Here’s an equation that, when graphed, draws itself.
Our brain hurts.
From the “Questionable Products” Department
Here’s two things we’re pretty sure we don’t need:
- Pocket-sized disposable single-serving shots of liquor;
- Beer for Dogs
Carry on.
The Brits Understand: Terrorism is a crime, not war
Via BoingBoing, this quote from Sir Ken Macdonald, British director of public prosecutions:
It is critical that we understand that this new form of terrorism carries another more subtle, perhaps equally pernicious, risk. Because it might encourage a fear-driven and inappropriate response. By that I mean it can tempt us to abandon our values.
London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war.
We wouldn’t get far in promoting a civilising culture of respect for rights amongst and between citizens if we set about undermining fair trials in the simple pursuit of greater numbers of inevitably less safe convictions. On the contrary, it is obvious that the process of winning convictions ought to be in keeping with a consensual rule of law and not detached from it. Otherwise we sacrifice fundamental values critical to the maintenance of the rule of law — upon which everything else depends.
Ah, the loonie right
They’re making shit up about Barack Obama. Fortunately, CNN remembered it used to be a NEWS organization and more or less obliterated the “story” promulgated by the Moonie Times (Washington Times and Insight Magazine) organization and Fox News. (The Moonie mag Insight is still insisting their unsourced story stands despite CNN’s actual investigative coverage, and they end up looking pretty stupid because of it.)
Even better: Obama himself isn’t taking this lying down.
How to tell if your marketers are unhip
In today’s mail — the paper kind — here at Heathen World Headquarters, we received a flier for Twin Peaks Ranch, which is apparently a ritzy development in the Hill Country.
We’re wondering if every lot comes with its own Laura Palmer mystery, or do we have to share one?
Wil posts for us
In a post on coercion and hearsay, he concludes:
Bush Breaks 30
And not in a good way: his approval rating stands at 28 percent.
From comedy relief to over-arching lynchpin: R2-D2 Reconsidered
Whoa. This is at once incredibly nerdy and very well-considered.
If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels. As we now know, the rebel Alliance was founded by Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa. What can readily be deduced is that their first recruit, who soon became their top field agent, was R2-D2.
Go read it. It’s not long. (Widely linked; we got it from JWZ.)
(Patrick: Email me your response to avoid the suckery that is the heathen comment engine.)
We have hope, but only a little
Boing Boing reports that George Clooney and SciFi are making a miniseries out of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.
Please God don’t let them fuck this up.
Dept. of Turnabout, Sort Of
Years after Mil Millington’s Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About hit the web, we get Things My Boyfriend Says.
Best. Waterfall. EVAR.
Jeep wins. Check this out!
This is sort of cool and sort of weird
Running from the Camera. (Via MeFi.)
A brief description of our feelings on the Attorney General
We wouldn’t cross the street to piss on this motherfucker if he were on fire. This goatfucker just gets more and more repugnant. William Marsh Rice would spin in his goddamn grave.
Things our employer does NOT do with RFID
Dept. of Polite but Scathing Rebuttals
Anant Raut, an attorney with the white-shoe (and known Aussie-employing) firm of Weil, Gotshal, and Manges, responds to the DoD’s sniveling goatfucker Charles Stimson in Why I Defend ‘Terrorists’, an open letter running in Salon. A bit:
Mr. Stimson, I don’t defend “terrorists.” I’m representing five guys who were held or are being held in Guantánamo without ever being charged with a crime, some of them for nearly five years. Two have been quietly sent home to Saudi Arabia without an explanation or an admission of error. The only justification the U.S. government has provided for keeping the other three is the moniker “enemy combatant,” a term that has been made up solely for the purpose of denying them prisoner-of-war protection and civilian protection under the Geneva Conventions. It’s a term that was attached to them in a tribunal proceeding so inherently bogus that even the tribunal president is compelled to state on the record, in hundreds of these proceedings, that a combatant status review tribunal “is NOT a court of law, but a non-judicial administrative hearing.”
