Category: Links

Some additional reading September 1st from 23:14 to 23:56:

• Sciencedebate 2008 – Beginning with these 3,400 questions, Science Debate 2008 worked with the leading organizations listed to craft the top 14 questions the candidates should answer. These questions are broad enough to allow for wide variations in response, but they are specific enough to help guide the discussion toward many of the largest and most important unresolved challenges currently facing the United States.
• Obama Answers Top 14 Science Questions « The Martian Chronicles – Sciencedebate2008.com has come up with a list of 14 science policy questions for the candidates to answer, and Obama just provided his answers. Here are my notes, highlighting key points in case you don’t have time to read the whole thing:;
• Democracy Now! Host and Producers Arrested at Republican Convention | The Trail | washingtonpost.com – ST. PAUL — Democracy Now! radio host Amy Goodman and two producers were arrested while covering demonstrations at the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn. Goodman was released after being held for over three hours, but is still waiting to hear when Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar would be released.

  "I was down on the convention floor interviewing delegates when I heard that two of our producers had been arrested," said Goodman. "I ran down to Jackson and 7th Street, where the police had moved in."

  Goodman said that when she ran up to find out what was going on, she was also arrested.

  "They seriously manhandled me and handcuffed my hands behind my back. The top ID [at the convention] is to get on the floor and the Secret Service ripped that off me. I had my Democracy Now! ID too. I was clearly a reporter."

• Focused–The Sequel – Swampland – TIME – "Frank Luntz/AARP focus group of undecided voters–this one in Minneapolis and with some bad news for John McCain: they don't like the choice of Sarah Palin for vice president. Only one person said Palin made him more likely to vote for McCain; about half the 25-member group raised their hands when asked if Palin made them less likely to vote for McCain. They had a negative impression of Palin by a 2-1 margin"

A few interesting links for August 29th through August 31st:

• Baby news strikes a chord: Politics | adn.com – Sarah Palin is allegedly eight months pregnant in this picture. Either she is wearing a corset, or she is lying, and the baby really isn't hers but her daughter's.
• Yankees will drag you out of the stadium if you try to go to the bathroom during "God Bless America" – Another reason to hate the Yankees:
  "The Yankees are serious about their bizarre prohibition on going to the bathroom during the playing of "God Bless America" during the Seventh Inning Stretch: a man was dragged out of the stadium for daring to stand up and move around instead of singing a patriotic, religious song. I really like Tommy Smothers's formulation of the principle at work here: "America, where you're free to say anything you want, and you'd better not say what you're not supposed to!"

A few interesting links for August 28th through August 29th:

• Why Oh Why Can't We Have Better Pollsters? – Polls are ridiculous, ignore them if you can.
  "But Gallup doesn’t report its daily results, they report a multi-day rolling average. Abramowitz notes that if you report a ten day rolling average, you get a chart where nothing happens — Obama maintains a flat lead of 3-4 points. Again, a stable race. But if instead of doing either of those things you do what Gallup actually does and report a three day rolling average, you get these pleasant looking peaks and valleys in the race. The change over time here is large enough in magnitude (unlike on the ten day chart) but also slow enough in pace (unlike on the one day chart) to be plausibly interpreted as public opinion shifting in response to events. And since the human mind is designed to recognize patterns and construct narratives, and since it suits the interests of campaign journalists to write narratives, people interpret the peaks and valleys of the three day average as real shifts in public opinion."
• Dwindling In Unbelief: Whose face do you see on the moth? – "Isn't it great? Jesus has returned again — this time on the back of a moth in east Texas.

  But I'm not so sure that it really is Jesus. I mean, aren't those horns on the top of his head? And what about those long, goat-like ears and beard? It looks more like Jesus' little brother Satan to me."

  that's freaky. Looks more like a Rasta from Texas if you stare long enough

• Poynter Online – Open Letter from Roger Ebert to Jay Mariotti – "What an ugly way to leave the Sun-Times. It does not speak well for you. Your timing was exquisite. You signed a new contract, waited until days after the newspaper had paid for your trip to Beijing at great cost, and then resigned with only an e-mail. You saved your explanation for a local television station.

