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February 28, 2005
    America is, after all, the world's most powerful nation.
     This sentiment has been boinging around the major media lately, especially in stories and columns about the health of the dollar. But what does it really mean?

     We have the world's biggest nuclear arsenal for sure. We could vaporize every world city if it came to that. But Russia has enough nuclear warheads and ICBMs to stop the world's clock, too (while standards of living and life expectancy there continue to decline). For that matter, Britain, France, Israel, and China have enough atomic military juice to seriously fuck up the current order of things.

     What America definitely doesn't have is enough oil and natural gas to run the nation's economy as it currently exists -- as a chain of realtors driving SUVs to tanning booths to impress house-buyers borrowing money from lenders who flip the mortgages to government sponsored entities who can't add up a column of figures, even with the help of computers.

     Speaking of math,  I did the oil figures a couple of weeks ago, and it's worth repeating. Of the the 80 million barrels a day the world burns, we burn one quarter of that, or 20 million barrels a day. Every five days we burn a hundred million barrels. Every fifty days America burns one billion barrels of oil. Every year we burn seven billion barrels. The US has 28 billion barrels of oil left. If we burned every last drop of our own oil, and somehow lost access to foreign imports, our oil would last four more years.

     Four more years of easy motoring, bargain shopping, RV vacations, and trading up to bigger houses farther out in the rural gloaming.

     If I was a young economist, I would reflect on this situation and perhaps conclude that the American economy doesn't have great long-term prospects. In fact, I'd have to imagine the American standard of living falling of a cliff within the lifetime of a TV sitcom. I'd have to wonder about American "power" and the actual value of the dollar.

     It's a good thing that friendly nations like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Venezuela are willing to sell us oil. That way, we don't have to use up all our remaining oil in four years. And its a good thing we can pay for that oil in dollars. What else could we trade for it? Tanning booth hours? Back episodes of "Sex in the City?" Free day passes to Six Flags?

     Of course, the global oil peak implies that all the nations of the world will have less total energy to divvy up. I just don't see where the United States is in a particularly favorable position on this. Have you heard of any plans to reduce our extreme dependence on cars? I don't think our supreme leader has even uttered the world "railroad" since he came on the national scene. Are we going to subcontract the Jolly Green Giant to go around America moving things closer together so we don't have to burn so much gasoline?

       Excuse me for saying this, but I don't think we have any idea what we're going to do. It causes me to wonder how powerful we really are, apart from our ability to blow things up.

[Via Mike’s List]

Scary as this is, my preliminary research has discovered some even more shocking facts. I have found that only 1% of Stanford professors believe in telepathy (defined as "communication between minds without using the traditional five senses"), compared with 36% of the general population. And less than half a percent believe "people on this earth are sometimes possessed by the devil", compared with 49% of those outside the ivory tower. And while 25% of Americans believe in astrology ("the position of the stars and planets can affect people's lives"), I could only find one Stanford professor who would agree. (All numbers are from mainstream polls, as reported by Sokal.)

This dreadful lack of intellectual diversity is a serious threat to our nation's youth, who are quietly being propagandized by anti-astrology radicals instead of educated with different points of view. Were I to discover that there were no blacks on the Stanford faculty, the Politically Correct community would be all up in arms. But they have no problem squeezing out prospective faculty members whose views they disagree with.

Link

Speaking to the National Governors Association, he said that "America's high schools are obsolete" and are "ruining the lives of millions of Americans every year."

High schools, leave most students unprepared for college and for today's jobs. "When I compare our high schools with what I see when I'm traveling abroad," he added, "I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow."

To address the problem, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said it would give $15 million to the National Governors Association, to be disbursed to states that take significant steps to improve their high schools.

Blinkorama Consists of nothing but video screen captures of people blinking.
You have to applaud this sort of singlemindedness, but it's hard to applaud and shake your head at the same time.

