Today's headlines:
Bush Ignored Urgent Warning on Iraq.
The sad fact is that "Iraq" can be replaced by several other disasters in that sentence, but you've already seen those headlines.
9/29/06
Gas is cheap...
...guess I'll vote for the GOP.
The retail price of gasoline has plunged by 50 cents, or 17 percent, over the past month to average $2.38 a gallon nationwide, according to Energy Department statistics.
Los Angeles had the highest pump price among cities at $2.78 a gallon, down 8.8 cents. Cleveland had the best deal at the pump at $2.11, down 11.2 cents. Houston was at $2.17, down 11.5 cents.
Fimat USA oil analyst Antoine Halff said there is no doubt that "the downturn in prices is welcome news from an electoral standpoint for the ruling party." But he scoffed at the notion that Bush had the power to muscle around a global market. |The Houston Chronicle|
9/28/06
Wait, wait, wait... Can they do that?
Under the "Torture Compromise," can the president designate a United States citizen, such as myself, as an "enemy combatant" based on his discretion, even if I have never left this country? And hold me forever, with no trial? And I have no right to judicial review?
Can this possibly be right? And if they can't do it, who is supposed to stop them?
I'm not even worried about the "torture" part any more. This is completely crazy.
UPDATE: Yglesias answers my question, "who is supposed to stop them," at least enough to point out that it won't be the courts.
Can this possibly be right? And if they can't do it, who is supposed to stop them?
I'm not even worried about the "torture" part any more. This is completely crazy.
UPDATE: Yglesias answers my question, "who is supposed to stop them," at least enough to point out that it won't be the courts.
There will certainly be challenges, but I wouldn't count on anything. The court-stripping issue hasn't been litigated all that much, but the idea that congress has the power to do this kind of thing has some real support from the text of the constitution. What's more, courts are generally disinclined to interfere in national security questions. And, of course, there's no particular reason to think that the Supreme Court's five conservative justices disagree with America's conservative politicians about this. You never really know what's going to happen, but we have a political system for a reason . . . if people elect politicians who want to give the president the power to indefinitely detain and torture people on the basis of his say-so that they're terrorists then the president is going to end up with the power to indefinitely detain and torture people on the basis of his say-so.
Losers
Outside my window this morning there are several hundred Michiganders lined up for a The Real World casting call. It's pretty clear that at least a couple dozen of them spent the night in line, and that very few of them can recall the olden days of Real People and That's Incredible.
9/27/06
Who wants to be a Shatner? Part 3
Our second nominee for Shater the Second is....
DOCTOR SHAQ, a.k.a. The Diesel, a.k.a. M.D.E., a.k.a. L.C.L., a.k.a., The Big Baryshnikov, a.k.a. the Big Aristotle and Master, a.k.a, Superman. Seven feet and one inch of Shatner Potential, Shaquille Rashaun O'Neal has a lot going for him in this competition. Shatneresque details include, but are not limited to, the following:
* He is a famous basketball player.
* He is a famous basketball player who is famously bad at a key component of the game, the free throw.* Like many of our nominees, Shaq is a musician. His 1993 debut album, Shaq Diesel, went gold. He also performed a song on the Pootie Tang soundtrack.
* Shaq starred in the cow-tipping episode of Beavis and Butt-Head.
* He's a dilettante pro-wrestler, having attacked WWE superstar "Carlito" with a chair.
* Shaq is a reserve police officer with the Miami Beach Police, in which capacity he presumably carries both badge and gun. He is also an honorary U.S. Marshal and was previously a reserve officer in the L.A. Port Police.* Shaq has his own martial art style, with the shatneresque name of "Shaq-fu," as chronicled in the video game, Shaq-fu.
* Shaq-fu is one of the worst video games of all time.
* In Curb Your Enthusaism, Larry David takes Shaq down.
* Shaq allegedly does his own stunts in his movies, since 7'1" stunt men are hard to find.
