Daily Lunch

2006-08-29T15:31:00.000-04:00

Iacta alea est

Well, the half-a-site I had mentioned before is now up: my new blog, here, in conjunction with my new homepage. Yes, I've decided to de-anonymize. I expect to have a higher online profile soon, as a result of the projects I'm working on, so I wanted a site to go along with it. I expect the new blog will be more think-y and less random than the current one (although making it any less random than all the unfocused crap I've put up here over time would probably have taken a real effort). It'll probably be less political, although I haven't written the political stuff here in a while. Let me say it'll be less partisan.

Please update your links.

One other thing: don't be alarmed if I have a link to you here but not over there; I'm still trying to work out the whole blogroll on that side.

2006-08-25T18:11:00.000-04:00

Sign o' the times

This is how I work at the computer... or is this how everybody works?

2006-08-23T12:06:00.000-04:00

Pluto apparently no longer a planet

Well, the world didn't end, but it appears that today might be the day we lost Pluto. Well, I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted, because this thrill ride is coming to a close. Yeah, aren't you regretting you didn't sign that petition now? Too little, too late.

Then again, it was always a bit of a weak excuse for a planet - as we learned in school, just a big, dirty ball of ice that's essentially a glorified comet. If it were any closer to the sun, if it would have just melted. Can planets melt?

Also, it's the only planet named in part after a person - Percival Lowell (that's the "Pl"), who predicted it before his death, based on the movement of nearby planets. That doesn't seem like one for the ages. In time, I bet it'll look like one of those ideas from the 30's that seemed good at the time but then just went on too long, like farm subsidies.

2006-08-21T17:59:00.000-04:00

World to end tomorrow?

Tomorrow, August 22... the day of an Iranian nuclear-powered endgame involving an attack on Israel or the U.S.?

Or is it all, as the Guardian's Middle East editor puts it, "utter tosh"?

We'll find out tomorrow... hopefully tosh is the word.

2006-08-18T15:06:00.000-04:00

Not everyone's a slacker

I spent the week working on my various projects (three-and-a-half sites right now, it's really getting ridiculous). Apparently I'm a bit of a nomad, too, by my count I worked at two apartments and five different internet cafes over the week.

And clearly I'm also such a slacker that I didn't notice until today that Chainik Hocker got engaged! Though he announced it over a week ago, and he was dropping mega-hints before, so I should have seen it coming. Click the link for the lovely photos, including some first-class hat-rocking.

2006-08-11T11:47:00.000-04:00

Post-birthday wrapup

Ivan is too kind. Well, just to me; on my girlfriend he's strictly an objective reporter.

I had a very good time. Though it's too bad about news of the major terrorist plot coming out right on my birthday. Not to mention a really torrential downpour that happpened during the early part of the evening. Frankly, I question the timing.

2006-08-09T15:14:00.000-04:00

By the way

It's my birthday tomorrow!!! Yay for me. 29 years young. My girlfriend and I and some other people are going out to a bar tomorrow night... let me know if you're in interested in going and I forgot to email you.

2006-08-09T14:55:00.000-04:00

What I saw at Wikimania

Posting's been sporadic... I had somewhat of a long journey home from the Wikimania conference, including a stop at my parents' house, and now I've been trying to catch up on everything I was doing before the weekend.

I had grand plans to move everything to a new blog, a real one with my full name on it and such, and have the Wikimania post be the first one on it, but that's not going to happen. No time, and too many things going on. Maybe that'll happen next week...

So, Wikimania was neat. Something like 400 people from all over the world coming together to discuss a single piece of software technology. But, of course, as technology wikis aren't even all that impressive - they're basically yet another content-management system, like a message board or any community site. So what people were really coming to discuss was the idea of open content creation, having a large group or in some cases literally everyone in the world be able to modify a document at the same time. The talks ranged from the anthropological (what are the current barriers to acceptance in various cultures?) to the policy-based (how best to handle vandalism and disagreements?) to the entrepreneurial (how do you create your own successful wiki?) to the quasi-political (the closest there is to a unifying message among the wiki crowd is "information should be free"; in practice that comes out to limits on copyright protection).

In between there was some technical discussion, which was what I had mostly come for (little tidbit: the most important new change coming to Wikipedia will be a URL field you can add to give you the "most recent validated" (as in, vandal-free) version of a page. Coming soon, and it should help a lot with the credibility problems some people perceive with Wikipedia and wikis in general.) What I was really there for was all the "semantic wiki" stuff: plugins that allow contributors to add computer-readable data to a page, instead of just text. For instance, IMDb is pretty neat, but what if there were an IMDb-like site that was a wiki, allowing anyone to add or modify all the information, in a way that could be accessed and searched by any other site? The technology is already there (well, pretty much), so all you'd have to do would be to create the site and the structure and let the contributor community fill in the content. Maybe IMDb wasn't the best example, because that one already exists and works quite well.... but you could imagine any other kind of data.

So I went to all those talks, and spoke with the semantic wiki creators, who are all German guys, and swapped some ideas with them. Quite a lot of Germans at the conference, by the way. Apparently they've really embraced the wiki thing over there; the German-language Wikipedia is the 2nd-largest.

Photo not by me... stolen randomly via Flickr "wikimania" tag

I felt nicely retro with my pen and notebook there; everyone else seemed to have a laptop and sometimes a camera too, and were simultaneously blogging, IRC'ing, emailing, listening to the lectures and looking up things the lecturers were talking about. Well, I'm blogging now.

2006-08-03T20:50:00.000-04:00

Conference-bound

I haven't posted in a while, and I probably won't be posting again till next week: tommorow I'm heading off to Boston for the Wikimania conference tomorrow. It'll be my first-ever conference, at least for me to personally be attending; my parents used to take me to their scientific conferences a lot when I was a kid. I probably won't be able to see anybody from Boston (I mean, among the people who read this) while I'm there, unfortunately; it's sort of a packed schedule. I'm going because, besides the fact that I do some Wikipedia editing, one of the projects I'm working on involves a wiki-based online database... it'll be pretty neat, I think. All will be revealed soon, I hope.

2006-07-25T16:49:00.000-04:00

Quick hits

T. of Johnny Triangles, whom last we saw trying to get Gawker commenter invites, is now armed with a fistful them. He already got one account banned from Gawker. Crime: "Making us feel bad about our unfinished novel manuscript, defending Ann Coulter."

A page of retro calculators! Groovy. (Via Signals vs. Noise)

Can't really dispute this: arguing on the internet is like competing in the Special Olympics. No offense to Special Olympians, they put in a lot of work.

There was some big story going around about psychedelic mushrooms giving people a transcendent religious experience. Ivan Lenin, who has some experience in the matter as well as apparently being a Russian mushroom himself, says "If I were yo mama, I would certainly tell you not to put those things in your mouth."

2006-07-25T12:50:00.000-04:00

WWIII thinking

Are we already in the middle of World War III? Or World War IV, if you're one the people who go in for that?

Two underreported facts to corroborate that idea:

Six to nine Iranian soldiers have been killed fighting in Lebanon (via Protein Wisdom).

And Hezbollah has been heavily aiding the anti-American insurgency in Iraq since the beginning of the war.

So there's a clear alliance on the other side.

I think the reason there's no consensus on the "World War III" thing is that, strange as it sounds, "war" doesn't really exist in 2006. The idea of nations or tribes fighting each other, pitting one army or air force against another doesn't happen anymore, even in less-developed areas. "Fighting" in Rwanda, for instance, mostly meant civilians being hacked with swords. In the Iraq War, that conventional form of fighting lasted less than a week, and really it was only about two days before the Iraqi Army was decimated. Nowadays evil regimes mostly fund organizations to do their fighting for them (you could call it - outsourcing?). And these organizations tend not to have military goals, just the idea of causing chaos by killing whomever they can - Iraqi civilians, Israeli Arabs, whoever.

So, yeah, I don't know.

2006-07-21T13:45:00.000-04:00

The rules are changed, it's not the same

What happens when Europe and the Arab world's basically aesthetic dislike for Israel comes in conflict with their real fear of Iran, and their new experience with local Islamic terrorism? Mark Steyn, in a radio interview, says Israel wins the debate:

Normally, by this stage, the public rhetoric of the Europeans and the Arabs would be ferocious. And instead, I think both of them have been very circumspect in public. And certainly, the ones I've talked to in private are in fact, in a strange way, and possibly unprecedented, at least in the last thirty years, they're rooting for Israel.

I don't think that any of the people of these countries, or their governments, like Israel any more than they used to. But realizing that your country and Israel share most of the same enemies certainly seems to help clarify the mind.

2006-07-17T10:22:00.000-04:00

Inconvenient burger

I knew eating meat had a big environmental impact, but I hadn't seen a direct analysis until this:

According to a recent University of Chicago study, a meat-free diet reduces greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide per year - as much as switching from an SUV to a hybrid car.

Personally, I don't care about global warming, though, if you didn't know, I am a vegetarian; together that must put me in some upper echelon for smugness. Seriously, though, if you happen to be concerned about global warming, I really suggest you look into eating the veggies. You'll feel healthier, and you'll do your part to prevent coastal cities from getting flooded. Or freezing over. Or baking. Or whatever it is is supposed to happen.

2006-07-14T16:04:00.000-04:00

Reconsidering a bit

Okay, so the situation's worse than I thought it would be...

Apparently the evidence that the Syrian and Iranian governments is strong enough that even our Secretary of State is willing to say it openly:

Rice said there are ``very direct links'' between Syria and the Hezbollah attacks on Israel and said ``it would be unthinkable'' that Iran is not also playing a role.

Then again, there was some story that Iranian "Revolutionary Guards" were firing into Israel, as evidenced by an Iranian-made missile hitting Haifa. Now that appears not to be the case.

Then again, by the Bush doctrine, since the governments provide material support to Hezbollah, there's already more than enough of a pretext for Israel or the U.S. to attack either Syria or Iran and depose their governments.

Will that happen? I doubt it. I'm sticking to my belief that this crisis will involve nothing more than a lot of mutual shelling and air strafing, and no ground fighting.

Other links... Esther, currently in Israel, is fine. Chainik has a prayer. Ace has evidence that, as I said before, the Lebanese government is basically on Israel's side. Karol hates France.

2006-07-13T16:21:00.000-04:00

Is this war?

Well, it is in that there are rockets being launched in multiple directions, by both Israel and various terrorist groups. It isn't in that no governments besides Israel have gotten (or, I think, will get) involved. (I'm not counting the Gaza Strip, because the people in charge there are not a government in the sense of being able to accomplish anything). It's Israel fighting against terrorist groups being funded by the governments of Syria, Iran, and, indirectly, the European Union, the United Nations, and, sadly, the United States as well, to a smaller extent. Which isn't really anything new: the last time Israel fought against other countries was in 1973; since then it's been wars of attrition against the PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah in various combinations, with the EU, the UN and the US taking the place of the Soviet Union as the source of Western funding.

