Believe There's A Way
Eric shows a sad picture of blind begging musicians.#
Last year in Beijing I listened to these guys outside the largest book store in the city. I thought they were quite good. I still wonder if the blind musicians in China have a place to stay at night. Seoul also had blind people in the street but rather than perform music they all carried portable radios. In Seoul contrary to what the local news will report I did see homeless people; however, most of the homeless that I saw did not appear to be physically handicapped. A large portion did appear though to be mentally ill, similar to what I have seen at home in America. I often saw the blind beggars being dropped off in the morning or picked up by what I assume are their guardians or relatives.
Matthew Yglesias writes about the weirdness of Dean.#
What's so odd about Dean is that while he has all the trappings of a candidate offering sweeping liberal reform proposals -- large, enthusiastic, group of supporters, panicked moderates, a frightened establishment -- he doesn't actually seem to have all that much in the way of sweeping proposals. His biggest plan is simply to repeal the Bush tax cuts. That's good policy, but there's nothing incredibly innovative or thrilling about the idea of putting the tax rates back to where they were in 2000. And then he wants to pursue what are, basically, incremental health care reforms that will only become more incremental when they make contact with a Republican-controlled congress. So, I guess I'm pretty much fine with all that, but if our nominee is going to be someone stuck getting labeled as some kind of far-left guy it would be nice to have someone who'd done more to deserve it.
Donald Sensing links to Austin Bay on the War on Terror and the Czech Republic's President Vaclav Klaus on his opinion of the EU.#
Though the Czechs have contributed troops to coalition forces in Iraq, it is the bitter lot of America that in defending liberty and the lives of innocents from Al Qaeda's sociopaths, we are required to "do more." Some Americans bear a greater burden of that defense than others, such as soldiers and police. It's a damned lousy lot.
I recall sitting in my tank along the old East German border watching Russians watch me. Winter is a curse in Germany, for field soldiers. For Alpine skiers, of course, it's winter wonderland. December 1975, and I asked myself why the heck am I here freezing in a tank? The answer: Only America could "contain" the Soviet Union. In Frankfurt, fat cat turf, American troops were dirt. In border villages, Germans who lived near the communist guard towers smiled and gave us absolutely superb beer. The residents of Muhle -- a real kuhdorf -- weren't in Frankfurt's dream world.
I admit it. In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, I hoped America would no longer have to "do more," at least with tanks and rifles. That hope was a short, sweet dream.
Recently, a radio interviewer asked me how long attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq would continue. His anxiety and concern were genuine and palpable. I hated my response: This war will go on a long time, not simply in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in other sad corners on the planet. There isn't an easier way.
John Daley writes about growing up and leaving learning and loving new music behind.#
It can be tough trying to stay familiar with good new music without getting caught up in the culture that the music is embedded in. It's always been that way, but as I get older, that culture increasingly belongs to a different, younger generation. It defines itself by excluding people like me, and to tell the truth, I don't want to have much to do with it, either. But that's not to say that I want to live in the musical past and give up on finding new interesting artists. Therein lies the dilemma.
I feel this happening to me. I don't really pay much attention to pop-culture anymore and barely know new artists except for a few local ones that are spin offs of older local bands I've liked. I'm so square sometimes.
Sarque links a great Onion article, Revolutionary New Insoles Combine Five Forms of Pseudoscience.#
MASSILLON, OH—Stressed and sore-footed Americans everywhere are clamoring for the exciting new MagnaSoles shoe inserts, which stimulate and soothe the wearer's feet using no fewer than five forms of pseudoscience.
"What makes MagnaSoles different from other insoles is the way it harnesses the power of magnetism to properly align the biomagnetic field around your foot," said Dr. Arthur Bluni, the pseudoscientist who developed the product for Massillon-based Integrated Products. "Its patented Magna-Grid design, which features more than 200 isometrically aligned Contour Points™, actually soothes while it heals, restoring the foot's natural bio-flow."
