Why is it standard operating procedure  for beauty pageant contestants to favor world peace & world leaders to favor war? — Constant Weader

I’ve become a real fan of Constant Weader whose  realitychex blog covers a lot of the usual liberal haunts for commentary and analysis in a succinct & entertaining way. I found out about this woman by seeing the URL on all the great comments she made on NYT articles (which she generally reposts on her blog).

Where  should one  go to read about current events? Reading the NYT headline page is a safe choice. For a while I would go to ThinkProgress/Matt Yglesias site, but I like the idea of checking an offbeat blog for a summary of the good stuff in NYT.

By 2015 75% of American adults will be overweight or obese, and 41% will be obese.

According to recent studies, as many as one in five girls between 10 and 18 years of age are now cutting themselves with razor blades or burning themselves with matches (according to Leonard Sax).

In other words, the girls who are most successful at meeting gender-specific societal expectations appear to be just as likely as other females to be cutting themselves.  Not so for boys.  How come?  That’s one of the questions I try to answer in my book Girls on the Edge.  My bottom line is that these pretty girls are searching for a sense of self that’s not about how they look, but about who they are.  We reward them for how they look but we — i.e. American society — are much less interested in what’s going on inside.  Self-cutting fills that need for some of these girls — just as anorexia does for others, and obsessive perfectionism does in others.

According to a Chronicle report, white children make up less than 8 percent of the Houston ISD enrollment… None of the 181 Texas state lawmakers are Hispanic Republicans.

According to this NPR Article:

"Children of parents who reported having a rule about bedtime scored about 6 percentage points higher on an assessment of their vocabulary compared with children whose parents did not report a rule about bedtime. They scored 7 percent higher on assessments of early math skills."

Health care information site. Good and easy to find things.

Melvin Goodman on how much of the defense department is privatized and lacking in accountability:

Nearly a quarter of the federal budget is devoted to contracts to the private sector, with the new Department of Homeland Security and Office of National Intelligence serving as conduits for this money.

Private contracts are now responsible for 70 percent of the intelligence budget, and private contractors represent more than half of the employees of the new National Counterterrorism Center. The trumpeting of "cyber war" marks the next cash cow for the defense industry.

See 2 other articles by Melvin Goodman here and here.

Steve Benen and commenters debate the soul of the Washington Post. I think the downfall began when Bob Woodward started writing Tell-All books about the Bush Administration.

Realclimate asks whether we can provide different levels of reporting for differing proficiency levels.

Joe Keohane reports on how brain science is finding that people cling to certain political beliefs, regardless if proven wrong.

People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)

Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”

Other insights: people with wrong ideas are more likely to change when presented with direct contradictory evidence; just showing them an article doesn’t do any good. Self-esteem has something to do with it:

Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.

Alan Bellows talks about how the 1985 New Coke marketing campaign overlooked the tendency of people to develop irrational reactions based on groupthink. The concept is informational conformity, defined as “the human tendency to unconsciously adjust one’s opinions to correlate with the outspoken views of the social group.”

Informational conformity was first formally documented by Dr Muzafer Sherif in 1935, when he placed a group of subjects in a dark room with a single point of light in the distance. He asked them to estimate how much the light moved around, and although each person perceived a different amount of movement, most of them relinquished their own estimates to conform to the predominant guesses within the group. In reality, the light had not been moving at all; it only appeared to move because of the autokinetic effect, a quirk in visual perception where a bright point of light in complete darkness will appear to wander. It is thought that this imagined movement occurs due to the lack of a fixed visual reference point, and it may be the cause of many nighttime UFO sightings.

(Michael Tobis relates this groupthink tendency to climate change).

(I remember that era well, and New Coke was on everybody’s minds, even to the point where during a homily, my parish priest held up a can of New Coke and asked rhetorically whether there were more important things to worry about).

David Corn explains why Politifact sometimes gets things only half-right:

Yet PolitiFact didn’t evaluate Cheney’s remark. So here’s the real problem: Huffington made a charge that was rooted in reality. Cheney responded with a statement that had no basis in reality. Yet PolitiFact zeroed in only on the former and let the real lie escape. True, Huffington had dared PolitiFact to review her remark. But Adair and his intrepid band were free to expand the mission. The greater public service would have been to compare Huffington’s and Cheney’s comments and determine who was closer to the truth. This is where PolitiFact truly fell short.

Matt Thompson talks about how news media drowns you with episodic content when  we yearn for  system content: 

Chances are that most of the information you’ve encountered about this subject has been what I’d call episodic. Over time, you may have heard a lot about budget reconciliation, insurance premium hikes, the public option, the excise tax, the Wyden-Bennett bill, the Stupak amendment, and on and on and on. You know that Democrats are trying to do something to the health care system, but it’s either a government takeover or an insurance industry giveaway. Hard to tell.

This constant torrent of episodic information is how many of us encounter information about current events. This has been true for as long as any of us has been alive, but in the wake of the real-time Web, it’s become ever more constant and ever more torrential.

Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.

See also:  Matt Thompson on 3 key parts of news stories you don’t usually get. Later Thompson describes 5 ways journalists can improve the news:

You might have heard about Politico’s notorious goal of “winning the morning,” i.e. finding a scoop that’ll lead each day’s news cycle. That’s great, if you’re content with your stories having about as much impact as a popular tweet. Too many of us follow Politico’s lead.

Instead, try to win the story. Aim to produce a work of journalism so excellent it’ll get passed around for weeks. Put your best storytelling chops to work on this. Try to supplant Wikipedia as the top Google result for your topic. This might not be a single article; it might be a nicely-packaged collection, a wiki, or something else you devise. The key is that it should be long-lasting and distinctive.

Essay on the same topic by  Tristan Harris and Jay Rosen. Also Thompson has 10 questions journalists should ask themselves.  Also, there is a modest amount of discussion on the Future of Context website even though it doesn’t seem to be actively maintained.

10 Mistakes JFK Jr. on the day his plan crashed. Interesting insights into the minds of nonprofessional pilots.

Beijing and Mexico City have the worst traffic congestion. Houston has one of the best.

Robert Sullivan on new ways to use buses in mass transit to improve efficiency:

Flexibility remains the bus’s chief advantage—unrailed, they can go wherever we want them to go—and they’re a relative bargain. But over the last decade, in a few transit-enlightened cities around the world, the bus has received a dramatic makeover. It has been reengineered to load passengers more quickly. It has become much more energy-efficient. And, most important, the bus system—the network of bus lines and its relationship to the city street—has been rethought. Buses that used to share the street with cars and trucks are now driving in lanes reserved exclusively for buses and are speeding through cities like trains in the street. They are becoming more like subways.

