How to Become a Philosopher

This eHow on becoming a philosopher seems to boil down to think deep thoughts.

So maybe the best way to become a philosopher is to read Deep Thoughts.

Close reading

Heh.

This is the first time I've ever wanted a tattoo

link

Who is right?

The party of the first part:

If you have any interest in building a high-quality audio system, the experts will tell you to spend what you can on speakers first, and spend on an amplifier second. This approach has been further reinforced by engineers who say there is no audible difference among amplifiers within a given price range. But you can’t hear your CD player or your speakers without an amplifier. |source|

Or, the party of the second part:

A principle that I want to be sure you understand is the hierarchy of Hi Fi. No component should ever be better than the component which precedes it (except maybe when evaluating equipment.) If the speakers outclass the rest of the system they will simply show you what a poor job the turntable or amplifier is doing. It is true that the speakers are often the weakest link of a cheap system and some improvement may be had by upgrading them but going beyond a point will make the sound worse. |source|

What we chat about: Dork science edition

Zombie Hervé Villechaize thinks I should get a tattoo on my face. He's been saying it for years:



Click past the jump for increased dorkiness:




("What we chat about," both in title and concept, are completely ripped off from the multi-part series, "what we talk about," over at the continuously exploding aardvark)

actinic

[Origin: 1835–45; 'actin-', ray beam + '-ic', having some characteristic of]

adj.
Of, relating to, resulting from, or exhibiting chemical charges produced by radiant energy especially in the visible and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum.

Am I evil?

Writing about Tony Snow's cancer today, Ogged -- a cancer survivor himself -- had this to say:

Best of luck to him. I want my right-wing hacks discredited, not dead. We have to believe in redemption. |Unfogged|

What to say? Let's start with this. Cancer freaks me out. Pretty much everyone on my mother's side of my family is dead, and they all died of cancer. Two summers ago a friend of mine died of leukemia. And of course Neal's wife Sarah is in treatment for breast cancer, and I'd strongly prefer that things go well.

I also believe in redemption, or something like it. People can change, and they do. My grandmother, for example, was a thoroughly unpleasant woman for the great majority of her life, but during the year or so that her lung cancer was in remission she was a real sweety.

On the other hand, by my reckoning Tony Snow is a seriously evil dude. Let's remember that even before he became a willing participant in and designated dissembler for the moral catastrophe that is the Bush administration, he was a member of a right wing punditocracy that does its level best to enable and legitimize policies that any decent person would be ashamed of. He ought to have known better, and frankly I think that he probably did. Why shouldn't I wish him ill?

Battlestar Galactica thread

A terrible meltown? Or the most terrible meltdown in sci-fi television history? Discuss in the comments.

UPDATE: Past the jump, check out John Aravosis of Americablog, who has found out why eveything turned to shit.

Just watched the season finale of Battlestar Galactica. All I can say is, good riddance. Never has a TV show gone from brilliance to crap in such short order. It's only the third season and they have already destroyed one of the best television shows ever. It's as if the writers all suffered a mass aneurysm this year. It's not even the same writers, it can't be (I think they moved the real writers over to the new spin-off - of course, if these are still the original writers, then they're really in trouble). It's 2am on a Monday morning, so I'm permitting myself a little latitude to vent about a TV show most of you probably haven't watched. But I love TV, and I know TV. This series was amazing television. And now it's pathetic, predictable, nauseatingly unbelievable crap. I just can't understand how something so good could so quickly turn so awful.

...

PS Okay, it's all making sense now. Check out this interview with the executive producer over at Salon.com. Basically, he says that a lot of the show is him just winging it and changing things at the last minute, "organically."

Do you have story arcs plotted out over the whole series or over the season, and how much of it do you decide as you go along?

A good amount of it is improvised in terms of how we develop story, which is how I like to do it. At the beginning of the season, we arc out about 10 episodes.

