, telling people what they want to hear. No minds activated. Some good lines, a glimmer that minds may have played a role in the Dean campaign at one time, but not today.

Ryan Overbey posts new pictures.#

Jorrit Wiersma writes about confusing having a child is.#

The problem of course is that we somehow have to educate her to eat her food. It can be quite frustrating. Sometimes she will spit out food that she seemed to like just a week ago. Sometimes we force her to eat one bite which results in a lot of screaming and crying and then she suddenly realizes she actually likes it and eats the rest of her food happily. And sometimes she doesn't. The really hard part is that you never know whether you are doing the right thing. I guess we don't really get points for consistency because sometimes when she doesn't want to eat we give her bread or even crackers so that she at least eats something and other times we don't. I think it helps if we scold her because she's smart enough to realize that she can avoid all the fuss by just eating her food. On the other hand, there are still plenty of times that she absolutely refuses to eat anything. At the moment I can only imagine that it gets worse if she can really talk and tell us that she doesn't want to eat her food.

I imagine this is the scariest part about having children - you don't and can't know what is right. *shutter*

New version of NetNewsWire is out!#

The Binary Circumstance on why heterosexual relations should be banned.#

I bring up this issue of consent because children rarely learn it from their heterosexual parents, especially the religious heterosexuals, whose entire view of existence is based on mystical beliefs that cannot be supported with evidence. For them faith and obedience are obligations, the highest moral good. There are choices but only one of them is acceptable; consent is a hollow concept with no real meaning when there is only one choice.

What this kind of upbringing produces are individuals at war with the possibility of real choice and real consent and the possibility of individuals who can mutually consent to relationships that make them happy. It produces people who are drawn to relationships where no consent is invovled. It produces people like Gary Ridgeway who killed at least 48 prostitutes, many of them teens, and Joseph Lehman Jr. who raped his own two-month old daughter. (Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein also pop to mind but typing a list of all the psychopaths that heterosexual relations have produced would eat up the rest of my life and I still wouldn't be finished.)

Oliver Willis on gay marriages.#

I find it pretty disheartening that so many Americans appear to be intolerant on the idea of civil rights for gays. I don't get it. As a heterosexual male, what does it matter to me if a gay couple is able to enjoy the same rights I would with my spouse? Why should I be entitled to some rights simply because the person I love is of the opposite sex, when gay couples are just as American and get second class treatment.

There are some shallow minded folks out there who spout things like "gays have never had it better", and while that's true it sounds disturbingly like the sentiment among many who couldn't understand what blacks were complaining about since they weren't slaves any more.

ScrappleFace reports on The Return of the King.#

(2003-12-21) -- Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright suggested today that the Bush administration influenced the timing of the release of the blockbuster movie 'The Return of the King' to boost the economy before the 2004 elections.

"In the first five days that movie has raked in $125 million," said Ms. Albright. "And that doesn't include popcorn, beverages and Sno-Caps. This is a major shot in the arm for the economy, and I find the timing suspicious. All three of these movies have been released during the Bush administration, and this one may create the economic tsunami that carries Bush to his second term."

Tyler Cowen on students writing their own recommendation letters.#

That being said, I am not very worried about the practical repercussions. Most people, especially undergraduates, do not know how to write a very good recommendation letter. They fail to realize that such letters, to be effective, should offer very specific and pointed comparisons. Those few students who understand this fact are probably too shy to call themselves "comparable to Greg Mankiw as an undergraduate." Nor will they write "comparable to your Professor Mediocre [fill in the name yourself!] as an undergraduate." So if a professor asks the student to write the letter, the professor does not care about the letter or student very much. The resulting letter is likely to be very generic and thus not very effective. In addition, the professor probably has a hard time saying much about the student. This again suggests the letter will be less than overwhelming, no matter who writes it.

Steve Koppelman writes about a visit a politician made to his sixth grade class.#

John Rowland was obviously ambitious even then. In an election that saw Ronald Reagan's macho swagger soundly defeat Jimmy Carter's compassion, Rowland ran for the Connecticut state legislature on swagger. He had a cop's mustache. He spoke to the class about an issue near and dear to the hearts of middle schoolers everywhere: tax cuts.

This was before Reagan went on to demonstrate that tax cuts could be accompanied by huge spending increases, as long as you can keep borrowing, a luxury seldom available to states and towns. As any kid in Monroe could have told you in 1980, tax cuts are accompanied by spending cuts. And spending cuts in our town meant school textbook shortages, not enough snowplows in the winter, and the public swimming pool we all went to every summer opening later and closing earlier than it had the year before. We saw the effects of tax cuts, and they sucked.

