sysrick.com

Moonset, viewed from the Space Station. This NASA website offers a streaming quicktime movie of our moon setting on the horizon, as viewed from the International Space Station. The moon turns into a squashy, pink pancake as it sets, and this science primer explains why. Link to article, Link to movie, Discuss
[Boing Boing Blog]

The Lecturer's Tale. The Lecturer's Tale is a book for anyone who's had contact with a college English department without actually becoming a postmodern literary theorist. [Blogcritics]

Tommy Williams explains why Microsoft holds lots of meetings. Sounds reasonable. I have learned the hard way to never send negative stuff via email. Always give bad news, or disagree with someone (other than what I do in my weblog, which is written for a public audience), face-to-face, or over the phone. If you deliver negative stuff via email, it is often misunderstood. Not to mention that person has the email to use against you anytime. I've thrown away hundreds of thousands of emails. I've kept every single negative one I've ever received. Yeah, I'm a masochist. Anytime I start thinking I'm mighty big I go back into the "crappy email" folder and reread them. That usually solves any ego problems I was working myself into.

Someday I just might publish them on my weblog. Heh. "Sucky emails Scoble has received." So, if you wanna tell me off in email, think about that one. Of course, you're welcome to tell me "you suck" via email at robertscoble@hotmail.com anytime.

[The Scobleizer Weblog]

Karl Blossfeldt photogravure: it's Ultrareal. German Objectivist photographer Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) once said "the best constructions for industrial design have already been anticipated in nature." Do your eyes a favor and look here. [MetaFilter]

Bizarre public signs in Japan. The "Virtual Picture Album: Japan" is an online gallery with lots of random images of life in Japan. A few of these are really interesting, like these two amazing public signs -- one, and two, which is said to be a sign "warning park visitors to beware of weirdos". Are these common in Japan? I could use one here in Hollywood. Discuss, (Thanks again, S!)
[Boing Boing Blog]

butterfly wings and other things. It took the Smithsonian author and naturalist Kjell B. Sandved 24 years to find all the letters that went into the butterfly alphabet. Along the way he found butterfly wings imprinted with salutations and smiling, happy faces, and threatening expressions on wings and flowers with menacing expressions that say "Do Not Eat Me". Explore the site yourself by going directly to the gallery without looking at all of the images I've linked to, or read the story of how Sandved discovered his magnificent obsession. [MetaFilter]

Google News
Google News

[Release 4.0]

The Monday Morning Quarterback.

Whenever somebody starts talking about our "American way of life," I usually get nervous. That's probably because I don't have a minivan, a cooler, or children. I don't go anywhere people dance, pray, sing, or view projected images. Maybe I haven't found the stairway to Valhalla, but from what I've been able to ferret out, the right path won't be the crowded one.

In my local paper this morning, I see that Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, the 10 Commandments Guy, was speaking Saturday at the 6th Annual Sovereignity and Your Rights seminar in Alamogordo, New Mexico. He says that our nation's "way of life" is under attack, because "drugs, homosexuality, and abortion have become acceptable." This is, in his eyes, a misuse of our liberty.

"Liberty is not the freedom to act like a whatever out on the street. It's a freedom to do whatever you want within the laws of God," Moore said.

Well slam, bam, thank you Imam.

If you need a laugh this morning, check out Mark Morford's column this morning at the SF Chronicle, in which he brings us Sex Tips From Rick Santorum. Turns out the Senator is taking e-mail queries, like this one:

Dear Sen. Santorum, R-Pa.: My boyfriend really wants me to talk dirty to him during sex, but I feel so embarrassed. I want to please him, but I've always been such a good girl! What can I do? —Potty-Mouth Wannabe, San Diego

Rick answers this, and many other sexually vexing questions, in his patented straight-shooting manner.

The political situation in Iraq is looking confused, which surprises no one. The London Times has a playbook to the major contenders for power in the new Democratic Republic of Iraq. Check it out if you want to know the difference between the emerging parties of the PUK, the KDP, the INC, and the ICP, all of whom are setting up shop in Baghdad's Acronym Alley. One thing's for sure: Each of these groups represents the Will of the People, and the others are infidels.

