I cannot get to The Yeti's blog. Very strange because I see Technorati has crawled it recently... Weiyad?#

Tony Pierce is very odd sometimes.#

ive got five more minutes to write you this morning. another flash from the past called me once they were gone, almost like people know what theyre doing. do you remember that episode of twilight zone where the aliens mess with peoples lights on the street? just the lights. they flick some on, and flick some off. some of the neighbors say whats going on that we have light and they dont. and the other neighbors say what do they have. and then they all start distrusting and getting all weird and in reality it was just the aliens. remember that one? that ones my life but instead of lights the aliens have hot chicks call me and come over and send gift boxes with varieties of cheese and the aliens try to figure out when im going to crack but all that ends up is i have discovered every type of cheese and you know what aliens

i fucking love cheese so keep switching on and off the bullshit all night long cuz this spaceman isnt ever gonna crack cuz this is my h0metown and im almost a hundred and ten and ive seen everything.

Pinder Johal recently conducted some very interesting research.#

one of the things i enjoy is getting girls to admit that they have lesbian tendencies. more specifically that they'd make out with other girls. my scientific research shows that you'd generally go further discussing "making out" rather than discussing vaginatarianism. the exception being of course if your friend is vulgar. if she is, then by all means go for the carpet munching discussion!

now, getting a girl to admit she'd make out with another girl is actually not that difficult. research shows that all you have to do is say the name of the first girl that came to your friend while pondering the question: Angelina Jolie.

Richard links to an article about a parody of a "lad" magazine, ie Maxim.#

I wonder, though, whether the lad mags (and broadcast analogues like The Man Show) are in such desperate need of satirization. Aren't they immune to it by their nature? The genius of Maxim is that it was a jiu-jitsu move in the gender wars. A couple of generations of men were raised to believe -- whether or not they were explicitly told so very often -- that they were the "objectifying," greedy, rowdy, infantile half of the species, a rude chorus of brawling, hairy, potential-date-rapists. The lad mags more or less embrace all this with a bellowed "Hell yeah!" In their pages men are the Dumb but Affable Sex: We like to buy gadgets, watch sports on cable, and look at boobies, and we're not going to change. This marketing idea has the powerful advantage of being one hundred per cent true, as far as it goes.

Via Metafilter is an article entitled, E.T. and God about what life outside Earth would mean for religions.#

The prospects for finding living organisms on Mars remain slim, of course, but even traces of past life would represent a discovery of unprecedented scientific value. Before any sweeping philosophical or theological conclusions could be drawn, however, it would be necessary to determine whether this life was the product of a second genesis—that is, whether its origin was independent of life on Earth. Earth and Mars are known to trade material in the form of rocks blasted from the planets' surfaces by the violent impacts of asteroids and comets. Microbes could have hitched a ride on this detritus, raising the possibility that life started on Earth and was transferred to Mars, or vice versa. If traces of past life were discovered on Mars but found to be identical to some form of terrestrial life, transportation by ejected rocks would be the most plausible explanation, and we would still lack evidence that life had started from scratch in two separate locations.

[...]

Some scientists believe that life on Earth is a freak accident of chemistry, and as such must be unique. Because even the simplest known microbe is breathtakingly complex, they argue, the chances that one formed by blind molecular shuffling are infinitesimal; the probability that the process would occur twice, in separate locations, is virtually negligible. The French biochemist and Nobel laureate Jacques Monod was a firm believer in this view. "Man at last knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance," he wrote in 1971. He used this bleak assessment as a springboard to argue for atheism and the absurdity and pointlessness of existence. As Monod saw it, we are merely chemical extras in a majestic but impersonal cosmic drama—an irrelevant, unintended sideshow.

[...]

Ascribing the origin of life to a divine miracle not only is anathema to scientists but also is theologically suspect. The term "God of the gaps" was coined to deride the notion that God can be invoked as an explanation whenever scientists have gaps in their understanding. The trouble with invoking God in this way is that as science advances, the gaps close, and God gets progressively squeezed out of the story of nature. Theologians long ago accepted that they would forever be fighting a rearguard battle if they tried to challenge science on its own ground. Using the formation of life to prove the existence of God is a tactic that risks instant demolition should someone succeed in making life in a test tube. And the idea that God acts in fits and starts, moving atoms around on odd occasions in competition with natural forces, is a decidedly uninspiring image of the Grand Architect.

Matrix Essays has a mythological analysis and prediction for the Matrix.#

Friggin' Dereks!#

Scoble reflects on his employer.#

Bill Gates keeps top spot on America's richest list.

That is just an unbelieveable amount of money. What's funny is that despite all that money, we both have to drive the same freeway to work.

Sometimes I joke that I'd just like an hour's worth of interest on that money. It used to be that if Microsoft's stock price went up $1, Gates would make about a Billion. Well, how do we get our economy going again?

