Richard interprets a rule that The Yeti wrote today...#

TheYeti: "When a man gets on an airplane to visit a woman, he is going to try to sleep with her."

TheYeti's rule is the secondary reason—which isn't to discount its imortance—why I don't go and visit female friends who are a plane ride away, the primary one being a lack of sufficient funds. It's not so much the fact that I would try to sleep with them but rather the perception of at least two of my male friends who would would wonder what the real reason is. Quietly—and not so quietly—they would wonder if there was something "more" involved. (This whole notion of "more than just friends is problematic", because romance is a type of friendship, not more of a friendship.) They actually wonder that about all of my female friends, where "there's something there". And yet I hang out with them, go figure.

The rule—or rather the stigma, legitimate or not—applies doubly so to women men have never met physically. If a man is so eager to meet a woman he's never met that he'd pay for a plane ticket, it's almost by definition creepy.

Richard responds to me about bad "advice",#

He's saying that I came to him (or, more accurately, the web) with a problem, and rather than accept his "advice", which wasn't actually advice, but fake advice that intentionally sounds irrational to make a point, e.g. this. So rather than get a chuckle from it, I took it seriously and bristled. Well, it happens. People take me too seriously (or, very rarely, not seriously enough) and I took him too seriously.

I got caught up in my own argument, an argument that's not even mine, that all advice, be it good or bad, is to be rejected in principle because it is simply a subconscious attempt by the advice-giver to control the behaviour of the person receiving the advice. Time and time again, I read articles that tell me what to do, often without even explaining why. The appeal is based on the quality of writing and the authority of the writer rather than the reasons for doing something, i.e. how it benefits the person to do something and what the costs might be. An alternative—a better alternative— to advice is information. People are generally smart enough to make decisions for themselves, and provided with enough good information, people generally make the right one. The right decision for them.

I could not agree more on the problem with advice being subtle coercion. Offer knowledge that a receiver can do whatever he or she wants with, under the goal of giving that person an greater chance of making the best decision for themselves.

Kevin links to a wonderful series, The Philosophers.#

Moxie is hilarity.#

I was lucky enough to catch about 20 minutes of the 9th Circuit recall hearing which was being broadcast by CBS. Funnier than any comedy on prime time while being far less realistic than network court room dramas, I laughed more in 20 minutes than during the entire past season of SNL.

If you thought the Candidates in the recall were clowns, the judges of the 9th circus have them beat. It was a battle of one liners bordering on slapstick comedy.

Philip Greenspun keeps them coming...#

Imagine my delight in running into a friend yesterday. She's a 23-year-old graduate student in computer science at Harvard. Conversation rolled around to programming tools. Unprompted she said "What I think would be best is Common Lisp Object System with a modern type system". I was stunned. I thought it was only dinosaurs like me that clung to Lisp.

I had a second ephiphany for the week... Believing that Lisp circa 1982 plus some mid-1980s ML tricks thrown in is better than all of the new programming tools (C#, Java) that have been built since then is sort of like being a Holocaust denier.

Let Me Get This Straight reports a new famous lesbian?#

Christina "I kissed Madonna" Aguilera told a German newspaper that girls are much sexier than boys and more enjoyable to look at. "I love experimenting with my sexuality. I want to try out as much as possible. It would be wrong of me to hide this side of my personality... I find it hornier looking at women than men."
[Christina: girls are more of a turn on than boys, Gay.com UK]

The Yeti writes about the Death Camp of Tolerance...#

When you habitually feel the need to use the power of government backed up with violence to change the behavior of your fellow citizens, you aren't far away from the South Park version of Tolerance Camp.

You must inspire or convince but never coerce. This is why conservatives say that leftists are closer to fascists than those on the right. The left is all for using the government to make you act like they want you to act.

Try this the next time a leftist is telling you how things "ought to be." Try to get them to explain just how far they would go and who they would get rid of to bring about their utopia.