These implicitly spiritual stories, just as explicitly spiritual ones, can be divided into parables and fables. Mysteries and romances, like Jesus' stories about servants, are meant to be plausible. Because the stories could be true, we can learn from Sherlock Holmes, Scarlet O'Hara, or the Good Samaritan. But fantasy and science fiction, like the stories about Jesus' miracles or divine birth, are meant to be implausible. By asking us to consider something outside our experience, like traveling in time, becoming a monster, or turning water into wine, they ask us to throw off our preconceptions and see the world as if we had never seen it before. Because it's impossible for a story to occur in our world, we know that it's about something more than its details, and we can learn from Santa Claus, Superman, or the Son of God.

As they do for many adolescents and adults, fantasy and science fiction gave me fables that were spiritual and fables that explored the desire to be spiritual. I appreciated the personal and public difficulty of promoting a faith by reading about Paul Muad'Dib in Dune and Michael Valentine Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land. Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light made me think about the nature of pantheons. As an atheist who yearned for meaning, I saw my struggle in Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man, the story of a time traveler who goes back to meet Jesus. I found answers to questions that traditional religions are reluctant to pose: James Morrow examined the literal death of the conservative Christian God in Towing Jehovah and Jesus' second coming as a woman in Only Begotten Daughter.

Link

(Thanks, Tom!)

Todd just pointed me to Slacker Astronomy.  Those slacker astronomers sound like my kind of slackers, too!  Love their tagline:

Because if you aren't going to care about something, may as well not care about astronomy.

They're doing regular podcasts on astronomy as well as keeping a nice little blog.  I've recently acquired a passing interest in astronomy, so I think I'll hang around those guys for a while...

From there I bumped over to the Hour of Slack, which looks, uh, very interesting.  And syndicated too, by the looks of it (scroll down their page for radio stations).

There are few stretches of Route 66 whose architecture was built from the imagination of a hauntingly creative mastermind.  Travel + Leisure runs a tale of Mary Jane Colter’s long lasting impression left in the old southwest by her designs.  Created for the rich Spanish family that she envisioned the little touches make all the difference.  One of her works that you may even recognize is Phantom Ranch found in the Grand Canyon.  If you aren’t too familiar with it, perhaps it’s time to get acquainted.

Schneider's ingenious approach shows several important virtues:

* User innovation and the lack of passivity. Apple didn't intend for third-party software to be used with the iPod; not only was Schneider unconcerned with this, he ended up using the iPod in a way that its developers wouldn't have anticipated (and, if they've heard about it, are probably amused or startled by). He certainly refused to limit his thinking to what the original manufacturer had in mind; he insisted, on, well, thinking different.

* Consciousness of history. This problem was solved before in an earlier generation of technology. As Dave Farber has often pointed out, it's tragic that computer scientists and programmers working today are often thoroughly ignorant of what earlier generations have already invented and implemented. Even more than other fields, computing may be repeating and duplicating effort all the time. The notion of modulating digital data as a waveform at audio frequencies has been deeply important in digital communications, but it's easy enough for people who don't use a modem any more to forget it -- never mind people who (like myself) have never had to use an acoustic coupler.

* An appreciation for the universality of the machine. The idea that data is data and that representations and encodings of it are merely accidental goes back, depending on how you want to count it, decades or centuries. (See, e.g., Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), for some antecedents of this idea in the days before Shannon, Turing, and von Neumann.) But even so, we can get stuck in what cognitive psychologists call "functional fixedness" and refuse to think about data outside of its current representation. We can refuse to think of some signalling method or storage medium as capable of representing any data, of communications media and computing devices as genuinely universal. We can say that certain outputs were made for certain purposes and stubbornly refuse to consider that there are other outputs, even outputs that may be a problem for somebody's security policy. We can read Shannon, or anything after Shannon, and still not know in a practical sense that any data can be encoded on any channel. But Schneider thought with an abstraction and generality that befits an "information age"; he knew that bits are bits, from a communication engineering point of view, and meaning comes after, at another layer.

