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December 31, 2006

End of the Line: Closing Tabs

Three links from tabs that have been open in my laptop for most of the last week:

• Carl Zimmer in PLoS Computational Biology on the relationship between computational and molecular techniques and "natural history" approaches in biology.


• The best of Jayson Stark's Useless Information Department. A pitcher gets credited with a strikeout of a batter without the two of them ever being on the field at the same time, and other zaniness.


• A Malcolm Gladwell article that I read in 2000, long before I ever heard of Malcolm Gladwell. In reality, I don't really like Gladwell all that much, but this piece is really interesting. It covers the history of the birth control pill. Read it for the parts that explain this bit:

  It remains, in other words, a drug shaped by the dictates of the Catholic Church--by John Rock's desire to make this new method of birth control seem as natural as possible. This was John Rock's error. He was consumed by the idea of the natural. But what he thought was natural wasn't so natural after all, and the Pill he ushered into the world turned out to be something other than what he thought it was.

  My impression in general that Gladwell simplifies things a bit much sometimes, so maybe a grain of salt is advisable, but it's very interesting nonetheless.

Posted by todd at 9:11 AM | Comments (0)

December 30, 2006

Two Days

Lately it has become cool to post an especially lame count down post. Color me hip.

Posted by todd at 8:28 PM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2006

Did You Know ...

The Wikipedia entry for ax mentions that it is "a shortening of "ask" in Ebonics."

Posted by todd at 1:24 PM | Comments (1)

December 28, 2006

Raja Bell, Sociologist

The Suns' guard makes a good point.

Matt (New York): Raja, you have some experience with NBA tussles. What are your thoughts on the brawl between my Knicks and the Nuggets? Do you think the suspended players got off easy, or were they unfairly scrutinized because they play in the NBA? Seems like in other leagues, players get off scot-free.

Raja: I saw the fight, but I wasn't involved in the events leading up to it, so I can't speculate too much. I'll say this: It's interesting when NHL players are praised for being great fighters, but in the NBA, we're "criminals" and "thugs." It's a shame, but what are we going to do? That's society. There are deeper issues in play. We just have to be aware of that.

Something similar struck me when I watched Barry "The Mullet" Melrose praising two (white) hockey players for a "great tussle" a couple of days ago on SportsCenter. Absolutely ridiculous.

Posted by todd at 3:52 PM | Comments (3)

December 27, 2006

"James Brown is Hip Because He Has to Be"

Via Crooked Timber, an excellent essay on the nature of James Brown's funk. To entice you, a nice long excerpt:

As I've explained elsewhere, I think about hipness a fair bit, and one of the things I think about is how very, very few things remain hip all the time. Hipness is Heisenbergian: the act of observation changes the thing observed. If I say that Madlib (say) is hip, the mere fact that I, a paunchy middle-aged music professor, say he's hip will mean that he's actually a little less hip, because it means that I've heard about him, and now that you've read this, so have you. (Ideally you know of Madlib's hipness because he got you high in his bomb shelter or something. You gotta live it or it won't come out of your horn, as Charlie Parker said.) So hipness is unstable, and you can't ever really define hipness in terms of individuals. Even so, there are a few musicians who are basically hip all the time: Miles Davis, John Lennon, and, it now must be said, James Brown. James Brown is hip because hipness, as a concept, as an eschatology, is unthinkable without him.

Posted by todd at 8:06 PM | Comments (0)

Year End Special

ESPN.com's Page 2 has done an obscenely long two parter on all of the absurd moments from the sports world in 2006, in which we learn all sorts of arcane, idiotic stuff, such as:

An Indian runner who won an Asian Games silver medal in the women's 800 meters failed a gender test.

and

A former Marshall University cheerleader sued for sexual harassment, claiming that the squad's cheers had sexual code names, that a female coach encouraged cheerleaders to act in a sexually provocative manner at a golf team fundraiser and that a male cheerleader rubbed his scrotum on her face.

The lawsuit claims that when the cheerleader refused to go along with the sexual hijinks, she was put on probation for "not being personable."

and

A Nebraska youth football coach was charged with 96 counts of possession of child pornography after handing out football camp flyers that had been printed out on child porn he had been looking at while drunk.

Posted by todd at 2:01 PM | Comments (0)

December 26, 2006

Irony

If you absolutely have to have a pentecostal wedding, the only way to make it work is with a gay guy and an atheist for groom's men.

Posted by todd at 10:03 PM | Comments (0)

December 25, 2006

Christmas Post

New books! New games, tickets for a good date, and a chance to bake a delicious ham! A very merry Christmas indeed. I hope that yours was as good, and that your new year is even better.

