the physiognomist

Quote for the day

2006-06-29T23:57:00.000-05:00

"A short while ago you learned that all that exists is in a state of unity and that goodness itself is unity; from which it follows that we must see everything that exists as good. This means that anything which turns away from goodness ceases to exist, and thus that the wicked cease to be what they once were. That they used to be human is shown by the human appearance of their body which still remains. So it was by falling into wickedness that they also lost their human nature. Now, since only goodness can raise a man above the level of human kind, it follows that it is proper that wickedness thrusts down to a level below mankind those whom it has dethroned from the condition of being human."

- Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

Quote for the day

2006-05-27T00:10:00.000-05:00

"The urgent consideration of the public safety may undoubtedly authorize the violation of every positive law. How far that, or any other, consideration may operate to dissolve the natural obligations of humanity and justice is a doctrine of which I still desire to remain ignorant."

- Edward Gibbon, discussing the genocide (there is no other word) of the Gothic youth in the Roman Empire [A.D. 378]

Long time, no blog...

2006-05-27T00:08:00.000-05:00

Like the title says. To those of you who have been checking the blog religiously, in eager anticipation of my next post, thank you for your fidelity. To ye of little faith who gave up, assuming that I would post no more, well, fuck you.

Children behave

2005-12-01T10:46:00.000-06:00

Things are getting pissy in the northeast corridor:

There is skulduggery afoot. There are unspoken rules, there is upstaging and there is backbiting. Some who talk about such things insist on anonymity. Others refuse comment.

The issue is Christmas trees.

According to the calendar of official Washington, the holiday season kicks off tonight, when the president and first lady flip the switch to light thousands of bulbs on the Colorado blue spruce on the Ellipse, the one the White House declares the nation's official Christmas tree.

Except New York flipped the switch last night for the tree at Rockefeller Plaza. It was, said some steeped in the tree wars, a careful, calculated decision to preempt the president.

National Christmas Tree organizers bristle at the call they say comes each year from New York asking when the president will light the White House tree. And then the tree at Rockefeller Plaza sometimes is lighted before that.

The spokeswoman for Rockefeller Center issued a statement declining to comment.

"I don't think they should do that. New York tries to kind of outshine us, and it is a little bit irritating," said David Curfman, the official historian for the White House tree and an executive board member for the Pageant of Peace, which includes the festivities connected with the tree on the Ellipse.

I'm not sure which bothers me more, that New York and Washington are bickering like 8-year-olds, or that the White House Christmas tree has an official historian.

Rock you like a hurricane

2005-12-01T10:37:00.000-06:00

This may be the most terrifying thing I've ever read:

The footprints of one of the most fearsome creatures ever found in the British Isles — a water scorpion the length of a person — have been discovered in Scotland.

Tracks in rock on the east coast of Scotland were created 330 million years ago by the six-legged Hibbertopterus, which was 1.6m (5ft 3in) long and 1m (3ft 3in) wide. The water scorpion, which is distantly related to its small modern cousins, had two claw-like arms, an armoured exoskeleton and a powerful tail tipped with a large, flat spike — although it was not poisonous.

The greatest athlete in all the world

2005-11-21T21:25:00.000-06:00

Mad props to Takeru Kobayashi:

Takeru Kobayashi swallowed 67 Krystal's hamburgers in eight minutes to retain his title of Krystal Square Off World Hamburger Eating Champion and win $10,000.
Kobayashi, of Nagano, Japan, fended off San Diego State University engineering student Joey Chestnut, who was tied with the Japanese champion at 60 Krystals with 37 seconds left.

Sixty-seven hamburgers?!? You've got to be kidding me. I doubt I've eaten 67 hamburgers in the last four years.

Harry Potter blogging

2005-11-21T00:06:00.000-06:00

So, I saw Harry Potter and Ye Olde Goblete of Fyre last night. Superb. It's been a good long while since I've enjoyed a movie so thoroughly.

It's really a wonderful thing that Chris Columbus stopped directing the movies. And I don't even mean to knock Columbus, but Cuaron and now Newell have done really wonderful things with Prisoner and Goblet, respectively. Newell really did a nice job contrasting Harry Potter the 14-year-old (the Yule ball subplot had a delightful John Hughes feel to it) with Harry Potter the boy-who-lived (Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort!). And, yeah, that's stock fare, but oh well. I'm not ashamed to say (ok, so maybe I am a little) that I got a bit misty eyed at the end as well.

There was also a surprising amount of sexual innuendo, particularly given that the lead characters are (allegedly) 14. Those hats the Beauxbatons girls wore could serve as a Rorschach test all on their own...

You learn something every day, Part the XXV

2005-11-21T00:03:00.000-06:00

There really is no limit to the creativity with which subjects will find ways to screw up one's data.

Quote for the day

2005-11-20T23:53:00.000-06:00

"There is something of Daumier about a six of clubs printed in red. Not quite obscene, but almost."

Jerome Bruner, In Search of Mind

Anybody got a broom?

2005-10-26T23:52:00.000-05:00

Seeing George H. W. and Barbara Bush at the game, I couldn't help thinking that many of the people in the arena there, you know, were losers anyway, so this - this [chuckles] is working very well for them.

Girly men

2005-09-07T22:43:00.000-05:00

These darn activist liberals, legislating from the...uh... legislature...

Science!

2005-07-31T11:44:00.000-05:00

Fascinating stuff...

You learn something every day, Part the XXIV

2005-07-16T18:45:00.000-05:00

One should not start a 900-page book three days before a new Harry Potter books is released. Doh!

2005-07-16T14:41:00.000-05:00

You learn something every day, Part the XXIII

2005-07-14T23:58:00.000-05:00

Jerry Mathers graduated from Berkeley with a degree in philosophy. My philosophy of mind professor, John Searle, started at Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in 1959. So, it's in the realm of possibility that I had the same philosophy prof as the Beaver.

Say it ain't so!

2005-07-14T23:44:00.000-05:00

It was bad enough when he admitted he supported No Child Left Behind, but finding out that Matt Yglesias ("kinda sorta") likes Jagged Little Pill is one straw too many.

Cardinal Schoenborn on neo-Darwinism

2005-07-10T01:23:00.000-05:00

My sister poses some questions about this Op/Ed in the Times the other day by Cristoph Schoenborn, Archbishop of Vienna.

Okay, what *is* neo-Darwinism anyway, and are these scientific claims really invented to avoid evidence of purpose and design? This whole argument would be okay assuming that science really is trying to explain away the appearance of design. I don't know; I'm not a scientist; maybe it is.

As far as I can tell, Schoenborn wants to differentiate "neo-Darwinism" from evolution in that the former position makes the further claim that no purpose or design guided the process of evolution (or at least remains agnostic on that matter). Schoenborn is willing to admit that evolution might take place, but denies the materialistic notion that this happens without divine intervention, as the following passage makes clear:

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not.

As for whether biologists are trying to "explain away" evidence of design, I think this is a silly question in that whether you consider something compelling evidence of design is inherently subjective. Certainly, biologists are trying to explain the full complexity of life, and to do so in the most parsimonious manner possible. Schoenborn really doesn't go beyond simply asserting the existence of "overwhelming evidence for design in biology." What is this evidence? It seems to be just the (undeniable) fact that life is really, really, complex.

Schoenborn is peddling a form of what one of my undergrad professors (referring, in that case, to Chomsky's theory of language) called "the argument from the poverty of the imagination" which goes something like "I can't imagine how such-and-such could have happened, therefore such-and-such didn't happen." Schoenborn can't imagine how complex life could originate without intelligent design, therefore even the attempt at such explanation (i.e., neo-Darwinism) is "an abdication of human intelligence."

This strikes me as a misplaced application of Occam's Razor, "because God wanted it that way" is always the simplest explantion for anything, under some sense of the term. Simplest, that is, in the sense of brevity, but hardly in the sense of parsimony. This sort of reasoning provides the veneer of explanation, but merely pushes the mystery back a level to "why did God want things this way, rather than some other way" and, while we're at it, "where did God come from in the first place." This isn't to say that modern biology (or cosmology) has a good answer to the question "where (or why) did the universe come from in the first place" (or, as Stephen Hawking famously put it "why is there something, rather than nothing"), but to point out that the motives and existence of an hypothesized creator are every bit as mysterious and in need of explanation as the existence of complex life to begin with. At the very least, modern science makes a good-faith effort to grapple with these issues. It is not neo-Darwinsim, but the invocation of the intervention of an omnipotent deity to account for complex phenomena that is an abdication of human intelligence.

Not so deep in the heart of Texas

2005-07-01T01:55:00.000-05:00

The travails of a modern day castrate.

Sud Diego

2005-07-01T01:51:00.000-05:00

Who knew San Diego was home to three of the world's top ten breweries?

Friday cat blogging

2005-07-01T01:38:00.000-05:00

You learn something every day, Part the XXII

2005-07-01T01:25:00.000-05:00

The mango was introduced to Britain by Sir Joseph Banks.

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Cheese Ninja...

