More Get Your War On, including the suggestion that the Times modify its motto to All the news that's actually un-fact-checkable horseshit pulled out of a conman's ass and solemnly regurgitated on the front page, just so we could keep sitting at the tough guys table.
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I took the train today for the first time in a while, which afforded me the chance to read the New Yorker while the sun was still up. (Why doesn't this space's sidebar have a link to the New Yorker?) At any rate, I seem to have pretty much known nothing about the history of marriage.
...Marriage as we know it today is the product of a particular history—a history that explains both its public character and the private expectations we have for it. The advent of same-sex marriage brings into focus a much larger transformation in how we have come to imagine the institution.Marriage as institution. I finally got annoyed by the recent sudden increase in the casual use of a secondary (or tertiary, depending on the source) definition of the word institution, so I looked it up. Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) said:
2. That which instituted or established; as:
(a) Established order, method, or custom; enactment;
ordinance; permanent form of law or polity.
The nature of our people, Our city's
institutions. --Shak.
(b) An established or organized society or corporation; an
establishment, especially of a public character, or
affecting a community; a foundation; as, a literary
institution; a charitable institution; also, a
building or the buildings occupied or used by such
organization; as, the Smithsonian Institution.
(c) Anything forming a characteristic and persistent
feature in social or national life or habits.
We ordered a lunch (the most delightful of
English institutions, next to dinner) to be
ready against our return. --Hawthorne.
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Son of a bitch! Eric Idle in Rutland, VT?! The mind boggles at the thought of a Monty Python member in Rut-Vegas. He seems to have launched his North American tour from there. Can someone please tell me I'm in error? Bonus: Eric Idle noodles on about The Owl And The Pussycat:
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea(You can't make this stuff up!) Reminds me of being six. Must get a copy of Edward Lear's A Book of Nonsense to read to the baby.
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
"O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!"
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Atlantic interview with Brian Greene, string theory physicist and popularizer:
While many of us have successfully moved past the learning challenges associated with biking and swimming, there remain concepts to master. Among them are phenomena that impact everything we think, do, and say—including biking and swimming. I speak of such beasts as the theories of Maxwell, Mach, Newton, Einstein, and others. Yet unless we are scientifically inclined, we avoid trying to understand them. If we accidentally happen upon one, we tend to pull up our collars, pull down our brims, and slink away. Few scientists have come along to make regular folks feel confident enough to try to comprehend such sophisticated concepts as general relativity, for example.The trouble I've found with Greene's explanations of string theory, like all explanations of string theory, is that they insist on being essentially nonmathematical, which seriously hampers the listener. Show us at least an approximation of the math, dammit! Wave your hands about how it degenerates into Feynmann diagrams if you blur your vision enough; compare and contrast for us the parts of the math that looks kind of like the equations governing real strings; anything other than these stupid CGI graphics and cute naming conventions.
For example, this kind of thinking is bullshit:
Because of the limitations of our senses, the reality that results from accepting string theory is wildly different from the one that we experience. In Greene's bold new world, for example, there are eleven dimensions and time moves not only forward, but in all directions.No! Physics seeks to describe precisely the very same world we live in right now, so if you find yourself writing sentences like that one then you've either misunderstood what physics is all about or descended into unhelpful poetry. This is a pretty fundamental point. New theories subsume the predictions of previous successful theories, rather than change them. For example, if string theory didn't demonstrably predict gravity or electromagnetism then it would be useless; in fact, failure to predict that human-sized observers would experience three space and one time dimension under conditions like those on Earth is a very good way to tell that your physics theory should be thrown away.
Speaking of the Times, here's Dan Kennedy pointing us to their non-apologia for letting Judith Miller get duped by Ahmad Chalabi and then putting her regurgitations of his (Iranian-inspired?) fabrications all over the front page for three years without ever bothering to do any fact checking, and then running rowbacks (sometimes) several days later buried deep inside stories that were in turn buried deep inside the paper. Wen Ho Lee must be reminiscing fondly of his own time in the sun. Update: Tom Tomorrow is even less charitable:
...In order to preserve their precious access to power, the Times, and papers like it, too often serve as stenographers to said power. Doing so this time has left them with serious blood on their hands, and I hope they are deeply ashamed.
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The New York Times Link Generator works. (The last time I tried, it didn't.) Never send the Times personal information (real nor made up) again!
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I should start riding the T again just so I can tell these guys to go screw. Real Americans aren't afraid.
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General Anthony Zinni on supporting the troops: "Look, there is one statement that bothers me more than anything else. And that's the idea that when the troops are in combat, everybody has to shut up. Imagine if we put troops in combat with a faulty rifle, and that rifle was malfunctioning, and troops were dying as a result."
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The Times: When Even Mathematicians Don't Understand The Math:
"Our brains evolved so that we could survive out there in the jungle. Why in the world should a brain develop for the purpose of being at all good at grasping the true underlying nature of reality?"Non-paywall copy here.
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Quick comment: it is seriously bizarre that the President was in Carlisle, PA, where your heroes from this space used to live. It's not a big town.
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Best intro ever: Megadriver is a brazilian heavy metal band devoted to videogame music.