Link

New Scientist has a fine article detailing the large amount of state-sponsored research currently looking at entheogenic substances as effective medications for the treatment of alcoholism, drug abuse, post traumatic stress disorder, and other syndromes of modern life. Sadly, many of the researchers blame Dr. Timothy Leary for putting the nail in the coffin of drug research. But I'd argue that Leary's evangelism of LSD was absolutely necessary to the development of western culture under the shadow of atomic war. People like to imagine that the civil rights movement and the protests against the vietnam war were separate from the acid scene. They weren't. Not to mention the impact of the psychedelic experience on music, movies, and cinematography...

Clinical trials of psychedelic drugs are planned or under way at numerous centres around the world for conditions ranging from anxiety to alcoholism. It may not be long before doctors are legally prescribing hallucinogens for the first time in decades. "There are medicines here that have been overlooked, that are fundamentally valuable," says Halpern.

...But to some brave souls, psychedelic medicine never lost its allure. One of them is Rick Doblin, who in 1986 founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in Sarasota, Florida, and who earned a doctorate from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government after writing a dissertation on the federal regulation of psychedelics. For nearly 20 years MAPS has lobbied the FDA and other government agencies to allow research on psychedelics to resume. It has also persuaded scientists to pursue the work and raised funds to support them. A similar body, the Heffter Research Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was founded in 1993 by scientists with an interest in hallucinogens.

In the past couple of years their efforts have begun to pay off. Doblin is optimistic that psychedelic research is back for good, and this time it will do things right.

Brad DeLong has an arresting post on the costs of the civil war.

• Cost of Civil War to North: $140 per capita (including only economic damages for dead and wounded)
• Cost of Civil War to South: $340 per capita (including only economic damages for dead and wounded)
• "Indirect" additional cost of Civil War to South: $450 per capita.

Cost to buy and free all the slaves?  $90 per capita.

This actually looks like it might be decent unless the Curse of Keanu strikes...

http://download.ifilm.com/qt/portal/2665182_200.mov

...Nixon has a keen understanding of these things. He has been a professional pol all his life, through many ups and downs. He understands that politics is a rotten, frequently degrading business that corrupts everybody who steps in it, but this knowledge no longer bothers him. Some say it never did...“Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail”

I was going to end a post with the above quote. It was to be a post to all the bloggers and the legions of young people who in the last couple years have entered politics. In them is the republic's future, but they need to understand that road is fraught with difficulty and much heavy lifting. I thought it would be amusing, sort of an ironic twist on the warning of the gates of Dante's hell, “Abandon hope, all who enter.” Such is my dark humor and such was Doctor Hunter S. Thompson's, a brilliant individual who was an unequaled teacher and practitioner of American politics.

I briefly met Dr. Thompson on the floor of the '84 Democratic convention. I had the pleasure to work with him, tangentially, once. In the '92 Dem primary, a week before the New York primary, the Clintons made their reprehensible comment about not inhaling. Pat Caddell was at a bar in New York with a couple of the national media. Caddell immediately called Thompson for a comment, “He's sold out a generation.” With six words, 8 months before they took office, Dr. Thompson had defined the Clintons' presidency.

Thompson's political instincts and radar were scary. There were few in American politics anyway near him. A couple years ago, he released two volumes of letters from the 50s and 60s. In 1965, Thompson was living in San Francisco and had covered the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. The Hippies weren't even happening yet, and General Electric's Ronald Reagan was just beginning to add politics to his long running television career. But in a letter he wrote that year, 1965, Thompson looked into America's future, he didn't see Berkeley, he saw Reagan – that's deep, heavy political mojo Bubba.

From World Net Daily: Bill Maher: Christians have neurological disorder.

"We are a nation that is unenlightened because of religion. I do believe that. I think that religion stops people from thinking. I think it justifies crazies. I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder. If you look at it logically, it's something that was drilled into your head when you were a small child. It certainly was drilled into mine at that age. And you really can't be responsible when you are a kid for what adults put into your head."

And more:

"When people say to me, 'You hate America,' I don't hate America. I love America. I am just embarrassed that it has been taken over by people like evangelicals, by people who do not believe in science and rationality. It is the 21st century. And I will tell you, my friend. The future does not belong to the evangelicals. The future does not belong to religion."