* Shaq played Kazaam the gentle Genie in Kazaam the movie. In this movie, according to Wikipedia*, the genie was trapped in a basketball for thousands of years. It must have been one of those Sumerian basketballs.
And finally, lest you think Shaq doesn't have the geek cred to be Shaterrific, remember that Shaq has played DC superhero Steel in the movie Steel. Steel is friends with and inspired by Superman. Shaq is also a big Superman fan in real life (see nicknames, above), and sports a tatoo that says, "You're not Superman."
Shatner Potential: 8.4 out of 10
What's your rating? Let us know in the comments.
------
* This is a case where Wikipedia is not to be trusted, unless Boromir and Steven Tyler were both in Kazaam.
9/25/06
Growing oranges in Alberta
Wow, those who really, really want to deny that global warming is happening sure are willing to adjust their evidentiary standard. You can find some crazy things on the internets if you try. But just because you can find a "scientist" who says that radiation is good for you and that you should get 20 chest x-rays a year does not make it so.
As August J. Pollak puts it,
... we have more evidence to prove it than most prosecutors have in criminal court cases....
Or, as I put it, you go to war with the science you have, not the science you want. Although it is at this point undeniable that the planet is getting warmer, it is entirely possible that the cause is not manmade, and it is entirely possible that the trend will reverse itself at a later point. However, that's not what our science suggests. To take the side of a few (well paid) scientists against the staggering majority of the scientific community when making policy because of misguided fears about the economy is really, really cynical and wrong.
Science gets it wrong sometimes. The starting point of science is skepticism, so it's definitely a good idea to question the conventional wisdom. However, when you sit down to draw up national policy, it makes absolutely no sense to base your plans on a tiny minority of scientists because you like their viewpoint better.
Where is Eastasia when you need her?
I found this post by Kevin Drum to be somewhat fascinating. After explaining the basis of the "Authoritarian Index," Drum writes:
That did surprise me, but it fits with my current bullshit theory of my country, which is this:
We are still recovering from the Cold War. Our institutions, or systems of thought, our political language... virtually everything that is modern America was born out of World War II and the subsequent nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union.*
The utility and meaning of many aspects of our national makeup were called into question at the end of the Cold War, often in ways so subtle that the questions are still unanswered. The messy birth of a new notion of our nation is, as always, disturbing to those with an authoritarian bent. I think what we are witnessing with in the widespread support for a misguided War on Terror** is a concrete, political manifestation of abstract, existential anxiety by voters who are afraid--even more-so than they are of terrorism--of change.
----
* For our younger readers, the Soviet Union was a large country with many nuclear weapons.
** I take the threat of Violent Islamic fundamentalist extremism seriously. These men want to kill us for no good reason, and should be stopped. What I think is misguided is the approach of the Bush administration to this serious issue.
It will come as no surprise that authoritarians tend to vote Republican. What may surprise you, though, is that this has only become true in recent years.
That did surprise me, but it fits with my current bullshit theory of my country, which is this:
We are still recovering from the Cold War. Our institutions, or systems of thought, our political language... virtually everything that is modern America was born out of World War II and the subsequent nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union.*
The utility and meaning of many aspects of our national makeup were called into question at the end of the Cold War, often in ways so subtle that the questions are still unanswered. The messy birth of a new notion of our nation is, as always, disturbing to those with an authoritarian bent. I think what we are witnessing with in the widespread support for a misguided War on Terror** is a concrete, political manifestation of abstract, existential anxiety by voters who are afraid--even more-so than they are of terrorism--of change.
----
* For our younger readers, the Soviet Union was a large country with many nuclear weapons.
** I take the threat of Violent Islamic fundamentalist extremism seriously. These men want to kill us for no good reason, and should be stopped. What I think is misguided is the approach of the Bush administration to this serious issue.
9/22/06
Gorillas... People... MEN!
We normally don't do caption threads at this site, but for some reason this photo cries out for a good one.
9/21/06
Creepy Thursday
(source, via Mark)
The picture portrays some of the half million coffins that the guv'mint is storing in a field in Georgia.