2005-07-01T01:16:00.000-05:00

Speaking of vapid media coverage, one group has an interesting (and really, really funny) way of bring attention to this problem.

Since Jan. 6, when the five-member Rochester-based group executed its first bust, as it calls them, of a live remote in their hometown, viewers in Boston; New York City; Manchester, N.H.; Columbus, Ohio; and several other cities have seen their local news briefly hijacked by elaborately planned vignettes that are more likely to baffle or alarm reporters than make them curse on the air.

The Newsbreakers' repertory of characters includes Cheese Ninja, who cavorts in the background of live news broadcasts, derisively tossing slices of processed cheese, and Jiminy Diz, a supposed newspaper reporter, wearing a loud jacket and a hat with a "Press" card in the band, who is angry with local television news for lifting reports from the morning paper.

This is fantastic stuff.

The Newsbreakers idea was born of what Mr. Landon described as his disillusionment with television news while working as a part-time assignment-desk assistant for Time Warner Cable's R News operation in Rochester. The blurred lines between the cable company's business concerns and its news side - as when management asked to be notified by the news staff when local officials were being interviewed on the premises, Mr. Landon said, so the company could lobby them - prompted misgivings about media consolidation and "vapid and banal" local television news. "I said: 'You know what? I'm not going to take part in this beast any longer,' " Mr. Landon said.

Local news coverage really is all too often stultifyingly awful. I hope this sort of thing gains some traction and shames local news outfits into improving their covergage.

Seduce and destroy

2005-07-01T00:42:00.000-05:00

Brooke Shields gives Tom Cruise the proverbial bitchslap in the august pages of the New York Times.

I was hoping it wouldn't come to this, but after Tom Cruise's interview with Matt Lauer on the NBC show "Today" last week, I feel compelled to speak not just for myself but also for the hundreds of thousands of women who have suffered from postpartum depression. While Mr. Cruise says that Mr. Lauer and I do not "understand the history of psychiatry," I'm going to take a wild guess and say that Mr. Cruise has never suffered from postpartum depression.

Good for her.

Kevin Drum has an excellent post on how the vapid coverage of Cruise's recent outbursts as "some kind of cutesy human interest story" gives Cruise's views apparent validity they most decidedly do not deserve.

It's a real shame to see Tom Cruise morph into his character from Magnolia.

Leviathan

2005-06-30T23:25:00.000-05:00

I had blogged a while back about a 124-lb blue catfish that was caught in Illinois, implying that it was the largest catfish ever caught. I should have been more specific,since while that may be the largest blue catfish ever caught, some species apparently get much larger. Case in point, this 646-lb (!) Mekong giant catfish caught last month in Thailand.

Just compensation

2005-06-29T14:33:00.000-05:00

This is outstanding.

Following a Supreme Court ruling last week that gave local governments more power to seize private property, someone has made what appears to be a tongue-in-cheek pitch to take over Justice David Souter's New Hampshire farmhouse and turn it into a hotel.

"The justification for such an eminent domain action is that our hotel will better serve the public interest as it will bring in economic development and higher tax revenue to Weare," Logan Darrow Clements of California wrote in a letter faxed to town officials in Weare on Tuesday.

I would suggest a slightly different plan, commisioning five large sculptures to be placed in public parks on properties currently owned by Justices Stevens, Souter, Breyer, Ginsburg, and Kennedy, to commemorate the role of eminent domain in American life.

You learn something every day, Part the XXI

2005-06-28T01:45:00.000-05:00

According to James Ussher, Bishop of Armagh, God created the world at 9 A.M. on Monday, October 23, 4004 B.C. Ussher's estimate was, apparently, widely accepted during the 18th century.

No word on which time zone this represents.

Stop the presses!

2005-06-28T01:33:00.000-05:00

How's this for a hard-hitting headline: "The Internet transforms modern life." Read all about it.

We Are Happy to Serve You

2005-06-26T14:25:00.000-05:00

The Times has a piece on New York City coffee cups (no joke). While unfamiliar with the cups, I found the opening passage beautifully evocative:

One morning a dozen years ago, a sculptor named Rodger Stevens got on a subway at 116th Street and Broadway and had what he calls a "Twilight Zone" moment. Everyone in the train seemed to be holding a paper coffee cup, and every cup was white, with no image or words whatsoever. The effect was so striking, Mr. Stevens said, "it was as if no one had eyebrows."

Suddenly, he was stricken with fear that New York's iconic Greek blue-and-white coffee cup - the one adorned with the words "We Are Happy to Serve You" and the trio of steaming mustard-yellow cups flanked by tall Grecian jars - was on the verge of extinction.

The article includes an interactive multimedia feature of Mr. Stevens' collection of coffee cups (again, no joke). Do check it out.

I know it was you, Roger. You broke my heart.

2005-06-25T02:20:00.000-05:00

A few weeks back I noticed on Roger Ebert's website that he had given Godfather III three and a half stars, but Godfather II only three stars. I was shocked and horrified by this, as I generally regard the second Godfather as my favorite film, while despising the third one. I was going to blog this at the time, but things came up, and in any case there's only so much invective worth spouting about a 30 year old movie review.

In short, Ebert doesn't feel that the comparison of young Vito with Michael works effectively. I disagree, of course. The first film was certainly tighter, but I love the more expansive and epic scope of the second film. I find the contrast between the rise and the fall of the Corleone empire (to use Tom Hagen's metaphor) brilliant (Pauline Kael, in her New Yorker review, famously likened Francis Ford Coppola to Tolstoy).

(Oh, and Ebert, it was Hymen Roth that ordered the "garroting" in the Brooklyn saloon, so that Frankie Pantangeli would think that Michael had betrayed him. This is clear from the setup, but is also directly adressed when Michael confronts Roth about it in a Havana hotel room. Roth responds elliptically, making analogy to Moe Greene's murder in the first film, in effect admitting his guilt.)

In any case, the more proximal cause of this post is Ebert's response to a letter upbraiding him for giving Adam Sandler's The Longest Yard three stars:

When a critic or paper bestows an upturned thumb or a coveted set of stars on a picture, that distinction follows the film throughout its existence. When you're gone, and someone compiles a list of "Roger Ebert's three-star Movies," this piece of cheese [The Longest Yard] will be right alongside (for example) "The Godfather, Part II," "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," "Masculine-Feminine," "The Spider's Stratagem," "Play It Again, Sam" and "Vixen." There won't be any mention of your honest crisis of conscience over this. Just the stars. You should have simply left the star field blank on this one.

In his own defense, Ebert writes:

Those who consult only the stars have only themselves to blame. If stars were all that mattered, why would I go to the trouble of writing a review? Nor need stars be immutable. "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" is now in my Great Movies series, and "The Godfather, Part II" is headed there. That is a de facto upgrading to four stars.

It is a surprising (and, perhaps, absurd) relief to know that Ebert now regards Godfather II as a four star film. I only hope that Ebert will have the decency to clear the film's name with the same publicity with which he besmirched it.

Show me the Ritalin!

2005-06-24T22:25:00.000-05:00

If I were engaged to Katie Holmes I suppose I wouldn't need antidepressants either.

You learn something every day, Part the XX

2005-06-24T22:24:00.000-05:00

Facetious is apparently the only English word (excepting, of course, derivatives such as facetiousness) with all five letters representing vowels in alphabetical order.

Oh, and I guess if you count y as a vowel, then facetiously is the only such word.

Friday cat blogging

2005-06-24T21:30:00.000-05:00

Kitty...

Sweet Pea...

Lily...

Absolutely fobulous

2005-06-24T02:27:00.000-05:00

The New York Times has a piece up about undergrads whining that their TAs don't speak proper English.

Valerie Serrin still remembers vividly her anger and the feeling of helplessness. After getting a C on a lab report in an introductory chemistry course, she went to her teaching assistant to ask what she should have done for a better grade.

The teaching assistant, a graduate student from China, possessed a finely honed mind. But he also had a heavy accent and a limited grasp of spoken English, so he could not explain to Ms. Serrin, a freshman at the time, what her report had lacked.

"He would just say, 'It's easy, it's easy,' " said Ms. Serrin, who recently completed her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley. "But it wasn't easy. He was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but he couldn't communicate in English."

If his conversational English is that bad, how does she know he's so brilliant? My own feeling is that the occasional non-English-speaking TA is a quintessential part of the Berkeley experience. I still recall fondly CS 188 sections with my Chinese TA who didn't really even bother trying to talk, but just wrote the code on the blackboard. This sort of whining is absurd.

Ms. Serrin said that she went to Berkeley thinking she might go to medical school but that she was now majoring in economics, in part because of freshman chemistry.

You heard her right. She would be a doctor if not for those damned immigrants! Where're the Minutemen when you need them.

Sunset over San Diego

2005-06-22T14:29:00.000-05:00

Don't get me wrong, I like the Chicago lakefront and all, but I can't get over how the waterfront faces the wrong direction. Heading out to Torrey Pines yesterday brought it all back...

La Jolla...

Del Mar...

