Thursday, July 31, 2008

Quote of the day

Ben has brought this list of fictional ducks to my attention...

My favorite part is the outrage in the discussion page:

"Please find more adequate sources, or remove the duck from the list. · AndonicO Talk 21:11, 2 January 2008 (UTC)"

Online research tool

I just ran into this program, zotero, which is basically a bookmarking/bibliographic tool aimed at academics (it operates as a plug-in to firefox.)

I often find that I would like to take notes about the things that I run into online, and this tool lets me do that quickly and in a way that stays organized. So far it plays well with firefox 2.0, and seems pretty polished. I thought others might be interested...

They've got some videos about how the system works here.

Who is the drinking-est animal of them all?



That would be the Malaysian pentail tree shrew. According to scientists, these little guys drink the equivalent of nine glasses of wine a night (compared to their body weight).

My favorite part might be that the German scientist who is running this study is Dr. Weins. (German for fermented grape juice.....)

A little investigative reporting...

Most of you have probably seen the front page news about the hiring scandals in the justice department. (Pinned mostly on poor little Gonzalez aide Monica Goodling, who got her JD at Pat Robertson's school o' law...I'm actually not kidding- it was founded by the environmental savior himself.)

What you probably don't know is that a few months ago I applied for a paralegal position with the justice department in the civil rights division. Unsurprisingly, I never heard from them- until this week, when I got a letter from a Human Resources staff member informing me that "due to an unforseen [sic] complication" the job I applied for would be reposted, and anyone who wanted to get the job would need to resubmit their application.

What's interesting is how different the new application is. Last time I applied all I needed to submit was a resume, cover letter, and a writing sample- this time, they've got a whole ton of questions for me (over 80). You can see the whole list on the job posting.

I have no reason to think that this particular search was conducted in an illegal (or even questionable manner). And, of course, I have no reason to think that I was somehow gleaned because of my liberal tendencies, because a) they had no reason to think that I was liberal (unless a Haverford degree counts against someone) and b) who the hell cares about paralegals?

However, I do wonder if the change in application procedure is on account of some heat inside the department. As in, "We had darn better have enough information from all our applicants so that we can always demonstrate legitimate reasons why they were turned down..." That wouldn't be too surprising to me.

Ludacris endorses Obama...Obama says...

"...rap lyrics today too often perpetuate misogyny, materialism, and degrading images that he doesn’t want his daughters or any children exposed to...This song is not only outrageously offensive to Senator Clinton, Reverend Jackson, Senator McCain, and President Bush, it is offensive to all of us who are trying to raise our children with the values we hold dear. While Ludacris is a talented individual he should be ashamed of these lyrics."



As you may remember, Ludacris has a pretty long history with Obama- they even met together to have a little conversation (strategy meeting?) before Obama decided to run.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Boston gets a shout-out!

Barack Obama says (in Berlin):

The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil.

As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.

Hrm...ok...so we didn't make it into the happy uplifting part.

Mostly I draw attention to it because I thought the speech, as a whole, was a little...I don't know, boring? I agree with the sentiments, it's certainly pretty "safe," but I'm not really blown away. I guess I was hoping to see him do what he did (at least for me) with his race speech, which was not only a great piece of oratory but also was one of the most accurate diagnosis of race relations in America...in my opinion.

I'm curious about European and American (and Asian and African for that matter) reception to the speech.

Any thoughts? Anyone more impressed than me? Less impressed? Am I missing something?

Olivia Judson is Dr. Tatiana

Evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson has been running a blog (about Darwin/evolution studies) for the nytimes for several weeks. She's also the bestselling author of "Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex."

Here's a piece from her recent mini series, which is pretty entertaining:

PES



Rubik's Cubes remind me of Wall-E now.

Hrm...I wish would have found this for FISA

In Obama's store: "Change" is sold out



Unsurprisingly, "Progress" soon followed...

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Update- McCain veep...nevermind

Novak thinks he's been used and that it's "pretty reprehensible." Apparently some senior aide told him that the selection would be coming down this week...but now it looks like just a leak to draw some attention toward McCain.

Seems like kind of a bad idea to yank around a prominent conservative journalist like that... hrm.

By the way, nytimes has this on the McCain-Romney candidacy...

Most importantly, Romney only got a handshake when he endorsed McCain- Guiliani got a hug.


Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Pollster gets a facelift...and woah

Pollster just updated their website, and the new version very clearly shows the uphill battle senator McCain is in for right now. If McCain took all the states that lean republican AND all the states currently classified as "toss ups" he would TIE with what Obama has in his "strong" category. If the states that "lean democrat" broke towards Obama (obviously something that seems likely) he would have no trouble winning.

Of course, November is a long way off...

SF mayor interview

TPM.tv brings an interesting interview with mayor Gavin Newsom (who was attending the "netroots nation" conference)...