Discussion question: How many coffins should the government of a modern industrial state keep handy? Be sure to explain the rationale for your answer.
9/20/06
Developing: Record industry execs are bloodsucking bastards
The other day I was listening to NPR while half asleep and heard, or possibly dreamed, about a lawsuit being pursued by recording artists and having to do with royalties owed on digital downloads. Maybe they were talking about this lawsuit from April, or maybe it was a flashback. I'm not really sure, but there don't seem to be any recent news stories to link to.
At any rate, as I understood things the nub of the issue has to do with the distinction between royalties owed for sales and for licensing. Standard recording industry contracts pay sales at a lower rate, presumably because the record company can expect higher overhead. Here are some key graphs from the article linked above:
At the end of the day I'd like to see artists paid, but what really gets me is that the record companies are trying to have it both ways. As a consumer, it doesn't feel like I really own the songs that I download from the iTunes Store. After all, with other things I own -- cds for example -- I'm free to make copies for personal use, transfer title to others, and so on. Not so with downloaded tracks, which I can only (legally) use in a very constrained way. The point being that so long as the DRM significantly limits my rights regarding a downloaded track, my consumer experience is more like licensing than owning.
Which is, you know, fine. I hardly ever download music precisely because I prefer owning cds to putting up with restrictive DRM. All I'm saying is that if the record industry is going to insist on that sort of consumer/vendor relationship at one end of the supply chain, then that fact ought to be reflected in the royalties paid at the other end.
At any rate, as I understood things the nub of the issue has to do with the distinction between royalties owed for sales and for licensing. Standard recording industry contracts pay sales at a lower rate, presumably because the record company can expect higher overhead. Here are some key graphs from the article linked above:
The class-action lawsuit claims that the artists' contracts require Sony to pay its artists about 30 cents out of every 70 cents it gets for digital downloads--out of a total of 99 cents that iTunes charges per song. But the complaint maintains that Sony is only paying artists 4.5 cents for each song.
The case hinges on whether a digital download is comparable to a sale of a CD, as the labels contend, or more on par with a license of a song for use on a movie soundtrack, for example, as the artists claim.
At the end of the day I'd like to see artists paid, but what really gets me is that the record companies are trying to have it both ways. As a consumer, it doesn't feel like I really own the songs that I download from the iTunes Store. After all, with other things I own -- cds for example -- I'm free to make copies for personal use, transfer title to others, and so on. Not so with downloaded tracks, which I can only (legally) use in a very constrained way. The point being that so long as the DRM significantly limits my rights regarding a downloaded track, my consumer experience is more like licensing than owning.
Which is, you know, fine. I hardly ever download music precisely because I prefer owning cds to putting up with restrictive DRM. All I'm saying is that if the record industry is going to insist on that sort of consumer/vendor relationship at one end of the supply chain, then that fact ought to be reflected in the royalties paid at the other end.
9/19/06
In honor of the occassion
Q: Avast matey, wouldja have heard the tale of t'pirate who had a dispute with his employer?
A: Please don't kill me!
Q: His case went to arrrrrh-bitration.
Q: What agency is oversees collective bargaining relations on the high seas?
A: Take my wife...please!
Q:The NL-arrrrrrh-B.
A: Please don't kill me!
Q: His case went to arrrrrh-bitration.
Q: What agency is oversees collective bargaining relations on the high seas?
A: Take my wife...please!
Q:The NL-arrrrrrh-B.
9/18/06
Which video game system should I buy?
Hello gamers! With the upcoming launch of the latecomers to the new generation of videogame consoles, I thought it might be a good time to remind everyone that they should instead spend their monies on the Xbox 360.
In short, it comes down to following three factors.
Cost: Nintendo wins by a long shot, here, but mostly I bring up cost to rule out the Playstation 3, which will cost approximately one million dollars.
