Dear Gadget Brain Trust…

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…. last night our 8-year-old rear-projection TV developed a very ugly convergence problem that renders it essentially unwatchable, and the quotes I’m getting for repair are well in excess of what I’m willing to throw at an 8-year-old TV.

Consequently, it looks like I’m TV shopping.

My initial research suggests that LCD is probably a better fit for our room (due to the large amount of natural light; the rear-proj set was unwatchable for about 2h in the middle of the day, not normally a problem except in football season). We also like the lower energy consumption; a friend just got a (very large, very high-end) plasma, and you can feel the heat coming off of it from a foot away.

Given that we’ve tried to be careful and ended up with some Tivo-related burn-in anyway, I also like that LCD is said to be much less prone to the problem than plasma. For a while, it looked like DLP was a good idea, but those sets seem to have nearly vanished from the marketplace, so I’m gonna ignore them unless someone can tell me a good reason not to.

We’re going to try to be frugal here and not spend a fortune, so the ideal television will be:

  • Probably 42″ or 47″ (replacing 55″)
  • Will eventually go on the wall
  • 720p is fine; 1080p is nice, but I don’t know how much I really care.
  • Under $1700 or so; I don’t need to surf the ragged edge of quality here. Also, if we spend less and need to bump up in 5 years, it hurts less.
  • Obviously HDMI is key, but I’m guessing it’s hard to avoid that at this point.
  • Right now, we’re on standard def DirecTV, because we prefer the Tivo software to any of the generic DVRs. It’s possible we’ll upgrade to HD DirecTV next year, when DTV releases a Tivo-brand DVR again, but not before. (Basically, we find reliable and friendly DVR software to be a bigger value than higher resolution sitcoms.)
  • We don’t currently have a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD deck, and have no plans for one YET. An upsampling player might be on offer, but we’re not feeling the need for more expensive movies given how good regular DVD can look with a proper upconversion.

We hear good things, and see good prices, about LG. The big boys (Sony, Pioneer) are very spendy, and I’m particularly unwilling to spend on Sony given their corporate behavior. What other brands should we look hard at, or avoid?

Any input is appreciated. Thanks in advance. Comments or direct email are fine.

The Weekend of No Surprises

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All our top three managed to dispatch their opponents with varying degrees of drama. Colt and the Longhorns put a Texas-sized hurt on critical darling Mizzou; Alabama faced down in-conference rival Ole Miss despite some sloppy second half play. And PSU won, not that anyone cares.

The real news of the weekend is the reaction to the rankings, especially now that BCS is out and in play. Texas’ national credentials are worth questioning, given that the Big XII appears to have given up on the whole idea of defense (n.b. that they gave up 30+ in their win over Mizz). Frankly, despite the nostalgia factor, I hope UT hangs on so that, should Alabama win out, the big game is Tide vs. Longhorns instead of Tide vs. JoePa. Granted, I think we’d win either one…

They SAY it’s for economics, but what of his other work?

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Paul Krugman, of course, won the Nobel in economics earlier this week, and bully for him. However, Tor books points out that perhaps Krugman’s most interesting work came early in his career:

Krugman is famous for his work on the economics of international trade, but as our corporate cousins at Nature remind us, one of his early works was a pioneering examination entitled The Theory of Interstellar Trade:

Abstract: This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.

The young Krugman observed that “This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.”

(Krugman is also known as an unapologetic fan of SF.)

As it turns out, there is at least one principled and sane conservative

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Christopher Buckley, son of right-wing firebrand William F. Buckley, has endorsed Barack Obama.

Of course, he was promptly let go by his father’s magazine as a consequence.

Mr. Buckley said he did not understand the sense of betrayal that some of his conservative colleagues felt, but said that the fury and ugly comments his endorsement generated is “part of the calcification of modern discourse. It’s so angry.” Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan’s quote about the Democrats, Mr. Buckley added, “I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.”

Social Networking Weirdness

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Facebook thinks I should be friends with lots of people I don’t know, mostly because of shared friends. If five folks I know also know John Doe, it stands to reason I might know him, too. You get false positives with this approach, but that’s ok, because you also end up with renewed connections to people you haven’t seen or spoken to in years.

