Archive for January, 2009
Randomness: Wall Street Bulls Style
The best in weird news, odd people, and funny events from across the globe. Proving once again that the Darwin principle lives in all of us.
Gaza: Residents Waving White Flags ‘Shot Dead As They Flee Their Homes’
Israeli forces said they had pushed deeper into Gaza City amid heavy fighting, with some units within a mile of the densely populated urban centre. Terrified residents were said to be fleeing from many homes which had been set alight.
At least three Palestinians in Gaza were shot dead yesterday after Israeli soldiers fired on a group of residents leaving their homes on orders from the military and waving white flags, according to testimony taken by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. The testimony was rejected by the military after what it said was a preliminary investigation.
The thrust by Israeli ground forces into Tel Hawwa was the furthest the Israelis had gone into Gaza City since military operations were launched on 27 December. Meanwhile, Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, declared that he would press forward with an “iron fist”. While his government in Jerusalem is claiming that Hamas’s military capabilities have…
When Newspapers Are Gone, What Will You Miss?
Seth Godin: Years and years after some pundits began predicting the end of newspapers, the newspapers themselves are finally realizing that it’s over. Huge debt, high costs, declining subscription rates, plummeting ad base — will the last one out please turn off the lights.
On their way out, though, we’re hearing a lot of, “you’ll miss us when we’re gone …” laments. I got to thinking about this. It’s never good to watch people lose their livelihoods or have to move on to something new, even if it might be better. I respect and honor the hard work that so many people have put into newspapers along the way. If we make a list of newspaper attributes and features, which ones would you miss?
Woodpulp, printing presses, typesetting machines, delivery trucks, those stands on the street and the newsstand … I think we’re okay without them.
The sports section? No, that’s better online,…
What Fair Use? Three Strikes and You’re Out … of YouTube
Nate Anderson | arstechnica: If there’s one thing we’ve heard repeatedly from content owners when it comes to user-generated content, it’s that there’s no need to worry; fair use would be respected. But Kevin Lee’s story shows just how many problems remain with the content owners’ use of DMCA takedown notices, and the chilling effects that such notices can have on speech.
Lee is a film critic and blogger perhaps best known at the moment for watching the 1,000 best films ever made and writing about them at his website. As part of his work, he has evolved an online video essay format that uses film clips like a professor might, as part of his criticism and commentary. Each essay was short, but Lee eventually uploaded more than five hours of such material to YouTube. After YouTube passed on a third DMCA notice this week, though, the company disabled his account…
The Top 10 NIght Sky Events in 2009
Alan Dyer, Discovery Space: The year 2009 marks the International Year of Astronomy — when people around the world celebrate the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of the telescope. From Saturn hiding its enormous rings to grand meteor showers to the longest total eclipse of the sun in the 21st century, you can bet on an exciting year in the night sky.
10. Saturn’s Invisible Rings — January
Saturn’s rings are now tipped at their minimum angle — nearly edge-on — this month. Because you won’t see them this razor thin for another 30 years, now is a great time to not see the rings of Saturn. The gas giant can be seen with unaided eyes, but you’ll need a telescope to view the rings, such as they are.
Hip-Hop And Homophobia
I have always been slightly bemused by homophobia. Why would two adults (or ten) having consensual sex upset you? What’s it to you?
A new expose of one of the West’s most rancidly anti-gay subcultures — hip-hop — offers the beginnings of an answer. Hip hop has long been the ultimate in fag-bashing, gay-trashing hate music.
Listen to any album and a list of homophobic howls will hit you: Eminem squeaking “Hate fags? The answer’s yes!”, or Masse saying “I be wastin’ em. That’s what you faggots get!” The music’s mood was summarised in a 1992 Ice Cube hit: “True niggaz ain’t gay.”
Barack Obama to Swear into Office on Homosexual Atheist’s Bible
Dennis DiClaudio, Comedy Central’s InDecision 2008:
Well, it seems to be official.
Barack Obama will be taking the Oath of Office on January 20, 2009, with his right hand planted firmly on the Bible owned by a man who neither believed in a personal god nor preferred the company of women in the bedroom.
That’s right. He somehow managed to score the same Bible on which fellow Illinoisiate Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president.
By deliberately choosing the Bible of Abraham Lincoln — a man who, if not an absolute homosexual, certainly had strong homosexual leanings, and who believed in neither the Bible nor a personal god — Obama seems to be giving aid and comfort to the enemies of American values.
Bush’s Legacy: He Survived!
Reagan broke Tecumseh’s Curse, but Bush may have killed it altogether.
Steve Friess writes on Slate:
Historians will be debating George Bush’s presidency for decades to come — in fact, they’ve already started — but in one area, at least, he leaves an unambiguous legacy: He will break, once and for all, Tecumseh’s Curse.
The curse — also known as the Curse of Tippecanoe, the Zero-Year Curse and the 20-Year Curse — refers to the fact that since 1840, every president elected in a year ending in a zero has died, been killed, or been shot while in office. Some curse scholars (I use the term loosely) say that Ronald Reagan actually broke the curse, since he survived his term. Others say that the terms of the curse, which appear to have been amended to take into account John Hinckley’s assassination attempt, were misunderstood and that Reagan actually kept it alive.
The Connected Book (and How to Make Soda Water)
Steven Johnson, author of The Invention Of Air, guest-blogging on BoingBoing:
One of the major themes of The Invention of Air, and one that will have special appeal to BoingBoing readers, is how committed Joseph Priestley and the American Founders (particularly Franklin and Jefferson) were to the open flow of ideas.
