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Characterizing a Fogbank. A prominent analytic philosopher discusses whether postmodernism is worth taking seriously.
comment posted at 4:50 AM on Oct-25-05

Wikipedia v. Encyclopædia Britannica. Wikipedia is a much loved resource on the internets, but often comes under criticism regarding its accuracy. In this article (The Faith-Based Encyclopedia) the criticism comes from a former Editor in Chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Turn about is fair play. Just the facts ma'am. [via Found on the Web]
comment posted at 12:36 PM on Oct-24-05
comment posted at 11:49 PM on Oct-24-05

Were you left as ambivalent as I was by the introduction of the iPod Video? Did you think, "well, it's kinda cool, but why would anyone really want it?" Well, Mark Morford thinks he has the answer. [text-only, but may contain trace amounts of NSFW; via obscurestore]
comment posted at 8:13 AM on Oct-24-05

Brent Scowcroft "Breaks Ranks" with George W. Bush
Longish excerpts from Jeffrey Goldberg's forthcoming article in The New Yorker.
comment posted at 3:32 AM on Oct-24-05
comment posted at 4:07 AM on Oct-24-05
comment posted at 1:14 PM on Oct-25-05

BWI -Blogging While Intoxicated ... a little less dangerous than DWI, for the most part ... Can you discern a DWI rant from a sober one? What makes many famous writers alcholics? ... and somebody compiled an Amazon list of Top 13 Works of Fiction Dealing with Alcoholism ... .... hick ....
comment posted at 10:54 PM on Oct-22-05

UN Hits Back at US in Report Saying Parts of America are as Poor as Third World Parts of the United States are as poor as the Third World, according to a shocking United Nations report on global inequality.
comment posted at 10:22 PM on Oct-15-05
comment posted at 10:48 PM on Oct-15-05

NEGADON!! "NEGADON - the Monster from Mars" is a "digital monster film", a film for the future. Similar in execution to the short film which eventually spawned "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow", Negadon is a 100% computer-generated short which has been cleverly designed to look like the old Japanese man-in-the-rubber-suit monster movies of the 50's. Even the posters look the part.
comment posted at 12:39 AM on Oct-12-05

Does dark matter exist? Dark matter has been suggested as a solution to the galaxy rotation problem where individual stars don't seem to rotate the way Newton's laws would predict. Now, some scientists are saying that observations fit with Einstein's general relativity, without any dark matter needed. I just find it amazing that no one has tried this yet.
comment posted at 4:59 PM on Oct-10-05
comment posted at 6:11 PM on Oct-10-05
comment posted at 8:12 AM on Oct-11-05

Like top-10 lists? The fifteen most incompetent Bush administration appointments.
Newsfilter, and reg. required. But this article is a thing of utter transcendent beauty. You have not heard of most of these people.
comment posted at 3:47 PM on Oct-8-05

White House Tapes has audio files and transcripts of presidental conversations between 1940 and 1973, including FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.
comment posted at 2:03 PM on Oct-8-05
comment posted at 8:58 PM on Oct-8-05

Networking on the Network Started over 10 years ago, long before social web apps became ubiquitous, Phil Agre's Networking on the Network was an introduction to professional networking, using the internet, for graduate students.
The document has grown and evolved to encompass 90 pages of widely applicable advice on building professional relationships and helping others do the same. Much of what he writes is applicable to surviving in any institution.
Reading it feels like being taken aside by an expert practitioner who tells you, "Pssst....hey buddy, here's how things really work."
comment posted at 6:04 AM on Oct-10-05

Intelligent Design on trial! The ACLU of PA is blogging the current trial in Dover, PA between the parents of students and the local school board which wants to teach students Intelligent Design. Over at The Panda's Thumb, they're also keeping track of the goings on. The main ACLU website has statements from most of the plaintiff's experts in the case, including this long, well-supported pdf from philsopher Barbara Forrest, whose testimony is being used to dismantle the canard that ID is not Creationism. Over at the Legal Affairs Debate Club Beckwith and Laylock argued, last week, about whether teaching ID is legal. For background: this 2002 special report from Natural History Magazine on Intelligent Design Creationism.
comment posted at 8:02 PM on Oct-6-05

"If Harvard had too many Asians, it wouldn’t be Harvard, just as Harvard wouldn’t be Harvard with too many Jews or pansies or parlor pinks or shy types or short people with big ears." Malcolm Gladwell on the Ivy League business.
comment posted at 3:39 PM on Oct-5-05

As old man winter approaches once again, and some of our minds turn to thoughts of flying through the air and sailing down mountains atop our trusted skis, what is there to do for the next month or so before most of our favorite resorts actually open for business? I present to you an assortment of new ski movie trailers, enjoy. [all sorts of Quicktime]
comment posted at 11:13 AM on Oct-4-05

Ronnie Barker , stalwart of UK comedy acting, dies aged 76. Best remembered for quite a few hit comedy shows, for me his best work was the evergreen Porridge. Who could forget the Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town?
comment posted at 2:46 AM on Oct-4-05

Bush nominates Harriet Miers Bush has nominated Harriet Miers to replace Justice O'Connor. The first woman elected to the Texas Bar, she was Bush's personal attorney in Texas, and has served as Counsel to the President since Feb, 2005.