Game selection: Xbox 360 wins this for a variety of reasons, the most profound being the fact that the console has a whole year head start on the other two consoles. But other factors include Microsoft's outreach to quirky Japanese game studios and the fact that Nintendo always ends up scaring off third-party developers. The facts are that if you purchase a Wii this fall, chances are that next fall you will still be waiting for your third fun game for your system. Conversely, if you purchase an Xbox 360, you could have several weeks worth of fun playing only the free demos available from Xbox Live. Once you are ready to spend money on a game, there are many high-quality titles for you to enjoy already on the market, with a glut of new ones coming this fall.
Online play: While Sony and Nintendo are still being cagey about how this will work on their systems, Microsoft has implemented a near-perfect solution, out of the box.
I am a very big fan of Nintendo, and I will no doubt purchase a Wii sometime next year when there are more than three titles worth playing. However, despite the reduced cost, I cannot see how the Wii is a good choice for purchase this fall.
For those of you are not bored to tears already, after the jump I've included a longer, more rambling agitation in favor of the Xbox 360. It's a mail I sent to a friend who recently got a job with Microsoft but is still planning on buying a Wii instead. Click only if you can handle the overwhelming nerdiness!
Hey Scott,
I will probably pick up the Wii when they release Smash Bros. for it (next spring, I hope), but for sheer utility as a gaming machine, Xbox 360 is my new fave, for these reasons (no particular order):
1. Xbox Live (XBL) is awesome. After playing a few months of World of Warcraft, I thought I was turned off of networked games for good. What I discovered through Live is that networking is as fun as I originally thought it was, and that network design and the nature of the game are both very important. Here's a common scenario: I'm happily watching a DVD or playing a game (these days it's "Dead Rising") by myself. Meanwhile, one of my friends, unbeknownst to me, is pinned down under heavy fire in a multiplayer game of "Perfect Dark Zero." That friend calls for help (via a game invite in XBL) and I accept the game invite. My disc tray pops open automatically and I put in the PDZ disk. Next thing my friend's enemies know, they've been shot in the head.
I have an idea of how Nintendo is going to handle their global network based on my experience with Nintendo WFC on the Nintendo DS. They understand that connecting should be easy, but they don't quite get what you will want to do once you are connected. For example, you can quickly find opponents in Mario Kart DS, but there is no way in the game to trash talk as you lap them.
All signs point to Sony completely dropping the ball on networking. But it doesn't matter to me because I'm not going to sell my car so I can afford a PS3.
2. Dead Rising is awesome. You haven't lived until you've put a bunch of horsehead masks on zombies and taken a picture of them (before chopping them up with a lawnmower).
3. The controller is awesome. It combines the best elements of the xbox, ps2, and gamecube controllers, as well as some added awesomeness.
4. Games get patched. I have no faith that Wi or PS3 games are going to get improved upon after release, but it's common in PC gaming and it's becoming common on the Xbox. Almost all the games I've played on Xbox 360 have already received at least one bug-fix patch. This could turn out to be a bad thing down the road, because it will encourage developers to release buggy products, but... they were already releasing some pretty buggy products, and on other consoles, they just stay broken.
5. Oblivion is awesome. It is the most entertaining RPG-ish game I've played in some time. The people all wander around based on their Radiant AI which leads to many genuinely surprising situations.
6. XBL Marketplace is cool. It's a central (and functional) way to get content updates like patches, demos, or expansions.
7. Demos are everywhere. There are some great, fully playable demos on XBL Marketplace, so you can have a LOT of fun before you ever actually buy a game. They are also much more helpful than reviews or advertisements for figuring out which games are worth my money. I have saved money on several games that I would have purchased or rented in the past, because the demo convinced me that they would be no fun.
8. The UI is really well done. It's not quite up to Apple standards, but it's close. (Haha).
9. The graphical power of the machine is impressive.
10. XBL Arcade has a bunch of cheap games (most under 15 dollars). A lot of these I find to be worthless (which I found out by playing the free demos), but I've purchased a few of them and been very happy. The ones I've enjoyed the most so far are Hexic (a puzzle game), Joust (basically it's just Joust, but Joust is awesome, and you can play it with/against your friends over XBL) and Cloning Clyde (a quirky platformer). Hexic was free, and the other two were under 10 dollars.