  As someone who was working here for 24 years before you arrived, I think you owed us more than that. You owed us decency. The fact that you saved your attack for TV only completes our portrait of you as a rat.
  Newspapers are not dead, Jay, although you predicted the death of the Sun-Times and the Tribune. Neither paper will die any time soon. Job- hunting tip: It is imprudent to go on TV and predict the collapse of a newspaper you might hope would hire you. "

• "Crossroads" – "A blues gem from the master, Robert Johnson. It worked wonders for Cream, better than for Johnson, and, truth be told, Clapton's hard rock cover has always appealed to me. But it doesn't even begin to approach the complexity of Robert Johnson's original, which mixes at least 3 time signatures: 3/4, 4/4, and 5/4: amateur guitarists out there, good luck trying to pull off these polyrhythms!

  I once read in a Very Serious Newspaper that Johnson was "a fine blues musician who had trouble counting to 12." No doubt, that same critic wrote somewhere else that Guernica was proof positive that Picasso was a fine painter who had trouble drawing horses."

  (oh, and the "Seth" in the comment flame-war is not me, just for the record)

Some additional reading August 28th from 13:30 to 14:33:

• Steve Jobs obituary published by Bloomberg – Telegraph – Ooopsie.
  "An obituary of very-much-alive Apple founder Steve Jobs has been accidentally published by the respected Bloomberg business news wire."
• Brain Transplant – SuperDuper! I already own, but WInClone I should investigate, and see if I need it in the future
• Nikon D90 plus hands-on preview: Digital Photography Review – I probably won't update my Nikon D80 to the D90, but just in case…
• Nikon | Universcale – One of the coolest corporate promos ever to strike the web, Nikon's „Universcale is an exquisitely rendered interactive Flash animation conveying epic orders of cosmic magnitude. Spanning subatomic particles on the left to the entire known universe on the right, this infinite yardstick is one technical chart you'll want to play with for a while…

Some additional reading August 27th from 11:14 to 22:39:

• New Haven Advocate: Tom Tomorrow's Convention Blog – interview with Tom Hayden – "Hayden: No … I've been to thirteen conventions, I've been in protests, I've been in party politics, I'm 68 years old and I was retiring out, but there's this emphasis on the fortieth anniversary (of the '68 Chicago convention), which is kind of a background noise, and so I had some books coming out, one of them on the Chicago trials, so City Lights suggested I come here. I've been on about five panels but along the way as I was preparing the books, my son and daughter-in-law were pushing me on Obama, so I became a convert to Obama just when I thought I was retiring out. And I keep telling him, that that's his message that people like me should retire out."
• Media Matters – Tom Brokaw, historian – "Following Clinton's convention address, [Tom] Brokaw on why it's tricky for the Dem to attack the GOP candidate: "When John McCain was sitting in a prison in Hanoi, Bill Clinton was writing letters to his ROTC commander trying to get out of the draft!""
• Media Matters – AP "FactCheck" distorted Dems' claim that McCain voted with Bush "90 percent of the time" – "According to Congressional Quarterly, McCain's presidential support scores (the percentage of roll call votes on which he sided with Bush's position) for each completed individual year of Bush's presidency are"
• Hullabaloo – Village Fair – For instance, I was riding on a tram yesterday with a delegate from the midwest who was festooned with Hillary buttons. I asked her if she was excited about the speech to come and if she expected it to be controversial. She said that she hoped Hillary felt free to bask in the glory a little bit but that she knew she would come through for Obama. I asked her if she was going to vote for her in the roll call and she said she was sent there by people who voted for Clinton and she wanted to cast that vote. But she also said that as soon as he was announced the winner she was going to take off all of her Hillary buttons and put on her new collection of Obama buttons, which she pulled out of her bag to show me. I asked if she would work to get him elected and she chuckled and said, "of course I will, I'm president of the Democratic Club!"
• PUMA Hunting – "From the media's coverage of the convention, you would think that Denver is the gathering ground for such voters, that you can find a PUMA behind every bush and around ever tree. The reality on the ground is that the vast majority of Clinton supporters here will be voting for Obama in the fall, many of them enthusiastically. You can observe throughout Denver Democrats wearing Hillary shirts with Obama pins, or vice versa.
  And yet, we are treated this morning by punditry and articles about how "many Clinton supporter say speech didn't heal divisions."
  It is one of the favorite tactics of the traditional media to build coverage upon false equivalency in order to portray friction or controversy in a given situation. A global warming expert–representing the opinion of 99% of scientists–is put up against a fringe climate change denier and is presented as being on equal footing."
• BPA Free Bottle and Sippy Cup Cheat Sheet : SafeMama | One-stop child safety – BPA Free Bottle and Sippy Cup Cheat Sheet
• Chicago Sun-Times :: Chicagopedia :: – Fun reference library
• WordPress Coda Clips Collection –
• McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Phrases Commonly Used by 1950s Housewives That Were Often Misinterpreted by the Housewives' Husbands as Blatant Requests for Sex. – "I think it's time to wax the linoleum."