This time they hit Haifa, my old home town, which I don't think has been hit since Saddam launched some Scuds there during the Gulf war. So that's an escalation.

Still, war? The governments of Syria, Lebanon, even Iran have known for the past 30 years that they can't get into a direct war with Israel; their government buildings would be obliterated. And other things have changed: Iraq is now a United States ally. As of last year, Lebanon is a quasi-democracy with a pro-U.S. prime minister (Fouad Siniora) whose government is almost as threatened by the presence of Hezbollah as Israel is. There's no more heart left in the Arab world for a ground war with Israel (a single nuclear attack, maybe). So, if anyone cares about my opinion, I don't think a war is coming.

2006-07-10T15:01:00.000-04:00

Updates, updates

I wrote before that I stopped listening to Kings of Convenience, because Erlend Oye's solo album had a lyric that read "one Jew that was never invited". Well, now I'm going to start listening to them again, because... it turns out I misunderstood the lyrics. As I recently discovered, he explained in his online forum that the lyric is somewhat personal:

The jews have historically been the outsiders.
Dispite the fact that they always been very talented artists,
business men, scholars. Or maybe excactly for that reason.

In this respect I have often felt like a jew.

Okay, so, bigoted: no. Twee: very much so. So I apologize for the aspersion.

One more "Fountainhead Cafe" update: so the soon-to-be-Objectivist in the West Village cafe was fully back to just being "Fuel" a few weeks ago, having removed even the "Fountainhead Cafe" sign. Today the cafe was closed. Have renovations started? Who knows!

Project's going fine. There's now two others which are happening at the same time, which is slowing things down.

There's some small chance I'll be at the anti-New York Times protest today in midtown New York at 5. I fully agree with Karol that "protesting is sort of dumb" (at least, if you live in a democracy, with other options available to you), but, hey, a more pro-America attitude on the part of the press seems like a good cause.

If you watched that world cup: that bizarre head-butting incident that may have lost France the title may have been prompted by the Italian calling the Algerian-born Zidane a "terrorist". Way to push some buttons!

2006-07-07T00:57:00.000-04:00

Armond's right, again

This is a little late, but Armond White nailed it in his review of Nacho Libre:

First, notice the color scheme of Nacho Libre. Its hues are vibrant and intense like luminous bible illustrations. In outdoor scenes, characters stand out against the slightly surreal backgrounds as if figures in religious chromos or Catholic prayer cards. Director Jared Hess instantly communicates his beatific view of ordinary things. Whether focusing on homely or misfit people—the demoralized monks who work at a Mexican orphanage, the pudgy yet hungry foundlings, the impoverished townfolk or the hapless, rotund title character played by Jack Black—Hess’ imagery remains unexpectedly radiant.

...

When Nacho teams with a homeless man, Esqueleto (Héctor Jiménez), to win the Lucha Libre competition, he becomes infatuated with a novice nun, Sister Encarnación (Ana de la Reguera), who stirs his ego and tests his faith. This trio flips and reworks Don Quixote, yet the film’s rousing theme song “Hombre Religioso” (“I am, I am/A real religious man”) sets a devotional comic tone. The pastoral landscapes where Nacho and Esqueleto practice their wrestling moves recall Rossellini ("The Flowers of St. Francis") and DeSica ("Miracle in Milan") while the hostile, sardonic Lucha Libre confrontations evoke Buñuel ("Nazarín"). Hess’ counterpoint of saintly and worldly experience is not new; it’s just rare in American pop culture. When Sister Encarnación warns that luchadores fight for vanity and power, that they are “false idols,” it comments on Hollywood’s routine hero-worship. Hess and Black find something deeper.

It's rare to see a Hollywood movie with a real moral center to it - Adam Sandler's movies, I mean the ones he's produced, definitely have one (think of all the times bullies get karmic retribution for their sins in his movies); other than those I can't think of any off the top of my head, at least not from anytime recently. Some people have accused the movie of being immoral, saying it's anti-religious in that it makes the priesthood look drab and priests look silly, but as White points out, it's just a comic take on the real-life struggle between materialism and spirituality that 99% of other movies can't even bother to deal with. How many other movies can claim a man of the cloth as a hero (an action hero, no less)?

By the way, if you're as obsessed as I was for a while with the theme song, it's a 1975 song by the Mexican band "Mister Loco", and Some Velvet Blog has it plus a few other songs from the soundtrack, like Os Mutantes' "Bat Macumba". (Update: it's not actually Os Mutantes' version, it's the original. Never mind!).

2006-07-05T20:57:00.000-04:00

Midwest tour

A college friend of mine got married in Minneapolis over the weekend, so my girlfriend and I took it as an excuse to make a mini-tour of the Great Lakes Region, AKA the Midwest, AKA Real America. In addition to the Twin Cities, we got to see Chicago, Madison, and Milwaukee. It's nice to see the middle of America, which until the weekend was, seriously, pretty much unknown to me. I had a good time.

Of all the places we visited, Chicago was the most impressive, especially after we saw all the gleaming architecture, but I think the most liveable was Minneapolis. Chicago has areas that are a little bit run-down and scary; Minneapolis is supposed to have those too, according to the Powerline guys, but I didn't see it. All we saw were the nice parts, including, of course, the nearby Mall of America, giant shrine to consumption:

You can buy stuff there too.

I got some nice shirts at Express and H&M. For a big city they're pretty politically laid-back too: their county went 60-40% for Kerry over Bush in 2004, compared to the ridiculous 82-17 in the People's Republic of Manhattan. It just seems like a really nice area, and the wedding was a lot of fun too.

2006-06-28T16:52:00.000-04:00

Milton Friedman on limited government

...now on Google Video.

Here he's laying down basically the entire case for free-market economics on the half-hour PBS show "The Open Mind", from an episode sometime in the early 70's. The clip's half an hour long.

I only saw about the first 10 minutes, but I downloaded all of it to my iPod (it turns out Google Video makes it easy to do that), so I'll be checking it out soon.

(Via Protein Wisdom)

2006-06-22T15:04:00.000-04:00

No time, world cup

I've been busy lately with a bunch of random commitments - between the friends' weddings, and a visiting cousing, and shuffling around between boroughs, it appears that even holding down a self-employed job is a luxury I just don't have the time for.

Anyway, I did get to see the last two US World Cup games. How do you say "total disappointment" in English? Anyway, most of the commentators said that the U.S. team looked sluggish, but I blame anti-American officiating, especially on the fouls, especially the one that led to the penalty kick in the Ghana game. The replays showed clearly how much of a non-foul that was. Yes, I'm playing the victim card. But, you know, against the Germans that's pretty much a no-brainer.

2006-06-15T15:41:00.000-04:00

Hello, East Coast

Well, I'm back from California; it's nice out there! Apparently it's a popular area for tourists. I even gained some appreciation for LA, which seems calmer and less snobby than I thought it would be. There I go, taking lessons from "Crash" again!

Even though no one bothered to guess at my fun trivia question, let me give you the answer anyway: according to the Wikipedia article "List of actors who played President of the United States", it was not until 2000, with the Mel Gibson Revolutionary-War epic "The Patriot", that a film thought to portray George Washington. The honor fell to someone named Terry Layman, in a small role.

And of course, it had to be Mel Gibson, an Australian, who did it. Score one for the immigrants!

I hope you all are astounded by this fun fact, though my guess is none of you are.

2006-06-09T13:49:00.000-04:00

Updates

So Zarqawi is dead. Y'all have seen the Allahpundit airstrike "Sabotage" video already, right? If not, it's a treat.

Speaking of important flight missions, I'm heading out to the West Coast later today for a five-day trip. I probably won't be posting anything here during that time, just so you know; feel free to use the comments section for random inanities.

Ooh, I've also got a good trivia question, if you're interested: what was the first major motion picture to have an actor portraying President George Washington? Okay, that's all.

2006-06-07T17:43:00.000-04:00

Say it loud: plus, a definition

I apparently outed myself as a conservative two posts ago, even though I used to tell people all the time that I was a libertarian. So I might as well come out and say it: I'm Spartacus (the non-libertarian)!

At heart it's pretty much a meaningless distinction: among the 100 definitions of "conservative" and the 80 definitions of "libertarian", with some "neo"s tossed in there, there are some that are identical. Libertarians are supposed to like guns and drugs, but conservatives, especially the Midwestern ones, are just as gun-crazy if not more so as any black-helicopters libertarian, and the National Review has supported marijuana legalization since the beginning.

Abortion and gay marriage are supposed to be another point of contention, but my experience is that your average Northeast conservative supports both of these things (though as long as they come through legislation and not court decree). Meanwhile, it's quite possible to imagine a strict libertarian argument against abortion: if a fetus is a full human being, then it should be covered by existing laws against murder.

And the difference that probably gets the most play these days is foreign policy: conservatives are supposed to be more in favor of foreign intervention, while libertarians support it only for self-defense. But a "neolibertarian" like this guy would argue that the War in Iraq, say, is self-defense: as Sept. 11 underscored, cheap air travel and technology mean that a dictatorial, terrorist-supporting regime anywhere in the world is a constant threat to the people of the U.S.; any action to take down any of these regimes is at least morally justified. Meanwhile, old-school Robert Novak-style conservatives are isolationists.

So, what's the real difference between a libertarian and a conservative? I've thought about it, and I contend that it has to do with none of these things: rather it's strictly an aesthetic issue relating to how you feel about your personal privacy. How much does it bother you that various aspects of your life, like your fingerprints, your call records, your library records, your financial transactions, etc. are sitting on a government computer somewhere waiting to be accessed by a greasy-fingered FBI lackey? (apologies to any government lackeys reading this). Every other position has adherents on both sides, but I contend that a libertarian has a revulsion at the thought of having his/her "facts on file", while a conservative has almost none.

So there you have it, I am a right winger. Awaiting your hate mail.

2006-06-04T16:23:00.000-04:00

Pick one

Okay, one more thing on global warming - if you really think fossil fuel consumption is going to lead to environmental devastation, you should probably be in favor of the current high gas prices, since high prices are the single most effective way to get people to reduce their consumption; and you should probably be applauding President Bush for whatever part he's played (minimal) in the current prices. Many people, like George Will, have already noted that.

So, you can complain about high prices, or about global warming, but not both. The Democrats should really pick one or the other and stick with it. Right now Nancy Pelosi complains about high gas prices, and Al Gore complains about global warming.

2006-06-02T00:05:00.000-04:00

Links update

I added Johnny Triangles, a fellow Brooklynite conservative, who wrote me recently. He's right about many things. Give the man a Gawker invite, if you can!