11. Potential for the future, part 1: Homebrew games may be really cool. Microsoft is pimping their developer studio (XNA). This will allow people to design games for Xbox 360 and Vista. They give it away, so hopefully this will result in lots of quirky games.
12. Potential for the future, part 2: Upcoming arcade games look pretty interesting. The one I am most interested in in Lumines. Also coming up are some classic board games like Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne. Check out some screen shots here.
13. Potential for the future, part 3: Upcoming main titles are plentiful (where even at it's height a Nintendo console will have very few games). Here are the ones I am most excited about:
- "Star Trek: Legacy." It's hard to imagine what this game will actually be like, but I have high hopes. They say that the whole feel of the game changes as you move through the different eras of ships with their respective technologies. Check out this clip of gameplay.
- "Gears of War" is supposed to be the Next Big Thing in first-person shooters.
- "Viva Pinata" is supposed to be a quirky, Nintendo-ish game to woo the Japanese. It's questionable how well they will succeed at that, but I do love the phrase "Pinata Cannon."
- And, above all, I'm excited about "Assassin's Creed" (and yeah, it will be on the PS3 as well, but not on the Gamecube (they say)). This game is made by the team that made "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" which is probably my favorite game of the last console generation. So far, they are saying all the right things about it. Here's a short interview with one of the developers. The interesting bits are the crowd reactions (it's part of gameplay) and climbing (anything that projects more than a couple inches from a wall can be used to climb).
Anyway, I just realized I haven't been doing work for a couple hours, so I'll have to wrap it up for now. To sum up: Buy an Xbox 360!
-Jason
In short, it comes down to following three factors.
Cost: Nintendo wins by a long shot, here, but mostly I bring up cost to rule out the Playstation 3, which will cost approximately one million dollars.
Game selection: Xbox 360 wins this for a variety of reasons, the most profound being the fact that the console has a whole year head start on the other two consoles. But other factors include Microsoft's outreach to quirky Japanese game studios and the fact that Nintendo always ends up scaring off third-party developers. The facts are that if you purchase a Wii this fall, chances are that next fall you will still be waiting for your third fun game for your system. Conversely, if you purchase an Xbox 360, you could have several weeks worth of fun playing only the free demos available from Xbox Live. Once you are ready to spend money on a game, there are many high-quality titles for you to enjoy already on the market, with a glut of new ones coming this fall.
Online play: While Sony and Nintendo are still being cagey about how this will work on their systems, Microsoft has implemented a near-perfect solution, out of the box.
I am a very big fan of Nintendo, and I will no doubt purchase a Wii sometime next year when there are more than three titles worth playing. However, despite the reduced cost, I cannot see how the Wii is a good choice for purchase this fall.
For those of you are not bored to tears already, after the jump I've included a longer, more rambling agitation in favor of the Xbox 360. It's a mail I sent to a friend who recently got a job with Microsoft but is still planning on buying a Wii instead. Click only if you can handle the overwhelming nerdiness!
Hey Scott,
I will probably pick up the Wii when they release Smash Bros. for it (next spring, I hope), but for sheer utility as a gaming machine, Xbox 360 is my new fave, for these reasons (no particular order):
1. Xbox Live (XBL) is awesome. After playing a few months of World of Warcraft, I thought I was turned off of networked games for good. What I discovered through Live is that networking is as fun as I originally thought it was, and that network design and the nature of the game are both very important. Here's a common scenario: I'm happily watching a DVD or playing a game (these days it's "Dead Rising") by myself. Meanwhile, one of my friends, unbeknownst to me, is pinned down under heavy fire in a multiplayer game of "Perfect Dark Zero." That friend calls for help (via a game invite in XBL) and I accept the game invite. My disc tray pops open automatically and I put in the PDZ disk. Next thing my friend's enemies know, they've been shot in the head.
