It was all a meme

New Rick Ross!!!

2012-01-06T20:46:00.001-05:00

Rick Ross – Party Heart Lyrics
Rick Ross – Last Breath Lyrics
Rick Ross – Stay Schemin' Lyrics
Rick Ross – Magic Lyrics
Rick Ross – High Definition Lyrics
Rick Ross – Rich Forever Lyrics
Rick Ross – The World Is Ours Lyrics
Rick Ross – MMG Untouchable Lyrics
Rick Ross – Triple Beam Dreams Lyrics
Rick Ross – Holy Ghost Lyrics
Rick Ross – New Bugatti Lyrics
Rick Ross – Keys To The Crib Lyrics
Rick Ross – Yella Diamonds Lyrics

NEW DRAKEOLOGY

2011-11-06T22:59:00.002-05:00

MY favorite is the track with THE WEEKND (Rihanna is dope too tho..)

Drake – Cameras Lyrics
Drake – Club Paradise Lyrics
Drake – Dreams Money Can Buy Lyrics
Drake – Good Girls Go (Interlude) Lyrics
Drake – Hate Sleeping Alone Lyrics
Drake – Headlines Lyrics
Drake – HYFR Lyrics
Drake – The Motto Lyrics
Drake – The Real Her Lyrics
Drake – The Motto (Remix) Lyrics
Drake – Look What You've Done Lyrics
Drake – Marvin's Room Lyrics
Drake – Make Me Proud Lyrics
Drake – Over My Dead Body Lyrics
Drake – Practice Lyrics
Drake – Free Spirit Lyrics
Drake – Lord Knows Lyrics
Drake – Take Care Lyrics
Drake – Shot for Me Lyrics
Drake – Stars Are Out Lyrics
Drake – Doing It Wrong Lyrics
Drake – Under Ground Kings Lyrics
Drake – Crew Love Lyrics
Drake – A Lot Lyrics
Drake – The Ride Lyrics
Drake – We'll Be Fine Lyrics

NEW J COLE!!

2011-09-20T03:29:00.002-04:00

Mahbod is breaking these lyrics down in honor of Schnells..

J. Cole – Breakdown Lyrics
J. Cole – Cole World Lyrics
J. Cole – Dollar And A Dream III Lyrics
J. Cole – In The Morning (Remix) Lyrics
J. Cole – God's Gift Lyrics
J. Cole – Intro Lyrics
J. Cole – Mr Nice Watch Lyrics
J. Cole – Regret Lyrics
J. Cole – Lights Please Lyrics
J. Cole – Lost Ones Lyrics
J. Cole – Nobody's Perfect Lyrics
J. Cole – Never Told Lyrics
J. Cole – Rise And Shine Lyrics
J. Cole – Sideline Story Lyrics
J. Cole – Can't Get Enough Lyrics
J. Cole – Who Dat Lyrics
J. Cole – Work Out Lyrics

New Drizzy!

2011-09-11T01:32:00.003-04:00

You're gonna love this one.. Drake – Club Paradise Lyrics

Drake – Free Spirit Lyrics

Waka Flocka Flame – Round of Applause Remix Lyrics

New J Cole

2011-09-05T02:15:00.000-04:00

Been hearing some crazy rumors about the new J Cole album - here's some mixtape shit for now..

J. Cole – Neverland Lyrics
J. Cole – Heavy Lyrics

2011-09-03T18:23:00.001-04:00

NEW WALE - we're explaining it on Rap Genius ASAP, but pleaaase help out!!

Wale – Ambitious Girl 2 Lyrics
Wale – Barry Sanders Lyrics
Wale – Ocean Drive Lyrics
Wale – Podium Lyrics
Wale – Chain Music Lyrics
Wale – Drums N Shit Lyrics
Wale – Fuck You Lyrics
Wale – Lacefrontin Lyrics
Wale – Fairy Tales Lyrics
Wale – Let's Chill Lyrics
Wale – Mother Nature Lyrics
Wale – Passive Aggres-her Lyrics
Wale – Pick.. Six Lyrics
Wale – Samples and Shit Lyrics
Wale – Bait Lyrics
Wale – Theory 11.1.11 Lyrics
Wale – Globetrotter Lyrics
Wale – Underdog Lyrics
Wale – Varsity Blues Lyrics

Asher Mac Milly

2011-08-26T04:06:00.000-04:00

My favorite thing about white rappers is - they all rap about weed.. (like me!)

Here's the explanations I'm working on at Rap Genius for these puppies:

Mac Miller – Cold Feet Lyrics

Asher Roth – Ampersand Lyrics

CARTER IV = TRIPPY!!

2011-08-25T02:53:00.000-04:00

As a computer programmer, Carter IV is tripping me the fuck out.. some weird ass songs on here - peep the lyrics:

Tyler The Creator + Game

2011-08-16T00:56:00.000-04:00

PROGRAMMERS:

Here's some simple math: Game + Tyler + Lil Wayne = A MOTHERFUCKIN MARTIAN (plus a Goblin and a Blood)

Rap Genius is working on explaining Game Lil Wayne & Tyler The Creator "Martians vs Goblins" lyrics right now..

AMAZING day for new hip-hop

2011-08-15T22:57:00.000-04:00

There are some tiiight ass songs dropping lately - Rap Genius is working our ass off on explaining these..

Pusha T & Kanye West "Amen" Lyrics

Game & Drake "Good Girls Go Bad" lyrics

If you know Pusha or Game well - please jump in and help us out. This is some insta-classic music that is dropping today..

COKE DOPE CRACK SMACK

2011-08-15T17:07:00.000-04:00

These are a few of my faaavorite things!

Rap Genius is breaking down the Busta Rhymes "Coke Dope Crack Smack" lyrics AS WE SPEAK (go check it out!)

It's Here

2011-08-10T21:56:00.002-04:00

We love our Drake! We love our Weezy! Let's love them together! It'll be like the one time I tried to get my girlfriend to watch Snakes On A Plane and Mega Shark VS Giant Octopus at the same time. Didn't work as well as Lil Wayne (Ft. Drake) – She Will Lyrics.

Kanye Ain't No Meme

2011-08-10T18:56:00.000-04:00

At least I don't think so. He and I shall take over the galaxy together. It'll be like Vader and Luke if Luke joined the dark side. So, maybe not like Vader and Luke at all, but you get where I'm going. I'm obsessed with all the Kanye West "Watch the Throne" lyrics. Rap Genius did some badass explanations.

CNN or The Onion?

2009-06-06T21:45:00.000-04:00

Throwing Down

2009-05-28T00:45:00.003-04:00

Tonight was the first meeting of the weekly ceramics class I decided to take in order to humanize myself to Ilan and Lauren (little do they know I'd still kill them to save a computer!). I got into ceramics in high school after I stopped complaining about the mandatory art class and decided to give it a try -- this is the last time I can recall an authority figure being right about forcing me to do something. (Authority didn't even get to enjoy the feather in its cap -- I never really got to thank my ceramics teacher for exposing me to something I will love for the rest of my life, and anyway the bulk of her daily experience was yelling at people for making marijuana paraphernalia).

There are basically two pottery aesthetics. One is "make something that has thin walls and is functional. Spend as little time glazing as possible (i.e., dip it in the glaze instead of painting it on). Now make 11 more exactly identical things", and the other is "I just carved a frog into into the side of my pot!". Obviously I belong to the first school, with the additional qualification that the identical bowls (mugs are probably more useful, but the handles are annoying) look like they were made by a machine.

On the other hand, the rest of the class is very human:

(Carol, the instructor, spots me throwing away an attempt at a bowl)

Carol: Wait, did you just throw away that ball of used clay?
Me: Well, wedging it again would be a pain in the ass -- it's $20 for 25 pounds, right? The replacement cost of this small piece can't be more than a few dollars.
Carol: Oh, that's not really how I think about it ... for me it's more like "I can use that clay to make another pot".
Me: Hmmmm, so I guess this is a bad time to ask whether I can pay someone to clean my wheel for me?

I didn't want to get into it at the time (as with the gym, after awhile you learn that correcting people in the pottery studio is a waste of time), but life truly is too short to re-wedge slimy used clay. Does she have any idea how many vodka tonics people buy even though they're about to leave the bar and aren't really even in the mood?

The Luddites Have a Point (or Do They?)

2009-05-13T01:37:00.002-04:00

David Bradley writes:

What scares me is the pride with which many of the people who claim they don’t understand “computers” brandish their ignorance

One reason for this is people don't think learning technology is a legitimate intellectual activity. Many people envision the problems of computer science to be more complex versions of "how do I install this printer?" They can follow the instructions if they have to, but they'd prefer to just ask their grandchildren.

Which is a shame because the reality is that there's a whole world of ideas out there. Understanding, say, object-oriented programming or the idea behind a relational database is analogous to reading Hamlet or Mill. People don't brag about not having read Hamlet.

But anyone can read Hamlet -- you just pick up the book. On the other hand, how can you learn about object-oriented programming? Well, the wikipedia article is gibberish*, every book is too technical -- I'm out of ideas.

People get more exposure to math and science, but it's taught in a similarly unpleasant and inaccessible way. For example, any high school calculus student can tell you that the integral of x is (x^2/2) because "it's the anti-derivative". None are likely to know why differentiation and integration are inverse operations.

One problem is that to really understand this stuff you have spend a lot of time working out, e.g., what a "real number" is. This is a) is pretty boring, and b) unnecessary if all you need to do is use the equations in physics.

This is a shame though, because like computer science, math and science contain some accessible and compelling ideas. Unlike computer science though, there are a few good popularizations of math and science that require no background. The most prominent example is probably Godel, Escher, Bach, but more straightforward books like The Elegant Universe are pretty good as well.

Takeaways:

Someone should write a good popularization of applied computer science!
Everyone who's good at technology should stop pretending the boring stuff is so fucking interesting! Despite what my 16 year-old self would tell you, building your own computer is not fun. It's a time consuming cycle of experimentation and googling. (and pirating DVDs is a waste of time!).

So I guess the luddites have a point in that a lot of perceived technological "expertise" is really just familiarity with the boring and arbitrary implementation details that computers unnecessarily expose to us all the time. I.e., it seems like one could reasonably say "I'm not interested in learning to install a hard drive for the same reason I'm not interested in learning to change my oil."

* Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm that uses "objects" and their interactions to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as information hiding, data abstraction, encapsulation, modularity, polymorphism, and inheritance. It was not commonly used in mainstream software application development until the early 1990s. Many modern programming languages now support OOP.

The Power of Less

2009-05-04T11:07:00.004-04:00

Ilan and I have been experimenting with Fresh Direct.

Delivery Guy: Where do you want the boxes?
Me: (Excited) Put them on the island, I guess? (Inside: I had no idea you offered this level of service!!!)
Delivery Guy: No problem -- whoa, it smells good in here!
Ilan: Yeah, this is our first time ordering from Fresh Direct; do you have any tips?
Delivery Guy: What? Oh, yeah, I accept tips.

Needless to say, it took some maneuvering to get out of this pickle (IRL it was me who asked if he had any tips -- you run out of things to talk about!).

Anyway, buying groceries is a balancing act:

You want to buy a lot at once so you don't have to transact as frequently
You can't buy so much that it will rot before being consumed

Of course the latter depends on how good the grocery is -- red cabbage goes bad more slowly than avocados, but it's also consumed more slowly and so you can buy about the same amount of each.

There are only a few groceries that are both tasty enough and last long enough to buy in enough quantity that it's worth the pain in the ass. Here they are:

Jumbo carrots
Pickles
Apples
Grapes (to freeze -- these are only necessary if you're planning on caddying or having sex and want to eat them afterwards)

I find videobox commenters only moderately more intelligent than Matt Yglesias

2009-04-06T14:48:00.005-04:00

If You Don't Like What The Numbers Are Saying, Get Some New Numbers

2009-03-10T16:49:00.004-04:00

TechCrunch speculates that Apple and Google could replace Citigroup and GM in the Dow. It's a pretty incoherent post, but the point made at the end, though sad, is important:

Some might say that the Dow Jones, with the limited amount of funds to track, is inaccurate and insignificant compared to the reach of the S&P 500. But still, it is the Dow that most Americans know and follow.

I don't believe that "most Americans" know or follow the Dow, but I do know that simply swapping out the underperformers for better performers undermines any scant remaining legitimacy the Dow might retain as a broad, American economic indicator.

Headlines That Please (Vol II)

2009-02-21T19:30:00.000-05:00

It's Sort Of Weird To Realize That If You Were Raped, It Would Just Be Rape, And Not "Molestation"

2009-02-21T00:00:00.000-05:00

Eben recently turned me on to Jeff Pearlman, a former SI writer who's got a blog. Good writing, he said. It's right up your alley; trust me, you'll like it.*

Eben's not often wrong about these things. He turned me on to Anonymous Lawyer back when it was still funny/published; he gave me a copy of Confederacy of Dunces; he harped on The Wire relentlessly. He does still watch 24, but nobody's perfect.

It's possible that Pearlman's, coincidentally, had a rough streak during the time I've consumed his posts. He's not been publishing for all that long, either, so maybe he's just adjusting to the format. This week's posts, though, have not been good. And by "not been good," I mean "been not good."