Jon Buscall comments on Love Actually.#
Love Actually was just what I expected: British pornography. An excess of everything supposedly British: tea and toast, foppish chaps and girly girls. There was even a wonderful two-finger salute to Tony Blair and his American counterpart-in-crime George Bush.
[...]
Nonetheless, I left the cinema smiling and once again convinced that love is, as a wise man once said, all you need.
Kevin notes how fun it is to watch John Kerry implode.#
Kevin links Woman trampled by holiday shoppers.#
ORANGE CITY, Fla. -- A mob of shoppers rushing for a sale on DVD players trampled the first woman in line and knocked her unconscious as they scrambled for the shelves at a Wal-Mart Supercenter.
Patricia VanLester had her eye on a $29 DVD player, but when the siren blared at 6 a.m. Friday announcing the start to the post-Thanksgiving sale, the 41-year-old was knocked to the ground by the frenzy of shoppers behind her.
[...]
"All they cared about was a stupid DVD player," she said Saturday.
Paramedics called to the store found VanLester unconscious on top of a DVD player, surrounded by shoppers seemingly oblivious to her, said Mark O'Keefe, a spokesman for EVAC Ambulance.
[...]
Ellzey said Wal-Mart officials called later Friday to ask about her sister, and the store apologized and offered to put a DVD player on hold for her.
Wal-Mart Stores spokeswoman Karen Burk said she had never heard of a such a melee during a sale.
"We are very disappointed this happened," Burk said. "We want her to come back as a shopper."
Jim Moore wonders about how presidential candidates get connected, and if it has something to do with their donor network.#
Here is an interesting question: If a political candidate could get all the financing he or she needed from 100 donors, should the candidate do it? If the candidate had the technology to get the financing instead from several hundred thousand or even millions of people, should the candidate do it?
I recall a friend who is a major liberal donor saying with nostalgia that "back in the good old days you could go to just three or four people and have the funding for a presidential run." Eugene McCarthy's campaign in 1968 is the classic example, funded by Stewart Mott and a handful of others.
Now, hmmmm. McCarthy didn't do too well. Neither did McGovern. What if the reason, in part, was not that they were too liberal for the times, but that they relied upon too few donors? And as a result did not connect with enough people, and did not allow enough people to become connected to them?
I think he's spot on with how candidates get elected now, but not how they should be elected. Obviously, the candidate with the most support should, and will win, because the largest number of people want that person as their leader. The problem is that right now the only way to show your support and get 'connected' to a candidate is to give them money. Because the candidates need so much money that is the ticket to entry. Support should really be measured in how many people want a candidate, not how many people are willing to donate a great some of money (whether individually or as an aggregate) to a candidate.
Dean Esmay on Senator Clinton and the people's view of the Democratic Party.#
To be clear, it is not really fair to tar Senator Clinton with that entire brush. She has, in fact, been quite reasonable on the Iraq war. If she were just another Senator, I'd even say she's behaved in an exemplary fashion. Her tone and her rhetoric should be emulated by more Democrats, most especially those running for President. If most of them were as reasonable as she has been when it comes to the war effort, I doubt that resentment of the Democratic Party would be as high as it is these days. I know I certainly wouldn't be as disgusted with them as I am right now, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that.
Unfortunately, I think your average person sees Hillary Clinton as the backroom leader of the Democratic Party. They also see her doing absolutely nothing to upbraid Democratic Presidential candidates who, for the most part, have been using the inevitable casualties and setbacks in the war effort for their own partisan ends. Every casualty proof of failure and incompetence, every success ignored or portrayed as insufficient. That's how the most partisan Democrats have been behaving for most of this last year, and most of the Democratic Presidential candidates have either done this directly, or tacitly given it approval by not objecting to it. With no one (except obscure figures like Zell Miller) within Democratic ranks calling people out for this attrocious behavior, it makes Democrats look terrible. Your average moderate Democrat might be able to escape being lumped in with the worst elements like that, but Senator Clinton is largely seen as one of her party's main ringleaders. This makes her powerful, but it also makes her look more guilty by association than your average Senator or Congressman.
