I Am Very Tall

This will be a quick post.

I don't know about the rest of you, but every so often I just feel like my brain is getting slower. And I'm not even close to approaching the age when senility would be an acceptable explanation. Enter Lumosity.

The concept isn't new - it's just BrainAge, but it's on the Internet and it's free (for now). It's a collection of simple flash games that are supposed to gradually improve your memory, processing speed, etc. I'm a big fan of the attention game (mainly because I'm good at it) and addicted to the processing games.

I think what this and other IQ/ brain-improvement games do well is provide constant feedback on how you're doing. I think this makes the games incredibly addictive - you can essentially 'see' your brain 'improving' in 5 minute intervals. I think it's a stretch to say that these games really do improve your mental abilities; what's more likely is that you just get really good at figuring out how to work these games, with some tangential improvements all around. Either way, it's some good addictive fun.

I'm trying out a new format. It gives me a little bit more space to write and post pictures, so I'm hoping it'll work out. It also gives me a chance to play with the new blogger template customization schemes, which seem like they might be kind of cool.

It seems like the template that I picked up is a little quirky though, so let me know if anything is messing up big-time.

The NY Times has written more about the state of modern education in the US than any other paper that I know of. I thought I'd take a moment to look at some of the prevailing themes that I've observed. The first is that the US is facing an educational crisis. As reported here and here, an uncomfortable proportion of today's high school students simply are not ready for college. In fact, the latest article states that only a quarter of high school students that took a college preparatory course are actually ready for college work.

What does that mean exactly? The apparent bar is a prediction of whether or not "the students had a good chance of scoring C or better in introductory college courses, based on their test scores and the success rates of past test takers." As with all of these studies, I'd say there's probably a fair amount of subjective fudge room in there, but let's just assume for now that they did their homework and got it right.

The broader case is that there are even more students that did not take college prep classes that are going to be even less prepared. The number of the "less prepared" is fairly significant, with only 54% of the test's participants (ACT exam takers - who takes the ACT anyway?) having taken at least a core curriculum class.

The second theme that's been emerging is the increasing competitiveness of the Ivy Leagues. Anecdotally-driven articles (here and here) describe the lives and accomplishments of students dealing with increasing pressure to be perfectly rounded students. One Harvard interviewer made the following comparative comment:

"What kind of kid doesn’t get into Harvard? Well, there was the charming boy I interviewed with 1560 SATs. He did cancer research in the summer; played two instruments in three orchestras; and composed his own music. He redid the computer system for his student paper, loved to cook and was writing his own cookbook. One of his specialties was snapper poached in tea and served with noodle cake.

At his age, when I got hungry, I made myself peanut butter and jam on white bread and got into Harvard.

Some take 10 AP courses and get top scores of 5 on all of them.

I took one AP course and scored 3."

Yet another feature from Google, Google Maps now has a "Street View" function that allows you to see what a spot on the map looks like at street level. As a New Yorker, I've got to say that this is one of the most awesome features ever. No more having to go to a random street corner and then searching for a few minutes to find a place - now you can just look at it from the street level and see where it is ahead of time.

The number of photographs that they must have taken in order to construct this feature blows my mind. Some locations are more fully fleshed out than others (my hometown of Atherton only has photos on El Camino vs. the ENTIRE NYC GRID), so if you're in the middle of Podunk, this may not be such a big deal for you. But anyone who lives in a city and has ever spent time searching a street corner will immediately see the value here.

...

Ok, so really, this isn't that big of a deal. It's still really cool though.

Fred Wilson recently posted this about the future of e-mail. His comment is a very VC-like pronouncement about the end of some era or other. His pronouncement is about the death of e-mail, or at least, its reduced usage in the coming era. The essence of his post is captured in this statement:

"Eventually every technology is trumped by something new and better. And I feel that email is ready to be trumped. But by what?"

Seeing as how I'm a big fan boy of his, I decided to post my first response ever. In the midst of posting that response, I figured that I should probably put the response down on my own blog and kill two birds with one stone. Here it is:

I think you're partially right. In the future, we will probably communicate via a collection of technologies. But I'm pretty sure that e-mail will be one of them, along with traditional phone calls, text messaging, and all that jazz.

I think that what's going to happen is a continuation of a current trend - different services will increasingly be used for highly specialized forms of communication that fit different needs. To clarify, these services have been dividing themselves up along a few axes - voice vs. text, one-way (sort of) vs. two-way, message length, assumed timeliness of response, number of recipients, etc. As user adoption increases, we'll start using the different services as tools that can be used interchangeably, depending on our current communicative needs.

This is already happening now. For example, text messages are a two-way channel with limited message length and assume a high level of responsiveness (although not quite as high as an actual phone call). Twitter is similar, but it's a one-way channel, assumes virtually no response at all, and can be blasted to a huge number of recipients. They each serve very different needs - you wouldn't try to remind your wife to pick up the kids via Twitter anymore than you would want to use text messaging to tell *all* of your friends that you're hanging out at Central Park.

The "axes" could certainly be refined, and will almost certainly change with technological development (e.g. blackberries have changed everyone's assumptions about a person's accessibility via e-mail). There's probably an unspoken social etiquette component out there that needs to be addressed. All the same, I think this is a valuable way of thinking about the evolving landscape of communications.

That being said, I think that e-mail is going to evolve - it's not going to go away. It is a perfect fit for a set of communicative needs and will thus have to stay in the game. The current problem that it's facing is a volume problem, and all of the other two-way communication mediums will eventually run into that same problem as they gain acceptance. This is a surface problem, and is not a fundamental defect of e-mail as a form. If anything, it just calls for more advanced filtering services (much like Caller ID or a good receptionist).

My guess is that social networks will serve as one of multiple filtration layers that go on top of e-mail and other services, rather than functioning as an entirely separate channel in and of itself. I'd also be surprised if someone didn't start gathering data on the types of messages that the user reads most frequently (a la Google Reader's trends) and then put together a predictive "flagging" feature that would tell the user that they should probably read certain messages first.
But I certainly don't see e-mail going away, anymore than I think that phone calls will go away. It serves too great of a purpose.

Craigslist is great and all, but in some ways, it's just a real pain in the ass. Here's my story and the lessons I've learned. I'm trying to sell a bunch of furniture, so I posted it on craigslist last Sunday. Since then, I've had somewhere on the order of 15 people write me e-mails saying that they're interested and would like to schedule a time to come and see the merchandise. As of yet, I have not sold anything.