Generational gap

2005-06-19T02:59:00.000-05:00

Charles Isherwood writes in the New York Times about Elizabeth Berkley's attempts to "redeem" her career after her association with Showgirls:

The name Elizabeth Berkley may ring a bell, but if you can't think why, for God's sake, don't ask me. I'm not telling.

A little more than a year ago, I received a phone call from Ms. Berkley. At the time, this actress was appearing in a revival of Larry Gelbart's "Sly Fox" on Broadway. I was then the chief theater critic of Variety.

...

She had read a reference I made to her presence at another awards ceremony, in a small picture-page item, and wanted to note her displeasure. My offense? I had identified her as the star of a movie, now several years old, famed for its breathtaking awfulness. She was tired of being tagged in print exclusively as the star of a movie famed for its breathtaking awfulness.

With poise and politesse, Ms. Berkley explained that subsequent to that cinematic debacle, she had been rehabilitating her career by pursuing work with respected and talented artists. She had been in a Woody Allen movie. She was currently on Broadway opposite Richard Dreyfuss, under the direction of Arthur Penn. She was not merely Elizabeth Berkley, star of a scandalously bad movie.

Marshaling my own resources of tact, I responded that while such credits were impressive, her renown still derived primarily from her appearance in the unspeakable movie. I had not meant to denigrate her, but simply to identify her as economically as possible.

I can't really say that Mr. Isherwood is misjudging his audience, since his audience is presumably people who read the theatre page of the Times, that is to say, people unlike myself (I just happened to see Ms. Berkley's name on the headline). Nevertheless, I for one certainly do not associate Elizabeth Berkley primarily with her role in Showgirls (a film I've never seen), but with her substantially more wholesome role on Saved by the Bell; she'll always be Jessie Spano to me.

** Update ** Matt Yglesias apparently agrees. Complaining about the Cruise/Holmes engagement, Matt writes:

In contemporary America, certain shows play a special role in the lives of certain age cohorts. They debut when you're in high school. They're about high school. The characters are about your age. The actors are a bit older. You grow up with them, you go off to college with them, and you learn from them that you're not alone in the world of weirdness that is adolescence. If you're a bit older than I, that show is probably Beverly Hills: 90210. If you're a bit younger, it's no doubt The OC. But if you're my age it's . . . Dawson's Creek.

And Katie Holmes wasn't just on the show, she was Joey Potter, the girl next door. Our girl next door. And the girl next door simply can't grow up to marry a creepy older movie star and join a weird cult. It was bad enough when Elizabeth Berkeley turned into a (fictional) stripper, but this is just too much. The very fabric of the universe threatens to unravel.

I never watched Dawson's Creek, so the Katie Holmes situation doesn't really trouble me, but I know the feeling.

Modern art

2005-06-19T02:39:00.000-05:00

Here's a headline: Bar of soap sells for $18,000

Perhaps the oddest piece of work at Art Basel is a bar of soap, displayed on a square of black velvet, purportedly made from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's fat, removed during liposuction.

Gianni Monti's work called 'Clean Hands' -- the title is a play on the name of an anti-Mafia group -- sold in less than an hour for 15,000 euros ($18,000) to a private Swiss collector, according to Monti's Galerie Nicola von Senger of Zurich.

What I want to know is how Mr. Monti managed to obtain Berlusconi's fat in the first place.

You learn something every day, Part the XIX

2005-06-19T02:34:00.000-05:00

The music of Beethoven was banned in the city of Pittsburgh during the first World War.

You learn something every day, Part the XVIII

2005-06-18T04:05:00.000-05:00

W.E.B. Du Bois became, in 1895, the first African-American to receive a Ph.D from Harvard. He was, however, refused entry to the Glee club.

Spawn of Friday cat blogging

2005-06-17T01:13:00.000-05:00

Is it ready yet?

Friday cat blogging

2005-06-17T01:00:00.000-05:00

On a steel horse she rides...

Friday cat blogging

2005-06-10T16:30:00.000-05:00

My sister has some excellent cat blogging up. She's got Sweet Pea covered, so I'll post one of the pics she recently sent me of Kitty. Enjoy!

**Update** Oh, and check out more oustanding kitten blogging over at Fiat Lux.

You learn something every day, Part the XVII

2005-06-10T00:52:00.000-05:00

One George Bush was professor of "occult therapy" at New York University in the 1830s and 1840s.

And, yes, he is of relation. Professor Bush's uncle's Great Great Great Great Grandson is president of the United States.

Brownie points to whomever figures out what relation that makes them.

You learn something every day, Part the XVI

2005-06-08T21:43:00.000-05:00

More Americans were killed at the battle of Antietam than were killed in all other 19th century wars (1812, Mexican-American, Spanish-American) combined.

(My outrageously beautiful) Busby Berkeley dreams

2005-06-08T21:35:00.000-05:00

The Gene Siskel Film Center is having a retrospective of Busby Berkeley films this month. I went this evening to see 42nd Street, which I hadn't seen in years. It was great, but I was surprised and disappointed that a song I like and thought was from the movie didn't appear.

The back story to this is that I was watching PBS a while back and they had this special on about Broadway's Greatest Hits (or something), and one of the best numbers was Jerry Orbach (who knew Lenny Briscoe'd appeared in more Broadway performances than any other actor?) doing a song called Lullaby of Broadway from the musical 42nd Street. It's a fine number, and Jerry Orbach is dashing. I was hoping it'd be in the movie as well. It wasn't. :(

But that's natural enough. There aren't enough songs in the movie to sustain a musical, so they must have written some new songs for the show. Except, that wasn't the case here. As I was sitting in Potbelly (mmmmm) eating my sandwich and reading the flyer the theatre put together about this series, I noticed that Lullaby of Broadway is in fact from a subsequent Berkeley film, Gold Diggers of 1935 (the very originally titled sequel to Gold Diggers of 1933). Curiouser and curiouser.

Jesus loves you more than you will know

2005-06-07T22:58:00.000-05:00

R.I.P. Anne Bancroft

You learn something every day, Part the XV

2005-06-07T22:54:00.000-05:00

Voltaire, reputedly quaffed between 50 and 72 cups of coffee every day!

Promise me just one more film (then we'll go our separate ways)

2005-06-07T21:57:00.000-05:00

Uh oh.

Could it be time to put more candles on the cake? Molly Ringwald said she's in discussions to make a sequel to Sixteen Candles, the 1984 movie about the obstacles and embarrassments a teen girl faces on her birthday.

The film, directed by John Hughes, shot Ringwald to teen stardom, but she hasn't appeared in a major role in many years. She said she's been appearing in theater, small TV and film parts and raising a daughter, now 18 months old.

Ringwald, 37, said she had been approached repeatedly about doing a sequel, but recently read a script that she liked and wanted to star in the movie.

"I've turned it down for years. I couldn't see how it would work," she said. "Now, it seems right."

Translation: "Small TV and film roles don't pay much."

This is a treavesty, I will not see it.

...ok, fine, I'll see it. But I won't like it.

...ok, so I'll like it. But I'll feel guilty about it...

(Note to USA Today: don't present as unsubstantiated claims things that you could easily confirm in 30 seconds using the internet. You don't just have to take Ringwald's word that she's been appearing in small TV and film rolls. You could, you know, do some journalisming or something and check up on it. I'll even help you out.)

The funny thing about this is that a couple months back there were rumors going around about a Pretty in Pink sequel. Yahoo Britain, for example, reported that:

Classic '80s movie "Pretty In Pink" is to get a sequel, director John Hughes has announced. The teen adventure starred Molly Ringwald as Andie, a high school student with a crush on the handsome new guy (Andrew McCarthy) while Duckie (John Cryer), her loyal best friend - who has long had a crush on Andie - must watch from the sidelines.
This update, which should be in cinemas in time for the original's 20th anniversary in 2006, will see all three stars reprise their roles as we find out what's happened to the characters in the intervening decades.

Happily, however, these rumors were an April's fools day prank from a site called commingsoon.net. How anyone could have taken this seriously, I cannot tell:

Molly Ringwald, who is still in the fantasies of many guys in their 30's and 40's from playing Andie Walsh in the first movie, said that her character will be more modern, more mature, and less whiny. "Sure, she'll still wear pink, but I just want to make sure that no one thinks I'm just trying to rip-off Elle Woods or something. I mean, I did do it first." Most recently, Ringwald has been appearing in various Broadway musicals.

John Cryer, who played "Duckie" in the original movie and who has been starring with Charlie Sheen in ABC's "Two and a Half Men", was happy to return, but not so happy that he would have more competition than just Andrew McCarthy's Blaine McDonnagh this time around. "When I read the script and found out that JH planned on giving Andie a whole slew of male suitors, I wondered if I should even bother to do this, especially when he said that he might try to get guys like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt to make cameos. I mean, c'mon! What does the Duckster have to do to get some of that? He's waited thirty years for her! He's 45 and still a virgin, ferchrissakes! And he has to deal with that for competition?!"

Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark have threatened to record a follow-up song for the soundtrack album, tentatively called "If You Leave Again", and Hughes said that if this proves successful, he may start brushing up the script for "Some More Kind of Wonderful".

