August 2011
39 posts
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Jon Huntsman: "The minute that the Republican... →
[ABC News’ Jake] TAPPER: These comments from Governor Perry prompted you to Tweet, quote: “To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” Were you just being cheeky or do you think there’s a serious problem with what Governor Perry said?
HUNTSMAN: I think there’s a serious problem. The minute that the Republican Party...
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Realistic Conflict Theory: The Robbers Cave... →
In which the founders of social psychology make a real-life Lord of the Flies:
In 1954, Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif studied the origin of prejudice in social groups in a classic study called the Robbers Cave Experiment. They conducted their research in a 200 acres (0.8 km2) summer camp which was completely surrounded by Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma.
During the study, Sherif posed as...
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Action Park - Wikipedia →
Some excerpts:
At least six people are known to have died as a result of mishaps on rides at the park. It was nicknamed “Traction Park”, “Accident Park”, “Class Action Park”, “Danger Park” and “Death Park” by doctors at nearby hospitals due to the number of severely injured parkgoers they treated.
Action Park’s alpine slide...
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The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor | The... →
Prisoners are employed at rates of twenty cents an hour manufacturing consumer goods; this is not very different, economically, from slave labor. Private companies that build, own, and run prisons have pushed tougher sentencing laws; this is diabolical rent-seeking. This article discusses a similar form of rent-seeking, by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which has pushed for...
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Alex Gourevitch: Fear →
In this brief piece, Gourevitch compares our present circumstances to what they might be if we had not been terrorized by Osama bin Laden.
The great lie of the war on terror is not that we can sacrifice a little liberty for greater security. It is that fear can be eliminated, and that all we need to do to improve our society is defeat terrorism, rather than look at the other causes of our...
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Letters of Note: PERSIST →
Austin Madison of Pixar hand-wrote a letter to people who want to create things, beginning,
To Whom it May Inspire,
I, like many of you artists out there, constantly shift between two states. The first (and far more preferable of the two) is white-hot, “in the zone” seat-of-the-pants, firing on all cylinders creative mode. This is when you lay your pen down and the ideas pour...
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Scripting Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby -... →
This is a huge (12 printed pages) information-dense table comparing syntax and idioms (eg, arithmetic, array concatenation, anonymous functions) in PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby. I do Python so this gave me a point of reference in understanding the other languages.
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Brandon's room while he was at camp - Failbook →
Brandon left for camp June 26th for 4 weeks. His last words to his sister were, “stay out of my room”.
It’s cute that he thought we wouldn’t go in there.
My advice for next time… invest in a good lock.
Brandon’s family took funny pictures in his room while he was at camp. My favorites are Lucy’s psychiatry booth and Dwight Schrute’s...
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Are You Sure You Want To Quit The World →
If you were desperate and hopeless enough to log on to a suicide chat room in recent years, there was a good chance a mysterious woman named Li Dao would find you, befriend you, and gently urge you to take your own life. And, she’d promise, she would join you in that final journey. But then the bodies started adding up, and the promises didn’t. Turned out, Li Dao was something even...
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Stop Coddling the Super-Rich →
Warren Buffett on how he doesn’t want the government to be so lax in taxing rich people like him. I disagree with some of his points, ie, raising taxes does somewhat diminish the worth of investment, but who am I to quibble with Warren Buffett? He’s spot on regarding tax policy: payroll tax and social security are regressive taxes. Richer people should not pay at lower marginal tax...
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Bachmann blames gaffes on busy speaking schedule →
One of the most entertaining aspects of the Republican primary campaign is Michele Bachmann’s slip-ups, for example, confusing John Wayne with John Wayne Gacy, Massachusetts with New Hampshire, the Soviet Union with Russia, and,
“You can’t do better than Elvis Presley,” Bachmann said, “and we thought we’d celebrate his birthday as we get started celebrating the ‘Take Our Country Back’...
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Rick Perry: Bernanke printing money treasonous →
Regarding Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, Rick Perry said at an event last week,
I know there’s a lot of talk and what-have-you about if this guy prints more money between now and the election. I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in...
