Meringue

...We are tempted to comment, in these last days before the war, on the U.N., and the French, and the Democrats. But the war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. It will reveal the aspirations of the people of Iraq, and expose the truth about Saddam's regime...

William Kristol, The Weekly Standard, March 17, 2003

Palladium-Item, March 30, 2005

UPDATE: Here's a link to some pictures and a movie of the pie-ing. I must add that I am objectively pro-pie-in-the-face. The recipient's political views don't matter, and neither does the flavor of the pie.

Sing it!

When I learn new words in my German class, I try to come up with mnemonic aids so I can memorize them. Today's mnemonic is a set of new lyrics for the French song "Alouette":

Öle Fette, trinkt die Öle Fette.
Öle Fette fühlt in Magen gut!

My living will

I wish this came with a signature line and a spot to initial. [Via Atrios]

Does God play dice?

Thank you Three-Toed Sloth -- I never would have found this set of "devotionals connected to mathematical content" without you.

How can you not laugh at passages like,

...Jesus is our least-squares solution to the impossible problem.  Note, though, that the distance between us and the law of God is infinite; through salvation in Christ, God accepts us as if the error is zero!

All in all, I'd say that these devotionals combined with the march towards so-called "academic freedom" mean I'm graduating in just the nick of time.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHT: I realize that the section on statistics is still a work in progress, but one part already leads to an interesting question. If, as quoted,

Among the accounts of his miracles, there are 23 healing events, 8 power over nature events, and 4 resurrections.  Surely Yahweb is truly God!

Intricate and sexy

Brian from Unsanity wants recommendations on fonts to use with BBEdit.

I've been using Bitstream Vera Sans Mono lately (11-point). It looks very good antialiased, which is surprising for a small monospaced font.

Kronos

I finally got around to seeing the Incredibles today. A couple of observations:

1. Regarding the flood of lawsuits against superheroes: damned if you do, damned if you don't.
2. The stained glass above the chapel doors features a Mr. Incredible logo! How cute!
3. The "capes are hazardous" motif is very well executed -- I didn't realize that Syndrome's outfit had a cape until the end of the movie.

The razor in effect

Unsanity.org goes Socratic:

...What's worse is that people always try to claim OS X has [no viruses] because it is such a small target. That claim doesn't work. We have a virus for mobile phones and a virus for a firewall that less than a hundred thousand people use (which I can't seem to find right now). These things are much, much smaller targets than OS X yet they have viruses written for them. Why is it so hard to believe that there are no viruses for OS X just because OS X is better engineered?...

Sweaty faces of the coffee-nitpickers

Oh, conservatives! Why must you be so batshit-insane?

...The Seattle coffee chain has raised some eyebrows over its "The Way I See It" campaign, which prints quotes from thinkers, authors, athletes and entertainers on the side of your morning machiatto. The goal, according to the company, is to foster philosophical debate in its 9,000-plus coffeehouses...

...The problem, critics say, is the company's list of overwhelmingly liberal contributors, including Al Franken, Melissa Etheridge, Quincy Jones, Chuck D. Of the 31 contributors listed on Starbucks' Web site, only one, National Review editor Jonah Goldberg, offers a conservative viewpoint...

...Seth Hoffman, president of the Tampa Bay Young Republicans and an occasional Starbucks drinker, said he tries to avoid buying some "liberal" products, like Ben & Jerry's ice cream. He said Starbucks should consider using more conservative voices, but if they don't, he's unlikely to stay away...

[Via Boing-Boing]

Apologies

1) With the current amount of alcohol in my system, I expect to have an unpleasant morning.

2) If I left an obscene instant message for you this evening, I apologize.

Harvesting the young

This just in: Bill Frist wants to kill helpless infants.

On feasibility

Omar Shahine writes

It seems that Paul Thurrott is astonished that Apple would apply DRM to purchased music on the client (iTunes) rather than the server. Seems like a really bad design decision and a good way to open the door for two programmers to crack it...

...I guess hindsight is 20/20 (that goes for everyone)...

The iTunes Music Store, as it stands, is already an amazing database feat. They have terabytes of digital music selections, and everyday they serve tens of thousands of song downloads and song previews on demand. It's amazing that they can handle that many database queries in the first place -- now imagine that in addition to all of that, they added on the computational overhead of encrypting each song on the server-side. (Whereas with a software update, you only need to encrypt the file once, but iTunes downloads need to be encrypted separately for each specific user.) Encrypting on the client-side is a clever way to let the servers focus on database queries and file serving without crashing... unfortunately, it really leaves Apple open to clever hackers.