[…]
[…] the question I get asked more than any other is, “How can a place like Guantánamo continue to exist?” I think it is because we as a nation are afraid to admit we’ve done something wrong.
There is a widespread belief, as well as a need to believe, that the men we’re holding in Guantánamo must be bad people. They must have done something to end up there. They couldn’t just be, in large part, victims of circumstance, or of the fact the U.S. government was paying large bounties in poor countries for the identification and capture of people with alleged ties to terror. If the bulk of the detainees are guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time, if there’s no evidence that some of them did the things of which the government has accused them, then it would mean that we locked innocent people in a hole for five years. It would mean not only that our government wrongfully imprisoned these men but that the rest of us stood idly by as they did it. (Emph. added.) It would mean that we have learned nothing from Korematsu v. United States, that we have learned nothing from the McCarthy-era witch hunts, and that when we wake up from this national nightmare, once again we will marvel at the extremism we tolerated in defense of liberty. It would mean that even as we extol the virtues of fairness and due process abroad, we take away those very rights from people on our own soil.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” It is my belief that the true test of a nation’s commitment to liberty occurs not when it is most readily given, but rather when it is most easily taken away.
Mr. Stimson, that is why I do what I do.
Nice job.
Sort of inevitable, really
Eventually, it was a given that someone who came of age in the 70s would run for office, and that pictures like this would surface. About this, we can only say that we hope he remembers Lavon when it comes time to pick a running mate. Awwwwwww, yeah. Shut up and put your butt in the puddin’.
No-Fly List to be reviewed, at last
Of course, it’s still a profoundly stupid idea, but this is at least an improvement. Sort of. In the sense of being “marginally less stupid,” though, not “smarter.”
What DRM is for
Stop believing it’s about piracy. It’s really about forcing you to buy the same content over and over again.
AG Gonzales Hates Habeas Corpus
This dude is fucking worthless.
We’re travelling. Deal with it.
Unhappy with the posting frequency? Consider how difficult it is to post when surrounded at all times by fine, fine rum.
We’ll be up to our old tricks next week.
Paul Ford Redeems Himself
We’ve long found Ford tedious, precious, annoying, but this bit redeems just about everything. On the misuse of the phrase “guilty pleasure:”
[But] Justin Timberlake is not a guilty pleasure. Putting oven cleaner in your daughter’s Similac is a guilty pleasure, or smearing birdseed on your balls and visiting an aviary. Having a thing for Sting’s lutework —
Goddammit. As I was drafting this my web server, which resides in Texas, was hacked into by Spaniards. Spamming Spaniards, or at least someone coming in through a machine in Spain. Off I go to set up a new, clean, new device that will present more of a challenge to intruders.
Things that make us feel much better
There’s already a level 70 in the new WoW expansion.
This is precisely the same as “we don’t have a problem; Bob drinks WAAAAAY more than we do!”
Dept. of Creepying Moronism, FedEx Division
You can’t ship made-up things, apparently:
The FedEx guy then grabs cans of nitrogen (N2) and neon (Ne), with their store-advertised “purity” of 78.084 percent and 0.0018 percent respectively (which was our way of being clever about selling cans of normal air, since that’s their percentage in the atmosphere — which, of course, was our way of making more money for 826 Seattle by selling products that cost almost nothing to produce). Here’s what the atmospheric gas cans look like on the shelf:
FedEx guy: Nope. You can’t ship these either.
Me: But… they’re empty! It’s just air. And… nitrogen? It’s, like, almost 80% of the atmosphere. There’s nothing dangerous about nitrogen, even if it were pure.
FedEx guy: They look too much like bomb-making materials.
Me [going into dumbfounded mode]: Bomb… Neon? What? Is there anything here I can legally ship? How about this bottle of tap water?
I hand him a bottle of Certainty (tagline, “For when it’s preferable to think you know more”), which looks like this: [pic elided]
FedEx guy: Nope. It still looks too suspicious, too much like bomb-making materials.