Here's what I've learned:

First, a lot of people just suck at writing. Any of you who've keyed into the lol-kitteh (or my personal favorite, the lolrus) speak would instantly recognize the constructions that these people are using. Except, the lol-kitteh people are being ironic. The people that have been sending me inquiries are just incoherent.

Second and more importantly, people treat sellers like crap. For a little over half of these people, I responded within half an hour of receiving the e-mail; the rest got something within a few hours. The follow-up rate has actually been ridiculously low. About 80% of these people never bother to respond, even if I follow-up again by calling them or sending them another message. Of the 20% that do respond, 0% have ever set up a real time to actually come by or just buy the damn thing.

I get that everyone wants to have the freedom to pick and choose the things that they want to buy. I've been on craigslist, I know the deal. But really - you can't take 30 seconds to respond to an e-mail and just say, "Sorry, not interested anymore?"

Truth be told, this isn't all that vexing. I'd really like to get rid of my furniture for more than $0, but if worst comes to worst, I'll figure something out. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot going on in my life. So there you guys go. Next up might be a post on financial markets or something.

[Thanks to phonelesscord for lolcats]

I'm busy doing a bunch of work, but I wanted to drop something in for anyone who's actually checking this place. I've been working on another post, but it's getting long and I don't have the time to accurately finish it.

For those of you who haven't heard, Jerry Falwell died. Those of you that are "big" enough to rise above your personal differences with his opinions will bow your heads at his passing. Those of you that aren't and thought that he was a small-minded racist/bigot/spreader of hate will really enjoy this article from Christopher Hitchens, which tars and feathers his memory, and this article which lists out some of Falwell's more quotable sayings. Here are a few:

On Sept. 11: "The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.' "

On AIDS: "AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals."

On public education: "I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again, and Christians will be running them."

On feminists: "I listen to feminists and all these radical gals. ... These women just need a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men; that's their problem."

On global warming: "I can tell you, our grandchildren will laugh at those who predicted global warming. We'll be in global cooling by then, if the Lord hasn't returned. I don't believe a moment of it. The whole thing is created to destroy America's free enterprise system and our economic stability."

This may be one of the most terrifying things I've ever seen. The soundtrack makes it even worse.

One of the canonical utilitarian cases against a deontological system of rights involves a ticking time bomb that can potentially wipe out an entire city and what you would be willing to do to the prisoner that (potentially) knows the bomb's location. The argument, which is still fairly contested, is that torturing that one prisoner is justified - the rights of one cannot be held against the lives of the many.

An editorial from Nick Kristof in the Times suggests that even though that's what some people may think, that's not how they act. More often than not, a single person is actually more important than a group of people, judging by people's willingness to give. The evidence for this hypothesis is as follows:

"In one experiment, psychologists asked ordinary citizens to contribute $5 to alleviate hunger abroad. In one version, the money would go to a particular girl, Rokia, a 7-year-old in Mali; in another, to 21 million hungry Africans; in a third, to Rokia — but she was presented as a victim of a larger tapestry of global hunger.

Not surprisingly, people were less likely to give to anonymous millions than to Rokia. But they were also less willing to give in the third scenario, in which Rokia’s suffering was presented as part of a broader pattern."

A four-day old article in TechCrunch talks about the digital divide in America in light of a recent survey of Internet behavior from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The results of the survey look like this (as usual the formatting of this blog is too narrow, so you'll probably have to click through to actually see what's going on here. I'll get around to widening the format sometime.)
Arrington wonders:

"Is the switch off factor strictly a question of Age? The study found that the Top 8% are young, ethnically diverse, and mostly male (70%). The median age of the Top 8% is 28 with more than half of them under the age of 30. The bottom 15% was not surprisingly older, with a median age of 64 – and as a group reported the lowest levels of household income. And yet this group isn’t entirely switched off: 82% watch TV everyday and 76% have cable or satellite service, and collectively had the highest levels of watching TV or listening to radio of any group in the study; it’s just that there not using Web 2.0."

I think Arrington is partially right - age certainly has something to do with it, but this is most likely a generational issue. The younger generations that grew up with technology are just more comfortable with it and certainly won't start becoming more crotchety about it as they grow older.

I think the surprising statistic is that 70% of the top users are male. You would imagine that in an age where women are outperforming men in higher education, they would be doing equally well in their utilization of technology, or at least their ability to understand how to use it. If that's true, then why are the top users predominantly male?

It's possible that there's a Larry Summer's like answer here - that men are naturally more gifted with technology, etc. But I think that the answer is probably a bit more subtle. My guess is that it's simply another generational issue. Given that the median top user age is about 28, that means that most of these people grew up when computer usage was still equated with pocket protectors, command line prompts, thick-rimmed glasses (before Rivers Cuomo made them into a hipster fashion statement), and a heavy dose of asocial behavior. Computer usage was not equated with self-expression, finding friends, music/movies, and all of this other jazz that Web 2.0 entrepeneurs and Apple are trying to push. At the time, there was probably a social stigma against girls/women using computers and I'm guessing this has had a pretty heavy impact on the number of technologically inclined women. Of the ones that are out there now, I'm guessing that they just happen to be smart enough to have gotten it anyway, without needing to be brought up with it.

Now, in a time when you can't be New York hipster cool if you don't have your own MacBook, website, and MySpace/facebook profile, I'm guessing this gender bias will fade away. It will be interesting to see how the technological profiles of the next generation shape up and its affect on the next wave of technology.

An article in the Times today talks about "Lonesome George," the last of a species of tortoises. I am personally quite fond of turtles and tortoises. In college, I had a pet turtle. My aunt had two tortoises that grew to the point where a 3-year old could have comfortably ridden on them (maybe). However, for all this, I don't think I ever grew this fond of tortoises. Read on:

"A few years later, in 1993, there was briefly a companion known as “Lonesome George’s girlfriend,” but she was not a tortoise. She was a 26-year-old graduate student in zoology from Switzerland named Sveva Grigioni.

By coating her hands in the genital secretions of female tortoises and gently stroking him, she managed to demonstrate a couple of times (in the course of several months’ work) that George was capable of an erection. But whereas her touch could induce other male tortoises to reach orgasm within a few minutes, with George she never managed to collect any sperm."

One more thing: Every so often, I check feedburner to see where people are coming from. Check out these phrases that actually got people here:

1. "dog pain"
2. "in how many days does a chicken have their eggs"
3. "how tall am i going to be in the future"
4. "do not eat pig and chicken"
5. "BABYS ABORTIONS"

Now, I sort of get the associations, but these are still really weird. If I Google any of these phrases, a link to my blog is nowhere near the top of the list. So how are these people getting here?