Chords and melodies

Here's a couple of songs you should buy with your Pepsi caps:

1. "Country Darkness" by Elvis Costello & The Impostors

2. "Spit It Out" by Brendan Benson

3. "Blue's The Only Color" by Franklin Bruno

Defense of comments, part 2

Kevin Drum, Washington Monthly, March 21, 2005:

Yep, it's true. This is the first time — the very first time — that Bush has ever cut short one of his Crawford brush clearing holidays. When the Christian right speaks, your commander-in-chief jumps.

that's not very fair, I'm sure he'd cut a vacation short to hurry up an execution as well.

(I would love to have comments, but I don't want to deal with the deluge of comment spam, or the moderation required to keep the comments civil. In a sense, trackbacks are poor man's moderation, for if you want to comment on one of my posts, you have to write an entire blog post yourself. This increases the probability of intelligent, interesting commentary.)

Hobgoblin of little minds

I find this quotation from Governor Jeb Bush fascinating:

Certainly, an incapacitated person deserves at least the same protection afforded criminals sentenced to death.

Texas law allows hospitals [to] discontinue life sustaining care, even if patient family members disagree. A doctor's recommendation must be approved by a hospital's ethics committee, and the family must be given 10 days from written notice of the decision to try and locate another facility for the patient.

However, I have found the one bit of consistency in Bush's positions! In both Texas and in the Schiavo case, George W. Bush has always been against letting the immediate family decide what's best for the patient.

General is better

From the April 2005 issue of Scientific American:

In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies...

...Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists.  Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that’s a somewhat religious idea.  But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells.  That’s what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn’t get bogged down in details...

...Get ready for a new Scientific American.  …  This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, not just the science that scientists say is science...

...And it will start on April Fools' Day.

Daddy knows best

"I think it's a nutty idea to fool around with the Social Security system and run the risk of [hurting] the people who've been saving all their lives.... It may be a new idea, but it's a dumb one."

George H.W. Bush, during a presidential debate, 1987

Comatose

For the record, folks, straight from the judge's decision:

In the initial adversary proceeding, a board-certified neurologist who had reviewed a CAT scan of Mrs. Schiavo's brain and an EEG testified that most, if not all, of Mrs. Schiavo's cerebral cortex--the portion of her brain that allows for human cognition and memory--is either totally destroyed or damaged beyond repair.

A pig wearing lipstick

Mozilla FireFox scares Microsoft. It scares them enough to make them release a new Internet Explorer without key features:

But Microsoft isn't planning to go the whole way and make IE 7.0 fully CSS2 compliant, sources said...

IE developers and users have been clamoring for full CSS2 support for years...

One partner said that Microsoft considers CSS2 to be a "flawed" standard and that the company is waiting for a later point release, such as CSS2.1 or CSS3, before throwing its complete support behind it.

Mail problems

Just wanted to let everyone know that my email has been flaky lately, and if you sent any messages to me in the past 48 hours, please resend them.

Extraordinary claims

Irresponsible!

HOUSTON -- President Bush wants to go back to the moon, but Houston has a problem: an acute shortage of fake moon dirt.

After all, conspiracy theorists never read the second paragraph.

Marginal propensity to torture

Why are you not reading the Fafblog regularly? Why do I have to link you to it? Don't you know that Fafblog is the best blog?

You are missing commentary such as this:

Right now the bill [to ban extraordinary rendition] has fifty-two co-sponsors. No Republicans have signed onto it so far and Dennis Hastert says he's opposed to it. They probably got a pretty good reason though. Like maybe the torture jobs we send overseas will help build up the foreign torture markets so overseas torturers can get better salaries an buy more goods an help their economies in developin countries an such. Global torture lifts everybody's boat an we all win the end! Or just turn into monsters.

Bird's eye view

There's a big-ass article all about Brendan Benson in this week's Metro Times.

De hæretico comburendo

J. Bradford Delong has the courage to call things as he sees them:

Nino Scalia's views on this are profoundly--there is no other word for it--UnAmerican. Here in the United States, we are all children of Thomas Jefferson. God does not give us rulers. Instead, God gives us rights: to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We then institute governments to secure these rights, and they derive their just powers from our consent, not from God's decree. Moreover, it is not the YHWH of Revealed Religion but instead "Nature's God" and Nature itself that are the source of these rights...