Razib at Gene Expression writes about Christian colleges.#
First is a factoid about how they have supposedly got higher SAT scores of the last few years, except that because the SATs were 'recentered', the scores are exactly the same. (In fact a little lower.)
Also, the "acceptance" of evangelical schools almost certainly is a harbinger of their decline as distinctive institutions. After all, Harvard was founded to train Puritan ministers, but within 150 years it became a fortress of liberal placid Unitarian thought, and today is one of the capitals of American secularism. In the 18th century Princeton was founded as a rebuke of Harvard by Presbyterians who hewed to a more orthodox theology, but today is it little different than the other Ivies. The Catholic colleges like Georgetown, Boston College and Notre Dame were founded as alternatives that inculcated Catholic values, but today they have shifted to meet the other elite institutions in their intellectual climates. A few years ago, William Dembski was fired from a position at an institute at Baylor University because of his aggressive espousal of Intelligent Design. Evangelical colleges need to be cautious in what sort of respectability they want....
Richard thinks about blogging books. (The impetus was Joi Ito.)#
Joi Ito: "reading a book while thinking about what to blog is a slow, but interesting way to read a book." I've done that before (see here,here, and here), and blogging stuff in print is a little odd, because bloggers and weblog readers are used to being able to click to the source of the quotes, but having to actually hunt a book or article down is a little, which usually involves physically going to the library and waiting if the item isn't available, well, it's not very "Internet". Some things are best read in print form, however—I regularly photocopy long articles in print editions of The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, usually because that's where the articles appear, and it makes reading them on the bus a lot easier—and books are no exception.
I mainly blog books because I want to remember things about them in a searchable manner, or they make me have thoughts just like weblog entries. I think the main reason I mostly blog non-fiction books is because that's mostly all that I read. At least more recently.
I really like hearing about what books people like, so I can put more books on my list. Reading is fun, mmmkay?
Richard comments on Betsy Devine's comment that search engines and the Internet make us more intelligent.#
Betsy Devine: "search engines make all of us smarter." But what happens when the information contained in them is false or, worse, has the ring of truth to it, or sometimes even worse than that, is information that should be kept private? The Internet—search engines comprising a small subset of it—makes it easier for us to find the truth, but it also makes it easier to find lies. It makes it easier to love and find love, but also to hate and find hate.
I very much agree with Richard. The Internet is just a tool, and it can be used in many different ways. On one hand it can make it easier to get a more diverse collection of opinions than would otherwise be accessible in traditional journalism and discussion. But also, it almost guarantees that you can always find someone who agrees with you and remain as ignorant as you want to be. (There was a comment about this in Code.)
Also, to paraphrase Harold Bloom, the big problem with the Internet is that it confuses in the minds of the people who use it the difference between Information and Knowledge, and more importantly Knowledge and Wisdom. My definitions of these things: Information is the hard results of experience, data and impulses; Knowledge is the first-order reduction of information into rules and understanding; Wisdom is the intimate understanding of something after time and contemplatio, the conceptual feeling and nature of the thing.
I think the only one of these you can get from the outside world is Information, and you must build your own models of Knowledge and Wisdom. The problem that is particular to the Internet, however, is that it encourages a very short attention span (ie, hyperlinks and short passages) that shatter the focus and contemplation that lead to the higher spheres of understanding.
Dan Sugalski has a pragmatic description of what A Type is.#
Ultimately, what the heck's the point of types? (Besides the excuse for an argument, of course) There are three big ones.
First, from a theoretical standpoint, they may, in the right system, allow you to prove your code is correct at compile time.