For me, this leaves out another obvious issue: decentralized mass transit system protects  against terrorist attacks.

Great list of reasons why using cameras to give traffic tickets is a bad idea. (PDF Alert). I would add:

• Before these red light cameras, were we facing an outbreak of people running red lights? In my experience, I haven’t seen much redlight running….
• There are reasons to run red lights on occasion. But the ticketing process makes it impossible for the ticket recipient to have a specific memory about the incident in question (which would be necessary to defend himself). If there were a way for the ticket recipient to be receive immediate feedback about the violation, my opposition would be greatly reduced. But if I receive a ticket and a photo in the mail two weeks later, chances are I will have no memory of this specific incident (and be powerless to oppose it).

Here’s one reason that I could find persuasive: saving police manpower! If police don’t have to handle routine stops, that could free up their time to do more pressing things. But the benefits of that would have to be proven. For example, traffic tickets may be a good excuse to stop cars exhibiting suspicious behavior.

My personal problem with camera tickets is that I don’t know the threshold for ticketing. If i follow a car across when the light is yellow, I don’t know if that would be considered a violation. Are the firms looking for egregious cases? Somehow I feel that if there is revenue involved, the tendency will be to fine all people who meet some minimum threshold.

Awesome Firefox tip: to jump to the Search box, choose Control K. To move left and right through tabs, do Control – K,  then Tab (that will give focus to your current tab); at this point you can use  the arrow keys to move through all your browser tabs.  (more).  This is a lifesaver. At the moment my lower back and wrist hurt a lot. Any need to move the mouse will hurt. (Don’t worry; I need to take a break and do exercises anyway).

Tom Johnson has written an incredible 17 part series about information design, blogging and technical writing. If I have time I’ll blog more about this piece later. Lots about facets, labeling, reuse, links. I’ll dump some of the comments I have already on his series:

WordPress 3x now will offer more menu control, which should improve navigation considerably.
- one reason Google sucks for finding technical answers is that Google is a commercial enterprise and can easily be gamed.
- facets are interesting, but they are dependent on your help platform. Also they are useful mainly if the users are performing different functions.
- ebooks are an interesting hybrid medium (and one I’m working on right now). Lots of alternate navigation/browsing methods plus better use of hyperlinks.
- agree that mediawiki’s templates make it easier to organize content. But if they are autogenerated (and not watched over by a human editor), they become useless.
–thanks for reminding me that wp search results are in chronological order!
– I think your problem in the first or second part about shallow help pages is a result of a schema like DITA which tends to segment things too narrowly.
– it helps to know how your audience looks for information. A lot of It staff (my target audience) will use search before anything.
– the big problem is that people never know what to search for. All they know is how to describe their problem. I think a glossary can help with that.
- I’m a wordy/prose-oriented person. It was a shock to me when people found it hard to find information in my dense prose. Labels are important — maybe the most important thing…
–that said, for conceptual things, people like content which is a readable chapter.
–hypertextuality has a down side, especially if you need to remove a subset of the docs (for a quick start or something like that).

I agree about the problem of documenting things which are obvious to the user. I’ve written elsewhere that screen shots are unnecessary if the GUI is well-designed and should only be used in special circumstances.

I made this comment about footnotes:

Footnotes have fallen out of favor on the Internet, but they still have an important role to play. If you have checked Wikipedia recently, you will know the reason. Many external links which were added are now dead. Sometimes, valuable information is available online in an offline source like a book or print newspaper. Wikipedia made a decision a few years ago to require that the main text body of their articles link to footnotes at the bottom. The footnotes themselves would contain the hyperlinks to the third party sources.

That is generally a good practice. First, it allows the page citing the source to include bibliographic information in an unobtrusive manner on the bottom of the page. Second, it gives the reader more clues for finding the original source if the third party source has gone offline or if the URL has changed. Sometimes, when the URL has changed on a third party link, if you know the title or some identifying keywords, it can be relatively easy to find the new line if it is still online. Sometimes it is just helpful to keep information about the source on the same page for the reader’s convenience.

While HTML has made it easy to create links to external sources, making footnotes is clumsy and time-consuming (even for people relatively comfortable with HTML). Perhaps the concept of the footnote does not translate well to the browser page; nonetheless,a CMS that automates the use of anchors can simplify the process somewhat of creating and maintaining footnotes.

How  I sued google and won: Part 1 and Part 2.  (He lost on appeal, but he won the moral argument).

Novelist David Rothman wrote a long piece about the potential with the iPad. (I’ll say more about that later).

I recently purchased a license to SnagIt, a souped up screen capture program for $49. In addition to being a good overall product, they have some good video walkthrough demos.  I like Gimp for a lot of simple graphics, but SnagIt anticipates batch jobs and printing tasks.

Here’s a free download to people making print books on Createspace (with generally useful information).

By the way, now that I have an ipad, I do much more reading on my ipad and less on my PC (mostly on Newsrack RSS reader).

Adam Schwabe on designers vs. content producers:

We’ve always made pretty bold proclamations in this industry that Content is King, but it really hasn’t been. Content is all too often considered as an afterthought after wireframes and design comps have been presented to and approved by the client. Relegated to boxes as placeholders and Lorem Ipsum, too many of us take a “do it later” approach with what is most important to the user. People aren’t visiting your site to look at colours and boxes, they’re there for a purpose, and the content should be at the core of any design.

Wireframes and design concepts are much more believable when populated with real content, both to the team creating them and the client reviewing them. Speaking from experience, the worst thing that can happen to me as an Information Architect is when I’m asked to design an experience without any content provided up front. It’s like building a house without having any clue how many people will be living there and decorating it without any regard for the resident’s taste; Ultimately, you’re going to end up with a pretty dry experience, a lot of filler and too much empty space.

Tom Johnson adds:

It’s the same idea that people who wear shirts with a big red x through the words “Lorem Ipsum” are trying to get across. Start with the content first and then create a design for it. Otherwise your design won’t fit the content.

Some technical podcasts worth noting:

• SXSW panel. Future of Context. Important and provocative panel about how we digest and process information. (mp3, with commentary here and here).
• Tim Oreilly Open Source Internet from IT Conversations podcast.
• Diplomacy 2.0 Social Media, Diplomacy and Co-Creation of Dialogue starring Podesta and Fallows.

I spent 10 minutes trying to find an article I forgot to bookmark. I’ll dump a quote in the next post. But boy! Finding that link was painful—browsing through Firefox’s browser history is painful!