Hello all. I am currently supposed to be working, but have decided to take a quick break. What do I do with my free time? I write to a faceless audience that may/may not be populated with complete strangers.

This Sunday, I saw Spiderman 3. I sort of knew that it wasn't going to be up to expectations - the movie's reviews so far have been pretty ambivalent. Sure enough, the movie was kind of a let-down. There are a lot of things to gripe about - an odd amount of camp was added to the movie (why is Peter Parker dancing like a fool?), the storytelling was more ham-fisted, there were too many thinly laid-out stories, and a lot of the acting felt forced (there's a moment when Peter cries and part of the audience started laughing)

But still, nothing is going to stop this movie from making an insane amount of money, and nothing is going to make the studios believe that simply having Tobey Maguire, Sam Raimi, and Kirsten Dunst in a Spiderman movie is not enough to make the movie great. Still, I'd be surprised if Spiderman 4 does anywhere nearly as well as this one. People are going to remember being let down by this movie and it's going to make them think twice about waiting in line, next time around.

I sent a version of my post to the New York editor at Citysearch. Here's the response I got:

Thanks so much for your thoughtful and helpful feedback. We love hearing from the site's users. You're right, this first phase of changes was largely cosmetic (however, we happen to think that's important to). And we're going to be implementing more changes over the coming months, many of which address your concerns about usability and community.

One thing that may help you in regards to searching around a location. If you know of a business near where you are, you can go to that business' page on our site and then scroll down to the bottom left of the screen, where you'll see something that says "what's nearby"--click on one of the business types (restaurant, bar, etc), and you'll see a map of businesses around that initial location. Not perfect, but hopefully it helps.

-Erin Behan
Senior Editor, New York

It's nice receiving personalized responses. It's also good to hear that they're not sitting around idly. Maybe they'll do something interesting soon.

Citysearch is up today with a brand new look. This may not sound particularly exciting, but it's a big deal for me. Citysearch is how I find new places to eat, which is pretty much my favorite activity in the city.

The listed updates include "brand-new profile pages, better search returns," and videos of local businesses. These changes are, for the most part, purely cosmetic. The profile pages have been reformatted with wider sidebars and larger fonts, meaning that at the end of the day, you have to scroll down farther in order to see the same amount of information. The only real addition seems to be user-specific recommendations on the side bar. It's pretty hard to see what's better about their search returns. And I really have no interest in watching videos of restaurants, which are probably just poorly-produced paid advertisements.

The only revision worth noting is that they did away with their 10-point system, in favor of a 5-star system. I'd say this is another cosmetic change, but it's not. You can no longer see the decimal rating for a place - the smallest increment is now a half of a star. In a world where most people are too nice to give a restaurant a truly bad review, the majority of reviews are going to be pretty tightly clustered in the upper half/quarter of the ratings band. This makes it all the more important for users to be able to see the decimal-level difference. And they took that away.

Citysearch is a property that I both love and hate, and these revisions don't really do much to change that. I find that it is the best repository on the web for finding places within the city. On the other hand, it is also one of the most freakishly stone-aged web site that's around. While every other information-based web site is moving full-blast into Web 2.0, Citysearch and the rest of the IAC-properties staunchly refuse to do anything remotely interesting.

For example, take a look at their "My Citysearch" feature. It's a total joke! It lets you make a bunch of lists, via an incredibly slow process of saving places and then moving them to a list. Why don't they let you search within your lists? Why don't they let you connect with lists made by your friends? For ****'s sake, couldn't they let you tag your saved locations, or at least let you use Citysearch's predefined tags?

As far as I'm concerned, IACI is missing out on a major opportunity here. With half of the web trying to cash in on social networking (I mean, they've got a NASCAR fan social network), it blows my mind that IACI isn't trying to build a massive network based on the actual habits of users. Sure, a lot of the social networking sites out there are fluff and add zero-value. But this could actually be big. One of the major channels for finding new restaurants/bars/places to see in a city is via referral from friends. If IACI could a) help customers easily and accurately record their visiting habits (buy Opentable, you fools!) and b) facilitate linkages between the different profiles, this would be a major benefit to all of their users.

Let's also take a look at their mapping functions. One of the things that I would love to be able to do would be to put in my current position, define what I'm looking for (restaurant, italian, cheap), and then see on a map what comes up within a 5-10 block radius. This is something that, to some extent, I can already do with Google maps. I cannot do this with Citysearch, even though IAC's focused on making major improvements to their Ask maps functionality.

Readers: I've been away for a while. For the last several months, I've been crushed by work. One of those sad things that happens to people that don't have 9-to-5's. There are two key reasons why this has stopped me from writing. The first is that I just didn't have time to write anything. The second and more damning reason is that I didn't really have anything to write about.

Working all the time makes you into a really, really boring person. Because when you do nothing but work, you are effectively being deprived of the opportunity to learn about interesting things (or things that would be interesting to other people, depending on how you look at it). I've barely looked at a book or a newspaper in months, and in fact had to be told about the Virginia Tech shootings by my infinitely more culturally literate girlfriend.

Moreover, once you stop writing, it's hard to get back on the horse. I probably wouldn't even be doing this, if it weren't for the few people that told me to start up again.

So, here's my post for the day. As an analyst at a large consulting firm, you're constantly being
asked to put together slides that make ideas immediately comprehensible. In some instances, this can be accomplished by writing simple, straightforward bullet points. But most of the time, it's better to just have a very clear graphic.

The first example comes from indexed. It very succinctly describes the difficulties in finding adequate mates as we age:

The second example is a Village Voice article on the single, "This is why I'm hot." The article gets a bump because it spends a lot of time illustrating phrases that are otherwise completely retarded. Here's a snippet:

"The most amazing line in "This Is Why I'm Hot"—and, even at this early a juncture, quite possibly the most amazing line of any song to see release in 2007—is "I'm hot 'cause I'm fly/You ain't 'cause you not." Brutal and unassailable in its simplicity. Consider the reasoning, first, of just "I'm hot 'cause I'm fly":
Mims is hot because he's fly. But it raises the question: Does being hot guarantee one's being fly? "You ain't 'cause you not" would seem to clear that up:"

That's all for now. I'll try and post an update sometime in the near future.

A recent article in the Times outlines the unfortunate plight of the modern pig. According to cattle-rancher Nicole Niman (Aside: in trying to find out whether she's associated with Niman Ranch, Wikipedia directed me to this utterly bizarre article on lightsaber combat. Somewhat relevant to the criticism of Wikipedia that it's heavy on the information that white, tech-savvy males might know and light on other important issues), pigs are kept in metallic cages so tight that they are unable to even turn around. Their tails are cut off without anesthetic. They are not allowed to roam outside of their cages - not even to handle basic functions. Eating, sleeping, urinating and defecating all happen in the same place (the waste drops into a pit just a few feet below their cages). In order to keep the pigs free from sickness, 10 million pounds of antibiotics are added to their feed, three times the total amount used to treat humans.