Posted by todd at 7:21 PM | Comments (0)

December 24, 2006

This One's for Jesus

Did I mention that, on our trip this summer, we happened to pass the (second?) largest cross in the western hemisphere?

Posted by todd at 6:29 PM | Comments (4)

December 23, 2006

Instant Classics

Ed Felten has signed off for the holidays with a bunch of updated Christmas stories, such as

How the Grinch Pwned Christmas: The Grinch, determined to stop Christmas, hacks into Amazon's servers and cancels all deliveries to Who-ville. The Whos celebrate anyway, gathering in a virtual circle and exchanging user-generated content. When the Grinch sees this, his heart grows two sizes and he priority-ships replacement gifts to Who-ville.

Bo, Josh, Jon, Jurvis, and Tony will be amused. Adrianne will think it's adorable, in so far as she gets the jokes. Adam will be amused, but will feel guilty for liking it and make some crack about how lame I am to cover it up. Everyone else will just think I'm lame.

Posted by todd at 2:55 PM | Comments (4)

December 22, 2006

The 'Hood

Drove all day. Home for the holidays. Very excited. We're in charge of baking the ham for Christmas dinner, and David Cross is on TV talking about elephant urine. Good times.

Posted by todd at 8:17 PM | Comments (3)

December 21, 2006

Stupid Ideas

Since some people don't appreciate Adam's linkblog as much as I do, I am going to rehash one of his entries from earlier this week.

The story is that David Sklansky, an author and poker player, has issued a challenge to the nation's Christians:

We will both take the math SAT or GRE (aptidude test). Your choice. We will both have only half the normally allotted time to lessen the chances of a perfect score. Lower score pays higher score $50,000.

To qualify you must take a reputable polygraph that proclaims you are truthful when you state that:

1. You are at least 95% sure that Jesus Christ came back from the dead.


2. You are at least 95% sure that adults who die with the specific belief that Jesus probably wasn't ressurected will not go to heaven.

Mr. Sklansky goes on to state that he is attempting to prove that in order to be a Christian you have to be stupid.

Of course, this itself is a pretty stupid idea. Jeopardy champion and devoted Mormon Ken Jennings has already volunteered to take his fifty grand. Few people in the world believe stupider shit than Mormons, but they don't have to be stupid -- or, more specifically, bad at math -- to do so.

Posted by todd at 8:55 PM | Comments (6)

December 20, 2006

Rock and Awe: Countdown to Guitarmageddon

Everyone must make me a promise: find out what time tonight's Colbert Report will be rerun near you tomorrow, and watch it. I guarantee that it's the only time in your life that you'll see The Decemberists, a guitar solo shred-off, Colbert, and Henry Kissinger incorporated into the same half-hour of absolutely sublime television.

Posted by todd at 8:59 PM | Comments (2)

Jesus, Take the Wheel

Were you aware of this? Because this shit is awesome:

Seriously, pop-country music is an absolute mystery to me.

Posted by todd at 4:10 PM | Comments (2)

December 19, 2006

Wedding Website Update

It's most of the way finished. Go visit, and leave a comment.

Posted by todd at 2:41 PM | Comments (4)

December 18, 2006

Delicious

If you're ever in Nashville, do have breakfast at the Pancake Pantry.

Posted by todd at 7:20 PM | Comments (0)

December 17, 2006

The NY Times Catches Up to TBND, A Year Later

The Gray Lady has noticed that atheists celebrate Christmas, which you may recall we discussed here this time last year. I still think it's an interesting subject, though, and they have the power to add to the discussion the thoughts of folks like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, who says:

"Presumably your reason for asking me is that ‘The God Delusion’ is an atheistic book, and you still think of Christmas as a religious festival. But of course it has long since ceased to be a religious festival. I participate for family reasons, with a reluctance that owes more to aesthetics than atheistics. I detest Jingle Bells, White Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too."

Wait, you hate "Jingle Bells" and "White Christmas"? I'm sorry, but that's just ridiculous.

Also, is anyone else starting to regret the fact that every story in the media which includes the word "atheist" must also include a quote from Dawkins or Harris? The guys are smart and all, but there are more than two atheists in the world.

Posted by todd at 4:35 PM | Comments (2)

December 16, 2006

Mail App Bleg

Will the Boz make it to a computer in time to post today? Only time will tell! But since I plan to go out later and wouldn't be able to cover for him if he fails, I'm writing Todd a safety post. This time I'm going to take this genre places it's never gone before, seeing as I'm one of its founders and all.