  "Has anyone seen my muffin pan?"

  "Looks like I forgot to pay the milkman."

  "I'll just put my pie on the windowsill to cool."

  "How about brown-bagging it for lunch tomorrow, dear?"

  "Yahtzee!"

  "Ward, it's time you and the Beaver had a little chat."

A few interesting links for August 26th through August 27th:

• Build a Green Roof – Wired How-To Wiki – "Consider installing a living or green roof. Plants on your roof can reduce your heating and cooling bills and protect your house's waterproofing. That's /in addition/ to all the other good things, like cleaning air, filtering water and providing a feast for your senses."
  Structural Engineering might be the most important step. Wouldn't want your beautiful garden to come crashing down on your dinner table, would you?
• Random Thoughts – "Spouse speeches at these conventions usually are fairly forgettable. I’ve been trying to remember some from the past. The only presidential candidate wife whose convention appearance I remember is Pat Nixon in 1972, for some reason. And I don’t remember if she actually spoke. I just remember that when she appeared on the stage she got huge applause, which I took to be in sympathy. Wow, Pat, you put up with that creep. How do you do it?

  I also remember one veep spouse speech — Marilyn Quayle, 1992. She was so hateful, so arrogant, so smug, she was nearly unbearable. I remember the reactions of co-workers, mostly women, the next day — usually a finger down the throat, to suggest gagging. I think that she and Pat Buchanan’s declaration of culture war helped Bill Clinton win the election."

Some additional reading August 25th from 12:22 to 15:10:

• Chinaskis and All You Can Eat Bacon – "one thing Chinaski’s has kept around is the Monday-night baskets of unlimited bacon. 1935 N Damen Ave at Homer St "
  Unlimited bacon? And Bukowski?
• I Am a Brilliant Original and Idiosyncratic Thinker but Don't Ever Disagree With Me – Richard Cohen a L.I.N.O., has perfected his wine. Matt Yglesias wonders why anyone reads Cohen:
  "Cohen clearly relishes his self-conception as an independent thinker. And presumably the whole reason he’s glad to be a Washington Post columnist in part because that gives him a large audience of people who care about politics. Given all that, of course people will sometimes disagree with him! But that’s now how he sees it, and certainly he sees no need to engage with his critics on the merits — instead, they’re just like Communists!

  The whole mindset is bizarre but also bizarrely widespread. You’d think that people who write for a living about public affairs wouldn’t be so thin-skinned."

Some additional reading August 24th from 16:31 to 23:00:

• BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Marley statue unveiled in Serbia – “A statue of late reggae legend Bob Marley has been unveiled in a small Serbian village during a rock festival as a token of peace in the Balkans.” There should be statues of Bob Marley in every city: I’ll wager there are fans of his music in every city. Rather see a Marley statue than some war lord/general on a horse.

• 

• History of Political Economy: A New Course I Am Not Going to Teach This Year–or the Year After – Pretty good list of books to read. I’ve read some, have purchased some that are on the unread pile, but some new to me.
• High Mercury Levels are Found in Tuna Sushi – Duh! – A blast from the past, a past that still is with us… “No government agency regularly tests seafood for mercury.”
• The Felonious American Dream – “Cindy’s father, who barely finished high school, went off and distinguished himself in World War II in a B-17 and came back with practically nothing and realized the American dream, and I am proud and grateful for that, and I think he is a role model to many young Americans who serve in the military and come back and succeed. I didn’t realize the American Dream included being a mobbed-up convicted felon. [http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/content/printVersion/167059 ]

  But seriously, usually it’s the Democrats who are mobbed-up. Most Republicans have the money to engage in organized crime so high level that it’s called “foreign policy.”