There's a wide array of thought about animal rights out there. Peter Singer, one of the largest philosophical proponents for animal rights, argues that the right to minimization of suffering is dependent on the ability to suffer. Pigs, which have intelligence comparable to a dog or small child, are certainly smart enough to know that they are unhappy. Niman points out that many of the crated pigs "exhibit behavior characteristic of humans with severe depression or mental illness." Judge Richard Posner, on the other hand, finds that moral intuition says that "it is wrong to give as much weight to a dog's pain as to an infant's pain."

While there is a substantial portion of the population that thinks Singer is on crack (especially in regard to his views on abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia), I think that we may naturally support his view when faced with the reality of what we are doing. While it is easy to rationalize and say that these animals are simply meat to be put on our plates, I think that that ease has less to do with the fact that they are animals and has more to do with the fact that few, if any, of us ever sees how these animals actually live. We don't have to see the pigs living in a warehouse filled with the stench of their own feces. We don't really think about the fact that millions of male chicks are thrown away upon birth, or that their female counterparts have their beaks cut off with a hot knife and are then thrust into cages so overcrowded that corpses routinely remain unobserved. And because we don't have to deal with that, we're shielded from the visceral consequences of what we do. It's the same sort of shielding that lets people write incredibly nasty messages/e-mails/flames that they would never be able to deliver in person.

I don't consider myself to be an animal rights advocate. Certainly, on the list of global problems that I would fix, it's nowhere even close to the top. And as a mostly carnivorous omnivore, I'm certainly very complicit in the very activity that I'm drawing attention to right now.
However, I do think that if I were to create a bucket of "right" and "wrong," with the former consisting of feeding starving children and the latter of kicking puppies, this would definitely go into the "wrong" bucket.

After college, some of us do things that don't readily lend themselves to conversation. For instance, were any of you to ask me what I'm up to these days, I would tell you that I've been hanging out at the office until around 10 or 11 each day, trying to forecast profits for financial product X, the workings of which would surely be of little interest to any of you. I could certainly talk the job up a lot - from a bird's eye view, it's actually sounds kind of interesting - but that wouldn't tell you anything about what's actually going on in my life.

My friend AKA Media System does not seem to have that problem. Several months ago, he dropped his job in New York and shipped out to Boston. Now, he's "questionably leading" a team at Ambient Devices. More importantly, he's doing his own stuff on his own time and is getting crazy-looking pictures put up in blogs.

If you don't follow the link, it basically discusses how he took a pair of giant green Hulk hands (i.e. big-ass gloves that make threatening Hulk noises when you punch something), soldered a bunch of wires and got them to work as inputs for his drum machines (I've doubtlessly mangled the description, but you get the idea). Other things that he's re-wired include a Boo-bah (which unfortunately had its head ripped off in the process) and a toy cake.

Anyway, my point is this. He's doing something that he enjoys on his own time. I'm envious.

You've got to hand it to conservatives. They really know how to take initiative when people don't agree with them. These initiatives, depending on your perspective, can either be revelatory or completely hysterical.

The latest and greatest comes in the form of the Conservapedia, the conservative response to the "increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American" bias of Wikipedia - which is apparently "six times more liberal than the American public." I am incredibly curious as to how you quantify liberalism.

In order to justify its existence, Conservapedia cites a "growing list of examples" that purport to show Wikipedia's clear liberal bias. These include the following:

4. Wikipedia's entry on abortion reads like a brochure for the abortion industry.
5. Initially a Wikipedia admin named "Nearly Headless Nick" deleted, without explaining his decision, an entry about Conservapedia... Wikipedia's entry is filled with obvious bias, numerous errors, out-of-date citations, and self-serving false statements.
9. Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English-speaking users are American. Within entries British spellings appear in the silliest of places, even when the topic is American. Conservapedia favors American spellings of words.
15. Wikipedia claims about 1.5 million articles, but what it does not say is that a large number of those articles have zero educational value. For example, Wikipedia has 1075 separate articles about "Moby" and "song". Many hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia articles -- perhaps over half its website -- are about music, Hollywood, and other topics beneath a regular encyclopedia. This reflects a bias towards popular gossip rather than helpful or enlightening information.

"According to the origins model used by creation scientists, modern kangaroos, like all modern animals, originated in the Middle East^[1] and are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah's Ark prior to the Great Flood. It has not yet been determined by baraminologists whether kangaroos form a holobaramin with the wallaby, tree-kangaroo, wallaroo, pademelon and quokka, or if all these species are in fact apobaraminic or polybaraminic.

Also according to creation science, after the Flood, kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land^[2] -- as Australia was still for a time connected to the Middle East before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart^[3] -- or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters^[2]. A recent theory is that the Kangaroos floated on corks rather than vegetation^[2]. Evidence for this theory was produced in the late 18th century during early exploration of central Australia when a large cache of cork was found near modern day Woolumbinda in south western Queensland. The lack of oak trees, from where cork is obtained, throughout the entire continent further reinforces this theory. Early settlers and explorers alike quickly used the cork to create the fly proof hats associated with the area."

"Fox News was started in 1996 in response to the other cable news channels which all had obvious liberal biases. Because of this, Rupert Murdoch decided to start a real new channel which would tell the truth. The success of Fox news over every other news channel is because it is fair and balanced. ^[1] It has many people on it who work to spread truth such as Sean Hannity who is a great American. ^[2]. Fox News is best because instead of just telling you what to think, they only report the news unbiased and then allow the viewer to decide. ^[3].

In 2005 the White House selected Tony Snow from Fox News to be the new White House press secretary which was a great honor for Fox because it showed how well it was presenting the real truth instead of the fake liberal version. ^[4]"

An editorial from the NYTimes tells me that today's kids are stupider than they were over a decade ago. Standardized testing apparently shows that only 35% of today's 12th graders are proficient at reading, 23% at math. I'm sure that these kids are proficient at a lot of other things that aren't being captured by these tests. But it doesn't matter! Because if you can't read or do math, then you're pretty much screwed going forward.

This actually has profound implications for our country. Supposing that future generations are all this stupid, than I'm going to have to seriously question their ability to accurately pick out a good Gubernatorial/Congressional/Presidential candidate. Instead, they're probably going to gravitate to the type of people that they would have picked to be high school class president. While those people were sometimes highly qualified, other times, they got the position just because they were popular.