While you're at the Times, take a look at the story of Fahd al-Mairi, a Syrian kid who just couldn't stay at home while American tanks were rolling over the Tigris. We follow him from his home, through Iraqi boot camp, and finally to his stand on a bridge leading into Baghdad. The kid held his ground, too, unlike the fifty members of the Republican Guard with him who took off, leaving Fahd holding the empty bag.

It's easy to forget that a major metro paper can occasionally pull off a great piece of investigative journalism, since so few of 'em do it anymore. But the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is one of the exceptions. The AJC got curious when the Gwinnett school district began reporting discipline data on its student body in compliance with the federal "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001."

They noticed that Cobb County, for example, had 97,843 students last year and reported 42,040 disciplinary incidents, and DeKalb County, with almost the same number of students reported 53,057 incidents. Then here comes Gwinnett County, with 115,837 students, reporting only 4,258 disciplinary actions.

Either Gwinnett is a model district with exceptionally well-behaved students, or the administrators are a lying pack of weasels. Bet you can guess which.

Although I'm letting everyone else talk about SARS, because dammit, Jim, I'm a linguist, not an immunobiologist, I highly recommend this story at the UK Independent, titled, "Welcome to the Sars camp: 1,000 solitary, sterile, white rooms."

Hundreds of construction workers are assembling plastic and metal panels around the clock in the latest attempt to contain the virus that has killed 131 people in mainland China, including 56 in Beijing.

Stanislaw Lem meets Michael Crichton.

That's it for this morning. We're scrambling under some deadlines, so we had to keep it brief. But remember, you're free to do whatever you want, as long as you obey God's law.

[The Raven]

I love Japanese copywriting.

[Tesugen.com]

W. C. Privy's Original Bathroom Companion. Jack Mingo is a wonderful pop culture historian. I really emjoyed his book on the origins of different products, How the Cadillac Got its Fins). He has co-written a new book out that sounds good, called W. C. Privy's Original Bathroom Companion. From the release:

It's a thick 480-page collection of diverse, short and amusing articles, quizzes, fact, fiction, and trivia, lavishly illustrated with drawings and photos.

CONTENTS
Here's a partial list of the table of contents:
History of the Hawaiian Shirt
Weird Tourist Sites
How to Build an Igloo
Prizes: Who were Pulitzer, Heisman, Nobel, Ryder, and Stanley?
Strange Tales from the Bible
How to Escape From Alligators and Quicksand
Ben Franklin's Naughty Writings: "About Flatulence" and "On Choosing a Mistress"
Penguin Love
True Facts About Pigs, Penguins, Kangaroos, and Lemmings
How to Charm a Snake
Eyewitness Accounts of the Boston Tea Party and the Lincoln Assassination
Bathroom History
Stories Behind Mona Lisa, American Gothic, Whistler's Mother & Washington's Unfinished Portrait
Latin and Yiddish Quizzes
The History of Toasters
Optical Illusions
How to Milk a Cow
What Happens After You Flush
Strange Vintage Ads
Obscure Aesop's Fables
A History of Bathroom Graffiti

I wish it were available as an e-text, because I do most of my bathroom reading these days with a Palm. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

1 Pixel per meter. Beautifully rendered site comparing the size of different large objects (Eiffel Tower, King King, Star Trek starship, etc.) on a scale of one pixel per meter. As much fun as the MegaPenny Project. Link Discuss (Thanks, Vanessa!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Iraqis running the U.S. airlines?.

American soldiers uncover nearly $1 billion in cash in Baghdad.  Former leaders such as Saddam probably have at least $5-10 billion more in their Swiss bank accounts (even the minor Arab dictators are among the world's wealthiest people, e.g., Yasser Arafat is estimated to have a personal checking account containing $1.3 billion siphoned from Western aid).  Meanwhile we were told throughout the 1990s that Iraqi children lacked food and medicine.

Is there an analogous situation right here at home?  Hmm... the Board and managers of American Airlines helped themselves back in October 2002 to $41 million to guarantee their personal pensions while CEO Don Carty was stating that "Shared sacrifice has to lead to shared success...".  Thousands of workers were being laid off, thousands more taking pay cuts from what in some cases were very modest salaries.  In theory you're not supposed to start spiriting away a company's assets or giving them to your pals before you file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from your creditors.  In practice the lawyer's for American's executives managed to construct a trust from themselves that would be unassailable and to hide the trust from their workers, creditors, and the public until a recent mandatory SEC disclosure.

http://www.governancemetrics.com rates American's parent company, AMR, as "above average" in corporate governance.