Second, they help catch some typos, provide a bit of help catching API changes (the ones that involve changing the types of the parameters, though that's arguably a Horribly Bad Thing), and provide something of a memory crutch for using libraries. (I personally find that last one useful, since I find details like argument ordering occasionally dribble out of my brain for less-used functions)
Third, they help the optimizer, and this is the one I like the best. Having types available at optimization time can mean the difference between knowing that foo is a generic thing and foo is a platform-native integer, something that can mean an order of magnitude or more difference in speed of use and memory usage. Not, perhaps, a huge difference for one variable, but it's something that can add up quickly.
Tony Pierce advises Tiger Woods.#
you need to check yourself bro.
how many majors have you won this year while youve been diddlin this'n?
zip. shes no good for you. even your crazy old man knows it.
"Let's face it, a wife can sometimes be a deterrent to a good game of golf," Earl Woods said regarding the announcement of his son's engagement.
unless youre willing to say, "im tiger woods and i dont give a fuck about golf any more, all i care about is this blonde, all blonde, swedish peice of ass," then stanford didnt teach you shit.
Joi Ito wonder if girls play dumb just to let guys show off.#
Goffman wrote this in 1959. Is this true today?
Goffman American college girls did, and no doubt do, play down their intelligence, skills, and determinativeness when in the presence of datable boys, thereby manifesting a profound psychic discipline in spite of their international reputation for flightiness. These performers are reported to allow their boy friends to explain things to them tediously that they already know; they conceal proficiency in mathematics from their less able consorts; they lose ping-pong games just before the ending.
According to the marketing talk on bowling alleys that I heard the other day, there is a funny behavior that is quite common. The guys try very hard to impress girls at the bowling alley and they start out OK, usually doing better than the girls at the beginning. These guys start to get tense and begin to perform more poorly towards the end. The girls, on the other hand, start to get the hang of it, remain relaxed (which is important for bowling) and usually win at the end, leaving the guy grumpy. Many bowling alleys have ping-pong tables which allow the guy to try to regain their pride and allow the girls to give it bac
I know that I play dumb for girls.
Moxie writes about the stupidest man on Earth.#
The next day I got this email:
Mox,
I'm very attracted to you and had a really great time at dinner last night but I simply cannot believe you belong to that party and I will not associate with you.
I'm sorry, I really liked you until I heard you are a Republican.
-John
Now either that was the most contrived "thanks, but no thanks" or the DNC has him on the payroll. He's not MY liberal boyfriend. Thank gawd.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid!
Will Baude wonders if the government should exclude theology students from state scholarships.#
Ostensibly, the issue at hand will be whether the First Amendment allows the government to exclude religious groups, etc., from a benefit given to non-religious groups (for example, whether a municipality could create a secular-school-only voucher system).
But I wonder, is excluding somebody from the study of theology really a disfavoring of religion? I mean, atheists study theology too, and so long as the test for the scholarship doesn't require one to say which "side" one is on, then does the decision to disfavor the study (both positive and negative) of religion really equal the decision to disfavor religion itself?
I'm on the side on letting them have them. I ponder what my favourite Theology student thinks.
A joke from Dean Esmay.#
Q: What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with a Unitarian Universalist?
A: Someone who knocks on a lot of people's doors, but isn't really sure why.
Joi Ito thinks about his presentation of self.#
Read more of Goffman's "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" thinking about how I consciously and sub-consciously show or hide facets of my identity depending on the context. Today, Marko introduced me to his mother and father. His father is Martti Ahtisaari, the former President of Finland and a very well known global diplomat famous for his skill in crisis management. I had heard a lot about his father and was looking forward to meeting him in person. As I was taking my morning shower, I was watching myself thinking about what I was going to talk about with him, trying to imagine what things would be interesting and how those things would affect his opinion of me. It was an odd thing. I consciously watched a lot of the things that I do sub-consciously and realized how much I was actually managing and presenting my identity. What might we have in common? Do I want to talk more or listen more? Do I need to impress him? A lot of things were going through my mind.