What’s weird is when you get strange friend intersections. Right now, there’s someone on my “you may know…” list that I do not know, but with whom I share three completely unrelated friends, at least from my perspective.

The first shared friends is someone I know from The Well, an online community I’ve been a member of for a decade or more.

The second is from my high school in Mississippi.

The third is a playwrite my wife and I hosted in Houston when she was working on a piece for a local group we volunteered with.

Bizarre.

It’s time to consider a replacement GOP VP candidate

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Roseanne Cash tosses her hat in:

In summation, I present myself to the GOP as a woman, and I repeat, woman, who has held a passport for thirty-eight years, a lip gloss-wearing soccer-volleyball-softball-gymnastics mom of five, who can carry a six-pack home to her husband like nobody’s business, whose will is firmly aligned with God’s will, a neo-natal conservative and legally savvy public figure, a border-watching, trigonometry-credited, breastfeeding, BlackBerry-tapping, cat-throwing maverick whose daughters are out of their teens, therefore immune to teenage pregnancy (although this is a private, family matter), and whose dad’s head (or an eerie facsimile) adorns a state airline.

Read the whole thing. It’s hilarious.

In which I admit to watching goofy TV

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I’ve been taken in by HBO’s True Blood, which is at least fun. Last night, however, when I watched Sunday’s episode, I found myself kind of uncomfortable with the final scenes — not because of any plot development, and not because of what Joe Bob Briggs called “aardvarking”, but because of who one of the aardvarkers was.

She’s grown up very nicely, and is (according to IMDB), a healthy 26 years old, but it still made me feel vaguely creepy to watch half-naked Anna “The Piano” Paquin in a sex scene.

Ah, TSA. Behaving exactly as expected.

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A TSA screener at Newark helped himself to thousands and thousands of dollars worth of goods, including a $47,900 camera from an HBO crew.

When investigators raided Brown’s home last week, they seized a trove of contraband, according to an affidavit signed by Thomas Adams, an agent with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General and the lead investigator on the case.

Among the items seized were 66 cameras, 31 laptop computers, 20 cell phones, 17 sets of electronic games, 13 pieces of jewelry, 12 GPS devices, 11 MP3 players, eight camera lenses, six video cameras and two DVD players, the affidavit said.

According to the affidavit, Brown confessed that he began stealing two to three items per week from the airport beginning in September 2007. He told authorities he put most of the stolen items up for sale on eBay, it said.

One more reason why Blizzard is made of Win

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Blizzard Entertainment is the powerhouse game developer behind some of the biggest and best hits in computer gaming. With competitor Westwood (who did the Command & Conquer series), Blizz essentially owned the real-time strategy game market with its seminal Warcraft (1994), Warcraft II (1995), and eventually Starcraft (1998) and Warcraft III (2002). These last two are still widely played today, which — in a world of flash-in-the-pan hits — should tell you something about their quality.

Blizz’s other major line started in the midst of all that RTS goodness with Diablo in 1996. It’s still viewed as a high point in the constantly evolving “D&D” hack-and-slash dungeon crawl genre. A sequel followed in 2000 even more successful than the first (many of Blizz’s games have set sales records, only to be later beaten by other Blizz games). Blizz, of course, found even greater heights of success by combining the lore of Warcraft with the dungeon-crawl motif in their genre-dominating entry into the MMORPG market back in 2004.

So, anyway, the stage is set: company makes consistently excellent products going back 14 years, right? In today’s world, you’d sort of expect them to stumble and start to suck, most notably in terms of customer service. Well, turns out, not so much.

They announced a third Diablo game this summer, so I’ve been vaguely wanting to replay D2 again for a while, but I had no idea where my disks were. When I accidentally found them today (when looking for something else), I was momentarily elated until I realized that they dated from 2000, in an era well before OS X, and would require an OS 9 or “Classic” capable Mac to play. (Or a PC, naturally — Blizz has consistently also released its games on the same day for both PC and Mac, and put both versions on all the disks.) Classic is now a long time ago in the Mac world, and Intel-based Macs can’t even run it. This meant I couldn’t play, at least with these disks.