Also, I removed "The New Vintage"; word on the street is that its author decided to make a blogging retirement.

2006-05-31T13:07:00.000-04:00

Pruning needed

So many bad things in the news right now. What should I be worried about?

A nuclear Iran?

The Islamicization of Europe?

The Mexicanization of the U.S.?

Bird flu?

Morgellons disease?

I just don't know that I can worry about all of these things. I mean, if we get hit with a nuclear attack, it doesn't really matter what language everybody's speaking, right?

Update: Almost forgot: global warming? Supposedly Al Gore's new movie claims that sea levels will rise 20 feet in the next few decades, submerging all coastal cities. And he uses graphs so, you know, it's got to be legit.

2006-05-30T00:47:00.000-04:00

The end has no end

We just saw Chen Kaige's "The Promise", which is something like mainland China's first attempt at a modern, high-budget, CGI-ful epic, and also possibly the worst movie I have ever seen in my life. Some movies are painful to sit through, but this one was also almost physically painful just to think about afterwards. I can only think of one other movie that had that effect on me, and that was the short Star Wars spoof called "Hardware Wars". Something about seeing people who sort-of looked like the Star Wars characters but not entirely made the 8-year-old me feel nauseous.

Anyway, this movie: I once had the idea for a symphony that would be about 30 seconds of music, and then the rest would be a "finale". You know, that part at the end of a symphony when they're stuck on the final chord and they come out with a series of blasts and cymbal crashes to let you know it's the end. It would be like that, but it would just go on and on. I'd imagine the effect would be first confusion, then amusement when people figured out what was going on, then ultimately total annoyance. This movie was just like that. From the constant thrilling background music to the shimmery soft-focus to all the "now I will kill you" dialogue, it was like a two-hour ending that never ended.

I wanted to see it partly because of a positive mention from NY Press' film critic, Armond White; here's his big tribute: "With The Promise, Chen Kaige joins cinema’s archetypal visionaries from Murnau to Kurosawa, Bertolucci to Boorman. He’s made an action movie rich with adult meaning and paradox." Armond White is my favorite film critic to read, because I really agree with his basic premise that there's a moral and political component to movies that colors every part of what we see on screen; so it pains me to say that he's totally wrong on this, and that I've been burned by him numerous times.

Here's what he said about War of the Worlds: "Bringing experience and existential contemplation together so forcefully, Spielberg joins the ranks of the most audacious avant-garde filmmakers: He turns the popcorn movie experience into a consideration of the abyss." Which is true, but as a movie it was bleak to the point of nihilism. I want to feel like there's some way out for the characters, which up until about the last two minutes there wasn't at all.

Here he is on "Spanglish": "James L. Brooks' Spanglish exposes all that nonsense "humanism" with an immigration and integration story that honestly questions the values of L.A.'s soft-headed and wrongheaded liberals. His complex view of family love and social commitment shows the difference between compassion and condescension." Okay, that sounds like a good movie, but that's not the one I saw.

He's been right on other movies, like how awesome "Minority Report" was, but I think his views blind him to how watchable a movie actually is. Like if it's not smug and doesn't go for cheap laughs, and it doesn't look like a TV show, then it gets a positive review, even if it's kind of a mess.

2006-05-26T12:26:00.000-04:00

Fountainhead Cafe mystery deepens (update: then is cleared up)

Could this be the first-ever blog post written from the Fountainhead Cafe? I don't know. I'm here in a cafe, with free wi-fi, with a big "Fountainhead Cafe" sign outside it, so maybe. Apparently this place is just the West Village "Fuel", recently re-branded. How recently? Well, the guy at the counter thinks the place is called "Fuel", though, to be fair, he doesn't speak much English. Also, the counter is still full of protein shake buckets, the menus all say "Fuel" (and have non-vegetarian options), and there are no Rand quotes on the walls. I wasn't sure that I was at the right place, but another guy sitting at a table said they had just changed their name.

Well, that probably ends my career as some sort of C-grade Harriet The Spy. For any of you web searchers out there, since the address doesn't seem to be available anywhere else on the web right now, Fountainhead Cafe is located at 181 West 10th St., New York, right on 7th Ave.

UPDATE: Okay, now that there's more staff here, I talked to some guy who apparently helps run the place; he explained that the New York Magazine article that started the whole thing was totally premature; the writer from the magazine said they'd hold off on running the article for a few weeks, but then it got published anyway. The cafe is still very early in the transition process, and the whole thing's pending some funding.

But hey, free wi-fi. And the wraps are good. I'll chalk it up as a good discovery.

2006-05-23T16:51:00.000-04:00

Quick hits

A new vegetarian objectivist cafe in New York's West Village, called "Fountainhead Cafe". Seriously?

Montenegro is splitting off from Serbia - is that good or bad? Publius Pundit applies the protest babe theory.

Sen. Chuck Schumer is right about Iran: "to allow the Iranian government to get weapons of mass destruction, the world will regret it."

Dawn Summers has a cute photo of a cat with a gun.

2006-05-22T17:30:00.000-04:00

Good online software in one sentence or less

A rare software-based entry (well, I guess they're all rare at this point), since software is pretty much all I'm doing these days: I have yet to find a guide to making good software as concise as this page, which I first saw about a year ago:

Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

It's just the littlest bit simplistic, but its heart is in the right place: in the web age, if you're a programmer and you're not writing space-shuttle-control apps or financial apps or games or some such, chances are the software you're working on is somehow involved with people creating content that other people will be able to see, whether it's art or music or political musings or calendar events or whatever. And the true goal of any such software is to give as many people as possible as favorable an impression as possible of the person using the software. Thus the "getting laid" shorthand (and it is shorthand - not every user is in it just for the recognition or the other stuff of course. But can that be said to represent the "base level" of users). And every new application, and every feature a programmer considers adding, should be judged with that in mind. So, for instance, creating the world's millionth "personalized search" engine might not pass that test.

I'm hoping my own online app will lead to positive results for some lucky users...

2006-05-17T12:25:00.000-04:00

Eminent domain made fun

The mayor of Piscataway, NJ helped seize a farm for public use through eminent domain. Ivan Lenin and comrades show up to congratulate the mayor for his glorious revolutionary activities.

2006-05-14T15:03:00.000-04:00

More wiretapping, please

Mark Steyn has another good column on the importance of NSA wiretapping and other surveillance measures. The information about what phone calls you've made is fairly non-private to begin with, anyway - a private detective could easily dig up the call history of any one person.

It reminds me of all the people who excitedly bring up the August 2001 memo "Bin Laden determined to strike in US" as some sort of "smoking gun" showing that President Bush failed to protect the country. But, ideally, what should Bush have done with that knowledge? Attacked Afghanistan preemptively? Started profiling airline passengers? Shaken up the CIA to get better intelligence? They never say.

2006-05-11T14:50:00.000-04:00

Music video roundup

Video for Coldplay's "Talk", directed by Anton Corbjin (scroll to the bottom for the video). They basically just added new lyrics to Kraftwerk's "Computer Love", but that's enough right there to make it one of Coldplay's best songs. Also, robots are featured.

Mariah Carey's "Say Something", featuring Pharrell and Snoop Dogg. The Neptunes (who produced it) really know how to use major-7 chords. I read a short interview with Pharell once where he said Stereolab was a big musical inspiration for them, and this song really proves it. Also the video manages to make the city of Paris look good, no easy feat.

2006-05-09T17:05:00.000-04:00

Tuesday fun link

This is a neat one-minute movie showing a computer map of Fed Ex planes arriving at a Memphis airport during a thunderstorm.

Watch it a few times and you may just achieve some sort of zen enlightenment about the patterns present everywhere in our world.

Or you may just think, "hey, Fed Ex has a lot of planes".

2006-05-05T12:06:00.000-04:00

Rolling Stone 1000th issue party

I was at this party! The Rolling Stone 1000th issue party, featuring The Strokes; my girlfriend got us in through her magical connections. There were free drinks (thank you Jack Daniels and Heineken) and nice swag, and the the event was thankfully free of politics. All in all, a good show. The Strokes are a great live band, and they know how to keep a tight set. When Eddie Vedder joined them for "Juicebox" he surprised me with his amazing voice. Who knew? I guess many people. We got to see a lot celebrities, though seeing Lou Reed do "Take a Walk on the Wild Side" with The Strokes might have been the highlight.

2006-05-03T11:39:00.000-04:00

A little more on Army of Davids

Since someone asked, I finished the book: well, my suspicions were pretty much borne out. I still recommend the book, but the second half is mostly digressions on Reynolds' pet topics like nanotechnology, space exploration and genetic engineering. Interesting topics, and they're all worthy of a book about the future, but they don't fit into the central thesis (about harnessing the power of distributed computing and communications) at all. It's too bad he couldn't have stuck to that theme and come up with more topics around it.

You could argue that it's just because Reynolds ran out of things to say and needed some padding, but I can think offhand of a number of really interesting branches of the "Army of Davids" theory he didn't get to:

Underground economies - PayPal, e-gold, and a bunch of even crazier schemes have made it possible to easily do transactions without bank involvement and with no government oversight. In addition, there are online multiplayer games that have their own thriving economy. What will all of this lead to? How will governments try to wrest control back of this flow of money?
The future of education - the web makes the idea of education as knowledge transfer more obsolete every day (okay, in my opinion). In addition, as Reynolds points out, the whole idea of rote learning in a public school building is an industrial-era concept. It would have been nice to delve into home schooling and other forms of alternative education that are gaining traction (according to one source, growing by 10 to 20 percent each year).
Direct democracy - the web certainly makes it easier, in concept, for everyone to vote on legislation instead of appointing representatives to do it. I happen to think this is a bad idea, but some people are for it, and that would have been an interesting topic.

It's more likely that he just really wanted to write about his pet topics in whatever forum he can.

Still very much worth reading, though I think if had stuck to the main idea it could have been a classic. Then again, as Reynolds himself might say, if you don't like it, you could just write your own book.

2006-04-27T23:25:00.000-04:00

Record-a-May (I expect about one person to get that title)

Ever wanted to designate a month? These guys did: May is now "National Album Recording Month".

The Concept

Have you ever thought about recording an album? Don't have the time? Want it to be just right? Don't know how to play any instruments? Screw all that.

Here's their "rules":

1. Record 31 minutes in the 31 days in May.
2. Pick a title and make some cover art.
3. Anything goes. Original songs, covers, spoke word, comedy, or essay. Just make an album!

Seems pretty neat, actually. Sometimes the fear of not being any good gets in the way of having a good time. Who knows, maybe I'll even take part myself.

The other nice things about having a recording of yourself is that you can then put it on your MySpace page. Voila - instant friends.

Via some Ruby-on-Rails site. If you don't know what that is, that's fine. It probably just means you're not a nerd.