Richard makes me feel like an asshole.#

I was trying to be funny in that asshole sort of way that does the exact opposite of what was recommended. So if you come to them with a problem, they not only assume that you want THEM to fix but they completely trivialize it to the point of their "advice" being extremely unhelpful for it's vague obviousness.

Sorry buuuddy.

Scoble wrote about why Microsoft isn't a threat to Six Apart.#

I have been asked by several teams and people here at Microsoft about weblogging and what I'd like to see in a weblogging tool or service. I can't give away too much details, cause that would help our competitors. But, if I were a Microsoft competitor (like Six Apart), I wouldn't worry too much yet, because no team has asked me the important question yet.

What's that?

"How do you get the A-list bloggers using Microsoft's stuff?"

Via The Bikini Diaries is a blog about whether Penis Enlargement Pills Work, amazing.#

Hmm. No change on the erect measurements. I think what's happening with the flaccid measurements is that these penis enlargement pills are constantly trying to fill your penis with blood. Therefore you're always walking around with a partial erection. And that constant blood flow is how I think they work. They soften the tissue in the shaft of the penis and then pump blood through it, expanding it from the inside out.

Right On Apple!#

Chirac Urges a Transfer of Power...#

President Jacques Chirac called today for the immediate transfer of sovereignty in Iraq to the Iraqi people, and indicated that France would approve only a new United Nations resolution that recognized this need.

[...]

Asked whether he had been tempted to tell Mr. Bush, "You were wrong," he replied: "On subjects as complex as this, it is always wrong to think that you are right and the other person is always necessarily wrong. This is a serious mistake, and you always pay the consequences."

Joi Ito, I think, has just started a trend of bloggers putting up stealth disco videos.#

Ryan McGee writes about a weekend at the movies...#

"Once Upon a Time in Mexico"
Come the Depp, stay for the Mendes. I think it was either Rene Descartes or Buster Poindexter who coined the phrase "Hot Hot Hot", but in either case, I'm sure they were predicting the arrival of Eva Mendes. She hath o'erlept Ms. Knightley in my Top 5 Safety List. (For those of you keeping track: Garner, Hayek, Hannigan, Barrymore, Mendes.) Johnny Depp, while never achieved the maximum coolness level of "Pirates", still kicks major butt. Banderas and Hayek completely phoned this one in. And I couldn't figure out which was weirder: Willem Defoe as a Mexican mob boss, or Enrique Iglesias wielding a guitar case that doubled as a flamethrower. Both had me completely baffled. The movie was strictly a level C until one miraculous moment where the camera caught Mendes in full, tight-shirted glory. All of a sudden, we've got a B+ on our hands. Should win the Oscar for "Best Use of an Elevator Scene to Pad 8 Seconds and Men's Pants".

I love Apple, SO MUCH.#

My iPod died. I'm not sure how, but it just stopped working. I called Apple and a very friendly woman sent me to a very easy to use Web site where I filled out a few very easy forms to set up service. A few days later a box arrived with simple instructions on what to do with my damaged iPod. That was last monday. I packaged up the iPod with the materials they gave me and dropped it into the Airborne express box that day.

I got a brand new iPod only two days later. It also came with an apology letter, an explanation of the problem and a 90 day extension of my warranty — which was almost up. I was so amazed at the speed and ease of this process my jaw hit the floor. I had expected to be heavily questioned about the nature of the breakdown, and not in my wildest dreams did I think I'd get it replaced that quickly.

Big props to Apple for giving me the best customer experience I've ever had. I a world where I've come to expect the worst from big business, Apple has not only given me hope, but gained a loyal customer for life. Yeah Apple!

Via the KurzweilAI newsletter is a Space.com article about a new theory...#

If black holes and the Big Bang befuddle you, try wrapping your brain around this one: The entire universe may have been created in an explosion inside a black hole.

Temple also describes the whole scenario as a white hole, the theoretical opposite of a black hole because it tosses matter outward instead of pulling it in.

[...]

Temple can't say where the matter we see today originally came from. What existed before the Big Bang? This, in fact, is a thorn in the side of all cosmologists, and it may never be answered because we can't see time and space as it existed prior to time as we know it.