Other interesting factoids:
  • he has fairly serious dyslexia...
  • he's the youngest SF mayor in 100 years (currently 40)
  • he's marrying some republican this weekend (well that's in the interview, but I thought many of you wouldn't bother getting that far)
  • you can buy some wine from him

Haverford Makes the Nytimes!

“You see some of these selective liberal arts colleges building new physical education facilities with these huge sheets of glass and these coffee and juice bars, and charging students $40,000 a year, and you have to ask, does this contribute to the public good, or is it just a way for the college to keep up with the Joneses?” Mr. Shinn said. “We are a tax-exempt institution, so I think the public has a right to demand that our educational mission be at the heart of all of our expenditures.”
-nytimes, July 21, 2008

Haverford's newest building: the Gardner Integrated Athletic Center...

Obama Too

Now there are rumblings that Obama will be naming his running mate soon. (Specifically, in the ten day window between his return from Europe and the olympics.)

I actually don't understand this timing particularly well, and agree with what Schieber has to say about it-

"Any PR bump will get stepped on by the games (unless they announce very soon after Obama gets back). Worse, the Olympic dark period will give enterprising reporters 2-3 uninterrupted weeks to look for skeletons in the veep nominee's closet, with which they'll pummel him/her at the convention."

I'm still hopin' and a wishin' that it'll be Sebelius though. Clinton supporters might get a little mad though...

McCain chooses Veep, this week?

Robert Novak is reporting that McCain will name his running mate (he thinks Romney) sometime this week. He suggests such timing will draw attention away from the headlines Obama is making on his trip overseas.

The timing thing makes some sense, but Romney, really? I feel like that would just be giving up the race now.

Anybody want to place bets? I still think Florida Governor Crist is probably the guy, but that's mostly because I can't see Huckabee, Guiliani, Romney, Sanford, or Lieberman on the ticket.

Dancing

One of my favorite videos available on youtube was just selected for APOD- I'm not sure what it has to do with Astronomy, but it made me really happy to see it there.

Just in case you haven't seen Matt Harding, check it out:




Yep, I find it more uplifting than Connie, more exciting than Feist on Sesame Street. (I'm pretty sure that will offend the aesthetic sensibilities of the range of people who read this blog.)

Then again, I thought Mad Hot Ballroom was great...

Monday, July 21, 2008

Distractions- yeah, I could blog about that

I just finished reading this article, which is mostly standard criticism about the oncoming death of the world on account of young people's inability to focus on a single task. The real important stuff (the stuff that's suppose to scare us into paying attention):

" The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone."

Good thing no one ever smokes as a distraction...now that combination will surely kill you...

And later:

" Chronic distraction, from which we all now suffer, kills you more slowly. Meyer says there is evidence that people in chronically distracted jobs are, in early middle age, appearing with the same symptoms of burn-out as air traffic controllers. They might have stress-related diseases, even irreversible brain damage. But the damage is not caused by overwork, it’s caused by multiple distracted work. One American study found that interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This, it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year. Yet the rabidly multitasking distractee is seen as some kind of social and economic ideal."

I heard about this study before (588 billion! woah), but here's where I got really interested:

"They [the writers and thinkers of the world] have all noted – either in themselves or in others – diminishing attention spans, inability to focus, a loss of the meditative mode. “I can’t read War and Peace any more,” confessed one of Carr’s friends. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

I'm a little skeptical. Certainly I find that I skim a lot of different things, and it might be that I acquired the ability through the pace of the digital age (IM, Television, cell phone, etc), but I don't think it has eroded my ability to focus on the issues that I'm interested in.

And that's really the key here- which I think these kinds of articles often ignore- the internet (or as this author says, "the digital age") has made it possible to find information (yes, extremely quickly in rapid succession) about almost anything that would ever come up in conversation. When we search for such information we tend to look for the 3 or 4 paragraph summary- but why? We do that because are interest in the subject is of a particular kind- namely, something we might call a "passing interest," or a temporary interest that has to do with whatever we are involved with this moment. These may be (and often are) related to the kinds of intense interests that some of us, as many of us as are lucky, will use as the basis for their careers, but they certainly are not the same. What "Carr's friend" really means, when he says he's lost some meditative focusing ability, is that he's bored by War and Peace.

And what I want to say, put simply, is it's perfectly natural for individuals to be bored by a variety of things. What I think Carr's friend is recognizing is that literature, like War and Peace anyway, were only a "passing" interest for him (perhaps as an English major, or a recent grad, or a strange teenager, whatever). This recognition might be a little difficult to take, as it could entail a fairly serious reflection on one's identity (oh, I'm not an english major, a recent grad, a strange teen ager, or a whatever anymore). This might scare us a bit, and one might write an article about it...

So what exactly has the advent of modern technology done by giving us incredible access to the breadth of human knowledge? Mostly, it's revealed to us the breadth of human knowledge in which any one individual doesn't have more than a passing interest.

