How old are you in abortion years?

Fafblog's very own Medium Lobster comments on the recent Florida abortion debacle:

Florida has no parental notifaction [sic] laws. But it does have a Department of Children and Families, and thank God for that: it has successfully sued to prevent a pregnant 13-year-old ward of the state from having an abortion on the grounds that she's too immature to make the decision. Too immature to choose to have a child, but plenty old enough to risk physically bringing it to term, and to raise it in the squalor of state custody. Ah, the glorious mysteries of the culture of life!

Implausible deniability

Jon Chait criticizes the Wall Street Journal in today's L.A. Times:

At this point, you may be wondering whether it's really possible that professional editorial writers at a first-rate newspaper — people who, after all, are paid to think seriously about issues like this — could make such a simple statistical mistake. Are they really so dishonest or so dumb as to think that you can measure the fairness of a tax code by looking at what share of the taxes various groups pay without considering how much they earn? I can tell you, as a regular reader of that page, that the answer is: Yes, they really, really are.

Corrections = HARD

I am disappointed to see the Wayne Review did not bother to print a correction for their plagiarism in Volume 2, Issue 4. Is the Wayne Review only willing to own up to their mistakes on their weblog?

It was here just a second ago

John Siracusa makes me laugh. :)

The other notable change to the Finder comes thanks to a combination of file system notification APIs introduced in Panther (but not leveraged by the Finder at that time) and the features added on as part of Spotlight. The Tiger Finder now correctly shows files when they are created and makes them disappear when they are deleted.

If this doesn't sound like a big deal to you, then you probably haven't used the Mac OS X Finder very much. Or maybe you simply have low expectations for your file manager. (A Windows user perhaps? F5!) But you know how crazy we "graybeards" are, always doggedly holding onto the quaint notion that the file manager should actually reflect the state of files on disk in something approaching a timely manner.

And as for Windows, it's still all about the F5.

Republican Youth

Oh, youthful exuberance!

[Jay Bob] Klinkerman [the chairman of the Colorado Young Republicans] also was identified as being involved in the incident by Karen Bauer, one of the three removed. She confronted him about it at a Young Republicans event Tuesday night.

Two of the three who were removed, Bauer and Leslie Weise, said that Klinkerman is the event volunteer who was wearing a magenta shirt and smiley-face tie that night, and told them, "Secret Service is coming down to talk to your group."

Then a man who looked and acted like a Secret Service agent arrived and threatened them with arrest. He allowed them to enter but then found them 20 to 30 minutes later and forced them to leave...

...The real Secret Service says the man who ousted Bauer, Weise and Alex Young from the president's speech was actually a Republican Party staffer. The Secret Service has told the three that the man admitted to an agent that he ousted them because they arrived in a car with a "No more blood for oil" bumper sticker.

The service is investigating that man on possible criminal charges of impersonating a Secret Service agent. He was wearing a dark suit, earpiece and lapel pin.

The Secret Service and the White House know the man's name but have refused to reveal it. The White House has said he was a volunteer "concerned that these people were coming to the event to disrupt the event."

We will add your technological distinctiveness to our own

Wil Shipley, co-founder of the Mac software company Delicious Monster, is dismayed:

Not content to imitate Mac OS X Tiger, today Bill Gates unveiled that Longhorn is going to contain a giant rip-off of Delicious Library, as well!...

...The amazing thing is THERE IS NOT ONE INNOVATION IN THIS. 100% of the things in this screenshot are things we did first in Delicious Library, except for the über-ugly look of their shelves. That's theirs. (And apparently you can view the BACK of the cover in theirs. Man, they are thinking OUTSIDE THE BOX!)

I'm amazed, yet appalled. Seriously, if there were ONE SINGLE THING in there that wasn't a copy of us, I'd think maybe they came up with the idea on their own. But... exactly the same categories as we have? You couldn't add any others? Like, say, software titles? I mean, you're Microsoft, why would you not have a category for software? Oh, because WE didn't think of it for you?...

A matter of perspective

Is this an image of a young girl, or an old woman?