And this:

We'll get different ideas or get inspiration in the middle of a scene I'm writing and think, "Oh, know what? We should make a hard left turn here." Then all the planning goes out the window and we have to make a change on the fly.... You think you've laid out a path, but as you do it you find that there's this other more interesting path to get there. It causes chaos and you have to scramble to change things that you've already set in motion. But I find that it's just a more organic way to do it.

And this:

In this season's finale, I decided on the fly to give Laura her cancer back. It's been bubbling in the back of my mind for a while. When we cured her cancer in the second season, I knew I didn't want that to be a permanent thing. I knew at some point I wanted to bring it back, because we'd changed her character in a way I wasn't happy with. But it wasn't until I was sitting down doing a rewrite of the finale that I decided this is the moment, let's do it. Tigh losing his eye was done in the same way. I was writing the teaser for the season opener and I decided on the fly that Tigh's lost an eye. That became a huge thing for the character and shifted a lot of things in the show. It just worked.

That explains a lot. He just changes major parts of the plot on a moment's notice, at the last minute. Well, I got news for you. It shows.

UPDATE 2: There's going to be a straight-to-DVD movie prequel about the Battlestar Pegasus during the break. Perhaps we can all just will this spring season out of existince.

I'll buy two of them RIGHT NOW

Yep.

Check it out

eripsa has posted a pretty cool YouTube vid about...well, let's say it's about the web. You should go watch it.

But get this. The vid was put together by a professor at K-State. What's more, he was an undergrad there around the same time as Jason, Mark, Neal, John, Eric, myself, and a bunch of people who don't have blogs.

Looks like he's applied himself more dilligently than some of us.

This just in...

...Landon Donovan is pretty good.

To stoke the fires of controversy a bit, have you noticed that the USA has dropped to 30th in the FIFA rankings? For someone like myself who's on the record saying that the FIFA rankings aren't particularly accurate, this isn't a troubling development. But those committed to the accuracy of the rankings seem to be compelled to think that the USA squad is now much worse than it was a year ago. That must be pretty upsetting, especially if you're a true fan.

Return of the hack gap or, "My opponent's fortitude is not an issue in this campaign"

On MSNBC this morning Michael Barone deployed the new GOP beholden hack talking points on John Edwards. In bullet point form they are:

• Like everyone, I have great sympathy for John and Elizabeth Edwards
  
• Having a terminally ill spouse would put a lot of stress on a President.
  
• None of Mr. Edwards opponents would bring this up, so
  
• It will be an issue for voters to consider in the privacy of the voting booth.

I feel dirty just from watching Barone's performance. Ick. I'm sure we'll see it repeated hundreds of times by dozens of GOP proxies before this is over. Ick. Ick. Ick.

A note to the naive: not talking about something is not the same as talking about not talking about something.

Speaking of quotes from Tony Snow

Heh.

Nice title

Do you want to know more?

Addendum: If you followed the link, you would have noticed that the book is published by the National Association of Marriage Enhancement. As I have an interest in Marriage Enhancement, I entered the string d-i-l-d-o in the search box on their site. I was taken to Slumber Party dot com and reminded that there really are some stark differences in the ways that women and men are socialized.

Well this is a fine how do you do

Professional Bull Riders, Incorporated, the only worker owned sports league that I know of, is selling a controlling interest to Spire Capital, an investment group headquartered in New York. I guess this means I won't be wearing my PBR jersey to the May Day parade like I planned.

Anyway, here's a worker getting his unexploited ass kicked by a bull:


Addendum: The pic above is from an organization as yet uncorrupted by capitalism.

Quote of the day

CNN's Ed Henry hit the nail on the head: if no conversations occurred with the president, and no advice was given, then how can the White House assert executive privilege, claiming the need to shield presidential advice?

Tony Snow's response: "That's an intriguing question."

via

Dumb game blogging: Fancy, fancy pants

This is fun. Give it a shot. "The Fancy Pants Adventures"