In part, I think it's because he's focused on steroids, and sportswriters, like other media figures/humans, tend to be at their worst when talking about morality. For one, it's hard not to step back and be like "IT'S A FUCKING GAME," when reading for the umpteenth time about how 'roiders have dishonored everything it means to be an Athlete, an American, and a Human. I'm less susceptible than some (Tom) to this, because I actually do like and care about sports, and think that on balance they serve a positive function in society. For two, sportswriters are rarely the sharpest tools in the shed. The sharper ones interested in writing for a living are waxing idiotic about morality in the context of Israel-Palestine, or stupidly advocating ever-more-expensive military purchases, or being Jim Fallows (he's the bomb).

Here are some choice bits from a recent post:

When I was a kid, my dream was to dig a tunnel in my backyard and wind up in Disney World. [You were a retarded kid. You also dreamt small.] I really thought I could do it, too. [Really, retarded.]I’d get Gary Miller and Dennis Gargano and John Ballerini to come over with their shovels, and we’d dig and dig and dig until reaching the Magic Kingdom. Boy, that would have kicked butt. [?]

[Covering sports i]s a fantastic way to make a living, and I count my blessings quite often. But there’s something about this widespread cheating (and it is, undeniably, cheating) that drives me to drink. [What about all the other cheating that took place over the years? That didn't bother you? Have you ever written an article blasting spitballers? Excoriating Kenny Rogers, who cheated IN THE WORLD SERIES? Calling for Gaylord Perry's ouster from the Hall of Fame?] In my six years of covering major league baseball for Sports Illustrated, I was led to believe I was seeing a lot of amazing things. Faster-than-ever fastballs; deeper-than-ever homers; arms that acted as cannons, and jumps that rivaled Mike Powell’s best. In hindsight, however, I’ve learned that much of it was fiction. [You are retarded. Your job was to cover this game; this massive, massively-obvious conspiracy was taking place in this game; you did not suspect anything; I should hate the perpetrators of the conspiracy for fooling you???] I was, in a sense, covering the WWF. [You were also, in a sense, covering women's basketball. What the fuck, in a sense, does this sentence mean? Does it mean the outcome of games was scripted? The announcing crews were better? That this is a misleading and/or irrelevant comparison? Right.] Why does this bother me? Because I have always been a lover of baseball’s history; of the very idea that Mickey Mantle and Bernie Williams stood in the exact same spot; that Rickey Henderson’s stolen bases, Lou Brock’s stolen bases and Ty Cobb’s stolen bases can be measured on the same chart. [Someone should teach him about controlling for eras and parks, such that these things can actually_be_compared.]

Yes, things have changed over the years: Stadium sizes, ball textures, integration, internationalism. But baseball is baseball is baseball is baseball. [Someone has apparently taught him about such things, though obviously only superficially, as we see with the "baseball is..." sentence.]

Hence, to see someone like Barry Bonds or Alex Rodriguez come along and show such blatant disrespect for the history of the game, well, it infuriates me. [Hard to see how you get a "Hence Q" from "P is P is P is P."] I’ve written this before, but if you’re Barry Bonds, how do you possibly justify breaking Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record while loaded with steroids and HGH? You know the man faced bitter racism in his pursuit; know he received death threats on more than one occasion. So how do you cheat? [With a syringe and a guillable press corps.] How? Or, in a similar case, you’re Mark McGwire. You’ve been juicing regularly, and when you pass Roger Maris’ single-season mark you rub your bat against his and begin to cry. How? How? Roger Maris’ 1961 was, from an individual standpoint, a nightmare. The media rooted against him; he began losing his hair and chain smoking. It was pure hell—and you come along, cheat and claim the title as your own? How? [Well to be fair, the pitchers were cheating too.]

So, yes, I am self-righteous, and I need to move on, and my high horse is on stilts by now. But I just can’t shed this anger. I probably need to, but I can’t. Not yet anyhow.

That’s my sincere explanation.

Thanks. [You ever cheat on anything in your life, Jeffy boy? Yes? Good, go kill yourself.]

I wrote this giant blog post, then realized that someone else said basically the same thing, only much more pithily.

*Eben wishes it noted that since his recommendation (he called Pearlman "must read") he has not read a single Perlman post. Did he level me?

It's Simple

2009-02-19T18:51:00.001-05:00

One thing Yglesias whines about a lot is the idea of simplifying the tax code. This has a lot of upsides and no real downsides, other than for lawyers and accountants who are paid to exploit the complexities and ambiguities in the code so that their wealthy clients save money. I always assumed that, at some point, the complexity of the tax code would cease to matter, because computers would just take care of shit. So, while to humans, the difference between 15 rules and 1500 rules to apply before arriving at a figure is rather large; to a computer, this difference takes up all of .003 extra seconds (I used Stirling's to approximate that).

Some persuasive evidence that I am wrong arrived today, in the form of a W2 1099 from a company I did some work for this year. The boxes on it are numbered. Here are the titles associated with numbers 1-10:

Rents
Royalties
Other income
Federal income tax withheld
Fishing boat proceeds
Medical and health care payments
Nonemployee compensation
Substitute payments in leu of dividends or interest
Payer made direct sales of $5000 or more of consumer products to a buyer (recipient) for resale [with a box for checking]
Car insurance proceeds

Headlines That Please (Vol I)

2009-02-12T20:45:00.001-05:00

This one's from CNN.

Free At Last; Free At Last; Thank God All-Mighty; I'm Free At Last

2009-02-09T07:19:00.006-05:00

I closed all of my Bank of America accounts today. They asked why, and I cited John Thain's commode.

Slippery Slopes

2009-02-08T20:45:00.000-05:00

Maybe some of the aspiring lawyers among my readership can answer this question for me. I'd imagine that, if someone left a stereo in a public place, and that stereo were blaring an annoying, incredibly loud series of alarm-sounds on repeat, after some amount of time I would be legally allowed to turn it off, take it, or destroy it. My question is: what if the "stereo" is also a "car"? How long do I have to wait?

P-O-O-P

2009-02-04T08:45:00.001-05:00

Defecating in another man's bathroom is like raiding enemy territory: you get in, you do what you have to do, and you get out, all the while hoping to leave as little evidence of your presence as possible. You're attentive to sounds, odors, and really anything else that might be emanating as a result of your incursion; you don't want your presence (in the bathroom) nor your lack of a presence (where everyone else is) noted; you don't want to take too long, but you definitely don't want to leave the job unfinished and risk a return trip.

This is why a nice rack with a selection of reading materials is such a wonderful gift you, as host, can give your guests. All at once it provides people with something to do (especially people hesitant about using an iphone while, you know) and assures them that you know what they're doing, and you're ok with it. Indeed, they should just relax and enjoy themselves. I recommend stocking it with the current New Yorker, and back issues of the Yale Alumni Magazine. The former is useful after the person exits, providing them with instant conversation fodder, while the latter helps the main event along nicely.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

2009-02-03T12:27:00.003-05:00

Some time ago, I put up a post cataloguing one instance of the larger debate over how and when one should use the phrase "begs the question." There are two camps on this one. First, there's the Rugby Dan/Jeremy camp, whose members are firmly against using begs the question to mean raises the question, under any circumstances, and generally feel that those who do misuse it in this fashion should be subject to, at the least, scorn (Rugby) and, at the most, death (Jeremy). I hesitantly count myself a part of this camp, and, although I am slightly more equivocal in my views, I come down on Jeremy's side of the punishment question. Arrayed against this formidable alliance of nitpickers/linguistic crusaders stand Tom and Ariel, Tom doubly so because he not only decries linguistic prescriptivism but also believes begs the question to be an empty statement (according to Tom, all valid arguments beg the question).

To each group I offer a challenge. Now, one mildly sophisticated thing to know about "hopefully" is that it is commonly used incorrectly, as is spelled out in some length in the usage note here. Saying "hopefully, I will do [x]," actually means I will do x, and I will do it in a manner that suggests that I am full of hope, not I hope that I will be able to do x. One interesting aside from the usage note: opposition to this usage has increased on the panel, despite the fact that other adverbs used in this fashion are given a pass (mercifully, frankly), so:

It is not the use of sentence adverbs per se that bothers the Panel; rather, the specific use of hopefully in this way has become a shibboleth.

As such, I would challenge Jeremy and Dan to only use hopefully in its original sense. As the usage note points out, unlike with begs/raises the question, hopefully is useful precisely because there's no exact synonym for its fake meaning. As such, using hopefully exclusively correctly will likely entail both correcting slip-ups and, occasionally, preemptively contorting one's phrasing.

On the other hand, I would challenge the Tom/Ariels among us to deliberately employ the "modern" usage of begs the question in front of people (a) whose respect they desire (maybe law school profs for Ariel; Ilan and/or Tyler Cowan for Tom), and (b) who are reasonably likely to hold Dan/Jeremy-esque views on the usage question.

Wannabe xkcd

2009-01-31T08:45:00.001-05:00

MoDo

2009-01-30T17:12:00.013-05:00

Some time ago, I commented to Nick that I found it weird that nobody was referring to Bernie Madoff as a sadist, since he'd caused too much pain for me to believe that he wasn't, at least in part, getting off on it. Today Nick points out to me that, of all people, Maureen Dowd read my mind.

There Is Such A Thing As A Free Lunch

2009-01-28T08:45:00.002-05:00

Amid the many TARPs, stimuli, bailouts and nationalizations that are either being floated, implemented (badly) or bastardized beyond recognition in Congress, the key word seems to be tradeoff. TARP all the bad assets and recapitalize the banks, and you've "privatized the profits and socialized the losses," creating a "moral hazard." Put a moratorium on foreclosures and force banks to accept "cramdowns," and you've left the banks with shittier assets on their hands, lowered revenue streams, and created a "moral hazard" (in the other direction). Plus, you cause other banks to have to write down their loans, causing contraction in lending markets which you don't want... A stimulus package targeted at infrastructure is limited by the number and size of "shovel-ready" projects, meaning that some of the monies won't reach the economy until 18mos-2yrs from now, if then. You may also "crowd-out" private investment, although nobody really knows whether that's true, and certainly not to what degree. Lowering taxes provides a shot in the arm, but it's unclear what size multiplier you get, and you certainly decrease government revenues in the future (the Laffer curve remains a joke). Plus, you have to fight Republicans if you ever want to raise them again. Nationalize the banks and you've get the upside of TARP (taking the losses off the banks' balance sheets) without the attendant moral hazard (because the consumers keep the "good bank" assets as well), but you've given up on a central tenet of capitalism as we understand it (that markets should set at least most prices; now we'd have the Fed or its equivalent setting both the price of risk and the price of liquidity.)

So, fine, I don't have any real suggestions/opinions that haven't been raised elsewhere, other than that Greg Mankiw is intellectually dishonest, and high speed rail is great. Except, legalize weed. It's the mythical free lunch, which, if served, we'll all be hungry enough to devour. First, you move a huge black market (isn't MJ the number one cash crop in the US? Why, yes.) into the actual market, enabling it to be taxed. Hooray, revenues! Since the revenues from the current indirect weed tax (the cost of dealing with illegality, from people arrested for smoking, to businesses having their employees face the possibility of getting arrested/shot) accrue to "criminal" enterprises, legalizing weed functionally amounts to a tax on crime (the government takes their revenue stream). Of course, the other benefits of legalization are myriad and would also probably act as a stimulus. The prison guards wouldn't like it, but the cost savings in the form of lowered imprisonment would certainly ease the burden on already stretched state budgets. We could pare back the DEA, significantly. We would lower court costs across the board, and likely see better results as prosecutors, public defenders, judges, and cops see a massive time-sink disappear off their collective calendars. Anyway, weed legalization being a good thing isn't a new idea, but I haven't seen anyone mentioning it as a stimulus-y idea. I would also make the point that Yglesias does, that good policies should virtually always be implemented, regardless of the economic climate. The current economic climate makes some ideas that are in normal times bad ones (bank nationalizations) potential good ones. But a good idea that isn't stimulus-y enough for the current bill (like high speed rail, apparently) should still be implemented.

It's also very much related to another idea that I'll do a post about, which is the counter-intuitive one that WARS ARE INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE.

Separated at Birth (The Triumphant Return II)

2009-01-28T08:45:00.000-05:00

Schemer Charles Ponzi:

and Jay Chandrasekhar (from Super Troopers)

Granting God's Request

2009-01-27T08:45:00.004-05:00

Here's the cover of Percival Everett's Wounded, which I haven't read yet:

Here's the cover of Nick Antosca's Midnight Picnic, which I also haven't read yet:

Of Few Things I Am Certain

2009-01-26T18:24:00.003-05:00

One of them is that I intensely dislike Terry McAuliffe. Hate is a strong word, to be reserved for...well, no, fuck that. I hate Terry McAuliffe. Of course, most of you would not find this surprising.

McAuliffe is noteworthy not because I hate him, then, but because I'm confident that I would have hated him whenever I was exposed to him. For many contemptible people, it's not hard to imagine liking them, if certain circumstances were different. If I'd met him before that bitch of a girlfriend poisoned him, I might have liked him. I bet he was really chill until he got that job, or didn't get into that school, or became gay. Before he got old and became insane, he was probably a reasonable professor.