Is this a chunk of salt-corroded cement, or an image of the Virgin Mary's vagina?

[Via Fleshbot]

Charge!

Kill the afterlife! [Via Raving Atheist]

Really tiny, part 2

Great minds think alike! Bertrand Russell:

But at last Weierstrass discovered that the infinitesimal was not needed at all, and that everything could be accomplished without it. Thus there was no longer any need to suppose that there was such a thing.

This is what makes Cauchy's idea so revolutionary -- he did not need to define "infinitesimal" in order to deal with the infinitesimal...

Unfortunately for Barsenas, Newton's calculus is one of the great triumphs of science. Newton made repeatable observations about the motion of the planets and moons, and developed mathematics to quantify his observations. As holes were found in his mathematics, other mathematicians and scientists used pure mathematical logic to fully develop Newton's theories. Indeed, mathematics is built on such rigor that a certain math professor of mine once offered an A to anyone who could find a logical contradiction in the course material, or in mathematics in general. (To my knowledge, no one ever found such a contradiction.)

I would like to thank Bishop Berkeley for inspiring many generations of mathematicians to build their developments on pure mathematical logic, for it actually strengthens mathematics, and thus science in general. And when science succeeds, history shows that human understanding and the overall quality of life improve.

Really tiny

M.C.'s mysterious mentor has some strange ideas regarding calculus:

Read the rest of "Really tiny"

Politically principled

My hero!

Q: Do you always vote Republican?
A: I don’t vote by party, I look at the issues at hand and base my vote on current needs. The only party I affiliate myself with fully is the one in my pants.

Let's keep it between us

No More Mister Nice Blog on theological consistency:

...It's weird enough to try to grasp the Catholic Church's logic on the use of condoms (that it's a grave sin), but once you grasp it, it's appalling to hear the church's chief doctrine cop say that this "lesser evil" is intolerable even in the face of an appalling pandemic.

And then you see the same doctrine cop saying that pedophilia charges against priests shouldn't go to the secular authorities and shouldn't be made public, and recommending punishment for anyone who violates this omerta. This is "tolerance of the lesser evil" -- better to let these priests get away with brutalizing children than to risk harming the church -- and Ratzinger says it's OK...

A delta for your epsilon

Time to fact-check Barsenas again!

As a matter of fact, a great deal of Berkeley's works were dirct [sic] assaults against the science of his time. In his essay "The Analyst" he attempted to undercut calculus by attacking its very logical foundations, particularly regarding fluxion or infinitesimal change (referenced here). An attack that mathematicians did not fully recover from until Abraham Robinson's 1966 book Non-standard Analysis.

However, plenty of mathematicians found this unsatisfactory, not just this Berkeley character. Cauchy started the main drive to make calculus a rigorous field (which is now called "analysis"). Weierstrass improved Cauchy's work. However, both of these mathematicians worked in the 19th century, not the 20th.

For a more enlightening look at this topic, check out this article.

Hell in a handbasket

Kevin Drum:

So for some of these folks, apparently it's not enough anymore to simply say that evolution is wrong. Now they're claiming that even the most mundane kinds of physical phenomena are actually signs that God can do the impossible, even put an egg in a bottle! That's pathetic.

Whatchamacallit

Brent Simmons:

“I need the meta key to frobble the jim-nose when smatterizing the sleepnorp. On Tuesdays.”

New from template

I just learned an effective new argumentation technique from M.C. Barsenas, and I'm itching to try it out. Here it goes:

The Church Constitution is not a democracy contrary to the pretender Catholic's deep-seated wishes living document, contrary to the feminist's wishes. It is not an equal-opportunity employer. Christ had Twelve Apostles, all of them men. The Constitutional Convention had fifty-five members, all of them men. For 2,000 years priests have been men. For 131 years women were unable to vote. Holy Scripture and Sacred Tradition The original Constitution is clear: there will be no female priests voters, not now, not tomorrow, not forever. Rome The Founding Fathers have spoken, the case is closed.