Me: But it’s “Certainty.” That’s not even a thing. I just made that up. [That’s not strictly true. It’s a scientific term/idea, and we sell it alongside bottles of “Uncertainty.” But it’s like having a bottle labeled “Friendship.”]
FedEx guy: It’s just too suspicious.
[long pause]
Me [going into post-9/11, TSA-style super-dumbfounded mode]: So what you’re saying is you can’t ship any sort of containers, even if they’re empty? You know that we originally ordered these empty cans and jars from a company, and they shipped them to us.
FedEx guy: They must have used a different vendor [“vendor”? I can’t remember, some word like that, like a “service”].
Which I imagine he said because he couldn’t bring himself to say, “It’s the words that are on the containers that are dangerous” — even after I had opened them all and demonstrated the utter harmlessness/emptiness of the containers themselves.
(Via BB.)
Our kind of chef
David Chang of Momofuku Noodle Bar in NYC takes no shit from the veggie hordes:
Back before Momofuku Noodle Bar was a certified hit, before it won widespread critical acclaim, before there was a rabble of foodies parked outside its door every night at 5:30 sharp, clamoring to get in, Chang remembers receiving a phone call. “It was a lady who said she was a vegetarian,” he says, “and that she got something to go, and there was broth on the side, and she drank it.”
“I said, ‘We don’t have any vegetarian broths,’ and she said, ‘Well, you should, and anyway, somebody said it was,’ and I said, ‘Well, that must have been a miscommunication.'”
“You can’t do this to the vegetarians!” the lady bellowed, before threatening to sue Chang and put Momofuku Noodle Bar out of business.
“I got so pissed off,” says Chang.
So pissed off, in fact, that the very next day, in a public-relations gambit that would give Danny Meyer night sweats, Chang and his co-chef, Joaquin Baca, removed every vegetarian dish from the menu (back then there were still a few) except the ginger-scallion noodles. (Emph. added.)
“We added pork to just about everything else,” says Chang, giggling like a schoolgirl.
“We said, ‘Fuck it, let’s just cook what we want.‘””
Word.
More from our principled Republican leadership
The Bush Administration is purging US Attorneys who are involved in GOP corruption cases.
The “liberal media” is, of course, nowhere on this story.
How to tell if you’re a big ol’ dork
While on a business trip, you buy (a) the WoW expansion and (b) a new mouse to play it with, as you left your travel mouse at home and find playing games with the trackpad on your laptop unsatisfying.
Amusingly, in the utterly anonymous shopping center where our hotel is, there’s an EB Games. EB was sold out, unless you’d thought to pre-order the expansion at this particular podunk pissant hole-in-the-wall shop. However, around the corner there is an Apple store.
The Apple store had a shelf full. Blizzard has, for most of its history, shipped Mac and PC versions of their games on the same day, and on the same media. We expect many folks have left the EB shop disappointed with no idea they could get their jollies just 100 yards away.
Freebie or honeypot?
We post this from gate B-62A at IAH in Houston, where an open wireless access point called “co_crew_wireless” allowed us in, presumably a Continental network. We reckon either they know it’s open and don’t care, or don’t know it’s open and intend for it to be a corporate network only, or it’s someone’s attempt to sniff traffic and such for nefarious purposes.
If the latter, good luck, buddy. We do everything over SSH anyway.
Mainstream Media Picks Up Law Firm Boycott Story
The good news: the Pentagon is explicitly disavowing the statements made by Charles Stimson.
A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Brian Maka, said Stimson was not speaking for the Bush administration.
Stimson’s comments “do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the thinking of its leadership,” Maka told The Associated Press on Saturday.
Stimson’s “shameful and irresponsible” remarks deserve condemnation, said Neal Sonnett, a Miami lawyer and president of the American Judicature Society, a nonpartisan group of judges, lawyers and others.