James Spader declined to comment.

Next up for Hughes, Planes, Trains, and SUVs.

You learn something every day, Part the XIV

2005-06-05T22:06:00.000-05:00

The joystick was apparently invented by early-20th century French aviator Robert Esnault-Pelterie.

This was a great man.

Motherese (or you can't trust everything you find on the internet)

2005-06-05T03:31:00.000-05:00

I mentioned the term motherese in an earlier post and, thinking that people might be unfamiliar with the term, looked for a good description to link to. The first thing Google spat out was an entry on MedicineNet.com, a perfectly professional looking web page claiming to bring bring doctors' knowledge to us. What I found there was appaling:

The language spoken, all over the world, by mothers to their babies, before and after birth. Motherese is the earliest language a baby hears. A baby may be deprived of motherese through deafness or through separation from the parents.

Reading this, one could be forgiving for thinking that mothers magically acquire the ability to speak the pre-Babel language. Each of these three sentences is wrong. Motherese is not a language; it's a manner of speaking employing high-pitch, exaggerated intonation, short words, etc. The earliest speech the baby hears is highly unlikely to be motherese. The child is able to hear in utero, and is likely hearing most everything the mother says, be it motherese or not. Reseach by Anthony DeCasper and others has demonstrated that newborn infants are able to recognize their mothers' (but not their fathers') voice, their mothers' native language, and even a particular story their mother had read to them in utero. It's a safe bet that the bulk of a mothers speech during pregnancy is not motherese.

As for the final claim, I suppose it's not so much wrong as it is utterly banal. Of course infants would be deprived of motherese if they were separated from all adults. But then, they'd be deprived of much more than just motherese. It's not as if only parents are able to use motherese, though. Most anyone talking to a baby will talk the same way. Most importantly, though, it only makes sense to talk about deprivation if the stimulus is necessary somehow. While many researchers regard motherese as adaptive and beneficial to language learning, it is certainly not necessary, as some cultures do not use it at all. Bambi Schieffelen, for example, has described the parenting practives of the Kaluli tribe in (I think) Papua New Guinea. She found that Kaluli generally do not address speech to infants at all (let along use motherese). Nevertheless, Kaluli children end up perfectly fluent in their native language.

What's frightening about this is that people presumably go to this website for answers to their medical concerns. The motherese stuff, by itself, is pretty trivial, but if their medical information is as offbase and absurd as this entry, it could really end up hurting people. I note as well that MedicineNet claims to have authored the Webster's New World Medical Dictionary. Scary.

Wikipedia has a much better description of motherese.

Finally, the Wikipedia article notes that motherese is commonly used when talking to pets. I'm glad to know it's not just me.

Wither supply and demand?

2005-06-05T01:06:00.000-05:00

I was one of these naive internet shoppers.

Most American consumers don't realize Internet merchants and even traditional retailers sometimes charge different prices to different customers for the same products, according to a new survey.

The study, "Open to Exploitation," found nearly two-thirds of adult Internet users believed incorrectly it was illegal to charge different people different prices, a practice retailers call "price customization." More than two-thirds of people surveyed also said they believed online travel sites are required by law to offer the lowest airline prices possible.

This is really outrageous.

Stores aggressively try to retain loyal customers who generate the highest sales while discouraging bargain-hunter shoppers who are less profitable because they check many sites for the same product at the lowest price. They are known within the industry as "bottom feeders" who don't show any brand or merchant loyalty.

First-time buyers at a retailer could see higher prices than a firm's repeat customers, and retailers may not offer discounts to consumers who buy the same brands regularly without even looking at alternative products on the same site.

...

Amazon.com outraged some customers in September 2000 after one buyer deleted the electronic tags on his computer that identified him as a regular customer and noticed the price of a DVD changed from $26.24 to $22.74. The company said it was the result of a random price test and offered to refund buyers who paid the higher prices.

I hope that more attention gets drawn to this issue and that congress will legislate this sort of behavior.

You learn something every day, Part the XIII

2005-06-05T00:43:00.000-05:00

I had assumed that people who liked kids would also be people who liked pets. I often interact with cats the way I might with babies, right down to the use of motherese. Apparently, I was mistaken.

Sexual selection?

2005-06-05T00:26:00.000-05:00

Sandra Lilley has a piece up at MSNBC arguing that "students may be the real victims of the evolution wars". The real victims? Who are the supposed victims?

“Students face consequences if they choose to accept evolution in a family or a church or a community that patently rejects evolution ... It might affect whether you get a date to the prom, or whether you get that summer job or not,” McCoy said. “You may even anger close family members. Conversations about evolution can make family reunions very tense.”

So that's why I can't get a date.

There is, however, a sliver lining:

And at a time when the National Science Foundation projects that the number of scientists and engineers reaching retirement age is expected to triple in the next 10 years, McCoy and others argue that the “evolution wars” are taking time away from their life’s work — making these children excited and prepared — to become the next Jonas Salk or Bill Gates.

So, even if I won't have a date to prom, I will have a job!

Friday cat blogging

2005-06-03T00:44:00.000-05:00

This picture pretty much speaks for itself.

You learn something every day, Part the XII

2005-06-03T00:24:00.000-05:00

Lake Gatún was formed during the building of the Panama canal by the damming of the Chagres River.

Props to Nathan Cornelius.

Where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies

2005-06-02T15:40:00.000-05:00

Exciting news from the world of children's literature:

Former Beatle Paul McCartney is writing a children's book called "High in the Clouds: An Urban Furry Tale," to be released in October, his publisher Penguin said in a statement.

The book was inspired by an animated film called "Tropic Island Hum," which McCartney worked on with animator Geoff Dunbar. The publisher said it was an adventure story about a squirrel and a frog, and the cover illustration shows the two main characters in a hot-air balloon.

High in the Clouds huh? That wouldn't be anything like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, would it?

appoggiatura

2005-06-02T15:27:00.000-05:00

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new champion speller:

Bursting into tears, eighth-grader Anurag Kashyap of California became the U.S. spelling champ Thursday, beating out 272 other spellers in a tough two days of competition. He said he felt “just pure happiness.”

Anurag, 13, of Poway clinched “appoggiatura,” a melodic tone, to take home some $30,000 in prizes. He won in the 19th round of the 78th Annual National Scripps Spelling Bee.

I was going to blog this competition the other day, but didn't get around to it. First things first, props to Anurag. Secondly, though, it fills me with pride that a San Diegan won this thing. Poway, California, if you didn't know, is a suburb of San Diego.

Interestingly, Poway is immediately adjecent to the community of San Diego where I grew up, Scripps Ranch. As you might guess from the name, Scripps Ranch was the home of newspaper magnate E.W. Scripps and his daughter Ellen Browning Scripps (the Scripps Ranch Civic Association has a brief history). The odd thing about this is that the spelling bee was sponsored by the E.W. Scripps Company.

Class of 2005

2005-06-01T23:32:00.000-05:00

At long last, my sister sent me graduation pics. Here I am (on the left) with my sister and my friend Ari, pure math majors both.

A piece fo my mind

2005-06-01T21:29:00.000-05:00

So, I'll be teaching my first course this coming fall, Psych 21204 at the University of Chicago, as a John Dewey Lecturer. The registrar, in their infinite wisdom, however, has seen fit to make a complete mockery of my course title:

The Role fo Body in Mind: Embodied Approachws to Cognition

I feel like I'm being hazed.

Do you reject Sianis and all his works?

2005-06-01T12:05:00.000-05:00

This is a few weeks old, but I missed it somehow. As the curse of the billy goat wrecks havoc, Chicago Cubs manager Dusty Baker is taking desperate measures:

Baker is rubbing holy water on the injured parts of Cubs players, the Chicago Tribune reported Wednesday.

Baker isn't Catholic, but he is a religious man who is open to all sorts of ideas. So when Cubs public relations manager Sharon Pannozzo brought Baker some holy water that had been blessed by Pope John Paul II four months ago, the Cubs manager leapt to action, the newspaper reported.

"It's about as close to holy medicine as you can get," Baker said, the newspaper reported.

"It's not like it's voodoo or something," the manager also said.

Therein, perhaps, lies the problem. Maybe voodoo's exactly what's needed here. The remainder of this season, now, is a straightforward empirical test of the relative merits of Catholicism vs. some form of obscure Greek paganism. May the best deity win.

One small snip for posterity

2005-06-01T11:46:00.000-05:00

This is really sad.

You learn something every day, Part the XI

2005-06-01T00:30:00.000-05:00

According to this dude Tom, wealth among the indiginous Maori of New Zealand is determined by the number of cassowarys owned.

You learn something every day, Part the X

2005-05-30T21:45:00.000-05:00

Matt's Memorial Day Pico de Gallo:

2 medium vine ripe tomatoes, diced
1/2 cup white onion, chopped finely and rinsed
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
2 roasted jalapeno peppers, chopped finely (but not seeded)
salt, black and cayenne peppers, and garlic powder to taste

yummy.

