The article, What Do States Owe The Exonerated? (Plastic), poses an interesting question. Almost everyone will have a knee-jerk reaction to it—evincing either a gut feeling that an exonerated prisoner is an innocent man and therefore has been treated unfairly by society or a kneejerk reaction that anyone who the courts saw fit to send to jail must be guilty in one way or another. There are those who view every exoneration as the result of a sly criminal’s—and a liberal lawyer’s—machinations of our... [More]

The annual chance for Europeans to embarass themselves in a no-holds-barred music contest finished up on Saturday evening. Ukraine and France were clearly having the most fun, with France entering a band singing French in a horrible British accent and English in a horrible French accent while a very bald guy ran around with a stuffed cat attached to his neck. The Ukraine was led by a transvestite in mirrored silver with awesome Boogie Nights sunglasses who sang in several languages—though... [More]

Soldiers involved in America’s imperial maneuvers throughout the world have the heretofore unknown privilege of making their voices heard in real-time on the Internet. Their blogs are in a variety of styles, covering a variety of topics, revealing both remarkable sensitivity and ignorance for that which is not American. There is naturally a lot of filtering going on—this is, after all, the US empire’s military—but some really good stuff does get through. On Being Home by SGT Derek McGee (The Sandbox) is the most recent... [More]

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at the ripe old age of 85. Despite explicitly asking for the following epitaph, “the only proof he needed for the existence of God was music”, bloggers around the Internet are tossing around his catchphrase, “and so it goes…”, ad nauseum instead. He made the request in his most recent book, a slim volume of thoughts he published after returning from retirement in a fit of pure frustration at the way the Bush administration was sullying America and doing such a crass,... [More]

As reported in I think therefore I am, I think by Stephen Cave (Financial Times), there are reports of repeatable experiments, which have the potential to obviate vast swaths of philosophical hypothesis and religious theory: science has its hands wrapped around free will’s throat and is starting to squeeze.

I Made You Read This

First, there’s the experiment by “American neuroscientist Benjamin Libet”, in which he tested brain activity of participants as they were performing various activities. Participants swore up and down... [More]

The term in the title stems from two movies released in the 80s, The Decline of Western Civilization (IMDb) and The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (IMDb), which documented the world of punk rock and heavy metal, respectively. With metal and punk safely behind us, there are now much more insidious cancers eating away at the fabric of our society. One of the more prevalent, Local TV News, is discussed in Things That Still Exist But Shouldn’t by Amelie Gillete (AVClub). The article covers a few things, but leads... [More]

This guy breaks down Mankiew’s principles of economics into terms we can all understand (though the original list isn’t what you would call earth-shattering either).

“Let’s begin by separating them into the first seven principles, which are microeconomics, and the last three, which are macroeconomics. The difference, of course, being that microeconomists are economists that are wrong about specific things, and macroeconomists, who are wrong about things in general.”

Principles of economics, translated by Yoram Bauman in 02/16/07 (YouTube)

The Onion has staked a claim in the world of news reporting: to report that which never happened, and likely never could have, but in a manner that suggests that it did. For the most part, the intended humor is relatively transparent, making it easy to laugh along as the author gets increasingly outrageous. It’s funny because it’s sometimes hard to discern articles from the Onion from the human interest pieces in what are considered mainstream news sources.

The “Politics” section necessarily... [More]

People’s interactions with each other online and how the web affects what kind of content they create is the subject of this short film by an anthropology professor. It’s got a nice soundtrack and the animation and transitions are really well-done. It takes the viewer visually through HTML content creation and the transition to XML and newsfeed creation through creation of videos and social bookmarking sites for organization to mashups of any kind of data.

“Digital text is different … more... [More]”

Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents by Michael Dirda (Washington Post) is a review of the book with the same name, by Robert Irwin. The review starts with a movie-trailer–worthy introduction of “Thirty years after Edward Said’s groundbreaking “Orientalism,” a British scholar responds.” This gives the reader the impression that Said’s book from the seventies had, to date, enjoyed an unchallenged status in the world of cultural history—a status the brave author of the book being reviewed finally had the temerity... [More]

The opinion piece, Why I hate vegetarians, is a typical example of hating the cause because of its proponents. The author doesn’t counter any arguments of vegetarianism—she simply claims its ok to eat meat because some vegetarians are so damned “smug and superior”. A lovely bit of deductive reasoning akin to taking up smoking because there are non-smokers who are annoying.

