Well, we’ve spent far too much time lately dwelling on trivialities. Time for some serious news: Snake Dies of Silicone Poisoning After Biting Model’s Fake Breast With video! Here. (Have to file this one under “Shameless Filler”, I think…)
Today, 3/14, is Pi Day. What we really ought to celebrate, however, is Tau Day. The delightfully engaging vlogress and “recreational mathemusician” Vi Hart explains why, here. And for all the details, have a look here.
A reader has emailed me to take me to task for the title of my previous post. The note began: To me, G_d is synonymous with the Explanation for Everything; for you, He is an angry, immature old man. I responded: Just to set the record straight, to me God is not “an angry, immature […]
March 13, 2011 – 10:24 pm
I’ve wanted to post something about the horror in Japan, but everything I’ve begun to write has seemed so trivial, so trite, next to the awful reality. Nothing I can say, or even imagine, from the safety and comfort of my home here in New York can gain any traction on what that reality must […]
With a tip of the hat to David Duff — nay, for this one a low, sweeping bow, with a scrape and a fawning obeisance — I introduce you to Private Frazer, whose acquaintance I had not made myself until just the other day. Here. High point: the auld empty barn.
Just discovered in the National Archives: a forgotten collection of photos of Eva Braun. Here.
This is good: Rand Paul confronts Kathleen Hogan, the Deputy Assistant Energy Secretary for Efficiency, on light bulbs, toilets, and bureaucratic busybodies.
Well, here’s an odd little story: it seems that in the little town of Ilulissat, Greenland (69° 13′ N) the Sun, which rises exactly once a year, did so two days early this time around. This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen; if there’s one thing you are supposed to be able to count […]
As you may have heard, things are changing rapidly in the Middle East. Libya is in flames, Egypt staggers uneasily under military rule, and throughout the region political structures of enduring stability now creak and totter as the ground trembles beneath them. Meanwhile, the U.S. position is shifting too: we are soon to withdraw from […]
I’m working late tonight, with no time for writing. So I’ll just pass along this shocking item: Racial Identity Tied to Happiness, Study Finds Here.
On the commercial street near my house, there’s a comic-book store, and as I walked by it today they had a big picture of Superman on display. It looked something like this: It seemed to me that the Man of Steel was looking even more buff than ever, certainly way more so than when I […]
In the hugely popular sci-fi video game Halo, humans do battle with something called the Flood — a disgusting parasitic fungus that takes over the bodies of its victims, converting them into mutilated zombie soldiers. When that happens to one of our boys, the result looks like this: According to Wikipedia’s account of the Halo […]
As long as we’re on the subject, here’s a little mission statement that’s been making the rounds today.
Lawrence Auster brings to our attention an article, published by the National Association of Scholars, about a Christian student’s experiences in the Islamic Studies department at the Hartford Seminary (which is, by the way, the oldest Islamic Studies department in America). The Seminary represents itself as a secular institution dedicated to interfaith dialogue and comparative […]
With a tip of the hat to Norman Geras, here are some amazing photographs of an expedition to the lava lake in Africa’s Nyiragongo Crater.
All over the Middle East and the Maghreb, freedom-loving people are shrugging off the yoke of tyranny. Soon the world will be a far better place, as the entire region emerges from a tenebrous netherworld of medieval despotism into the broad, sunlit uplands of representative government and post-Enlightenment liberal society. Everywhere you look, the yearning […]
I’ve been reading Here, There, and Everywhere, a memoir by the Beatles’ recording engineer Geoff Emerick, and enjoying it no end. Though Mr. Emerick’s name may not be familiar to the public at large, it’s a very different matter for those of us in the recording studio’s hermetic brotherhood; in our little pantheon, he is […]
February 28, 2011 – 10:52 pm
Back in Gotham, but too pooped to post. Will resume shortly.
February 24, 2011 – 10:53 pm
The lovely Nina and I will be on the road for a couple of days — off to southern CA to pay my dear old Dad a visit on his 85th birthday. Might be quiet here till we get back, early next week.