Whoremonger

Apple could be a lot more profitable if they didn't waste their money like this:

Apple and other companies paid NBC Today show tech editor Corey Greenberg up to $15,000 to talk about their products on news shows, according to The Washington Post. Greenberg talked up Apple's iPod last July, calling it "a great portable musical player... the coolest-looking one;" however, while NBC officials denied any knowledge of the financial relationship, Greenberg confirmed that he accepted payments from Apple, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Seiko Epson, Creative Technology and Energizer Holdings.

And shame on you Corey Greenberg for not disclosing such things on the air!

Ungrateful little snot

Quick correction. In his own comments section, M.C. constructs a strawman argument against me.

The faithful are those who follow the Church's teaching. What you mean by faithful, and what Jeffrey Czerniak means by "average" are actually the Catholics uneducated in the faith or unwilling to accept the Church's teaching.

Oh whatever. In the same comment M.C. endorses the Crusades and the Inquisition. Read it for yourself!

Pope roundup

Can't get enough Benedict XVI?

• Upon reading M.C. Barsenas's tribute to the new pope, you may be inclined to think it's a joke, like Jesus's General. Not so.
• Hopefully everyone realized my last post was tongue-in-cheek. While the choice of Ratzinger may get the more conservative Catholics excited, it's likely to further alienate average Catholics. Plus the world doesn't need another leader who endorses bigotry against gays, Muslims, etc.
• Speaking of tongue-in-cheek, if you get a chance, go find a copy of the song "The Vatican Rag" by Tom Lehrer. It was recorded in 1965 right around Vatican II, and it sums up the Catholic faith quite nicely. Lyrics after the fold...

Read the rest of "Pope roundup"

Benny boy

Number sixteen! Sixteen-ereeno!

There's a new Pope in town, and his name is Benedict. Benny, as I've taken to calling him, is a big improvement over JP2 when it comes to conservatism. For example,

He wrote a letter of advice to U.S. bishops on denying communion to politicians who support abortion rights, which some observers viewed as a slam at Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry. He publicly cautioned Europe against admitting Turkey to the European Union and wrote a letter to bishops around the world justifying that stand on the grounds that the continent is essentially Christian in nature...

...He once called homosexuality a tendency toward "intrinsic moral evil" and dismissed the uproar over priestly pedophilia in the United States as a "planned campaign" against the church.

To succumb to the temptation of dissent, on the other hand, is to allow the "leaven of infidelity to the Holy Spirit" to start to work.

Ah, it's good to be Pope!

Drugs are more dangerous than guns

A member of Daily Kos brought up a Real Time with Bill Maher moment I saw Friday night:

...Friday night on `Real Time with Bill Maher,' the topic of gun control came up.  Specifically, the fact that terrorists can come to this country and easily buy guns.  No waiting period.  No paper trail.  No problem.

GOP pundit and guest panelist David Frum, bristling with fresh hypocrisy, chastised Democrats on the issue.  He said it was fine if we wanted to talk about gun control in general (gee, thanks), but c'mon...you shouldn't link it to terrorism.  That would be cheap and tawdry and manipulative.  Beneath us, y'know...

"Cues from chatter" gathered around the world are raising concerns that terrorists might try to attack the domestic food and drug supply, particularly illegally imported prescription drugs, acting Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Lester M. Crawford says.

....Crawford said the possibility of such an attack was the most serious of his concerns about the increase in states and municipalities trying to import drugs from Canada to save money.

Read the rest of "Drugs are more dangerous than guns"

The joy of work

Belle Waring has an awesome idea for hardcore slackers:

I’m sure others have suggested this, but doesn’t there seem to be a great job opportunity available in those American states which carve out (as some are considering) a “conscience exemption” for pharmacists who do not wish to fill prescriptions for birth control or emergency contraception? Just get certified as a pharmacist, hired at Walgreen’s, and then reveal that you are a Christian Scientist and it is against your religion to dispense any medicine at all. Then just sit back, read chick magazines, and eat expired candy while the money rolls in. “I’d like to fill this perscription for an asthma inhaler?” “Sorry, ma’am, that’s against my religion.” And you can’t get fired! Awesome.