I'd have to disagree with that last statement. Clearly, the short-term future of the U.S. definitely belongs to religion -- at least that's what works best for the politicians.

(via Steel White Table)

There aren’t many things I miss about having Direct TV, but after moving into my new apartment last year sometime, I do sorta miss LINK TV.  One of the newsletters showed up in my email and I thought I would go poking around the site.  LINK TV features some of the best programming around for the connected viewer.  If you are lucky enough to tune in, check out the world music videos, Mosaic news, and other informative docs. 

One that may be of interest to you (there are always several good shows running):

”After 40 years, Silivia Morini returns to Havana, to th epalatial house of her youth , where her nostalgia for a pre-Castro Cuba confronts modern-day Cuban realities.”

Anyone returning home after 40 years must be in for some unique adventure.  Check the site for showtimes.

Backpacker Magazine runs a feature on the best backpacking in America. Some good stuff here. All 50 states are thoroughly covered within an easy interface and lots of solid recommendations.

In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?

The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones. Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases -- cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis -- the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless.

And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist...

Link

(via Kottke)

February 21, 2005
       Last month media elder statesman Bill Moyers made a speech after receiving an award at Harvard in which he said that "born again" members of the Bush regime couldn't possibly believe in the future if they truly subscribed to the doctrines of Pentecostal Christianity -- since its theology includes the notion that the world has entered an "end times" scenario as described in the the Book of Revelations. Moyers went further, implying that people who explicitly and programmatically don't believe in the future have no business running a government, the chief task of which is safeguarding the future.

     Friends of mine are alarmed about the rise of the Pentecostals and evangelicals. Personally, I think there is going to be a hearty backlash against them. It is beginning to look too obvious that they don't care about several crucial aspects of the human project in its current form. They don't care about global warming. They don't care about the gathering world energy crisis. They don't care about America's phony economy based on ever more suburban development. At the secondary level, they don't care about basic medical research, they don't care about protecting the nation's borders, they don't care about corporate depradations against communities and workers, they don't care about the growing obscene gap between the rich and the poor.

      This apocalyptic religion has risen out of the Sunbelt, out of those very parts of the country that have most enjoyed hyper-turbo-mega prosperity during the high tide of the cheap oil era. Perhaps their dark vision is an apprehension that the things they have benefited from so hugely are indeed coming to an end -- easy motoring and cheap air conditioning, to name two biggies. But are they so dumb that no other way of life is even conceivable to them?

      One of the dirty secrets of our time is that a large group of relatively stupid people were able to thrive in the growth medium of a cheap energy economy. People who had emerged blinking from agricultural serfdom in the 1950s found themselves, within a generation, making millions whacking together suburban houses and selling Chevrolets to other people like them. It is no accident that the main activity of televangelism is, literally, money-grubbing, or that so many of the branches of this degraded Christianity are preoccupied with unearned riches. It is also not an accident that no major spokesperson of the "born again" sector has made a peep about Las Vegas, or against legalized gambling anywhere in the country -- in fact, this New Christianity represents the Las Vegas-ization of religion per se, faith in the idea that it is possible to get something for nothing, an idea which is generally only believed in by stupid people or little children, an idea that is deeply pernicious to the human project.

       As the post-war economy uprooted so many southerners from rural places, and traditional ways of life, and plunked them in alienating, lonely, disconnected suburban nowheres ruled by consumerist ways of life, religion became ever more important as the only remaining place of social enactment. Church membership across this arid suburban social landscape increasingly compensated for the absence of real communities based on networks of local economic relations. In a way, fundamentalist religion made the predations of the corporate community-destroyers easier. It made secular community seem optional, dispensable, provisional, something easily replaced by WalMart. It squared nicely with the ethos of hyper-individualism, in which bargain shopping trumped any aspect of civic amenity. The churches, meanwhile, sought to benefit from the same economies of scale as those enjoyed by the giant retail chains. Increasingly, the churches were organized on a mass basis and housed in buildings that looked like WalMart with gigantic parking facilities. In fact, evangelical churches were renowned for taking over the leases of dead chain stores in dying malls because the rents were so cheap. Sunbelt evangelicalism became a kind of WalMart of the spirit. Political leaders went bargain shopping in them for voting souls.

