Sporcle has a lot of fun quizzes, but my favorite is Countries of the World. After you start the game, you have 15 minutes to type in the English names of all of the internationally recognized states in the world. Not only do you have to actually know them and be able to recall them just by looking at the political boundaries on the map, you have to type pretty quickly to get them all.

A while back, I (well, the wife and I) used this game to try to learn all of the countries. We did pretty... [More]

Reading this article, This Is Your Brain. Aging. by Sharon Begley (Newsweek), reminded me of some notes I scribbled down and never posted, because I was actually doing something else at the time.

Does our capacity for learning grow or shrink as we age? Some things seem easier to grasp with distance: E.g. in school certain concepts just needed to be learned, but didn’t necessarily fit in with anything else—with age, these concepts are more evidently revolutionary. The light is a wave/particle experiment, for example.... [More]

There are a few (relatively) popular sites that do not even attempt to provide unique page titles for article pages. For example, Glenn Greenwald’s blog on Salon.com or 3QuarksDaily both use the same title for all pages.

This is a huge pain in the neck if you have multiple pages from those sites open in a browser. It would be much more useful (for bookmarking, etc.) if the page title included the title of the primary content on the page.

For example, instead of simply using

Glenn Greenwald... [More]

Here’s the cover of a recent issue of the Weekly Standard. Though it’s possible that they were being highly ironic, it’s highly unlikely.

The Weekly Standard is not alone in promulgating this propaganda. It is the standard story that the U.S. military is on the point of collapse not because it is too large or used too often, but because the “liberals” are trying to strangle it in its crib. The poor, benighted thing barely stands a chance at survival if the American people don’t rise up and... [More]

The Gulf of Mexico fills with oil. This disaster is short-term insoluble, even for highly-advanced, 21st-century, western nations. Medium- to long-term, there is likely to be a solution. There always is. The cleanup process will be long and painstaking, but it will be out-of-sight for most people. Once the problem is solved and years have passed, the shortness of human memory will serve to help us forget what happened—and to be surprised the next time it happens.

Petroleum is intrinsic to... [More]

I missed the second half of this game because I was watching the Tour de Suisse racing through my home town. In catching up on the news, I discovered the the U.S. had been robbed of a game-winning goal! Or so Facebook and Reddit told me. A search for videos on YouTube turned up several links to videos showing the goal in question: the play was not offsides and no U.S. player committed a foul (to the contrary, it was the Slovenians who were all over the U.S. players).

It seemed quite clear-cut:... [More]

Ah, those lovely U.S. taxes—there’s no way to avoid them, even when living abroad. You can’t even renounce citizenship in order to avoid taxes, as documented in the article, Expatriation Tax. Even if you’re no longer a U.S. citizen, the U.S. reserves the right to require you to pay U.S. taxes if you’re either (A) in non-compliance with filing rules or (B) you’re rich (in which case, you probably won’t be paying anything significant, like other rich Americans). I’m not sure how this is... [More]

Portions of this discussion are taken from a discussion I had on Facebook.

Joe Legal vs. José Illegal

This comparison of Joe Legal vs. José Illegal (Snopes.com) reaches its conclusion by employing both straw-man reasoning (knocking down an exaggerated, drastically simplified or superficial version of a premise and then claiming to have refuted the original) and a pretty cavalier attitude toward fact (e.g. undocumented workers are not eligible for welfare; their American children, on the other hand,... [More]

The reason that so many people believe unquestioningly that the Israeli attack on the cargo flotilla was completely justified is that these people really and truly believe that there were terrorists on board. It’s hard for those who know that the boats were mostly filled with humanitarians, activists, foodstuffs and cement to imagine how people could really and truly believe that their main mission was to deliver missiles and suicide bombers. It’s faith, pure and simple; those that don’t doubt... [More]

In Switzerland, you can now watch the world cup live online in three different languages (German, French and Italian). It’s very good quality and easily good enough to watch the match. Compared to 4 years ago, it’s absolutely incredible. With a 5MBit connection at the office, we can easily spare some bandwidth to pull down the live stream and stay up-to-date as we work.

Apparently, we’re not alone in doing so.

This afternoon, during the Netherlands – Denmark match, we couldn’t log on to... [More]

Two recent events have elicited reactions from participants

Pat Buchanan on the Flotilla Attack

The recent Israeli attack on the the Hamas military resupply flotilla (as it must surely be called in U.S. media) forced Patrick Buchanan (Wikipedia)—perhaps most famous for having such stridently and racist nationalistic views that the fact that so many Florida Jews voted for him was cited as proof that something was rotten in Florida in the 2000 presidential election—to write the article, Lift the Siege... [More] (Antiwar.com)

Unfortunately, this isn’t the easiest question to answer. There are those out there who would naively declare that it’s never OK to kill someone are just showing the gross inexperience in thinking in an ethically constructive way. These people are also most likely anti-Semites. The article, This Says It All by Justin Raimondo (Antiwar.com), gets us started.