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A successful Git branching model » nvie.com →
I was telling some nerd friends last night about git and told them that git is different because there is no truth, there is no central repository for code. Commits, branching, and merging all happen on git instances, and any two git instances of the same project can push changes to and pull changes from each other. I have used git for almost a year, before that, I had used Subversion, and CVS...
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Fire! by José Avelino Gilles Corbett Lourenço →
A couple bickering as their house is on fire.
Fire! Fire! Quick! Put it out! Use the blanket! The dog! No! Don’t use the dog! The dog is on fire! Smother the dog with the blanket! Not like that! Smother the flaming part! Good! Oh! Your arm! Your arm! Smother your arm with the blanket! The curtains! Oh my god! Lose the blanket! The fire is on the curtains! How is your arm?! It will be OK!...
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Dominionism: Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry's... →
Reporting on American Christianity is often difficult, because American Christianity is diverse in a subtle way that is not easily understood by outsiders. Fundamentalists, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Charismatics, for example, while having some important overlap in political agenda, have historically distinct roots and important differences in tone, outlook, and approach.
The author of this...
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Announcing bake →
Bake is a software tool I’ve used all through my graduate research work to make it easier for me to run many jobs at once and then collect data from them in a systematic way. You can get it on github. If you do any numerical modeling, it should be helpful for you. It is also useful for aggregating grids of experimental data, and may be useful for other things, too.
Bake runs a set of code...
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Intrauterine cannibalism - Wikipedia →
A parenting tip from the world of animals:
Intrauterine cannibalism is a behaviour in some carnivorous species, in which multiple embryos are created at impregnation, but only one or two are born. The larger or stronger ones consume their less-developed siblings as a source of nutrients.
In adelphophagy, the fetus eats sibling embryos, while in oophagy it feeds on eggs.
Intrauterine...
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RFC 3092 - Etymology of "Foo" →
There was an RFC describing the etymology of “Foo”. (RFC means “Request for Comment” but these now typically describe networking standards.)
Abstract:
Approximately 212 RFCs so far, starting with RFC 269, contain the terms foo',bar’, or `foobar’ as metasyntactic variables without any proper explanation or definition. This document rectifies that...
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Zookeeper | Plugged In Online Movie Reviews →
Plugged In, “Shining a Light on the World of Popular Entertainment”, is a Christian website with reviews of media; it’s run by Focus on the Family. Here is their review of The Zookeeper (In which Kevin James is friends with talking animals). This review alerts the readers to mentions of feng shui and yoga (Spiritual Content), a gorilla flirting with a woman at TGI Friday’s...
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Mars500 →
Six scientists are simulating a trip to and from Mars, through Russia’s Institute of Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency. When I first heard about this project, it sounded like it was an excellent simulation of the long trip, only missing the gravity. All communications with the outside have a twenty-minute delay, in both directions. The crew are locked in together for 520...
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Jeff Hartline: Hundreds of thousands of veterans... →
My friend Jeff Hartline got back from military service in Afghanistan in December. In this Baltimore Sun op-ed, he describes the difficulty he and many other veterans face in getting a job after demobilization:
I flew home from demobilization, excited about the prospect of seeing friends and family and confident that I would quickly find work. Eight months later, I find myself still applying,...
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Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And... →
From The Onion, January 17, 2001:
On the economic side, Bush vowed to bring back economic stagnation by implementing substantial tax cuts, which would lead to a recession, which would necessitate a tax hike, which would lead to a drop in consumer spending, which would lead to layoffs, which would deepen the recession even further.
It’s spooky how accurately Bush recreated this Onion...
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Stanley Kubrick: However vast the darkness, we... →
Playboy: If life is so purposeless, do you fell that it’s worth living?
Kubrick: Yes, for those of us who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow...
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FBI ‘Islam 101′ Guide Depicted Muslims as... →
The ACLU of Northern California and the Asian Law Caucus, through an FOIA request, found this PowerPoint slideshow (PDF) previously used by the FBI to train new agents about Islam. The slideshow is offensive in both its thoughtless combination of several information-poor slide templates and in its characterization of Muslims. I think this is the worst slide:
This Wired article by Spencer...
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Difficulties in dealing with wealth disparities:...
I listened to these two podcast episodes back-to-back, and I think they have a common idea.