I pointed my browser over to Blizz, and discovered that D2 was available for download for only $19.95, which made me kinda happy (not because I could give them money; because it was available at all), but then I thought to call to find out if I could get a new download based on my 8 year old license key. As it turns out, yes, yes you can; you just create an account at the Blizz store and use their “add game” feature; you type in your license key, and thereafter you can re-download that game (in its most current and up-to-date version) from their site whenever you like. This works for Starcraft, Warcraft, and all the expansions, apparently, in addition to Diablo, Diablo 2, and its Lord of Destruction expansion.

The whole process make so much sense I can’t stand it. It’d be so easy for Blizz to just blow off people in my situation — it’s not a significant revenue stream either way, and God knows I’ll keep paying my WoW bill, and will probably buy both D3 and all three games of Starcraft 2 when they’re released no matter how they handled this. Instead, though, somebody at Blizz realizes that surprising customers with good service is always good business, and that’s a lesson far too often lost.

Cool.

In Which We’re Longhorns for a Weekend

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UT put an end to Oklahoma’s unbeaten season yesterday in a hard-fought rivalry game I’m sorry I missed; the final score was 45 to 35, which kinda suggests something we’ve all been saying: the Big 12 is all offense. In any case, the win — along with some other amusing events — set up a rejiggering of the AP poll that puts Texas on top:

  1. Texas
  2. Alabama
  3. Penn State
  4. Oklahoma
  5. Florida
  6. USC
  7. Texas Tech
  8. Oklahoma State
  9. BYU
  10. Georgia

Mizzou falls to 11; LSU to 13. What stinks here is PSU in the #3 position. Penn State has played ONE ranked team all year, and it was #22 Illinois. Other than that? Nada. For this they’re ranked 3rd? It’s horseshit; they won’t even play another serious team all year, so they could stay unbeaten unless Ohio State (currently 12) or Michigan State (20) can knock ’em off. (The rest of their year is Michigan, Iowa, and Indiana — unranked squads to go with Coastal Carolina, Oregon State, Syracuse, Temple, Purdue and Wisconsin to fill out the rest of JoePa’s creampuff season). Florida — coming off its 51 to 21 domination of LSU — is a much more reasonable pick for #3.

Of course, Texas hasn’t exactly played titans, either, largely because the quality is on the back end of the Longhorns’ schedule; they still play #11 Mizzou, #8 Oklahoma State, and #7 Texas Tech before a stop at Baylor on 11/15, and then close out with #16 Kansas and the A&M game. Nobody will complain about UT’s rank if they keep winning, but the trick will be continuing to win.

Same goes for Alabama, though the Tide had more of a front-loaded schedule than UT. Still up for them: Ole Miss, Tennessee, and Arkansas State before the LSU game on 11/8. After that, MSU and Auburn. If the Tide that beat Georgia show up, they’ll win out, too, and set up a fine SEC-Big12 matchup in the championship game.

Sadly, this week also marked the end of Vandy’s win streak, as they were upset by Mississippi State. It sucks they lost here, but I’ve gotta say I love the idea that VANDY is the victim of an upset. You’ve gotta been seen as a strong favorite for a loss to be an upset, so in a way it’s still a moral victory. N.B. that the ‘Dores could still notch a bowl berth; they two more winnable games coming up (Wake and Duke).

Comments.

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Right, so, Heathen is under persistent spammer attack right now; we’ve trapped 2000 spam comments in the last 48 hours, so even a fraction of those getting through is enough to create a noise problem. With Mike D., I’m in the process of migrating to a new system that sucks less, but I’m also about to go out of town for business for a couple days, and I don’t want to keep getting swamped with 100+ spam comment alert messages in my email, so:

I have drastically altered the comment policy. Posts get locked up now after 10 days; say your piece before then, or suck it. Also, you have to have an AJAX capable browser to comment, which means you have to have Javascript enabled. This ought to drastically cut down the spammery.

We live in an age of miracles and wonders, or, We Are All Commodores Today

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Vanderbilt, one of the most academically elite schools in the South if not the nation, is traditionally the whipping boy of the SEC come football season. Granted, their offensive line has 4-digit SAT scores, so it’s almost not fair, but there you have it.

Except this year. Vandy started strong with a convincingly thorough whipping of Miami (OH) back in August, and really turned heads with its win over Spurrier’s South Carolina Gamecocks, then ranked 24 (that’s 2 in a row Steve’s dropped to the Commodores; maybe that should have told us something). Then came Rice, a true peer — they’re also an elite academic school playing football with state squads — but Vandy kept rolling. And the next week they beat Ole Miss, and all of a sudden Vandy was 4-0 with two SEC wins under its belt, and had a top twenty ranking (19).