2006-04-25T01:34:00.000-04:00

Spring cleaning

I spent a lot of the day fixing up my room, and the apartment in general. I tossed a bunch of stuff, some of which had been around for years. It's important to toss stuff out every once in a while. Paperwork especially, like old credit card bills, random coursework and the rest, has a tendency to stick around for no good reason.

The idea of spring cleaning makes a lot of sense; the sun starts coming out, and you realize that a lot of the stuff lying around is just an impediment to the important things, like being able to wake up to a clean room with the sun streaming through. I think that's a big part of why I couldn't live in California: I need some cues from the seasons.

Which is not to denigrate the important cultural contributions of California: for instance, "8th & Ocean", which I'm chilling and catching up on now. Good show, by the way.

2006-04-21T13:46:00.000-04:00

Reading An Army of Davids

I'm about halfway through Insta-... I mean, Glenn Reynolds' new book, An Army of Davids, and it's quite good so far. The basic thesis is that the web and other technologies enable individuals, working together with loose organization, to do more than even the largest of companies or governments. It's mostly ideas I've seen before, but never all together in one place, and they really gain a lot of strength when they're all put side by side. Much like with his blog, he brings in a lot of other people's ideas,but he has the knack for tying it all together.

One interesting concept in the book is how much of our society's structure is strictly a product of the industrial revolution, which started in the early 19th century but didn't reach its peak until the mid-20th century; it's much easier to see what the idiosyncracies of it are now that we're moving into the new phase, the information revolution. Industrialization greatly increased people's life spans and living standards, but it also came with a lot of requirements: because of the high costs of both production and communication, workers, blue-collar and white-collar both, had to work in close proximity to one another. That led to mega-cities and giant corporations, with workers leaving their families behind for the day and punching in on a fixed schedule. That in turn led to a bunch of developments. Someone has to take care of the children while parents are away, and all those little future workers need training in performing rote activities - thus, the public school system. The big corporations possess an enormous amount of power and money - thus, the labor movement, in addition to Big Government, Communism, Fascism, and assorted other "isms" intent on either reining in or harnessing that power (of course, usually the government solution only ended up making things worse - as Reynolds says with his typical matter-of-factness, "much of the the twentieth century was spent in making this clear in various unfortunate and lethal ways.").

Additionally, there are all sorts of intangibles - a culture of smoking and alcoholism to act as a sedative after a hard day's work (see the fascinating first paragraph of this review of "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit") that, I think, is fading; a "generation gap" - alienation between parents and their children - that had never really happened before the 20th century.

The future, Reynolds says, is in some ways about a return to pre-industrialization culture - parents working at home while raising their children, more localized government; though in other ways it'll of course be quite different. He also makes a big deal about the so-called "third place", a place that's neither home nor work, where people can interact and do business. Coffeehouses used to be the place where important meetings were held in the 1700's, and now they're returning to that level of prominence (probably without the wigs though). Reynolds apparently wrote a lot of the book in the lounge area of a local Borders Books, and says he has a casual friendship with many of the other regulars. Given that I'm writing this at a West Village cafe, I can certainly relate.

There's a lot more, including the rise (rebirth, actually) of citizen journalism, distributed crime-solving, and how even big companies are flattening out their management hierarchies. I don't know if the second half will be as good, since it seems to be about space exploration, nanotech, and some of the other topics that a lot of people tend to skip when they read Instapundit.

All in all, thumbs up.

2006-04-20T15:44:00.000-04:00

No rabbi consulted

Tom and Katie have baby, call her "Suri", claim that's Hebrew for "princess"; but the actual Hebrew word for that is "nesicha". Israelis now in the midst of a linguistic debate.

2006-04-17T11:35:00.000-04:00

Fabulously assured destruction

I'm surprised the photos from Iran's totally-fabulous nuclear-capabilities press conference haven't gotten more attention online:

And, lift... by the way, odds that that's actually uranium in their hands are approximately zero

You didn't see Oppenheimer put on a display like that in the U.S. at the end of the Manhattan Project, did you? No, the Iranians know how to put on a show. You know Mark Steyn will have a snappy quote for the situation... here we go: "this is the dawning of the age of a scary us."

I don't know what motivates the Iranian government to telegraph their intentions quite so clearly. They have now stated their desire to destroy both Israel and Britain. I don't know that any previous dictatorial regime has made public statements like that at a time when its enemies could obviously do a lot more damage to it than vice versa. As I see it, there are two possibilities: the first is that Ahmadinejad and the rest of the Iranian government are scared about the shaky state of the regime, given the size of the opposition and the general democratizing trend in the Middle East, and they want to bolster their support both in the country and in the Arab/Muslim world. That would certainly explain the elaborate photo ops. The other is that the Iranian regime really are crazy, or maybe crazy-like-a-fox, and figure that the West won't have the will to stop them from going nuclear no matter what they do.

Either way, I think it would be an extremely bad idea to assume they're bluffing. Let me just say that whatever action it is Bush and/or the Israeli government decide should be done to get rid of the Iranian regime, I support it.

Any thoughts?

2006-04-14T13:26:00.000-04:00

Spring blogroll renewal

I added Ivan Lenin's new, mostly-Belarus blog, Russian Mushroom, and Blogger Ale, a new blog by JD, a guy I've met a few times. Also I removed the defunct Slantpoint and Standard Deviance. I'll mourn ya till I join ya, as they say.

2006-04-11T15:15:00.000-04:00

West Coast Customs

An anonymous haranguer (let's call her... 'Karol') says I should be posting more. Possibly this person is right.

So - as of two days ago I'm now in California, having gotten in time for my nephew's 2nd birthday party. He got a lot of presents; it took about two hours to open a lot of them. His favorites are the "tucks" (toy trucks). He knows who I am now: I am "Don" (rhymes with "own"). That's an abbreviation of "Dod Yaron", Hebrew for "Uncle Yaron". Well, I'll settle for a syllable.

Other than that, I'm just chilling, working on my project, catching up a little on the news (okay, one link - No Pasaran notes how France's problems are, in their own way, hilarious).

That's pretty much it.

2006-04-05T16:23:00.000-04:00

All graphite and glitter

The top 15 skylines in the world, according to some guy. With photos. (Via Kottke.org).

Nice photos, if you're into architecture or whatever. Hong Kong's #1. Shanghai's looks like it's a big, bustling city on some other planet.

2006-04-04T18:19:00.000-04:00

Voting room of one's own

Kuwait had kinda-sorta elections today, and for the first time they involved female voters and candidates (via Powerline). It's another small step for Arab democracy.

Which reminds me, fun fact about women's suffrage: the first U.S. election in which the women's vote changed the election was in 1996. And still the only one. If only men had voted we'd have been looking at President Dole. Take that however you want.

2006-04-03T13:55:00.000-04:00

Random rundown

Ah... it's been a while, hasn't it? The big event recently that kept me from writing anything here was a four-day trip to Lake Placid, NY I took last week with my girlfriend. It's a great winter sports destination (and the site of two Olympics), and it was an eye-opener as far as what's available right here in New York State. Even in late March, you can still feel the burn of cross-country skiing on an Olympic-sized track! Get the adrelanine rush of downhill skiing on 3000-foot-high Whiteface Mountain! Experience nausea on a 50 mile-an-hour (guided) bobsled run!

All in all, it was fun, though.

Besides that... I've just been working a lot my project, I'm trying to get an initial version done within a few weeks. It's certainly true that I have less free time now than when I was at my real job. Back then I could show up at 10 or so, take care of doing some writing and reading other people's blogs, leave at 6 or so and still have time for lunch and a gym trip. It really feels different when you're doing something for yourself. And I don't have to wait for people to assign me things, which was actually often a big time sink at work.

Right now I'm at Soy Luck Club, a cafe in the West Village with good wi-fi and excellent meat-substitute paninis, and probably the best cafe named after a 90's novel about the ethnic-American experience. Well, at least until that "How the Garcia Girls Got Their Lattes" opens up.

Er, that's it.

2006-03-24T17:17:00.000-05:00

Quick hits

Ivan's still blogging the Belarus uprising at Russian Mushroom. The police swept in and arrested almost 500 protesters. Tomorrow's supposed to be the make-or-break day for the opposition; Ivan's not very optimistic.
Karol somehow ended up at the "Bring 'Em Home Now!" concert.
Ken Wheaton retires.
Is American Idol being sabotaged by people deliberately voting as a bloc for the worst candidate? Oh, the intrigue! Here's the site's blog - you can see they made a strong effort to keep Kevin on.

2006-03-22T15:27:00.000-05:00

I wouldn't have guessed

This U.S. military death rates PDF chart is an eye-opener: various casualty statistics from 1980 to 2004. Of those years, which saw the most military deaths? You might think it was 2003 or 2004, since between 1980 and 2001 the U.S. wasn't really engaging in any large-scale combat (depending on whether or not you count the Gulf War). Actually, it was 1983, year of the Beirut terrorist bombing which killed 263 marines: 2,486 deaths total. The next deadliest was 1980, with 2,392 deaths. By comparison, 2004 saw 1,887 military deaths.

The biggest reasons for the lower death totals now are safer equipment, reduced illness and non-combat homicide, and a smaller military. Accidental deaths around military equipment are a chronic fact of life, and I don't think the layperson (or, certainly, the media) realizes how big an element they are. Big enough that a something like 60% reduction in their rate is enough to outweigh the simultaneous fighting of two wars.

Interesting stats in the whole document.

(Via Instapundit)

2006-03-21T13:01:00.000-05:00

The Minsk scene

Ivan Lenin, now at Russian Mushroom is blogging the post-election protests in Belarus. Apparently this one's more of an uphill battle than the successful uprisings over the last few years in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, among other places, because there's less anti-Russian, anti-authority sentiment there. Still, long live the revolution!

2006-03-20T14:12:00.000-05:00

Girl is rich

Meet Hind Hariri: at 22 years old, the world's youngest billionaire, according to Forbes magazine's latest issue. Ms. Hariri is one of the five children of the late former prime minister Rafik Hariri, the assassination of whom last year you may recall set in motion a series of events that culminated in the pullout of Syrian troops from Lebanon and the democratization of Lebanon. The news I missed while following that story was that Hariri was also filthy rich, having built up an empire in construction, real estate, oil, and telecommunications, among others. He was worth $4 billion at the time of his death. Not the kind of guy you want to be messing with if you want to keep your shaky hold on another country, apparently.

Anyway, fast forward to today: as a result of some bold moves by Hariri's sons to buy into Turkey's privatizing industries, among other things, the Hariri estate has now quadrupled over what it was at his death, now standing at 16 billion. Meaning all five kids are worth at least $1.5 billion. And they're all involved in politics in some way.