“People should be allowed to make their own choices and not be bullied or frightened into giving up meat. In the US... [More]”

Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert comic strip and several books, including the interesting God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment (Amazon) and increasingly bitter Dilbert collections, like When Did Ignorance Become A Point Of View? (Amazon) has a blog as well and updates with ferocious regularity, almost always with a unique idea that usually freewheels into a thought experiment. Some work, some don’t.

A recent theme was free will.

The Little Robot That Could by Scott Adams

In this one he posits a robot, whose job it is to... [More]

Giant Carnivorous Centipedes tells you all can probably stand to know about “Scolopendra gigantea, a venomous, red-maroon centipede with forty-six yellow-tinted legs”, which reach “lengths of over thirty-five centimeters” (almost 14 inches). They’re carnivores, but beasts of this size (lovingly described as a bitter repast themselves in Papillon by Henri Charriere (Amazon)) must necessarily seek larger prey than mere beetles and spiders.

“In an environment completely devoid of light, the centipede scurries across the damp... [More]”

Threat to CivilizationThe War on Christmas has begun. The opening salvo of 2006 is brought to you by this article, Woman faces fines for wreath peace sign (Yahoo News), which brings us the sad tale of Lisa Jensen, who was lying her face off when “said she wasn’t thinking of the war when she hung the wreath” (pictured left). Her arch fiend—and the enemy of a peaceful Christmas—Bob Kearns, said in a phone interview that he couldn’t allow it because it would pave the way for other forms of expression, like saying we should “drop... [More]”

Straight Outta LynwoodIt seems that the world, through the Internet, has finally developed a place where Weird Al Yankovic’s special genius can shine. A truly talented performer is becoming more mainstream than he ever was. And his new stuff is just as good as he’s ever been, from the free song download done in the style of “Save the World” charity songs from the 80s, Don’t Download this Song (video drawn by Bill Plimpton and also available for free online at his MySpace page) to the brutal parody of James Blunt... [More]

The recent Mark Foley scandal in the US dragged the issue of pedophilia back into the limelight. It’s an issue that has increasingly gripped public fears, resulting in medieval public registration programs and increasingly inflexible laws. By simply reading the mainstream media, one would think that child predators lurk around every corner and it’s only a matter of time before every child is preyed upon.

Hurting the Innocent

As irrational fears go, it ranks up there with the fear of... [More]

For the longest time, pop psychology has taught us that “rape is about power, not sex.” That rape was purely an expression of power was received truth, though it didn’t sit well with anyone who’d experienced the powerful effects of libido. It was hard to imagine that rape would have nothing to do with that; it seemed more logical that different personalities responded differently to this drive. Because of the nature of most pornography—and it’s distinctly male-dominant/women-subservient... [More]

The comic strip Doonesbury has weighed in heavily on the second Gulf War, stationing one of its main characters, BD, there and having him sent home after his leg was blown off in an attack. His friend, Ray, is still there. Recently, The Sandbox has appeared on the Doonesbury web site, which, in its own words:

“…[is focused] not on policy and partisanship … but on the unclassified details of deployment – the everyday, the extraordinary, the wonderful, the messed-up, the absurd. The Sandbox... [More]”

Borat In KazakhstanBorat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (IMDB) is—as the title makes relatively clear—a fake documentary by Sacha Cohen. The preview shows Cohen as Borat Sagdiyev, wandering from one excruciatingly socially awkward situation to the next, all the while with an ingratiating grin on his face that begs forgiveness for not understanding our great culture while, at the same time, apologizing for the backwardness of his own. In a word, he’s disarming—enough... [More]

Kenny’s wife is jumping for joy right now. Since he died before going to trial, the judge in the case was forced to accede “to decades of legal precedent” and wipe all 10 criminal charges from his record. Judge Revokes Lay’s Conviction (Washington Post) has the gory details.