Of course, this assumes that the current population is actually intelligent. Fox's new television show, "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?" provides strong (if anecdotal) evidence to the contrary. The name of the show is actually a bit misleading - as far as I can tell, the (fake) 5th graders are actually on the same team as the contestant. That said, everything else is about what you'd expect. It's a trivia show where they ask you questions that you should have learned sometime in grade school (some of it in middle school, depending on your school board).

I will readily admit that the show is not as straightforward as it seems. A lot of it is trivia that doesn't necessarily carry forward, e.g. "What constellation is the Big Dipper in?," and "What is the largest species of bear?" But many of the other questions are incredibly easy. Such questions include, "How many E's are there in the phrase, 'Pledge of allegiance?'" and "What country has the longest border along the United States?" Sadly enough, the contestant answering the first question (who went to college and got a GPA of 3.3) required multiple hints from the host. The contestant answering the second question said, "Mexico" because she'd heard a lot about that border.

The cynical, asshole-ish part of me wants to be in the audience, so I can mercilessly heckle these people. At first, I thought that this was an incredibly petty/snotty thing to want. But then I realized that the "5th graders" were actually thinking the same thing. In fact, if you watch footage of them, they are frequently laughing at the contestants, or blatantly rolling their eyes at their blatant stupidity.

The part of me that's not an asshole just wants to get on the show, so I can win a million dollars.

Update:

There are now four dead mice outside of my apartment. If I find eight of them on my next observation, I'll have the beginning of an exponential curve going.

So, I lied.

I said it's been about a week or so.

It had actually been two and a half.

Time flies.

Hello readers.

It's been a week or so. I've been pretty busy. I'm doing some interesting things at work, but that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the fact that a week ago, I found a dead mouse outside of my apartment. Not outside of the building, but outside of the window that leads out into my "backyard." That was not the first dead, squishy mouse that I've found out there. It was the third. When I found it, I was momentarily disgusted. Then I was a bit sad. Then I left.

Admittedly, leaving a dead mouse out there to rot is not the most sanitary thing to do. But back then, I really didn't feel like dealing with it. It was cold and I had other things to deal with.

When I came back today, I found that the little bugger had found itself a partner. I can't tell which one was there first - they both look like they're in pretty bad shape. Luckily, there aren't any other animals around to bother them. If I were more enterprising, I would start taking a daily photo log of them and mimic what they did at stinkymeat. But I'm not, and that project was gross anyway.

I'm formulating hypotheses. Here's the main theory: I think that the backyard is some sort of death trap for them. The place where they die is at the base of a set of steps. Everything around those steps is either brick, steel, or glass, so they probably can't tunnel their way out. If I had to make a guess, they probably have been coming from some other place outside, make their way down to the bottom of the steps, then get stuck and die long, slow deaths.

The cruel, apathetic part of me would want to know what gets them first: the cold or the hunger. I'm guessing that I could probably get some insight by looking at the corpses and seeing if the second one tried to eat the corpse of the first one. Anyway.

The other hypothesis I have is that they somehow fell off a ledge from upstairs apartments. The reason I think that this is possible is because they are very, very flat on the bottom. They haven't splatted or anything, but they definitely look a little squished. Also, I saw a note on the front door of the building from another tenant, asking if anyone else had noticed a mouse problem. So, they're definitely elsewhere in the building. Maybe they made their way down to the outside of my apartment via gravity.

One last thought - I'd really love it if there was a way of getting rid of these things without having to actually pick them up. It's not that I'm incapable of doing it. I've picked up a number of dead things in my lifetime, including a rat that had been left in one of those snap-traps for so long that it was completely stiff, from the tip of its tail to the end of its snout. It's just that it's really unpleasant, especially when you have no idea how long it's been there. It's really unpleasant when you don't know how long it's been there, but you know it's been at least a week. At that point, you know that it's going to be completely liquefied on th inside, and so will be unreasonably squishy around the midsection. You also know that it will probably be stuck to the metal floor, so you will have to really get under there, like a spatula beneath an omelette cooking on an un-oiled, brass pan. This is probably a bit too much detail, but it should give you an idea of why I really am not looking forward to doing this.

At one point, I thought about finding a stray animal of some sort that might want to eat these things. But I'm pretty sure that would be wrong and more importantly, way more trouble than its worth.

Anyway, that's enough of that. I'll post something substantive some other time.

There was a time when a good old-fashioned bout of vomiting was a sign that you were having a good, no, an awesome night. That time was called college. Unfortunately, that is clearly no longer true for me.

Yesterday and for a good portion of today, I've been pretty sick in the stomach. Things came out of my stomach that I thought had been put away days ago.

All this while, there have been two things that came to mind. One, I am very lucky to have a loving girlfriend that was willing to take care of me.

Second, I am also extremely fortunate to have health care, courtesy of my employer. The US is currently the only developed nation to not have a universal health care system. This puts us behind many countries that we typically consider to be mildly retarded/backwards, including Canada, Russia, New Zealand, China, Poland, Mexico, and Argentina[1]. Our system currently leaves an estimated 17% of the population uninsured[2]. That translates to roughly 50m people without coverage. While I'm in no position to go off on a discussion of the pros and cons of our current health care system, I will say a few things.

One, health care costs have been going up at about 7% a year. That means that they'll double in a little over a decade, leaving people without health insurance doubly screwed.

Two, I think it would be incredibly frightening to be in a position where you feel deathly ill, aren't sure if your appendix is about to explode, but feel incapable of calling a doctor because you know you won't be able to afford it.

Lastly, according to the Kaiser Foundation, it would cost about $110 billion[3] to provide health care coverage for those that currently are not being covered. The war in Iraq has currently cost us $360 billion[4] and is projected to hit $1-2 trillion[4] before we are done.

So, yeah. That's about it.

[3] The estimate is actually $69 billion, but I've scaled the number up to account for the 7% growth in expense and the growing number of people that are uninsured.

I lived in Cambridge, MA for four years. This does not really give me the authority to comment on how retarded Boston is, but just for the sake of this post, I'm going to pretend that it does.

In all seriousness, Boston is severely retarded in many ways. It is one of the most heavily college-populated towns in the country and yet it restricts people from purchasing alcohol after eleven (it previously stopped people from doing it on Sunday). That may actually be smart, but from the point of view of the college student, it is very stupid.

It has a subway system where you can buy the equivalent of a Metrocard on one of the lines, only to discover that that Metrocard is not accepted at other subway stops, requiring you to purchase tokens to get back to where you cam from. Yeah. Tokens.