First was Munger on Exchange, Exploitation and Euvoluntary Transactions on EconTalk. The episodes of EconTalk with Mike Munger are the best, he’s clever, funny, and has surprising insights into the “and then what?” of economics. He tells stories about the bus system in Santiago, Chile,...
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My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant →
Jose Antonio Vargas, co-winner of a Pulitzer Prize, tells his story. He was born in the Philippines, but emigrated to the United States when he was 12. It was years before he even knew that he was an undocumented immigrant. Here, Vargas describes the steps he took to become successful in America, while hiding his immigration status. And then,
Early this year, just two weeks before my 30th...
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The Beck of Revelation by Mark Lilla | The New... →
Mark Lilla presents a profile on Glenn Beck. I normally think of Beck as a good subject for the Two Minutes’ Hate, that he is an enemy of sound policy. And, I think he is, but Lilla paints him as more of a demagogue than a misguided idealist:
But after reading these books and countless articles on the man, I’m coming to the conclusion that searching for the “real” Glenn Beck makes no...
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The Mad Genius Who Invented Sea-Monkeys →
Regarding Harold von Braunhut, who invented Sea-Monkeys, X-Ray glasses, invisible goldfish, and the game Balderdash. And he was a Jew, but involved with the Ku Klux Klan:
It’s tempting to think that von Braunhut’s biggest con was convincing himself to buy into preposterous and despicable ideas. Unfortunately for the world, however, that’s not so unusual. More extraordinary is this: Richard...
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What Were They Thinking? by Elizabeth Drew | The... →
Elizabeth Drew has written a wonderful piece on how strange the debt ceiling debate has been, and how the political forces behind it are not acting in your interest. The Tea Party has disproportionate influence over House Republicans, and thus, the world, Boehner and McConnell have different concerns for power in the House and Senate, and Obama wants to get reelected.
The Republicans were...
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For Anarchist, Details of Life as F.B.I. Target -... →
An account of the silly efforts of the FBI to track a spindly, vegan, nonviolent anarchist:
A fat sheaf of F.B.I. reports meticulously details the surveillance that counterterrorism agents directed at the one-story house in East Austin. For at least three years, they traced the license plates of cars parked out front, recorded the comings and goings of residents and guests and, in one case,...
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The Republicans exit history - Roger Ebert's... →
There are trigger issues in which the GOP no longer reflects the thinking of mainstream Americans of either party. In Tuesday’s charade as the House put the Tea Party debt legislation to a vote, what we saw was an example of the kind of coalition voting common in Europe, where separate parties arrive at an agreement to govern. There are now essentially three parties in Congress:...
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Rep Jim McGovern on the debt ceiling debates (PBS... →
REP. JIM MCGOVERN, D-Mass.: I keep expecting lion tamers and acrobats to appear on the House floor, because this process under this Republican leadership has become a complete circus. The underlying Boehner plan should be called the Republican default act.
MONSTER BURN
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To Escape Chaos, a Terrible Debt Deal -... →
This is the best explanation I have seen so far on how bad the debt deal is:
For weeks, ever since House Republicans said they would not raise the nation’s debt ceiling without huge spending cuts, Democrats have held out for a few basic principles. There must be new tax revenues in the mix so that the wealthy bear a share of the burden and Medicare cannot be affected.
Those principles...
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David Frum: Wake up GOP: Smashing system doesn't... →
From the “Sane Republican Department”:
Only about one-third of Republicans agree that cutting government spending should be the country’s top priority. Only about one-quarter of Republicans insist the budget be balanced without any tax increases.
Yet that one-third and that one-quarter have come to dominate my party. That one-third and that one-quarter forced a debt...
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Paul Krugman: The Centrist Cop-Out - New York... →
Paul Krugman:
As The Times’s Nate Silver pointed out, Mr. Obama effectively staked out a position that was not only far to the right of the average voter’s preferences, it was if anything a bit to the right of the average Republican voter’s preferences.
But Republicans rejected the deal. So what was the headline on an Associated Press analysis of that breakdown in negotiations? “Obama,...
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Paul Krugman: The President Surrenders on Debt... →
I’m no Keynsian, but Krugman gets the “debt ceiling crisis”:
For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no...
