Off-Topic/Unrelated

Bad memories erased, no kooky helmet required.

2008-10-23T09:38:00.000-07:00

In a few years you might have a pill to help you forget your bad breakup just the way Jim Carey did in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. With a high dose of just one enzyme, scientists can now erase very specific memories while you're in the act of recalling them. The enzyme known as CaMKII is linked to learning and memory, and Georgia neuroscientist Joe Z. Tsien and his team used it to induce extremely targeted memory-erasure in mice. Tsien thinks the process might help humans lay traumatic memories to rest.

Link

Link Dump

2008-09-10T15:26:00.001-07:00

First of all, please add some cowbell to something. I did.

Second of all, to all you stressing about wildly-bouncing poll numbers:

a. Read this.

Update: But then read this.

b.. More importantly, take a look at this.

Nano meets bio to make better batteries

2008-08-29T13:04:00.000-07:00

This is pretty exciting, futuristic stuff.

Instead of physically arranging the component parts, researchers genetically engineer viruses to attract individual molecules of materials they're interested in, like cobalt oxide, from a solution, autonomously forming wires 17,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper that pack themselves together to form electrodes smaller than a human cell.

Link

Slow news day?

2008-07-24T13:52:00.000-07:00

...

;)

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Our real problem? We're not selfish enough

2008-07-07T20:13:00.000-07:00

Kos diarist LithiumCola makes a pretty good point:

You get mad when someone is taking welfare and sitting on their ass. What have you got against sitting on your ass? The whole point behind having a government and paying taxes is to have more time to sit on your ass. That's what technology is for. You Americans work longer than anyone, pay all these taxes, make all these robots, and then not only don't you sit on your ass, but you get mad when anyone else does. You're fucking crazy.

Link

The real diamond age begins

2008-06-17T14:29:00.000-07:00

Someone is finally making "cultured" diamonds without the colors found in other diamond manufacturers' products. Yeah, they will look good on your finger, but the fun stuff is all the other ways they could be used.

From the beginning of his research with CVD more than 20 years ago, Robert Linares hoped that diamonds would become the future of electronics. At the heart of almost every electrical device is a semiconductor, which transmits electricity only under certain conditions. For the past 50 years, the devices have been made almost exclusively from silicon, a metal-like substance extracted from sand. It has two significant drawbacks, however: it is fragile and overheats. By contrast, diamond is rugged, doesn't break down at high temperatures, and its electrons can be made to carry a current with minimal interference. At the moment, the biggest obstacle to diamond's overtaking silicon is money. Silicon is one of the most common materials on earth and the infrastructure for producing silicon chips is well established.

Apollo has used profits from its gemstones to underwrite its foray into the $250 billion semiconductor industry. The company has a partnership Bryant Linares declines to confirm to produce semiconductors specialized for purposes he declines to discuss. But he revealed to me that Apollo is beginning to sell one-inch diamond wafers. "We anticipate that these initial wafers will be used for research and development purposes in our clients' product development efforts," Linares says.

Link

What really went down in Bosnia.

2008-03-26T21:40:00.000-07:00

By now, I'm sure you've heard of Hillary's time in-country. But have you read her first-person account?

Link

How do you undo this?

2008-02-22T11:47:00.000-08:00

Even if the Democrats have a series of landslide victories in the fall, it will take years to undo the damage that Bush/Cheney have done to our country.

This really demonstrates the lengths to which Bush-Cheney's hyper-politicized Department of Justice can go. If they can railroad the actual governor of a state into prison and have pretty much nobody really sit up and take notice, what does that say about the extent of the damage to the country? Not just the DOJ (which is a goner), but about the supposed watchdogs of the media, who've been in large part either cowed into silence, or distracted by an endless stream of shiny objects?

Seriously, this means they can do this to anybody.

But worse than that, it means that anybody who finds themselves under scrutiny by the federal government now has license to charge that they're being politically targeted. Because if this can happen as Horton describes it happening, all bets are off. It has all the ingredients of the complete and total undoing of all federal law enforcement capability for the foreseeable future.

Nobody indicted by the Bush-Cheney DOJ can possibly help but wonder whether they're being targeted by the White House political machine. Not Don Siegelman. Not Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio. Nobody.

And once America realizes this really can happen (it's previously been unimaginable, and therefore all too easy to dismiss as "conspiracy theory"), you can bet your last dollar that any Republican indicted by a Democratic administration will be making that claim, too.

Link

Patton Oswalt finally tries to eat "a failure pile in a sadness bowl."

2008-01-08T17:38:00.000-08:00

Verdict?

The Famous Bowl hit my mouth like warm soda, slouched down my throat, and splayed itself across my stomach like a sun-stroked wino. It was that precise combination of things, and so many other sensations that did not go together. At all.

The gravy, which I remembered as being tangy and delicious in my youth, tasted like the idea of blandness, but burned and then salted to cover the horrid taste. The mashed potatoes defiantly stood their ground against the gravy, as if they'd read The Artist's Way and said, "I'm going to be boring and forgetful in my own potato-y way!" The corn tasted like it had been dunked in fake-corn-flavored ointment, and the popcorn chicken, breaded to the point of parody, was like chewing a cotton sleeve that someone had used to wipe chicken grease off their chin.

The cheese had congealed. Even in the heat and steam of the covered Famous Bowl, it had congealed. I stabbed it with the tines of my spork and it all came up in one piece. I nibbled an edge, had a vision of a crying Dutch farmer, and put it down.

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Owen and Ben crack each other up

2007-12-27T18:56:00.000-08:00

David Byrne and Thom Yorke talk about In Rainbows and the value of music

2007-12-19T09:48:00.000-08:00

Yorke is still a little cagey on how well their download experiment went:

Byrne: Are you making money on the download of In Rainbows?