Men lie

Here's a funny anecdote about John Thompson of Honest John's Bar and No Grill, pulled from the January 3, 2000 Detroit News:

Some 10 years back, John Thompson met a woman at his Detroit bar. He was attracted to her, so he sent her a dozen roses and asked her out.

Irene Wright said thanks for the roses, but I don't want to date a guy who owns a bar.

So Thompson sent her two dozen roses and asked her out again.

Irene again said thanks, but no thanks.

So Thompson found a little kid who had red hair like Irene's. And he made a sign that read, "Irene Wright is my mother and she won't acknowledge me."

Then he took a picture of the little kid holding the sign. And sent the picture to Irene.

He said if she didn't go out with him, the kid was going to be marching up and down in front of her place of employment the next day.

They went out. They've been together ever since.

Big enough

As you probably know, Google has a built-in calculator.

It's reasonably smart too -- it knows how to calculate tan(0) and tan(π/4), but it has an interesting response when you ask it what tan(π/2) is.

Hot singles

A couple music tidbits:

• The White Stripes have a new record coming out in June called "Get Behind Me Satan", and the first single "Blue Orchid" has leaked.
• Trent Reznor is offering the latest Nine Inch Nails single as a GarageBand download so you can remix the song yourself.

Eminently fair, part 2

Wonkette has an email from the brave student who asked Scalia if he sodomizes his wife. The critical part of the email:

...Law school and the law profession do not negate my identity as a member of an oppressed minority confronting injustice. Even so, I did have a legal point: Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in Lawrence asked whether criminalizing homosexual conduct advanced a state interest "which could justify the intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual." Scalia did not answer this question in his dissent because he believed the state need only assert a legitimate interest to defeat non-fundamental liberties. I basically asked him this question again - it is now the law of the land. He said he did not know whether the interest was significant enough. I then asked him if he sodomizes his wife to subject his intimate relations to the scrutiny he cavalierly would allow others - by force, if necessary. Everyone knew at that moment how significant the interest is...

The stud files

Daily Kos's research team has concluded that White House boy-toy James Guckert (a.k.a Jeff Gannon) never served in the United States Marine Corps. Unfortunately, this contradicts the marketing for Guckert's "services":

EX-USMC Jock: Available for hourly, overnight, weekend or longer travel -- OUT ONLY!...

"Aggresive [sic], verbal, dominant top"
I don't leave marks.... only impressions

Eminently fair

Finally, someone has the courage to ask the critical question!

When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spoke Tuesday night at NYU's Vanderbilt Hall, "The room was packed with some 300 students and there were many protesters outside because of Scalia's vitriolic dissent last year in the case that overturned the Texas law against gay sex," our source reports. "One gay student asked whether government had any business enacting and enforcing laws against consensual sodomy. Following Scalia's answer, the student asked a follow-up: 'Do you sodomize your wife?' The audience was shocked, especially since Mrs. Scalia was in attendance. The justice replied that the question was unworthy of an answer." [emphasis and hyperlink added]

Seems to me that Scalia should either answer the question, or plead the Fifth! :)

The end of academia

If this is not a hoax, then I must agree with Cory Doctorow -- it IS the funniest thing ever.

Apparently, some clever MIT graduate students wrote a program that randomly generates computer science articles. According to their website, one of their random papers was accepted by a computer science conference!

FYI: There are some grievously absurd claims in this paper (as you would expect -- it's random). Here are the biggest hints as to the paper's bogosity:

...We question the need for digital-to-analog converters...
...We hope that this section sheds light on Juris Hartmanis’s development of the UNIVAC computer in 1995...
...We ran a deployment on the NSA’s planetary-scale overlay network to disprove the mutually largescale behavior of exhaustive archetypes...
...von Neumann machines no longer affect performance...

The myth of separation

Shape of Days on Apple's cross-platform code toolkit, Core Foundation Lite:

Unlike similar foundation libraries from Microsoft, CF Lite is available for free. Unlike similar toolkits of Linux, you don't have to sell your soul to Richard Stallman to use it. So it seems like win-win to me.