Meanwhile US Airways emerged from bankruptcy.  The creditors got 2 cents for every dollar that they were owed.  The managers who drafted the reorganization plan decided that their shareholders, the folks who'd paid their salary to manage their investment, were entitled to 0 percent of the new company.  They themselves, however, felt that their hard work and dedication entitled them to 8 percent of the shares in the reorganized enterprise.  The theory here is that it is tough for a manager to do a good job if he or she is paid only a straight cash salary of several million dollars; the manager also needs to get an additional $10-20 million per year in stock.  Business school professors who've studied this question find that managers who don't get any stock or stock options do just as good a job as those who transfer a substantial portion of the company into their pockets.

US Airways likes to pay their executives even when they don't work.  Three top executives offered themselves $45 million in the event that they decided to stay at home instead of working at a merged US Air/United Airlines.  The merger never went through but the guys took home an extra $35 million for failing.  How did the US Airways workers fare by comparison?  Nearly 20,000 have lost their jobs entirely; the rest have taken pay cuts (a US Airways flight attendant earned between $18,000 and $38,000 per year before the cuts).

How is this situation different from other industries in the U.S.?  Isn't it very common for managers and their cronies on the Board to steal from the shareholders?  Of course.  But the airlines are different because their executives have bludgeoned their shareholders so badly that there is nothing left to steal.  The airline execs are taking hundreds of $millions in salary out of the $6.9 billion in federal aid that has come out of taxpayers' pockets since September 11.  (The one exception to this rule is Southwest Airlines, which has the industry's lowest-paid executives and is the only consistently profitable U.S. airline.)

[Philip Greenspun Weblog]

[a] BLOW. >>  I like the dirty style and unique flavor of the works from Narushima, from somewhere deep in Tokyo...  [Coolstop Daily Pick 4/27/03 via channel 67 < Retrolounge] [jenett.radio]

Notebooks Of Mass Destruction. I just bought a new Dell notebook from Dell UK and at the end of the order form it asks some questions presumably designed to flush out any IT savvy terrorist cells or recently deposed Iraqi presidents, by cunningly tricking them into exposing their WOMD programmes - see Q4 from the screen capture below. I don't know which is scarier - the reality or the surreality.


[Momentary Lapses Of Dilution]

Seattle Times: Travel editor blogging travels in Northern California. Seattle Times travel editor Terry Tazioli is about a week into his new travel weblog as he tours Northern California. His first stop was Half Moon Bay and now he's in the Napa Valley. [Scott Loftesness]

Quiet music soothes that savage beast.... Dalai Llama muses: meditating monk sets "positive emotion" record : The 14th Dalai Llama, Tenzin Gyatso, muses on new research on the benefits of mindfulness meditation: "A University of Wisconsin-Madison research team has found that a small amount of "mindfulness meditation" results in positive, lasting changes in the brain and immune system." The mainstream medical community in the U.S. has now acknowledge the significant benefits of mindfulness meditatiion - "...a significant decrease in symptoms, both during and after the course."

[ Tenzin Gyatso ] "The calamity of 9/11 demonstrated that modern technology and human intelligence guided by hatred can lead to immense destruction. Such terrible acts are a violent symptom of an afflicted mental state. To respond wisely and effectively, we need to be guided by more healthy states of mind, not just to avoid feeding the flames of hatred, but to respond skillfully. We would do well to remember that the war against hatred and terror can be waged on this, the internal front, too.".....I once was host to Tenzin Gyatso's brother and several other Tibetan monks for a few weeks - and was never again quite the same. So, when Tenzin Gyatso speaks, I listen. [MetaFilter]

Get Ready for the New Cold War. India and China are picking up where the U.S. and Soviet Union left off. So says Bruce Sterling in this commentary for Wired magazine. [Wired News]

Senator Rick Santorum's Guide to Appropriate Sex. Scarlet Pimpernel writes:

Below is a verbatim transcript of my call this morning to Senator Rick Santorum's Office.

SSO: "Senator Santorum's office."

Me: "Hello there... took me awhile to get through. Guess you're pretty busy what with all this going on."

SSO: "Yes."