Yorke: In terms of digital income, we've made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever — in terms of anything on the Net. And that's nuts. It's partly due to the fact that EMI wasn't giving us any money for digital sales. All the contracts signed in a certain era have none of that stuff.

However, the article has this, near the beginning:

In the first month, according to comScore, more than a million fans downloaded In Rainbows. Roughly 40 percent of them paid for it, at an average of $6 each, netting the band nearly $3 million. Plus, since it owns the master recording (a first for the band), Radiohead was also able to license the album for a record label to distribute the old-fashioned way — on CD. In the US, it goes on sale January 1 through TBD Records/ATO Records Group.

What nobody seems to have really worked out is how much the band netted, after bandwidth costs, transaction fees, etc. Let's say that the answer is closer to $2,000,000. If so, that would mean that they netted basically $2/album, which is not bad - probably about the same or a little more than most artists make under the major label system.

Link

Our Paths related gets a couple of reviews

2007-12-18T10:36:00.000-08:00

So far, so good!

JamBase:

When you first encounter Paths you won't know where it's going to take you but trust that their drive to please and experiment is sincere and successful enough at every finely crafted turn to keep your ears humming long into the new year. Truly grand stuff.

AllMusic:

For a prolific band who have yet to quite achieve the wider recognition they so richly deserve the Society has produced, here with their third album, a vastly compelling work that, if there is any justice in the world, will rocket them into the spotlight.

Wonderful Kos Christmas post

2007-12-09T09:31:00.000-08:00

DevilsTower nails it over at DailyKos:

Any and all of those issues might have been the centerpiece of a Democratic speech today, because those issues remain unsolved. And oddly enough, many of these issues were also on the mind of the man who two thousand years ago stood up in his family church and announced that "I come bringing good news for the poor."

When you're too busy trying not to lose, you may win elections now and then, but you rarely advance those causes you're supposed to care about. We've reached the point where Republican voters can claim the philosophy of absolute greed.

"I make a great deal of money through my own hard work. I don't want to pay for someone else's child to eat breakfast at school anymore."

Get that? She makes not just enough money, but a "great deal of money." How dare anyone take it away for something so frivolous as feeding a poor child? And yet Republicans, through their actions in blurring the lines between church and state, have become the "party of faith." Because they say so. Because they are bold in their actions and snarling in their defense.

We need to be just as adamant. We need to not hide behind any abstraction or evasion. We need to be unafraid to address this voter and say "I am going to take some of your money, and give it to that poor kid, because it's more important -- both to the child and to society -- that he eat, rather than that you have an extra week in Cabo."

Note that we should not pretend that "a program will take your money." Or "the government will take your money." This is a democracy, and we are the government. I will take your money. I will. Some of that money you worked hard for and want to keep. I will give it to a kid who is hungry. If your concern is that poverty should be addressed by individuals, then there's a simple solution: feed him. If there are no poor children needing food, I won't have to take anything for them. If your position is that people would be more generous if only the government would stay out of it, then sorry. I'm not willing to put this child at risk to as part of your experiment. Besides, if that were true, then why were their more hungry kids before we started these programs to give them a little breakfast? If your position is that your being able to keep all your money is more important than a child being fed, then I simply think you're wrong. And sick. You want to keep that money? You better beat me at the polls.

Link

The records are in!

2007-11-17T15:07:00.000-08:00

Buy them at Parasol...

Happy birthday, boys!

2007-11-09T15:02:00.000-08:00

What a crazy year for Ben...

and Owen.

Subpop finally has MP3s for sale!

2007-11-08T15:29:00.000-08:00

Good stuff. I've been waiting for this.

Link

Vinyl making a comeback?

2007-10-29T11:22:00.000-07:00

Wired article, with bonus Society of Rockets plug at the end!

Link

Health care professionals for single-payer

2007-10-29T10:11:00.000-07:00

This article makes what I think is a great point in the debate:

Opponents of a single-payer system argue that single payer could be even more inefficient and bureaucratic than the current system. They point to other countries, such as Canada, that have national health insurance and yet have long wait times to see doctors.

But research supports the opposite conclusion. For example, a 2003 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that the average overhead of U.S. insurance companies is 11.7 percent, compared with 3.6 percent for Medicare and 1.3 percent for Canada’s national health insurance program. And the waits in Canada are a result of Canada’s low level of health spending - on a per capita basis, about half that in the United States. The efficiency of Canada’s national health insurance program coupled with our current high level of health funding would yield the world’s best health care system.

[bold added for emphasis]

Link

Man, it's been a while

2007-10-10T15:39:00.001-07:00

Sorry folk (s?), I've been very busy at work and with the twins. Here are some fun links for you.

The particularly obnoxious strain of US evangelicalism seems to be fading in popularity.

Cooks Illustrated figured out the secret to making easy-to-roll pie crust that is still flaky and delicious: Vodka! Not sure how long the full recipe will stay up.

I paid 3 pounds for the new Radiohead record. How much did you pay?

By the way, the tracklisting on our new record on ALL the download services seems screwed up. And, they are missing a track. If you bought a copy, let me know, and I'll send you a link to a fixed version.

Our Paths Related on Amazon's sweet new DRM-free music store

2007-09-25T09:36:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I work for them (sort-of), but this is a really nice store - All the indies, plus EMI and Universal, for ten cents less than iTunes, with better quality and no DRM!

Link

Our Paths Related out on eMusic

2007-09-05T11:39:00.000-07:00

Get it before it's hot!