[Via Ranchero]

I had a bad meme

For a look at the sorry state of music journalism, do a Google search for "decemberists palanquin" and observe how many articles include the observation "The Decemberists use big words!"

The most recent example comes to us via largehearted boy.

The Times they are a-changin'

Aaron Swartz has a scathing analysis of journalism, and of the New York Times in particular. If you don't like the New York Times, you will love this article.

Not depressing enough

While scrolling through the new blog Sploid tonight, I saw the following headline:

Readers Unsatisfied With Unhappy Ending

Specifically, the ending to Steve Martin's novella The Pleasure of My Company. A happy ending on such a dark book seems wrong.

Apart from the last five pages, the book is funny and enjoyable, even though it's written from the perspective of an obsessive-compulsive.

Ecclesiam sempiternam

One of Andrew Sullivan's readers sent in an interesting email regarding the Pope's previously-mentioned "stats". Here's a heavily edited excerpt:

Read the rest of "Ecclesiam sempiternam"

Estimating

As Mr. Koss says in his inimitable style,

The point of an estimate number, is obvious. It is a guess on the amount of SOMETHING.

Read the rest of "Estimating"

A middle finger for every pie

Because I am a staunch pie-in-face advocate, I was thrilled to hear that David Horowitz got nailed last night. (You know, that David Horowitz?)

For more pie discussion, I urge you to check out the semi-regular Friday Pie Blogging at Fafblog.

Software shout-out

Panic released version 1.6 of their newsreader Unison yesterday, and I can personally vouch that it's much faster than any previous version. A highly recommended update!

Echo

M.C.'s snark contains much truth. He criticized my blog today:

The Geekable Method is simple: write nothing substantive, write pithy, pseudo-funny commentary, link to other web-sites, and use lots of block quotes.

You may notice that this weblog does not offer much original content. In fact, most of my blog posts simply link to another website and then say something snarky. For that, I apologize. In fact, I feel so bad about it, I'm willing to refund the full amount you paid to read it. :)

A liberal in every corner

Welcome back Wayne Review! You haven't posted anything substantive in a month, but now that you're back, you whine about liberals like the best of them!

And I agree with Joe, vandalizing a silly religious display is wrong. Instead, we should be congratulating these folks for finally spelling "cemetery" correctly!

Bitte, noch einmal

If I know anything about Geekable.com's audience, it's that they are hot for German erotic poetry.

I am here to serve, so here's a poem by Erich Kästner (and an interpretative English translation). This poem was considered so raunchy back in 1927 that it caused Kästner to get fired from his job as a journalist.

Siamese twins

Via Slashdot, here is a 1992 article from the New Yorker archives about the Chudnovsky brothers. Some fun excerpts:

Read the rest of "Siamese twins"

Snark place

From today's Wired News:

The Matrix movies raised the question, "How do we know we're not in the Matrix right now?" The Matrix Online, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game for the PC, answers that question: If we were in the Matrix, we'd know it by the clumsy interface, frequent glitches and tedious gameplay.

Landing in the shark pool

Today's Dilbert really sucks.

Open malware

I must have the psychic ability to channel Slashdot!

This morning I thought about the possibility of a Mac OS X virus. It occurred to me that a Mac virus could be much more dangerous than a Windows virus -- due to the Mac's Open Firmware. If a virus or worm gained administrative privileges, it could lock you out of your own computer, or (theoretically) overwrite your firmware with a malicious version that keeps track of everything you do. (You wouldn't be able to fix these things with a simple OS reinstall.)

This afternoon I check Slashdot and see that someone considered a similar possibility on PC hard drives. Great minds think alike!

Airplay floods

I have a startling admission to make. I'm a censor!

That's right -- over the course of the last couple months, there were 1,173 trackback pings that you didn't see. I feel like such a rotten individual -- after all, I'm stifling the blogosphere discussion and preventing self-correction!

Rest assured, from now on, you will see every trackback to Texas hold-em poker and online pharmacies.