February 23, 2011 – 11:49 am
Lawrence Auster asks: “Is some kind of intensification of the world going on? At the very moment that uprisings are proceeding in several Muslim countries simultaneously, uprisings are proceeding in several states of the United States simultaneously.” Yes, some kind of intensification of the world is going on, and I think we can find an […]
February 22, 2011 – 10:40 pm
Well, it’s hard to feel cheery tonight, I have to say. Muammar Qaddafi, pausing on his way to martyrdom, is strafing his people, and blowing up oil pipelines. It is becoming clearer every day that the wave of “freedom” sweeping the Arab world is a disaster in the making. Europe watches aghast, bracing itself for […]
February 21, 2011 – 11:48 pm
If you haven’t heard, the University of Arizona will announce on Monday the establishment of a new alma mater, to be called the Institute for Civil Discourse. The effort to institutionalize its important new curriculum — which will target militaristic metaphors, contumacious dissent-mongering, and other unseemly manifestations of political faction — was triggered by the […]
February 20, 2011 – 11:51 pm
We’re back from our little retreat. Over the transom while we were en route: First, a tireless and Argus-eyed reader has noticed an item at Iran’s Press TV website reporting that Muammar Qaddafi (or however we’re supposed to spell that moniker of his; I never seem to see it the same way twice) has left […]
February 19, 2011 – 2:16 pm
I’ve been “offline” for a couple of days — avoiding the computer and the news media — but plenty has been happening. If you’ve been waiting for the Muslim Brotherhood to extend its hand in Egypt, wait no longer. The Ikwhan’s éminence grise and foremost theoretician Yusuf Qaradawi — the one who explained to the […]
February 17, 2011 – 6:02 pm
After a very busy spell we’re traveling tonight, and things might be quiet here for a couple of days (though you never know). But for now, here’s a gruesome item about the Tunisian uprising, with an odd twist: a mysterious blonde sniper.
February 16, 2011 – 9:15 pm
How one thing leads to another! With my glory days as a globe-trotting big-shot recording engineer behind me (for now at least), I earn my daily crust in a small cubicle in midtown Manhattan, writing C++ code for a medium-sized global corporation. It is now 9:15 P.M., and as is so often the case, I […]
February 15, 2011 – 8:39 pm
We’ve heard a lot for quite a while now about America’s stubborn Achievement Gaps. The stubbornest and most notorious of these is the gap between the races in primary-school education (as mentioned again in yesterday’s Times, where it is fully explained), but another lingering blot on our escutcheon has been the scandalous underrepresentation of women […]
February 14, 2011 – 11:03 pm
Well, I realize that I’m probably the only person outside of Pyongyang who didn’t already know about this website, but my son just introduced me to the Perry Bible Fellowship. My first click of the ‘Random’ link brought me to this, and I was stuck for the next hour or so.
February 14, 2011 – 10:23 pm
I wonder how many of you this happens to: I see a headline like “Clinton To Announce New Special Envoy To Afghanistan And Pakistan“, and the Clinton that comes to mind is that taller one, the one who doesn’t really even have a job any more. I have a feeling that doesn’t just happen to […]
February 14, 2011 – 12:09 am
The website spaceweather.com has been offering some amazing solar images lately. Here’s a good one: a video clip of a gigantic plasma ejection.
February 12, 2011 – 12:11 pm
From Stephen Fry, by way of David Duff: A girl goes into a bar and asks for an example of double entendre, so the barman gives her one.
February 11, 2011 – 12:58 pm
The latest from STRATFOR: Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman delivered the following statement Feb. 11: “In the name of God the merciful, the compassionate, citizens, during these very difficult circumstances Egypt is going through, President Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down from the office of president of the republic and has charged the high […]
February 10, 2011 – 5:08 pm
“Hosni, old boy, it’s time you made your farewell address to the Egyptian people.” “Why? Where are they going?”