A while back Todd posted about his skepticism of internet applications, and the time I was a sympathetic Thunderbird user. But in the intervening months, I started autoforwarding my other email accounts, and now I live with a Gmail tab constantly open. Thunderbird only ever gets launched to do the occasional archiving. I've gotten used to some of the more cloying aspects of the interface, and while it does pretty much what I want it to, it's still not perfect. Then again, neither was Thunderbird. So here are two things I never found a way to get working that would influence my choice of mail client:

• The only two options for accessing your Gmail via POP are to leave all your messages intact or delete them all. So back in my Thunderbird days, I would go for weeks without using the Gmail interface and then have hour-long cleaning sessions where I added categories, deleted junk, and archived mail I'd read long before. I'm guessing that changing directions so that Gmail is where I read my mail primarily is the only way to get around this problem, although I'd be happy if it's not.


• This is a somewhat more minor, but consequently vastly more annoying problem. Recently I've been using mail groups more than before to contact specific sets of people. This feature itself is widely available, but for some reason neither Thunderbird not Gmail (that I can see) include a function to do the reverse - sort mail based on the recipient being a member of that group. I'm perfectly willing to accept if I'm just an idiot and this is easy to do, but as I wasn't about to create a different filter for every group member, this has been a thorn in my side for months now.

There, todd's off the hook for tonight.

Posted by tony at 2:59 PM | Comments (5)

December 15, 2006

Thanks, Tony

Way to strike at my greatest weakness.

Posted by todd at 6:58 AM | Comments (2)

December 14, 2006

Cappucinos I Have Known

Since todd is content with California, he won't mind a post about the awesome coffee shops of the right coast (I mean "right" in the sense of "correct", obviously):

Diesel Cafe, Davis Square, Somerville

Simon's Cafe, Mass Ave, Cambridge

Krankie's, Third Street, Winston-Salem

That third one I threw in mostly because the Boz might actually make it there in the near future.

Posted by tony at 4:00 PM | Comments (0)

December 13, 2006

Typical

The ol' "Going out for drinks" safety post. Suckers.

Posted by todd at 6:38 PM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2006

Damn That Colbert

Very nearly cost me the contest, just as we're entering the home stretch.

Posted by todd at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)

December 11, 2006

Things I Should Have Read Long Ago

I'm just getting around to reading the Crooked Timber seminar on China Mieville. I bought Perdido Street Station because it was the first of his books that I came upon in a book store, but put off the seminar until I'd read Iron Council. And, of course, by the time I had done so, I had forgotten about the essays. They're both good books, though IC is a bit laborious at times. Anyway, here's a bit from the seminar, which I think might convince a person or two to go out and get PSS.

The subject under consideration is Mieville's tendency to kill off or maim his characters. He does it with stated disregard for the reader's comfort, which can be a bit bracing at times. If you're accustomed to literature in which only Tragic characters are ever harmed, the fate of the character discussed here comes as a real punch in the gut. After it happens, you read the rest of the novel in a bit of a daze, completely unsure of what kind of shit the author is going to put you through next.

Anyway, Mieville, respoding to Belle Waring's suggestion that the character's fate is too much (in particular, the character is beaten, possibly raped, and brain damaged so that she is left in an odd state of child-like adulthood):

If you kill a main character, then you're obviously a 'brave' writer. Etc etc. This is the specious and middlebrow gravitas of charactercide. It's not always an aesthetic con to do a protagonist in, of course, but it shouldn't be an automatic brownie point.

This apparently most extreme thing you can do to a character, bumping her/him off, is easily assimilable by nebulous structures of comfort. (The question of what if anything is wrong with that is huge, of course, and fundamental to many of the issues here. For here, I'm just going to assert that all my writing tends to be sceptical of consolation and comfort.)

This is precisely why I'm not surprised by Belle’s resentment at the fate of [SPOILER] in PSS. It was, yes, precisely 'uncalled for'. 'That [SPOILER] should get killed,' Belle says, 'OK.' Well quite. Had she been killed, it would have been ok. More than that, it would have presented us with one of the most trite figures in Romantic Art: The Beautiful Dead Female Lover. I didn’t want [SPOILER] to turn into Eurydice, which is why what happened to her had to be utterly foul and uncalled for. I maintain that it was more respectful of her as a character to give her a fate that vigorously resisted aestheticisation, than to subordinate her to the logic of myth, symbol and genre. (Particularly when (Ophelia in the water, consumptive beauties a-coughing) it's a logic deep-structured with fetishised misogynist despite. Hmmmm... raping and mind-ruining a female character as striking a blow against the structures of gender essentialism? Well yes, actually.)