Not so McAuliffe. If, in some alternate universe, Terry McAuliffe the boy and I had lived next door to one another, I would have hated him. If we'd been in homeroom together, I'd have hated him. When he's 90 and some sort of éminence grise in the Democratic establishment, or wherever his political ambitions land him, I will hate him. If we volunteered at the same soup kitchen; if I were to marry his daughter; if he simply, for no reason, gave me $1,000,000, I would hate him.

Indeed the vitriol I feel for the man is probably irrational. I tried to make a list of his deplorable qualities, and it isn't that impressive:

He's chirpy - ugh.
He's a liar - fine/reasonable.
He's totally unhinged from reality when it suits him to be - ugh (understandable).
He's enthusiastic - ugh.
He's unintelligent - ugh.
He's utterly, totally, insanely shameless - ugh.
He hunts - ugh.

There was a kid, MP, who played baseball with my brother for a number of years. MP was a hustler in the David Eckstein model: a mediocre-to-bad player who ALWAYS hustled, even when it made no sense to. He was the kind of catcher who would dive for foul balls that were clearly going over the backstop and out of play. The kind of kid who would score sliding when there wasn't even a throw to the plate - in warmups (gotta be the first to get the uniform dirty!). The kind of kid who was always "firing up" his teammates by screaming incoherently at them while they were trying to focus on hitting - with a metal stick - a small, white ball flying at them at the speed cars travel on the freeway. The kind of kid who was always yelling about how many outs there were, even if he was wrong. Terry McAuliffe is a grown-up version of MP. I hate Terry McAuliffe.

(Incidentally, this line from Eve Fairbanks' pre-Gubernatorial profile of McAuliffe is pretty funny: "The idea of Terry McAuliffe babysitting an autistic child seems a patently bad one.")

Irresistable

2009-01-24T03:56:00.005-05:00

On another note, here's Ross Douthat's much-ballyhooed meditation on torture post-9/11. I think it not at all intellectually honest, which is what most of the people who disagreed with it would have said if they didn't like Douthat personally. It's mostly argument by non-sequitur; here's the bright insight that motivates the piece:

That while the Bush Administration's policies clearly failed a just-war test, they didn't fail it in quite so new a way as some of their critics suppose ... and moreover, had I been in their shoes I might have failed the test as well.

He proceeds to go on and on about just war theory, invoke an atomic bomb comparison, and obliquely argue against The Dark Side. What he does not do, however, is more telling.

He does not, once, in some 2100 words, mention efficacy. Or effectiveness. Torture's lack thereof is well-established (incidentally, this is an argument Mayer's made many times, upon which Douthat fails to comment). Assumed throughout Douthat's piece is that torture works. While Douthat doesn't come right out and say so, his phrasing gives him away:

But I certainly remember how I felt about interrogation in the aftermath of 9/11: I felt that we were all suddenly in a ticking-bomb scenario, that the gloves have to come off, and that all kinds of things needed to be on the table.

As Rugby Dan has pointed out before, the ticking time bomb scenario is tendentious as generally posed: You have a responsible party before you who holds some piece of information critical to saving thousands of lives, the lives of people who will otherwise perish in some short amount of time. Do you torture him to get the info? Rugby offers a categorical no, based on this phrasing of the question. I've heard it offered with the following modification: The only way to get it out of him is to torture. Do you? In this case, the answer is probably "toss me the razor and the blowtorch," although it's close. The problem is that the second scenario explicitly, and the first implicitly, assume that torture will achieve the desired effect: saving the people. Which it won't in the first case, and only will in the second case because it's specified as part of the hypothetical. Douthat does not address this issue in the follow-ups (1, 2) to his post. He did finally, kinda get around to it a couple of days ago.

Here's his verdict:

But I know at least some people in Washington for whom this isn't the case: People who argue, with a reasonable degree of knowledge and no self-justifying incentives, that whatever one thinks about the morality of waterboarding, the Bush Administration's interrogation policies up made a substantial difference in our ability to disrupt al Qaeda in the aftermath of 9/11.

Nothing that's been made public to date has left me convinced that they're right. (And even if they are right, it probably wouldn't change my judgment that the Bush Administration's broader record on detainee policy looks like a moral fiasco.) But I'm entirely convinced that they're sincere - and I think that any sincere proponent of what the United States did to its high-value detainees should be willing to see those policies defended more fully and publicly than they've been to date.

(emphasis mine)

Astonishing, no? He defends the decision to torture, decries the results, and then admits that the best evidence he can offer that torture works - that we were, post-9/11, actually in a ticking-time bomb scenario - is that some people he knows are sincere in their belief that torturing hundreds if not thousands of people helped us disrupt al Qaeda.

I am having a difficult time making myself clear to Richard Berger

2009-01-06T14:21:00.000-05:00

In reply to my reply, Rich writes:

the oscars have rules about what can be up for best picture (http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/rules/rule02.html), so if i were you i would have assumed that i (rich) had just assumed the same films that are up for oscars are up for my mythical awards. while this issue is valid and interesting to discuss on the whole, it was not an important part of the post and you are blowing it out of proportion.

ps a movie could "rip off" another movie, but still be a great movie in its own right for a given year. e.g. the departed was a remake that won best picture. furthermore, what if someone made a sweet mash up of only found footage from casablanca and the departed (a la the grey album in music) and it was genius. should that be allowed? interesting questions. but where do you see me shutting down this line of thought in my original post?

The question isn't whether a particular movie should be eligible for an Oscar. The point is that, in determining what should win an Oscar you can't merely consider a movie's intrinsic quality (but rather also its place in the intellectual history of movie-making).

The reason why I stress this is to explain to Richard, why this idea:

How about making the Best Picture the one that brings the highest combination of profit to filmmakers and enjoyment to viewers. Have exit polls at every screening of every movie and tally the enjoyment ratings in some manner (details TBD).

won't work. To wit: if you only (or even primarily) consider profits and enjoyment (exit polls), you'll be taking into account only the movie's intrinsic quality and not its context. People don't care that Yes Man is a rip off of Liar Liar, and this will be reflected in their dollar votes and exit polls. However, when determining who should win an Oscar, presumably we do care about originality (and therefore exit polls and dollar votes are inadequate metrics for Oscar-worthiness).

Any port in a storm

2009-01-06T12:01:00.002-05:00

Rich writes:

3. This paragraph is classic condescension/wanting to make a funny:
The above two symptoms hint at the gangrene that infects Rich's entire premise: when we say "Best Picture of 2008" we are not trying to approximate "The movie released in 2008 that provided the most total pleasure to movie watchers". Proof: even if a re-release of Star Wars killed the game in terms of clitoral stimulation, we wouldn't want to give it "Best Picture" since it was made 30 years ago.
You are putting words in my blog post that aren't there and making false assumptions about what I wrote. I never explicitly said "only new releases" because I didn't realize that I had to be so rigorous in a blog post to avoid ridicule. I'm (sincerely) happy to hear your take on this stuff, but I would prefer to hear substantive disagreements.

You wish I'd put words in your blog post.

At first blush, my example -- a re-release of Star Wars winning "Best Picture" -- doesn't seem troubling. After all, you could always (as Rich suggests) add the caveat "only new releases can win Best Picture". My point, however, is that it's impossible to adequately define "new release" (for this purpose).

What about a re-release of Star Wars that included 5 new shots? Can this be considered for "Best Picture"? What about a shot for shot remake of Star Wars by another director? What about a movie that just rips off its central premise (like "The Wizard" rips off "Rain Man", as Kristen astutely points out in comments). What if a movie ripped off its main artistic technique (e.g., another movie in which time is reversed, a la Memento).

The point is that, when considering a movie for "Best Picture", you can't merely think about its intrinsic quality. Rather, you have to take into account is place in the history of movies, whether what it's trying to do has been done better (or worse) before, etc. If you don't, you'll never be able to exclude movies that, though they're pleasurable to watch, are unoriginal rip-offs of other movies.

Is it a mistake to wage war against Richard Berger on two fronts simultaneously?

2009-01-05T19:35:00.003-05:00

Richard cautiously (yet laudably!) shuffles into the world of ideas in his latest post:

Maybe "best" needs to be redefined. As currently understood for something like the Oscars it's a fairly arbitrary decision that pretty much only rewards dramatic movies that are judged to be well-acted and have some serious themes. Fairly limited, eh? How about making the Best Picture the one that brings the highest combination of profit to filmmakers and enjoyment to viewers. Have exit polls at every screening of every movie and tally the enjoyment ratings in some manner (details TBD).

First of all, Richard, on behalf of myself and Malcom Gladwell, welcome to the world of ideas!

I think the "Best Picture" case is substantially more complex than you grant (does that hidden complexity intimate a larger problem? Yes). For example, why profits instead of gross revenue? It's "Best Picture", not "Best Picture per dollar spent to make it".

Exit polls of enjoyment are problematic as well -- a scary or otherwise upsetting movie might bias watchers' immediate responses, even if they would later admit that the movie was good. Furthermore, what if the watcher just doesn't get it (this is a problem even among well-educated Jews as evinced by the friends of mine who don't like Adaptation)? Or what if the main idea depends on getting some reference, or being a certain age, or having lived through certain events?

The above two symptoms hint at the gangrene that infects Rich's entire premise: when we say "Best Picture of 2008" we are not trying to approximate "The movie released in 2008 that provided the most total pleasure to movie watchers". Proof: even if a re-release of Star Wars killed the game in terms of clitoral stimulation, we wouldn't want to give it "Best Picture" since it was made 30 years ago.

Likewise, even if a movie doesn't completely copy another movie, but rather just rips it off substantially, we wouldn't want to give it "Best Picture" either (even if no one noticed and everyone loved it).

The point is that you can't effectively crowdsource the selection of the year's "Best Picture" because the criteria aren't available (or even easily definable). There's a plausible case that experts do a better job here since they have a good intuitive understanding of what makes a "Best Picture" (though comedies tend to get the short shrift -- and what am I saying; they're all idiots; whatever.).

That said, if you could define what makes a "Best Picture" (in the same way that you can define what makes a good encyclopedia article -- Wikipedia has a tome of guidelines), I think you could also effectively crowdsource its selection.

Department of Hyperbole: Aren't Newspapers Supposed To Have Editors?

2008-12-17T01:22:00.003-05:00

From an otherwise unobjectionable article about Kevin Love:

Already the game's greatest outlet passer, Love fired one of his vintage three-quarters-of-the-court numbers in Sunday's first half, hitting a streaking Ryan Gomes for a layup.

For Posteriors' Sake

2008-12-12T00:53:00.006-05:00

A google reader tiff started this week with this post, in which Josh Marshall misused/employed the modern use of "begs the question":

Everything I've heard is completely consistent with PN's report, though that does beg the question of how this goof got elected and reelected in the first place.

and addended this defense of his use:

(ed.note: Please no emails telling me this is the incorrect use of the phrase 'beg the question', though I know you're right. I've decided that this misuse is too widespread, too serviceable and too lacking in an alternative not to simply persist in using it.)

before reconsidering:

Late Update: Despite my forewarning, I'm being deluged by emails from purists telling me it would be so easy simply to use "raise" instead of "beg." I guess I'll have to give it more thought.

As far as the blogosphere knows, he's still contemplating.

Rugby Dan shared this post initially (prior to Marshall's reconsideration) with the comment, "No, asshole, it raises the question. The ed note makes it worse." I reshared expressing agreement.

Ariel responded at length:

everybody complaining about the use of "begs the question": get over it. language changes. if a term is used with such regularity to mean x that everybody who hears the term understands it as x, it means x. congrats on knowing that in one particular discipline there's also a meaning, y, that predates x, but acting all pissed off and saying "no, you're all idiots: this term means y because we were using it first!" is dogmatic, not to mention probably motivated by a desire to prove intellectual superiority to everybody 'misusing' the term (elitism, btw, is almost always the motivation involved whenever people complain about the adoption of a new linguistic convention. as in "this isn't in line with how people who are properly educated talk, so because this new way of talking reflects a lack of sophistication/education/class it must be something to be frowned upon and dismissed.

Dan clapped back:

"saying 'no, you're all idiots: this term means y because we were using it first!' is dogmatic"...

"elitism, btw, is almost always the motivation involved whenever people complain about the adoption of a new linguistic convention"

hahahahahahahahaha...see this, is why it's good to know what words mean; particularly, why it's useful to have a term like 'begs the question,' the better to observe when it's being done

Ariel had to have the last word, with:

[RugbyDan's] comment shows why it is also useful to have terms like "beg the question," all the better so that one can point out "this begs the question, what the fuck is dan talking about?" because, of course, there would otherwise be no way to express such a thought.”

Today, I see this on Rugby's FB profile:

The only way I can see to settle this is a combination poker-weightlifting biathlon once Ariel's ~~labia~~ labrum heals.

Ariel's Brain For Dummies

2008-12-04T15:22:00.001-05:00

Click for bigger.

Fetal Bites!

2008-12-03T16:31:00.001-05:00

Order here.