I guess there's supposed to be some point to this whole story. Er, what a crazy world we live in.

2006-03-14T18:27:00.000-05:00

Nerds return to NY

An interesting article in Sunday's New York Times on
the new "Silicon Alley". I've known about most of these companies, but it's interesting to seem them all together in context. Most of them are "Web 2.0" companies, a buzzword that essentially means they're community-based in some way.

Not so long ago Silicon Alley was all but obliterated. Dozens of companies went out of business during the burst of the technology bubble, and the economic slow-down following the 9/11 attacks took still more. Employment in information technology in New York City plummeted to around 35,000 at the end of 2005 from around 50,000 in 2000, according to the New York State Labor Department.

Along the way any semblance of a digital community in New York dissolved as well. Launch parties gave way to pink slip-parties and then to no parties at all. The Silicon Alley Reporter, a trade publication, folded, and the New York New Media Association, a focal point for the tech community during the boom, quietly closed its doors in 2003. Nerds went underground.

"In 2002 it was definitely embarrassing to say you were doing Internet stuff," said Mr. Heiferman, who founded the Web advertising firm i-Traffic in 1995 and Meetup in 2002. "It seemed so passé."

Things are back, but now everything's more sedate, with open-source tools taking the place of large technology departments, and ad placement services taking the place of sales departments.

It makes me seem like a hopeless trend-setter, but this story essentially tracks my career exactly. I worked at three different internet-related companies from '98 to '01, none of which exist anymore. When there was no more new media work to be had, I put on a suit and tie and went to work at a bank for three and a half years. Now I have my own web project, using all open source tools and ad blah blah blah.

Strangely, according to the accompanying map, if you want to make it at all in new media, you need set up shop somewhere right around Soho. Hm, good to know...

(All via Gawker)

2006-03-10T12:57:00.000-05:00

Music plug

I'm listening to an album of Philip Glass string quartets today and it's really great music for being productive. People mock his music as repetitive but there's something about the rhythmic eighth notes that really lets you focus on the task at hand.

The CD is Kronos Quartet performs Philip Glass, which incidentally might be my single hardest-to-file-away CD. File under Glass or Kronos? For classical music I usually just file it under the composer (or, since there's often more than one composer, the first one listed) and call it a day, but I have to make an exception for the Kronos Quartet since that group's identity really colors everything they do. So I have no good answer for this one.

2006-03-08T23:36:00.000-05:00

Yet Another Meme: son of Another Meme

Chainik Hocker tagged me with another meme; he created this one. I guess now we know where they start, with folks like you and me. Well, on to the assignment...

My nick: Uh, Yaron, I guess, though it bears a striking resemblance to my real name.

My hometown: Haifa or Amherst. I don't know. Maybe Brooklyn now.

My team: I don't really follow any sports either. I'm always a fan of Team USA, though. So I'll root for any team whose players don't end up on other countries' teams in the Olympics, like that Satan hockey player guy. Talk about a suspicious name.

My theme song: Trick Daddy, "I'm A Thug". Self-explanatory.

My drink: Scotch on the rocks, but I haven't had it in a while, so I don't know if that's a lie.

My occupation: Programmer

My spare time: more programming.

My hiding spot: um. Can't tell you.

My book: Okay, this is a real one: Friedrich A. Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom".

My hero: I filled out my MySpace profile recently and there's a spot for "Heroes", so let me put what I wrote there: George Washington, Calvin Coolidge, Theodore Herzl, Friedrich Hayek, Andy Grove, Vincent Gallo, James McNew, Philip Kaplan.

I never pass these on, but since it's a new one I feel a little compelled. So, since there's one person who's always keen to pass them on to me, Petitedov, here you go! Also getting tipped is Dawn Summers, who knows more about me than anyone.

2006-03-06T20:02:00.000-05:00

Oscar wrapup

Ace of Spades: "I Used To Fear Death, Until I Saw Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep Engaging In "Funny Banter": Now I welcome the sweet oblivion of Death's embrace."

I thought Jon Stewart was pretty good. His real problem is that he just doesn't seem to care about either movies or actors and actresses. Just about all of his jokes were about politics and music. I can understand that those are his interests, since those are sort of my two main interests too, but I feel like I would at least have tried to make jokes about the movies that actually came out this year. His indifference to the whole movie industry also came out every time he made some sarcastic remark after the latest montage. What's the point of having a host who undercuts whatever statement you were trying to make with your montage?

The other main problem was the seeming total absence of both Brangelina and Tom and Katie. I know none of them were nominated for anything, but that's no reason not to include the two all-powerful couples of Hollywood. In general there didn't seem to be that many random stars around, other than the omnipresent Jack Nicholson. It just served to make the show look a little less legitimate, like maybe all those other people were at the real awards ceremony.

2006-03-03T15:24:00.000-05:00

Drawing time

I was inspired today to scan in a bunch of doodles that I had made at work during team meetings over the three years I was there. Those meetings were generally regarded in our group as something of a time-waster, since everyone was working on pretty disparate projects, so there wasn't much productive communication that could happen between projects. Some people took care of email on their PDA's, some people worked on pricing algorithms or whatever; I doodled (though I was still listening to what people were saying, for what it was worth).

Here's a good one. It's some sort of robot... on a swing. Note well-executed use of shading:

In a more stylistic vein, an old woman and her teacup:

One more of a robot... I guess this one's singing:

Wow... okay, forget what I said about wasted time.

2006-02-27T23:49:00.000-05:00

The Apprentice, first episode

My initial verdict for Season 5: most boring season yet. Everyone seems to have watched the previous shows and know the routine. They're all well-manicured and strategic, except the people who were specifically chosen because they're not well-manicured (or maybe that's just one, awkward Brent).

Tarek, who looks like Orlando Bloom, should have just coasted on his looks but instead makes all sorts of petty moves. It should have been obvious right from the beginning, when he announced he was a Mensa member, which sounds like a symptom of insecurity.

Perky blonde Allie, the other project manager, doesn't come off that with-it either, wondering why she chose Brent for her team when we had just seen that he was picked last.

Lenny, the Russian from New Jersey, who's clearly watched the show, gives Summer very good advice before the boardroom, which is to keep her mouth shut and let other people dig their own holes, advice she takes for a short while before ignoring.

(By the way, I feel like I've seen Lenny, aka Lenny Val, somewhere before in real life, like at a party or something. Does anyone know who he is?)

(Spoiler alert) Summer is fired, but she doesn't seem apologetic about any of the "mistakes" she had made, which gives the strong impression that she wanted off the show anyway. Which recalls the old quote that, according to a web search, was made by Eugene McCarthy and is about politics and football: "You have to be smart enough to know the game and dumb enough to think it's important."

Don't get me wrong, I'll still be watching.

2006-02-27T13:04:00.000-05:00

Another band off the playlist, or (surprise surprise) Western Europe is screwed

Mark Steyn has another one of his well-written but increasingly-depressing columns, this one about how the Jews of Europe are once again taking up their role as "canaries in the coalmine" for a coming disaster in Western Europe and, possibly, the Middle East:

In five years' time, how many Jews will be living in France? Two years ago, a 23-year-old Paris disc jockey called Sebastien Selam was heading off to work from his parents' apartment when he was jumped in the parking garage by his Muslim neighbor Adel. Selam's throat was slit twice, to the point of near-decapitation; his face was ripped off with a fork; and his eyes were gouged out. Adel climbed the stairs of the apartment house dripping blood and yelling, "I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven."

Is that an gripping story? You'd think so. Particularly when, in the same city, on the same night, a Jewish woman was brutally murdered in the presence of her daughter by another Muslim. You've got the making of a mini-trend there, and the media love trends.

Yet no major French newspaper carried the story.

...

A lot of folks are, to put it at its mildest, indifferent to Jews. In 2003, a survey by the European Commission found that 59 percent of Europeans regard Israel as the "greatest menace to world peace." Only 59 percent? What the hell's wrong with the rest of 'em? Well, don't worry: In Germany, it was 65 percent; Austria, 69 percent; the Netherlands, 74 percent. Since then, Iran has sportingly offered to solve the problem of the Israeli threat to world peace by wiping the Zionist Entity off the face of the map. But what a tragedy that those peace-loving Iranians have been provoked into launching nuclear armageddon by those pushy Jews.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the Kings of Convenience. I've mentioned before that I stopped listening to Belle and Sebastian after I found out that some of the members were publicly pro-Palestinian. Well, more recently I stopped listening to Kings of Convenience too, for similar reasons (if you don't know who they are, they're a Norwegian folk duo who are somewhat indie celebrities). Well, it's not on any of their released albums, but on his solo album, Erlend Oye, one of the two "Kings", has a track called "Every Party Has a Winner and a Loser", basically describing the goings-on at a typical party: one line reads "one Jew that no one invited". I was shocked to hear it, because the line pretty much comes out of nowhere, and as far as I know they've never mentioned any other ethnic group by name on any of their songs. In the absence of any other information, and given what I know about Europeans, I'll have to assume that the two are bald-faced anti-Semites. Maybe someone will at some point do a PhD thesis on the surprising correspondence between uber-sensitivity and anti-Jewish feelings (terrorist-sympathizer Cat Stevens also comes to mind, as does, for the one American example, Michael Jackson). In any case, talk about confirming an entire stereotype with one line: the preening, poncy Euro-boy who wouldn't hurt a fly and is also a casual anti-Semite.

Which, to take up Steyn's point again, sounds too bad but not like any sort of crisis: after all, it's not like newly-pacifist and wussy white Europe is going to start up rounding up Jews again. That's true, but when his country gets overrun by Muslims who themselves like to kidnap Jews or, to take another example, like performing gang rapes, forget about an adequate response from the locals: Mr. Sensitive European doesn't even have the vocabulary to express his disapproval.

2006-02-24T14:43:00.000-05:00

Sort of a project description

So this marks the end of my second week of working for myself. Still going well! I'm back at 'sNice now. So - I figure I should give some more info on what this betting site I've been working on is all about.

The initial inspiration for the site came from reading James Surowiecki's 2004 book "The Wisdom of Crowds". Just hearing about the book, I knew it tapped into something that had been bouncing around in my head for a while, having thought about the Iowa Electronic Markets and my own inherent anti-elitism, my bias that the idea of getting the "smartest guys" together to figure everything out is usually just a recipe for failure, whether it's in business or politics. To me it's an extension of my libertarianism. So, anyway - I found out Surowiecki was doing a book signing at a Barnes & Noble's in Manhattan, and I went to see him talk and got my signed copy. The talk was great, and so was the book (I recommend it to anyone), and it got me thinking about the ways that people can currently tap into collective intelligence, and the obstacles that still exist; that's when I got the idea for this site. That was about a year and a half ago; I've been working on it in one form or another ever since.

