Electric Josh

DC
We were over at some friends' house the other night (where this cute baby was absolutely performing: four solid hours of looking cute interrupted only by laughing fits and the occasional snack) when I heard from across the room something to the effect of, "It's horrible. I can't stop paying attention to politics, and I know it's turning me into a ranting lunatic." I chimed in that I felt exactly the same way. You, my slavishly loyal readers, are probably unsurprised.

The interesting part, of course, is that this friend and I are almost certainly of totally different political persuasions. We manage to occasionally have conversations about politics, always without coming to blows or reciting canned, professionally produced talking points (which, after a while, would start to seem worse). They didn't poison our food because of our left-wingedness.

Go read about how real politics used to be like this.
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Marriage
One more gay marriage cartoon. Then I'm done forever until something way more ridiculous starts happening.
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Sunday Times
So the Sunday Times Magazine is already online---it usually goes up Saturday morning---and though it claims to be about inspiration, which is kind of dumb, it's all about design. What better way to spend a lazy holiday weekend? Now back to no longer pointing behind the paywall.
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Tunes
This cute baby loves The Beatles and Husker Du. An excellent start; dad is pleased.
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Bus
An Onion classic: Area Man Goes And Gets Himself Hit By A Goddamn Bus. I really need to quit my job and start a newspaper that reads like this.
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Lib
So while I'm busy giving a crap about newspaper op-ed pieces and stuff, Lib is having fun getting lost in the snowy woods below Hubbard Park. I guess I need to relax.
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Fear again
Friedman: "Whether we're talking about our public officials or your family deciding whether to vacation in Istanbul, we all have to learn to live with more insecurity. Because terrorists are in the fear business, and every time we visibly imprison ourselves, they win another small victory and become more emboldened." Thanks to Todd for the heads-up.
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Moon vs. Soros
Which sugar daddy is right for you? A consumer's guide. Handy test to see whether George Soros or Sun Myung Moon matches your political philosophy more closely. All the cool kids are pointing their websites at it.
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18
Happy birthday, Martha.
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Soros
I know I already pointed at this George Soros article in The Atlantic, but go read it again.

To come to terms with these [terrorist] threats will take some adjustment; but the threats cannot be allowed to dominate our existence. Exaggerating them will only make them worse. The most powerful country on earth cannot afford to be consumed by fear.

More voting
Wired, via slashdot:

California will become the first state requiring all electronic voting machines produce a voter-verifiable paper receipt.

The requirement, announced Friday by California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, applies to all electronic voting systems already in use as well as those currently being purchased. The machines must be retrofitted with printers to produce a receipt by 2006.

Test
Spelling test. I got 42/50 correct, which is worse than I had thought I'd done. Alas. Post your score in the comments; no cheating.
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Dick
The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick
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Money map
Which Democrats get how much money from where? Excellent maps.
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Trafalgar Square
Here's a webcam claiming to overlook Trafalgar Square, where the big protest is scheduled for today.
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Cover
Man, somebody tell me this isn't for real. Update: alas, it seems not to be a hoax.
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Southern Man
More news from way down under. Update: He sends the following:

We just did the bag drag to get set for the C-130 flight to Beardmore tomorrow at 08:30. We are the only group on the flight, although there will be lots of cargo. It may be hard to get through via e-mail, but I may be able to place one or two Iridium calls while we are out in the field.

We did go to the penguin ranch. No, there were no cowboy hats, but it was cool. Many penguins in a pen, one cool tube through the ice, and a warm and cozy set of huts way, way out on the sea ice.

So this it it for a few weeks. There *may* be email at Beardmore, but no one believes it.

Soros
George Soros, in The Atlantic, argues very calmly, and very persuasively, that, "[The President] is leading us in a very dangerous direction." That's about as vicious as it gets, folks. Remember when most of politics was like that?
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Goodridge
Read this before complaining about or celebrating the MA gay marriage decision. Come on, you're smart. Read it. (Or read this if you're lazy.)

"Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code."

Ivins
Molly Ivins: "It is not necessary to hate George W. Bush to think he's a bad president. Grownups can do that, you know. You can decide someone's policies are a miserable failure without lying awake at night consumed with hatred."
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Diamonds
Goodbye diamond monopoly. Turns out some dude has figured out how to make diamonds using chemical vapor deposition for $5 per carat. (Chemical vapor deposition is really, really easy. They used to let undergrads run the machines at UVM.) Now instead of costing two months' salary (are they kidding?!) and causing the severing of the hands of one or more Sierra Leonean children, diamonds can now be had nearly for free. Good. The diamond industry is amazingly scummy. Here's some background. Do your own google search. Update: The original article, in Wired. Highlight:

So, for now, Clarke is sticking with cultured. But in the end, he insists, it won't really matter. "If you give a woman a choice between a 2-carat stone and a 1-carat stone and everything else is the same, including the price, what's she gonna choose?" he demands. "Does she care if it's synthetic or not? Is anybody at a party going to walk up to her and ask, 'Is that synthetic?' There's no way in hell. So I'll bite your ass if she chooses the smaller one."