Me: "Well I just wanted you to know that my wife and I are big supporters of the Senator, but we have just one question..."

SSO: "Yes?"

Me: "Does oral sex between a husband and wife, when they're both consenting... does that constitute sodomy?"

SSO: "Umm.. no. It does not."

Me: "HOT DAMN! (calling out to wife:) HONEY? GREAT NEWS!"

SSO: (stifles laugh)

Me: "Thank You. Thank You Very Much. Just one more thing..."

SSO: "Yes?"

Me: "How does the Senator feel about doggy-style?"

SSO: "Umm... I can't really speak for the Senator on that."

Me: "Oh Well... Thanks Again!" (Hangs up.)

If you've got questions for the Senator concerning appropriate sexual behavior, why not give him a call? (202) 224-6324

Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

surfing for the bored. WebCollage: Exterminate All Rational Thought --Neato (and sometimes beautiful) page refreshed every minute or so. Every image is clickable, too. It finds the images by feeding random words into various search engines, and pulling images (or sections of images) out of the pages returned.
A very cool surfing tool for when you're bored of your usual web haunts (mefi excluded, of course) [MetaFilter]

Edgar Watson Howe. "Americans detest all lies except lies spoken in public or printed lies." [Quotes of the Day]

Breaking Up Countries Where Citizens Hate Each Other.

The only thing more shocking than the airplane engine control falling apart that happened during the trip south was reading an editorial in the Washington Post by Ralph Peters entitled "Must Iraq Stay Whole".  This is the first time that I've seen any sign in the mass media that anyone else has the same thoughts that occurred to me last year regarding Afghanistan (see the Boston-Alaska-Baja-Boston trip report) and this year regarding countries such as Nigeria and the Sudan (see the Israel essay).

In the old days a good argument for being large would have been that a country could thereby defend itself against aggression by other large countries.  In today's world, however, where even the most armed-to-the-teeth Third World government can be unseated in a few weeks by the U.S. military, it doesn't make sense for people who hate each other to live together in one country.

Peters makes the seemingly obvious points that (1) the Kurds hate their Arab conquerors, (2) the Kurds demonstrated during the 1990s that they can govern themselves quite nicely, (3) giving the Kurds their own country would really irritate the Turks, which is just what they deserve for not supporting the U.S. [Peters doesn't say this but presumably it would be a powerful example to foreign governments if the Turks' biggest nightmare came true as a consequence of their failure to obey U.S. instructions], and (4) the Sunnis and Shiites Muslims don't seem to like each other.

[Philip Greenspun Weblog]

Rheingold's "Technology Innovation and Collective Action" at ETCON. Here are my notes on Howard Rheingold's opening keynote at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference, "Technology Innovation and Collective Action."

We lived in small groups, hunting rabbits and digging up carrots for a long time, and at some point, we worked out how to team up in groups larger than families to hunt big game and to engage in agriculture, the birth of collective action.

The history of Unix is the history of people working collectively to create a common good that was useful to all of them. This was enabled by the architecture of Unix. The end-to-end principle guaranteed that people would invent their own services, unenvisioned by the creators of the Net.

The Web is the ne plus ultra: if you had asked five big corps or the govt to create the web, they'd still be working on it in our g'childrens' day. But giving a million geeks the power to post pages about their dogs was the affordance for collective action that gave rise to the Web.

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

The Observer | Review | 300 reasons why we love The Simpsons [Daypop Top 40]

This would *kill* Dr Atkins -- Big Sugar wants 25% of diet to be sugar. Big Sugar is furious that the World Health Organization is proposing to officially recommend that no more than 10% of our diets should consist of sugar. They don't even want the notion discussed in public.

The industry is furious at the guidelines, which say that sugar should account for no more than 10% of a healthy diet. It claims that the review by international experts which decided on the 10% limit is scientifically flawed, insisting that other evidence indicates that a quarter of our food and drink intake can safely consist of sugar.