Cripps Ranch 92131

2005-05-30T21:23:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post (apparantly this is from Newsweek) has a list of the top 1,036 public high schools in the country. Schools were ranked according to a ratio of the total number of AP and IB tests taken by all students divided by the number of graduating seniors. I won't get into the merits of this particular index. (The author of the list, Jay Mathews addresses criticism here.)

What I do want to get into is the relative rankings of San Diego County high schools. (I don't know a thing about Chicago high schools.) Accordingly, I've put together a table of San Diego area schools making the cut.

Rank (San Diego)	Rank (nation)	School	Location	Index
1	82	Torrey Pines	San Diego	2.929
2	101	Muir	San Diego	2.774
3	105	La Jolla	~~La Jolla~~ San Diego	2.709
4	171	San Dieguito	Encinitas	2.410
5	173	Coronado	Coronado	2.402
6	233	Serra	San Diego	2.162
7	240	La Costa Canyon	Carlsbad	2.129
8	241	Scripps Ranch	San Diego	2.129
9	251	University City	San Diego	2.100
10	258	Point Loma	San Diego	2.085
11	309	El Camino	Oceanside	1.934
12	324	Southwest	San Diego	1.880
13	345	Patrick Henry	San Diego	1.843
14	390	San Pasqual	Escondido	1.756
15	421	San Diego School of Creative & Performing Arts	San Diego	1.712
16	423	Bonita Vista	Chula Vista	1.707
17	530	Eastlake	Chula Vista	1.531
18	542	Helix Charter	La Mesa	1.519
19	736	Rancho Bernardo	San Diego	1.302
20	771	Madison	San Diego	1.264
21	783	San Marcos	San Marcos	1.248
22	789	Grossmont	La Mesa	1.244
23	797	Mission Bay	San Diego	1.237
24	833	Poway	Poway	1.207
25	848	Clairemont	San Diego	1.195
26	859	West Hills	Santee	1.187
27	912(tie)	Granite Hills	El Cajon	1.130
28	914	Mira Mesa	San Diego	1.129
29	921	Mt. Carmel	San Diego	1.120
30	986	Sweetwater	National City	1.058
31	1006	Crawford	San Diego	1.038

My alma mater, Scripps Ranch High School, does pretty well, ranking 241 in the country and 8th in San Diego. I was surprised (and disappointed) to see that Serra had beaten us. I suspect that my intuitions may be misled by mistaking the top decile of students as representative of the entire student body. Case in point, San Diego Academic League afficianados will be surprised to note that San Diego High apparently didn't even make the list! Oh, and isn't Muir a school for special students or something? Of course, what really matters is that Scripps Ranch beat out Beverly Hills High, which was 265 in the nation.

Also worth noting is that San Diego county totals 31 of the top 1,036 schools in the country, 3%! I figure that San Diego county has, oh, 3 million or so people or about 1% of the nation's population. Maybe my guestimates are off (and, of course, enrollment may vary from school to school), but it seems that San Diego did pretty well here.

**Note** I have no clue why there's a huge blank space preceding the table. I don't really have the motivation or time to look into it.

Pope Benedict and conscience

2005-05-30T00:52:00.000-05:00

A letter writer in the May 30th edition of The New Yorker finds an intriguing passage written by Joseph Ratzinger in response to Vatican II:

Over the pope as the expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority, there still stands one’s own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, if necessary even against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority. This emphasis on the individual, whose conscience confronts him with a supreme and ultimate tribunal, and one which in the last resort is beyond the claim of external social groups, even of the official Church, also establishes a principle in opposition to increasing totalitarianism.

Googling the passage, I find that it's from Commentary on the Doctrine of Vatican II, 5, 134, Herbert Vormgrimler (Ed.). The letter is written in response to piece by Jane Kramer in last weeks edition, that I haven't read yet, but it's an intriguing passage. Certainly it's surprising to see it attributed to Ratzinger. One wonders if he'd stand by it now.

You learn something every day, Part the IX

2005-05-30T00:34:00.000-05:00

The Sound of Music opened 40 years ago this Memorial Day weekend.

Sometime in my youth or childhood, I must have done something bad...

**Update** Some days you learn something else!

Pauline Kael apparantly lost her job as movie critic for McCall's after panning The Sound of Music, which, the story reports, is the third highest grossing film ever, adjusting for ticket price inflation (Titanic isn't even in the top five!). Kael was better off at the New Yorker anyway.

Stem cells and eugenics

2005-05-29T16:28:00.000-05:00

Henry Fountain has a disgusting little piece in the New York Times Week in Review today likening stem cell research to eugenics.

In the case of stem cells, some concerns are overshadowed by the tantalizing promise of the research: rejection-free organ transplants, regenerated spinal cords, perfectly matched blood transfusions, cures for diabetes and Alzheimer's.

But those promises run headlong into questions raised by a dark history of research. Take eugenics. According to Christine Rosen, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington and the author of "Preaching Eugenics," scientists who supported eugenics claimed that it could cure disease and end poverty - involuntary sterilizations were one result.

Where to start? It's not at all clear how the potential benefits of stem cell research run headlong into anything. The argument here seems to run something along the lines of: stem cell research is being conducted by scientists, scientists sometimes do bad things, therefore stem cell research is bad too. There are many problems with this line of argument, but the most pressing one is this. Eugenics is not a scientific theory. Rather, eugenics is a social policy inspired by scientific research into heredity and genetics. The scientific research does not even remotely imply eugenics, and crucially, rejection of eugenics as a social philosophy does not entail rejection of the underlying science.

Let's start at the beginning (a very good place to start). Eugenics arose largely from Sir Francis Galton's studies of hereditary genius, published in 1869 in a book of the same name, in which he investigated whether 'genius', that is excellence in a particular field, was transmitted hereditarily. Galton created family trees to investigate how genius was transmitted, concluding that talent does, indeed, run in family lines (see Stephen Stigler's The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900 for an excellent discussion of Galton's work). (It is worth noting that this conclusion is problematic given that Galton's results could potentially be accounted for by environmental factors. This remains a major area of controversy.) From Galton's results, the idea immediately presents itself: the overall level of genius in society could be increased by only allowing the most talented in society to procreate: hence eugenics. Galton's ideas were undoubtedly influenced by those of his first cousin Charles Darwin whose Origin of Species was published only a decade prior to Galton's Hereditary Genius. Nevertheless, it does not follow that rejection of eugenics necessitates rejection of Darwin's theory of evolution or of genetics. Unsurprisingly, though, this seems to be the conclusion that conservatives wish to draw.

The controversy over eugenics is particularly relevant to the current debate, argues Wesley J. Smith, an opponent of therapeutic cloning at the Discovery Institute, a conservative research group in Seattle.

When eugenics was popular, he said, "people at the top levels of society were accepting of the idea that you could improve the human race by improving the gene pool." Even the United States Supreme Court, he said, supported involuntary sterilization, in the 1927 case Buck v. Bell.

The article fails to mention that the Discovery Institute is among the leading proponents of teaching intelligent design in schools. Even so, it's painfully unclear how Mr. Smith's assertions about eugenics (while certainly true) are "particularly relevant" to the question of the ethics of stem cell research. The only logic of this style of argument is to smear science and portray it as inexorably leading to immorality. Research on evolution and genetics led some people to propose eugenicist social policies, therefore research on genetics and evolution, and now apparently embryonic stem cells, is immoral. It's unsurprising to hear this from the Discovery Institute. It's disappointing, however, to see the New York Times presenting this sort of argument unchallenged.

Microsoft Millionaires

2005-05-29T15:35:00.000-05:00

The Times has a quirky and interesting article about what Microsoft millionaires have been doing with their fortunes. Worth a look.

"While the exact number is not known, it is reasonable to assume that there were approximately 10,000 Microsoft millionaires created by the year 2000," said Richard S. Conway Jr., a Seattle economist whom Microsoft hired to study its impact on Washington State. "The wealth that has come to this area is staggering."

Many employees spent their money immediately, in a variety of ways. If the stock price hit a new high, for example, five new sports cars might drive into Microsoft's parking lot in Redmond, Wash., the next day. Big-screen video projection theaters and indoor pools built to resemble the rocky caves of Hawaii appeared in employees' homes. One employee treated 30 family members to a weeklong vacation at a five-star resort. Another endowed a professorship in his name at Oxford University.

Byron Calame, Ombudsman

2005-05-29T00:53:00.000-05:00

I complained in an earlier post, about the New York Times' poor covergage of the so-called "Downing Street Memo". The Times must have gotten an earful about this, since Byron Calame, the incoming ~~Ombudsman~~ Public Editor decided to address this issue two days before his tenure even begins. Calame's discussion is excellent:

The Times's coverage of the once-secret memo started alertly with a May 2 article by Alan Cowell that laid out its contents in the context of the possible impact on the May 5 British election. But the news coverage languished until this morning when a Times article from Washington focused on the reaction to the memo there. This has left Times readers pretty much in the dark until today — and left critics of the paper's news columns to suspect the worst about its motives. (On the Op-Ed page last Monday, Paul Krugman did cite the memo high up in his column.)