Apparently, a federal appeals court upheld the copyright ruling that upheld the Rule of the Shorter Term. I have updated my Is US Copyright Law hurting Wikipedia? article with this statement:

It looks like a federal appeals court overruled the lower court’s decision about Golan. This latest decision ruled that the Uruguay Rule of the Shorter Term (that put some foreign-produced works in the US public domain back under copyright) was valid. Therefore, Uruguay Round still applies, and those foreign-produced works which were previously in US legal limbo are now safely in US copyright again. Terrible news, and let’s hope the Supreme Court decides to take it. In the meantime, Public Domain Sherpa has a chart which illustrates the complexity of works published overseas. (The famous Hirtle copyright reference chart has not been updated). Wikipedia’s image use templates have been updated accordingly.

First, I am reading and very much enjoying Steven Moore’s landmark book on the Novel: An Alternative History. (Read this review by Steven Donoghue which is extensive and critical though somewhat fair):

If authors had any genuine talent for categorization, they’d be accountants. Authors are nitwits – that’s what makes them holy; it’s the critic’s job to determine categories. And a critic like Moore, who’s so lost in his pet theory that he’s willing to throw all categories to the wind, does neither writers nor readers any good service.

I read books for a living, and a hefty number of those books are novels. I know what a novel is, and I’d bet my last basset hound Moore does too (at one point, when discussing an obscure Buddhist text – after once again scorning Buddhism itself, of course – he disqualifies it for ‘novel’ status, saying “we have to draw the line somewhere”). It’s not hard, but it does exclude medieval falconry manuals and ancient Egyptian recipe books. A novel is a coherent prose narrative that’s too long to be read comfortably in one sitting. Eighteen words instead of 700 pages – anticlimactic, I know, but there’s such a thing as making a mountain out of a molehill. If the book in question doesn’t tell (or want to tell) a coherent narrative, it isn’t a novel

AP story about dog concert being organized by Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson.

Multimedia artist Anderson said the inspiration for the canine performance came while she was backstage before an event and thought: “Wouldn’t it be great, if you were playing a concert and you look out and you see all dogs?

Letters of Note reprint some famous or important letters. Faves: Steve Martin’s reply to a fan, Frank Sinatra’s letter to George Michael to chillax, Harlan Ellison’s requirements for giving a blurb, John Lennon’s letter to a clueless art critic and the poignant letter to FDR from a war widow.

Linda Kirkpatrick writes about the Texas legend of Emily West (who some claim distracted Santa Ana at the Battle of San Jacinto and inspired the song Yellow Rose of Texas).  This comes from the Texas historical webzine Texas Escapes.

Did  you know North Korea kidnapped one of South Korea’s best directors and actresses  and forced them  to make a North Korean horror film? (Film Review here). The complete movie is on Google Video.  From an IMDB comment:

The backstory to this movie is pretty darn incredible – made in North Korea by the country’s dictator – the director and two lead performers were actually kidnapped from S. Korea after they refused to work on this movie with the dictator. Seriously – not kidding. As for the movie itself – it is pretty good in many ways. The story itself works as an old village myth – an iron eating monster comes to life to save poor farmers and villagers from a cruel warlord. The effects are cheesy and silly but some of the battle sequences are impressive for no other reasons then you can tell there are literally thousands of people fighting in these scenes. After all the CGI effects of recent time – it was refreshing and stunning to see so many actual people being used in a big battle. Then again, they probably didn’t have much choice. I guess if the dictator of a country tells you to be in his movie, you don’t refuse.

Ursula Lindsey on how Egyptian bookstores are having problems selling Arabian Nights.

Salem was the victim of a hisba case — what has become the legal weapon of choice in the arsenal of would-be censors. These are cases — based on a principle in Islamic law — in which an individual may sue another on behalf of society, alleging some grave harm has been done it. Several Islamist lawyers specialize in hisba lawsuits and use them with alarming frequency against writers, intellectuals, and professors whose opinions they deem to have denigrated Islam. Egypt’s minority Christian Coptic population also has its self-appointed moral guardians, eager to take novelists to court. And while charges against a book, author, or publisher are being investigated, the book is usually confiscated from the market.

My god, I wish someone could file a suit against Glen Beck for bad taste!

Merrill Markoe has a humorous video Something Extremely Important about her dog. I crack up every time I watch it. Other vids here and here. Markoe was the David Letterman writer who created Stupid Pet Tricks. Oh, imagine having that on your tombstone!

Similar: Lost as reenacted by Cats in 1 minute. and Viral Video Film School on Adorable Puppies.

From Thomas Leupp’s scabrous review of Sex and the City 2:

By this point, King has clearly lost his perspective, unaware of how monstrously self-absorbed and entitled he’s allowed his film’s four protagonists to become, or how their unapologetic opulence might appear to a world still struggling to emerge from economic armageddon. He’s too preoccupied with mounting his female version of Ishtar — replete with awful puns involving camel toes and “Lawrence of my labia” and an atrocious karaoke performance of the feminist anthem “I Am Woman, Here Me Roar” — to notice how badly things have gone awry, and how badly his film reflects upon women.

And it gets worse. Before leaving Abu Dhabi, the increasingly loathsome quartet become involved in a mishap that ends with Samantha (now effectively reduced to a walking hormone joke) in the middle of a busy town square, holding up a package of condoms, thrusting her hips and shouting, “I have sex!!!” as the Muslim call to prayer is sounded. Sex and the City 2 won’t win any awards (save for a few Razzies), but it could become an effective inspirational video for suicide bombers — provided they can endure the film’s two-and-a-half hour running time, of course.

This singles map shows the gender ratio of single people in selected cities.  The most interesting thing here is that almost all cities have a higher ratio of males for all age bracket under 40; then it starts to even out and by the time you reach 45-49, females predominate. (Heck, what is killing all those males!?)  This makes me wonder about how the skewed gender ratios are affecting the dating scene in China.

Patricia Gutman writes about how evolutionary biology is changing literary criticism and vice versa.  The comment section is amazing – populated by bitter academics and people generally frustrated by the drivel coming out of English departments.  The comment section makes clear that the real issue is not the latest trend coming out of English departments, but the futile attempt by English departments to embrace the social sciences as a way to improve their prominence in academia. Or to put it in another way: English departments are underfunded, teachers are woefully underpaid and they need alternate funding sources.  Here’s one comment that attempts to rebut this charge:

There are several kinds of internet trolls conjured forth by internet discussions about English Departments and their internal workings:

1) The math and science Philistine trolls: while most science types have a healthy respect for the humanities, there is a vocal minority that will seize any opportunity to mock and belittle that which makes them feel insecure: intellect used in the service of something other than the empirical and the rational. Art. Literature. Maybe this is their revenge for that “B-” in Classic Modern Novels. I’m not sure, but it would seem that these trolls would rather see humanity evolve into the Borg cube than the Federation.