Sonnett said in a statement that Stimson had made a “blatant attempt to intimidate lawyers and their firms who are rendering important public service in upholding the rule of law and our democratic ideals.”
Stimson on Thursday told Federal News Radio, a local commercial station that covers the government, that he found it “shocking” that lawyers at many of the nation’s top law firms represent detainees.
Stimson listed the names of more than a dozen major firms he suggested should be boycotted.
“And I think, quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms,” Stimson said.
Asked who might be paying the law firms to represent Guantanamo detainees, Stimson hinted at wrongdoing.
“It’s not clear, is it? Some will maintain that they’re doing it out of the goodness of their heart — that they’re doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are,” he said. “Others are receiving monies from who knows where and I’d be curious to have them explain that.”
What a reprehensible jackass. But he gets worse:
Stimson also described Guantanamo as “certainly, probably the most transparent and open location in the world” because of visits from more than 2,000 journalists since it opened five years ago. However, journalists are not allowed to talk to detainees on those visits, their photos are censored and their access to the base has at times been shut off entirely.
He discounted international outrage over the detention center as “small little protests around the world” that were “drummed up by Amnesty International” and inflated in importance by liberal news media outlets.
Uh, right. Our own court system disagrees, bub:
FBI agents have documented more than two dozen incidents of possible mistreatment at Guantanamo. In one, a detainee’s head was wrapped in duct tape because he chanted the Quran; in a second, a detainee pulled out his hair after hours in a sweltering room.
In a December court ruling, a federal judge in Washington decried the plight of “some of the unfortunate petitioners who have been detained for many years in the terrible conditions at Guantanamo Bay.”
The judge criticized a system in which dozens have been held without charges and cut off from the world for lack of English or knowledge about the law, leaving them no choice but to turn to a fellow prisoner with outside connections for legal help.
Since the detention center opened, the U.S. military has transferred or released about 380 detainees. Some 395 remain in the prison.
We said we were done with football, but it turns out we’re not
The Saints just ended the Philly Eagles’ season to advance to their first conference championship in the history of the team. Ever. 27-24.
Wow. Last year, the Saints went 3-13 and did not play a home game all season. Also, we just became HUGE Seattle fans.
Bush to Seniors: Drop Dead
The newly Democratically-controlled House righted a serious wrong in the much ballyhooed Medicare drug plan this week by reversing a clause explicitly preventing Medicare from negotiated with drug companies for the best price.
Yes, that’s right: the GOP bill forbid negotiation. Gee, corporate handouts, anyone?
It gets better. Under the new bill, Medicare will be required to negotiated for the best price. And, of course, Bush has threatened to veto it if it makes it to his desk. Nice one, George.
The Democratic majority may not, in and of itself, be big enough to override a veto, but it’ll only take a few defections to create such a supermajority. And even if that isn’t possible, Bush will make it abundantly clear where he and his party stand on these matters, in front of God and everybody.
Best. Lit Gag. EVAR.
Or, why the New Yorker remains the coolest magazine in the known world. From EmDashes:
Q. Is it true that at some point in the seventies, Goings On About Town used the listings for The Fantasticks to serialize James Joyce’s Ulysses?
Jon writes: Yes. The New Yorker began serializing Ulysses in the November 3, 1968 listing for The Fantasticks […]. That issue quoted the copyright information from the third printing of the novel (London, Egoist Press). The book’s opening words — “Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed” — appeared in the Dec. 21, 1968, issue. The serialization lasted almost three years, ending in November of 1971, and encompassed the entirety of the book’s first chapter. By the end, Ulysses had spread to the listings for other long-running musicals such as Hello, Dolly!, and Fiddler on the Roof. For about six months prior to serializing Joyce’s novel, the magazine had filled the Fantasticks listing with geometry (“The sum of the squares of the two other sides”), grammar (“‘I’ before ‘e,’ but not after ‘c'”), instructions for doing your taxes (“If payments [line 21] are less than tax [line 16], enter Balance Due”), and other nonsense.