Separated at Birth (The Triumphant Return)

2008-12-02T14:37:00.003-05:00

James Fallows:

John Lithgow:

Redundancies, Dependencies

2008-12-01T18:03:00.006-05:00

Yahoo! Pipes is great, if not totally accessible to the non-programmer. Nonetheless, I've managed to make the following modifications to my Google Reader feeds, mostly using the filtering function:

Andrew Sullivan now comes in a feed sans "The View From Your Window Posts"
I've consolidated The New Republic "Plank" and "Stump" blogs into one feed, and removed the TNRTV posts.
I've gotten rid of TPMTV posts.
I've combined low-post-rate right-of-center-sometimes-insightful-sometimes-idiotic-Atlantic blogs (Douthat and McArdle) into one feed.
I've removed the non-comic posts from Penny Arcade.
I've stripped my meme feed of my own posts.
Some of the AI via brain emulation posts were enough to keep Yudkowsky in the Overcoming Bias feed. For now.

Further suggestions welcome.

Seriously, I'm pretty sure you meant 'california eminem' this time

2008-12-01T13:36:00.008-05:00

Thanksgiving Nears

2008-11-26T16:39:00.006-05:00

Everyone, quick, put up a post complaining about how the "holiday season" starts earlier and earlier every year, and you just can't fucking stand listening to Christmas music before Thanksgiving! Have we no shred of decency left? What about the Constitution!

I've never understood this obsession. Christmas music sucks, yes, but it also sucks in the pre-Christmas period when, I'm sure, the same people would be horrified to note that it wasn't being played. It's also tough to argue that Christmas music sucks more than whatever music the store would otherwise play. Given the choice, I'd favor year-round Christmas music in all stores, if only because it would piss off so many people who should be buying ipods.

Once dissatisfaction with a given meme reaches a certain fever pitch, I generally begin to wish for its continued centrality. I initially favored pulling the plug on Terry but ultimately was rooting for tubal reinsertion.

Schiavo is a meme, true; really, though, all memes are Schiavo.

6 strangers trapped in an elevator

2008-11-25T09:55:00.004-05:00

Shaved Head Blackberry Guy: Yeah, two Feburaries ago. I had just moved from 28 to the mailroom. This was during that year when we were sending LCD picture frames to all the investors, and they were packing them into boxes all day. I'd hear the sound of shipping tape tearing in my sleep. I remember one temp kneeling on the floor complaining: "I can't believe I got my Master's to do this".

Ginger Guy: Yeah, it sucks because you know, commercial banks will just literally hold all the paper. They don't care! (Not like investment banks...)

Anoop: Are you guys hedged? How often does Anne come to your meetings -- once a week? Nice. I can't believe she doesn't yell at you more for not hedging.

Shorter Ginger Guy: Well, it's not so easy to hedge real estate...

Frank the Fire Safety Marshall (on intercom): How are you guys doing?

Hoboken Woman: We're all still here -- do you have a time estimate?

Frank the Fire Safety Marshall (on intercom): You guys are great.

SHBBG: There must be some kind of manual override. Like that little hole at the top of the elevator door, I think that's for some kind of key? I mean, what if you got trapped in here on a weekend, or...

(Inner Monologue: Oh god, oh god, oh god... I know what's coming...)

(Beat)

Ginger Guy: Hey, did anyone read that New Yorker article about the guy who got trappe--

Me: NOOOOOOOOOOO! GET ME OUT OF HERE! I'LL DO ANYTHING!

(Beat)

Me: (To Hoboken girl) So I guess you buy monthly pass then, right?

Since everyone has been skeeting on IOZ's anti-libertarian posts lately...

2008-11-22T23:53:00.004-05:00

Oh yeah, you're so clever, IOZ -- too bad I ran up libertarianism's back and dunked cable guy-style like 2 years ago in this email to Bryan Caplan:

Dear Professor Caplan,

I was wondering if you could answer a few basic questions about libertarianism for me, as it has become quite voguish with many of my friends, and I can't seem to understand it at all.

As I understand it, libertarianism is a philosophy that extols free-markets and private property in the economic sphere and the Millian "Harm Principle" in the moral sphere. I don't think either of these basic premises is tenable.

As far as economics goes, it seems to me that libertarians fetishize markets. To me, markets are conditionally effective means to achieving the intrinsically morally significant end of welfare maximization. Government regulation is usually morally prohibited, not because it runs afoul of the faux moral principle that regulation is categorically bad, but rather because regulation tends to reduce efficiency and thus make everyone worse off.

Given this, what do libertarians say about market failures? Obviously libertarians realize that markets don't always maximize efficiency. Furthermore, I assume that libertarians support governmental intervention when it effectively corrects market failures.

But if you accept this, your principle is no longer "markets and economic freedom are good," but rather "economic efficiency (or wealth maximization, or whatever) is good," with the footnote that it happens to be true that markets and economic freedom (usually) promote wealth maximization (or whatever). Hence, it seems to me that libertarianism collapses into run of the mill (run of the mill? Is that a pun?) utilitarianism.

As far as morality goes, I feel the same way about the so-called "presumption of liberty." Usually it is the case that leaving people alone maximizes overall utility, but this is not always so. Consider, for example, the case of children. Presumably, no libertarian would argue that the state cannot act paternalistically towards children. But once you admit this, how can you deny that the state can act paternalistically towards adults who act like children? The relevance of childhood cannot be simply age, but rather the tendency to make certain types of shortsighted, counterproductive decisions. If the state can stop these decisions in the name of a person’s own good, regardless of his age, what left is there of the harm principle? Once again, it seems like libertarianism collapses into utilitarianism.

So, to summarize, why is libertarianism so popular when its appeal stems entirely from its frequent (yet empirically contingent) convergence with utilitarianism? It seems to me that libertarianism either a) is wrong, or b) equals utilitarianism.

I Don't Actually Agree With Many Of The Things This Post Suggests I Agree With

2008-11-22T11:03:00.004-05:00

Find and Replace: "homosexual(s)/gay(s)/straight(s)" with "African-American(s)/black(s)/white(s)"

***

I’ll stand arm in arm with the African American crowd when it comes to demanding equality under the law. But forcing a private dating service to spend money to reconfigure its website and retool its matchmaking formula to accommodate African Americans isn’t a civil rights issue. It’s petulant and silly.

Ultimately, it’ll also be counterproductive. Because if feeds into the (usually, but not always incorrect) claim that the African American crowd is forcing its lifestyle onto others. I won’t go so far as to say, as some on the right have, that whites should sue to force black dating sites to set up separate sections for whites, because I don’t think black dating sites should have to stoop to this bullshit, either. Freedom of association means that when private parties choose to associate with one another, some people will under some circumstances be excluded. Deal with it.

It’s too bad eHarmony caved.

Fire The Intern

2008-11-15T20:19:00.003-05:00

Trevor Hoffman's been treated like schiavo by the Padres front office. They're right to let him go, as he's washed up and closers are way overvalued generally, although it's odd that they felt the need to be such dicks about it. Regardless, it's pretty funny that these are the stats ESPN chose to display alongside the article about Hoffman. Debates about the relevance of the statistic aside, you'd think they'd include saves, you know, the stat that was invented in response to the rise of the relief-pitcher-designated-to-pitch-the-end-of-games, and for which Trevor Hoffman holds the career record.

Is He Calling Them Gay?

2008-11-12T08:45:00.001-05:00

Andrew Sullivan on the special friendship between Spenser Ackerman and Eli Lake.

More Sullivan on Prop 8:

Look, guys: we lost an initiative. We lost it by a much smaller margin than in the past, and the next generation will pass it. Boycott as you feel like; protest by all means. But in the end, even constitutional protections require popular support.

(Emphasis mine.)

This is a pretty stupid statement. The whole point of enshrining protections in Constitutions is so that such protections aren't subject to the whims of popular support, able to be swept aside willy nilly by voters. This is why the threshold for Constitutional revision is so high. This is also why allowing ballot initiatives ~~revising~~ amending the (state) constitution to pass with only a simple majority of the popular vote is stupid.

In non-Sullivan-news, this post is silly:

Over the last 40 years there has been a trend of shrinking presidential output. "Every Democratic president since [Lyndon] Johnson has sent fewer major proposals to Congress [i.e. Clinton sent fewer than Carter], just as every Republican president since Richard Nixon has done the same," says Mr Light. Amongst Democrats, Johnson led the way with 91 major domestic/economic proposals in his first full term, while Jimmy Carter sent 41 proposals to congress and Bill Clinton sent 33 (George Bush sent just 18).

While it may be true that, depending on how one defines the various terms in play here, this trend is in decline, there's no evidence that said trend is a meaningful measuring stick of...anything. By this standard, GWB has done relatively little during his time in office. In point of fact, he's done a ton of shit by any reasonable standard, including STARTING TWO WARS. That the increasing power of the Presidency coupled with increasing Congressional fecklessness and a certain brand of conservative brazenness has allowed the Bush Administration to effect massive change while sending comparatively fewer "major proposals" to Congress is not an indication that Presidents have become "more repairmen than reformers." They don't ask Congress to sign of on nearly as much stuff as they used to.

I got that ignorant shit you need Nigga, fuck, shit, ass, bitch, trick plus weed I'm only trying to give you what you want Nigga, fuck, shit, ass, b

2008-11-12T01:13:00.010-05:00

So one way to state Turing's big thing is:

There's no way to write down an algorithm/recipe that someone could follow by rote and successfully determine what an arbitrary computer program will do. I.e., the output of some programs cannot be predicted based on their rules and initial conditions. I.e., the only way to determine what a random computer program will do is to actually run it and see what happens.*

An example: Suppose I email you a program and tell you run it, promising you that it will fix your botched lasik. You get pretty excited, but you're a little nervous: maybe I'm lying; maybe the program is actually a virus that will delete all the photos of you that I took. Furthermore (thought experiment time) suppose I'm dead and so you can't make me tell you what I was thinking when I wrote it.

But then you think to yourself "Hey, couldn't I just program a computer to search through every line of YOUR computer program, checking for anything that looked bad? Obviously I'd check for the "delete all photos" command, but I could also check for all delete commands, reasoning that since none are required to make your program function as advertised, they must all be malicious. Maybe I could generalize this reasoning to pick out all potentially malicious parts of your program."

But as we know from Turing, this is impossible. You can't write a computer program that will determine whether my program is malicious because you can't even write a computer program that figures out what my program does!

"Intuitively though, why is predicting what a computer program will do so hard?" Here's an example of a short program whose behavior is difficult to predict:

int natural_number = 1;
int count = 0;

while (natural_number > 1) {

if ( natural_number is even ) {
 natural_number = natural_number / 2;
}

if ( natural_number is odd ) {
 natural_number = natural_number * 3 + 1;
}

}

count = count + 1;
natural_number = natural_number + 1;
GOTO LINE 1 (i.e., start over, preserving the values of 'count' and 'natural_number')

The question being "How large does count get (if in fact it ever stops growing)?".

What's going on? Well, the program applies a certain process to every natural number, starting with 1:

If the number is even, divide it by two
If the number is odd, triple it and add one

If this process eventually converges to 1, the program moves onto the next number. If the process doesn't converge to 1 for the number X, the program will enter into an infinite loop and the highest count will ever be is (X - 1).

Therefore, to find how big count gets (if it stops growing at all), we have to figure out the smallest number that doesn't converge to 1 upon repeated application of the above process.

Oh, but oops; that every number converges to 1 (i.e., that count never stops growing) is the Collatz conjecture, which, as its name suggests, has not been proved:

The conjecture has been checked by computer for all starting values up to 10 × 2⁵⁸ ≈ 2.88×10¹⁸[1]. While impressive, such computer evidence should be interpreted cautiously. More than one important conjecture has been found false, but only with very large counterexamples. (See for example the Pólya conjecture, the Mertens conjecture and the Skewes' number.)

It is also known that {4,2,1} is the only cycle with fewer than 35400 terms (skeet -- ed).

Determining what a computer will do is hard because the behavior of a computer program can depend on whether a tricky mathematical proposition is true or false. Since there's no general recipe for determining whether a mathematical proposition is true**, there's no such recipe for predicting the behavior of computer programs.

* I'm eliding one subtle distinction here for simplicity (SSD).
** Next time I feel like having sex, I'll post something about this.

Rocking A Mohawk

2008-11-11T14:20:00.005-05:00

Dear Obama,

I knew it was a just a matter of time until you left me. I'm an adult; I understood that this was likely going in. I know you're a politician's politician, and you probably "actually believe" some things that I was hoping you knew enough to "just be sayin'". I think it's good that you're going to close Guantanamo, and I don't much care about bailing out Detroit: the sums of money involve just don't concern me all that much, even if the bailout really is, you know, stupid and wrong. Even the torture thing - Jesus, the torture thing. Fuck. Table that for a second.

I'm broadly unsympathetic to the notion of leaving Gates in place for a year. I think Yglesias makes a good point (though lately he has backed off this line of reasoning). Even that, though, I can understand. But Joe fucking Lieberman? Joe Lieberman? Line in the fucking sand, bro; the Jew's gotta go. It's him or me. (I know who you'll be picking, at which point I almost hope he does make headaches for you. You do realize that it will be massively politically inconvenient to strip him of his chairmanship once he starts using those subpoena powers - the ones he's been neglecting for several years now - in ways you dislike, right?)