Pretty much everyone thought that would be over once they met #13 Auburn today, though. Spurrier’s not having much luck in South Carolina, and Ole Miss is nearly always helpless when someone not named Manning is calling the plays. “It’s been fun, boys,” said the sports press, “but enjoy it while it lasts.” Indeed, that sounded reasonable: the last time Vandy beat Auburn was 1955, in the Gator Bowl.

A little while ago, though, it became clear it’s going to last at least one more week, and probably two, as the Vanderbilt Commodores edged Tuberbille’s troubled Tigers 14 to 13 in Nashville. Vanderbilt is 5-0 for the first time since 1943. Vandy’s ongoing top-25 position is also pretty new — its undergrads weren’t born the last time that happened (1984) — and they haven’t finished with a winning record since ’82. They still might not do that, but it’s certainly possible: next up is Mississippi State (1-4, 0-2 SEC). A win there puts them at .500, with wins at Duke and/or Wake Forest certainly possible. Sadly, their schedule is back-end heavy; they’ve still got to play four more SEC teams (#11 Georgia, #12 Florida, Kentucky, and Tennessee), too, and can’t realistically expect to bag more than one of those even if they’re lucky.

All that’s in the future, though. Today is still today, and as of this writing, they are in first place in the SEC East, and remain one of only three undefeated teams in the SEC (the other two, Alabama and LSU, are in SEC West).

Oh, yes, the Tide won, too, but frustratingly so, with needless errors and penalties in a game that was theirs to lose — Kentucky hasn’t ever beaten them in Tuscaloosa, and, like Vandy, is something of an SEC also-ran in football. The UK defense is real, though, and Saban will be justified in handing out some serious asskicking this week for gameplay that, against a more competitive team, would have cost them the game. Amusing stat, though: Tide RB Coffee had more yards on the ground than the whole Kentucky offense. At the end of the day, an ugly win is still a win, so Bama goes 6-0 with a bye next week, then Ole Miss, Tennessee, and Arkansas State cued up before the big show in Baton Rouge in November 8. (Thanks to Frank for the correction.)

Today’s Challenge

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In recent snippet of interview, Gov. Palin suggested she disagreed with Roe because she was pro life, but also supported the constitutional right to privacy that underpins Roe (and Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird). This suggests a sort of basic confusion about Constitutional law, but never mind that. It also reminds me of something else I’ve been meaning to talk about.

Mainstream pro-life theory attacks the idea of Constitutional privacy as enshrined in these three decisions (and, later, Lawrence v Texas), and their main weapon is the doctine of Constitutional originalism, or the idea that the text of the Constitution must be interprested as normal persons of 1789 would have read it. Adherents to this theory insist that the idea of a penumbra of rights implied in the privacy decisions is invalid, since it’s not part of the original text. (This is tenuous, but stay with me.) (It’s also this theory that suggests to Scalia that torture is not “cruel and unusual punishment” because it’s not punishment; it’s interrogation — and that consequently torture isn’t unconstitutional.)

But here’s the thing: I’ve yet to meet anyone, ever, who holds to this point of view, but also believes abortion ought to be legal. On the contrary, it appears that this POV is adopted exclusively by persons who wish to see an end to safe and legal abortions in this country, and who view this as an issue of paramount importance. (N.B. that the absence of Constitutional privacy doesn’t mean abortion must be illegal; it just means that the government would be free to make laws forbidding it.) This strongly suggests to me a measure of intellectual dishonesty among the originalists — that they have simply picked a philosophical structure that supports their desired outcome. This is certainly convenient for them — and is made more so, and at least slightly respectable by such high-profile proponents as Scalia and his manservant on the Court — but doesn’t suggest overmuch analysis of related ethical or legal questions. Picking an endpoint and eliminating schools of thought until you find one that supports your conclusion is pretty bankrupt — it’s the philosophical equivalent of picking a scientific conclusion and discarding evidence that fails to support it.

So, dear Heathen Nation, find me a pro-choice originalist. I’ll be right here.