Its major, major architectural project, The Big Dig, was originally estimated to cost $2.8BN and end in 1985. As of now, it has cost $14.6BN and only "finished" in January 2006. And by "finished," I mean, got to the point where people could start driving in it, only to notice the thousands of leaks, usage of substandard materials, and collapsing ceilings.

So yeah, Boston is retarded.

Here is the latest manifestation of its retardation: It got freaked out by 40 glowing Mooninite boards that were posted around the city. It was so freaked out, it had bomb squads come in and shut down half the city. Turner Broadcasting had to pay fines of $2MN for being so crazy as to put up advertisements.

In this post-9/11 era, I can vaguely understand why people would respond the way that they did. The one part that doesn't click with me is - why would terrorists decide to make their bombs glow? More importantly, why would they make their bombs look like little block-shaped cartoon characters giving us all the finger? Isn't that a little too much pop-culture for people that hate us because of our godless, commercial excesses/on-going support of Israel?

Anyway, I digress. To read more about it, check out this article.

[Link via Thomas Bechtold]

Recently, I signed up for Feedburner so I could start tracking the traffic data for this site. I'm interested in basically two things - how many people are actually reading this and who those people are. At one point, this wouldn't have been particularly interesting to me. For the most part, I've just been assuming that no one - save for a few friends and family - would actually bother to pay attention. However, there's been a recent wave of anonymous comments (and by "wave," I mean all of 3-4 comments, which is a lot for me) that have piqued my curiosity. Who are you people and how did you get here?

Since I started checking this out, I'll admit to being even more perplexed about who's actually looking at this thing. Given who my friends are and where they're from, I would have guessed that I'd see traffic coming from New York, Boston, and the Bay area. While I'm right about New York, the rest of the traffic is actually coming from LA and Scottsdale. Boston and the Bay Area aren't even on the radar. Which leads me to believe that either this traffic tracker is feeding me BS or I have somehow attracted people from places where my current friend count is zero.

Sweet.

Update: I've had one person come forward. Now all I want to know is who is coming from Iquique, speaks Castilian, and/or is searching for "record tall tallest giantess women videos."

About a month ago, I joined everyone and their hippy mothers by writing a post expressing my concern about global warming. Since then, there's been a heavy flow of writing around the subject. Notable events included:

* The IPCC releasing a summary report [pdf] stating that it is "very likely" that climate change is caused by human activity. For those wondering wtf "very likely" actually means, it means better than 90%, which is pretty freaking likely.
* The US speculating that "putting a giant screen into orbit, thousands of tiny, shiny balloons, or microscopic sulphate droplets pumped into the high atmosphere to mimic the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption" could be a possible means of dealing with global warming. [via The Guardian, report is here in pdf format]
* The NOAA coming out and saying that 2006 was the "Warmest year on record"
* Vinod Khosla saying, "He should see his proctologist to find his head, and you can quote me," referring to the chief executive of Nestle, the food giant, who had questioned global warming. [Link via Valleywag]

There's still a substantial amount of resistance to the whole global warming thing, which I find pretty surprising. For a random sampling, check out these responses to Fred Wilson's blog, or the comments on this Arstechnica article.

Without being a climate expert, it's hard for me to join in the fray and provide long-winded proofs of anything. I can, however, point to the fact that there seem to be people on the "we're not doing it" side that seem to be actively trying to manipulate the conversation so as to change the way that this story plays out [article here, same as above]. While I'm sure there are very intelligent people that believe that anthropogenic climate change is just a mass-media conspiracy, I find myself made increasingly skeptical by the fact that they need to cover things up in order to make their point.

Update:
The American Enterprise Institute just sent out a letter offering scientists $10,000 plus travel expenses to write criticisms of the IPCC's findings. The paper they hope to sponsor will "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model [forecasting] outputs as they pertain to the development of climate policy..." The letter goes on to criticize the IPCC for being "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work."

Some scientists have criticized the letter, as it is actively soliciting papers with a particular outcome. The American Enterprise Institute receives funding from Exxon ($240k in 2005, $1.6m in total), which they claim represents less than 1% of their total funding. More than 20 of its staff members have worked as consultants for the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former ExxonMobil head, is the vice chairman on their board of trustees.

The Exxon connection is considered significant, as there is a widespread perception that Exxon is actively funding agencies in an effort to cloud public perception on the dangers of public warming. To date, Exxon has spent $16m on funding for 43 "organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science," according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

[Sources: CNN and the Guardian]

I love the Daily Show. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and call it the single best show on television. My guess is that while a good portion of you think it's a fine show, you may not really feel that it rates as the best show. After all, there are a bunch of other quality shows out there, especially the new breed of serials that get us all incredibly involved in complex story lines that may or may not ever pan out (*coughLostcough*). That's all well and good, but the Daily Show is the best, and here's why.

1) The show is hilarious. It clearly stands in the same league as Leno or Conan (never been a Letterman fan, sorry). Judged purely on the grounds of entertainment, the show is quality. Some nights can fall a little flat, and the interviews can sometimes be uninteresting. But the quality levels is consistently pretty good and for a show that comes out four days a week, that's awesome.

2) The show is the left's response to Fox News.

Begin digression: It seems to me that the world of news is increasingly focused on pulling in viewers and less about responsibly reporting what the f*** is actually happening. This has resulted in several types of reporting. There's the heart-on-sleeve reporting, where the news is reported but interpreted by a newscaster with an explicitly stated leaning (think Anderson Cooper, Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Reilly). There's infotainment, where the news is liberally mixed with "stories" that are entertaining, designed to pull in people that normally consider newscasts to be dry and boring (see my previous post on CNN, and Fox news). And of course, there's blatant partisan hackery (see Fox News). The common thread here is that the reporting of the news is increasingly focused on being easily digestable, requiring as little viewer interpretation as possible. End digression.

Fox has managed to do this by blending trashy stories with intense partisan hackery. The trashy stories draw people in. The partisan hackery tilts them towards a particular political direction. If you doubt that they are drawing people in with trashy stories, then head on over to the Fox News website. A quick scan of their stuff shows me these immediately clickable headlines:

* Hot Bods VolleyPalooza: Miami based models battle it out in beach volleyball at Super Bowl event
* Woman: Ex sent me severed kitten head
* Stray dog rescues Ga. woman from crash
* Cops arrest Chewbacca street performer
* Rice rooting for Colts in bowl
* Some meth addicts turn to urine to get high

While a lot of the other news sites have crap on them, I'm going to state with an 85% confidence level that Fox's crap-to-quality ratio is the highest out there.