Regards,
Jesse

PS - Listen to Rahm on this one!

Dumb Questions

2008-11-11T01:03:00.003-05:00

CNN would seem to have answered its own poll...

(Image captured with Capture Me. Good software.)

Real world tip of the day: take notes on meeting agendas

2008-11-07T21:24:00.000-05:00

Hey law school students!

Here at Meme, we're committed to preparing you for work in the real world. To this end, look for more posts in the coming weeks with tips for how to deal with office life. Everything from "how often should I go to the bathroom?" (quite frequently when you first start, less and less as time goes on) to "what should I order for lunch?" (Low fat tuna salad on toasted rye, honey mustard, and optionally cheddar cheese).

Today's tip is: In meetings, print out the meeting agenda and take notes on it. Don't bring a spiral notebook, and definitely don't bring a lappy:

If your notes are on a meeting's agenda, it's easy to associate them with the meeting / topic at a glance. On the other hand, all slices of notebook paper look alike.
You'll often want to refer to agenda items in your notes, and this is easier when they're on the same physical piece of paper (e.g., you can draw arrows and shit).
Relative to a spiral notebook, it's harder to file annotated meeting agendae. This is good. If you can easily file your notes, you'll be tempted to file them away and not do anything with them. Instead, you should place your annotated meeting agendas right on the surface your desk.

Having a mess of scattered papers on your desk will make you uncomfortable and therefore motivate you to copy your meeting notes to a more useful (and computerized) location so you can throw the papers away. (Another strategy that helps in this respect is to make your notes embarrassing for passersby to see by filling their margins with practice signatures, small colored in circles, and Greek letters (particularly lower-case alpha and capital delta (also called triangle!))).

GAFFE!

2008-11-07T16:28:00.004-05:00

Ugh - one press conference and Obama's already giving ammo to the enemy:

Obama: Well, President Bush graciously invited Michelle and I to -- to meet with him and First Lady Laura Bush.

It's Michelle and me. Mark my words, the white supremacists are going to be up in arms about this one.

Is W Drinking Again?

2008-11-06T15:15:00.002-05:00

This is, apparently, what he said to Obama:

Mr. President-elect, congratulations to you. What an awesome night for you, your family and your supporters. Laura and I called to congratulate you and your good bride.
I promise to make this a smooth transition. You are about to go on one of the great journeys of life. Congratulations and go enjoy yourself.

Italics mine (In honor of Tom, I was going to link to the Dinosaur Comic in which T-Rex contemplates the idea of speaking in italics. After searching - with this VERY NIFTY COMIC SEARCHING TOOL - for a while, I gave up. Furthermore, the seeming-comprehensiveness of the search tool made me doubt my own memory. It is possible that there IS NO SUCH COMIC?).

Now That Obama's Been Elected

2008-11-05T23:00:00.000-05:00

can we scrap "African American" in favor of "black"? I've never been a fan of the (country/continent name)-American form (especially because you could run into weirdness with people from other parts of the Western hemisphere (South American-American?)), and am downright giddy with postracialism today.

A Levitt Love Letter

2008-11-05T08:45:00.002-05:00

UCLA opened its basketball season with an exhibition game last night at Pauly, dispatching Cal Baptist by a bunch of points. This year's freshman class was on display, and it was clear that UCLA has stepped up its recruiting game yet again under Ben Howland. Consider Howland's recruits' first names. Until this year, he was getting (American) recruits with mostly conventional, or near conventional, names and spellings:

Arron (Afflalo) - pronounced "Aaron"
Jordan (Farmar)
Josh (Shipp)
Lorenzo (Mata-Real)
Luc (M'bah a Moute)*
Alfred (Aboya)*
Mike (Roll)
Darren (Collison)
Russell (Westbrook)
Nikola (Dragovic)*
James (Keefe)
Kevin (Love)
Chace (Stanback) - pronounced "Chase"; he transferred.
* = not American

This Year's Class:

Malcolm (Lee)
Drew (Gordon)
Jrue (Holiday) - pronounced "Drew"
Jerime (Anderson) - pronounced "Jeremy"
J'mison (Morgan) - pronounced "Jay-mis-son"

Voting is Decadent and Depraved

2008-11-04T15:00:00.003-05:00

I woke this morning at 8:47, figurative sand (residue of last night's drink) in my eyes exacerbated by light streaming in through hastily, ineffectively closed blinds. After donning unwashed (though not particularly dirty, in the Kai tradition) clothes from the foot of my bed, I stumbled to the Felicia Mahood Senior Citizen Center, coffeeless and paradoxically more bitter for it, to participate in this grand, gay affair we call - endearingly, much in the way a child refers to his molester father as "Papa" - Democracy.

The stench of age was upon me as soon as I entered; mottled Obama relatives, in spirit at the very least, tottered about clutching Qur'ans, muttering in Arabic, shitting and stinking and dying. Besandaled, I shifted my weight frequently; my feet hurt and it was barely 9. In front of me in line, an unlikely veteran prattled about the various attributes of bicycles (he has bladed spokes on his road bike) as my eyes roved for a janitor's bucket in which I could loudly vomit and then quietly drown myself.

I was overwhelmed; arriving at the voting station I couldn't remember which black guy to vote for; I may have cast one for Alan Keyes. I knew nothing about the various local and judicial candidates. Fortunately, in (literally) every race a former prosecutor was running against one other candidate, easing process of elimination voting, though exaggerating the pounding in my temples, wherein an Oriental gong rang every few seconds to the consternation of the poll workers (the sound may have been my cellphone informing me that I had a new textual message from Ilan: brief respite from the single worst day of my life).

What if He loses?

Prop Bets

2008-11-03T20:45:00.001-05:00

So I took the over on "Obama wins at least 330 electoral votes" against Eben, a line I set without really gaming out any scenarios. Here's how I'm voting on the various California ballot initiatives:

(1A) Yes (high speed rail)
(2) Undecided. This is basically me vs. David Foster Wallace (Tom has some reasonable thoughts here). My general stance on animal rights issues is "sure, let's fix that once there are no more starving humans."
(3) No (Gives money to Childrens' Hospitals. I am not a child [legally speaking], nor am I a hospital.)
(4) No (As a general rule, one should never vote for an initiative in the "girl's first name" tradition. This one's dubbed "Sarah's Law." Last-name laws are only rarely OK "the Brady bill.")
(5) Yes (reduce sentences for non-violent drug offenses; adds loopholes that would allow "defendants accused of child abuse, domestic violence, vehicular manslaughter, and other crimes to effectively escape prosecution. Strongly opposed by MADD."* All seem like good reasons to vote yes.)
(6) No ("Every California Sheriff supports Proposition 6."*)
(7) No (T. Boone Pickens wants you to give him money.)
(8) Yes (Eliminates rights of same sex couples to marry in California. Serious eww factor here.)
(9) No (Crime, blah blah blah. Probably supported by the Prison Guards' union.)
(10) No (More alternative energy BS)
(11) No (Something about redistricting)
(12) No (Give Vets money to buy houses. Yes! As we've seen recently, encouraging and subsidizing homeownership is sound policy!)

*Quotes taken from the Official Voter Information Guide

Save your angst; I'm kidding on 8. This was interesting, though wrong.

There's a fine line between sharing with note and blogging...

2008-11-03T15:29:00.003-05:00

Julian Sanchez writes in a characteristically thoughtless post that there are three "types" of redistribution:

Incidental Redistribution (i.e., redistribution that happens as a side-effect of a government program)
Altruistic Redistribution (i.e., redistribution intended to help the worse off)
Egalitarian Redistribution (i.e., redistribution intended to bring about a more egalitarian justification of resources as a good in itself)

Sanchez is right that Egalitarian Redistribution is retarded (i.e., no one really believes it), but he misses out on a huge "type" of redistribution -- the "type" that I actually think motivates a lot of people's support for redistribution, even if they don't know it: Redistribution as Insurance.

The goal of this type of redistribution is not to help the worse off, but rather to reduce risk for everyone. In other words, if everyone buys into a system that will require them to give to the poor when they're rich and get money from the rich when they're poor, people have less exposure to the risk of hitting a string of bad luck and becoming poor (though they also have less incentive to become rich).

Under this view, while on the surface my tax dollars are going to some poor hipster cutie in Williamsburg, what's really happening is that I'm paying for "bad luck insurance" -- the money I give to the hipster cutie is the equivalent of an insurance premium that gives me access to similar benefits when my luck runs out.

This justification for redistribution is more palatable than the others. This is because the relevant transfer isn't "Tom in good times" -> "Random poor person", but rather "Tom in good times" -> "Tom in bad times". Could the private market provide this service? Sure, and maybe it should, though there are transaction costs, adverse selection, blah blah blah.

In any event, I think some version of this is the most palatable justification for redistribution. Altruism doesn't really work because if you buy it, you have to concede that approximately 0% of the money you want to redistribute should go to poor Americans, and approximately 100% should go to poor Africans -- it's like $19 billion dollars for a loaf of bread in Zimbabwe! (Note to the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine: I'll give you anything you want, just please stop writing meme-y articles about inflation in Zimbabwe).

So yeah, if you think poor Americans should get any of the wealth you want to redistribute, you either:

Think we're all buying into the same big insurance policy.
Are racist (i.e., think that poor Americans deserve more than poor Africans just because they look like you and they're closer).

Heh heh

2008-10-28T08:45:00.001-04:00

Remember when I said that E*Trade looked smart and Citadel stupid for their trade last year? Yeah. Bad year for the E*Meiz (I'm guessing).

Other things you've probably seen already:

Joe McCain calls 911 to complain about traffic.
Good anti-Obama email. Nut graf:IF YOU KNOW HOW TO DO SPIRITUAL WARFARE, PLEASE PRAY TODAY AND CONTINUALLY THAT ALL SUCH CURSES [CAST BY OBAMA'S FAMILY IN KENYA] BE BROKEN AND SATAN'S PLAN FOR AMERICA BE DEFEATED, IN JESUS' NAME. PRAY AND COVER MCCAIN AND PALIN WITH THE BLOOD OF CHRIST. IF YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW TO DO SPIRITUAL WARFARE, IT IS TIME YOU LEARN!!!
Porsche vs. VW, German stock market edition.
Terrence Howard replaced by Don Cheadle in Iron Man II. (I obviously approve.)
Flying car.

Foregone Conclusion

2008-10-27T21:39:00.004-04:00

Ambinder is, apparently, "old-school" in that he pretends that "political reporter" does not include the "political" part, and seems to believe that airing both "sides" of an issue is sufficient reportage, regardless of the relative truth content of the claims of each side. Nevertheless, even he seems to be conceding that the election's over, (incorrectly) reassuring young McCainiacs that they retain their dignity, despite the media's interest in maintaining the fiction of a tight race. Even when trying to frame the building implosion of the McCain campaign as something neither unique nor surprising, Ambinder brings up telling precedents:

Principal-staff tension is a tradition of presidential campaigns. There was tension between John Edwards and the Kerry staff... and between Joe Lieberman and the Gore staff... and between the Kemp and Dole staffs. Just not this public or poisonous.

Hat tip to my office mate

2008-10-21T12:40:00.002-04:00

Here is a page from the 2007-08 Birmingham International Airport Annual Report:

Notice anything weird?:

In honor of Ilan...

2008-10-20T16:10:00.000-04:00

I have created a new meme:

Eric Got Bored And Drew A Graph

2008-10-17T08:45:00.000-04:00

I'm probably the biggest Eric-flamer around, but this is pretty funny:

Click for legible.

That bird is a liar!

2008-10-16T14:10:00.002-04:00

When President Bush came into office, we had a budget surplus and the national debt was a little over $5 trillion. It has doubled over the last eight years.

- Obama last night

This is false -- in 2000 we owed $5 trillion 2000-dollars, and now we owe $10 trillion 2008-dollars. The size of the national debt has doubled in nominal terms, but in order to determine how much it has doubled in real terms (the figure that matters), you have to discount 2008 dollars by inflation (i.e., we owe more 2008-dollars now than we did 2000-dollars then, but 2008 dollars are worth less than 2000 dollars and thus easier to pay back).

So either Obama was being intentionally misleading, or he doesn't know the difference between real dollars and nominal dollars.

The Ravages of Subprime

2008-10-11T08:45:00.000-04:00

Listen to Todd:

Basically, I see 2 possible scenarios, and I don't know which one we're in. I hope we're in...

Scenario 1) There are many banks out there, some are solvent and some are insolvent, but right now we can't observe which ones are which because they all hold assets whose value is uncertain. But in truth, some banks hold assets that are collectively worth more than their liabilities, and others don't.

The government's goal should be to reveal which banks are solvent, while letting the insolvent banks "fade into Bolivian," thus freeing the good banks to lend freely. The tricky part is making sure that nobody makes a run on the good banks, which would then be forced to liquidate assets at firesale prices, perhaps failing to raise enough money to cover liabilities. It's in everybody's best interest to avoid that situation. At the same time, it's in nobody's best interest to subsidize the insolvent banks (except maybe their shareholders, but that's insignificant given the scale). So the question becomes whether we want to make a false positive or a false negative error. My personal opinion is that it's probably better to bail out a few crappy banks than it is to let all the good banks go to shit.