"Taxpayers' dollars should not be used to support misguided, non-science-based reports which do not add to the health and well-being of Americans, much less the rest of the world," says the letter. "If necessary we will promote and encourage new laws which require future WHO funding to be provided only if the organisation accepts that all reports must be supported by the preponderance of science."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Charlie!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Pointed This Modern World. Today's This Modern World has some pointed observations contrasting domestic and foreign policy. Link Discuss
[Boing Boing Blog]

Sashimi! And Sushi Too!. The Most Delicious Food That's Also Very Good For You - - in fact, to my mind, the best food in the world, including all the tastiest unhealthy ones, is sashimi. And sushi comes second. But sometimes it's late at night or too early in the morning; you're broke; the restaurants are closed; you're nowhere near Tokyo's Tsukiji Fish Market and all your sushi etiquette, memories and knowledge; your favourite sushi websites; your well-thumbed sushi books and your fishy wishlists...are of no darn use to you. Then you remember it's late or early enough to hit your local fish market... And it's then that this ideologically incorrect and Hawaii-leaning, California-dreaming, somewhat Englishly-challenged set of video tutorials comes into its own! Truth be told, for the price of one fresh mackerel, one sardine, a slice of salmon... and sashimi is yours! [But who am I kidding? It's just not the same. Oh well, Windows Media required for the vids.] [MetaFilter]

Brain-twisting interview questions. Here's a collection of mind-bending job interview questions from Microsoft, along with other tidbits about the MS interview process. Possible answers to some of these questions (as well as some of the Car Talk Puzzlers) can be found here. [MetaFilter]

"A Mighty Wind" [Daypop Top 40]

The Atlantic | May 2003 | "I'm Right, You're Wrong, Go To Hell" | Lewis [Daypop Top 40]

Well-curves: the middle drops out. Interesting Wired story on the increasing prevalence of the "well" curve -- an inverted bell-curve that's showing up in more and more contexts: students are either doing very poorly or very well on their standardized tests; companies are either very small or very large; Americans are either very poor or very wealthy.

Consumer culture is going bimodal, too. Electronics manufacturers are racing to equip us with screens small enough for cell phones or large enough for home theaters - relegating standard screens to the scrap heap. High-end luxury hotels and low-end budget chains are doing well - but at the expense of midprice accommodations. In retail, Wal-Mart is soaring, boutiques are thriving, but middlebrow Sears is struggling. As The Wall Street Journal noted last year, "consumers are flocking to the most expensive products and the cheapest products, fleeing the middle ground in between."

Then there's the drooping middle class. The Federal Reserve Board's latest analysis of family finances showed that from 1998 to 2001, American incomes were up across the board. But when economists divided the population into five equal segments, a well curve emerged. "Incomes grew at different rates in different parts of the income distribution," the Fed reported, "with faster growth at the top and bottom ranges than in the middle."

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

Pysanky. You're welcome.. Not your father's Easter eggs, um, unless your family's Ukrainian, of course. Pysanky (mentioned in passing here) is a folk art with a rich symbology behind it. Whatever the meaning, though, these eggs are simply amazing to look at in person, and hopefully at least some of that comes across in 72dpi web photos. [more inside] [MetaFilter]

Philip Greenspun asks a question about education.

Why do Colleges Build Dormitories? And teach half-time?  Interesting question.   Interesting answer.

Oh, and check out his post about Israel.   More thought-provoking stuff.

[Ernie the Attorney]

Let My People Go © 2003, John H. Farr Now then. I am really sick and tired of all this steenking Bushwahdiddypoop. The man is a freaking disaster and there ain't no two ways about it. Furthermore, the whole evil mob of rich ignoramuses wouldn't know a Constitution if it bit 'em on the ass. It's time forpoorJesus'sake to DO SOMETHING about all this. But look: I have to make a living, and I still don't have it in the bag. There are plenty of humorless dweebs out there, some of them right here at Salon.com, with all the self-righteous indignation anyone needs to carry on the fight. Take some of mine, fergodssake. It's dragging me down. I'm too old for this. I need to pay off the Visa bill and buy a motorcycle. This is serious. Madre de Dios, I'm even straight. Furthermore, I DID THIS already!!! I put my body on the line and helped desegregate AustinfuckingTexas. I did time teaching in a stupid racist junior college. I helped stop a bloody immoral war against little brown people half a world away. I've marched, written, harangued for solar power, natural food, freedom & justice for all, and the inalienable rights of everyone on the planet to have a good time and not hurt anybody else. I hate the corporate state and haven't ever minced words about it. Dammit, I even vote. isn't that enough? It was supposed to be, but somebody changed the rules. The country is just plain sick. The vampire-sucked Democrats are toasted fools. Safety nazis and jingoistic Stepford families rule the suburbs. All the news is packaged, slanted totalitarian swill. Nobody will get to retire anymore except the plutocrats. Well, you know what? IT'S YOUR TURN, KIDDIES! Fight, fight, fight! GET WITH THE PROGRAM or you'll be washing Bushfeet for a living. Take off the stoopid headphones and READ A BOOK! Any book! Hell, read two books, blow my mind. The ship of state sank years ago. A nation of five percent of the world's population can ... not ... survive ... while scarfing 40 to 50 percent of the world's resources. Can't, can't, can't. And won't! That's why the jerkface doodlebutt suitmeisters are so intent on locking up all the goodies once & for all. That the president of all the people can go out in public and say that billionaires need MORE MONEY without getting stomped into fertilizer probably means it's way too late anyway, so just ignore everything I've just said. Now then, where's my contract?!? WHERE'S MY HARLEY? What is the matter with you people? [Urk, gibber, splutter] Agghhhhh ... [puff, pant] [whispered:] "Die Mütter, die Mütter, es klingt so fremd..." [FarrFeed]