     Since it is a religion essentially based on extreme selfishness, luxury, comfort, and self-satisfaction, it will probably become most virulent when the goodies its members have enjoyed grow scarce. In other words, when the folks in Phoenix and Atlanta find themselves on line waiting for gasoline, duck and cover. It is unfortunate that the very real hardships of the global oil crisis will appear to jibe with their stupid fantasies about the "end times," because the end of cheap fossil fuel does not have to be the end of civilization, and certainly not of the human race. But this stupidity and selfishness go hand-in-hand, so the nation as a whole has not been able to face the most obvious tasks of preparation, like reviving the railroad system.

      The non-stupid, non-born again part of the nation has been cowed into submission for decades by the Sunbelt evangelicals. The Democratic party could not formulate a coherent opposition to that culture of self-satisfaction. The Democrats nominated a paragon of unearned riches as its most recent presidential candidate, a man who didn't even have the moral fiber to make his fortune selling cars or building strip malls.

     Soon, the problems this nation faces will be so obvious and grave that George W. Bush and the Republicans and the WalMartians, and all the moneygrubbing TV preachers, and the people who can't imagine an hour of leisure without engines ringing in their ears, and the offspring of all the bug-eyed lynch-mob cretins of yore will stand naked in discredit. The rest of the nation, the non-stupid, non-selfish, non-childish, non-believers in the idea that it is possible to get something for nothing will take a stand. It won't be the end of the world, but it will be a political convulsion against a background of fire, proving that the future belongs to those who believe in the future.

Really, is there a weaker argument against the Founders' intentions as to the separation of church and state than the refrain that the phrase itself doesn't appear in the Constitution? N&R contributor Michael Skube trots it out this morning (unposted). Yawn. I haven't addressed the complete and purposeful secularity of the Constitution in, oh, a week: "This irreligious Constitution -- a forest in which the First Amendment is just the highest tree -- proves most inconvenient to people who want to argue that the Founders didn't intend for there to be separation of church and state."

Skube also nets a red herring about Jefferson being a reference point for advocates of a secular government, pointing out that Jefferson didn't write the Constitution. Right, but ridiculous -- the Constitution wasn't imposed on America by its author, it was approved by the several states. But just for fun, Skube, here's a quote from James Madison, the guy who did write the Constitution: "Strongly guarded as is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States."

Speaking of authorial intent...it's no coincidence that the author removed the religious language from a key source document when writing the Bill of Rights.

Facts is facts, people. You are free in this country to practice your religion in large part because of the separation of chuch and state. Why in the world would you want to pretend that it doesn't exist?

Bill Maher in the LA Times: "Now, I didn't mind being on the losing side of the last election. But as a loser, I guess I have some "unpopular" opinions — and I'd like to keep them. I'd even like to continue to say them right out loud on TV, because if I just get up there every Friday night and spout the Bush administration's approved talking points, that's not freedom or entertainment. It's Fox News."

The CEOs of Verizon and MCI, the Wall Street Journal reports, claim that their merger will heighten competition. So, too, the Big Cheese at SBC and AT&T.

Sure. Did I mention I've got a really good deal on a bridge for you? Personally, I'll vote with the WSJ's headline writer concerning the deal: "What About the Customers?" (TP comment: Who they?)

"Shameless CEO" ... the Ultimate Tautology!

For those considering a move: Sperling's Best Places web site ranks locations in the U.S. by all sorts of criteria, like best and worst cities for sleep, gas prices, hurricanes, stress, crime and cost of living.

Compare your current location to where you're thinking of settling down. Sperlings will provide an statistical comparison of population, crime, education, housing, number of Starbucks (!?) and climate in the two places. Here's one for New Yorkers heading to San Diego.