2) Bitter, rejected English department grads who feel rejected by the mother they love because she can’t find them a job. This group is perhaps the most transparent. Most are in fact aware deep down that their spite is motivated by ego bruising and rejection, but they just can’t help spitting on the nipple that once nursed them.

3) Cultural conservatives. These people hate literature because it is a “liberal” art. They know that if their sons and daughters read, they may might become more empathetic, might become bleeding hearts who want to do terrible things like provide health care for those in need. They are driven to troll these threads by the same motivation that drives them to troll science and environmental threads: hatred of the intellect, fear of that which they don’t understand, and provincialism.

4) Overly romantic creative writers: most creative writers have healthy understanding of the role of critics and scholars (who are also teachers of literature, after all). But there is a vocal minority who wish to maintain a hostile divide between creating and reacting to art. These people are mostly art purists, anti-intellectual romantics who just don’t understand why universities pay people to teach literature rather than pay them to finish their sonnet cycles and slam poems.

5) Undergrads who received a low grade in a literature class. It can’t be that I wrote an obvious and vague paper! Look! The whole field is messed up! It wasn’t me!

Strange bedfellows, no?

All of these groups share some common misunderstandings: for one, that English departments are dying (they are not, statistics show enrollment has been fairly steady and the long-term enrollment trend is up). English departments continue to dominate almost all university humanities in terms of enrollment and student interest. Another misunderstanding: that intellectual restlessness and diversity in a field somehow amounts to intellectual death. The opposite is true. English departments versatility, prolixity, and openness to change comprise a strength, not a weakness.

(By the way, I clearly reside in camps 2 and 4! See my thoughts about grad school here).

Peter Gutmann is a lawyer who writes a lot of criticism about classical music. Here’s a great profile he did of the German composer Wilhelm Furtwangler (who stayed in Nazi Germany even though he kept it at arm’s length):

Despite his valid cultural intentions, he unwittingly bolstered the German war effort.

For example, Furtwängler accepted the Vice Presidency of the mandatory performers’ union and served on a commission that approved the programs of all public concerts. He assumed these positions of leadership in order to maximize his impact upon preserving cultural integrity and assuring exposure to composers and artists of quality. But his constant visibility also served to legitimize and lend credibility to the Nazi regime, not only in the eyes of foreign observers, but to the citizenry as well: after all, how could the Nazis be thoroughly depraved barbarians if someone like Furtwängler could coexist with them?

Similarly, after the War many asserted that Furtwängler concerts had served to rally Resistance members. These events succeeded in assembling a core group of cultural leaders for a post-war Germany who would vaunt humanism over militarism. Even outside Germany, many emigrants were inspired by Furtwängler as a symbol of their dissent. Thus, Furtwängler’s wartime activities may have produced lasting humanitarian benefits. In the short run, though, they had the opposite effect.

As biographer Sam Shirakawa aptly notes, Furtwängler may have offered his art for the sake of “true Germans,” but he had no control over its dissemination. Thus, his concerts were broadcast to bolster troop morale. Worse, Hitler and his top henchmen often attended Furtwängler concerts to bask in his musical balm. That same balm may have lulled the frustrations of intellectuals and artists into indifference and diverted their energies from actively opposing the ongoing war and genocide. Furtwängler only saw music as a force for moral redemption. He once told Toscanini: “Human beings are free wherever Wagner and Beethoven are played and if they are not free at first, they are freed while listening to these works.” But the hearts of Nazi soldiers did not melt and the souls of their leaders proved impervious to aesthetic redemption. Were those responsible for (or at best indifferent toward) the liquidation of innocent millions really entitled to have their consciences set free by the liberating glory of music?

Nor was Furtwängler’s personal outlook free of paradox. Indeed, even his attitude toward Jews was inconsistent. One of the axioms of Nazi social engineering was that Jews were incapable of being true spiritual Germans and therefore were less than fully human and a social pollution. Nowhere was the absurdity of this assumption more apparent than in classical music, as many of Germany’s finest performers were Jews. Indeed, the pianist Artur Schnabel, a Jew, was universally hailed as the preeminent exponent of Mozart, Schubert and especially Beethoven, the quintessential German musicians. And yet, although he was ideally equipped to reject the Nazi racist view, Furtwängler often drew distinctions between two classes of Jews.

On the one hand, he ardently supported Jews who had arrived at the top of their musical, artistic, scientific or academic professions. Furtwängler vehemently opposed Nazi efforts to oust such individuals, as they had become an integral part of, and significant contributors to, German culture. The vast majority of Jews whom Furtwängler assisted were professionals (or their families or acquaintances).

On the other hand, though, Furtwängler apparently felt that Jews outside these exalted ranks were potentially subversive and therefore expendable. He endorsed attacks upon alleged Jewish domination of newspapers because, in his view, this supplanted the development of a truly “German” press. Similarly, he seemed to indulge boycotts of Jewish commerce, protesting only the resultant adverse foreign publicity and the threat of a spill-over that could deplete the arts.

Tara Parker-Pope reports on a Harvard nutrition study:

A new Harvard study that found no increased risk of heart disease among meat eaters is generating a lot of buzz for red meat. “A Guilt-Free Hamburger,” reads one headline. “Order the Steak,” begins another.

But the research, published this week in the journal Circulation, is not so much a celebration of red meat as it is an indictment of processed meats like bacon, sausage and deli meats. Eating one serving of those foods a day was associated with a 42 percent higher risk of heart disease and 19 percent increased risk of diabetes. But there was no increase in risk associated with eating unprocessed red meat.

The findings come from a broad analysis of several studies tracking meat consumption and cardiovascular diseases and diabetes. Processed meats include bacon, salami, sausages, hot dogs or processed deli or luncheon meats.

Some reactions: It’s unclear whether the “exoneration of beef” relates to serving size. If you had a steak twice a week, that’s different from having a hamburger once a week. Also, it didn’t say anything about frozen dinners – although presumably, they are high sodium as well. Third, this is just one meta-analysis (and one of the commenters made the point

Hugh McGuire offers some ideas about how wordpress could be incorporated into a book publishing system.  I made 2 long comments at the bottom here and here .

Suzanne Smalley asks whether bloggers are more likely to investigate, less likely to do pack journalism. Interesting tidbit: do you know police have a likely suspect for the Chandra Levy case?