My checks find no basis for Ms. Lowe's concern about censorship or undue outside pressures. Rather, it appears that key editors simply were slow to recognize that the minutes of a high-powered meeting on a life-and-death issue — their authenticity undisputed — probably needed to be assessed in some fashion for readers. Even if the editors decided it was old news that Mr. Bush had decided in July 2002 to attack Iraq or that the minutes didn't provide solid evidence that the administration was manipulating intelligence, I think Times readers deserved to know that earlier than today's article.

It's good to see Calame take this issue so seriously. Hopefully he'll be better than Daniel Okrent. He's off to a good start.

Fucking Asshole of the Day

2005-05-29T00:19:00.000-05:00

Every now and then you encounter an individual who transcends the usual assholeness to achieve the enlightened state of the fucking asshole. Here at the physiognomist, I wish to honor the contributions of these pioneering assholes by naming them the Fucking Asshole of the Day. I am pleased to announce the inaugural honoree as Fucking Asshole of the Day: Robby Gordon.

If, like me, you live in a blue state, you may not have heard of Robby Gordon. Mr. Gordon is a NASCAR driver, and is apparantly quite good. He qualified 25th for the Indianapolis Derby and was one of the fastest drivers in the practice sessions. Nevertheless, Gordon is considering skipping Sunday's race. The reason? A gurl is going to be allowed to race! Danica Patrick finished fourth in the qualifying trials and has a very real chance of winning. Why, you might ask, is this a problem?

Gordon, a former open-wheel driver now in NASCAR, contends that Patrick is at an advantage over the rest of the competitors because she only weighs 100 pounds. Because all the cars weigh the same, Patrick's is lighter on the race track.

"The lighter the car, the faster it goes," Gordon said. "Do the math. Put her in the car at her weight, then put me or Tony Stewart in the car at 200 pounds and our car is at least 100 pounds heavier.

"I won't race against her until the IRL does something to take that advantage away."

Yes, that's right, Patrick is apparantly cheating by not being fat. It's truly astonishing to hear someone who styles themselves a professional athlete whining that they're at a disadvantage on account of their flabby physique. Mr. Gordon is free not to compete, and I doubt that anyone will really miss him. But if he's concerned that his bulk is slowing his car down, maybe he should stop whining and start dieting.

You learn something every day, Part the VIII

2005-05-28T23:45:00.000-05:00

James Bushby introduced the grape to Australia in 1832.

Department of Homeland Voyeurism?

2005-05-28T15:24:00.000-05:00

Speaking of the Department of Homeland Security, I don't really have such a problem with this, but I can't imagine social conservatives will be happy:

I am looking at a copy of an ad that ran in the back of comic books in the 1950s and early 1960s." X-Ray Specs! See Thru Clothing!" blares the copy, which is illustrated with a cartoon of a drooling geek wearing the amazing toy goggles and leering at a shapely woman.

Now, any kid with half a brain knew that X-Ray Specs were a novelty gag that didn't really work. But time marches on and technology makes the impossible possible. Stand by, air travelers, because the Homeland Security Department is preparing to install and test high-tech machines at airport checkpoints that will, as the comic-book ads promised, "See Thru Clothing!"

Get ready for electronic portals known as backscatters, expected to be tested at a handful of airports this year, that use X-ray imaging technology to allow a screener to scan a body. And yes, the body image is detailed. Let's not be coy here, ladies and gentlemen:

"Well, you'll see basically everything," said Bill Scannell, a privacy advocate and technology consultant. "It shows nipples. It shows the clear outline of genitals."

What'll we tell the children?

You're either with MPAA or you're with the terrorists

2005-05-28T15:20:00.000-05:00

What's the mission of the Department of Homeland Security again? Certainly not this:

Agents shut down a popular Web site that allegedly had been distributing copyrighted music and movies, including versions of "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith." Homeland Security agents from several divisions served search warrants on 10 people around the country suspected of being involved with the Elite Torrents site, and took over the group's main server. [Emphasis added]

Picasa

2005-05-28T15:07:00.000-05:00

I mentioned Picasa in the last post. If you're unfamiliar with this program, I highly recommend giving it a look. It's a program for managing, editing, labeling, captioning, presenting, and sharing digital images. It's brought to us by the good folks at Google, and quite simply it is going to revolutionize the way we interact with photographs.

I've been struggling for the past couple years about how best to deal with photographs I take on trips. I had my 35mm film developed and put online, resulting in absurdly expensive and mediocre quality digital images. With these, I created a series of web pages, breaking the images down by location and creating thumbnails for faster loading. All this was time consuming and kinda clunky. There was no good way to caption or even label pictures. Picasa does all this automatically, sorting images by folder, creating quick-loading thumbnails, captioning is nicely integrated, slide shows are easy to create. And best of all, it's really an elegant interface. The Google people really have a way with design. Oh, and Picasa also integrates seamlessly with the blogger software.

The Chrysler Building

2005-05-28T14:21:00.000-05:00

The New York Times' Home and Garden page has a special section up on the Chrysler building. It's a fascinating read, and well worth a look. I've always had a certain fascination with art deco, and I love the Chrysler building.

I was in New York last month for the first time since my 8th grade school trip. This was the first trip I'd taken with my digital camera (thanks Santa!), and some of my favorite shots were of the Chrysler building. Let me share.

This picture was taken as I walked south on Lexington Avenue:

This one was taken at dusk from the observation deck of the Empire State Building (pictures of which to come):
I know the contrast isn't great on this last picture (though try turning off the room lights), but in a way I think that's part of what I like about this picture. I was playing around with Picasa's contrast settings, and this picture looks nice with better contrast. You can check it out here.

You learn something every day, Part the VII

2005-05-27T20:41:00.000-05:00

It must suck to have technical problems while giving a job talk.

Ditka vs. Dumbledore at golf

2005-05-27T17:13:00.000-05:00

The AP suggests that, with the end of Star Wars, the era of the superfan may be coming to a close. I love the speculation about these people's motives:

“The people who do this suspend the normal rules of society,” says Dr. Jerry M. Lewis, a sociology professor at Kent State University who has studied fan behavior. “Normally, you don’t walk around dressed as Chewbacca or Darth Vader.”

Touche.

“Why do people do this? I have no idea, other than it gives them an identity,” Lewis adds. “And I would guess, if we could generalize from die-hard soccer fans and die-hard Cubs fans, it gives them an identity that’s greater than their personal identity.”

What are these people going to do, no longer having a source of identity? The article suggests they may turn to Harry Potter. Yes, now you too can add a countdown to the next book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, added to your desktop.

Friday cat blogging

2005-05-27T16:25:00.000-05:00

You didn't think I'd forgotten about Friday cat blogging I hope. This is Sweet Pea. She is the fluffiest (and stupidest) cat ever!

Driver's ed

2005-05-27T16:08:00.000-05:00

A GMAC survey of liscensed drivers has yielded some frightening results:

one out of five drivers doesn't know that a pedestrian in a crosswalk has the right of way, and one out of three drivers speeds up to make a yellow light, even when pedestrians are present, the study said.

It doesn't really surprise me that a third of drivers speed through yellow lights. What does surprise me is that so many drivers would admit to doing so.

Overall, Oregon and Washington drivers scored highest while Northeastern drivers scored lowest. I have no particular theory about this, but it's kind of interesting.

Somebody get a rope...

2005-05-27T13:37:00.000-05:00

I've never been to Texas (unless you count a layover at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport), though I've heard great things about Austin. Reading about David Plotz's pilgrimage to find the best barbecue has made me think I need to check things out.

Here's the amazing thing about Texas barbecue. Even a run-of-the-mill place around here is better than the best barbecue anywhere else.

I particularly liked his description of his experience going through security at the Austin airport going home:

I was singled out for a special security screening. The TSA agent fingering through my bag pulled out a jar of barbecue sauce I had bought at Gates in Kansas City. "What's this?" she asked.
"It's barbecue sauce," I said.

"I know it's barbecue sauce. I mean, what kind of sauce is it? I've never seen this kind before."

"It's from Kansas City."

She grimaced at this. Holding the jar like it contained C-4 explosive, she showed it to another screener. "Look, this guy has some kind of barbecue sauce from New York City or something," she told the other screener derisively.

"Kansas City," I weakly interrupted.

She waved me off, then said in an ominous voice. "Now, why would you have that?"

You learn something every day, Part the VII

2005-05-26T22:51:00.000-05:00

Beer tastes better when it's free.

I'll tell you what I want

2005-05-26T14:54:00.000-05:00

...what I really, really, want. Anything but this.

What would Aunt Hetty say?

2005-05-25T23:52:00.000-05:00

So much for the supposed efficiency of the Canadian health care system:

A Canadian province will shut its 24-hour suicide hotline and replace it with one that operates only during business hours.

Prince Edward Island, a small province on Canada’s East Coast, says it is too expensive to operate the hotline around the clock. Starting June 1, it will be open only between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.

The plan drew protest from mental health groups across the country Wednesday.