I have an idea of how Nintendo is going to handle their global network based on my experience with Nintendo WFC on the Nintendo DS. They understand that connecting should be easy, but they don't quite get what you will want to do once you are connected. For example, you can quickly find opponents in Mario Kart DS, but there is no way in the game to trash talk as you lap them.
All signs point to Sony completely dropping the ball on networking. But it doesn't matter to me because I'm not going to sell my car so I can afford a PS3.
2. Dead Rising is awesome. You haven't lived until you've put a bunch of horsehead masks on zombies and taken a picture of them (before chopping them up with a lawnmower).
3. The controller is awesome. It combines the best elements of the xbox, ps2, and gamecube controllers, as well as some added awesomeness.
4. Games get patched. I have no faith that Wi or PS3 games are going to get improved upon after release, but it's common in PC gaming and it's becoming common on the Xbox. Almost all the games I've played on Xbox 360 have already received at least one bug-fix patch. This could turn out to be a bad thing down the road, because it will encourage developers to release buggy products, but... they were already releasing some pretty buggy products, and on other consoles, they just stay broken.
5. Oblivion is awesome. It is the most entertaining RPG-ish game I've played in some time. The people all wander around based on their Radiant AI which leads to many genuinely surprising situations.
6. XBL Marketplace is cool. It's a central (and functional) way to get content updates like patches, demos, or expansions.
7. Demos are everywhere. There are some great, fully playable demos on XBL Marketplace, so you can have a LOT of fun before you ever actually buy a game. They are also much more helpful than reviews or advertisements for figuring out which games are worth my money. I have saved money on several games that I would have purchased or rented in the past, because the demo convinced me that they would be no fun.
8. The UI is really well done. It's not quite up to Apple standards, but it's close. (Haha).
9. The graphical power of the machine is impressive.
10. XBL Arcade has a bunch of cheap games (most under 15 dollars). A lot of these I find to be worthless (which I found out by playing the free demos), but I've purchased a few of them and been very happy. The ones I've enjoyed the most so far are Hexic (a puzzle game), Joust (basically it's just Joust, but Joust is awesome, and you can play it with/against your friends over XBL) and Cloning Clyde (a quirky platformer). Hexic was free, and the other two were under 10 dollars.
11. Potential for the future, part 1: Homebrew games may be really cool. Microsoft is pimping their developer studio (XNA). This will allow people to design games for Xbox 360 and Vista. They give it away, so hopefully this will result in lots of quirky games.
12. Potential for the future, part 2: Upcoming arcade games look pretty interesting. The one I am most interested in in Lumines. Also coming up are some classic board games like Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne. Check out some screen shots here.
13. Potential for the future, part 3: Upcoming main titles are plentiful (where even at it's height a Nintendo console will have very few games). Here are the ones I am most excited about:
- "Star Trek: Legacy." It's hard to imagine what this game will actually be like, but I have high hopes. They say that the whole feel of the game changes as you move through the different eras of ships with their respective technologies. Check out this clip of gameplay.
- "Gears of War" is supposed to be the Next Big Thing in first-person shooters.
- "Viva Pinata" is supposed to be a quirky, Nintendo-ish game to woo the Japanese. It's questionable how well they will succeed at that, but I do love the phrase "Pinata Cannon."
- And, above all, I'm excited about "Assassin's Creed" (and yeah, it will be on the PS3 as well, but not on the Gamecube (they say)). This game is made by the team that made "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" which is probably my favorite game of the last console generation. So far, they are saying all the right things about it. Here's a short interview with one of the developers. The interesting bits are the crowd reactions (it's part of gameplay) and climbing (anything that projects more than a couple inches from a wall can be used to climb).
Anyway, I just realized I haven't been doing work for a couple hours, so I'll have to wrap it up for now. To sum up: Buy an Xbox 360!
-Jason
9/15/06
Overstatement?
