When I read this morning that a Bush aide, Timothy Goeglin, plagiarized part of a column for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, I was perplexed. Is it that hard to write your own opinion on something?
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I’ll refrain from speaking ill of the recently-deceased, but suffice it to say that I am not a William F. Buckley fan. Dennis Perrin dug up some clips of Buckley debating Chomsky about Vietnam in 1969, and I include them below to let interested parties draw their own conclusions.
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One of my internet bad habits is reading FARK.com. Occasionally I see worthwhile stuff there, and sometimes it keeps me connected with a certain aspect of the zeitgeist, but generally it falls squarely into the “time-wasting” category. Today, it managed to be quite depressing as well, due to the commentary on this incident: a woman was apparently threatened by a knife-wielding assailant; the woman called her husband; the husband showed up and shot at the assailant, missing; the assailant ran away; the husband got his SUV, pursued the assailant, hit him with the car, and then hit him with the car another two times, killing him. The prevailing FARK sentiment is that the husband is a hero for these actions.
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Despite the screenshot for this clip, it’s not about Ann Coulter.
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I’ve been waiting for an article about computers versus apostrophes in names for a while. As a software engineer who has a name with an apostrophe, I’m usually very unimpressed with systems that can’t handle names with apostrophes, and there seem to be many out there.
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This is another game based on fairly simple physics. It’s not as compulsive, slick, or evil as Untangle, but it’s got some similarities.
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Brian David-Marshall interviewed Jon Finkel about his recent Pro Tour win, and I found some things Finkel said fairly interesting.
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It’s mind-boggling to me that the United States is actually trying to build a fence between itself and Mexico. I mean, really. A fence? A fence seven hundred miles long?
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Jon Finkel, one of two candidates for the title “best MTG player in the history of the game”, won his third Pro Tour title (in Kuala Lumpur) over the weekend—seven-and-a-half years after his last PT win. He’d been away from high-level play for quite some time, but came back last year after being inducted into the Hall of Fame (Hall-of-Famers get automatic entries into Pro Tours).
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I finished Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal yesterday. In summary, the book is a statement of Krugman’s views on a modern society’s optimal economic setup, the fact that he believes that the United States of the 1950s–1970s was much closer to that setup than it was before or has been since, and his theories on how that state was reached, lost, and can be reached again.
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If you have OCD tendencies, avoid this game. It’s one of those games where you’re not even sure it’s fun to play, but you have to keep going. The end of a level brings momentary, fleeting, satisfaction, and then it dumps you right back in.
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I know that this was on BoingBoing so everybody’s probably seen it already, but I thought it was good enough to highlight. (For the record, sometimes I obsessively check to-do lists, and sometimes I ignore them completely.)
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Today the US Senate voted to authorize warrantless wiretapping, and to grant retroactive immunity to telecom companies who aided in the recent illegal wiretapping. I do, in truth, find this outrageous and disgusting, particularly since the upshot of the discovery and uproars appears to be “well, now we’ve made it legal and so you can’t cause trouble again by finding out what we’re doing in the future”. But the disgust and outrage are a tad on the anemic side.
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This John Lanchester article in the London Review of Books is an excellent overview of the current credit-related turmoil in the markets and includes a good summary on how banks work. Their manner of operation, in case you’re unfamiliar with it, looks remarkably like sleight-of-hand.
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Last Monday I went to a Long Now Foundation seminar by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan—both books I would recommend to just about everyone. The title of the talk was “The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought”, and while Taleb did talk about our historic inability to predict what was going to happen in the future, I didn’t feel that ‘future craziness’ was actually a major theme. (If you change “Crazier” to “More Unpredictable” you get a more accurate title.)
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So the US Government, primarily through the FBI, has been pseudo-deputizing a bunch of private-sector individuals to aid in “infrastructure protection”. The group is called InfraGard, and I’m not quite sure how to capture the mix of creepy and tacky (not to mention authoritarian) that they represent.
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Not El Chombo/Andy’s Val Gourmet, apparently.
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I voted today, although I have to admit that I did it without much enthusiasm. The major races don’t interest me that much, because it seems such a foregone conclusion that one of the front-runners will win, and I don’t support any of the front-runners. Indeed, Hillary Clinton took California, despite what seemed like a late push for Obama. Somehow I don’t see her (or Obama) representing my views too well…
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While working on the tournament runner application that’s part of the ongoing rewrite of sfmagic.org, I encountered a problem which I think is indicative of how important ways of viewing problems are for coming up with solutions, especially in programming.
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For the first time since moving to California, I missed the Super Bowl. Apparently I picked a pretty bad Super Bowl to miss, with the Patriots finally unable to mount a last-moment game-winning drive (maybe because the Giants, unlike the Rams and Panthers, didn’t leave the Patriots too much time on the clock at the end?).
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Short post tonight, recommending Who is IOZ?, a political-commentary blog that may be the height of snark.
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