...Now this is a free country. And Nino Scalia is allowed to break with those like Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln who think that legitimate power ascends from the consent of the people. It's a free country. He can take his stand with those like James I Stuart, Innocent III, and Khomeini who think that legitimate power descends from God.

But does such a guy have any business being a Justice of the Supreme Court of a free country? No.

O ye gods, ye gods! Must I endure all this?

For the past 15 hours, I have been unable to hear out of my left ear, presumably due to some sort of wax blockage. (Don't worry -- I have a doctor's appointment scheduled.)

My brother Gregory sees some irony in my predicament, what with my left ear useless, and today's calendar date.

MEDICAL UPDATE: Thanks to the fine staff at my doctor's office, if you give me a shout-out, I will now be able to hear it. However, there is still no word on whether or not I will be assassinated in front of the Capitol. I'll keep you informed.

Just shut up and enjoy the goddamn movie

A.O. Scott, New York Times, November 13, 2004:

The intensity with which "The Incredibles" advances its central idea — it suggests a thorough, feverish immersion in both the history of American comic books and the philosophy of Ayn Rand — is startling.

In fact, one particularly surprising and wonderful aspect about the film is how conservative it is in one particular respect. You know how the Disney films are always, always about building self-esteem, e.g., the need to "believe in yourself" and all that? Well, "The Incredibles" is about a world in which superheroes are not allowed to use their gifts because society has decided, in various ways, that mediocrity and avoiding risk-taking are the qualities it wishes to honor.

Some people said it was Ayn Rand or something like that, which is ridiculous. Other people threw Nietzsche around, which I also find ridiculous. But I think the vast majority of people took it the way I intended. Some people said it was sort of a right-wing feeling, but I think that's as silly of an analysis as saying The Iron Giant was left-wing. I'm definitely a centrist and feel like both parties can be absurd... Ninty-eight percent of the people got that stuff the way I intended and two percent thought I was doing The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged.

Now with enzymes

Thank goodness No More Mister Nice Blog's retirement has turned out to be fake! Otherwise we wouldn't get to read such fun articles as his latest, which deals with the bankruptcy bill as it relates to the blogosphere.

Shorter version -- the fact that the bankruptcy bill is going to pass contradicts all of the so-called "properties" of blogs.

Bless this mess

If you've never seen an installment of Stephen Colbert's "This Week In God" segment on The Daily Show, now is a good time to start. Click here for the Lenten edition.

(Honestly, though -- go to a friend's house with broadband, or the local university if you must. It was quite funny.)

The inadequacy of formal demonstrations

Because a certain person once confidently told me that they're going "rescue logicism from Gödel's incompleteness theorem" by bypassing it entirely, it might behoove this person to learn about what they're trying to bypass. A good place to start would be this wonderful article in Slate today called "Does Gödel Matter?"

My favorite part:

What is it about Gödel's theorem that so captures the imagination? Probably that its oversimplified plain-English form—"There are true things which cannot be proved"—is naturally appealing to anyone with a remotely romantic sensibility. Call it "the curse of the slogan": Any scientific result that can be approximated by an aphorism is ripe for misappropriation. The precise mathematical formulation that is Gödel's theorem doesn't really say "there are true things which cannot be proved" any more than Einstein's theory means "everything is relative, dude, it just depends on your point of view." And it certainly doesn't say anything directly about the world outside mathematics, though the physicist Roger Penrose does use the incompleteness theorem in making his controversial case for the role of quantum mechanics in human consciousness. Yet, Gödel is routinely deployed by people with antirationalist agendas as a stick to whack any offending piece of science that happens by. A typical recent article, "Why Evolutionary Theories Are Unbelievable," claims, "Basically, Gödel's theorems prove the Doctrine of Original Sin, the need for the sacrament of penance, and that there is a future eternity." If Gödel's theorems could prove that, he'd be even more important than Einstein and Heisenberg!

The wallflower

I found this blogpost from Eric Alterman very peculiar:

Though he was clearly the celebrity guest of the moment... Paul Wolfowitz was more whispered about than talked to last night.  So I felt bad for the guy when I saw him standing by himself and went over to see what cocktail party banter might yield in the way of global understanding.  (I began with, and remain committed to, the admittedly controversial hypothesis that Wolfowitz is a genuinely misguided idealist—perhaps the only one-- in the administration’s top echelon.)