A very short Letter To The Editor at the New York Times about cheating.#

All of these writers focus on the characteristics of the assignment to stop cheating. There is another way. Get students to understand why it is important to do the assignment. Then cheating won't make sense.

A small comment. In the book I'm reading, Jacques Barzun talks a little bit about cheating. I will write his thoughts and my reflection at a later date but for now I will just not this: It is irresponsible and immature for a student NOT to cheat. If your success relies on what degrees and academic credentials you have and those rely on your grades in high school and college classes (and thus exams) then you should do everything in your power to maximize your grade. With this in mind, you owe it to yourself to cheat as much as possible to get ahead - take a lesson from Enron, WorldCom, or Bush Junior. (This might be satire, but if you look around at successful people it's true.)

Patrick French in the New York Times writes about "Dalai Lama Lite"...#

The Dalai Lama has become whoever we want him to be, a cuddly projection of our hopes and dreams. This enthusiasm, though, has not translated into any tangible political benefit for Tibetans. He has been seen on advertisements for Apple computers and SalesForce.com software; significantly, he was not paid for either of these uses of his image. Some of the books that purport to be written by the Dalai Lama are scarcely by him at all, but have his face on the cover to increase sales.

In reality, Tibetan Buddhism is not a values-free system oriented around smiles and a warm heart. It is a religion with tough ethical underpinnings that sometimes get lost in translation. For example, the Dalai Lama explicitly condemns homosexuality, as well as all oral and anal sex. His stand is close to that of Pope John Paul II, something his Western followers find embarrassing and prefer to ignore. His American publisher even asked him to remove the injunctions against homosexuality from his book, "Ethics for the New Millennium," for fear they would offend American readers, and the Dalai Lama acquiesced.

Atrios calls The Threat Matrix "porn for Bush fans."#

Richard links a Quentin Tarantino article.#

[...] In a 1994 Playboy interview, Tarantino displayed the observant sensitivity that marks his writing and his movies. He described the tension between a man and a woman when a man walks behind a woman on a city street:

Is this guy going to do something? What's going on here? They're feeling it. And guys feel it too. I feel it. And I'm like, Hey, I'm just walking down the street. I just happen to be going the same way. I'm walking behind this woman, and she's thinking I'm a rapist. And now I'm feeling guilty for being a rapist when I haven't fucking done anything. So now I'm feeling guilty and feeling a little angry because I'm minding my own business. Like, I'm sorry I'm walking behind you. And she's thinking, Why the fuck can't I just walk down the street? All of a sudden there's this tension and anger about nothing.

It's that kind of careful attention to the quotidian and the banal that led critic Ron Rosenbaum, in a 1997 Esquire article, to herald Tarantino as a 1990s F. Scott Fitzgerald. "His tough-guy act, his tough-guy actors, and his blam-blam moments may disguise it, but Tarantino is an aesthete, a Fitzgeraldian observer of the delicate dance of social interaction," Rosenbaum wrote. "Because, at his best, in the interludes between the blam-blam, he's a genuinely curious philosophic investigator of manners and morals, more akin to a novelist of manners such as Jane Austen, say, than even to Fitzgerald."

Razib at Gene Expression writes about liberalism in South Africa as compared to other parts of the world.#

In The End of History and the Last Man Francis Fukuyama argued that the trajectory of political development showed that the triumph of liberal democracy over its rivals was within sight. Though Fukuyama's long-term projection might still be correct, his short-term optimism inspired by the thaw after the collapse of Communism seems to have been misplaced. The emergence of political Islam, the reversion of Russia to autocratic practice if not forms and the continued vitality of the Communist Party of China all argue that the march of liberalism is not proceeding in a steady fashion but halting for a respite. Granted, liberalism is the most vital political philosophy in the world today, in name, if not in fact. One of the hallmarks of liberal thought are axioms about human nature, human rights and human dignity, ideas that are today accepted in principle, though often breached in many polities. Many sophisticated utilitarian conceptions of a liberal political order, for instance that of John Rawls, still have in place inviolable rights which are sacrosanct no matter the general cost vs. benefit calculation methodologies. Rawls' own philosophy, articulated at length in A Theory of Justice, has been criticized by some as overly abstract and lacking in any grounding in the reality of the human condition. Such critiques are as old as liberalism, David Hume criticized the theories of nature used by Locke & Hobbes in the 18th century as well as heaping common sense scorn on abstractions such as social contracts. Contemporaneously in The Blank Slate Steven Pinker castigates modern political philosophy for looking to 18th century works as seminal and neglecting the real contributions toward an understanding of human nature and the nature of early human social life that modern science and history can shed light on.

[...]