New Get Your War On. Very nice installment of Get Your War On for V-I Day. Link Discuss
[Boing Boing Blog]

New Blog worth checking out.

Dave Winer has convinced Philip Greenspun from MIT to get a weblog.  I am so excited.  I got a copy of his book on Web publishing (Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing) about 4 or 5 years ago just because it looked cool and was well written.  At the time I knew nothing about websites, and had no idea I would ever be able to publish to the web. 

His first post is not descriptive of who he is.  Philip is a great writer, photographer, programmer, commenter on social and cultural issues, and apparently he's taken up flying.  Oh, and he teaches at MIT, so I'm guessing he's kind of smart too.  He's definitely funny.  His Photo.net site is a great resource if you are into photography.

Oh, and be sure to read his How I became a Scum-Sucking Yuppie Materialist.

[Ernie the Attorney]

Tips for Protecting Your Identity. Much is made of the potential for identity theft in online transactions, but the truth is that the vast majority occursdue to meat-space activities that are much simpler to pull off. I ran across a set of ideas on how to protect your identity and thought they'd be good to record. Some of them are obvious, at least to me, but they probably aren't to everyone. I don't know who the author was. Here they are, edited and augmented by me: [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

The Second Violinist.

The Second Violinist is in a practice room at Symphony Hall.  The police knock on the door:  "We've got some bad news for you, sir.  Your house burned down and your children were injured.  They've been taken to the hospital."

"That's terrible!" exclaimed the Second Violinist.  "How did it happen?"

"I'm sorry to have to tell you this, sir," continued the policeman, "but it seems that the Conductor has been having an affair with your wife.  They were in your bedroom, smoking cigarettes after having sex, and got careless.  The cigarettes lit the bedclothes on fire and then it spread to the rest of the house."

The Second Violinist seemed stunned for a moment as a look of wonder spread over his face.  "The Conductor?  ... Came to MY house?"

------------------------------

This story may explain how things spiraled into violence in Iraq.  George W. kept mentioning Saddam and Iraq in his speeches.  If Saddam had been watching CNN he'd have seen the most powerful man in the world focussed on him and the country that he owned.  It would have been a lot scarier for Saddam if W. had said, in response to a question about Iraq, "I delegated the issue to a one-star general, who has full authority to bomb Saddam if necessary, and he will be giving me a report six months from now."

I recall seeing a headline "President delivers ultimatum to Saddam Hussein".  How much more scared would Saddam have been if the headline had read "Administrative assistant to 3rd Undersecretary of State delivers ultimatum to Saddam"?

[Philip Greenspun Weblog]

What they should teach in public schools.

Third World dictators come and go.  Preppie U.S. presidents come and go.  The U.S. military comes and goes (from various far-away lands).  What topic is sufficiently eternal to merit inclusion as my very first blog entry?  Public education!

A friend grew up in a rich suburb of Chicago and went to a public school full of rich kids.  "In our school we read all of the great philosophers and were asked by the teachers to figure out which of these philosophies we agreed with and would like to apply to our lives and our society," he related.  "The problem with most public schools is that they don't teach this kind of critical thinking," he continued, "I'd like to see every kid in America educated like this."