So here was John Rowland, directing an angry, adult Reaganomics stump speech that probably got applause at VFW halls and the Chamber of Commerce, to a roomful of middle school students and teachers in a town where taxes were the battleground. Maybe he was playing to reporters in the room.

Kuro5hin reports that Bjørn Lomborg was cleared of dishonesty charges.#

In 2001, Bjørn Lomborg sent tremors through the environmental movement with his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist.

Lomborg, a former member of Greenpeace, had come to believe that much of modern environmentalism was grounded in pseudo-science, incomplete information and misleading headlines. While he did not advocate abandoning environmentalism, he asserted that the situation was not as bad as groups like Greenpeace tried to make it look. In addition, he argued that much of the money we spend on environmental issues is wasted, and that we need to establish priorities for tackling environmental problems, rather than letting policies be driven by scary headlines. (For example, because Bush is afraid of being labeled a scorched-earther, the US is preparing to spend millions to reduce the amount of arsenic from our water. Unfortunately, arsenic has not been shown to cause problems at the previous legal standard or even much higher - and naturally occurring - levels. Meanwhile, Americans collectively yawn whenever the issue of fuel efficiency standards comes up.)

Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber writes about Newgrange, a five thousand year old tomb in Ireland.#

Newgrange is a clock. The shaft leading out to the roof box is precisely aligned so that on the morning of the Winter Solstice the first light of day will run directly into the middle of the tomb. Or, at least, it was precisely so aligned. It is so old that changes in the Earth's orbit have affected its operation. When it was built, the sun would have struck the back wall of the chamber, rather than the floor, and the light would have remained in the chamber for about four minutes longer than it does now. It was very accurate. The people who built Newgrange knew what they were doing.

A society — a civilization, if you like — is a hard thing to hold together. If you live in an agrarian society, as the overwhelming majority of people did until about two hundred years ago, and you are on the western edge of Europe, few times are harder than the dead of Winter. The days are at their shortest, the sun is far away, and the Malthusian edge, in Brad DeLong's phrase, is right in front of you. It's no wonder so many religious festivals take place around the solstice. Here were a people, more than five millennia ago, able not only to pull through the Winter successfully, but able also to build a huge timepiece to remind themselves that they were going to make it. It's astonishing.

Jonathan calls those bastards on their shit.#

The problem for non-creationist origin stories is supposed to be that they rely on something fantastically unlikely to have occurred. But here's a case which I allege to be parallel: I'm currently reading Christine Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity. Just now, I opened the book to page 61, and discovered the following remarkable thing -- the pattern of the left-most characters in each line on the page, read top to bottom, is "sTvmstvTawcIFseemcuTlormtomibouAanMc'r" Even ignoring punctuation, considering twenty-six letters and the upper/lower-case and italic or non-italic as variables, the probability of that string having occurred on a page by chance is one in (26 * 2 * 2)^38, somewhere on the order of 4.1 * 10^72. But surely that's not remarkable -- it's just what's there. We don't need to posit someone designing the page that way, even though it's fantastically unlikely that it should have turned out just like that.

(Korsgaard is a designer for the book, but presumably not for the layout of page 61.)

Fantastically unlikely things happen every day -- and we can discover true things that are unlikely to an arbitrary degree just by making them conjunctions (for example, even more unlikely than that string's occurrance is that string's occurrance in a paperback book. More unlikely still, that string occurred in a paperback book on a prime-numbered page!

Jessica posts notes from seeing Clark and Gephardt on Saturday.#

An older man spoke about his $4,000-a-year bill for perscription medication when he asked about Clark's thoughts on the recent Medicare bill. Clark expressed his displeasure with the bill. He says that the legislation may kill the program instead of working with it. He wants to focus on getting the drug companies to lower their prices. He doesn't understand why the government passed legislation limiting the it's power to negotiate with the drug companies and he wants to change that. He emphasized that the government usually negotiates for the lowest price when it's forming contracts. He can't understand why they don't do that with the pharmaceutical industry.

A man whose son is in the Navy inquired about how Clark would have prevented 9/11. Clark said that the current administration had been warned by officials in the Clinton administration about the threat Osama bin Laden posed. He thinks the Bush administration did not take appropriate steps to address the threat. He emphasized that the training of the president is key in how he addresses potential terrorist threats. Clark implied that there might have been problems with how Bush was trained. Clark indicated that he had that training because of his military background. Clark did state that he didn't think there was anything the Bush administration could have done to stop the terrorist attack on our country before it happened.

Ryan Overbey posts new pictures. My favourite.#