This is why the Daily show is great. It uses the same formula - mixing entertainment with news - to compete for viewers, but without getting dragged into the morally decrepit cesspool that the Fox News channel has claimed as its favored mudhole.

3) The Daily Show does something that no other show (that I know of) is willing to do - tell the god damn truth. While every other news show on the air incessantly worries about political posturing and appropriate levels of gravitas, the Daily Show consistently focuses on what it considers to be the "real" story and then juxtaposes that with the garbage that the other networks decided to actually focus on. When the other news networks deferentially played the role of Presidential fanboy, the Daily Show showed us clip after clip of the President/Vice President/Secretary of Defense/Press Secretary saying one thing, saying it again, saying it a third time, and then saying he never said it. In essence, it gets us a little closer to the truth, which I think is becoming increasingly elusive in today's world of "Fair and Balanced" reporting.

4) Jon Stewart. While every other show out there seems to have some sort of clear agenda that it's trying to sell, Stewart doesn't seem to have one at all. If anything, his job seems to be to seek and expose hypocrisy and agendas wherever they may be. Maybe I'm just internally overstressing the importance of his single-handedly dismantling "Crossfire," which he seemed to do for no reason other than that it was the right thing to do. Maybe I'm giving him too much credit for backing Stephen Colbert's White House Correspondent's dinner. But I just have a belief in that man that I wouldn't even extend to Barack Obama, were it to come down to it. And the fact that this show can restore my belief in the integrity of television personalities is what makes this show great.

I'm not going to say that him and his show don't have a clear political stance. The Daily Show clearly appeals much more to those leaning towards the left. At one point, I might have found that objectionable - maybe because it smacks of some sort of agenda or partisan hackery. But the truth of the matter is that the show trades in satire: it ridicules stupidity, pompousity and hypocrisy, wherever it may be. And the Daily Show is clearly willing to take a stab at either side of the aisle. Witness the reporting on "the First 100 hours," or Stewart's relatively merciless interview with Joe Biden. While the guy certainly isn't above tossing out soft-balls every once in a while, I trust him to report on what he thinks is right, rather than what will score a political potshot.

Last comment: The one criticism that might be leveled at the Daily Show is that it is frivolous, doesn't actually contain any real news, and is pulling American youth away from real newscasts where they might actually learn something. While I certainly wouldn't call the Daily Show a comprehensive newscast, I do think that it provides a (relatively) reasonable amount of news for just a half hour period. To back me up, check out this press release from Indiana University. In brief, a widely cited article claims that the Daily Show is as substantive a news source as regular network news, with "substantive" being defined as discussion of issues. Anyway, this post is long enough. You all can read that for yourself.

Link to press release via Arstechnica

This chart (from a National Geographic study) is a country-by-country breakdown, showing the percentage of people that believe that "Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals."

Caveat, this chart is not all-inclusive. It only includes "Western" countries, which seems to include Japan for some reason. I'm sure that if we were to survey some other places, the US might not be second to last.

Even so, I find it incredibly disheartening to think that our country is so behind the times that we are roughly 10 slots behind Poland. If any of you ever makes a Polish joke again, just remember that they're still miles ahead of us in terms of not believing that the Bible is the literal word of God.

One last point. The other disheartening thing about this is that not only are we far behind ranking-wise, the margin is also terrible. Only 40% of us decisively believe that evolution is true. That says something terrible and sad about scientific education and rational processes in this country.

Link via Overcoming Bias

Attentive readers have probably noticed that my articles tend to reference the NYTimes, the Wall Street Journal, or other blogs. I don't, however, reference CNN that frequently. Why is this, you ask? Because CNN tends to be full of crap articles. While they certainly make sure to run stories on all the big stories, they tend to dilute that flow with a bunch of human-interest stories - which I tend to view as crap.

A (biased) sampling of articles looks like this:
* Frat brothers jailed for paddling pledge
* Model Niki Taylor: I was slandered by E! show
* Overly ambitious eagle knocks out power
* Cats lose visiting privileges at women's prison
* Angelina Jolie's mother dies
* Mountain lion victim may need more surgery

While a good chunk of these stories may be interesting, it's really a stretch to call any of these things news. Considering that CNN has global reach, you would think that they'd focus on stories with a bit more import. Who the hell cares about a mountain lion victim and his surgery? Anyway, that's my beef.

Now that I'm done bitching about how retarded CNN is, here's an article that they just wrote on postsecret. For those of you not in the know, postsecret publishes secret-bearing postcards that have been sent in from all over the place. Some of the secrets are funny, some of them are sad. It's all pretty interesting. Take a look.

Sorry about the picture quality, my blog is too narrow. Just click on it for a better view.

This is the essence of a "Natural Selection Speed Date" event that's being held (of course) in New York city. I'm not sure what's more upsetting, the fact that this kind of stuff really happens or that I'm too poor to participate (yes, yes, already have hot girlfriend, blah blah blah).

Students at Tarleton, a college in Texas, had a party on MLK Day where a bunch of white kids dressed up as gang members (or Aunt Jemima), ate fried chicken and drank malt liquor. If it was in the summer, I bet there would have been some watermelon too.

Of course, someone had to go and post photos on facebook. And then the president of the school's NAACP chapter had to find the photos and then send them to the smoking gun. And now a bunch of dumb kids that didn't know any better than to have their racial stereotyping party are all being revealed as either retards or bigots (not that the two descriptions are mutually exclusive).

The sad part is that I'm guessing that these people were spoofing stereotypes of black people and just thought that it would be a funny thing to do while they got hammered. Of course, this is in Texas, so I could be totally wrong.

Oops, did I just make a gross generalization?

Again, this comes courtesy of the Freakonomics blog.

The S.F Chronicle has podcasts with the voice messages left by angry readers. There are a variety of things that the SF Chronicle does that might upset you. What these are, I wouldn't really know, since I haven't read the SF Chronicle since I was about twelve. However, I'd imagine that it would have something to do with editorial slants, the running of some stories versus others, etc. The usual things that make people angry.

The guy on this recording clearly has a very different list of "things that piss me off" than I do.

Drone! Drone! Drone! Pilotless airplane! Not pilotless drone!

Link courtesy of Freakonomics Blog

After thinking a bit about why it is that my blog has not hit any sort of stride, I've landed upon the following: I write a lot like the last thing that I read. Unfortunately, I read a lot of different sources with varying aims, contents, and styles. If I've just gone through Fred Wilson's blog, I'll probably try to write something that's simple, straight to the point, and yet relatively informative (these posts never get posted, because I can't do them). Phonelesscord inspires me to write witty rebukes to political assholishness (I might have written one of these once, I can't remember). The New York Times nudges me towards some sort of educated response to something, whatever it may be (these also go in the trash heap).