One other inspiration was Thomas Malone's "The Future of Work", also from 2004; I found that book doing a bit of research into other people's views on collective wisdom. It's about how organizations are restructuring themselves based on the falling costs of communication. The ideas in it inspired some tweaks to the basic site concept.

So there you have it - betting for knowledge aggregation. I'm lucky to have found a project that satisfies both my technical and socio-political interests; who knows if that'll happen again. I'm not revealing the actual structure of the site yet, but to my mind it's just a few pretty obvious logical steps from the premise.

2006-02-22T13:40:00.000-05:00

Quick hits

I'm back, a little bit - somehow I thought that quitting my job would result in more free time. Turns out that now I have less free time than before! I'm a little surprised by this.

Ivan Lenin is back to blogging, and is now a striking a blow for freedom of speech! With PC Paint.
This is what blog-based independent research is all about: Michael Totten has strong evidence that an independent Kurdistan is on its way.
Speaking of which, Ace of Spades has a good reason for an independent Kurdistan. Involves Turkey.
If you're as excited about school privatization as I am, check out this interesting New York Magazine story about the private-sector turnaround of one Queens elementary school.
Invisible Man: Dawn Summers explains why Shani Davis looks so stoic in all of his interviews. (If you're not following the Olympics, he's America's top distance-speed-skater).

2006-02-15T21:51:00.000-05:00

Next stop on the wi-fi tour

I'm at "Postmark" now, the newest wi-fi-enabled cafe spot in Park Slope. They have a bunch of postcards on the walls. Some By the way, yes, I have an internet connection at home, but I like getting out of the house.

Yesterday was a little hectic because of Valentine's Day preparation and, uh, implementation - my valentine and I went to Smoke, on the Upper West Side (or what some people call "SoHa"), to see a Hammond-B3-organ-based jazz quartet. It was pretty awesome. What a nice neighborhood, too.

Other than that, I've been pretty much just working on my project. It's a little strange - even though I obviously have a great deal more free time than I did before, I feel like I have less, because what I'm working on is engrossing in a way that what I was doing at work rarely was to me. Too bad about that income reduction, though.

2006-02-13T11:36:00.000-05:00

Day one

I'm spending the day at a cafe in the West Village, "'sNice". All vegetarian, with wi-fi access. There are a lot of other people with laptops here. I'm getting a bunch of stuff done. It feels a little like early 2001, although I get the sense people are doing real work this time, instead of just surfing on Monster.com or whatever. Prognosis for my first day "on the job": so far, so good.

2006-02-10T17:03:00.000-05:00

Phases and stages

[later than I thought it would be... Blogger's been down most of the day]

Lots of excitement today... today was my last day on the job here at, uh, Mega Finance Corp. (as I've sometimes referred to it). I submitted my resignation two weeks ago, so I've sort of been sitting on the news since then, maybe for no good reason, but anyway, now you all know. I'm going into business on my own now, working on completing the web site that I've been at work on for a while and have mentioned once or twice here (more info on that later). I've been at this one banking job since I started blogging, a little over two years ago, so I'd imagine it could lead to some changes in my online presence too.

I'll still be in New York, probably working at home in Brooklyn, along with hanging out at wi-fi cafes around the city. I don't expect my general schedule to change all that much, really, but we'll see. I may have worn my last tie in a while. Although I've sort of gotten attached to wearing them, so maybe not.

Anyway, goodbye cruel corporate world, and all of that. On to the next episode.

2006-02-06T20:58:00.000-05:00

It's always something

I find this Mohammed-cartoon controversy bizarre yet predictable. Predictably bizzare, I should say. Israelis are used to this kind of gross disparity between cause and effect, like the idea that Ariel Sharon visiting the Temple Mount caused three years of Palestinians blowing themselves up. Something doesn't quite add up. Or, more generally, that Israel is somehow a heavy obstacle to hundreds of millions of Arabs who have never met an Israeli or a Palestinian in their lives. So these new riots, with their widespread destruction colorful signs are out of the same playbook. What's that you say? You're setting buildings on fire because some drawings of the prophet were published in a newspaper you've never heard of? Oh, of course. What, they were published not last week but five months ago? Well, no wonder, makes perfect sense. As always, the real issue is frustration with the squalor, tyranny and welfare-state-dependency (pick the ratio depending on the country) they're living in. Which is not an excuse, just an explanation. Burning the flags of the Great Satan, the Little Satan or the Satan-Who-Makes-Havarti is the only sanctioned outlet for that intense frustration, so they grab at that with gusto. The fact that some of the riots were planned and orchestrated in advance is fully to be expected.

2006-02-01T10:21:00.000-05:00

Overheard in New York - highlights

I guess a lot of people read this site already, but I was just reading through it, and I thought these were hilarious:

Two ways of looking at things

I can understand this one thanks to Petitedov

I think Chainik Hocker would appreciate this one

Karol would appreciate this one

I think Paul would appreciate this one

2006-01-30T12:16:00.000-05:00

Clooney explains all

We just saw "Syriana" last night. Quite an eye-opener. It appears that the reason there's no democracy in Saudi Arabia or the other oil-rich states is (spoiler alert... sort of) because of a secret plot between the CIA and American oil companies! Sure, every once in a while some kind-hearted emir will try to bring democracy to his people, but we'll nip that effort right in the bud because we need the cheap oil and terrorism!!

It's a bit of a strange theory since, as far as I can see, in the real world the only leader the CIA seems to have any heart in undermining anymore is President Bush.

Seriously, I think I would have preferred to see "Underworld: Evolution". It probably would have a clearer view of the current geopolitical situation.

2006-01-27T16:53:00.000-05:00

American Idol's early favorite? (I wouldn't know)

Paris Bennett audition on American Idol - I read about her in the New York Post. The video's a pleasure to watch, and she's probably the first auditionee hip enough to sing Brubeck (well, okay, Paul Desmond). This makes me want to watch the show, after they whittle it down to the actual ten.

2006-01-24T23:22:00.000-05:00

NY on $10 a day

An interesting article in this week's New York Magazine: New York on $10 a Day. The reporter limited herself to just that much for a week, which meant a lot of walking around, and a bunch of scrounging, but also going to some interesting, varied free events around the city. $10 a day is not at all feasible, but she makes the obscure stuff sound neat.

UPDATE: Speaking of cool free events: Archives Listening Party tonight at 9! On the Lower East Side.

2006-01-24T12:25:00.000-05:00

Well, not those three

Seeing Canada's election results last night, I couldn't help thinking about this old Economist cover:

As we now know, Spain was an anomaly (the cover's a little misleading - Aznar didn't run again; it was his party that was defeated). Since March 2004, Blair, Howard and Bush have all been re-elected; of the major leaders who opposed the Iraq War, though - Schroeder of Germany, Chirac of France, Putin of Russia, and Paul Martin of Canada - two have been voted out, and Chirac will most likely lose if he runs again (their elections are in 2007). Vladimir Putin, you could say, is the only leader able to survive taking an antiwar position. A little less cheekily, I'll say that with each election over the last few years we find that the developed world is turning more right-wing, and the adoption of anti-war, anti-American positions looks less like an act of principle and more like an act of desperation by leaders whose policies are otherwise unpopular.

(In Putin's case, what may have saved him is that being against the Iraq War wasn't at all an act of principle - he isn't a left-winger, he just wanted to keep his oil contracts.)

I don't mean to say that these elections prove that the Iraq War, or any other position, is justified - as you probably know, I have a whole bunch of political opinions that put me deeply in the minority, so I wouldn't argue that popularity equals rightness. But it's neat to see this trend, and to note how differently things turned out from how so many people expected they would.

2006-01-20T08:57:00.000-05:00

Reaching for the security blanket

Of all the news coming out of Iran, the only part that's a tiny bit encouraging is this one: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Bashar al-Assad meet in Damascus in a "defiant show of solidarity". Hunkering down for solidarity with your one ally doesn't seem like the actions of someone who believes he's some kind of religious prophet and all set to declare nuclear Armageddon. Possibly if he were just thumbing his nose at the rest of the world he wouldn't even bother. Plus, that one ally ("Boy Assad", as Mark Steyn calls him) is hardly a pillar of strength; his continued rule looks shaky even over the next year.

I'd like to think it's a positive sign.

2006-01-18T09:52:00.000-05:00

Travel photos roundup

Noah visits Hong Kong and Singapore.

Ken Wheaton visits New Orleans.

Petitedov visits Israel.

Jessica visits Israel.

Chainik Hocker visits Israel.

Karol visits the CORE awards (granted it's not much of a trip, since it was in New York - she did meet John Bolton, though)

A lot of people have been on trips to Israel lately, me included. Sounds like a good indicator for the Holy Land.

I also have some photos, from my trips to Israel and Bangkok, that I've meaning to post. Not like there aren't enough travel photos to be looked at now!

2006-01-13T09:58:00.000-05:00

My five weird things

Okay, I've been tagged with another "meme". In this one you have to list five weird habits you have.

Thanks to this one's go-rounds I've learned that Petitedov is a compulsive ~~teacher's pet~~ class-talker, Karol is a lip gloss addict, Ari ...is too, Zelda drinks pickle juice, and Dawn stutters when she talks to someone who stutters. Was this a good idea, people?

And Ace feels "truly alive only on the dance floor". Well, that one I knew.

Doesn't this whole confessional thing seems tailor-made for women? I just don't think your average man wants to show off his actual neurotic habits.

Anyway, I don't think I have many interesting ones:

When I listen to instrumental music or play back music in my head, I usually do out the solfège syllables for it (do-re-mi) at the same time. Since I've never heard of anyone else doing it, I'd assume this is a very weird habit.
When I'm frustrated at work, I will sometimes talk right back to the computer screen. Actually, I will do this while programming at home too.
Blogging... uh, that's kind of a weird habit.
I can't go more than a day or so without wanting to check my email.

Okay, I'm running out of things here. I tend not to pick up that many real habits. I spent two summers ago basically trying to start smoking, and failed. I have short-term obsessions; like I haven't mentioned this before, but lately I've been on a big Wikipedia-editing kick. But who knows how much longer that'll last.

Not sending this to anyone else ('cause that's not how I roll). But if you're inspired to do your own, let me know by linking to me and I'll link back to you.

2006-01-11T09:34:00.000-05:00

Clearing up the misconceptions

Random semi-political post here. Via Jane Galt, TigerHawk has a list of his "lefty thoughts" - opinions he has but supposedly shouldn't have as a right-winger. It's sort of long and meandering, but I thought this one was notable:

I don't really understand why people get so bent out of shape over porn. Or pot.