Many questions remain, perhaps most obviously: how can we determine asset prices if there's no trading in these markets? (answer: we can't, but people (like me) can make models to make the best possible guess. It's still very crude) It's possible that the good banks would survive even if nobody does anything. It's also not clear that letting the government buy assets is the best way to reveal which banks are good/bad.

Of course, we might all be screwed if we're actually in...

Scenario 2) Most/all banks are actually insolvent right now. Their assets are just so shitty and worthless that ultimately no bank can meet its obligations. If this is true then I don't know what the gov't should do. Maybe just start buying houses and renting them back to people. Unfortunately there's $15 trillion worth of mortgages in this country. Not all of that is bad, but it would be very difficult to figure out exactly which loans to buy. Plus once you start buying out delinquent loans, people who were previously current on their payments will stop paying. No easy answer. I hope we're not in this scenario because I don't see any good way out.

Also see Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager.

Hey, Hadron Scientists

2008-10-10T08:45:00.000-04:00

Your shit's broke, yo. I know you're probably enjoying sitting around all day playing Fantastic Contraption, which, I would be the first to admit, is a particularly pleasant way to spend an afternoon. In the interest of progress, though, I have a request. Could one of you take an afternoon and make an omelette without breaking the eggs? I'm thinking you should use a syringe to get the goodness out, or maybe you could do some sort of osmosis thingy; however you do it, that fucking phrase needs be banished to the depths, heights, or middling-altitudes of hell.

Thanks.

One Thing I Haven't Seen Mentioned

2008-10-09T08:45:00.002-04:00

So how sick does E*Trade's move from last year look now? From wikipedia:

On November 29, 2007, E*TRADE announced a deal with the Citadel Investment Group in which Citadel purchased E*TRADE's securitized subprime mortgage investments for $800 million, cash. The transaction removed the assets with the greatest market risk from E-Trade's consolidated balance sheet -- their $3 billion asset-backed securities (ABS) portfolio, including its ABS collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and second lien securities. This resulted in a net $2.2 billion reduction in assets on their balance sheet. In addition to that divestiture, under the terms of the deal E*TRADE received $1.6 billion of capital in exchange for 12.5% senior unsecured notes and 84,687,686 shares common stock (equal to 19.99% of the then currently outstanding shares). Citadel received a seat on E*TRADE FINANCIAL's Board of Directors. Mitch Caplan resigned as CEO on the same day that the deal was announced.

Although E*TRADE's management admits that the deal was costly for E*TRADE, it removed the risk from those subprime investments and resulted in an infusion of $2.5 billion in cash.

At the time, the idea was that Citadel was in a position to hold the assets for a while until they regained some of their value. Anyone want to take the over on those assets being worth $800M?

The Devil's In The "Presumably"

2008-10-08T16:19:00.004-04:00

Douthat defends McCain's health care plan:

This is an argument you hear frequently from liberals: That McCain's plan will tax employer provided health insurance, which is worth roughly $12,000 for a typical family, which in turn will lead many employers to stop offering said health insurance; meanwhile, the plan will give the same family a tax credit worth only $5,000 to pay for the same plan they used to have through their employer. This makes the whole thing sound like a pretty rotten deal, but it also begs a pretty big question: What happened to that extra $7,000 that employers were spending on health care under the old dispensation? To hear Biden tell it, it'll just vanish into thin air. But that's just absurd. Right now, that $12,000 plan is part of your compensation; it's just that the current tax code incentivizes employers to pay you in health insurance rather than in cash, because the health insurance is tax free. But that doesn't mean that if health insurance stops being tax free and employers stop including it in your package of salary and benefits, they'll suddenly cut everyone's compensation by $12,000; they'll cut it by the cost of the tax deduction, presumably, and wages will rise to roughly where they would have been if employers had never been incentivized to pay their workers in health care. So the typical family will get their $5,000 credit from the government, and something like the remaining $7,000 they need to buy health insurance will show up in their paycheck. Except that a lot of Americans will actually come out ahead, rather than just breaking even, since McCain's plan offers a flat credit regardless of income, whereas under the current system the dollar value of your tax deduction - and thus the compensation your employer is incentivized to give you - goes up as your income rises.

Right. I'm sure that if the government tells your employer they no longer have to provide you health insurance, you'll get a commensurate raise. Everyone will. Especially low-income, low-bargaining-power workers. Definitely gonna happen; it's what the market would predict, and the market, as we've seen recently, is completely logical, fair, and requires little to no intervention to run smoothly.

As a mildly sophisticated aside, I'd also note that he misuses "begs the question."

Please Be My Friend On Netflix

2008-10-04T08:45:00.001-04:00

The Homicide Clearance Rate measures the percentage of reported homicides for which someone is eventually arrested. Obvious objections to the statistic present themselves, but table them for a minute. Apparently the national clearance rate has been declining slowly from around 80% in 1970 to about 70% now. Meanwhile, somewhere between 12,000 and 18,000 people are murdered annually (not sure if this counts non-citizen murders). With another improbable but likely harmless assumption - that all murders are committed by one and only one different person - we arrive at something like 4500 murderers uncaught, each year - 0.0015% of the population.

Now Available In Three New Colors!

2008-10-03T20:45:00.001-04:00

Hey Everyone, I'm Ted, the off-putting gynecologist.

I like to make my patients uncomfortable. I give them nicknames like "Overgrown," "Flappy," and "Herpes." My favorite patient has pale, beautiful skin. I call her "Snow White and the Seven Warts," because she has genital warts. Mostly I just want to be loved.

Recent troubles in the credit markets have allowed me to break out my new favorite line:

***

A WOMAN, middle-aged, tired after a long day, sits timidly on an examining table, shivering as she wraps herself more tightly in the requisite thin, crinkly gown. She eyes the stirrups uneasily.

Ted bursts rather jauntily into the room, right hand extended, middle and index fingers straight and erect.

Ted: My name's Ted. Spread 'em!

Ted: Get it?

I Like Being Late Getting To Things; It Makes Me Seem Busy Or Lazy

2008-10-02T20:45:00.000-04:00

A little while ago, conservatives took a break from defending the indefensible to crow over this:

The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?
The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.
Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama's former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin's former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.

Hmmm - this is a pretty narrow definition of "occult and the paranormal," which is basically "weird shit that most of us don't happen to believe in." As I've mentioned before, all religious belief is equally insane. Consider the following pairs of questions:

Do you believe in ghosts?
Do you believe in angels?

Do you believe it is possible to communicate with the dead?
Do you think [your dead relative] can hear your prayers? Can you ever feel him/her "with" you?

Of course, Sarah Palin must believe in witchcraft, as she feels the need to be protected from it:

Okay, I Did Not Know That Lil Wayne Shot Himself In The Chest With A .44 Caliber Revolver While "Imitating Travis Bickle,"

2008-10-02T08:45:00.000-04:00

which is rather thug.

However,

Favorite teams:

Packers, then Saints
Favorite Player: Brett Favre
Red Sox
LSU (and Tulane, a little) college football
UNC college basketball

Lil Wayne is a douchebag.

Perspective Alert

2008-09-23T08:45:00.001-04:00

OH MY GOD - $700 billion!!! That's like, so much money! And the benefits are uncertain! How could anyone in her right mind vote for such a thing?

AHHHHH - CREEPING CREEPY SOCIALISM IS BREAKING INTO A FAST WALK! MAYBE EVEN A SLOW JOG!

Over the course of the last 5 years or so, the United States took approximately $1.5 trillion in $1 bills, threw a couple thousand soldiers, another country's infrastructure, and a several hundred fucking thousand Iraqis on top, and lit the whole thing on fire. $700 billion - with potential upside - is a dribble of piss from our diseased fiscal dick.

Riddle Me This

2008-09-19T12:00:00.002-04:00

Ok - so we're in this totally fucked economic climate, and the rumor is that the Fed/Treasury is going to set up something like an RTC where the government buys all (or a lot of) the bad securities, holds them for a while (later selling them, potentially at a profit), and all the banks and shit start lending one another money again. Of course, all these bad securities are either directly backed by shitty mortgages or derivatives thereof, in some sense (insurance on corporate default which is intimately related to these derivatives, &c.). So why - instead of buying all of Wall St.'s debt and letting a lot of people get foreclosed on, doesn't the government just buy a lot of people's mortgages outright (or pay off part of their mortgages and help them renegotiate the terms en masse)? This would mean that the derivatives that rely on these mortgages would suddenly become as safe as advertised - AAA, at least so long as US gov't debt doesn't actually lose its AAA rating - and would bail out, you know, lots and lots of taxpayers on the taxpayer dime, rather than relatively few big institutions on the taxpayer dime. Further, I'd hazard that whatever overrated moral hazard qualms are still being floated around are less so with a broad bailout than a narrow one. The precedent from the view of the individual would not be: I should take out a shitty mortgage, because if I can't pay it the government will bail me out but I shouldn't take out a shitty mortgage, because if I can't pay it the government will bail me out if and only if a sufficient number of other people also took out shitty mortgages.

(Update: The problem with future-posting is that sometimes in the intervening hours Kevin Drum comes up with your idea all by himself).

I Can't Take It Anymore

2008-09-17T16:45:00.002-04:00

I just bought a Josh Howard jersey:

The video, from Allen Iverson's event, shows Howard, as the national anthem is being sung, saying: "'The Star-Spangled Banner' is going on. I don't celebrate this [expletive]. I'm black."...Also in July, Howard was arrested and charged with speeding (94 mph in a 55 mph zone), careless and reckless driving, and speed competition in North Carolina. He was released from jail on a written promise to appear in court Sept. 23...Last year, Howard admitted he is an occasional marijuana user. And in 2006, Howard opted out of playing for the U.S. Olympic team program, reportedly because he said it conflicted with his summer training camps.

Art

2008-09-15T08:45:00.001-04:00

Thoughts from Rebecca on the Met's pick:

It depends on how you look at it. They picked an intellectual, someone who has two credits as a curator - both in tapestries, is well-liked, but under the radar. Most of his accomplishment comes from the attendance rate of the tapestry shows, and that the accompanying catalogue (yes, this is how art people spell that word) for one of the shows managed to walk the line between "pretty pictures" and "scholarly" extremely well. But, he is not the head of his department and has held no managerial position in his entire career. Not to mention the fact that almost no one, in all of the art blogs I have read in the last few days, has ever heard of him.

This is not the road most US museums have taken. Most museums (LACMA is the best example - Michael Govan) have recently picked people who can fundraise, deal with board members, and attract crowds with spectacle. The man who turned museum directing into that kind of position, the first man to acquire corporate funding, etc., was a director of the Met (Hoving, the guy before de Montebello). The Met may have bet on not needing to hire someone already trained in that manner for two reasons - de Montebello was there for 30 years, he's not going to disappear overnight, and he and a very supportive board will most likely be able to sustain development while Campbell learns. Also, the Met is co-run, a detail that seems to be missing from most of the press - a woman named Emily Rafferty is the operating director of the Met, basically a COO/CFO position, so she can take on some of that responsibility. She's gone mostly unnoticed due to de Montebello's tenure and charm.

My personal thoughts - I am genuinely surprised that in picking someone from within the Met's operation, they did not pick Gary Tinterow, the head curator of 19th Century, Modern and Contemporary Art. He would have been middle ground - establishment, within the Met, but also responsible for Jeff Koons on the Roof, and such similar shows. The part I am torn by is that this is decidedly bad for contemporary art at the Met, but maybe that's a good thing?

Buried Nugget/Dig It Out

2008-09-14T08:45:00.002-04:00

In his annual "State of Yale" email, amidst the self-congratulatory bullshit, President Richard C. "Dick" Levin drops this little munner:

Four undergraduates represented Yale in Beijing last fall and won the international grand prize for debate conducted in the Chinese language. Remarkably, three of the four knew not one word of Chinese before beginning their language study at Yale, an amazing testament to the quality of Chinese language instruction here.

What kind of asshole gets into Yale without at least knowing "General Tso's," or "beef with broccoli"?

Asked And Answered

2008-09-13T08:45:00.002-04:00

The issue is not that Sarah Palin couldn't precisely define the Bush doctrine. I doubt that anyone could; Dubya, if asked, would probably laugh off the question:

Well, it's my doctrine, so it's whatever the hell I say it is, in't it? Heh. Seriously, though, the Bush doctrine is freedom. That's it. I see something beautiful in that simple...ness: freedom. The Bush doctrine is freedom. You believe in freedom, I believe in freedom, and I know the American people believe in freedom. And I support our brave men and women in uniform, who fight to make freedom a reality.

The Bush doctrine is not so much subtle as it is ambiguous, although the central concept is probably something like what Yglesias say:

It holds that we should attack other countries that might attack us at some future point even if we have no particular evidence of a specific or imminent plan to do so.

I'd add something about the culpability of states for the actions of non-state actors it harbors.