“Legal analysts said Lake’s ruling closely hewed to a long-held doctrine called abatement, which allows a conviction to be vacated if defendants die before they are able to exercise their right to appeal. Courts typically rule that defendants’... [More]”

The movie below is called Imperial History (1.1MB) and documents the occupation of the Middle East, Asia and northern Africa over the last 5000 years.

The following empires ruled over smaller and larger swatches of land throughout recorded history. The dates given are approximate and estimated from the movie. The names and ordering are correct. And, yes, there is overlap: that’s kind of the way it with empires.

• Kingdom of Egypt (3000 BC − 1380 BC)
• Hittite Empire (1400 BC -1050 BC)
• Kingdom... [More]

This essay is written as a response to the CPU giveaway by Wil Shipley (Call Me Fishmeal).

I double-click the GTA: San Andreas icon and watch, relieved, as the Windows desktop fades to black.

*Churn*

The intro graphic’s looking a little pink.

Drat. The font’s messed up.

*Restart game*

Again with the pink logo, but the font’s ok. Let’s load up a saved game and do some driving. Funky music accompanies the fade from the loading screen to Carl’s back. A quick look around confirms that Carl was taking some serious psychadelics... [More]

Imagining the Tenth Dimension is a web-site dedicated to the book of the same name by Rob Bryanton. With a resounding recommendation by none other than Greg Bear, this book explores a universe of ten dimensions, as put forth in string theory. The preamble contains the following disclaimer text:

“The “theory of reality” that I advance on this website and in the book “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” is not the one that is commonly accepted by today’s physicists. Anyone wanting to know more about... [More]”

One Year Performances is a website dedicated the performance art work of Tehching Hsieh, who, during the late 70s and early 80s, did some simple, elegant pieces that tested the limits of human endurance. Each piece has a simple rule, by which he lived for one year.[1]

This Flash video, Oreos by Ben Cohen (TrueMajority), uses dessert to focus your attention on the ridiculous numbers in the US federal budget. The first illustration (below) shows the size of the military budget as compared to the sizes of other portions of the federal budget. On the one hand, he’s conveniently left off Social Security and Medicare (the two biggest non-military programs in the federal budget), but on the other, he’s only included the official Pentagon budget, which does not include Homeland Security’s... [More]

The Bible is Bullshit is a video of an old Penn and Teller show[1] in which they spend some time gleefully debunking some of the more obvious contradictions in the bible. They actually provide a lot of decent historical background from the annals of biblical scholarship, which basically accepts that the bible is a work of man and has made some inroads into discovering exactly which men wrote which parts and when.

The biblical scholar they interview is completely incapable of formulating an... [More]

Biggest. Fireworks. Ever.

The shuttle program is 25 years old now and, ever since the 2003 crash of the Columbia, which was caused by pieces falling off, has had a much more touch-and-go feel to it—which is certainly attractive to NASCAR fans nationwide. As noted in the article, Shuttle fears over foam lost in blast-off (Telegraph.co.uk), the liftoff was not error-free, but the problems were well within expectations:

“‘This isn’t too abnormal,‘ said Bill Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for spaceflight. ‘We fully expected to... [More]”

Map of World ReligionsWadsworth Religion Course Guide Religion Maps offers a colorful look at geographic distribution of world religions and religious sites in both the ancient and modern worlds. Leaving out religion is the Contemporary World Map, which shows all of those countries from the World Cup that no one could find. Note that the inside of Africa’s elbow seems to be especially conducive to football, as the Ivory Coast, Ghana and Togo are all neighbors there. Most interesting is the map shown in thumbnail to... [More]

An event with the lasting effect of the 9/11 attack was bound to spawn any number of conspiracy theories. The are thousands of web sites dedicated to poring over any material related to the attacks in excruciating detail. Most of the media is happy to accept the cleansed version offered by the government, which streamlined its message to maximize impact and effectiveness in using 9/11 as a cudgel with which to whip the American people into a savage frenzy. The reality is almost certainly much... [More]

The gap left by Dan Brown’s writer’s block needs to be filled by something as you lie on a beach this summer. There are only so many different versions of Digital Fortress under various names and publishers you’re going to read until you notice that they’re all the same book and that he hasn’t magically written a new novel you haven’t heard about. In steps Playboy with its 25 sexiest novels ever written, which is chock full of books to take the beach with friends and family. It’s a pretty... [More]