Kasia writes about knowing interesting and strange things.#

That's all normal (for me) but it is amazing that I also happen to be an inexhaustible fountain of useless knowledge. Have a topic? I probably know some completely weird and useless factoid about it. When I was in grade school I used to win quiz contests with one half of my brain focused on some incredibly stupid and dangerous experiment and the other half wondering if the cute boy from the other team likes me. I can name authors of books I never read, Latin names for plants I've never seen and quote from movies nobody cares about. All this before my first morning coffee.

I'm often asked "How do you know all this".

I don't know. Really, it all just accumulates in my brain pushing out useful information, like simple regular expressions, the last location of my car keys and the fact that I promised to finish up a certain project. And that's just an example from today's afternoon, morning was more exhaustive.

My answer to "How do you know all this?" is: "This is what I do."

Dienekes writes about the argument around The Passion.#

Christians should of course be mindful of the crimes perpetrated against Jews by Christians at the past. Perhaps, they should ask for forgiveness for these crimes as the Bloom Holocaust Center requests. But, are Christians of today really responsible for the crimes of Christians of the past? Isn't this what we are trying to avoid, to put blame on the people of today for what their genetic/spirtual ancestors did? If Christians are blamed for past crimes by Christians, then Jews should be blamed for past crimes by Jews, e.g., for the role of 1st century Jerusalem Jews in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Ryan Overbey writes about Baptists.#

"God destroyed a whole city over this issue," she said, referring to the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. "We're trying to save our city, our state."

Why didn't the reporter press her on this? It would have been simple. "Excuse me, ma'am? Are you going on the record as saying that the entire state of Massachusetts will be destroyed by a vengeful deity as the result of today's proceedings? Would you care to comment on the exact nature of the destruction? Will it be an earthquake, or fire? Or will we all spontaneously transmutate into pillars of salt?"

Sometimes I really wish I were a religion reporter. It would be so much fun.

Henry Farrell points to Ed Felten who writes: "Google cannot be perfect, ever."#

His rejoinder: Google results don't represent some Platonic ideal of the truth - they're the product of collective choice.

Google is a voting scheme. Google is not a mysterious Oracle of Truth but a numerical scheme for aggregating the preferences expressed by web authors.

This means, as Felten suggests, that Google isn't perfect, and can't be. Indeed, the point is underlined by Arrow's possibility theorem which says, more or less, that any form of aggregate decision making is going to be flawed under certain reasonable assumptions.

Michael Feldman: Dean was sank by "a combination of poor advice, sloppy execution, and being played like a pansy by a Big Media Machine [...]"#

The Internet pundits have been questioning the Dean media strategy for some time. It just seemed that they were sucking up millions from the 'net and shoveling it directly into the coffers of the Big Three TV networks for scads of ads - handing the cash to the dastardly dudes who turned on the campaign just as it was showing signs of making some real headway in transforming the electoral panorama.

Why would Joe Trippi, the prescient political guru who invented the Dean Internet strategy and alone among major campaign managers seemed to "get it" from our point of view, take all of the money raised by alternative media and hand it over to traditional media? Turns out he was getting a kickback for every single ad!

Joe Trippi is such a joke.

Jessica Baumgart writes about the class she spoke to. Interesting. (The link to the Harvard Crimson magazine is dead though.)#

R. Lo writes about what was great or good about Clark.#

Whatever. If I must tip my hand, Clark was up until now my favourite of the Democratic candidates, largely because he was general with real achievements—even though at the time, I (wrongly, in hindsight) opposed one of those achievements—but not insignificantly because of how he described meeting his wife. Sure, it was any one of coached, acted or exaggerated, but it was an effective display of humility. He may or may not be human, but in that quote, he sure comes across as one. It's funny that people don't understand why Clark wouldn't call Bush a deserter, but it's an easy one: as a former general, he has a pretty good idea of what a deserter really is.

Matt May begins his Arnold body remoulding adventure.#

I burst out of the evil mirrored room, with the energy of... uh... well, no energy, really. Not even enough for a decent metaphor. And off we go to the workout area most feared by geeks: the free weights. It is a given that everyone behind the metal bars in this section can bench press my entire body. Half of them can curl me. So it's always fun to hop onto a bench and hoist a mind-blowing 90 pounds. In my state of near-death, I manage almost an entire set of 15. Then, Jim says, more push-ups: ten of them, to be precise. My arms wobble under my weight. I somehow do three, having to suffer the double embarrassment of finishing the set from my knees. Further attempts to push anything more than 30 pounds from a prone position prove fruitless.

I got distracted by a mini-presentation and now have overrun the time I allotted to myself to write this. I'm trying something new with my blogging. I will only blog for two hours at a time, and I split up my 1100 feed list into 100 "Every Day" reads and the rest equally split over 7 days, chosen at random. This means that every day I will read about 200 blogs, and about 100 of those will be different each day. I'm also working on a custom aggregator for myself to do other things... but I'll talk about that later.#