• Germaine Greer on Condoleezza Rice and her power pearls | – I edited out the “pearl necklace” obscenity, you can imagine it yourself.

  ” Angela Merkel, the most powerful woman in Europe, wouldn’t be seen dead in the full-on row of pearls. I suspect that Helen Clark, prime minister of New Zealand, doesn’t have a pearl to her name. Pearls are tears; Diana Spencer wore her jewelled ligatures as signifiers of subjection. Condie Rice is George Bush’s creature, and when he steps down he will take her with him. The consensus is that she will not find another job in politics. Hillary has taken to wearing pearls in defeat, which leaves only Michelle.”

• Netroots and Housing Gaffe – and wouldn’t this be hysterically funny? Use 2004 talking points from conservatives against them.
  “Glenn Greenwald has a list of the quotes from 2004 calling Kerry a gigolo. As a commenter has suggested, it should be possible to splice the audio quotes into a radio commercial or video. It would probably be quite inappropriate as an Obama campaign ad, but Brave New Films, some other group, or even the SaysMe route or a viral video, might work better.
  Suggested framing:

  Here are a group of people slandering a good man who has served his country honourably.
  – actual voices of limbaugh, coulter etc., edited to leave in the content but leave out the name of the person slandered –

  Shouldn’t political campaigns be about real issues than such character assassination?

  The name of McCain never needs to be mentioned. It would both make the point about McCain and about right-wing hate.”

• democracyarsenal.org: Biden People – “But what has impressed me most, for years, is his staff. He knows how to pick ‘em, and that’s no small thing. Brilliant people come and go in DC, but rarely do they also have the ability to pick quality staff the way Biden does. His folks always are among the brightest from a policy standpoint, but also possess a sophisticated political acumen. It’s a rare but valuable combination. … I’ve always gotten the sense that their boss respected them for their abilities and listened to their ideas rather then them simply having to implement his. They were encouraged to push hard and dig deep on issues. …
  As a result of having a staff that is so good, Biden is almost never behind the curve of policy developments. He’s proactive, not reactive.That’s a huge strategic advantage, and as a result, becoming a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is a badge of validation among foreign policy folks. “

Some additional reading August 24th from 10:49 to 14:57:

• Farmer's Almanac predicts below-average temperatures for most of the US this winter — chicagotribune.com – Excellent, hope there is record snow this winter.
  " People worried about the high cost of keeping warm this winter will draw little comfort from the Farmers' Almanac, which predicts below-average temperatures for most of the U.S.
  "Numb's the word," says the 192-year-old publication, which claims an accuracy rate of 80 to 85 percent for its forecasts that are prepared two years in advance. The almanac's 2009 edition, which goes on sale Tuesday, says at least two-thirds of the country can expect colder-than-average temperatures this winter, with only the Far West and Southeast in line for near-normal readings."
• They Never Said It – "In my 'Odds and Ends' folder on my computer I've got a file called "They Never Said It." In it I put every example I come across of a famous line of dialogue that was never said by the fictional character it's attributed to. It's a fairly short list so far (a list of misquoted real-life people would be much longer),"

Some additional reading August 23rd from 20:00 to 20:55:

• Lyle Lovett Never Made a Dime on Record Sales – "Lyle Lovett has sold 4.6 million albums in the United States since 1991, but
  “I’ve never made a dime from a record sale in the history of my record deal. I’ve been very happy with my sales, and certainly my audience has been very supportive. I make a living going out and playing shows.”
  “Records are very powerful promotional tools to go out and be able to play on the road, but you do have to think about it as a way of sustaining itself at some point. I’m very excited about being able to do some of that on my own, maybe.”
  Crazy. Lyle Lovett is high profile enough, where does all the cash go? Wheat grass smoothies?
• Confessions of a blogger – Roger Ebert's Journal – Ebert gets a little mea, and misty-eyed, about the blogosphere.
  "Now I know I was wrong. I started this blog in May, and it has enriched my life. I have been astonished by the high quality of the comments received. I have also been educated, amused, moved, corrected, encouraged. I personally read all the comments that are submitted, and after four months I have received not one obscene message, not one illiterate message, not one hostile message. Those few comments I have not published were not dumb or offensive, but simply things like well-wishes that I didn't think most readers would be interested in."