Link

The twins "playing" the piano

2007-08-31T10:52:00.000-07:00

Link

Pile o' links

2007-08-29T11:57:00.000-07:00

Sorry I've been super-neglectful lately, but I'm sure the three of you who read this will understand. Here are a few links:

Matt Taibbi pens a devastating article on the waste and corruption of the no-bid, "cost-plus" contractors in Iraq.

A video demo of some amazing new image resizing algorithms.

We got a nice little mention on Fluxblog this week.

Go see King of Kong!

Why won't Pelosi allow an impeachment vote?

2007-08-22T16:11:00.000-07:00

Bruce Fein brings this question into the mainstream.

Speaker Pelosi's argument against impeachment is not high-minded, however. It is the fortunes of the Democratic Party, not the fate of the Constitution and the strength of democracy, that animate her decision. She opines that Democrats would risk losing control of Congress and the occupancy of the White House in 2008 if impeachment efforts moved forward. Many Democrats dispute that opinion. They maintain that citizens voted for authentic change last November and will revolt if Democrats ape President Bush and maneuver for partisan advantage while the Constitution burns. If an impeachment inquiry is blocked by Pelosi, and the White House is left undisturbed in its constitutional usurpations and celebration of perpetual war, voters may turn against Democrats for their political spinelessness.

Link

The tortured confessions of a liberal hawk

2007-08-07T14:52:00.000-07:00

David Rees tears Michael Ignatieff a new one

Ignatieff's latest essay is what Latin people call a "mea culpa," which is Greek for "Attention publishers: I am ready to write a book about the huge colossal mistake I made." I imagine the book will be about a man struggling to do the right thing-- a man who thinks with his heart and dares, with a dream in each fist, to reach for the stars. It's about a journey: a journey from idealistic, starry-eyed academic to wizened, war-weary politician. (Ignatieff used to work at Harvard's Kennedy School; now he's Prime Chancellor of Canada's Liberal Delegate or whatever kind of wack-ass, kumbaya government they've got up there.)

In a way, it's a story much like Cormac McCarthy's recent best-selling "The Road." Both follow a hero's long march through thankless environments-- in Ignatieff's case, from the theory-throttled, dusty tower of academia to the burned-out hell-hole of representative politics. Danger lurks. Grime abounds. The narrative tension is: Can the hero be wrong about everything, survive, and still convince people he's smarter than everyone in Moveon.org?

I was excited when I first saw this new essay: At last, Ignatieff was going to come clean about his super-duper-double-dipper errors. I expected a no-holds barred, personal excoriation. In fact, I assumed the first, last, and only sentence of the essay would be: "Please, for the love of God, don't ever listen to me again."

Link

Could this week in sports possibly be any worse?

2007-07-27T09:01:00.000-07:00

Josh Levin imagines it could.

Barry Bonds broke baseball's all-time home run record last night with a towering, eighth-inning long ball against the Washington Nationals. After smashing his 756th career home run, the seven-time National League MVP pumped his fists in the air repeatedly. Bonds then reached into his back pocket and pulled out a large syringe labeled "DRUGS FOR CHEATING AT BASEBALL." The San Francisco Giants slugger lowered his pants, injected himself in the buttocks, and extended both middle fingers before setting off on his record-setting jaunt around the bases.
—Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 10, 2007

Link

Yay Flight of the Conchords!

2007-07-27T08:43:00.001-07:00

Max Blumenthal visits the Christians United for Israel

2007-07-26T13:09:00.000-07:00

So we don't have to. What a nightmare.

CUFI has an ulterior agenda: its support for Israel derives from the belief of Hagee and his flock that Jesus will return to Jerusalem after the battle of Armageddon and cleanse the earth of evil. In the end, all the non-believers - Jews, Muslims, Hindus, mainline Christians, etc. - must convert or suffer the torture of eternal damnation. Over a dozen CUFI members eagerly revealed to me their excitement at the prospect of Armageddon occurring tomorrow. Among the rapture ready was Republican Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. None of this seemed to matter to Lieberman, who delivered a long sermon hailing Hagee as nothing less than a modern-day Moses. Lieberman went on to describe Hagee's flock as "even greater than the multitude Moses commanded."

Link

What motivates an Isbister baby?

2007-07-23T10:12:00.000-07:00

The remote, of course!

An objective comparison between an iPhone and a Nokia E70

2007-07-17T08:25:00.000-07:00

Link

I like John Mackey, but...

2007-07-11T16:06:00.000-07:00

You gotta be pretty dumb as a CEO to try and pump your stock on Yahoo message boards...

Rahodeb [Mackey's wife's name backwards...] began posting messages about Whole Foods shares on Yahoo.com in the late 1990s. He quickly gained a reputation as being one of the stock's biggest cheerleaders, and gamely defended himself when other posters chastised him for being too rosy. "I've never pretended to be anything but enthusiastic about WFMI," he wrote in 2000, using Whole Foods' stock symbol. "I admit to my bias -- I love the company and I'm in for the long haul. I shop at Whole Foods. I own a great deal of its stock. I'm aligned with the mission and values of the company... Is there something wrong with this?"

Link

Hahahaha

2007-06-21T09:19:00.000-07:00

Removing DRM increases sales!

2007-06-20T09:27:00.000-07:00

Hopefully this is not just a temporary uptick as "punters replace their old DRM infected tracks with those which are protection free."

Link

WWJBD?

2007-06-19T09:59:00.000-07:00

Scalia is a pathetic, small-minded person, and an embarrassment. The torture segments on 24 have always been its most unconvincing (with the IT jargon a close second), yet Scalia seems to think that he's watching a documentary.

Link

One step closer to "Mr Fusion"

2007-06-18T20:30:00.000-07:00

Nestled in the farmland surrounding the University of California campus in Davis (UC Davis) is a set of giant vats filled with hungry microbes. The bugs are devouring cafeteria leftovers and lawn clippings and converting them into biogas--mostly methane and hydrogen--that can be burned to generate electricity or compressed into liquid to power specialized vehicles.