“Vice President Joe “Loose Cannon” Biden, […] when asked about the attack on the flotilla, said: “So what’s the big deal here?” […] At the time he said it, the odds... [More]”

Why Iran? Why, why, why are we hammering on Iran again? Which countries have they attacked? Which countries have they threatened? And don’t say Israel, because that little tidbit is a mistranslation bordering on a lie. The NIE has, for the second time in a decade, come out and conclusively said that Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons. This despite the fact that doing this is pretty much career suicide for all involved in the report. Iran just sealed a deal to deposit about half of its already... [More]

From the article This column will change your life by Oliver Burkeman (The Guardian):

“[…] when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won’t think it’s rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no. Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who’s assuming you might decline. If you’re a Guesser, you’ll hear it as an expectation. This is a spectrum,... [More]”

After a relatively long dry spell of more toned-down blog entries, Krugman finally sinks his teeth into his opponents again, while at the same time pointing out an interesting concept, the anti–straw-man.

“[T]he construction of anti–straw-men: […] attributing to your intellectual opponents sophisticated, reasonable positions they do not in fact hold, ignoring the nonsense they actually espouse. […] both the OECD and Rajan are calling not just for fiscal austerity but for raising interest... [More]”

The article, My Brother Faces a Lifetime of Solitary Confinement on a Spurious Terror Conviction by Mariam Abu-Ali (AlterNet), tells of a young student’s life in an American super-max prison in Colorado. He spent two years in a Saudi Prison, a stay during which a confession was extracted using torture. His stay in the U.S. is hardly better, where he’s

“[…] under 23-hour lockdown, in a 7x12 cell. He has one recreational hour in which he must get strip-searched if he wishes to leave his cell. He gets one unscheduled... [More]”

Item the First: Search Bug

For the last couple of months, it has been impossible to search earthli in any of the applications (news, albums, recipes). This bug has been fixed as of today and searching should work as expected.

Item the Second: Styling of Citations

The default theme on earthli no longer uses a dark red color to indicate that a particular piece of text is a citation. Long time readers have doubtless become quite accustomed to picking out citations by color, and it is hoped that... [More]

I got this question recently in a mail:

“From my quick understanding I don’t see why it’s a big deal to ask the immigration status of someone that has potentially broken the law?”

The main reason that it would be a big deal[1] is that it violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. (Wikipedia)

Here’s the text of amendment:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no... [More]”

Despite the worst economy since the Great Depression and the clear failure of all of the policy tenets of the last three decades, economics and financial reporting has continued largely unchanged. It does not provide context or information that would help people understand why their wages are low, why their houses are underwater (worth less than they still have to pay for them) or why they can’t find jobs. Instead, it continues to generate vast amounts of propaganda designed to continue... [More]

In an effort to continue improving my German, I read the book mentioned in the title, which is a rollicking guide to the finicky nuance of the German language. A few years back, I read Eat, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, which effects a similar service for the English language. Another absolutely wonderful essay on the issue of usage and grammar is Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the wars over usage by David Foster Wallace (a few citations of which are documented on earthli News),... [More]

This was found as a comment on a Photo Essay of Vietnam (Big Picture Blog), which included photos from the war 35 years ago. It was one of the few thoughtful comments on a page full of jingoist fools defending the notion of America’s essential goodness and the necessity of war in the face of all historical fact.

Season 14, episodes 5 (#200 overall) and 6 (#201 overall) have been pulled by Comedy Central because of vieled death threats made by proprietors of a purportedly Islamic web site. The site—called RevolutionMuslim.com[1]—supposedly peddles Osama bin Laden support and celebrates 9–11. It’s hard to tell because they’re down right now and showing no signs of coming back up anytime soon. The proprietors of the site live in New York City and claim to be devout Muslims, though they are more likely... [More]

According to the official documentation, the sealed keyword in C# serves the following dual purpose:

“When applied to a class, the sealed modifier prevents other classes from inheriting from it. […] You can also use the sealed modifier on a method or property that overrides a virtual method or property in a base class. This enables you to allow classes to derive from your class and prevent them from overriding specific virtual methods or properties.”

Each inheritable class and overridable... [More]

Howling at the Muslim MoonJust one day after writing the article, Terror Kabuki, the cartoon to the right show up, almost as if on cue. The question mark is the coward’s shield, protecting the cartoonist from actually putting the statement in print that he doesn’t think the Times Square bomber was acting alone. That, in fact, he sees it as just another skirmish in the battle against Islam itself—as evidenced by the crescent moon and star.

That’s quite a stretch, though, isn’t it? The guy they arrested is the bomber?... [More]

Obama did his second White House Correspondents’ Dinner, as covered in the article, Did You Hear the Joke About the Predator Drone That Bombed? by Medea Benjamin and Nancy Moncias (AlterNet) One joke apparently stood out as out of line—as out-of-line as Bush’s jokes about not being able to find WMDs.

“‘Jonas Brothers are here, they’re out there somewhere,‘ President Obama quipped as he looked out at the packed room. Then he furrowed his brow, pretending to send a stern message to the pop band. ‘Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys,... [More]”

The American media machine is truly something to behold. On Saturday, there was a “bomb” in Times Square—bomb in quotes because the incident actually involved potentially combustible materials put together so ineptly that only smoke was (or could have ever been) produced. All qualified observers (including NYC police commissioners and mayor Bloomberg) deemed the would/be bomber laughably incompetent. Though his intent was undoubtedly malicious, his skills were so thoroughly lacking as to... [More]