In 1970, New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford explained to Time magazine that he began the serialization of Ulysses because he got bored writing the same straight capsule reviews week after week. Asked about reader response to the serialization, Botsford observed, “Many are delighted they can identify the excerpts, but others think we are trying to communicate with the Russian herring fleet in code.”
It’s true; thanks to the Complete New Yorker, we have a screenshot from the 12/21/68 issue:
Click thru for the original 2-page spread; there’s a lovely surprise on the 2nd page.
Dept. of Public Service Announcements
Mark Frauenfelder points out that 1-880-free-411 and 1-800-411-metro are free, ad-supported information lines. Stop paying your carrier, listen to a 12-second ad, and get the same info for free.
Nice tip.
We just lost. So did you.
Crap. We just lost the Game.
Like cornered rats, they are
So, the Administration keeps losing in the courts when it comes to its treatment of detainees and such, right?
Well, now they’ve turned their guns on the law firms doing the pro bono work for the detainees in an attempt to drive corporate clients away and punish them for daring to provide counsel.
That’s just plain evil. Which is, of course, pretty much par for the course with this bunch.
So right it hurts
Wil Wheaton points out what John Rogers figured out:
They search for the best way to describe a President who engages in military policy opposed by his Joint Chiefs and contradicted by his own brand-new counterinsurgency policy, who doesn’t seem to understand the difference between goals and strategy, recycles last year’s “Plan for Victory” with more troops, and is apparently hell-bent on starting a war with Iran … a man incapable of calculating risk versus reward, or even understanding that hope is not a plan …
The geeks have it cold. The rest of you just won’t get it, but —
We can’t make this shit up
According to Condi Rice, planning ahead is a bad idea. When asked what the Administration would do if its plans failed (AGAIN):
“It’s bad policy to speculate on what you’ll do if a plan fails when you’re trying to make a plan work,” Rice replied.
Jesus wept.
(Found here.)
Bush to Diabetics, etc: Drop Dead
The new Democratic Congress seems poised to revise Federal stem cell research guidelines, but Bush has vowed to veto any such changes.
Current GOP-backed rules forbid Federal funding of research using embryonic stem cells even if the donor embryos were to be destroyed anyway, as is the case with many from fertility clinics.
Because science is COOL
Some gases are sufficiently heavier than air that it is possible to trap them in a box and float”lightweight items on them. (Widely linked.)
Because math jokes are funny
We forget where we found this, but it’s been open in Firefox all week. We like it. Enjoy.
Horological Advice from the Wall Street Journal
From an article on choosing a new high-end watch:
“Do not consider scuba diving in your Patek to a madman’s undersea nuclear laboratory.”
Noted.
More More iPhone Backlash
We’re still pissed off about this. Deal with it.
First, Jobs on the iPhone:
“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”
The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.
“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”
Actually, Steve, that’s all bullshit, and in fact a small telephone/computing device is exactly what I and others want. And the whole “it won’t work if you put software on it” thing is a damned lie; I don’t recall Treo or Windows Mobile people having this problem.
Mark Pilgrim has more, as does Open the Future; the latter suggests that regardless of how wrongheaded this is, Jobs may be digging in his heels on the “no outside software” point. The Steve isn’t known for backing up when he’s been wrong, so we’re pretty sure this means the iPhone will remain a crippled, useless thing instead of what it could have been.
Great job, Steve. Fuck you.
More iPhone Backlash
Geek productivity-porn site 43Folders weighs in on the suckitude of the closed platform:
Yes I’d understand, but I’d feel like Apple was abandoning an opportunity to make this more than a phone, and more that an iPod, and even — let’s be frank about the elephant in the room — much more than a Palm or a Pocket PC. There’s the potential here for some serious George Jetson shit and it would be a pity not to capitalize on that as early as possible.
Exactly. The problem is: every Treo or Windows Mobile device can already do orders of magnitude more things than the iPhone precisely because they’re open platforms.