Next up, the police will get weekends off.

Big fish

2005-05-25T23:43:00.000-05:00

Illinois got just a little bit more special over the weekend.

Tim Pruitt went fishing and pulled up a whopper of a beast.
No, seriously: It was roughly the size of a sixth-grader.

Pruitt, casting his line in the Mississippi River on Sunday, hauled up a 58-inch (146 cm) long, 44-inch (111 cm) around blue catfish that weighed a whopping 124-pounds (56 kg).

That, folks, is a world record!

Now, Pruitt, whose fish has already been weighed in the presence of a conservation police officer and measured by a biologist for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, is expected to submit documentation to the International Game Fish Association so that it can be certified a world record holder.
Once that's done, the catch should be approved as the world's largest blue catfish, replacing the current champion that was caught January 16, 2004, in Lake Texoma, Texas, said Becky Reynolds, a spokeswoman for the association.

Illinois, land of ~~Lincoln~~ the World's Largest Catfish...

Name that tune

2005-05-25T23:23:00.000-05:00

New feature here at the physiognomist, first to name that tune in comments will gain the people's ovation and fame forever.

No sex, no drugs,

no wine, no women,

no fun, no sin,

no you....

no wonder it's dark

Oh, and no googling!

You learn something every day, Part the VI

2005-05-25T23:15:00.000-05:00

Avacados + Tomatillos = mmmmmmmm

Law & Order

2005-05-25T22:47:00.000-05:00

I'm sure you're all familiar with the experience of reading something and then encountering something intimitely related later in the day. This morning, I came across a funny post at DailyKos about unusual laws on the books in Maine:

Shotguns are required to be taken to church in the event of a Native American attack.

You may not step out of a plane in flight.

After January 14th you will be charged a fine for having your Christmas decorations still up.

Shoelaces must be tied while walking down the street. (Portland)

To stroll down the street playing a violin is against the law. (Augusta)

These are all moderately amusing. Unlikely to be enforced, surely. Or so I thought until I came across this article on CNN just now:

Sheriff Carson Smith of Pender County, North Carolina, recently relied on a 1805 law banning the cohabitation of unmarried persons to give one of his employees an ultimatum.

He told Deborah Hobbs she could either marry her boyfriend, move out of the house they were living in together or get fired. Hobbs, 40, quit and went to the American Civil Liberties Union, which launched a legal challenge to the law.

This is scary stuff. Props to the ACLU, but it's unfortunate in a way that these laws can't be challenged in court until there's a specific case in which they've been enforced. In a sense, then, it's great that this jackass Sheriff Smith tried to enforce it, likely having the result of such laws being declared unconstiutional. The prototypic case of this would be the landmark Lawrence v. Texas case in which the Supreme court declared sodomy laws unconstitutional. For this case, which established wide-ranging sexual privacy protections, to even be heard required that two gay men actually be arrested in Texas for having sex.

Both of these articles link to an amusing site on dumb laws. It's not clear how accurate the site is, but there are some funny Chicago laws:

Law forbids eating in a place that is on fire

It is illegal to give a dog whiskey

It is forbidden to fish while sitting on a giraffe's neck

It is legal to protest naked in front of city hall as long as you are under seventeen years of age and have legal permits

My favorite, though, is the following from Champaign, IL:

One may not pee in his neighbor's mouth

Oh, those wacky Illini...

I'm off...

2005-05-22T06:45:00.000-05:00

...to that sunshine state where the bomb-ass hemp be.

You learn something every day, Part the V

2005-05-21T22:44:00.000-05:00

Nobody sings Cole Porter like Ella Fitzgerald.

Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus

2005-05-21T20:16:00.000-05:00

In a special section on the role of class in contemporary life, the New York Times has an interesting article on attempts by Evangelical Christians to prostlytize on Ivy League campuses. I was struck by one passage however, describing the Friday night dinners Tim Havens holds for Evangelical students at Brown University:

On Friday nights, he is a host for a Bible-study and dinner party for 70 or 80 Christian students, who serve themselves heaping plates of pasta before breaking into study groups. Afterward, they regroup in the living room for board games and goofy improvisation contests, all free of profanity and even double entendre.

Double entendre? Am I missing something here? I've never really been aware of any Christian opposition to double entendre or figurative speech. Is this like Jorge's approach in The Name of the Rose?

Adstronomy

2005-05-21T19:46:00.000-05:00

This is like something out of a James Bond movie. I'm glad the FAA is stepping in here to try and prevent this, but it's terrifying to think what might happen when lobbyists get involved:

The Federal Aviation Administration proposed Thursday to amend its regulations to ensure that it can enforce a law that prohibits "obtrusive" advertising in zero gravity.
"Objects placed in orbit, if large enough, could be seen by people around the world for long periods of time," the FAA said in a regulatory filing.

Currently, the FAA lacks the authority to enforce the existing law.

For instance, outsized billboards deployed by a space company into low Earth orbit could appear as large as the moon and be seen without a telescope, the FAA said. Big and bright advertisements might hinder astronomers.

"Large advertisements could destroy the darkness of the night sky," regulators said.

Scary.

**Postscript** It occurs to me now that the bigger problem is that the FAA doesn't really have juristiction in space. Maybe they can prevent ad-satellites launched from American soil, but what if the satellite is launched from the Cayman Islands, say. Is there anything the US Government can do? I don't know, but it's a pretty dismal thought.

Making a run for the Borders

2005-05-21T19:10:00.000-05:00

My sister graduates from Berkeley Monday and I'm off to California in, oh 14 hours or so to be in attendence. I was at the Hyde Park Borders just now shopping for graduation gifts (shhhh, nobody tell her I waited until the last minute). I don't know if someone there has a sick sense of humor, or if it's just pure serindipity, but I found it amusing that the Erotica section is directly across the aisle from the Christianity stuff. This aisle is shared by the "Psychology" section, which has been entirely taken over by "Self-Help". I sorta understand how it came about that Psychology became conflated with Psychiatry (Freud was not a psychologist folks), but I really don't get how the same happened with self-help.

Anyway, the reason I was in the self-help section (not that I'm defensive about it or anything) was to find this book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell about which I've heard wonderful things (don't ask me why it's in self-help). In the end, though, I was too cheap to pay for the hardcover, so my sister will have to settle for something else in paperback.

One last thing, is it just me or is there a rash of Teddy Roosevelt bios out at the moment? Is there something in particular precipitating this? The centennial of his becoming president was four years ago, so it's not that.

The secret man of the world

2005-05-21T01:15:00.000-05:00

Robert Messenger has a delightful paean to Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series in The New Criterion. Incidentally, I finished book 19, The Hundred Days, of the 20 book series just last night. The series is superb. In terms of sustained excellence, I suspect it is without peer. My only quibble with Messenger's piece relates to the relative musical aptitude of the principles; he writes:

The two spend their evenings together aboard ship playing chamber music: Aubrey on his violin, Maturin slightly more adeptly on the cello.

I don't know from where Messenger derived this interpretation, but it is belied by the following passage from book 17, The Commodore, pp. 72-73:

[Stephen Maturin] stood leaning on the balcony rail and presently Jack Aubrey, in a summer-house by the bowling green, began again, playing very gently in the darkness, improvising wholly for himself, dreaming away on his violin with a mastery that Stephen had never heard equalled, though they had played together for years and years.

Like many other sailors Jack Aubrey had long dreamed of lying in his warm bed all night long; yet although he could now do so with a clear conscience he often rose at unChristian hours, particularly if he were moved by strong emotion, and crept from his bedroom in a watch-coat, to walk about the house or into the stables or to pace the bowling-green. Sometimes he took his fiddle with him. He was in fact a better player than Stephen, and now that he was using his precious Guarnieri rather than a robust sea-going fiddle the difference was still more evident: but the Guarnieri did not account for the whole of it, nor anything like. Jack certainly concealed his excellence when they were playing together, keeping to Stephen's mediocre level: this had become perfectly clear when Stephen's hands were at last recovered from the thumbscrews and other implements applied by French counter-intelligence officers in Minorca; but on reflexion Stephen thought it had been the case much earlier, since quite apart from his delicacy at that period, Jack hated showing away.

Now, in the warm night, there was no one to be comforted, kept in countenance, no one who could scorn him for virtuosity, and he could let himself go entirely; and as the grave and subtle music wound on and on, Stephen once more contemplated on the apparent contradiction between the big, cheerful, florid sea-officer whom most people liked on sight but who would never have been described as subtle or capable of subtelty by any one of them (except perhaps his surviving opponents in battle) and the intricite, reflective music he was now creating. So utterly unlike his limited vocabulary in words, at times verging upon the inarticulate.

'My hands have now regained the moderate ability they possessed before I was captured,' observed Maturin, 'but his have gone on to a point I never thought he could reach: his hands and his mind. I am amazed. In his own way he is the secret man of the world; but I could wish his music were happier.'

I've quoted more than necessary, since it's just such a beautiful passage. This is, of course, a minor quibble. It is possible that passages from earlier in the series give a different impression, though O'Brian is certainly more careful to maintain consistency across his works than, say, George Lucas.