Security
Given how secure world-class security really is, remind me never, ever to run for President. The New Zealand Herald: "A lone anti-war protester has dodged tight security and scaled the gates of Buckingham Palace on the eve of United States President George W Bush's state visit to Britain." Yikes.
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2004
A Politics that is Dumber Than Spam.
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Sign
One last thing before bed: the church sign generator. For your entertainment convenience, I reproduced a mildly baffling (but probably pretty funny) bumper sticker I see sometimes.
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McJobs
This paranoid-sounding yelling from a week or two ago about sinister forces at work behind Merriam-Webster's removal of the word McJob from the dictionary turns out to have been true. Weird. One can't help but quote Gravity's Rainbow: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
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0-3
We've already begun the purge of the baby's size "0-3 month" clothes; they no longer fit. Hmmm.
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Moyers
Bill Moyer's keynote address to the National Conference on Media Reform is, among other things, the type of thing that causes me to realize that it kind of stinks to have had so little interest in history as a kid. Who'd have figured that history is just politics shifted in time?
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Southern Man
So we've heard from Dad again via email; he claims that the network connections down there are slow, which makes sense since the only way for information to get in or out down there is electronically via satellite or in hardcopy via plane. But he sounds like he's having an excellent time.

Since I'm assuming that most of you, like me, had only a kind of vague notion of how big Antarctica is, how it's shaped, and so forth, and since the vast majority of people I've spoken to recently have no idea where one would stay while down there, I've been trying to find information and, most importantly, decent maps of Antarctica online. It turns out that the CIA has a nice pile of information, although the PDF map they have is kind of light on detail. The highlight of the CIA's datasheet is the following Land Use chart:

arable land:	0%
permanent crops:	0%
other:	100% (ice 98%, barren rock 2%) (1998 est.)

More later.
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War
Those of you in the Boston area should note that David Rees, the author of the Get Your War On series, is going to be in Newton and then in Harvard Square the week after Thanksgiving. I might just have to go.
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Strings
So of course we missed the start of the TV series about string theory, but thanks to the magic of streaming video the baby and I have started watching it online. For what it's worth, even when I was a physicist and went to super technical colloquia all the time, the string theory guys would give essentially the same layman-oriented description of their work even to audiences of physics professors. It's that mathematical and, so far, that unreal; it has proved impossible so far to design an experiment capable of proving or disproving string theory. Folks, untestability is the very essence not of physics, but of metaphysics.

So anyway, while I think about all this stuff and try to figure out how to match up what Dr. Greene is saying with what I remember from school days, this cute baby stares at the colorful special effects.
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CPD
Dad reports from the ice. More, he claims, to come.
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This
Mom finds out about blog. (I hate the word blog.)
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11/11
Happy Veteran's Day.
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Voting
Hey, kids! The regular press has noticed the whole touchscreen voting disaster-in-waiting. Nice.
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Average
Okay, this is creepy. Apparently I am, in fact, the average Russian internet user. Click repeatedly on "Random Portrait" for hours of pixellated people-watching fun.
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Kid
At long last, more baby pictures. Have fun, and no complaining about the absence of captions!
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Unstoppable
Get Your War On fans will derive minutes of mindless entertainment from the new Unstoppable video game. It has bad words, so be careful, kids. What are bad words? Let's ask the United States Supreme Court!

Sophie: Dad, is it okay if I say "shit?"
Me, kind of stunned: Well, probably not. How old are you now? In what context are you using that word?
USSC: Sir, we'll answer that question for you. You don't have the legal training to answer it effectively. There are broad constitutional issues at stake.
Me:Wait a minute...
Clear Channel:You certainly won't hear that filth from us!
Me: Hold on. Don't I get to choose how to expose my kid to the world? Shouldn't she be allowed to hear some of George Carlin's seminal work if her mom and I think it's appropriate?
Clear Channel: What the hell heck do you know? Besides, someone in Nebraska might be mortally offended if they had to get up and change the channel. What if the Lawrence Welk they're accustomed to suddenly started spouting off such foul language?
Me: That's about as likely as their pastor suddenly spouting off such foul language on Sunday morning, isn't it? What's the point of bleeping out the "bad" words if you're going to play otherwise-uncensored Nine Inch Nails songs? That stuff's okay and George Carlin isn't? Why must you people be so puritanical, and inconsistently so at that? Besides, this is local radio we're talking about!
USSC and Clear Channel, together: What radio?
Me: Local radio.
USSC and CC: What what?
Me: Never mind.
Sophie: Dad, what's local radio? I thought everyone in the country listened to the same radio programs? You mean it's possible to originate radio broadcasts locally, so we can hear local music and regional bands on the radio?
Me:Yeah, although---
Clear Channel:No! Such impudence! That's complete nonsense! Radio must be centrally controlled!
Sophie: Well that's pretty fuckin retarded on its face.
Me: Hey! Watch your language. What if your grandparents heard you talking like that? (Although that is pretty precocious for a kid who's only eleven weeks old...)
Sophie: Sorry. Can I go check IM, see if my friends are online?