February 10, 2011 – 12:36 pm
As you’ve probably heard by now, our second-term upstate Congressman, Republican Christopher Lee of New York’s western 6th District, has resigned after having been exposed, quite literally, by a woman to whom he had sent a half-naked picture of himself by way of Craigslist. (Mr. Lee is married, with a young child.) Booth Tarkington said […]
February 9, 2011 – 8:35 pm
I’m swamped again at work, with no time to write. So for this evening, just a provocative little tid-bit. I had coffee very briefly today with my friend Salim Ismail, a remarkable fellow who was most recently the director of the Singularity University. I don’t get to see Salim very often, because he is always […]
February 7, 2011 – 11:57 pm
In the comment thread of our previous post, we’ve been looking at Sam Harris’s claim that there can be a prescriptive natural science of human morality, one that uncovers objective normative truths. This would rebut, it seems, the idea that there are no “oughts” in nature. People do want there to be absolute moral truths, […]
February 6, 2011 – 6:06 pm
A while back I noted that Sam Harris has a new book out (The Moral Landscape), in which he argues that it is possible to develop an objective, entirely naturalistic science of human morality that would be not just descriptive, but prescriptive as well. From a philosophical perspective this is a hugely audacious assertion, because […]
February 6, 2011 – 4:46 pm
While I was in our local upscale grocery-market today, an amazing little vegetable caught my eye. It was something called “Romanesco” broccoli (Brassica romanesco, as it turns out), and it is one of the most beautiful natural fractals I’ve ever seen. Smitten, I bought one, and when I got it home I snapped a couple […]
February 4, 2011 – 9:58 pm
What’s your favorite color? Mine are the darker blues and greens; best of all are the deep and aqueous tones in between. The blues and greens are horizontal, and patient, and extended in time, like the sea and the sky and forest; the reds and yellows and oranges are vertical, and call us to the […]
February 3, 2011 – 4:50 pm
I’m chastened; things are worse than I thought. It seems Paul Krugman, Sherrif Dupnik, et al. were right after all: there really is a lot of racist, violent, over-the-top, “eliminationist” rhetoric out there. At a political rally deep in the Southwest, a cameraman has captured on video chilling footage of this vitriolic, inflammatory hate-speech: people […]
February 3, 2011 – 11:00 am
Amongst all the turmoil in the Mideast, some good news: Lars Hedegaard has been acquitted — on a technicality, but we’ll take it. He published this statement at the website of the International Free Press Society: As my ancient forefathers, the Vikings, would have said: It is always good to fight. It is better to […]
February 2, 2011 – 9:45 pm
Oh my. Here’s the Tera Patrick of fiscal conservatism, steaming up the lens again. Republicans concerned about the Presidential field will want to watch this in private.
February 1, 2011 – 10:59 pm
Allan Sherman, Dean Martin, and Vic Damone. A previous age of the world.
February 1, 2011 – 5:33 pm
A hat tip to Lawrence Auster for bringing to our attention an excellent article by Caroline Glick on the strange-bedfellow convergence of rose-bespectacled, democracy-exporting conservatives and West-loathing, Howard-Zinn-style leftists in cheering on the uprising in Egypt. Both viewpoints, argues Ms. Glick, are animated by narcissism about the West, though of very different kinds: the democracy-evangelists […]
February 1, 2011 – 2:33 pm
Now King Abdullah of Jordan, stalling for time while he makes his arrangements, has dismissed his cabinet. Meanwhile, in Egypt, Mubarak no longer has the support of the Egyptian Army, and is presumably wrapping up the last of his official duties: emptying the vaults of the national treasury into a waiting aircraft.
February 1, 2011 – 1:15 am
Things are just so terribly unfair, so pitilessly unequal in this awful society that some days it’s all I can do not to retire to the attic with a notepad and a length of stout rope. Today’s Times brings to our attention yet another clamant injustice: egregious gender inequality at Wikipedia, where it turns out […]
January 31, 2011 – 5:33 pm
Federal judge Roger Vinson, of the Northern District of Florida. has ruled that the entire “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”, a.k.a. Obamacare, is unconstitutional. I’ve only just had a quick look at the ruling, but it appears that the reasoning goes like this: The individual mandate — the part of the law that compels […]
January 31, 2011 – 10:19 am
I’ve just been told that Pakistan has suddenly shut off electronic communications. That would not be a good sign, especially in light of this. For confirmation, so far all I’ve found is this item, which suggests that the issue is more specific — though I’d be inclined to think that’s just smoke. Oh, and there’s […]
January 29, 2011 – 11:53 pm
Over the transom comes a link to an analysis of the Egyptian situation by foreign-policy analyst Barry Rubin. Some salient excerpts: There is no good policy for the United States regarding the uprising in Egypt. …There is no organized moderate group in Egypt. Even the most important past such organization, the Kifaya movement, has already […]
January 28, 2011 – 10:50 pm
Here’s something I wonder about: what is this mayhem in the Middle East going to do to the world’s economic markets? In particular, if trouble breaks out between Israel and Iran over Israel’s tightening encirclement, and the Strait of Hormuz — through which a very significant portion of the world’s seaborne oil must pass — […]