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Tuesday, May 06, 2003

Hot Shots of Mercury. The transit of Mercury. About thirteen times a century, the orbits of Earth and Mercury align in such a way that Mercury can be observed passing across the disk of the sun. The next transit is from 0740 to 1317 GMT, May 7th, and will be webcast from NASA's orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Hot Shots page. NASA also has a piece on the seventeenth century mathematician and astronomerJohannes Kepler, who predicted (but died before observing) transits of Mercury and Venus.More info on space. com, including a viewer's guide and a history of previous observations. [MetaFilter] 9:57:25 PM  Permalink  comment []

Slate on Bennet Here's a nice piece on Slate that sums up a big bunch of what's wrong with the sanctimonious loathsome Bill Bennet and his gambling troubles. The righties are now coming to his defense, saying things "that Bennett's gambling is 1) OK because it hurts nobody else directly and 2) non-hypocritical because Bennett never explicitly criticized gambling." Well, if 1) is true, then why aren't these same folks arguing that, say, it should be OK for me to grow pot for my own personal use? Or that it's OK for men to have sex with each other if it's consensual? But of course, in reality gambling is a much bigger problem than either of the two items I cited: it destroys more lives than either pot or homosexuality do. Its profits feed more corrupt politicians and "businesses" and, yes, terrorism than pot ever will. There's also a nice piece in the Semi-Daily Journal about the inexorable statistics of the matter. If Bennet has been gambling as long as it appears he says, the laws of large numbers make it virtually impossible for him to have done anything other than lose large amounts of money. 9:55:52 PM  Permalink  comment []

Tiny Hole Doomed Columbia, Inquiry Finds. The board investigating the Columbia's breakup said that superheated gas entered through a small hole in the front edge of the left wing and melted it from the inside out. By John Schwartz. [New York Times: NYT HomePage] 9:43:27 PM  Permalink  comment []

This just in -- now the mainstream media knows what everyone else does!. Did Bush know? An article in today's New York Times (link to mirrored site with no reg. req.) pieces together data that the author claims proves that Bush and his inner circle were well-aware that they were using false "evidence" of Iraqi WMD. Sy Hersh from the New Yorker is also chiming in, as is Salon's Joe Connason and Katha Pollitt of The Nation. A pretty decent subsection of media is finally descending on this story. If Bush or Powell or Rumsfeld are proven to have been knowingly deceitful, will the American public be even half as angry as the rest of the world? [MetaFilter] 4:30:34 PM  Permalink  comment []

Reader-Submitted: The Ultimate In Christian Bigotry. Here you see a truly bigoted take on Christian supremacy: A straight-up declaration that non-Christian people cannot do good deeds because they are not Christians. [Morons Dot Org] 4:14:22 PM  Permalink  comment []

Joyce's Dirty Letters When I was an undergraduate reading Joyce, these letters were rumors; you couldn't find them. Richard Ellman published them some years later, now here's a selection of them on the web. Warning: it is filthy stuff. But fascinating. The qualities that made Joyce the greatest prose stylist in English, and a man of great ability to portray other people (though probably somehow insane), come through clearly in these letters. The prose is luminescent, musical, unique. But not for the squeamish! 3:24:49 PM  Permalink  comment []

The road to 1984:. Thomas Pynchon's introduction to a forthcoming edition of Orwell's 1984. "George Orwell's final novel was seen as an anticommunist tract and many have claimed its grim vision of state control proved prophetic. But, argues Pynchon, Orwell - whose centenary is marked this year - had other targets in his sights and drew an unexpectedly optimistic conclusion." Guardian UK [props to mousemusings] [Follow Me Here...] This is an edited extract of the introduction I read about in the SF Chronicle the other day. It's a great piece, incisive about Orwell and the times he was writing about: 1948, when he wrote the book, and the purported 1984 in which it was set. Pynchon is also typically smart about how 1984 the book "predicts" what's going on today. This extract makes you want to read the longer introduction and re-read 1984 in turn. 8:00:49 AM  Permalink  comment []

© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.