Read the rest of "The wallflower"

Surviving the 21st century

How do you know if the person you're talking to is a human or a robot? Thanks to this quick and easy Turing test, you'll know within a minute. This could save your life someday!

[Via BradLands]

Defense of comments

Maybe comments are good sometimes... like in this Washington Monthly post:

...The folks at PIPA have an interesting report out about how average citizens would like to reallocate the federal budget. 1,182 adults were given a spreadsheet that showed current spending in a variety of categories and were then asked to either accept the current amounts or move them around in a way that kept total spending constant. As the chart below shows, respondents overwhelmingly wanted to make drastic cuts to defense spending and voted to redirect the money to deficit reduction and a variety of mostly social programs.

The key: "1,182 adults were given a spreadsheet that showed current spending."

In other words, when *first presented with the facts*, people turn into liberals.

But the voters at the polls don't have a spreadsheet. They think that foreign aid and welfare are the top government programs.

Big pussy

It's all too easy to hijack someone's identity in commenting systems: case in point. It's sad that the authors of such comments are not man enough to sign their own names.

However, since this is Geekable.com, and I am a geek, I've come up with a very good solution. Comments that I didn't write will now have a big "FAKE!" logo next to them.

Geekable.com will remain comment-free, as usual. If you wish to comment on any Geekable posts, you are free to do so on your own weblog, and you are free to trackback such commentary to my site.

"Logical fallacy", he whined

M.C. Barsenas, February 8, 2005:

Who is John Derbyshire? A doctored professor of evolutionary science? Nope. He's a writer for the National Review. Can anyone say a fallacious appeal to authority? I surely can.

Matt: Alright, first I'll deal with the latter assertion.
Bob: The one where theologians don't know anything about atheism?
Matt: Yes, that one. See Bob, that argument is called a genetic fallacy. Here, let me get an elementary logic book. See, right here.
Bob: Good and well, but what does it mean?
Matt: It means that the source of information does not affect the truth value of the information. For instance, if it was written on a bathroom wall that the earth revolved around the sun, I could not reject the assertion merely because it was written on the bathroom wall. Do you see?

Foreign aid

Recently the Supreme Court considered once again whether the Ten Commandments should be publicly displayed in government buildings. And once again Christians have been harping about how America is a Christian nation, and was founded on Christian principles.

Sure, our country was in a sense founded by fundamentalist Christians, but I never understood why anyone would want to glorify a bunch of repressed, murderous thugs. By the time the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written, the Enlightenment had taken hold and the Founding Fathers realized the problems involved with running a country on religious law. If you compare the rough drafts and the final versions of our founding documents, you'll see that prohibitions of state establishment of religion were generalized, and in some cases religious allusions were completely excised. Make no mistake about it, the Founding Fathers were clearly trying to base the country on principles other than Christian ones. Below are some examples of their efforts:

Read the rest of "Foreign aid"

Love letter

Dear Apple,

I love you guys, but you gotta stop fucking with the blogosphere.

Hugs and kisses,
Jeff

Appeal to inauthority

This just in! Worldwide atheism in decline, according to... two theologians and zero public surveys.

After all, who knows more about atheism than a theologian? :)

Sweet strains or pensive smiles

Dahlia Lithwick of Slate injects some snark into ordinarily dry legal commentary:

Throughout the morning it becomes increasingly clear that Scalia is the only member of the court who is being truly honest. His position: Sure, the display is religious and not secular. Let's put up some crosses, too, and have a revival meeting. In this sense, Scalia represents the vast majority of the protesters outside. They are not venerating the historical secular influence of the commandments, whatever the lawyers inside the courthouse may say. They just really like God.

Not in Homer's gods

Philosophy makes everything so tricky.

For example, I often think to myself, "M.C. Barsenas's blog sucks." But within this simple statement is a mess of philosophical conundrums. For example, would M.C. Barsenas's blog suck even if his blog contained no posts? That's a tricky question!

Thankfully Fafnir and Giblets of Fafblog have carefully considered the sucking issue. I tend to agree with Giblets -- sucking is an objective irreducible moral property, so M.C's blog would suck regardless of his posts.

As M.C. would say, "Q.E.D."

There oughta be

After reading the WRO[N]G's look at garage-jumpers, it made me wish there was a law against frivolous lawsuits.

Oh wait, there is!