Friday, July 18, 2008

Pat and Al on a couch at the beach...



It's kind of old, but I'm still confused...

Some Thoughts About this Blog

Hello friends, family, and those who stumble upon this blog:

I figured I would start out with a brief summary about, well, starting this blog. The biggest factor is that I'm really really bad at staying in touch with people. That inability may bring about a misconception: I neither think nor care about a variety of people . This is just untrue- I actually pretty regularly begin emails because I run across something that reminds me about someone that isn't geographically close to me. If you've managed to find this blog, chances are you've been the unknowing addressee (can you call someone an addressee if the email was never sent? Do people ever use the word addressee?) of several of these. Usually I get about halfway through the email before I decide that the person I'm writing (far less eloquent than "addressee") more than likely does not care at all about the thing that I've connected with them, and really it's pretty silly to contact them at all about it. (Of course saying "halfway" is entirely meaningless since I never finish these emails- let halfway mean to you what you will.) "Moreover," I think to myself, "maybe it wasn't (for example) Jim's Aunt who was named Alice at all, but Susie's." So now the article I was intending to send Jim - about how people named Alice are statistically more likely to be run over by stampeding flamingos - will be received with a good deal of confusion, particularly when I title it "Better warn auntie Alice." Now I have not only sent Jim, my dear dear friend, an article that he doesn't care about, I have also revealed my own ignorance about Jim's personal life, thereby confirming that I really don't know Jim at all and never considered him a close friend because I can't even remember that it was Susie's aunt Alice, who I've met 26 times.

Ok, so anyone would be pretty excited about the flamingo story, but you get the idea. I'm hoping the blog will help me nourish ongoing exciting relationships with the various people I've come to know and love. In that regard I strongly encourage comments.

Secondly, I give as a fair warning a summary of the material you will likely find here. I expect much will come from the outlets that I read most frequently; the somewhat liberally minded news blog TPM will be balanced by "Thatcherite" Andrew Sullivan, with healthy doses from the mainstream media (read as NPR and nytimes). I expect there will be occasional forays into philosophical and classical musings (old habits die hard), and maybe, if I do get a job, some thoughts on that. Perhaps the stray thought on Cambridge. Maybe some television (currently the wire) and book reviews. If none of these subjects entertain or interest you, you probably shouldn't waste your time checking this blog, unless, of course, you are simply interested in me. In that case, this is probably a good place to start to find out about what I'm thinking. If you happen to be interested in all these things, and read the above stuff as often as I do, my blog may be superfluous. I encourage you to read anyhow, so that I can feel like I have a community here...

I honestly had no idea that I was so long winded.

An Afterthought: It occurred to me that point number 1 may look like I'm just trying to get out of ever personally contacting friends while pretending to be close to all of them, which was not my intention at all. If I wanted to do that, I would just start using Facebook, ooooohhhh, burn...but seriously. Despite the existence of this blog, I will do my very best (which is frankly not all that good) to send email, make calls, etc.

Rangel Rankled

There's been quite a bit in the news recently about New York representative Rangel's rent controlled apartments. (The key there being, of course, that nasty little plural.) People are pretty annoyed at the fact that he's getting four apartments for about $3,200 a month (several of which are combined to make one big apartment, and another is used as a campaign office, which is probably the biggest no-no, and he's given that up), well below the market price.

I find the story to be a little bit lame, and I expect that it has only been front line news through a combination of Rangel's colorful responses (favorite excerpt: “Paying the legal rent is not a gift. Are you doing this deliberately, or are you just stupid?”) and the current mortgage/housing crisis (is a link necessary?). My lack of excitement is based in the fact that it seems likely to me that Rangel wasn't going out of his way to secure this, yes, probably illegal, deal. He claims to have never even met his landlord. This combined with the fact that I don't really have a problem with paying congressmen/"public servents" fairly well- and a deal or two doesn't hurt - pretty well stifles my interest. Especially if they're fairly active and clearly working hard to further their policies. (If their policies happen to be similar to what I agree with, all the better).

Anyhow, what I do find really fun about the story is how it has played out in the halls of congress, where people are pointing fingers all over the place. This ends up playing out as political posturing about who lives where, in what neighborhood, for how much. And what is so fascinating about all this is how (I'm at a loss for the right word) inbred (?) the whole system is. For example, take this npr story, where we find out that Minnesota senator Norm Coleman lives in the basement of a political operative, and Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin share a room with each other in the house of Representative (of california) George Miller.

I don't know why I find these living arrangements so interesting, but I'd guess it's a combination of a desire to live in an environment surrounded by smart people who are working on similar things, and horror at the fact that it sounds a lot like a college dorm. hrm

ps. Those who are similarly interested in this stuff should read long time reporter Meg Greenfield's book, Washington, whose central thesis is that Washington is basically exactly like High school (I think college is also like high school for her, then again she went to Smith...).