The world's population has reached 6.5 billion this year, a billion more than 1993, despite low fertility in developed countries and high mortality in developing countries, a new United Nations report says. It estimates that the world's population could reach 7 billion in 2012 and could stabilize at 9 billion in 2050. The rate of growth has fallen, however, to 1.2 per cent now from 2 per cent in the late 1960s.

Say that there are three big problems with undergraduate education in America today:

In the mass, how do we teach undergraduates things that they will find useful and beautiful--and what are those useful and beautiful things that we should teach them? Call this the "William Morris" problem.

For the elite, how do we get those potentially extremely talented to fulfill their potential--how do we get the thoroughbred horses that we have painstakingly and expensively led to water to actually drink deep from the Pierian spring? Call this the "No Ross Douthats!" problem.

For those who have difficulty learning to speak the language that is mathematics like a native, how to teach them science in a world where it is a fact that the underlying bones of reality are profoundly mathematical--for that is the conclusion Eugen Wigner's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" leads us to? Call this the "Friends of Wigner" problem.

Anyone with any answers to any of these please email me. I haven't a clue.

Right now I have the flu, and I'm trying to figure out whether we should give zero, one, or two points to someone who writes that the "Eerie Canal connects the Great Lakes with Hudson's Bay, and thus allows water transport from the Midwest to the Atlantic Ocean." Everything after the comma is 100% true...

Weblogger Liz Lawley posts an interesting list of 24 tips and tricks for the home which includes using a marshmallow to prevent ice cream cone drips, freezing leftover wine into cubes for future use in sauces and removing splinters with Scotch tape.

Some answers to the question, What Should I Do If The Internet Goes Down?

No one knows when the Internet will fail. It could happen at any time, leaving you bereft of your e-mail, your sports scores, and your Blogs. Therefore, it's important that you and your family have a contingency plan for just such an emergency. If your connection to Cyberspace were to ever get severed, you should at least be prepared. We have included a few key points that should assist you if that were to happen.

Bruce Sterling's new design class in SoCal is having a blast creating magazine and newspaper covers from the year 2010.
Link, start there and work backwards -- and maybe forward, depending on whether or not more image posts are forthcoming. (Thanks, Stefan Jones).

Over at Flickr, there's this cool series of charts exploring the web of inter-relationships of users of that photo-sharing service. Interesting stuff for the online social anthropologists, but what I dig is the reflexivity: the study's offered up as just one more batch of Flickr images.

Caught a bit of Howard Stern in real time this morning. (Out on the West Coast it's delayed three hours — a kind of pass-along podcast for network affiliates out there. Except for Los Angeles, where KLSX airs it live from 3-6am, when the delayed broadcast starts.) The big subject was H.R. 310, the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act. The bill is on a railroad to passage. (It was fast-tracked by the Energy and Commerce Committee by a vote of 42-2.) One voting against it was Henry Waxman, who represents the heart of the entertainment industry. Jeff Jarvis:

The chickens in Congress -- birds of both parties -- will pass it because they're afraid of voting for smut but not afraid of voting against the Constitution. The chickens in the broadcast industry have done nothing to fight this (if they had any guts, they'd go silent for some period of time in protest, as Howard Stern suggests); the unions are squacking at last.

Meanwhile, the allegedly religious right is pushing for more: They want the Justice Department to go after cable.

Since this bill is a re-launch of the one that got us talking almost a year ago, I'll repeat some of what I said then:

To bring some sense to this whole thing, let's return to the late Communications Decency Act, by which Congress attempted to impose "decency" on the ungovernable chaos of the World Wild Web when it first appeared on the public radar in the mid 90s. The best thing ever written about that act came from the typewriter of Steve Russell, a retired Texas judge.

THE X-ON CONGRESS: INDECENT COMMENT ON AN INDECENT SUBJECT is dirty and funny and right-on — just like Howard Stern, commenting on the same indecent urge to regulate speech in the spaces where we gather to inform each other.

Read that last link.