But the history of people even trying to create what would today be recognized as quality television programming is simply very short. Nothing from before the 1990s holds up at all and even something as good as the beloved Buffy is rather mechanically crude compared to a contemporary understanding of how you're supposed to put serialized drama on the screen. |Yglesias|
In the comments Yglesias makes it more explicit that he's only talking about dramas, but still. I seem to recall that Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere were both pretty good. Northern Exposure, by the way, came on the air in 1990, and I think it holds up pretty well against just about anything.
Anyway, there's something a little fishy about comparing TV shows across eras. Expectations change, and that doesn't necessarily mean that modern expectations are better. One thing to remember about shows like The Wire is that their intricate plotting more or less assumes both that viewers will watch episodes more than once and that viewers will sometimes watch several episodes back to back. To fault a show from the 1970s for existing in a different technological milieu strikes me as a mistake.
Still, I think it is right that there is an awful lot of good TV out there at the moment. I watched the first six episodes of Weeds the other day, and it was awesome. Sad and funny and clever all at once.
treacle
[Origin: 1275–1325, Middle English variation of 'triacle', antidote; from Greek 'thiriakos', concerning wild beasts]
n.
1. Contrived or unrestrained sentimentality.
2. British. (a) Molasses, esp. that which is drained from the vats used in sugar refining. (b) Also called golden syrup. a mild mixture of molasses, corn syrup, etc., used in cooking or as a table syrup.
3. Pharmacology, Obsolete. Any of various medicinal compounds, formerly used as antidotes for poison.
n.
1. Contrived or unrestrained sentimentality.
2. British. (a) Molasses, esp. that which is drained from the vats used in sugar refining. (b) Also called golden syrup. a mild mixture of molasses, corn syrup, etc., used in cooking or as a table syrup.
3. Pharmacology, Obsolete. Any of various medicinal compounds, formerly used as antidotes for poison.
9/14/06
Nagging
This is pretty neat. The diagram shows a distributed search procedure called nagging. Basically the way it works is that one processor, the master, starts at the beginning and advances along the search. Periodically other processors, naggers, will query the master about the status of the search. The master will tell the nagger how things are going and then the nagger will go off on its own and start running the algorithm an arbitrary number of steps ahead. Once it's made some progress the nagger will report back and then the master will know that it doesn't need to cover the ground that the nagger looked at.
Apparently it works pretty well. All I know is that something about it is very attractive to my inner geek. Also, my inner nerd would like to read a sociology of science paper analyzing the process by which computer scientists came to choose the labels 'Master' and 'Nagger'.
By the by, here's the story of how I came across nagging. The other day I did some fancy stuff over at baseball-reference.com, the result of which was, an automated email from the man behind the site, Sean Forman. The name reminded me of a professor I once had, so I googled "sean forman baseball" and, as luck would have it, one of the top hits was a faculty page at St. Joseph's University, which page had a link to the paper Forman co-authored about nagging. The guy I was thinking of, it turns out, is Sean Foran, not Forman. In figuring that out I found this page and I'll bet that if Bellmaniacs follow the link many will see a face they recognize.
Shorter John Gizzi: Muslims are scary!
This is just ridiculous.
All of the problems Gizzi ascribes to Kosovo are the result of years of war and and (more recently) Kosovo's ambiguous status as a state.
Gizzi belives that the problem is (I guess) that Kosovars are predominantly Muslim.
Recognizing Kosovo as a nation lets us use many well-honed tools to reduce the risk of terrorism. Also, there doesn't seem to be a coherent alternative. It's telling that Gizzi doesn't suggest one.
All of the problems Gizzi ascribes to Kosovo are the result of years of war and and (more recently) Kosovo's ambiguous status as a state.
Gizzi belives that the problem is (I guess) that Kosovars are predominantly Muslim.
Recognizing Kosovo as a nation lets us use many well-honed tools to reduce the risk of terrorism. Also, there doesn't seem to be a coherent alternative. It's telling that Gizzi doesn't suggest one.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