The reality of the situation is that most of the world is excluded from the consumer class, and so do not focus on the finer things of life, do not give much thought to liberty, fraternity and equality, for the latter two are frankly cruel illusions, taunting abstractions. The liberal must face up to the fact that their vision, which by nature is universalist, has to deal with the reality of a world that is defined more by injustice and organically developed constraints on freedom. Within the context of the moderately affluent electorate of white South Africans the liberal message of the Democratic Party made sense as a counter-point to communal/corporatism, but in the multi-racial South Africa liberalism is a thin gruel for the mass of poor citizens who have little care for issues of private property and freedom of speech with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse stalking them. Tony Leon certainly knows the reality of the situation on some level, that liberalism is a lost cause as a broad-based movement, and though he argues in universalist terms, he is truly fighting for his people, the liberal middle-class, of whatever color.

[...]

In much of the rest of the world liberals exist among a sea of non-liberals, and there, the illiberal tendencies of the majority are more assertive than the United States, with our axiomatic documents and activist judiciary. Americans who see the world as the City on the Hill writ large make a grave miscalculation, the liberal pattern of neglecting the messiness of reality and taking common axioms as a given become an Achilles' heel. The free play of universalist axioms can only truly exist within narrow parameters seeded by the organic development of a society as it transitions from a pre-modern regime to a bourgeois society. Too often liberals think that just because everyone parrots their values we are in a liberal world. Instead I suggest that liberals acknowledge that communal/racial/religious ties are important, nay, paramount, to the majority of the individuals of our species, rather than viewing them as mere details in the panoply of diversity. Liberalism for these people is purely instrumental and we should always keep that in mind, individual freedoms and universal truths are fine, but so long as they benefit whatever values these people already hold. It can be argued that much of Europe is still illiberal, and certainly it was before World War II as illiberal democracies sprouted all over central & eastern Europe, so it should be no surprise that the forms of liberalism there paper over the realities of the ancient regimes battling utopian demagogues, both groups who liberals have little sympathy with. We should not be surprised if societies as diverse as Russia and South Africa slide away from liberalism, after all, as I have noted, with the expansion of the franchise, liberal parties lost their positions of dominance and dissent to more ends-oriented socialist parties on the Left. In the marketplace of ideas liberalism becomes appealing when some basic necessities are met. Even if those necessities are met it may take several generations for the transition to be made to a post-corporate/communal mind-set to an individualist/liberal one.

Godless at Gene Expression writes about "The Passion"...#

So, Mel Gibson's recent movie has aroused much fervor from the ADL, among others. I'd like to offer a few thoughts.

It seems to me that the central myth of Western Civilization for the past few decades has been retellings of the Holocaust. The mass murder of the Jews was one of the few nonmathematical things I can recall learning in my pre-college years. Movie [Shindler's List] after movie [Life is Beautiful] after movie has touched the topic. Comparably little celluloid has been devoted to what used to be the central myth of Western Civilization: the death and rebirth of Jesus Christ. The only flick I can think of in recent memory that touched upon the topic was Stigmata, but for every semi-positive Stigmata, there are hordes of explicitly anti-Christian movies like Bob Roberts and Dogma and many more implicitly anti-Christian ones (namely, anything with sex/violence/Hollywood in it).

Joey has a new "worst date ever" story...#

A little while later, she pulled her face away from mine and said "I'm hungry. How about you?"

"Famished."

"I'm housesitting at my parents' place. It's closeby. Let me feed you."

Her parents lived in a large house in Forest Hill, a posh neighbourhood full of Tudor houses with tree-lined streets expensive cars in the driveways. We were deep in WASP territory. I was reminded of the joke that went "What's the definition of a WASP? Someone who steps out of the shower to pee."

We entered the house through the front door, which into a large dark-tiled foyer, where we were greeted by The Waitress' youngest sister, a younger, darker-haired version of The Waitress herself. An evil thought entered my head -- Hey, let's date both of them! -- but (a) she was too young, and (b) in younger, more callow days I'd dated sisters before (keeping each one ignorant of my dalliance with the other) and I can assure you that it is not a good idea.

Brad DeLong wonders why financial markets are so optimistic.#

Morgan Stanley's Steven Roach wonders why foreign exchange traders, gibbering in terror as they look at the U.S. trade deficit, haven't dumped the dollar, pushing it down in value. He also wonders why bond traders, gibbering in terror as they look at the budget forecast, haven't pushed long-term interest rates up further:

[...]

I think I understand the bond market: some bond traders think that American fiscal policy is about to come to its senses again in the next two years, either because George W. Bush will be replaced by a competent president or because George W. Bush will be forced to delegate economic policy to some competent and Rubinesque Grand Vizier; other bond traders think that the recovery will stall and investment will remain low, hence there will be little demand for capital.