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Powerful words from Bill Clinton

2007-06-09T11:02:00.000-07:00

Even just reading these words brought tears to my eyes.

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Only one more season?

2007-06-01T14:03:00.000-07:00

Oh well. Better to burn out than to fade away...

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I don't want to hear about how you hate The Family Guy

2007-05-29T20:05:00.000-07:00

This is funny.

Are you a Republican who's having memory problems?

2007-05-25T11:31:00.000-07:00

Link

Society of Rockets show TONIGHT!

2007-05-18T13:24:00.000-07:00

Moving tribute to Falwell

2007-05-16T14:40:00.000-07:00

Link

It's like Mag-Safe for music!

2007-05-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

ZZYZX (Wow. Great name, guys...) has created a magnetic break-away plug and cable set to replace your standard 1/4" guitar cable. I've bought two so far, and they work as advertised. The magnets are strong, and the noise suppression is lovely. The only caveat is that they do work as advertised, so if you are used to stepping on or tripping over your cables, you may come unplugged mid-shred. Maybe these should come in different strengths, like ski bindings...

Buy them here or here.

Uncensor the internet!

2007-05-02T15:49:00.000-07:00

If you can read ALL of this f***ing post, then you are using this Greasemonkey script (or Firefox plug-in) to eliminate the self-censorship asterisks that pollute our discourse on the internet.

Link

Whatever ahppened to Ashleigh Banfield?

2007-04-27T16:09:00.000-07:00

Long story short?

She's now a co-anchor on a Court TV show.

Link

Guess who WON'T be giving a eulogy at Yeltsin's funeral?

2007-04-25T14:35:00.000-07:00

Matt Taibbi, that's who!

Finally, let's not forget perhaps the most ironic victims of Yeltsin's reign. Few today remember that the make-or-break moment for Yeltsin as a "democratic" leader came when coal miners in places like Cherepovets and Vorkuta went on strike in support of the revolution. Yeltsin rewarded those same miners by telling them to go fuck themselves when ruthless mine owners in his newly capitalist "reform Russia" turned them into slave laborers and left them unpaid for months and years on end. I visited Vorkuta in 1998 and found the same people who had protested in favor of Yeltsin's "democratic" revolt years before now living off tiny daily rations of rotten eggs and bacon fat. I was with one miner who brought home a single package of a boiled egg, a piece of sausage and a hunk of cheese given to him in lieu of salary at the mine, and solemnly divided it up with his wife and his two kids at dinner. The food came from past-due stocks of old food that the mine owners had traded for with a local store in exchange for coal.

Those same steam-boiler-bellied mine executives -- Yeltsin lookalikes -- proudly showed me a new slate pool table they had had imported from St. Petersburg that day and which they kept in the mine's newly-furnished executive lounge, where they hung out boozing all day while everybody else worked in dangerous prehistoric conditions. I visited that mine in June of 1998; 37 people had already died in mines in Vorkuta that year.

That was Boris Yeltsin's Russia. It was a place where pigs got fat and everyone else sucked eggs.

Link

How the world works, according to Bill O'Reilly

2007-04-24T15:34:00.000-07:00

I never realized how much power Media Matters had!

Link

The full details of Vista's DRM lock-down insanity

2007-04-23T08:43:00.000-07:00

The worst thing about all of this is that there's no escape. Hardware manufacturers will have to drink the kool-aid (and the reference to mass suicide here is deliberate) in order to work with Vista: “There is no requirement to sign the [content-protection] license; but without a certificate, no premium content will be passed to the driver”. Of course as a device manufacturer you can choose to opt out, if you don't mind your device only ever being able to display low-quality, fuzzy, blurry video and audio when premium content is present, while your competitors don't have this (artificially-created) problem.

As a user, there is simply no escape. Whether you use Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 95, Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, Solaris (on x86), or almost any other OS, Windows content protection will make your hardware more expensive, less reliable, more difficult to program for, more difficult to support, more vulnerable to hostile code, and with more compatibility problems. Because Windows dominates the market and device vendors are unlikely to design and manufacture two different versions of their products, non-Windows users will be paying for Windows Vista content-protection measures in products even if they never run Windows on them.

Here's an offer to Microsoft: If we, the consumers, promise to never, ever, ever buy a single HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc containing any precious premium content, will you in exchange withhold this poison from the computer industry? Please?

Link

More funny

2007-04-20T11:09:00.000-07:00

Socialized medicine horror story

2007-04-20T10:16:00.000-07:00

Sounds like a real nightmare...

He was first diagnosed by our pediatrician, a private sector doctor, who sent us to the (public) specialised pediatric hospital in Paris for additional exams. We did a scan and a MRI the same day, and that brought the diagnosis we know. He was hospitalised the same day, with surgery immediately scheduled for two days later. At that point, we only had to provide our social security number.

Surgery - an act that the doctor that performed it (one of the world's top specialists in his field) told us he would not have done it five years before - actually took place the next week, because emergency cases came up in the meantime. After a few days at the hospital, we went home. At that point, we had spent no money, and done little more than filling up a simple form with name and social security number.

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Why I haven't been blogging...

2007-04-17T16:29:00.001-07:00

I promise I'll get back to it soon...

The New York Sun

2007-04-05T13:14:00.000-07:00

Taking out-of-touch GOP bootlickery to a whole new level...

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You've probably seen this by now...