Some additional reading August 22nd from 11:50 to 16:47:

• The right and men who live off their second wives' inherited wealth – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com – "there are only two options for Democrats in response: (1) purport to "rise above it" and thus ensure that they get slaughtered in a one-sided, one-way War of Personality Demonization which renders issues irrelevant (hence: the all-American Everyman War Hero versus the rich, out-of-touch, effete elitist), or (2) attack the GOP candidate using the same lowly character themes in order to neutralize the attacks and prevent the election from being decided on these grounds."
• Temper, Temper Lil Johnnie – "By the day's end, the Democratic National Committee was threatening to escalate the fight further by highlighting McCain's connections to the "Keating Five" savings and loan scandal, in which the senator ended up before the Senate ethics committee.
  "They go Rezko, we go Keating," said a Democratic strategist, speaking on the condition of anonymity to divulge potential campaign strategy. "If they want to escalate, bring it on."

A few interesting links for August 21st through August 22nd:

• Anne Trubek on Why We Should no’t Still Be Learning Catcher in the Rye – "If Salinger needed to acknowledge Dickens in 1951, today any new adolescent coming-of-age tale must go through “all that Holden Caulfield crap.” In the 19th century, a bildungsroman showed the growing maturity and self-awareness of a young person. That remains more or less true, but now the equation for the modern bildungsroman is more like, as a friend puts it: “Horny plus bored minus transportation divided by the whole of one’s interior life, multiplied by an inverse ratio of miles to a city or a place where there is anything at all to do.”"
• Hacker: Gymnast He is 14, not 16 – Salon Olympics Daily – Salon – Close readers of our blog already saw this story, but now national press has sniffed something is not right in IOC-land.
  "Stryde found some Excel spreadsheets hosted on Chinese government Web sites that contain He's name and the birth date 1-1-94. During the two-day process, these spreadsheets have had a habit of disappearing as fast as Stryde can find them, but readers are downloading and saving the files as fast as they can."
• PKD's Obscure 18th Century Philosophical Allusion of the Day – After finding a mysterious strip of paper that reads SOFT-DRINK STAND instead of an actual Soft-Drink Stand in one of Dick's most amazing scenes ever, Time Out of Joint's protagonist Ragle Gumm expresses an interest in studying philosophy, saying to his brother-in-law Vic, "I've read some [philosophy], in my time. I was thinking of Bishop Berkeley. The Idealist. For instance -"…
  Bishop George Berkeley was a 18th century philosopher/metaphysic who developed a very complex notion of subjective reality, dubbed by him as 'immaterialism' and later termed by others subjective idealism, which contends, in part, that no object exists without someone perceiving it. In other words when a tree falls in the woods and no one's around to hear it, it doesn't make a sound [although that's a simplification since the tree falling in the woods riddle is basically a vocabulary problem that depends on the definition of the word 'sound'].

Some additional reading August 21st from 20:41 to 20:49:

• Roseanne Cash spanks the hippie bashers – "You have to sympathize with the McCain campaign for this move. After all, they got rejected by ABBA, and after something like that, you start to consider expanding past the living for a musician to support your cause. But Johnny Cash is quite the overreach. Then again, these are the people that have the audacity to claim the Martin Luther King would have sided with them, so it’s not like shame puts any kind of constraint on their behavior. "
• Paul Jackson and the iPhone’s Camera – Scan to the right for some funky results. I'm trying it

Some additional reading August 20th from 13:17 to 20:48:

• Debunking two anti-Obama e-mails | Salon News – Luckily, we haven't seen too many of these fake emails. In case you have been, bookmark this page for later.
• The Happy Hour of Aquarius – Awesome, vintage advertising.
  "Are you having trouble getting drunk? Are your mixed drinks not having the proper effect, fast enough, or perhaps engendering too large a hangover? Does your choice of drink preclude picking up the partner you truly desire and deserve at your local bar?"
• What Makes for a Good Blog? | 43 Folders – "As I think about the blogs I’ve returned to over the years — and the increasingly few new ones that really grab my attention — I want to start with, ironically enough, a list. Here’s what I think helps make for a good blog."
  I doubt B12 would fit into anyone's definition of a 'good blog', but I'm not paid by the word like some of the more popular blog plantations, and what ends up on a page reflect my current obsessions. A little of this and that, the same things I would tell you about if you sat in the cubicle next to me. I like if you read me every day, but if you don't, I won't cry, much.
• Tell Zell – Sam Zell is not popular with Tribune employees (journalists, and others), especially not with the ones he has fired.
• Sonic Youth Silver Session for Jason Knuth – Discovered my copy of this CD stuck in between some other CDs. There was a typo in the suicide prevention hotline phone number, ooops!
  "a note on the music: silver sessions were taken from an evening when sy had to do vocal overdubs for 'a thousand leaves' — the band upstairs was hammering out some funky metal overdrive and we couldn't "sing" properly (?!) — we decided to fight fire with molten lava and turned every amp we owned on to 10+ and leaned as many guitars and basses we could plug in against them and they roared/HOWLED like airplanes burning over the pacific — we could only enter the playing room with hands pressed hard against our ears and even then it was physically stunning — we ran a sick outmoded beatbox through the p.a. and it blew out horrendous distorted pulsations. Of course we recorded the whole thing and a few months later we mixed it down into sections, ultra-processing it to a wholly other "piece"
• Stryde Hax: Hack the Olympics! – "There's been some widely publicized controversy regarding the competition age of the Chinese women's gymnastics team recently. Rather than be too CNN, I decided to take a page from my friend Johnny and investigate on my own. I have an Internet connection, that means I should be able to verify the age of the gymnasts in question with primary state-issued documents and find out for myself if someone's cheating, right? Right. Let's go to work."
• TSA security theater | MetaFilter – "Two commercial pilots find themselves on the no-fly list. One pilot sues after having his flight privileges revoked, while the second pilot (and a five-year old sharing his name) note they can bypass the watchlist by checking in using their initials instead of their full names. TSA has also found themselves in the news this week for disrupting 40 flights and damaging 9 planes during an overzealous security check. "

Some additional reading August 20th from 09:49 to 11:47:

• DVDpedia – Do you know where your DVDs are? – I wonder if this application works with Netflix? Viewing is nearly the same as owning (I rarely watch a film twice)
• TidBITS Home Macs: Wine with Bento – "Setting up a database manager requires a great deal of expertise and planning but setting up a list manager does not. All you need do is figure out how you want to be able to sort your list – by whether a wine is red or white, by price, etc. – and set out this information in separate fields. The remaining information you can divide into whatever chunks you find convenient."
• Tankboy – Jumping on the Mosaic Bandwagon – Note to self: do this! Even though some of the questions are rhetorical, or worse, unanswerable, answer them anyway.

  "Type your answer to the questions into flickr search
  -Using only the first page, pick an image
  -Copy and paste each of the urls in the Mosaic Maker

  1. What is your first name?
  2. What is your favorite food?
  3.What high school did you go to?
  4.What is your favorite color?
  5.Who is your celebrity crush?
  6.What is your favorite drink?
  7.What is your dream vacation?
  8.What is your favorite dessert?
  9.What do you want to do when you grow up?
  10.Who/ what do you love most in life?
  11.Choose one word that describes you?
  12.What is your Flickr name?"

• ENDPAPER: HOW TO; Solve The New York Times Crossword Puzzle – New York Times – "Mental flexibility is a great asset in solving crosswords. Let your mind wander. The clue ''Present time'' might suggest nowadays, but in a different sense it might lead to the answer yuletide. Similarly, ''Life sentences'' could be obit, ''Inside shot'' is x-ray and my all-time favorite clue, ''It turns into a different story'' (15 letters), results in the phrase SPIRAL STAIRCASE."

  I wish I had enough not-already scheduled leisure time to work on the crossword every day.