After three weeks of hanging around like an unwelcome in-law, the filthy grey snow banks are finally melting here in Boston.  With the advent of warmth and sunshine I would have expected everyone  along Alex's Harvard Yard/Square dog walking route to be grinning with happiness.  Yet people did not seem any happier than usual.  To explain this phenomenon it is necessary to turn to TIME magazine's January 17, 2005 "The Science of Happiness" issue.  According to TIME, "sunny days [do not make us happy though] a 1998 study showed that Midwesterners think folks living in balmy California are happier and that Californians incorrectly believe this about themselves too."

Friends and family make people happy as does "contributing to the lives of others" (tough for folks in Vero Beach, FL given that it is tough to find anyone within a gated community facing a more important decision than whether to play golf or tennis).  When asked "do you often do any of the following to improve your mood?", TIME's own poll revealed that 38 percent of women checked off "playing with pet"; only 18 percent checked "have sex".  As the favored pet among America's ladies is the cat, from this we can conclude that cats are more satisfying to women than men are.

[Additional sources: World Values Survey at http://wvs.isr.umich.edu/; BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3157570.stm]

Sidestep claims to better other popular travel searches like Expedia and Travelocity, and they offer a browser toolbar to do side-by-side comparisons to prove it, which is great. Except the toolbar only works on Windows PC's with Microsoft Internet Explorer, which is not great.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: February 13, 2005 - February 19, 2005 Archives: It's amazing how many times the president can lose the Social Security phase-out debate without some of Washington's worthies even noticing. Today on the Stephanopoulos show, George asked Sen. Judd Gregg (R) of New Hampshire about whether there should be any changes to the new Medicare prescription drug law. Gregg noted that 'over its lifetime, 75 years ... it's going to cost us $8.6 trillion, which we don't have.' So that's an $8.6 trillion shortfall, albeit spread out over the lengthy period of three-quarters of a century. The president has said that he'll veto any effort to trim those costs. So that amount of money is manageable.

And yet Social Security -- the program that President Bush thinks is swooning and flailing like some B-Movie damsel in distress -- faces a shortfall of only $3.7 trillion over the same period of time.

The price of keeping Social Security kicking for another 75 years is less than half of that it will take just for the bill President Bush pushed through last year. And because of that Social Security has to go and the drug bill is inviolate.

Why, oh why, must we have this debate on training wheels?

90% of US College Students Own a Cell Phone and Other Mobile Stats

“In 2000, just over 33% of US college students had cell phones on campus, according to a national survey by Student Monitor. In the fall of 2004, nearly 90% did. [via ItFacts]

On this same page from ItFacts is a mile long list of ‘Mobile usage statistics’ from around the world. Here are just a few:

-- 171.2 million Americans have cell phones
-- 300 million cell phone subscribers in China by the end of 2004
-- 36% of personal calls are made from cellphones…
-- 75.5 Americans to use SMS by 2007…
-- Americans send 2.5 bln text messages a month“ [textually.org]

You can tell yourself that these trends won’t affect libraries, but you’d just be burying your head in the sand.

Take a moment and look at a picture near you. What did you see? How long did it take you to understand what was in the image, meaning how long did it take you to realize the green blob was a tree? Or that the orange circle was a piece of fruit? Most likely you assume that it took you no time at all, you just knew. Psychologists who study how we perceive images used to think that, before the process of object recognition and categorization could begin, the brain must first separate the figure in the image -- such as a tree, or a piece of fruit -- from its background. However, new research shows we actually categorize objects before we identify them. It means that, by the time your brain even realizes you are looking at something, you already know what that thing is.

An "analysis" of Democrats and Republicans from the Ladies' Home Journal in 1962 concluded: "Republicans sleep in twin beds - some even in separate rooms. That is why there are more Democrats."
That biological analysis turns out - surprise! - to have been superficial.

Read remarks from Peter Burnet, John Quiggin, Roger Ailes, and Orrin Judd.

“There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.”