2007-04-03T08:35:00.000-07:00

EMI to offer DRM-free music

2007-04-02T09:13:00.000-07:00

Well, it costs more, but you get 256Kbit AAC, so all-in-all - not a bad deal. Hopefully EMusic will get in on this.
Link

"Ask A Ninja" ninja interviews Will Ferrell and Jon Heder

2007-03-29T09:12:00.000-07:00

Link

Burger King starts to shift meat supply toward less cruelty

2007-03-28T11:44:00.000-07:00

The change will be gradual, due to supply problems, but this is a great start.

In what animal welfare advocates are describing as a “historic advance,” Burger King, the world’s second-largest hamburger chain, said yesterday that it would begin buying eggs and pork from suppliers that did not confine their animals in cages and crates.

The company said that it would also favor suppliers of chickens that use gas, or “controlled-atmospheric stunning,” rather than electric shocks to knock birds unconscious before slaughter. It is considered a more humane method, though only a handful of slaughterhouses use it.

The goal for the next few months, Burger King said is for 2 percent of its eggs to be “cage free,” and for 10 percent of its pork to come from farms that allow sows to move around inside pens, rather than being confined to crates. The company said those percentages would rise as more farmers shift to these methods and more competitively priced supplies become available.

The cage-free eggs and crate-free pork will cost more, although it is not clear how much because Burger King is still negotiating prices, Steven Grover, vice president for food safety, quality assurance and regulatory compliance, said. Prices of food at the chain’s restaurants will not be increased as a result.

While Burger King’s initial goals may be modest, food marketing experts and animal welfare advocates said yesterday that the shift would put pressure on other restaurant and food companies to adopt similar practices.

Link

Modeling the brain

2007-03-28T11:23:00.000-07:00

A Fascinating look at a team in Switzerland who is attempting to model the brain (first of a rat, then of higher lifeforms) in silicon. An excerpt:

Today the Blue Brain project essentially has its own factory to produce artificial brain matter, so the computer can clone nerve cells almost automatically. The system's production line can produce whole series of neurons, one after another. Its memory contains close to 400 types, differentiated by shape. The stored neurons could be used to construct thinking tools of any size, in principle. Before they can be approved for use, though, the individual cells are randomly provided with individual characteristics -- because in the actual brain, no two cells are identical.

While none of this is especially challenging for a supercomputer, the real work starts when the time comes to link 10,000 non-identical cells to one another in a way that mirrors nature. The result is a particularly tricky 3-D puzzle, because each cell has about 10,000 protrusions with which it attempts to connect to other cells. The computer, in other words, must rotate and twist all cells in the space until their conductors are connected -- correctly -- at a total of 100 million points of contact.

Link

Et tu, Douchebag?

2007-03-27T09:36:00.000-07:00

When even Robert Novak is using words like "incompetent," "inept," and "isolated" about the Bush administration, can people finally start talking seriously about impeachment?

With nearly two years remaining in his presidency, George W. Bush is alone. In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress -- not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment.

Link

WiiMote used to control audio software!

2007-03-22T15:10:00.000-07:00

Awesome stuff!

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Thanks, Dano...

"The List"

2007-03-22T08:55:00.000-07:00

of New York "socialites." An example, you ask?

Baroness von Langerdorff

One of the most fascinating members of the great passing parade in New York is the Baroness W. Langer von Langerdorff, who is easily spotted in any crowd, gilded or no because of her tall and tumbling flaming tresses, her satin and/or taffeta evening dresses, and above all, her famous milkmaid complexion — and above above all, her ensembles of astonishing jewels. Which are always in ample supply, generous weight, high lustre, and, in short, unbelievable on sighting.

Link

Anyone up for NLVW2ROTTMMO?

2007-03-21T08:47:00.000-07:00

Can America's reputation and prominence ever be recovered?

2007-03-19T13:27:00.000-07:00

Michael Hirsh examines this question and comes to the conclusion that Obama is our best chance.

Who could better reassure a jittery and suspicious world that America is ready to resume global leadership than a new young president who is the son of a black African father and a white Kansan mother, with a Muslim middle name who grew up in Asia? Rather, Obama’s value is as someone with the courage, independence, and basic common sense to declare, without equivocation, that America’s loss of global leadership is a result not of the inevitable breakdown of the existing structure, but of the Bush administration’s radical and disastrous policy decisions. And that, with the right mix of patience, wisdom, and common sense, we’re not as far from reclaiming that leadership as it might appear.

Link

Douches on parade

2007-03-09T14:03:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, when we first reported about a nauseating Manhattan speed dating event that would require male participants to meet an annual income threshold of $500,000 (with at least a million in the bank) and females to submit five pictures to prove their hotness, we wondered, "What kind of schmuck would pay $500 to meet a bunch of gold diggers?"
And we were determined to find out.

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Next-gen videogame design tools

2007-03-09T09:09:00.000-08:00

Mind-blowing design tools for the Crysis "CryEngine:

Algae farming starting to take shape

2007-03-08T08:54:00.000-08:00

A while ago, I posted about the possibility of using algae for fuel. Now, some venture capitalists are taking a serious look (and starting to spend some serious money) looking at this possibility.

The company projects that in three years it can produce some biofuel, which theoretically could eventually be produced in quantities of as much as 20,000 gallons of fuel a year per acre of algae.

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What's scarier than terrorism?

2007-03-01T08:46:00.000-08:00

Unions, apparently.

The U.S. Senate began debating legislation to bolster America's security on Wednesday with the White House threatening a veto because one part would extend union protection to 45,000 airport workers.

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SoR concert tonight!

2007-02-27T14:19:00.000-08:00

James Cameron to debunk Christianity

2007-02-24T19:45:00.000-08:00

Oh man...