The last great hope for smartphone geeks was the Sidekick, which T-Mobile foolishly insisted on controlling completely. Like, there was no way to download your own apps, and T-Mobile could delete anything they liked from the phone at any time, over the cell network. It wasn’t and isn’t really yours with that kind of power imbalance. As a consequence, instead of the technorati carrying them, idiots like Paris Hilton carry them.
Apple and Cingular don’t seem to be fucking up quite that much — the iPhone will sync with your desktop, not remote servers, for example — but they’re close. Openness is paramount. It’s Freedom 0. Without it, the iPhone is useless to a significant and influential demographic.
Coolest. Thing. EVAR.
If this behind-the-scenes video is any indication, Walking With Dinosaurs will be a must-see show when it reaches the US.
Shut up. You know you wanted to.
This is what you get when you combine an aging geek with a penchant for model rocketry and a GI Joe Mercury Capsule re-issue kit.
Hawesome.
Octopi remain cooler than you
Check it out:
Today’s Best Cartoon
Well, hell: as it turns out, the iPhone sucks.
Gizmodo is reporting, and we have heard elsewhere as well, that the new Apple iPhone will be a closed system — i.e., like an iPod, not like a proper handheld smart device.
By contrast, all Treos and Windows Mobile machines have the ability to add programs from third party developers. Their usefulness is limited only by developer ingenuity and the phone’s owner. Apple, by contrast, has apparently chosen the opposite plan, where only they can decide what can run on the iPhone.
If this is true — and at this point is seems very much so — Steve was being very disingenuous when he said this thing “runs OS X.”
Laura Lemay put it this way, over on The Well:
From the further info coming out it doesn’t run Mac OSX — it runs something that looks like OSX but is actually a locked down, proprietary system similar to that of the iPod.
When us geeks hear “it runs OSX” we think we’re hearing “It’s unix, we can write apps for it and get a bash prompt.” But when Steve says “it runs OSX” he’s saying “it looks like OSX and has the same icons and interface whizzies you expect from OSX.”
Exactly.
It’s still a very nice phone, if it lives up to the hype, but $500 for a closed machine is more than Heathen will consider no matter who pays the bill. In fact, it’s overpriced by a factor of 5. There’s no chance at all of us adopting such a phone, Apple shiny-ness or no, for more than $100 if we’re limited to what Steve thinks is useful. No thanks, Apple. We’ll take another Treo and wait for someone else to do this properly.
Because Knowing is Half the Battle
The Straight Dope answers the burning question “When the zombies take over, how long till the electricity fails?”
(Yeah, it’s from 2004. It’s still great.)
Geraldo is apparently worried people might have forgotten that he’s a douchebag
So now he’s threatening to beat up Keith Olbermann. This is just fantastic:
Apparently Geraldo was visiting with 104.1 FM’s Monsters just before Christmas, when they asked him about the time he made international headline for disclosing too much information about troops in Iraq. Geraldo claimed the incident was blown out of proportion, largely by NBC — and specifically Olbermann. Geraldo then began mumbling semi-audible names, seemingly meant to describe Olbermann: “midget … punk … slimeball.”
But then, with the Monsters helpful prodding, Geraldo went a step further, leaving no doubt about what he was saying. He called Olbermann a coward — specifically a “[female part of the anatomy] who wouldn’t walk across the street against the red light.”
He then said he was ready to fight him, saying: “I would make a pizza out of him.”
Oh, and before leaving the topic, Geraldo offered an example of a TV talker who’s a “real man” … that would apparently be Montel Williams.
No word yet on whether Olbermann even knows Geraldo called him out. (Maybe we’ll see.)
UPDATE 1/9: Yes, Olbermann does know now. On his MSNBC show last night, he cited this blog and then recounted the story. He said the “midget” remark confused him, claiming: “I’m about 7 inches taller than he is.” And after describing Geraldo’s desire to fight him, he said: “Geraldo, you should not give me a hard time. I can still remember when you were a big deal … back when I was a kid.”