Back to the question at hand, the problem is that Sarah Palin had clearly never heard of the Bush doctrine. She doesn't have a fucking clue. First she asked for help, "in what respect?" Gibson parries with "well, what's your interpretation of it?" to which she responds, "his worldview." It's a line that would crack up the seminar class, the Professor wearing a smirk, while the offending student would blush and raise his hand furiously for the rest of the period, hoping to score makeup points. Gibson could have said, "President Bush's position favoring Cuban annexation," and Palin would have ranted about the evils of Castro, the Cuban people's longing for freedom, and the winnability of the Bay of Pigs, assuming she didn't have to ask what "annexation" meant.

Cheating, It Works

2008-09-12T16:57:00.003-04:00

I've long maintained that Lance Armstrong obviously took steroids. Clearly. There's enough evidence that the burden of proof falls on him, something Armstrong apparently realizes, and I'd bet is motivating his comeback attempt. It will be hilarious when he fails.

I'll admit, though, that the thought of Usain Bolt on steroids hadn't crossed my mind. Carl Lewis sets the record straight:

I'm still working with the fact that he dropped from 10-flat to 9.6 in one year. I think there are some issues. I'm proud of America right now because we have the best random and most comprehensive drug testing program. Countries like Jamaica do not have a random program, so they can go months without being tested. I'm not saying anyone is on anything, but everyone needs to be on a level playing field...Let's be real. Let me go through the list: Ben Johnson, Justin Gatlin, Tim Montgomery, Tyson Gay and the two Jamaicans. Six people have run under 9.80 legally, three have tested positive, and one had a year out. Not to say [Bolt] is doing anything, but he's not going to have me saying he's great and then two years later he gets popped. If I don't trust it, what does the public think?

Finally, Nikolay Davydenko got away with throwing a match. The ATP finally realized that it lacks subpoena power, and so ended it's investigation "concluding" that Davydenko didn't cheat. Except, like:

For months, Davydenko refused to comply with an ATP request to turn over phone records for himself, his wife Irina and his brother, Eduard, who is also his coach. In November 2007, Davydenko told ESPN he was willing to comply with the ATP request for his personal phone records. In January, while competing at the Australian Open, Davydenko was given a 15-day deadline to turn over phone records for his wife and brother. While it did not specify who failed to comply with its request for phone records, the ATP's statement of Friday indicated that investigators did not get all they were after. "Certain individuals declined the ATP requests and appealed them to the independent hearing officer," the ATP said in a prepared statement. "Due to the length of the legal proceedings some of the records were confirmed as having been destroyed by the relevant telephone providers in line with local data protection laws."

Don't They Have An Editor?

2008-09-11T19:08:00.002-04:00

To continue with the ESPN bashing, Greg Garber offers his contribution to the annals of awful prose:

All season long, going back to the Australian Open, Roger Federer has taken it in and refused to make excuses. The mononucleosis virus that infested him is gone, but the effects clearly lingered well into the summer.
Something was missing: His elegant, well-oiled movement, the crackling volleys, the sizzle on his forehand, the scintillation of his serve.
On Monday evening, the vintage champion returned. Like Carl Sandburg's "Fog," he rolled in on little cat feet; his footwork was extraordinary. His running forehand was again a velvet hammer, his volleys sang and his serve was sometimes impossible to read.

I'm Actually Watching Sportscenter Right Now

2008-09-10T12:17:00.003-04:00

The long decline of Sportscenter is tough to talk about for those of us who grew up on it in what we consider its heyday. We look back fondly on the days of Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann (before he became quite such a pompous), remember Chris Berman as a lovable buffoon who mostly talked football but occasionally anchored, and hate the Coors Light 6-Pack. In our darker moments, we wonder whether the co-incidence of the the presidency of George W. Bush and the end of Sportscenter providing meaningful, useful recaps of the day's sporting events is somehow causation rather than correlation. It was, after all, around the year 2000 that Sportscenter decided its NBA coverage should consist entirely of dunks, its MLB coverage of homeruns and the occasional flash of leather, and its NFL coverage of Brett Favre. (It would have been convenient for my narrative had Stuart Scott started on Sportscenter in 2000, but apparently that happened in 1995, which implies that I've been listening to - or at least hearing - the man for 13 years now, or more than half of my life. Kill me.)

Highlights on Sportscenter used to fit the narrative of the game. A long, clock-killing drive composed of a bunch of 5 yard runs and 8 yard passes would merit a number of highlights, even though no individual play was outstanding. Now, it's skipped entirely, in favor of the meaningless 55-yard touchdown run that took place in the fourth quarter of a 49-14 game. The overall highlight reel would provide a feel for the game as it took place. Instead of summary, we now get random, oustanding plays, sometimes even out of order, like ridiculious newspaper recaps that, owing to deadline pressures, begin with the fourth quarter and end with the third . In my desperation, especially with the recent downfall of ESPNews, I turned to local news at times, especially for highlights of games in which a home team was involved. At least until I found this. Sportscenter on Sunday nights, featuring the return of Chris Berman: sucka sucka dick.

Joe Lieberman Is Not A Centrist

2008-09-06T08:45:00.001-04:00

He's "liberal" on most issues. He's a raving lunatic on foreign policy generally, and the Iraq War in particular. His support for this war has led him to take "conservative" positions on a number of semi-related issues, including torture and electronic surveillance. A one-dimensional, weighted average of these positions corresponding to the halfway mark on an arbitrary continuum does not a centrist make.

Becker And Posner, Sittin' In A Tree

2008-09-05T08:45:00.000-04:00

Becker on gay adoption:

It is still too early to have reliable evidence on the effects on children of being raised by gay parents, but I suspect these effects will be more negative than positive, in part because even married gay couples are likely to dissolve their match at relatively high rates.[emphasis mine]

I assume he means "relative to heterosexuals," and, um, well, we don't know for sure, and we don't know why Becker thinks this is obvious, but that vaunted stuff - "evidence" - suggests otherwise.

There's No Such Thing As A Coincidence; There's Just People Fucking With You

2008-09-04T08:45:00.005-04:00

I initially hailed John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as a boon to the Dems: she's under-vetted; corrupt and facing investigation; knows little to nothing about foreign policy (her "command" of the Alaskan National Guard notwithstanding); has already shown a willingness to tell stupid, easily-exposable lies about her own record; undercuts McCain's "experience" narrative. I also like the idea of secessionist movements as they have the musk of Kennedy-Shafferian quixoticity to them.

But I think I've come around to Tyler Cowan's notion that this was a good pick, because, essentially, people will believe what they believe:

There is one biographical fact about Palin's life that the critics (Drum, DeLong, Yglesias, Klein, Sullivan and Kleiman are among the ones I read) are hardly touching upon. I mean her decision to have a Downs child instead of an abortion. This is the fact about her life and it will be viewed as such from now through November and perhaps beyond.

Basically Cowan's suggesting a cognitive dissonance effect, where the chain of logic goes like this:

(1) Sarah Palin chose to bear her Downie
(2) Only a good person would make such a choice.
(3) Sarah Palin is a good person
(4) Good people only do good things
(5) I want a good person to be Vice President/John McCain must have good judgment for picking such a good person.
(6) [in reaction to evidence or claims [however specious] that Sarah Palin did a bad thing or that Ms. Palin holds insane views or is embroiled in scandal or whatever] That cannot be true, or even if it is it must not matter/Sarah did the right thing, because Sarah Palin is a good person. Shame on Obama.
(7) [in reaction to evidence or claims [however specious] that Sarah Palin did a good thing or that Ms. Palin holds non-insane views or whatever] Well of course that's true, because Sarah Palin is a good person. Good on McCain.

Note that this is basically the same process by which McCain's maintained his "maverick" reputation thus far.

Others have mentioned that (can't remember where I saw this) for McCain, this may be a weakly dominant strategy since the margin of loss is irrelevant. By this logic, while a safe pick would have ensured a narrow loss, a risky pick leads to a larger loss most of the time but occasionally a victory. This is, to my mind, the likeliest explanation for the pick. Republican strategists are much smarter than are Republican voters, which is why the former are able to keep tricking the latter.

Splaying Everywhere

2008-09-03T08:45:00.000-04:00

Joe Lieberman's caught in a weird place. His website lists no speeches for September '08.
"Two brothers who ran a funeral home and crematorium admitted Tuesday that they sold corpses to a company that trafficked stolen body parts, a macabre scheme that left families aghast and unclear about the fate of their loved ones. [Reporters salivated over the opportunity to use 'macabre.']" As for the loved ones, their fates remain: dead.
Shield Season Last started yesterday. Nick approves.
Charles Barkley speaks truth.
I understand that in this case they would have had to fly a long way, but I've really never understood landing-gear-impaired airplanes always circle the aiport from which they took off in order to burn fuel before attempting the slightly-tricky landing. Flying to the destination would also serve to burn fuel, no? (This was cool at the time.)
Good Helen Mirren content.
UCLA got Tyler Lamb and inside sources tell me Tyler Honeycutt's ours.

No

2008-09-02T18:37:00.003-04:00

Megan McArdle:

I have a low opinion of politicians, and I do not expect Obama to change the world. But he's nonetheless inspiring. The least of it is that America has nominated a black man--the son of immigrants--to be the likely next president of the United States.

America has done no such thing. The Democratic Party has. The last person America elected is George W. Bush.

Movies On Which Sarah Palin Should Be Forced To Opine

2008-09-01T16:05:00.006-04:00

Juno
Insomnia
Knocked Up
Bridge on the River Kwai
WarGames
In The Heat of the Night
Mystery, Alaska
Dr. Strangelove
There's Something About Mary
I Am Sam
Pumpkin (fucking brilliant movie, btw)
Tropic Thunder

San Francisco: A Play In Three Acts

2008-08-29T08:45:00.000-04:00

Act Three

Also on the bus; again, Kai sits while I stand. The bus shudders to a stop, and a woman's voice begins booming out from the area of the bus equidistant from the two doors.

Woman: Y'all best be out my way. I know you ain't gettin' in my way now.

People shuffle and crowd one another. Generally in this situation the complainer is incredibly fat; I crane my neck to confirm.

The woman, a reasonably-sized black woman in her thirties, is shoving a rolling cart that contains a wheeled suitcase. She makes it to the stairs, at which point her cart gets stuck between railings.

Woman: Oh hell no. Oh – oh. (mumble mumble).

A man tries to get on the bus.

Woman: I know you ain't tryin' to get on this bus now. I know you ain't tryin' to get on this bus now.

Another passenger: Why do you need a rolling cart for a wheeled suitcase?

Woman: Oh hell no. HELL no.

The back door begins to close.

Crowd: Back door!

The woman shoves ineffectually at the cart, wedging it tighter. Two passengers move to assist, as does the guy who was previously attempting to board.

The back door begins to close.

Crowd: Back door!

Woman: Oh, you still be tryin' to get on the bus. Your fuckin' stupid ass still be tryin' to get on this bus. I know your stupid ass ain't tryin' that.

Jesse: Stop helping her if she's going to call you a stupid ass.

The crowd titters, a few calling out agreement.

Chick: Heh – yeah, don't help her if she's insulting you.

Dude: Yeah!

Woman: Oh hell no! I'm'a make you swallow your teeth motherfucker. I'll make you swallow your teeth.

The back door begins to close.

Crowd: Back door!

The guy pulls her suitcase out of her cart, collapses the cart, and places both on the curb.

The back door begins to close.

Crowd: Back door!

The woman gets off the bus and the guy gets on.

Woman: I'll make you swallow your teeth.

The door to closes. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief. The bus starts to move.

Jesse: Back door!

San Francisco: A Play In Three Acts

2008-08-28T08:45:00.001-04:00

Act Two

Rob, David, Kai and I sit in a bar, drinking Sierra Nevada and watching USA v. Spain. At halftime, Rob and I go down the street to buy a pizza and bring it back, as the bar's kitchen is closed. As we enter, I see a couple slices of cheese and a couple slices of pepperoni sitting in a glass case.

The counter guy counts receipts.

Rob: Uh, yeah, can we get a large cheese to go?

Counter Guy (mumbling, barely audible): We're closed.

Three people shuffle in behind us.

Girl: Oh thank God; I'm starving.

Counter Guy (mumbling, barely audible): All we got is what's there.

Jesse (quickly): We'll take it all.

San Francisco: A Play In Three Acts

2008-08-27T08:45:00.000-04:00

Act One

Kai and I ride the bus. Kai has obviously managed to connive his way into an unoccupied seat, while the rest of the proles and I stand and sway.

A ding announces that someone's requested that the bus stop.

Kai: This is our stop.

We move to exit.

Long, dark-kinky-haired dude: Gerps?

I look directly at him and nod.

Jesse: Yes.

LDKHD: Three D twenty-one x.

Kai gently nudges me in the back to move off the bus/register his lack of understanding.

Jesse: Absolutely.

LDKHD: (incomprehensible).

Israel: Where the Elite Meet to Skeet

2008-08-24T23:46:00.005-04:00

Dear God,

I hope you are well. I'm doing ok, as I'm sure you know. Well, how has life been looking from up there? Because from down here life and this world isn't going so well ... My friend's father died. Please remember her and her family sometime. He was so nice. Why are they always nice? ... Sorry, Hopefully I'll get to Israel some day very soon. Take care of your children. All of them. Please.