In a new documentary, producer Cameron and his director, Simcha Jacobovici, make the starting claim that Jesus wasn't resurrected --the cornerstone of Christian faith-- and that his burial cave was discovered near Jerusalem. And, get this, Jesus sired a son with Mary Magdelene.

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iTunes plugin tells you when bands in your library are playing near you

2007-02-23T16:30:00.000-08:00

Great idea!

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Who fucking cares about Britney's stupid haircut?

2007-02-20T13:47:00.000-08:00

My definition of a news story involves something happening. If nothing happens, then you can't have "news," because nothing has changed since the day before. Britney Spears was an idiot last Thursday, an idiot on Friday, and an idiot on both Saturday and Sunday. She was, shockingly, also an idiot on Monday. It will be news when she stops being an idiot, and we'll know when that happens, because she'll have shot herself for the good of the planet. Britney Spears cutting her hair off is the least-worthy front page news story in the history of humanity.

Apparently, from now on, every time a jackass sticks a pencil in his own eye, we'll have to wait an extra ten minutes to hear what happened on the battlefield or in Congress or any other place that actually matters.

On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the priorities of our current political elite.

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Slate believes the Hyph

2007-02-15T11:30:00.000-08:00

A nice-and-square look at my new favorite type of music.

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How long can you take this?

2007-02-10T21:42:00.000-08:00

I was literally crying with laughter by minute three.

Lethem ponders plagiarism and copyright

2007-02-07T13:18:00.000-08:00

A little crit-theory-y. but great.

The idea that culture can be property—intellectual property—is used to justify everything from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties for singing songs around campfires to the infringement suit brought by the estate of Margaret Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone. Corporations like Celera Genomics have filed for patents for human genes, while the Recording Industry Association of America has sued music downloaders for copyright infringement, reaching out-of-court settlements for thousands of dollars with defendants as young as twelve. ASCAP bleeds fees from shop owners who play background music in their stores; students and scholars are shamed from placing texts facedown on photocopy machines. At the same time, copyright is revered by most established writers and artists as a birthright and bulwark, the source of nurture for their infinitely fragile practices in a rapacious world. Plagiarism and piracy, after all, are the monsters we working artists are taught to dread, as they roam the woods surrounding our tiny preserves of regard and remuneration.

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Also, Lethem, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Mark Hosler, and Mike Doughty will be discussing these issues tonight on NPR.

Steve Jobs on DRM

2007-02-06T13:16:00.000-08:00

An extremely interesting "blog entry" on DRM from Steve Jobs.

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

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The story of General Tso's Chicken

2007-02-05T14:19:00.000-08:00

When I met Peng Chang-kuei, a tall, dignified man in his 80s, during a visit to Taipei in 2004, he could no longer remember exactly when he first cooked General Tso’s chicken, although he says it was sometime in the 1950s. “Originally the flavors of the dish were typically Hunanese — heavy, sour, hot and salty,” he said.

In 1973, Peng went to New York, where he opened his first eponymous restaurant on 44th Street. At that time, Hunanese food was unknown in the United States, and it wasn’t until his cooking attracted the attention of officials at the nearby United Nations, and especially of the American secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, that he began to make his reputation. “Kissinger visited us every time he was in New York,” Peng said, “and we became great friends. It was he who brought Hunanese food to public notice.” In his office in Taipei, Peng still displays a photograph of Kissinger and himself raising wineglasses at the restaurant.

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San Francisco magazine on the dearth of young female chefs

2007-01-29T09:36:00.000-08:00

“When I was pregnant, people kept telling me that being a parent would be the hardest job I’d ever have,” says McGillis. “Now that I’ve gotten a taste of what it’s like to be the mother of twins, I say no way: being a chef is by far the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.”

:)
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Michael Pollan tells us how to eat

2007-01-29T09:26:00.000-08:00

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

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"We are Canada's Mexicans"

2007-01-18T11:14:00.000-08:00

... when it comes to health insurance

It's obviously outrageous that tens of millions of citizens of the wealthiest country to have ever existed in human history are one cluster of metastasizing cells away from bankruptcy. Did you know that 25 percent of mortgage foreclosures result from high medical bills?

But there's a second, even bigger healthcare scandal that no one ever talks about. There are 250 million other Americans--those of us "lucky" enough to have health insurance--who aren't much better off than the uninsured.

Workers and employers pay an average of $465 per month each to insurance companies who use every shady trick in the book to avoid paying out claims. Pre-existing condition? Not covered. Don't want to drive hours to see a doctor who belongs to your plan? Pay out of pocket. Suffering from an unusual condition that requires the expertise of a high-priced specialist? Denied. You might think a chronic condition calls for long-term care, but to a claims analyst it's merely another excuse to refuse to pay up.

Every now and then, you luck out. Odds are, however, that your deductible will eat up your payout.

When an insurance company hack can't invent a legitimate excuse to turn down a claim they do it anyway. They play the odds, assuming that most petitioners, baffled by Byzantine voicemail trees, impenetrable websites and endless wait times, will be too discouraged to pursue appeals to rejections of their rightful claims. They want you to simply go away.

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I made a onesie

2007-01-16T09:44:00.000-08:00

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Rick Santorum's new job?

2007-01-09T11:58:00.000-08:00

He's in charge of the Ethics and Public Policy Center's new (I fucking kid you not) "America's Enemies" program.

“It’s a stark name,” says Santorum. “But we wanted to be candid about the fact that America really does have enemies and to point out that the nature of these enemies is much more complex than what people realize. It’s not just Islamic fascism, but also Venezuela, North Korea, and, increasingly in my opinion, Russia.”

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A new winner in the great Apple Hyperbole Wars of the early 21st century

2007-01-09T08:17:00.000-08:00

"Apple is about to touch off a nuclear war," said Paul Mercer, president of Iventor, a designer of software for hand-helds based in Palo Alto, Calif. "The Nokias and the Motorolas will have to respond."