After having spent a good while reading Tim Urban's stuff, I will undoubtedly start writing a bunch of Seinfeldian opinions about nothing. I will try and stay away from uttering timeless truths, like:

"If peeing in the shower is wrong, then I don't want to be right."

That being said, I can't help but be influenced. Already, you can see the self-referentiality seeping into my prose, the endless parentheses, the references to parentheses, and so on.

All things being equal, this is probably the easiest style to write in. You don't have to know anything beyond yourself and what you think, meaning that you don't have to sit around and look for a link to the informative tidbit that you think the world should see via your post. Since your post will be about nothing, there's no real reason to find a pithy image to fit with it. You're not trying to convince anyone about the validity of some point or other, so you don't have to cover your ass and think about an issue from a bunch of angles. And since the post is ultimately about you and what you're currently thinking, it's totally fine to just end at some arbitrary point, because that says just as much about the subject matter as anything else (i.e. I don't care enough to finish thinking this through).

Really, this is blogging at its laziest/most convenient. That other stuff, in one way or another, just feels like work. And to be perfectly honest, if I'm writing on this blog while I'm at work, it's because I'd rather not be working.

I've been trying to hit my stride with this blogging practice for a while. It's difficult - it takes time, thought, and in some cases, research. In my worldview, I have to do research-like functions for my job, and I'd rather not have them encroaching into my precious personal time. In general, that time is reserved for flipping through channels, mindlessly sifting through NBA fantasy stats for that one bargain player that nobody's yet picked up, and reading news articles that I'll promptly forget in the next day.

In any case, here's an example of a guy that seems to have found his blogging stride. He's currently on the Apprentice LA, which seems to be tracking with the other recent seasons in terms of its suckitude. On a more personal note, he lived right below me freshman year, and was the guy that we enlisted to play the keyboard when we started grilling burgers outside in the Yard. I'm pretty sure that he played Billy Joel's "Pianoman" about fifteen bazillion times, in a successful bid to get attention from passing females. From what I can recall, he was friendly, amusing, and frequently drunk. I also recall him getting belligerently upset when one of his roommates (who shall remain nameless) vomited all over his stuff one night, and then passing out without doing much about it. Said stuff included the interior of his shoes.

I never really talked to him following freshman year. For that matter, I don't think I even saw him after that. He's firmly in the category of "people that I definitely met at one point, to whom I am relatively indifferent." The amusing nature of his posts nudges him a couple ticks closer to being likable.

First: 30 Rock. Much like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, it's loosely based around the people that write and produce Saturday Night Live. Unlike Studio 60, it's actually funny, which is something that you would expect out of a show with the aforementioned content.

It reminds me of Arrested Development in some ways - reasonably strong ensemble cast, none of the characters are particularly likable as people, but they're all so clearly oblivious that you like them anyway. Unfortunately, it's not quite as funny as R-Dev... except for the moments when Alec Baldwin walks on-screen, at which point I promptly crap my pants with laughter.

I'd put up a clip, but this show is not popular enough to have any good YouTube clips.

Second: Violent Acres. I came across this blog while going through AKA's del.icio.us bookmarks and have been steadily growing more interested with each post. It's sort of what I would imagine Tucker Max to be like if he was a 30-something woman with a sense of responsibility, and a lack of alcohol-induced retardation. This person, who keeps enough to herself that she is speculated to be a dude, basically slams on assholes and self-indulgent women.

Here are some hilarious posts:

• On women gaining weight during pregnancy
• On Tucker Max
• On people being assholes to wait staff
• On fighting (the post from AKA)

The Chinese post office is giving a boon to all of its poor underpaid secretaries and mail-stuffers. This year's stamps will smell and taste like sweet-and-sour pork. A part of me vaguely wants to call, "Bullshit?" But hey, what do I know.

According to CNN (which seems to be full of generally crap stories, come to think of it), 2006 was the warmest year on record for the US. Citing the National Climatic Data Center, they stated:

I found this link to a Dallas Morning News article via David Winer's Scripting News.

Apparently, Barack Obama smokes cigarettes. Will this news tarnish his golden boy image with the taint of weakness, or burnish it with the luster of "he's one of us" normality? Will parents think of him as a bad influence on their children, or just shake their heads in amusement, much like they did with Bush's blatant stupidity?

It's hard to tell. Americans are fickle people. They seem to think that a person's consumptive habits somehow define their moral character more accurately than their actual history of decision-making. I would be pretty disappointed if this ever became an issue, though. There are so many more important criteria to think about (e.g. positions on the environment, Iraq, taxes, religion) that if this one actually gains traction, then my faith in democracy as a political system will drop by about five points.

**** Update ****
As I don't want to be yet another vector for anti-Obama sentiment, I removed the picture.

Happy New Year everybody. Hope everyone did something exciting. More importantly, I hope people are still setting out their resolutions.

I don't really take to resolutions. It's a pretty arbitrary thing to do - completely changing one habit or another because it just happens to hit a certain day of the year. But sometimes, the need is such that any catalyst will do.

I just watched Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Going into the movie, I wasn't exactly a skeptic. I've been listening to people talk about global warming since I was in grade school. I never doubted that the Earth was gradually getting warmer, or that mankind was the reason for this effect.

I was, however, not particularly motivated to do anything about it. It seemed like yet another issue that would probably percolate for many years before actually being dealt with.

Perhaps one of the most important reasons to see this movie is that it presents you with stark images of what global warming has already done. Gigantic ice shelfs falling off of Antarctica. Mountains losing their snow caps. Lakes and rivers withering away. It may not sound like much. But it's frightening when you look at it.

This year, I would like to think that I'm going to do something that will help change the way that this story goes. Being cognizant of my weaknesses, I'm aware of the relatively high probability that I will stop thinking about this tomorrow, or next week, or the week after that. But at the least, I'll urge everyone to go see this movie. In fact, I'll go one better, and point you to a place where you can see it for free. Unless you are an asshole, I promise that you won't consider it to be a waste of time.

Alternately, you can go to www.climatecrisis.net and see all of the corporate plugging that's been legitimately set out for the movie.

Update: Apparently, boingboing logged the "liberation" of a gigantic ice shelf off the coast of Canada. The CNN source article states:

A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada's Arctic. The mass of ice broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometers (497 miles) south of the North Pole, but no one was present to see it in Canada's remote north.

If you saw the movie, this will make you scared.