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So Google News is really a pretty cool page, but a bunch of the articles it links to don't go directly to news articles, but instead to registration pages where I'm expected to provide demographic information (sometimes detailed) in exchange for that particular paper's editor's slight rearrangement of the AP's single-sentence paragraphs written at a third-grade level. Uh huh. (A-and if an article can't be visited directly by clicking on a link in a web browser, in what sense is that article on the web, precisely, which is what Google indexes?)
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The baby just learned to sort of crawl, and it looks like the picture at right. She kind of drags one leg, refusing to lean on her knee and instead using that foot. The result is a compact, lopsided limp. This picture originally came from The Onion and was captioned "Inspirational Disabled Horse Crosses Preakness Finish Line After 11 Hours", so now I get to deal with feeling guilty about finding ths picture so funny every time I see the baby crawl. It's hard being me.
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This space got Dad a giant fresnel lens once, though not one quite this big. It was a minor hit, as I recall. It came with a bag of army men and eggs and stuff: targets. Good times, good times.
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iRaq, a new product from Apple? (From boingboing as usual; aren't you just reading it by now? It is—and has been for quite a while—in the sidebar, you know...)
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We went to Mama Maria's in the North End last night. Holy crap, it was good. I had pulled rabbit and K had lamb osso bucco. Thanks, Mom.
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After a much-too-long break, here are more baby pictures. This batch includes figuring out how to walk, stand, make cute faces, and cry pathetically. They're larger (more pixels) than previous batches; if this is a problem (and it shouldn't be for most of you) let me know and I'll shrink them some. Have fun.
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Cursor (in the sidebar) points out last fall's Rolling Stone piece on depleted uranium. Kills the hell out of armored tanks and such! If only it didn't cause sickness like what got cousin Harry.
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I work in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and just the fact of being in that town today was enough to make it seem like a pretty good day. Except for grabbing a sandwich across from the hideous county courthouse (no visible silliness) I just sat at my desk all day and witnessed nothing obviously marriage-related or gay. Here, though, is a nice firsthand account. (Note the important update to yesterday's snide item.)
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More Get Your War On, in the sidebar as always. But this time there's new Fighting and Filing cartoons as well. Life is good.
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Gay marriage becomes legal in Massachusetts in just a few short hours. This space certainly hopes it remains married despite the apocalypse. We'll keep you posted. [Update: Still married. Haven't noticed any feelings of gayness. Lots of super happy people everywhere. Yay!]
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At right is an 
actual screenshot from the Times site. Tell me this is accidental.
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Cory Doctorow (who is usually here): "The Swiss thought his official underoos were ridiculous."
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As this space works too hard, Lib ponders becoming an author: "Chapter One: Nice, innocent girl moves to new town. Is immediatly unpopular."
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The Economist: "Unlike much of the soggy thinking peddled by too many anti-globalisers, The Corporation is a surprisingly rational and coherent attack on capitalism's most important institution."
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A quick dose of the political, and now back to normal. Sorry about that.
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Peter Galbraith: How to Get Out of Iraq.
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So the .406 Club at Fenway pretty much rocks even though Byung Hyun Kim was pitching and (do I even need to say it?) he let in a crapload of runs. Two runs on one wild pitch at one point. Ah well. Update: It may have been his last Red Sox game: they took him out of the starting rotation after the game.
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The baby and I went and watched my nephew's baseball game atop an honest-to-god EPA Superfund site. Kind of surreal. [Update: apparently we watched it atop a leaky landfill (now covered with Big Dig dirt) that isn't a Superfund site. The Superfund site is actually the other direction from the house. It's good to live on a hill.]
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Ira Glass: "I'm the host of a show on public radio, and when my listeners tell me they don't care for Stern, I always think it reveals a regrettable narrowness of vision. Mostly, they're put off by the naked girls."
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Pat Tillman, the ex-NFL player that was done in on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan, was revealed by his family to be (unsurprisingly) a way, way more interesting guy than his caricatures (hero, dupe) suggest. "Robbed of a cliche, where does that leave us?"
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Jay Rosen (of PressThink, in the sidebar) has a long, thoughful rant on Ted Koppel and the yelling surrounding his enumeration of the 721 dead soldiers: "Political innocence is performed during controversies like this."
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This space's childhood was full of Scrabble. I even presently work with a guy who (and I am not making this up) got his Ph. D. in Scrabble. But the lovely wife hates the game so I don't get to play much anymore, and instead must make do with this gallery of bad scrabble hands found via boingboing. Several of the hands aren't that bad, which diminishes the fun only somewhat.
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The usual nerds have noted that the Times has noticed that the US is losing its scientific dominance [non-paywall copy here]. Pitifully underfunded public schools from which it is possible to graduate without knowing algebra, nor how to write clearly, nor how to reason, are not mentioned in the article.
[For example, my biggest pet peeve from physics days was that most of my students would say that a force "impacted on" an object, which drove me crazy because it was wrong in like five different ways (forces don't "impact" upon things, but rather "impinge" upon them; when people say that A "impacts on" B, they're often just semiliterate, and mean instead to say that A "has an impact on" B; be less fancy (and more precise) and say that the force "acts" on the object; and so forth). People who can't be bothered with such annoying details are not going to be too interested in practicing science 60 hours a week...]
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This space is delighted at having discovered that the word okay derives from a (small) joke. It's an abbreviation of oll korrect. Like internet humor from the 1830's.
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