Like anyone, of course, O'Brian is capable of mistakes, as when Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander describes the explosion of the Orion at the Battle of the Nile. While the HMS Orion, 74, did, indeed, fight at the Nile, the French flagship which expoloded was L'Orient, 120, as is indicated in later books in the series. And, no, I don't really have a point to make...

Do read the books, if you haven't already.

You learn something every day, Part the IV

2005-05-20T22:22:00.000-05:00

Traditional Chinese massage is all freaky looking. I'm watching this show on PBS and they have these bottles that they suction to your back. It leaves these welts on the skin that, apparently, last about a week.

$tar Wars

2005-05-20T20:57:00.000-05:00

I expressed surprise the other day that I was able to score opening night tickets to Revenge of the Sith the day before it opened. I wondered aloud if this was a bad omen for the film's financial success. Clearly, I was wrong:

The final chapter in the “Star Wars” movie saga grossed a record $50 million from its first 24 hours in North American theaters, the highest box office tally ever for a single day, 20th Century Fox said Friday.

Nearly 30 years after George Lucas revolutionized cinema with his original sci-fi tale of good vs. evil in a galaxy far, far away, the concluding installment to his double trilogy seemed firmly on course to redefine the boundaries of the Hollywood blockbuster.

Opening Thursday on some 9,400 screens in nearly 3,700 U.S. and Canadian theaters, “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith” generated $16.5 million in ticket sales from sold-out debut midnight showings packed with costumed fans and went on to accumulate $50,013,859 in receipts by day’s end.

The unprecedented sum easily surpassed the previous opening-day box office record set last June by “Spider-Man 2” — $40.4 million — and the $44.8 million single-day benchmark “Shrek 2” grossed a year ago in its fourth day of release.

Unlike live shows, opening night tickets to blockbuster movies apparently aren't such a hot item anymore (not that they were ever comparable). The obvious reason being that theatres can always add more showing on more screens.

Friday cat blogging

2005-05-20T10:43:00.000-05:00

At long last, regularly scheduled Friday cat blogging! This is Lily. She's a rather shy cat (except around my mother), but she's super white!

My sister and I had wanted to name her Lilith, but my father didn't like the religious (or, more properly, anti-religious) overtones.

**Update** Via Kevin Drum, check out some incredibly cute Friday kitten blogging.

You learn something every day, Part the III

2005-05-20T01:11:00.000-05:00

Downtown Chicago is gorgeous when the fog rolls in.

Star Wars blog I must

2005-05-20T00:38:00.000-05:00

So, A. O. Scott was right, Revenge of the Sith is, indeed, the best of the Star Wars prequels. Yoda scores high on the testicular virility. Much to discuss, but I'll start (where else?) with nitpicky minutia.

If Chewbacca is some big time Wookie general who's hanging out with Yoda and stuff, why is he hanging out with Han Solo on Tatooine in Episode IV?

The Death Star is under construction at the end of Episode III when Luke and Leia are neonates, and is just being finished in Episode IV when they're what, 19 or 20? I know it's a big ship and all, but Coruscant's contractors must be even worse than Chicago's!

Obi-Wan Kenobi sets out to fight (kill?) Darth Vader. He ends up cutting off Vader's legs and watching molten lava set him on fire. Then Kenobi leaves. Does he think Vader's dead? If so, that's a pretty enormous mistake. Is he just leaving Vader there to die, thinking he'll never be found? That's some cold blooded shit for a Jedi. Is he content just knowing that he defeated Vader? Then why'd he go to fight him in the first place? Just for pride's sake? It certainly seemed from his discussion with Yoda that they intended to kill the Sith. WTF!!

Wouldn't living with Senator Organa on Aldaron and with the Skywalker family on Vader's home planet of Tatooine make Luke and Leia fairly conspicuous?

How dense is Anakin to take so long to pick up that Palpatine is a Sith lord? This girl I was talking to about this on the bus ride home tonight made the excellent point that Darth Vader sure seems a lot smarter in Episodes IV-VI than Anakin does. Maybe he goes to college between Episodes III and IV.

In Episode V, Obi-Wan famously says "That boy is our last hope." only to be corrected by Yoda, "No, there is another." Episode III, however, leaves no doubt that Kenobi knows Luke and Leia are twins.

For better snark than I can provide, see Bryan Curtin and Chris Suellentrop in Slate. More tomorrow. May the Force and Mary be with you.

Testicular virility

2005-05-19T12:06:00.000-05:00

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is being criticized for his use of the phrase "testicular virility" to refer to his ability to make tough decisions.

"This is the kind of thing that I think frankly separates the men from the boys in leadership. Do you have the testicular virility to make a decision like that, knowing what's coming you're way?" Blagojevich said then. "I say I do."

Maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger's presence at Governor's meetings is making Blagojevich less than secure in his masculinity. He defended his remark with similar swagger:

The remark prompted both laughter and complaints that it was sexist and an undignified thing for a governor to say.

But Blagojevich called such objections "complete baloney."

"I think the people understand that means: Do you have the fortitude -- if you're a man or a woman in leadership -- to put the people first?" he said Wednesday. "It's all about having the fortitude to fight for the people."

Blagojevich made the remark Monday in explaining his decision to temporarily close a landfill run by a distant relative of his wife.

The fortitude to fight for the people....and to impregnate them.

I'm not so much offended by the sexist overtones of Blagojevich's comments (Governor Blagojevich, do you believe that Lisa Madigan has sufficient testicular virility to successfully fulfill her duties as Illinois Attorney General?) as at the hokey machismo of it all.

Science journalisming

2005-05-19T00:00:00.000-05:00

John Schwartz has a piece up at the New York Times about the Hill and Barton study described earlier. It's your standard sort of pop science piece. But it gets truly awful at the end:

This does not mean that a bad team can reverse its fortunes by wearing red, Dr. Barton said. The study applies only to closely matched competitors. "If you're hopeless," he said, "then wearing red isn't going to make you start winning."

In London, a representative of William Hill, a leading betting company, called the study "absolute rubbish." "There is no such thing as equally matched opponents in any human activity," and there are too many individual factors to pronounce a trait like color decisive, the representative, Graham Sharpe, said in an e-mail message.

Dr. Barton's quote is certainly on the money, but it certainly doesn't indicate that this study applies only to closely matched competitions. Since a dichotomous dependent measure (winning or losing) was examined, you wouldn't expect to see effects of color if there's a pronounced asymmetry in skill. That is, even if wearing red provides a benefit an awful boxer is still going to lose to a good boxer. What you might expect to happen is that he wouldn't lose as badly. This wouldn't show up in the win/loss record (though it would start to as the competitors got more closely matched), but would show up if you examined some continuous measure of performance. Basically, Hill and Barton are claiming that there's an effect analogous to a floor or ceiling effect. Their findings on skill asymmetry are really more of a manipulation check than an actual result. Indeed, it's not clear to me why these data were included at all. They seemed to have the effect of bamboozling Mr. Schwartz.

And what to say about Mr. Sharpe, the London bookie? He's certainly attacking a straw man. Hill and Barton certainly aren't claiming that color is decisive, just that it's a factor. (Though, they do use unfortunate wording at one point claiming that "it is likely that the red advantage will determine the outcome only in relatively symmetric contests." I can't imagine they really mean "determine" here; "influence" would have been a better term.) But, since Hill and Barton clearly indicate that they believe non-chromatic factors (e.g., skill, strength) are relevant, Mr. Sharpe would seem to be asserting that since there are many factors involved, that color cannot also be a factor. This is self-evidently stupid, and should have been filtered out by Mr. Schwartz. It's as if even the science writers have adopted the he-said/she-said style of the political reporting. Somebody, anybody, has to be on record criticising the study. Whether the criticism makes any sense is, apparently, beside the point.

All the news that's fit to print....and some other stuff

2005-05-18T23:05:00.000-05:00

Why oh why has the paper of record decided that this story has any business on the front page (at the top with a big picture) of nytimes.com (as of 11pm Wednesday night)? I'm glad these (very naughty) kids are ok, but come on.

The final voyage of the boat with no name, formerly docked at Kings Plaza Marina in Jamaica Bay, Brooklyn, began innocently enough on Monday night, with three friends, an assortment of guitars, a full bottle of Myers's Rum, a hookah and a dream of the open water. It ended yesterday afternoon in a stalemate over a $3,000 towing fee.

What happened along the way, a comedy of errors involving an ill-fated attempt to swim to safety, signal flares wasted as fireworks and an empty bottle of Myers's Rum, drew in the police, worried families, a helicopter rescue unit and a singularly displeased marina owner.

For Alexey Zharov, the 16-year-old at the center of it all, the voyage draws to a close with a mixed legacy. The boat is shipwrecked and he has a nasty cut on his finger, but at least Alex is not grounded.

Well, thank god he's not grounded. They had me worried there for a minute. And where did the times put their story about the British memo asserting that President Bush had decided to go to war in Iraq by the summer of 2002, facts be damned? Page 9.