This is the uber-quote for all of the “there are two kinds of people…” lines you see today. Benchley was an American humorist who passed on in 1945.

The Quotations Page also offers a Word of the Day.

Private Accounts: A No-Brainer.

Molly Ivins nails the problem with private accounts:

If you aren't smart enough to figure out what's wrong with President Bush's plan to privatize Social Security, then you won't be able to run one of the accounts-formerly-known-as-private, either.

Heh. Indeed.

By noemail@noemail.org (Sid the Fish). [Sid's Fishbowl]

Molly has a way with words. And this is actually a very true statement.

And has been for at least a while, apparently. I don't need to talk politics when this guy's around, and oddly enough, he doesn't either. Talk politics, I mean. One of the things Billmon does best is lay out a trail of crumbs that leads you to make the connections all on your own, and today's post is a classic. You may have just read that Medicare drug "reform" is now estimated to cost $1,200,000,000,000 ($1.2 trillion), nearly three times what the Bush administration claimed when they whipped it through Congress. One of the points these "new" costs reflect is Medicare's recent announcement that the program will pay for sexual performance-enhancing drugs like Viagra. Billmon is merciless: Pfizer Corporation, maker of Viagra and a major Republican political contributor, is experiencing a temporary reduction in profit due to revelations that a formerly hot-selling painkiller leaves people dead, too. Medicare's endorsement of payments for Viagra fills a big hole for them, at the expense of the future of a program that benefits millions and millions of older Americans. I cannot even BEGIN to think how my mother, father, and grandmother would have coped with all they endured if Medicare hadn't been there for them. Read Billmon to see where the money goes, then ask yourselves why.

The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, move on to another. Sometimes there is trouble during the transitions. So, in the early-to-mid-19th century, it was all about expansion westward and a colossal growth in population. After the Civil War, it was about exploitation of the world’s richest resource base: iron, steel, coal, the railways, and later oil.

For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It’s no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you’re living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.

It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.

Link

Josh Marshall, whom I cribbed this whole thing from, points to Paul Krugman's latest column to blast the idiotic Social Security "crisis" hoo-raw all to bits:

In his Tuesday column, Paul Krugman hits the big question that shames every reporter who hasn't posed it to the president or whichever other privatizers they can finagle a minute with. It's as simple as this: the privatizers base their predictions about privatization on a 21st century of robust economic growth while they foretell Social Security's bleak future based on a 21st century of anemic economic growth -- a classic apples and oranges comparison which, if anyone were paying attention, would stop the whole debate in its tracks.

Pain's new victims, pain's new vanquishers. Cory Doctorow: Steve Silberman has turned in a fantastic long feature for Wired Magazine in which he describes the way that the advances in body armor (which doesn't cover legs or arms) has created a new cohort of disabled veterans with missing or badly disabled limbs. Concomittant with this is the rise of terrible, chronic pain, something that is being treated with new technology that blocks specific nerve-endings. This is a disturbing, fascinating piece.

The blocks used by Buckenmaier and his team are made possible by the recent invention of small, microprocessor-controlled pumps which bathe nerves in nonaddictive drugs that discourage the transmission of pain signals. The pumps also can be used for weeks after surgery, enabling soldiers to adjust the level of medication themselves as they need it.

For soldiers evacuated from the battlefield, the advantages of nerve blocks over traditional methods of pain control are clear. The wounded troops flying in and out of Landstuhl are often in misery or a narcotized stupor, while those treated with blocks remain awake and pain-free despite massive injuries.

This new war on pain is the brainchild of John Chiles, the Army's chief anesthesiologist. "Places like Duke were doing great things with peripheral nerve blocks, but they had fallen by the wayside in the Army," he says. "I wanted us to be on the cusp of these advances." The Walter Reed program is supported by grants from the Murtha Neuroscience and Pain Institute, founded by the US representative from Pennsylvania. John Murtha, who was wounded in combat in Vietnam, visits the troops once a week at Walter Reed.

Link [Boing Boing]

Unfortuntely, war often leads to new technological developments. Treating pain is an obvious one.