For some reason it's a widespread view that drug legalization and keeping smut legal are left-wing issues. I don't know how this came about - I've certainly never seen any evidence for it. Anecdotally, almost all the conservatives I personally know are social libertarians like me. Heck, I've smoked up with some of them. (That is to say, I would have, if such a thing were legal). Granted, that's not proof, but the track record of our political parties doesn't back up the story either. The only elected leaders I know of that have advocated legalizing drugs are Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico, and Congressman Ron Paul; both Republicans (though Paul is really a libertarian). Other than him I've never heard any elected leader, from the most die-hard Republican to the granol-iest Democrat, say a word in favor of drug legalization or against the war on drugs. As for demagoguery on obscenity, it's an equal-opportunity job: for every Lynne Cheney there's a Tipper Gore. I've never seen "public decency" on any GOP issues list; I would assume it must have shown up in some party platforms in, say, 1955. But then again it was probably on the Democrats' as well.

Do the conservatives of the heartland feel more negatively about pornography than people on the coasts? Maybe. Do they favor any more government action to curb it? Haven't seen the evidence.

I think clearing up this misconception would go some way toward improving understanding between the political sides. Well, maybe.

2006-01-08T20:32:00.000-05:00

Blog links update

I updated some of the links at the right: new URL's for Kesher Talk and Chainik Hocker (who's back to blogging), and I removed the links to the now-defunct Executive Slacks, delbrians, Ivan Lenin, Material Squirrel and Occam's Toothbrush. Let me know if you want your link restored or you've moved or whatever.

2006-01-04T23:53:00.000-05:00

Critical condition

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke earlier today. Whether or not he makes it out alive, this will spell a big change in Israeli politics; he was on his way to revolutionizing Israel twice in as many years (last year it was the Gaza pullout; this year he formed a new political party, Kadima, that became Israel's most popular party on inception). I have a feeling he'll make it out of this one; he's nothing if not a fighter. Let's hope so. And when/if he does, I hope he starts hitting the SlimFast in a serious way. With extreme prejudice, as they say.

2006-01-02T21:06:00.000-05:00

"There were horses, and a man on fire, and I killed a guy with a trident"

The WFMU blog has a video of a brawl between two competing Russian soccer teams. Or teams and their fans. Not clear. Maybe "brawl" is the wrong word too, because it really just looks like a well-organized battle. In the middle of a parking lot. I don't know that I've ever seen a real-life large-scale confrontation shown this clearly.

Deeply disturbing. And by that I mean "awesome".

Via Peter.

2005-12-28T20:12:00.000-05:00

King Kong review

I saw two movies recently: King Kong and (yes) Brokeback Mountain. The second was, as you might expect, the result of intense lobbying from my girlfriend. I actually thought Brokeback Mountain was pretty good. Nice cinematography, and you could really feel the movie going through the two decades or however long it lasted.

I actually liked it more than King Kong. King Kong did nothing for me. Maybe it was because, as I realized at some point afterwards, it was essentially just a remake of... Brokeback Mountain! You just have to think of Naomi Watts in the Jake Gyllenhaal role (not too hard, with those pouty lips) and then it all makes sense. Here's the story: it's about a young woman who aspires to be in showbiz; she ends up in a rugged, semi-deserted location with a gruff, anti-social guy. The guy broods a lot and barely says more than a few words, but he's had a rough life and there's something alluring about him. The two are mistrusful of each other at first, and her attempts to entertain him fall flat, but after getting to know each other better (and fighting off some lethal animals) they develop a nice rapport; before you know it they're making googly eyes and stroking each other lovingly. She still has to deal with her "official" love interest, who's completely clueless about the relationship and a bit of an airhead to boot. Things really fall apart when he comes over to visit her, and once people get wind of the relationship it has to be destroyed. This is partly because society can't deal with things it doesn't understand, but mostly because there was realistically no other way to end the story.

Anyway, that's my view. I predict King Kong will do for man-ape love the same thing Brokeback Mountain did for homosexuality (i.e. nothing).

2005-12-25T17:21:00.000-05:00

Wafah du jour

America must have gone Wafah DuFour-crazy! GQ's new issue, with a photo spread on her, came out recently. She's Osama bin Laden's niece (although she says she's never met him) and she's in New York trying to make it as a singer. I wrote this little post about her way back in April, where I suggested that, if she wants to make it, she should be an M.I.A.-like militant rapper instead of a singer (hey, that's the kind of career advice you get for free). Pretty much as soon as the magazine hit the stands last week the search engine queries started coming, and they never stopped; I'd guess I've gotten a few thousand already.

If you're curious about her, Ace has a post with both more insightful commentary and more cheesecake than I offered. But that's why he's the big success.

2005-12-22T23:34:00.000-05:00

Quick hits

That transit strike was really another battle in the pensions war. Our 70-year-old pension system won't go down without a long fight (though declining birth rates mean go down it will).

Ken Wheaton's photos from New Orleans. Damn, these make the Superdome look like a nice vacation getaway.

Eliot Spitzer behaves thuggishly.

The NSA wiretapping "kerfuffle" turns out to be a Clinton-era data mining initiative, according to Ars Technica. Not that that makes it good or bad.

What's the big story of 2005?

2005-12-20T12:33:00.000-05:00

No transit, dammit

I'm taking the day off, not because of the transit strike but because of a package delivery. I went out before and car traffic on Flatbush, the main street near where I am, was at a crawl, not much faster than walking speed.

Jessica has a William Carlos Williams-style poem that captures the mood. Well, I'm inspired now, let me give it a try:

So much depends
upon

a Trinidadian guy who gets
on my nerves

and should probably
be in jail.

Karol says that this strike might convince New Yorkers that unions are not their friend. I hope she's right. I especially hope that Randi Weingarten, head of the United Federation of Teachers, which has done the most to keep vouchers and charter schools out of New York City, gets her reputation trashed. She's been at every press conference showing "solidarity".

Jane Galt is much more pessimistic, alas: "the union will win, as unions always win in New York City."

UPDATE: Turns out he's Trinidadian, not Haitian! I found this out a few hours after I wrote the post but never got a chance to edit it.

2005-12-15T07:59:00.000-05:00

Iraq War: 2003-2005?

Is it too early to declare an end to this war? Obviously, there will be no climactic moment when we know it's over, like a peace treaty signed or piece of land conquered. The actual "war" war ended less than a week after it started, when Saddam Hussein went into hiding and our troops rolled into Baghdad with minimal resistance. But the level of insurgent fighting since then has been significant enough that no one could say peace had arrived. Look at the situation now, though: there's a massive election going on in Iraq, with all ethnic groups actively involved (I recommend this Iraq the Model meta-post for a roundup of election information, by the way). Thousands of candidates across the political spectrum ran, this time openly and not (unlike January's election) in secret or semi-secret. Moqtada al-Sadr (remember him?), who at one point represented the specter of destabilization and anti-democracy, was heavily involved in campaigning this time around. Yes, there were some explosions, one fatality, and insurgent attacks aren't going to end anytime soon. But at what point do you say it's no longer a war and just low-level unrest?

I was flipping through the news channels on TV this morning for updates, and they were barely covering the elections, unlike in January. Even Fox News spent less than 50% of their time on it, as if democracy in Iraq were so commonplace by now that it's not worth spending a lot of time on.

Will peace be official when U.S. forces leave Iraq? I don't know a good 60 years since we saw any action over there. Well, maybe it's wishful thinking, but maybe now is as good a time as any to call this thing a wrap.

2005-12-12T17:56:00.000-05:00

Tough choices

Three big things going on for New York Jews on Dec. 24... I'm still on all sorts of mailing lists so I figured I'd share:

Heeb Magazine "Heebonism" party at Happy Valley
"Jewltide III" at Southpaw
Israeli rapper Subliminal and crew at B. B. King's

Ironic that it's all happening on Christmas Eve, which is when usually the hardest choice for Jews is whether to eat at "Hunan Delight" or "Empire Szechuan".

I myself will be going to none of these things. For once, I've got some bona fide pre-existing Christmas Eve plans, suckaz.

2005-12-07T23:41:00.000-05:00

My latest gig

I'll be playing bass in this production this weekend, on Friday and Saturday (subbing in for the main bass player, who's got some Christmas gigs - hey, subbing is what keeps me in the 'biz). It's a new musical, an adaptation of "Lysistrata", written by Galt MacDermot, who wrote "Hair". Like "Hair", it hits the trifecta of sex, anti-war politics and classical references ("Hair" had a bunch of allusions to "Hamlet", of all things). It's also got the same mid-60's sound that "Hair" did; I guess unlike, say, Andrew Lloyd Webber, MacDermot never bothered to change his style; probably for the best.

Anyway, Friday and Saturday nights are when I'm playing, if anyone's interested in seeing it. I saw it and I was entertained; it's not really a political show, per se, and it doesn't have any cheap applause lines or anything. It's nicely put together.

2005-12-06T17:21:00.000-05:00

The Squid Movie

I saw "The Squid and the Whale" over the weekend. It's about an dysfunctional family in the middle of a divorce, in mid-80's Park Slope, Brooklyn. I wouldn't really recommend it, unless you want to see two hours of miserable people doing miserable things to each other. The two parents are both authors, and they both (especially the father) come off as self-centered and amoral, basically just worried about getting published and scoring notches on their bedpost.

The neat part of the movie is that was filmed to a large extent within a few blocks of my apartment. I saw them filming one evening last year (and posted about it too - too lazy to look it up now), and saw one of the Baldwin brothers on the corner (turns out - Billy). It's neat that there's this little memento of my home now.

I don't know if it's a common perception of authors that they're narcissists, by the way - I recall another movie a while back, a French movie called "Look At Me", that said basically the same thing. Apologies to any authors reading this - maybe I'm thinking about it because I had a run-in recently with a novelist that didn't do anything to alleviate that perception.

Though maybe in this movie they were just bitter because they were the only family with an 80's car, on a block full of 2004-era cars. That would tee off anyone.

2005-12-01T09:04:00.000-05:00

Quick hits

Fifty Cent, George W. Bush fan.

Apparently not everyone loves Canada's health care! "In a recent poll, more than 80 percent of Canadians rate the system 'in crisis.'" Socialism not working again?

How bad are political experts at making predictions? even worse than average schmoes, says a New Yorker article.

Also via Jane Galt: free brunch on New Year's Day. Pancakes with an economics expert, sounds not bad.

Israeli politics: Shaister says it's no longer "incredibly boring".

2005-11-29T10:20:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving wrapup

I went home over Thanksgiving as usual; I got sick at some point over the weekend, so I'm still recovering a little. I went to my 10th high school reunion, which turned out fun. Just about everyone seems to have mellowed out since then, and people have been doing well themselves. Maybe it's a cliche, but the differences between people in their various groups really start to fade away after a few years of the real world. A whole bunch of people have moved to New York, and some are even in finance, though none of the people I was friends with; they're almost all in grad school or public policy. Good Amherst choices.