A nuclear war? Enough already. It's just a freakin' gadget.
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Why does Jobs get a pass?

2007-01-08T15:58:00.000-08:00

Unlike, Enron, who, for all their shenanigans, may not have actually broken a law, Apple appears to have flagrantly broken the law. Why, then, won't Jobs be punished?

Jobs is too big to fail. He is too popular—among investors, journalists, employees, analysts, and in the culture at large—for anyone to recommend that he be deposed. Without Jobs, after all, there would be no Apple. The scandals at Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, and everywhere else ended the era of the rock-star CEO. But Jobs is the lone exception, as revered today as he ever was. Apple's 30-year history is divided into three phases: the golden early years in which Jobs and co-founder Steve Wozniak revolutionized the computer industry (1976-1985), the dark ages in which the company floundered after Jobs was ousted (1985-1997), and the glorious restoration (1997-present), in which Jobs ushered in a new golden age, making hip new computers and revolutionizing the music and entertainment industry with the iPod.

Everybody loves Steven. Employees love their visionary leader who has spread options throughout the company. Stockholders and analysts love him for delivering stunning returns. Consumers adore him for liberating them from the tyranny of expensive CDs and crappy radio. Creative types love Jobs for creating the iMac, a hipper alternative to the blocky PC. As Jack Shafer noted in 2005, even the press loves Jobs. Nobody—no board member, or analyst, or hedge-fund manager, or columnist—will step up to say that Jobs should go. A future without Jobs is simply too grim to contemplate. Writing in New York this week, John Heilemann cites an analyst who believes the company would instantly lose $14 billion in market capitalization if Jobs were forced out.

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FINISH HIM!

2006-12-27T09:09:00.001-08:00

The HD format wars are finally over

2006-12-27T08:56:00.000-08:00

THE NEXT GENERATION disk format has been settled once and for all. Thanks to the due diligence, hard work and unprecedented cooperation between the media companies, the hardware vendors and the OS vendor, we finally have a solution. It is quite easy, Piracy, the better choice(TM).

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See, I'm not lazy!

2006-12-22T09:38:00.000-08:00

It's the MICROBES, man...

US scientists have discovered that "gut microbes" - bacteria that live in our digestive tract - could be powerful clues to the cause and treatment of obesity.

This remarkable news was published in Nature this week and conducted at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The clue lies in the relative abundance of two major families of intestinal bacteria: Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes. These make up 90 per cent of the bacteria in the gut of humans, and, coincidentally, white mice.

Researchers in the first of two parallel studies found that as obese people lose weight, the balance between the Firmicutes and the Bacteroidetes changes - the latter increasing in abundance as an overweight person gets slimmer. (It would seem that the microbes ending in "cute" are perhaps not as lovable as their name implies!).

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All she wants for Christmas...

2006-12-18T10:11:00.000-08:00

Bad-ass jew takes on the evangelicals in the military

2006-12-13T09:29:00.000-08:00

Your youngest son is at the Air Force Academy, which has been the focus of a lot of the allegations about evangelical proselytizing. With you being so out-front on this, has he been the target of any reprisals?

No. I think that they realize if they touch a hair on his head, I will open up the skies and bring down a hammer and tongs like they've never seen before. There have been some snide remarks, but in the main it's steady cruising.

Now, my older son and his wife have had a few things. They're both first lieutenants. In the military, you wear a name tag, and their name is Weinstein. My daughter-in-law has had senior officers walk up to her and say, "I know who you are, and I know what you're family is all about." She's a junior officer, so she just looks at them. In the main, it's been fairly calm, because they're not that stupid to think that my kids wouldn't make a phone call, and then I'm going to do what I have to do.

But I can tell you that I get -- I don't think I'm in double digits, but it started at about 10 o'clock last night; after the press conference in the morning, I've had nine death threats since about 10 o'clock last night. I usually get about two or three a week. They're very grotesque, everything from wanting to gas all the Jews in America and send the corpses back to Israel to threatening to blow me up, threatening my house will be blown up, raping my wife, blowing up my house. We've had our tires slashed, we've had feces and beer bottles thrown at the house, we've had dead animals placed on the front door of the house.

I was in Topeka, on a book tour, and the local Episcopal priest came out to support me and five hours later his church was burned down. And the local synagogue in Topeka, where I was to speak that night, was desecrated with spray paint saying, "Fuck you, Jews" and "KKK," all that stuff.

So if this is a nice, Christian response, my response is take a number, pack a picnic lunch and stand in line, because we're not going to stop, we're not going to ever stop, we're going to lay down a withering field of fire and leave sucking chest wounds on these people that are trying to destroy our Constitution.

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And here is the fucked-up video he talks about in the interview.

Embarrassed yet?

2006-12-12T15:02:00.000-08:00

Having entered Iraq without any semblance of an occupation plan, our blockheaded leader is belatedly acting like a man concerned with his legacy as a nation-builder, a Dr. Frankenstein who cannot bring himself to kill his monstrous dream of Iraqi democracy. And it's this fatal weakness that is producing perhaps the very worst consequence of this war, the stunning international political victory of Ahmadinejad, the Holocaust-denying Iranian reptile.

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Damn! I wish I'd gone to this...

2006-12-07T09:09:00.000-08:00

I'm not a huge Imogen Heap fan, but I love Kid Beyond, and I would have liked to hear him play something other than the 4-5 songs that he has on his EP. The small clip of the show looks great. Anyone else have more?