That's the important bit, but I think I'll keep on below the fold.

This is precisely why Mieville is so much fun to read. For one thing, he's fantastically inventive. Elsewhere in her essay, Belle says:

The material in the average two-sentence Miéville observation would serve a more parsimonious author of fantasy as the meat of a trilogy. (Or more: just consider that there are about 18 Robert Jordan novels, none of which contains a single thought not pilfered, feebly, from Tollkein or Stephen Donaldson.)

Indeed. PSS is bubbling over with ideas to which one responds, "Huh. Cool." But that is, in essense, just a nice paint job on a well-made car. The above quotation displays the best qualities of Mieville: 1) he's incredibly smart, 2) he has interesting ideas about the nature of narrative, and 3) he is absolutely willing to go out of his way to subvert your expectations and to get you thinking -- not only about his stories, but about what you expect from and what you like about stories in general.

Posted by todd at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)

December 10, 2006

Things We've Learned This Week

1. Ruth doesn't know what day Christmas is. The conversation went as follows: "I think Christmas Eve is a bit late to be getting back." "I know, that's why I said the 24th." "Uh...."
2. Ruth has a real thing for Christmas movies, and the more absurd the better. The conversation went as follows: "Jenny McCarthy as Santa's daughter? We're totally watching that."

Posted by todd at 11:10 PM | Comments (2)

December 9, 2006

I'm not a monster. Well, technically, I am.

I've never done this before, but at the end of the post I get to make a zimboe joke, which means it's as good a time as any to start.

Be sure not to miss the email, subject line, "Re: Your brains" at the beginning.

Via PZ, via Mixing Memory, who says, "Someone should pass this on to David Chalmers. That zombie clearly exhibits all the signs of consciousness."

To wit: c'mon, that entity clearly has second-order beliefs about its own state. We're obviously dealing with a mind eating zimboe.

Posted by todd at 1:54 PM | Comments (0)

December 8, 2006

Questions for my Fellow Californians

Do you even know what a scarf is for? Do realize how ridiculous you look wearing one when it's 65 degrees out? Where do you even buy such a thing around here?

Posted by todd at 3:23 PM | Comments (1)

December 7, 2006

Now That Exams are Over

Anyone want to mention a book that I absolutely must read over the holidays? Don't say Linear Algebra, because that's already on the list.

Note that it has to sound really good in order to leap frog the cryptography book that Tony sent me, the Eric Kandel autobiography, and a Salman Rushdie book in the queue beside my bed.

One other thing to note is that I seem to get into an odd mood every December where the thing I want most to read is the sort of thing which would come recommended with, "If you enjoyed Jonathan Strange, you'll love this ...." This was true even during Decembers before Jonathan Strange had been written.

Posted by todd at 11:16 PM | Comments (1)

December 6, 2006

Shout Out to Someone?

Heartfelt thanks to the people who run CMU's Machine Learning class for leaving their old exams on-line. Hell of useful for studying. More classes should do likewise.

Posted by todd at 10:56 PM | Comments (0)

December 5, 2006

Funny Stuff from PZ

I've been fairly busy studying for finals this week, so all you get is a funny piece from PZ Myers. Please do go find out why Mr. "Barefoot" is so much happier than Mr. "Shoes".

With his so-called "shoes."

Posted by todd at 10:21 PM | Comments (0)

December 4, 2006

I Know You Don't Have Time for This

But, seriously, carve out an hour or so for Richard Dawkins taking all comers at a lecture in Lynchburg, Virginia.

"Yeah, I understand the words of your question. [...] What if you're wrong about the Great Juju at the bottom of the sea?"

(Hat tip to Tony, who sent me that over IM.)

Posted by todd at 5:33 PM | Comments (4)

December 3, 2006

Of Note

TDC has gone on a bit of a tear and written reviews for five beers in three days. Must have been a long week indeed.

Posted by todd at 10:49 PM | Comments (3)

December 2, 2006

.9386

Starting to look like .938 may be as well as we're going to do.

Posted by todd at 6:58 PM | Comments (1)

December 1, 2006

The Reason for the Season

Of course, I'm not picky. I'll co-opt anyone's traditions.

Posted by todd at 5:06 PM | Comments (0)

.9414

Qualified for a progress prize. Still lightyears behind the leaders.

Posted by todd at 4:57 PM | Comments (3)