Robert Pear reports  some of the devilish details of health care reform:

If a company offers coverage but requires any full-time employees to pay premiums that amount to more than 9.5 percent of their household income, the coverage is deemed unaffordable, and the employer may have to pay a penalty.

A goal of the law, pushed through Congress by President Obama and Democratic leaders with no Republican support, is to give all Americans access to affordable insurance.

The Mercer survey found that one-third of employers had some workers for whom coverage might be “unaffordable,” meaning that the workers’ share of premiums — in the absence of federal assistance — would consume more than 9.5 percent of their household income.

…

If an employer’s health plan is deemed unaffordable, the worker may qualify for a federal tax credit, or subsidy, to buy coverage in a new state-based marketplace known as an insurance exchange. A person claiming a credit must disclose income information to the exchange. The exchange will then notify employers if any of their workers qualify for subsidies.

Democrats say the subsidies will be a boon to low-wage workers. But the subsidies can also lead to monetary penalties for employers.

An employer offering unaffordable coverage is subject to a penalty of $3,000 a year for each full-time employee who gets government assistance to buy insurance in an exchange. The maximum penalty is $2,000 times the total number of full-time employees in excess of 30.

Eric Normand gives a personal account of the Tennessee floods.  (I have to admit, I totally missed this story).

And where was our national media in all of this? During the flood, and in the days that followed, mainstream news media like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, provided minimal coverage of this disaster, a disaster that is likely to be the costliest non-hurricane water related disaster in American history. Our plight was dwarfed by the Gulf oil spill and the New York City car bomber which, while being important stories, were not the only stories. In spite of the American press corps residing under a blanket of ineptitude, all levels of government, combined with an army of volunteers, quickly began to mobilize.

…

While all this was going on, the minimal media depiction was that of a flood that primarily affected Nashville. And while a small percentage of America was hearing about a flood in Music City; 20,000 people in Hickman County, some 50 miles south of the capital, were completely cut off and isolated and without power or communication for almost a week. Much of their community was devastated and many roads and bridges were washed out, with months of repairs still ahead. On Highway 7 in Maury County, an area the size of three football fields collapsed. The city of Clarksville, some 80 miles to the northwest of the capital, was also particularly hard hit, with dozens of small businesses on Riverside Drive under 4 to 5 feet of water. An AT&T call center was flooded, rendering 1400 people out of work indefinitely, and 2 weeks after the disaster, one neighborhood of homes was still under water. In fact this storm system also killed four in Arkansas, and flooded many parts of Mississippi and Kentucky, where it caused statewide damage estimated at more than $30 million. All of this was accompanied by, essentially, no national media coverage to speak of.

This is the worst disaster to hit the state of Tennessee since the Civil War, and all these statistics and facts don’t even begin to paint the picture of the loss and suffering had by many. For some, the disaster will remain a part of their lives for a long time to come. Thousands of damaged or destroyed homes and businesses were not in flood zones, leaving many with mortgages on structures that no longer exist, and without insurance money to rebuild. Thousands have also lost their jobs and livelihoods. Communities and infrastructure have been damaged or destroyed over an area that spans thousands of square miles, with the totality of destruction still yet unknown.

Tom Slee has a good takedown of the anecdote-based arguments of Clay Shirky.

But stories and analogies should be a starting point for thought, and not its terminus. They should be the spark that prompts more analytical, more rigorous investigation and introspection, testing out your idea to see where it fits reality and where it fails. In this essay, and in some of his others (see below) anecdotes are all there is, and that’s just not good enough.

Slee alludes to Shirky’s statement that Charlie Bit My Finger youtube video was the number 1 video and that it suggested the paradigm-shifting nature of user-generated content away from complex production models. Except it isn’t. In fact, Slee says:

the most watched video made in the last five years shows Lady Gaga and a group of hired models dancing on an elaborate set in a video that embodies complex production methods, that is part of the Vevo channel (a joint venture between Google and major record labels) and that features product placements by Nemiroff Vodka, Parrot by Starck, Carerra sunglasses, and HP Envy  [link]. Now there is a complex business model.

That’s the thing about anecdote-related pieces. People can refute your larger point simply by mentioning extra details about the anecdote that show it’s not typical or valid any more. Actually,  you have to give credit to popularizers like Shirky, Friedman and Gladwell.  Making your prose interesting and readable is the hard part; fixing the logical errors is not as much of a challenge.

Daniel Seidemann counters the logic of pro-Israelis about Jerusalem settlements. 

93 percent of Israel – including most of West Jerusalem and the 35 percent of privately-owned land in East Jerusalem expropriated by Israel since 1967 – is categorized by Israel as "State Land." Only Israeli citizens and those entitled to immigrate under the Law of Return may acquire properties on this land. Palestinians of East Jerusalem, with rare exception, are in neither of these categories. So while Wiesel may purchase a home in anywhere in East or West Jerusalem, a Palestinian cannot.

Since 1967, Israel has built more than 50,000 dwellings for Israelis in East Jerusalem, but has built fewer than 600 for Palestinians (the last was built 35 years ago). And from 1967 until today, as East Jerusalem’s Palestinian population increased from 70,000 to 280,000, Israel has issued only 4,000 permits for private Palestinian construction in East Jerusalem. Barred from building legally, the Palestinians built without permits – leaving them subject to Israeli demolition of their "illegal" homes.

Today extreme settler groups have launched a campaign to evict Palestinian families – refugees of Israel’s War of Independence – from densely-populated Palestinian neighborhoods in the heart of East Jerusalem. They are doing so based on the "right" of Jews to recover properties lost in the 1948 war. But under Israeli law Palestinians have no such right. So while Israel insists that Palestinians renounce any "right of return" – something understood as necessary for the two-state solution – it is implementing a Jewish right of return to Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and turning 1948 refugees into 2010 refugees.

Karl Levin has a testy exchange with Goldman Sachs CEO about shitty deals.

Paul Krugman criticizes Mitch McConnell’s false logic for opposing new banking regulations:

"And basically, the (Republican) argument boils down to saying that what we really need to do to deal with fires is abolish the fire department. Because then people will know that they can’t let their buildings burn in the first place, right? It’s incredible. So anyone who says bipartisan, should say, bipartisan doesn’t include the Senate minority leader."

Jane Brody reports that teenagers engage in risky behavior not because they are oblivious to the risk but because they perceive the benefits of them as being greater or more important. Fascinating!

Jonathan Schwarz lets us know about a South American mining tragedy that resulted in 8 million miners being worked to death.

Wow, a great insight in an article about a terminally-ill blogger by Madison Park:

"What we’re seeing over the last decade, we are gradually moving from a culture that had become during the 20th century, very closed about death," said Dr. Chris Feudtner, research director of Palliative Care Services at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.