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New solar power efficiency record

2006-12-06T13:39:00.000-08:00

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Alexander Karsner today announced that with DOE funding, a concentrator solar cell produced by Boeing-Spectrolab has recently achieved a world-record conversion efficiency of 40.7 percent, establishing a new milestone in sunlight-to-electricity performance. This breakthrough may lead to systems with an installation cost of only $3 per watt, producing electricity at a cost of 8-10 cents per kilowatt/hour, making solar electricity a more cost-competitive and integral part of our nation’s energy mix.

But it wouldn't be a governmental report from 2006 without a bit of nauseating pro-Bush pablum:

Reaching 40 percent efficiency helps further President Bush’s Solar America Initiative (SAI) goals, which aims to win nationwide acceptance of clean solar energy technologies by 2015. By then, it is intended that America will have enough solar energy systems installed to provide power to one to two million homes, at a cost of 5 to 10 cents per kilowatt/hour. The SAI is also key component of President Bush’s Advanced Energy Initiative, which provides a 22 percent increase in research and development funding at DOE and seeks to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of oil by changing the way we power our cars, homes and businesses.

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Bye bye Bolton

2006-12-04T09:44:00.000-08:00

President Bush today ended his efforts to have John R. Bolton confirmed by the Senate as United Nations ambassador and said Mr. Bolton will leave the position, which he has held for the past year after being chosen between Congressional terms, this month.

Mr. Bolton became the ambassador under a recess appointment made by President Bush, bypassing the usual requirement of Senate confirmation after Democrats blocked a floor vote on the nomination. Because it was a recess appointment, Mr. Bolton’s term expires when the current Congress ends its term later this month.

Mr. Bush had planned to push for confirmation during the current lame-duck session of the Republican Congress, which would have allowed him to continue as ambassador. But today’s announcement suggests that the White House realized it was not going to receive the necessary votes.

President Bush said that he accepted “with deep regret” Mr. Bolton’s decision to end his service.

“I am deeply disappointed that a handful of United States Senators prevented Ambassador Bolton from receiving the up or down vote he deserved in the Senate,” Mr. Bush said. “They chose to obstruct his confirmation, even though he enjoys majority support in the Senate, and even though their tactics will disrupt our diplomatic work at a sensitive and important time.”

Disrupt? Bolton was the one who advocated blowing up the U.N! If anything, this will make any negotiations easier, now that that jackass is out of the picture.

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How to create a pop star

2006-12-03T10:32:00.000-08:00

There's no trick - it's just a simple trick.

"San Francisco values"

2006-11-28T13:35:00.000-08:00

Since O'Reilly boycotts everything he hates, I look forward to his boycott of all Bay Area-origin products. Same with every conservative who bashes San Francisco and the Bay Area. So no iPods or anything Apple. No HP computers. No Google. No Yahoo. No eBay. Those conservative bloggers using Blogspot, MovableType, or TypePad? Sorry. Those products are Bay Area-based.

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How do we get more power?

2006-11-27T11:01:00.000-08:00

Predictably, Reason says government spending is not the answer.

First of all, I think he is being a bit facetious when he claims that the Apollo project was a "technological dead-end." Here is a short list of some technologies that were spun-off from the program:

Yeah, not all of these are mind-blowing (who could have ever envisioned an "electronic food warmer" without the space program???), but still...

I think a better way of looking at this is:

"Where would we be in our search for alternative energy if we had spent the $345 billion dollars we've burned through in Iraq on such a project?"

My guess? We'd be driving those cars from Back to the Future that run on garbage by now.

Enough with the McCain fetishizing

2006-11-27T08:36:00.000-08:00

Sifting through McCain's four bestselling books and nearly three decades of work on Capitol Hill, a distinct approach toward governance begins to emerge. And it's one that the electorate ought to be particularly worried about right now. McCain, it turns out, wants to restore your faith in the U.S. government by any means necessary, even if that requires thousands of more military deaths, national service for civilians and federal micromanaging of innumerable private transactions. He'll kick down the doors of boardroom and bedroom, mixing Democrats' nanny-state regulations with the GOP's red-meat paternalism in a dangerous brew of government activism. And he's trying to accomplish this, in part, for reasons of self-realization.

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My new internet handle

2006-11-16T18:04:00.000-08:00

"DrMethKing"

And now for something completely different!

2006-11-15T12:20:00.000-08:00

Twins are here!

Emotional Whiplash

2006-11-06T11:50:00.000-08:00

My mother passed away on October 29th. She was an amazing woman who helped many children and families, all while raising some great kids of her own. Her impact was felt at her services in Santa Cruz, which were attended by nearly 500 people from every walk of life.

It has been especially tough for me, as my wife and I are expecting twins in the next two days, and I know that my mother was excited to meet them.

So... Circle of life, I guess. I don't know how I'd be dealing with all this if it weren't for my wonderful family, my strong, generous mother-in-law, and my amazing collection of friends. And of course, my wife Tracy, without whom I'd be lost.

Thank you to all of you.

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Self-parody net-neutrality FUD from the cable industry

2006-10-27T12:07:00.000-07:00

A commercial so ridiculous it even looks like something out of Reefer Madness.

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Ars Technica shows how to steal an election

2006-10-26T10:55:00.000-07:00

This is not some nutbag ranting on a street corner, this is a highly-technical, well-researched study on how one would go about stealing an election. Turns out it's not that hard.

Over the course of almost eight years of reporting for Ars Technica, I've followed the merging of the areas of election security and information security, a merging that was accelerated much too rapidly in the wake of the 2000 presidential election. In all this time, I've yet to find a good way to convey to the non-technical public how well and truly screwed up we presently are, six years after the Florida recount. So now it's time to hit the panic button: In this article, I'm going to show you how to steal an election.

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Chris Matthews calls a spade racist a racist

2006-10-25T16:04:00.000-07:00

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