Don Park loves technology but doesn't love the hype and contrived use-cases.#

One of the common cited RFID use is a customer walking by checkout stand with a shopping cart. Items in the cart are automatically noted and payment is also made automatically. Fat chance.

Once RFID becomes common place, people will find ways to kill or replace RFID tags. If checkout is automated, one could walk out with a cartful of expensive goods and pay nothing.

Tony Pierce points to an awesome democrat.#

The Pierce:

i cant believe tomorrow is friday already.

i cant believe that finally a democrat stood up soberly,

raised his hand,

and when pointed at

called bullshit.

and i really cant believe

it was a kennedy.

but i can believe that the kennedy story has been up since 5pm, and here it is 7 hours later and drudge would rather lead you to hurricane stories, articles on how the new dem candidate - the general - would have backed the iraq war, and stories on how a woman sued after finding a tooth in her soup, and how another woman got $150k for a bad haircut. but he's not going to tell you about one of the most famous democrats alive calling out the president

for fraud.

The Politic:

In an interview with The Associated Press, Kennedy also said the Bush administration has failed to account for nearly half of the $4 billion the war is costing each month. He said he believes much of the unaccounted-for money is being used to bribe foreign leaders to send in troops.

[...]

Kennedy said the focus on Iraq has drawn the nation's attention away from more direct threats, including al-Qaida, instability in Afghanistan or the nuclear ambitions of North Korea.

"I think all of those pose a threat to the security of the people of Massachusetts much more than the threat from Iraq," Kennedy said. "Terror has been put on the sidelines for the last 12 months."

Philip Greenspun has a very unique way of looking at things...#

A recent story in the New York Times discusses the old story of Saudi oil money financing Palestinian terrorism. What's new is the revelation of the size of Hamas's budget: $10 million per year. Hamas is probably the world's most successful Islamic organization, delivering on its goals (see my Israel Essay for some quotes from their old Web site), admired by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and a constant presence on the world's TV screens and front pages.

By contrast, consider this story on Richard Grasso, who got his buddies on the board to pay him $140 million for his work as a manager at the New York Stock Exchange, 14 times the total annual budget for Hamas. Hamas had to start their enterprise from scratch and develop it in the face of opposition from the heavily armed Israel Defense Forces. Grasso inherited a #1 position in a market with little competition and a smoothly functioning organization. Members of Hamas risk their lives every day in their efforts to kill Jews and eliminate the State of Israel. Grasso took no personal or financial risks, only showed up every day and collected a paycheck once every two weeks.

James Robertson links to Alan Cooper on how costs can be managed and accounted for in the software business.#

ne hour of programming isn't related directly to one product sale; you can sell the same code repeatedly, so it's not a variable cost. However, it's not a fixed cost either. Writing software is an ongoing, revenue-generating operation—not the same as constructing a factory. Some might suggest that programming is research and development; the comparison works, but traditional accounting separates R&D from revenue-generating operations, so this doesn't fit either. You'd be wrong to discount this little terminology mismatch as a minor quibble for bean counters to debate. It has a huge effect on how software is funded, managed, and—most significantly—regarded by senior executives.

You and I create software, and business executives create revenue streams and profit centers. You and I measure our success by the product's quality, and business executives measure their success by their investments' profitability. They do this by applying the language of business mathematics, which recognizes fixed costs, variable costs, corporate overhead, and R&D, but, unfortunately, has no model appropriate for software or programming. Accounting is the basic language of business, and its categories are so fundamental to all business measurement and communication that contemporary executives have internalized them completely. They see programming as another corporate expense to fit into an existing category. Most simply treat programming as a manufacturing effort—a variable cost. This is the worst possible choice because it prejudices their business decision-making hopelessly.

[...]

The only available economic upside comes from making your product more desirable by improving its quality, and you can't do that by reducing the money you spend designing or programming it. You must invest more time and money on the research, thinking, planning, and design to make your product better suited to your customer's needs. Instead of reducing what they spend to build each object, software companies must increase what they spend to build all objects. This is the essence of the real new economy. The intangible but extremely complicated patterns of thought are that software has value only when it's accompanied by the programmers who write it. No company can treat programmers the same as a factory because programmers demand continuous attention and support well beyond any factory.

James Robertson has an interesting idea about why software, movies, and construction have such bad budgets and schedules.#

Think about other industries - how many movies do you hear about that run on budget and on time? The interesting thing about this is how software, movies, and construction are similar - in many, many cases they involve working with a lot of people you haven't worked with before - using a management team that may not be known or respected by all those involved. In other words, they are all ad-hoc projects that run with ad-hoc teams. There are some directors who seem to work with the same actors (and crews) time and time again - and I'd bet good money that, as time goes by, their on time/on budget numbers get better. Just as any construction crew that stayed together would - just as any software crew that stayed stable would.