A cultural shift has occurred, he said, referring to columnists and Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who discussed their impending deaths with frankness. Pausch’s last lecture, urging students to fearlessly pursue their dreams, went viral on YouTube in 2007, getting more than 11 million views.

Their line of thinking may be, "I’m still alive. I don’t want to be closed. I want connection. I want to be able to share what I’m learning on this journey," Feudtner said.

Bloggers like Miles Levin, an 18-year-old who had a rare soft-tissue cancer and died in 2007, and Michelle Lynn Mayer, a 39-year-old mother who had scleroderma and died in 2008, shared their thoughts on living and dying, too.

"We all tend to be open via video, blog or Facebook about what we do every day. It’s hardly surprising that openness extends to people’s last days or weeks," said Dr. David Cassarett, author of the book "Last Acts," about end-of-life decisions.

These bloggers, Cassarett said, are helping the rest of us through largely uncharted territory. He used a sports analogy to explain.

"Hardcore bicycle riders ride in packs, and there’s a tradition," he said. "The one in the front points out hazards in the road to those who come behind. It’s both an opportunity to be helpful, if you’re in front. You spot sewer grates, so others can avoid accidents."

Blogs like Markvoort’s could be acting similarly, he said. They don’t shy away from the ugliness and brutality of the dying process.

"They’re not just about hope but also about despair. That is, they’re telling us not just what we want to hear but also what we need to hear," Cassarett wrote.

This is a great insight. The sick and the elderly are easy to overlook especially because they don’t get out of doors as often. But information travels quickly over the Net, and unless one is a hermit, one is active on Facebook or blogging or some web-community. This network becomes a way for people to keep up with you. This happened to a friend of mine who has breast cancer.  It is convenient to have people check her blog for the latest anecdote. Web communities and blogging tools allow for more introspection than we used to have. Before that  we had poetry and prayer and churches and hospital socializing.

1/4 of boys in Indonesia between 13 and 15, Margie Mason reports:

As smoking has declined in many Western countries, it has risen in Indonesia — about 63 percent of all men light up and one-third of the overall population smokes, an increase of 26 percent since 1995. Smoking-related illnesses kill at least 200,000 annually in a nation of 235 million

…

"If Kelly Clarkson goes ahead with the concert, she is by choice being a spokesman for the tobacco industry and helping them to market to children," said Matt Myers, president of the U.S.-based Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which has urged Clarkson to drop the sponsorship.

"She has the power now to turn this situation around and to send a clear message to Indonesian young people and, frankly, to the young people of the world."

I’m determined to actually get work done today and not do a lot of random stuff. So this blogpost will merely record some things I’ve found over the last few days.

Totally random video by Steve Martin talking about the Jerk to the AFI. The movie is not that well-regarded, but is exactly right for my age group and doesn’t have a dull moment. See also his Mark Twain prize Acceptance speech.

Some pretty amazing nostalgia videos:

• B52s sing Downtown in 1978 before they became famous. (I can’t get this out of my head!)  Petula Clark said in an interview that she also preferred her version best, but it was pointed out that her version had no cow bell to which she thought, then replied, "I like the B-52’s version better too!" There are many videos from that 1978 performance, including Rock Lobster.
• Speaking of Petula, here is her Downtown in German. At that time apparently singers used to sing the same song in many different languages. Here’s Clark’s  incredible Hello Dolly in French.
• Quite accidentally I stumbled upon a marvelous (and sexually explicit) music video  also named Downtown by Peaches. SFW, but I would wait until you get home!
• Midnight Special had some great live performances including Bad Bad Leroy Brown, Steve Miller’s  The Joker, Taste of Honey’s Boogie Oogie Oogie and Manfred Mann’s Blinded by the Light.  I don’t know if this is necessarily a good thing, but it’s interesting how the Midnight Special’s live performances sound pretty similar to the canonical recordings (with a few embellishments).
• Speaking of Croce’s, his live performances are electrifying. Here’s his 1972 live performance of You Don’t Mess Around with Jim.  He was 29 at the time, a year before he died. It’s a sad fact that America doesn’t recognize great artists until it is too late. (Fortunately, for regular readers of this blog, you already know who is  the best songwriter in the USA today   because I’ve interviewed her! 

Nick Bilton on computers and eyestrain (a very important question for ebooks):

“The new LCDs don’t affect your eyes,” Mr. Taussig said. “Today’s screens update every eight milliseconds, whereas the human eye is moving at a speed between 10 and 30 milliseconds.”

From the same article, a quote by ergonomic expert Alan Hedge:

Professor Alan Hedge, director of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Laboratory at Cornell University, said that reducing eye fatigue is less a matter of choosing a specific display than of taking short breaks from looking at the screen.

When we read, Dr. Hedge explained,  a series of ocular muscles jump around and can cause strain, regardless of whether we are looking at pixels or paper. “While you’re reading, your eyes make about 10,000 movements an hour. It’s important to take a step back every 20 minutes and let your eyes rest,” he said.

See also the NYT Room for Debate with some technology luminaries about the ipad and portable devices. the biggest complaint seems to be that the iPad didn’t really tap into the power of the cloud. See also the exhaustive 18 page Arstechnica Review of iPad.  It is exhaustive, but I bet about 10 of these 18 pages are just screenshots.

Eric Alterman reports about the “free pass” that reporters gave John McCain in the 2008 campaign:

McCain flatters the press in other ways as well. For instance, he is particularly adept at embracing reporters’ romantic notions of themselves as tough-minded, hard-charging opponents of power, particularly conservative power. After facing questions from the late Tim Russert, host of NBC’s influential Meet the Press, he opined, "I just had my interrogation on Russert…. It’s a good thing I had all that preparation in North Vietnam!" One can hardly imagine what it must have been like for McCain to endure what he did as a POW in North Vietnam, but it’s hard to believe that it is an appropriate metaphor for taking questions about his main opponent in the Republican primary such as this: "Is Governor Romney waving the white flag?… Is Governor Romney suggesting surrender?"

And then there’s the special treatment, given no other American politician, to allow McCain to make his case to the public. When Media Matters conducted a study of Sunday-morning network guest lists, it discovered that the most frequent invitee during the nine-year period of 1997-2005 was McCain, who had appeared 124 times–over 50 percent more than his closest competitor. What’s more, not only was he the most frequent guest, he was the most honored. McCain was accorded eighty-six solo interviews. The runner-up in this solo interview sweepstakes was former Democratic Senator Tom Daschle, with just forty-five. As Senate minority leader, Daschle was the highest-ranking official in his party; McCain, who was on the outs with the leadership of his party for much of this period, was the leader of nothing but himself. In fact, during the early period of Bush’s presidency, before–apparently–he decided that he wanted to be the Republican nominee for President in 2008, McCain often represented the Democratic position on questions about taxes and political reform.