Washington Post
Google News search
SCOTUS Blog
comment posted at 4:21 PM on Oct-3-05

Simputer : High tech meets extreme poverty
comment posted at 11:10 AM on Sep-30-05
comment posted at 11:17 AM on Sep-30-05
comment posted at 11:15 AM on Oct-1-05
comment posted at 7:10 PM on Oct-1-05

A $100 Laptop for Every Kid. With a plan to distribute up to 15 million rugged, innovative, and very low cost laptop computers by the end of 2007, MIT Media Labs may be calling Steve Ballmer's year old bluff, in ways commercial vendors haven't. [more inside]
comment posted at 10:42 AM on Sep-30-05
comment posted at 2:02 PM on Sep-30-05

It is a highly addictive drug, but governments everywhere encourage its use... though they are not so keen on no-name brands. Richard Dawkins details the dangers of the most insidious opiate.
comment posted at 11:51 PM on Sep-28-05
comment posted at 9:59 AM on Sep-30-05

Coming soon to a theater near you. If The Shining were made today. [via waxy]
comment posted at 12:13 AM on Sep-29-05

Norman Wildberger's New Trigonometry Dr Norman Wildberger has rewritten the arcane rules of trigonometry and eliminated sines, cosines and tangents from the trigonometric toolkit. The First chapter of his new book, Divine Proportions, is online (.pdf).
comment posted at 10:12 PM on Sep-25-05

Recent research claims that even smoking a few cigarettes a day is dangerous according to Tobacco Control . This is bad news for millions of smokers who have cut-back their daily consumption of cigarettes. It is also contrary to previous research which claimed that light smoking had little impact on health.
comment posted at 3:23 AM on Sep-22-05

Why is everybody mad about the cups?

Last month there were those who were mad about “made-in-Israel-paper cups” at the King Khaled National Guard Hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Now it’s a quote from novelist Armistead Maupin inscribed on Starbucks coffee cups at Baylor University that have made others mad!

Concerned Women for America charged that Starbucks is promoting a homosexual agenda with some paper cups containing Maupin’s quote:

"My only regret about being gay is that I repressed it for so long. I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don't make that mistake yourself. Life's too damn short."

CWA demanded that the cups containing the quote be removed from campus. Baylor Dining Services complied with the request.

(What exactly is the “homosexual agenda”?)
comment posted at 1:24 PM on Sep-21-05

Ball Bounce. A game where the object is to get the ball to the other side.
comment posted at 10:54 PM on Sep-20-05

Telly looks at Birmingham [Realplayer] One of TV's most famous detectives and Hollywood actors, Telly Savalas, takes a look at England's second city - part of the Baim Collection
comment posted at 1:58 PM on Sep-20-05

Weight lifting in prisons & correctional recreation. With interesting legal commentary and videos.
comment posted at 6:36 AM on Sep-20-05

Goodnight, mr. Wiesenthal
comment posted at 6:38 AM on Sep-20-05

Opera is free. If Opera isn't the best browser, then it's a very close second. They hope to make money through ad revenue generated by search engines instead of banners.
comment posted at 4:56 AM on Sep-20-05

Lisa Randall's Theory of Communication about Science
comment posted at 9:09 PM on Sep-19-05

Consensus View
New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds "explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future." Now this idea has been put into practice with Consensus View, a site where you can enter your predictions on stocks, commodities, and currencies, and view the group consensus. (from wsj.com)
comment posted at 6:39 PM on Sep-18-05
comment posted at 12:56 AM on Sep-19-05

"If time has to end, it can be described, instant by instant," Mr. Palomar thinks, "and each instant, when described, expands so that its end can no longer be seen." He decides that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think of being dead. At that moment he dies.
In memoriam of Italo Calvino, who died exactly 20 years ago.
"Calvino's novels" by his friend Gore Vidal. Calvino's obituary by Vidal, il maestro William Weaver's essay on Calvino's cities, Jeanette Winterson on Calvino's dream of being invisible, and Stefano Franchi's philosophical study on Palomar's doctrine of the void. More inside.
comment posted at 9:50 PM on Sep-18-05

George Bush Doesn't Care about Black People: The Remix? Kanye West's anti-Bush ad lib on a telethon for the victims of Hurricane Katrina has already attracted considerable controversy, but now Legendary K.O. of the Houston rap group, the K-Otix, has decided to immortalize Kanye West's soundbite by incorporating it into a mash-up with Kanye's song Golddigger. The K-Otix rewrote Golddigger's lyrics to serve as an indictment of Bush and his sluggish response to Katrina, while simultaneously promoting Houston Hurricane Aid to help displaced residents of New Orleans. Other rappers including Mos Def have already recorded songs in response to the disaster, while other performers such as Jay-Z and Usher have rallied to Kanye West's defense.
comment posted at 11:52 AM on Sep-19-05
comment posted at 1:31 PM on Sep-19-05
comment posted at 5:18 PM on Sep-19-05
comment posted at 5:41 PM on Sep-19-05

Yesterday morning in Florida, the landing gear on a student-piloted Cessna failed to lock into place. After the plane circled for an hour, the airport president drove a Jeep underneath the plane at 80 mph while his passenger took a stick and knocked the wheels into place. And that, as they say in the business, was caught on tape.
comment posted at 7:39 AM on Sep-17-05

Freddie Hoffman is a geek. He's ridden one million miles on a bicycle, and he's still at it. More here (pdf).
comment posted at 10:44 PM on Sep-18-05