No Tofurky (that's how it's spelled) this time; shockingly, area stores were all out.

2005-11-22T22:37:00.000-05:00

Give us free

So every year there's a presidential pardon for a turkey. The president shows up in front of the cameras, delivers the pardon, turkey's free, ha ha. Except that, for the last 15 years, the freed turkeys have been placed in a park in Washington D.C., and because they were bred to be food, they have trouble even walking around and they keel over within a few months. This year for some reason there's two turkeys, and also because of years of protests they're now going to Disneyland.

Will the Butterballs have better luck there? Let's hope so.

(Via VegBlog)

2005-11-21T00:24:00.000-05:00

InkScape, plus random open source thoughts

Note: kind of boring technical commentary follows

I needed to do some illustrations on my laptop a few weeks ago and, since I didn't have Adobe Illustrator on that computer, I looked around for an open-source alternative. I found InkScape, which, for what it is, is amazing. It has the basic look-and-feel of Illustrator, although the interface is a little clunkier; but you can't the price (free). And it installs amazingly fast. And it's only been out for less than 2 years, compared to Illustrator's 20. I really recommend you try it if you want to do any kind of illustration and you don't want to shell out hundreds of dollars or get a pirated version (illegal, you know).

Computing-wise, this has really been the year of open source, hasn't it? Most obviously, it seems like everyone is switching to Firefox for a web browser: no one gets paid to develop it but it's better than the software created by very-highly-compensated professionals at the world's largest software company. The proverbial million typing monkeys keep coming up with good results, what can you say. PHP is another omnipresent open-source technology. If you don't know what that is, note all the web pages that have a ".php" at the end of the URL; that means there's a PHP interpreter on that side turning database content into HTML pages. I was a web programmer for a brief period during the internet boom of '98-2000 (sadly, I am still forced to work for a living); and though PHP was already around, the big web technologies at that time were Cold Fusion and Microsoft's ASP. How many sites do you see anymore with .asp or .cfm URLs? They're relics, and just about everyone uses PHP; the only real competition comes from other open-source technologies like Python and Ruby. Same with databases: the open-source MySQL and PostGres have improved to the point that they're just as good as the Oracles of the world for any application unless you're someone like Amazon.com or a bank.

At work I use the open-source Eclipse for Java compiling.

What about Linux? Surprisingly, the "Linux revolution" has so far pretty much failed to materialize, despite 10 years of hype. Sure, a lot of people run servers on it, but as a consumer OS it's not going anywhere. From the little I've used it, it seems like the biggest problem is that it's hard to install any new software unless you're already a UNIX hacker.

Give the monkeys some time, though. They always seem to win in the end. Unpaid monkeys.

Update: I forgot to mention NVU for web editing, which is totally awesome.

2005-11-16T12:47:00.000-05:00

Les biculturelles

Mark Steyn says that Europe is in deep trouble because it's not multicultural but bicultural:

There are ageing native populations, and young Muslim populations, and that's it: "two solitudes", as they say in my beloved Quebec. If there's three, four or more cultures, you can all hold hands and sing We are the World. But if there's just two - you and the other - that's generally more fractious. Bicultural societies are among the least stable in the world, especially once it's no longer quite clear who is the majority and who is the minority - a situation that much of Europe is fast approaching, as you can see by visiting any French, Austrian, Belgian or Dutch maternity ward.

...

I love the way those naysayers predicting doom and gloom in Baghdad scoff that Iraq's a totally artificial entity and that, without some Saddamite strongman, Kurds, Sunnis and Shias can't co-exist in the same state. Oh, really? If Iraq's an entirely artificial entity, what do you call a state split between gay drugged-up red-light whatever's-your-bag Dutchmen and anti-gay anti-whoring anti-everything-you-dig Muslims? If Kurdistan doesn't belong in Iraq, does Pornostan belong in the Islamic Republic of Holland?

Time to accept a Two-State Solution?

2005-11-10T01:18:00.000-05:00

Hong Kong photos

A few highlights from our trip.

Hong Kong is a city on the side of a mountain. This is a view from the top of the mountain. Pretty stunning, no? Seems like a 15% maximum tax rate over the course of 100 years can get you a skyline like this one.

Same view, with some shmuck cluttering up the foreground.

Me and the "Big Buddha". Who's looking placid now, mofo?

(You can read more info on him here)

2005-11-08T17:47:00.000-05:00

...but I'm not the only one

Well, it looks like the WSJ's Joel Kotkin (reg. required) and Publius Pundit agree with me on the welfare angle.

Also, Belmont Club has a graph of daily car burnings since the rioting began. Wow - at what point do they run out of cars?

2005-11-07T09:34:00.000-05:00

The welfare connection

I'm disappointed that not enough people are talking about what I think is the key to the massive rioting in France (make that Berlin and Brussels, too), which is the welfare state. Conservatives have an incentive to paint the riots as another component in the war with radical Islam (which they are), and liberals have an incentive to not talk about the riots at all. But I think the real heart of the issue is France's (and Europe's) prized welfare state. How is welfare actively destroying French and European society? Same way it always does:

Destroying families - we know that many or most of the youth of the suburbs were raised by single mothers - here's an AP article that discusses it. The lack of a father figure creates unmanageable children. Welfare removes the normal family and societal pressures for the father to help raise a child, since the mother is now at least financially able to support the child on her own. After Clinton's 1996 welfare reform in this country, teen pregnancy and single-mother parenting both started a decline that's been going on ever since.
Subsidizing extremism - the strong link between welfare and terrorism has been remarked on before, at least by Mickey Kaus. It makes sense that people who get monthly checks from the government and not doing anything productive would have plenty more time to sit, fester, and radicalize than those working a steady job.
Segregation through public housing - if you wanted to ensure that the poorest citizens stayed poor and never got a chance to mix with the rest of the population, what would be the best way to do it? Probably to put up special housing for them, away from the main cities, and let them languish forever. As we've seen in the U.S., public housing projects are natural breeders of crime, drug abuse and gangs; it's very hard for even well-intentioned people to grow up in a project and become a productive member of society.
A weakened economy - obviously, every dollar (make that euro) that goes to welfare payments or housing projects is one that can't be used for legitimate employment. The current unemployment rate in France's militant suburbs is now at 25% - how many of those disaffected "youth" would be working if the economy could take them in?

France's level of welfare spending is "second to none". Is it starting to make sense now?

2005-11-03T00:25:00.000-05:00

If you're wondering about the Paris riots

No Pasaran! has the whole thing covered. 7 straight nights so far.

2005-10-31T22:37:00.000-05:00

Rosa Parks, the libertarian view

On the commemoration of her passing, Thomas Sowell notes that the racial segregation that Rosa Parks fought to end was the work of the state:

Far from existing from time immemorial, as many have assumed, racially segregated seating in public transportation began in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Those who see government as the solution to social problems may be surprised to learn that it was government which created this problem. Many, if not most, municipal transit systems were privately owned in the 19th century and the private owners of these systems had no incentive to segregate the races.

...

The incentives of the economic system and the incentives of the political system were not only different, they clashed. Private owners of streetcar, bus, and railroad companies in the South lobbied against the Jim Crow laws while these laws were being written, challenged them in the courts after the laws were passed, and then dragged their feet in enforcing those laws after they were upheld by the courts.

Isn't it neat that corporations and the free market fought tooth-and-nail for racial integration, even in the post-slavery Deep South? And that, as Sowell notes, it came about not despite of but because of their amoral adherence to the bottom line.

(Via Best of the Web)

UPDATE: Yaron-savvy Dawn Summers points out the segregated lunch counters at Woolworth's in Greensboro, SC, which were strictly the work of the private sector. That's true, dammit!

2005-10-27T21:37:00.000-04:00

Notorious (he is)

I just saw on MTV a "town meeting"-style interview with Bill Gates. Because it's MTV they a big logo behind him saying "Notorious B.G.". Ha ha. It's interesting, though, because I just finished reading "High Stakes, No Prisoners", by Charles Ferguson, the guy who developed FrontPage, which he eventually sold to Microsoft. It's interesting to see Gates looking so affable and calm, because the portrait Ferguson paints of him is of a ruthless businessman, who demolished Netscape in the late 90's, both by taking advantage of Netscape's strategic blunders, like not going aggressively after the server market, to backhanded tactics like threatening to end business with PC manufacturers who wanted to bundle the Netscape browser into their computers. Ferguson still ends up, somehow, with an overall positive impression of Gates and Microsoft and their ruthlessness, which is partly why he agrees to sell to them: if it weren't for that kind of force constantly exerting its will on the software and hardware industries, he says, there wouldn't be nearly the same standardization across hardware and software that we've taken for granted for at least the last ten years or so. If PC manufacturers really had their way, they'd each have their own operating system running on their hardware, with their own set of software tools, and charge for every part of it.

2005-10-27T18:46:00.000-04:00

The results are in

And the person who knows me best is... Dawn Summers. (?)

Open and shut case.

2005-10-25T19:48:00.000-04:00

Test your knowledge

And another meme... since Karol, Dawn and Ari demonstrated the fun-ness of the concept, I created a quiz that's all about me. If you've read my blog carefully you should know all the answers.

2005-10-24T18:13:00.000-04:00

Meme again

Petitedov tagged me with another meme. In this one you have to find your 23rd-ever post, take the 5th sentence of that... and I think that’s it. Here’s my entry:

“Why would you do this to me, New York Sports Club?”

There it is. Another self-indulgent whine? Or a bold new Hemingwayesque literary voice, crying out at the human condition? You decide.

2005-10-24T13:12:00.000-04:00

Haloscan's not working!

Now that they have a virtual monopoly on the comment market, I guess they can go down whenever they want. And they did! It's been that way for about the last 24 hours. Dammit! Does RateYourMusic still exist? Is it time to switch to Blogger comments? Lord, I hope not. Those make every comments section look like a high school yearbook page.

2005-10-23T21:05:00.000-04:00

New on the playlist

I stopped listening to Belle and Sebastian about three months ago, after some of their members started making anti-Israel statements, and guess what? Haven't listened to them since, and don't really miss it.

But I've got a new obsession anyway: post-punk/"C86" music from the early 80's, bands like Orange Juice, Felt, Gang of Four, and especially Josef K. I've known some of these bands for a while, but mostly I started listening to them after an Archives Listening Project party that played some of them (thanks, ALP!). There's an energy and sparseness to it that I like, and it's not pointless and dated-sounding like some of the so-called punk greats (looking at you, Television).

2005-10-21T09:05:00.000-04:00

Friday fun link

"Everything Sounds Like Coldplay Now" - the video!

Of course, those guys stole it from Radiohead. But I guess the student has become the master.

Performed by Mitch Benn, who seems like Britain's answer to Weird Al.