 

As much as Eric Alterman is right about everything, the main mistake he made was in turning this article into a laundry list of things which were wrong about McCain (which at present is of no importance). I would have preferred that this story be about the media and not merely about presidential politics.

Timothy Noah on what the IRS will really do when health care reform passes:

When someone files their return, the insurance company will send us a little box that is checked, a yes-no question, that says do they have coverage or not. They’ll send it to the individual, the individual will attach it to their return, and they’ll send it to us. Think [of it] just like a 1099, where you get information reporting about the interest that you have on the bank account. We will run matching programs around that, and if somebody doesn’t have coverage they’ll either have paid the penalty that they owe or they’ll get a letter from us saying that you owe this amount.

I think there’s a couple important points that I would make, though, about our role in health reform. One is these are not the kinds of things—check the box whether you’re here or not—that we send agents out about. These are things where you get a letter from us. Second is Congress was very careful to make sure that there was nothing too punitive in this bill. … First of all, there’s no criminal sanctions for not paying this, and there’s no ability to levy a bank account or do seizures, some of the other tools.

…

My belief is while some people may play with the kind of question that was asked, the vast majority of American people have a healthy respect for the law and want to be compliant with their tax obligations and whatever else the law holds. People will get letters from us. We can actually do collection if need be. People can get offsets of their tax returns in future years [italics mine], so there’s a variety of ways for us to focus on things like fraud, things like abuse, and we’re gonna run a balanced program.

As an aside, I have to say that Slate really publishes some good stuff both in the past and present.  I just read David Plotz’s 2001 Seed Series (about the children produced by sperm bank donations).  The series is long and fascinating; I would start with this article which summarizes the results he collected.

James Rainey summarizes the results from a Norman Lear study about local news media:

New study of 30 minute  local news programs:

• ads = > 8 minutes
• news outside city = 7.5 minutes
• weather & teasers = 6 minutes

Out of 8.5 remaining minutes most are crime scene, rescued animal stories, human interest stories, leaving less than 30 seconds for actual investigative reporting. Rainey comments:

You’re sure to learn about the Guitar Hero championships. (Slammin’ video. No analysis required.) But don’t expect to find out much about who’s running for Assembly or just how much library hours will be reduced by the latest city budget cuts.

Speaking of which, I just learned that Houston Public Library hours have been reduced… again! Oh, well.

My old government teacher Murvin Auzenne offers this gem by Valerie Callanan’s Feeding the Fear of Crime: Crime-related Media and Support for Three Strikes.

"…Research has shown that the pubilc believes that crime levels are the same or worse than what is presented in the media…surveys conducted in 1993 and 1994 found that almost 90% of respondents thought that crime was rising and at an all time high ,even though crime, particularly violent crime , had already started to decline….

The implications are unsettling. Silly me; I used to think that prison corporations contributing to electoral campaigns of tough-on-crime judicial candidates was the only dsyfunctional influence.

Christopher Helman explains why large corporations don’t appear to pay income taxes: they defer income and put costs in high-tax countries and profits in low-income countries. Oh, the advantages of being a multinational corporation!

Lots of small things to blog about.

Allegory of the Cave as a claymation film (3 minutes). Great but it made me realize how much I missed the first time I read Plato!

Here’s  Life after Tomorrow, a  delightful 70 minute documentary about some of the people who starred in the Annie Broadway play as children. This film is pure joy.

From the health care debate, here is Natoma Canfield’s letter to Obama  and an update about her health.

AT SXSW Interactive I saw Dan Roam talk about visual thinking. (Here are his succinct diagrams illustrating the health care debate).  I bought both of his books and found them fascinating. The trick is reading the text and trying to imagine how Roam will illustrate these abstract ideas.  Here is an audio interview with Dan Roam by Moira Gunn.

I just learned that apparently you can use a Pen + pad device to draw over Power Point presentations. You need a USB device costing about $50-75, but it’s extremely helpful, especially if you are trying to do on-the-flaw diagrams.

Sam Greenspan’s 11 Funny Graphs about Twitter.

Although I like idiotprogrammer as a blog name, I would seriously change it to Booby Naked (just because it’s more memorable). Just an idle thought.

Bill Palmer asks how long it will take for the iPad to become a kind of joke:

Hundreds of thousands of people have already plunked down for a device that they can’t even get their hands on until next month, and many of them will go wait in line to pick it up because they don’t want to be in the bathroom when the delivery man comes and risk not being among the first to get their hands on one. The question isn’t whether Apple will sell a million iPads in the first year, but how many millions. As such, the first generation iPad will be consumed by the masses in a way that the first (second, third) generation iPod never was. Here’s the funny part: no matter how well received the first generation iPad might be next month, even if most users consider it to be a gift from above, within two or three years it’ll be considered a joke in comparison to whatever the future iPad lineup looks like at that point.

Some fascinating audio:

• from the PEN podcasts, here’s a fascinating and enjoyable conversation with translators Gregory Rabassa and  Edith Grossman (mp3).  Both translators mentioned their fave underappreciated authors. Grossman said Alvaro Mutis (check) and Mayra Montero (who!?). Rabassa mentioned Osman Lins’ Avalovara and Lima’s Paradiso. Ok, copies of all these things have been bought (except Mutis, whom I know and love).  Damn you, half.com!
• from SXSW podcasts, here’s a fascinating History of the Button by Bill DeRouchey.  By the way, there’s a decent shot that my panel Novel in 2050: Tolstoy vs. Twitter  at SXSW will be available as a podcast.
• From the always excellent Writing Show podcast,  a discussion about novels from ancient Greece,  a discussion about Chris Anderson’s Free from a publishing perspective (great audio book review!),  Catherine Anne Jones about spirituality in writing (this is not a subject of interest to me, but Jones made it interesting), Networked Books (with the if:book people), Boychick literature  (humorist novelist Gerald Everitt Jones). Also, here’s the transcript with Will Eisner biographer Bob Andelman.
• Wired for Books interviews. Yes, I have listened to all 250+ of the WFB interviews. They run the gamut, and about 30% could be classified as “celebrity interviews” but most are entertaining and insightful. Part of the charm of these interviews comes from the fact that the author guests never expected that the full audio would ever be archived somewhere. They thought they were recording only a  3 minute interview.  Interviews I recommend: Ray Bradbury (what a raconteur), Barry Hannah (who died recently btw),  Thomas Keneally,  Jane Smiley (total egghead), John Barth (IBID),  James Dickey (highly entertaining and insightful), James Michener (not a fan of his fiction, but his anecdotes here were great) Jerzy Kosinski (he sounded like a loon and he was defensive about a minor literary scandal, but still an amazing interview), Harold Brodkey, Henry Louis Gates (talks about unearthing early African-American novel Our Nig)   William Shirer (talked about  WW2 reporting), John Gardner (sounds  more modest and open-minded than I expected),  Walter Tevis, P.D. James (never expected to enjoy this as much as I did), Doris Lessing, Han Suyin (great interview! brilliant and fascinating Asian woman!)  Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers!), Karl Shapiro, and Raymond Carver (the two interviews  were interesting though not particularly riveting;  the interview with his wife Tess Gallagher is a lot more revealing). Of course, the most notable find was the Jack Matthews interview (mp3) which I blogged about here.
• Moira Gunn does a great interview show called Tech Nation. I already mentioned the Roam interview above. Here’s another interview with Jaron Lanier.