Have a nice day and thank you for your time.
-Tess

It was pretty strong throughout, but the meteoric rise of Dan's and my birthright nihilism really began the night I convinced him to leave the group in the Bedouin tent and sleep naked with me in the desert. Later I pressured Dan into shitting among the rocks and wiping with a sock.

Adding to the rush of breaking Birthright norms was the conversation we had with our insane friend Dave who stumbled on us while he was walking around smoking cigarettes.

We met Dave on the first night when he offered us some extra-long menthol Pall Malls (unquestionably the longest-burning cigarette, he assured us) of which he had purchased a carton at the duty free shop in JFK. The conversation went something like this:

Dave: Oh nice -- I'm a writer too. What kind of stuff are you working on?
Dan: Well, right now I'm working on a period piece about lobbyists in Washington DC in the 1790s.
Dave: A period piece -- cool. I'm working on the lost Seinfeld script: the one where Jerry kills a whore: "You killed a whore? What do you mean you killed a whore!?" / "I killed a whore!". And then Kramer comes in...

Later that first night though, Dave revealed his core decency when, in response to my attempt to make friends slash run game by offering a menthol to a flaxen-haired 12 y.o. native Kibbutzer he emphatically called me a monster (pronounced "Mahnstah") for the first of several times.

But on this particular night, Dave, whose teeth are the after picture in a Meth lecture, was coming off the rush of making out with one of the Israeli soldiers (who he then lost to a rotund UCF junior like the very next day -- we found this out for the second time when we provoked a reaction by asking "So, whatever happened with Liron; you fucked her, right?"). He revealed his recent success when Dan asked him "How'd it go with those Uruguayan chicks" (decent looking girls) and he responded "Those rancid whores? I wouldn't let em neah my cawk".

As the night drew on, he solemnly gave Dan advice on how to cheat on Susanna.

Dave: Okay rule number 1, and this is the most important rule. No cash. You gotta use pills or drugs. You gotta BAHWTER. And definitely no fucking credit cards.
Dan / Tom: (Unsure of the exact mistress/prostitute arrangement that Dave assumes is standard and trying to mask our laughter) Well no credit cards makes sense, but why no cash?
Dave: Are you fucking kidding? You can't pay her rent with cash! Yah bitch knows yah money!
Dave: Okay. Rule number 2, and this is very sad. You gotta use a condom...

Our nihilism reached its zenith at the Western Wall ("Wait, this wall is made of molecules, right? Okay good.") when everyone was getting all solemn and anti-photography and shit. When one of the hassids asked me if I wanted to wrap teffelin, I said "I'll answer that question with another question: suppose a meteor were headed for a school and you had the opportunity to divert it onto the western wall -- would you do it?" to his credit, he said "yes" and even admitted that he would destroy the wall to save even one human life. I wanted to keep pressing him ("Would you destroy the wall to save someone from having to accept a 50% chance of death? What about a 1/1000 chance?"), but Dan and I needed to touch our dicks to the wall.

Concealing our laughter, Dan and I solemnly approached the wall ("Which was actually searing hot -- it really burned my hand" -- one of my many western wall jokes that fell flat), but he casually slipped in one of Jason Congdon's business cards and I stole two notes (one excerpted above, the other was in Spanish). Telling Dave about this was a rush until he again called me a monster and threatened to tell the group.

The trip had its earnest moments. One night a tall, incredibly poised, ex-marine and fellow Birthrighter named Gabe (with whom my only previous interaction was when he told me to "watch my language" after I had just loudly announced in front of several probable Holocaust survivors "wow -- this dead sea water really hurts my dick and asshole") gave a truly heartfelt talk about his experience in Iraq, the positive cases for the war, etc. (It was actually pretty good, but I couldn't help asking "would you still support the war if it were 10 times as expensive? 100 times? You don't know? Okay, you're an idiot.")

The Holocaust museum was just too much. "Zahava" (below) was our guide. Her name is one of the toughest prompts in the the classic "getting to know you" first-day-of-Birthright game "Birthright tour guide or seasoning".

Zahava: ...and when he was 10, his father gave him a harmonica for his birthday, and he would only play one song -- "My Shtetl Bells" ... And when he was at Treblinka, the only way he could stay sane was to play one song over and over: "My Shtetl Bells" ... Finally, when he died, they played just one song at his funeral. And of course, that song was "Mambo No. 5". It would always cheer him up when he heard it! He loved listening to it in the gym...

Anyway, the other campers were pretty much all reptiles. I was on fire the entire time, but my game kept falling flat:

It's 5am and we're all assembled in front of the bus with our bags. Today we're driving to meet our new Israeli soldier friends (who, as many people would go on to point out at length throughout the trip, are not so different from us (in many respects!).

Tom: Boy, I'm pretty tired...
Tom: ...of the way Hezbollah has been acting in Northern Israel!!!
Mephitic Fellow Birthrighter: (Surprisingly not writing anything down) ...
MFB2: Wait -- HOLY SHIT -- you only brought ONE bag? That's fucking incredible! OMG -- how many pairs of shorts / shirts / shoes did you bring? (A variant of this conversation happened several times.)

To their credit, I did bring a very small suitcase (and did so to impress):

The Bergers actually packed really light too, but got zero props. Here's another joke no one understood:

We're at the Tel Aviv airport waiting to fly home.

Tom: Hey guys? Guys -- could you come take a look at this?
Tom: (Throws away the framed group photo they gave to us at the banquet hours earlier).

The point, as I explained to Rich and Dan, being "hey, we're never going to see these people again; why not?" Though of course right after explaining this, I couldn't help but engage one of the attractive, dull girls about the neck pillow she just bought ("Wow, cool design -- is that a Jewish star? Hey -- we decided not to exchange all our Shekels so that we could buy snacks in the airport. Are you familiar with that strategy?").

So I guess in the end, Birthright taught me that you really have no choice but to, ugh, affirm life after all. Really I just want to be liked:

Classic Kai Moment

2008-08-23T17:25:00.001-04:00

To get to Kai's apartment, turn onto Roach then take a right on another street. He offered me a beer. We popped a couple. Kai took the caps, opened the cabinet under the sink, and looked surprised at the fact that there wasn't a trashcan there. Shrugging, he deposited the caps on the counter. Kai's been living here for 5 months, and, as I found out today, there's never been a trashcan under the sink. Their trashcan is in the bathroom.

Steve, I continue to wish that your birthday be happy. I left my fucking phone charger in LA, though.

Notes From The Angel Game

2008-08-22T08:45:00.000-04:00

Between the third and fourth inning of each Angel game, they give one lucky, young fan the chance to "steal" third. The fan, bedecked in the jersey of his/her player of choice, has to run from left field to third base, "steal" the base, and run back carrying the base. Until today, I'd only seen boys compete against a 30-second clock (invariably, the difficulty lies not in the run, but in dislodging the base from the peg that keeps it in the ground, so Figgins often comes over to assist). Today's female contestant had 40-seconds, which offended my mother. GI Jane made it in 32.
Brother informs me that tonic has calories. This is total bullshit. Vodka soda it is.
I now own a stuffed rally monkey, which to my mind represents the apotheosis of human civilization. The stars await, or perhaps they don't.
Bro was also telling me about some sort of sonic device he'd been hearing about on various semi-credible conspiracy theory-ish websites, which would cause people to shit. The government was interested, for applications in riot dispersal. Were I on the verge of rioting, being forced by sound to shit myself would likely increase my desire to sow random destruction. Then I remembered that this is basically a South Park episode. Mythbusters also investigated.
Happy Birthday Steve.

Time Inconsistent Viewing Option

2008-08-21T08:45:00.000-04:00

Obama got a bit of a bad rap for his TV watching habits, compared to the oh-so-hip John McCain. Even by TNR standards, it's a pretty sloppy comparison, since the candidates were responding to different questions. Obama professed love for M*A*S*H and The Dick Van Dyke Show in response to "What shows were you passionate about as a child?" while McCain cited Dexter, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Wire when answering a question about current viewing habits.

Indeed, Obama's favorite TV show is none other than The Wire.

Note also that Zimmerman contrasts their superhero picks, calling McCain's pick of Batman edgier than Obama's Spiderman, when Obama's actual response was

I was always into the Spider-Man/Batman model. The guys who have too many powers, like Superman, that always made me think they weren't really earning their superhero status. It's a little too easy. Whereas Spider-Man and Batman, they have some inner turmoil. They get knocked around a little bit.

O

2008-08-20T08:45:00.000-04:00

Your roommate leaves a note on your computer, along with cash, that reads:

For gas bill
x

Admit that you'd momentarily think about packing and/or strategies for letting him down slowly before realizing that his nickname abbreviates to "X".

Just Stop Talking Now

2008-08-19T08:45:00.002-04:00

Here's a post from Barron YoungSmith (Brown, '06). He endorses Kevin Drum's idea that the war in Georgia is bad for Russia because, "the countries on Russia's border are more firmly in our camp now than they were even before the war." YS then goes on

I'm not sure how to tally everything up, but I'd add that the war pushed Georgia into America's popular consciousness for probably the first time ever...[which] alone seems like a change in Tsibli's favor.

Even tabling the reliance on the screwy premise that war is zero-sum, this is insane.

Georgians have no means of getting from one side of their country to their capital, short of military helicopter transport. Part of Georgia is currently occupied by the army of a giant, menacing, neighboring country intent on flexing its oil-fueled muscles. Georgia has all but guaranteed that territories previously under dispute with said menacing neighbor are lost forever. Georgia's military is in shambles, weapons and bases being destroyed as we speak. Its main port - civilian, not military - has taken lots of damage. Georgia has lost soldiers and civilians, seen its towns pillaged and women raped. But, it's winning, after all, because Barron YoungSmith and some other people half a world away are now aware that it exists, and, like, has a plight. Yeah, it's called living next to Russia, and they might as well get used to it.

Folks in Darfur should be psyched too; as of 2004 or so, I hadn't given a single thought to the Sudan since one of those asinine map tests I was forced to take in 8th grade, but now the Darfurians are definitely up in my consciousness. They're still getting genocided, though.

***
(Thankfully, all the Bush administration's going to do is bluster and bitch. John McCain - now a Georgian along with the rest of America, apparently - might try to kick the Rusians out of the G8 or the WTO. Wowee, they must be scared!)

It was all a meme

New Rick Ross!!!

NEW DRAKEOLOGY

NEW J COLE!!

New Drizzy!

New J Cole

Asher Mac Milly

CARTER IV = TRIPPY!!

Tyler The Creator + Game

AMAZING day for new hip-hop

COKE DOPE CRACK SMACK

It's Here

Kanye Ain't No Meme

CNN or The Onion?

Throwing Down

The Luddites Have a Point (or Do They?)

The Power of Less

I find videobox commenters only moderately more intelligent than Matt Yglesias

If You Don't Like What The Numbers Are Saying, Get Some New Numbers

Headlines That Please (Vol II)

It's Sort Of Weird To Realize That If You Were Raped, It Would Just Be Rape, And Not "Molestation"

It's Simple

Headlines That Please (Vol I)

Free At Last; Free At Last; Thank God All-Mighty; I'm Free At Last

Slippery Slopes

P-O-O-P

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Wannabe xkcd

MoDo

There Is Such A Thing As A Free Lunch

Separated at Birth (The Triumphant Return II)

Granting God's Request

Of Few Things I Am Certain

Irresistable

I am having a difficult time making myself clear to Richard Berger

Any port in a storm

Is it a mistake to wage war against Richard Berger on two fronts simultaneously?

Department of Hyperbole: Aren't Newspapers Supposed To Have Editors?

For Posteriors' Sake

Ariel's Brain For Dummies

Fetal Bites!

Separated at Birth (The Triumphant Return)

Redundancies, Dependencies

Seriously, I'm pretty sure you meant 'california eminem' this time

Thanksgiving Nears

6 strangers trapped in an elevator

Since everyone has been skeeting on IOZ's anti-libertarian posts lately...

I Don't Actually Agree With Many Of The Things This Post Suggests I Agree With

More boring-ass Turing content

Fire The Intern

Is He Calling Them Gay?

I got that ignorant shit you need Nigga, fuck, shit, ass, bitch, trick plus weed I'm only trying to give you what you want Nigga, fuck, shit, ass, b

Rocking A Mohawk

Dumb Questions

Real world tip of the day: take notes on meeting agendas

GAFFE!

Is W Drinking Again?

Now That Obama's Been Elected

A Levitt Love Letter

Voting is Decadent and Depraved

Prop Bets

There's a fine line between sharing with note and blogging...

Heh heh

Foregone Conclusion

Hat tip to my office mate

In honor of Ilan...

Eric Got Bored And Drew A Graph

That bird is a liar!

The Ravages of Subprime

Hey, Hadron Scientists

One Thing I Haven't Seen Mentioned

The Devil's In The "Presumably"

Please Be My Friend On Netflix

Now Available In Three New Colors!

I Like Being Late Getting To Things; It Makes Me Seem Busy Or Lazy

Okay, I Did Not Know That Lil Wayne Shot Himself In The Chest With A .44 Caliber Revolver While "Imitating Travis Bickle,"

Perspective Alert

Riddle Me This

I Can't Take It Anymore

Art