Priestley used every available information network of the day to share his discoveries and insights: he published nearly five hundred books and pamphlets over the course of his life, and wrote endless correspondence to his colleagues, documenting in exhaustive detail the techniques behind his experiments.
When you read through those original documents and letters, there’s a distinctly open source vibe to the approach that they all took. Franklin argued for sharing his scientific discoveries — sometimes before he was even convinced of their accuracy — because releasing early and often would “attract the attentions of the ingenious” who would then go on…
Brave, Stupid and Curious: Dangerous Psychology Experiments from the Past
Jesse Bering, Scientific American: When most people think about research ethics in psychology, they take the perspective of the participants (subjects) of the study. And, usually, what comes to mind is some outrageous battery of experimental procedures involving electric shocks, brain vivisections, or some sort of unauthorized subliminal incursion into one’s private thoughts. The boring truth is that the vast majority of studies are about as scary as cheese and crackers.
But there’s another ethical issue that you may not be so familiar with, and that has to do with protecting the research assistants running the study, many of whom are undergraduate students. In the field of social psychology, this is often a very real issue indeed. Sometimes there are dangers involved that the scientists themselves, I suspect, have not thought through entirely.
For example, in one study from the mid-1980s, investigators staged a rape scene on a college campus in which…
With Presidency Over, Bush Drops Fake Cowboy Shtick
Cenk Uygur, The Young Turks: George Bush bought his “ranch” down in Crawford in 1999 shortly before he started running for president. And now that he’s done with politics, he is moving out of there as soon as he possibly can. The Bushes have bought a new home in a tony neighborhood (and until recently a whites-only community) in Dallas. So, what happened to retiring down to the ranch?
Well, it’s what most of us suspected — all total bullshit. He was never a cowboy. That ranch had nothing on it. No cows, no farming, just a lot of bullshit brush that Bush pretended to clear (for what fucking purpose?). The ranch was always a political gimmick. It was purchased so that Bush could play the role of the Texas cowboy when in fact he has always been the Andover cheerleader.
So, that pisses me off a little bit. And his brazen…
Our World May Be a Giant Hologram
New Scientist: A chance discovery in research in to gravitational waves suggests the universe is actually a two dimensional projection.
DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn’t look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres.
For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves — ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.
Obama Inauguration Speech Generator
A grassroots internet campaign helped Barack Obama get elected. Now he’s calling for the internet’s assistance one more time — to help him craft the best inauguration speech ever…
Source of Moon’s Magnetism Found
SPACE.com: Moon rocks delivered to Earth by Apollo astronauts held a mystery that has plagued scientists since the 1970s: Why were the lunar rocks magnetic?
Earth’s rotating, iron core produces the planet’s magnetic field. But the moon does not have such a setup. Now, scientists at MIT think they have a solution. Some 4.2 billion years ago, the moon had a liquid core with a dynamo (like Earth’s core today) that produced a strong magnetic field. The moon’s magnetic field would have been about 1-50th as strong as Earth’s is today, the researchers say.
The MIT team found evidence for the molten-core theory by analyzing the oldest of all the moon rocks that have not been subjected to major shocks from later impacts — something that tends to erase all evidence of earlier magnetic fields. In fact, it’s older than any known rocks from Mars or even from the Earth itself. The…
Vintage Video Game Violence
Brandon Boyer, Offworld:
Unreality’s list of 20 vintage video game ads is a decently selected list of classic franchises and fun comic art (see Atari’s “Mario Bros.’ ad).
But most striking is this ad for Wizard’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” a 180 turn from most modern marketing (bar, perhaps, “Postal” or “Manhunt”), brazenly using its violence as both a selling point and a healthy anger-management pursuit.
Even better, the video of its actual gameplay:
UK Jewish MP: Israel Acting Like Nazis in Gaza (Video)
Sir Gerald Kaufman MP gives this amazing speech in the House of Commons.
What Do Prostitutes and Rice Have in Common?
Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics Blog: If you believe what you read, then the answer to that question is that they are both examples of one of economics’ most elusive objects: Giffen goods. But don’t always believe what you read.
A Giffen good is a product or service for which demand rises with price. In other words, if you hold everything else constant, but the good gets more expensive, the quantity consumed will increase.
In an excellent series of guest posts to this blog earlier this year, economist Robert Jensen described his personal quest to prove that rice is a Giffen good for peasants in China.
On The Economist magazine’s Free Exchange blog, the same claim is made about prostitutes:
Less attractive and even cheaper prostitutes may still be available, but for a variety of very good reasons, the customer will not desire the cheapest option, suggesting prostitution services can be classified as a Giffen good.
Are…
Maggot Cheese That Tries to Eat Your Eyes
Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing: Casu marzu is an illegal Sardinian cheese that is served riddled with writhing maggots that try to jump into your eyeballs as you eat it:
Casu marzu is considered toxic when the maggots in the cheese have died. Because of this, only cheese in which the maggots are still alive is eaten.
When the cheese has fermented enough, it is cut into thin strips and spread on moistened Sardinian flatbread (pane carasau), to be served with a strong red wine. Casu marzu is believed to be an aphrodisiac by local Sardinians.
Because the larvae in the cheese can launch themselves for distances up to 15 centimetres (6 in) when disturbed, diners hold their hands above the sandwich to prevent the maggots from leaping into their eyes.
Those who do not wish to eat live maggots place the cheese in a sealed paper bag. The maggots, starved for oxygen, writhe and jump…