There are times when blogging is out of the question, but I come across amazingly bloggable things.

Aaron Datesman discovers that “ every day, 3 million pounds of explosives are used to blow the tops off ancient mountain ridges in southern West Virginia to access thin seams of coal underneath.” and calculates that it’s the equivalent of dropping 3 atom bombs per month in West Virginia.

Here’s some great climate change videos. Climate Denial Crock of the Week, a dozen or so refutations of global warming canards.

Monbiot summarizes some research about the irreversibility of climate change. (The original paper is here: PDF):

The first one, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in February, set the scene(1). It showed that the climate change we cause today “is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop”. Around 40% of the carbon dioxide produced by humans this century will remain in the atmosphere until at least the year 3000*. Moreover, thanks to the peculiar ways in which the oceans absorb heat from the atmosphere, global average temperatures are likely to “remain approximately constant … until the end of the millennium despite zero further emissions”.

In other words, governments’ hopes about the trajectory of temperature change are ill-founded. Most, including the UK’s, are working on the assumption that we can overshoot the desired targets for temperature and atmospheric concentrations of CO2, then watch them settle back later. What this paper shows is that wherever temperatures peak, that is more or less where they will stay. There is no going back.

Mark McClish analyzes the substance of the bizarre ransom note for Jon Benet Ramsey. I have had a fascination with this case, especially this ransom note. Here’s wikipedia updates.

A good summary of the number of the outrages of Gitmo. Read some of the interviews to see the people whose life were destroyed by Gitmo.

95% of Fox News  viewers are white according to Nielson.

I saw a great movie from Netflix instant viewing: Man from Earth.  Philosophic science fiction. I like the fact that it basically takes place in a single room. (Another movie that does this is Linklater’s Tape).

Sometimes I don’t blog about something simply because I assume that most people had seen it. Let me call attention to three things.

• Katie Roiphe’s piece on how depictions of sexuality have changed in recent American fiction. 
• James Fallows long (and hopeful) piece on America’s future.
• Hannah Elliott on what not to say when buying a car.
• Tyler Cowen on how to estimate  the value of your time.
• Unnamed person asks what is the hardest language to learn?
• Juliet Lapidos on how we communicate the dangers of hazardous material to future Earthlings (with intelligent comments on Marginal Revolution).

Happy Reading!

I’m doing research for an article about green computing. Here is just a jumble of great stuff I’ve been finding.

Texas consumes more fuel generated from coal & petroleum than any US state. Per capita, Texas is 5th in energy consumption (behind Alaska, Wyoming, Louisiana & North Dakota). Curiously, CA & NY per capita energy consumption is 50% of Texas. (Source: EIA)

Summary of Federal Tax Credits for Energy Efficiency. Tax credits are available at 30% of the cost of purchases, with $1500 on most items but no upper limit on big ticket items.

Texas may be backwards in some respects, but the Texas Comptroller produced in 2008 a kickass document about Texas energy. Links to the rest of the document are on the blue box to the right.

U.S. college students could save more than 2.3 billion kW hours per year of electricity by enabling power saving features on their desktop PCs. That equals an annual savings of more than $200 million in energy costs and a 1.8 million-ton reduction of CO2 emissions from the operation of computers –equivalent to taking more than 350,000 cars off the road. (Here’s how). (Source).

Triplepundit, a news blog about green technology

Green data Center blog. (I talked to him yesterday for my article!)

Here’s an Energy Star certification process for Servers and Data Centers.

Climate Change Computing Blogs. Here’s an RSS of all of them. Cool, this RSS came from a yahoo pipes aggregator script.  Sweet!

Global Warming Bingo, a game to play for pieces about global warming. The post was written several years ago, but the references are current.

Here’s a list of green-e certified carbon offsetters.

Greenpeace tips on energy efficiency.

Sharon Begley profile of Al Gore for his new book.  Begley writes some of the most well-informed pieces about global warming. In fact, aside from maybe George Will, Newsweek has become a much spiffier mag since it dropped the weekly schedule.  A sample:

He (Gore)  regales you with numbers: more CO2 is emitted from burning and destroying forests—20 to 23 percent of the annual total—than from all the world’s cars and trucks; only by the 1980s did CO2 from fossil fuels overtake that from deforestation, which accounts for 40 percent of the CO2 increase since the 1800s.

The potential for soils to absorb more of the CO2 that our utilities, factories, and vehicles spew poses a dilemma for Gore, one of two where his scientific and political instincts collide. With better management, soils could sequester much more carbon than they do now. The question is how much more. Soils scientist Rattan Lal of Ohio State University was surprised to get a call last summer ("Vice President Gore would like to talk to you") that began, "I have 15 or 20 questions about soils and climate for you." Lal calculates that if more farmers adopted mulching, no-till farming, and the use of cover crops and manure, 3,700 million acres worldwide could sequester 1 gigaton per year of CO2, roughly 12 percent of annual global emissions. Other experts are even more sanguine. "If we feed the biology and manage grasslands appropriately, we could sequester as much carbon as we emit," says Timothy LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute, who presented at two summits. The political clash is this: if you tell people soils can be managed to suck up lots of our carbon emissions, it sounds like a get-out-of-jail-free card, and could decrease what little enthusiasm there is for reducing those emissions—as one of Gore’s assistants told LaSalle in asking him to dial down his estimate. (He didn’t.)

This is the first time I preordered a book from Amazon. Gore’s book may not be the definitive source for climate change, but he has the access and time to find out who has the best insights into the subject. Oddly, it never occurred to the publisher to release an ebook version.