I replied "that doesn't make sense for schools in middle-class and poorer neighborhoods.   With the increasing income disparity in the United States, it is very unlikely that a middle- or lower-class kid will ever become wealthy enough to influence politics.  So it is irrelevant what he or she thinks is a fair, just, or optimum law or philosophy of life.  We should teach middle class kids to obey authority mindlessly because that's what they'll have to do anyway."

[philg News]

Matrix.... Will we ever know what is real anymore? The making of the Matrix sequels. After these movies, will we ever be able to tell what is real or not on the small and large screen? [MetaFilter]

Snootchie bootchies: "Jay and Silent Bob" actor Jason Mewes will be the subject of HBO documentary [FARK]

Laura Palmer's Secret Diary. The (not so) Secret Weblog of Laura Palmer brings back many memories of trying to work out who the real murderer was, and being deeply infuriated with how the story ended. As Agent Cooper puts it: "I know that good is stronger than evil and yet sometimes it's difficult to see it. Even in a place like Twin Peaks." [via Caro] [MetaFilter]

The secret history of VisiCalc. Bob Frankston, the lead programmer for VisiCalc and co-inventor of the computerized spreadsheet, has posted a long history of the project. It's fascinating reading, a kind of computer paleontology, describing the origin of commercial software products.

Before discussing keyboards, it's worth noting that back in 1979 people viewed the keyboard as an impediment to using computers. After all, only secretaries could type and the rest of us need to be able to talk to the computer. Hence the decades spent on trying to get computers to understand speech. It turns out that most people could type (at least those who used spreadsheets) since it was a basic skill necessary for getting through college. In fact, speech is a very problematic way to interact with a spreadsheet. In fact, the spreadsheet itself is used as a communications vehicle rather than speech.

The Apple ][ had a simple keyboard that only had upper case letters and only two arrow keys. There were no interrupts nor a clock. If the user typed a character before the keyboard input buffer was emptied it would be lost.

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

Wincing causes empathy, not the other way around. UCLA neuroresearchers conclude that physically mimicking others' activity (wincing when someone falls off a bike, for example) triggers large amounts of neural activity in the insula, one of the brain's centers of emotion. In other words, you don't wince because you feel sympathy -- you feel sympathy because you wince. This reminds me of some of the received wisdom from the neuro-linguistic programming camp, the idea of creating subconscious rapport by matching physical characteristics with your target (i.e., matching breathing).

UCLA neuroscientists using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are the first to demonstrate that empathetic action, such as mirroring facial expressions, triggers far greater activity in the emotion centers of the brain than mere observation...

The findings explain why humans vary in their ability to understand the pain, joy and anger of others, and how damage to this neural circuit might impair the ability to empathize with the emotions of others, as often seen in patients with autism, a socially isolating psychiatric disease.

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

Head-shaking. Tell you what, sometimes even I think I make this stuff up. Then I read something like this. Not that I’m stepping cheerfully up to accept the “intellectual” label, like a knight’s accolade. I’m too grubby, too grumpy, too old, too hands-on to be the Liberal Arts Torchbearer for the... [Caveat Lector]

Excerpt from an Andrew O'Hehir interview with Bill Moyers in Salon:

Is this period of history -- the collapse of communism and the triumph of global capitalism, the troublesome 2000 election, moving through 9/11 to the current crisis -- one of those fulcrums of history that our children or grandchildren will look back on and say, that changed the direction of the world?

I believe that. I won't be around to see it, but I definitely believe this is a defining period of history. The last third of the 20th century created a kind of political certainty in the world, in this sense: There was the Cold War, which enabled two superpowers, wary of each other, to keep the other stable, to keep the other checked. There was a delicate balance -- there was the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin airlift -- but the Cold War kept velvet gloves over much of the world. There were lots of bad things happening, but it did keep a certain kind of equilibrium in the world.

The other great phenomenon that came in the last half of the 20th century was the rise of the welfare state, with the sense of obligation growing out of the collapse of capitalism in the 1920s -- we had certain obligations one to another, there was a need for the government to intervene to correct gross inequalities in income and health and opportunity.

Both of those have gone now. The Cold War is over and the United States has risen as the great military power, which always brings consequences that powers don't want. And the collapse of the social contract -- the rise of the right wing, the rise of the corporate