South
Dad is off to Antarctica. Have fun, dad!
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Deficit
Those nutty pinkoes at The Economist talk deficits.
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John, Howard
So just as I was starting to think that John Kerry was an okay guy, and would make a decent backup if anything untoward were to happen to Dean, Kerry said, "He ought to literally apologize to people." Curse those constant metaphorical apologies! They should be less figurative and more literal! (This, obviously, is something of a pet peeve.)
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Solar flare
Hey, look: the sun god is angry and narrowly missed killing us all.

IMPACT: A coronal mass ejection hurled into space by the superflare described below has just swept past Earth (at 1924 UT on Nov. 6th). Moderate geomagnetic storms and high-latitude auroras are possible during the hours ahead.

SUPERFLARE: Astronomers won't soon forget Nov. 4th, 2003--the day of the biggest explosion ever recorded in our solar system. The blast originated from giant sunspot 486, and on the Richter scale of solar flares, it measured X28. Smaller flares in the past have caused power outages and widespread auroras. The Nov. 4th explosion was not directed squarely toward Earth, and its effects so far have been relatively minimal. Even so, it was a flare to remember.

Fonts
The raster tragedy at low resolution explains why computer fonts mostly suck. It does so by way of showing all the hoops one must hop through in order to make a font even kind of okay.
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Code
The software industry in ten panels.
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karl
The vast right-wing conspiracy grows:

Karl Rove Ensures Republican Elected As Student Body President
McALLEN, TX—Thanks to the intervention of White House political advisor Karl Rove, McAllen East Middle School elected a Republican student body president Monday. "I'd like to give a special shout-out to Mr. Rove, for helping me beat [incumbent president] Luis Mendes," Paul Wenger said in his victory speech. "Thanks to him, I was totally able to expose Luis' idea of using candy funds to buy uniforms for needy students. As your president, I'll make sure that that money goes back into the school, where it belongs—and into the biggest pizza party that McAllen East has ever seen." Rove denied any involvement in the election.

Bright
Godless Americans launch a semantic crusade.

Be that as it may, it will be instructive to see if bright catches on. It certainly addresses the negativity problem: as The Chronicle of Higher Education has noted, "not incidentally, the word makes [atheists] all seem exceptionally smart." Still, the annals of semantic substitution of this sort—in which a name change is proposed for an entire group of people, and everyone goes along—are not voluminous. During the past few decades we have seen gay largely replace homosexual, and Native American replace Indian. Underprivileged has supplanted poor people. We no longer have housewives—we have homemakers.

In the god-drenched eras of the past there was a tendency to attribute a variety of everyday phenomena to divine intervention, and each deity in a vast pantheon was charged with responsibility for a specific activity—war, drunkenness, lust, and so on. "How silly and primitive that all was," the writer Louis Menand has observed. In our own period what Menand discerns as a secular "new polytheism" is based on genes—the alcoholism gene, the laziness gene, the schizophrenia gene.

cpd
News from dad.
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Voting
Okay kids, just in time for election day comes this exciting update of an earlier blurb from this space: EFF is suing Diebold. This is good!

Diebold, the company that makes safes and such, is getting into touchscreen voting machines. The trick being that there are some extremely shady features to these voting machines, like the ability to log in over a WiFi connection and change votes, of which there is no paper record. The complaints against the company, each more paranoid than the last, keep rolling in. The lawsuit about which this space is so optimistic stems from their attempt to money a bunch of rowdy college kids into shutting up about the general shabbiness of the whole outfit. Survey, then rant.
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Space
The chief irony built into this space is that it's hardest to fill when there's the most actually happening. Lots of postings here typically mean lots of semi-recreational time in front of the computer. Recently things have been made even worse by reading extra nerdy computer books (on the computer, of course) in what free time there is. Still working on that next batch of baby pictures, too.

At any rate, this space is still active. Maybe it's the season; Lib and dad seem to be similarly preoccupied.
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