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Monday, January 12, 2004 |
Number of days.... Number of days between Novak column outing Valerie Plame and announcement of investigation: 74 days. Number of days between O'Neill 60 Minutes interview and announcement of investigation: 1 day. Having the administration reveal itself as a gaggle of hypocritcal goons... [Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall]
8:10:23 PM Permalink
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The Allure of an Outpost On the Moon.
For some, it is the steppingstone of the Moon, not the distant goal of
Mars, that is the irresistible destination in the human venture into
space. By Kenneth Chang. [New York Times: Science]
The moon is in many ways preferable to Mars. 1) It's close; 3 days
instead of years. 2) Therefore, it's much cheaper. 3) It's a platform
for good science; put telescopes on the far side, especially radio
telescopes and see how much we learn. Geologically it's very
interesting, though "dead." 4) It's doable, at a reasonable cost.
8:01:00 PM Permalink
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Some Laws
The Edge has a
long collection of laws stated by a wide variety of different thinkers.
To me a law should be short and pithy: if it takes a paragraph or a
page to explain it, it doesn't work. Examples, of course are Clarke's third law
(" Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic"); Murphy's Law ("Whatever can go wrong will go wrong");' Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everythng is crap"); and my favorite, Cole's Law (thinly sliced cabbage with a dressing).
Anyway, though some people do tend to go on, there are some insightful laws here:
Susan Blackmore Blackmore's First Law
People's desire to believe in the paranormal is stronger than all the
evidence that it does not exist.
Richard Dawkins Dawkins's Law of Adversarial Debate
When two incompatible beliefs are advocated with equal intensity, the truth
does not lie half way between them.
Geoffrey Miller Miller's Law of Strange Behavior
To understand any apparently baffling behavior by another human, ask: what
status game is this individual playing, to show off which heritable traits, in
which mating market?
Robert Sapolsky's Second Law
It's okay to think about nonsense, as long as you don't believe in it.
There are many more...
7:55:36 PM Permalink
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To boringly go where they've gone before. The first images of Mars cost £800m to collect and showed a barren, rocky landscape; 28 years on, pictures of Mars have cost a mere £200m - and show a barren, rocky landscape. Robert Matthews asks what America keeps going back for [Telegraph News | International News]
A very stupid piece of writing. Did this author expect that Mars would have changed in the past 25 years? Does he think that the Viking landers learned everything there was to learn? It's guys like this that give stupidity a bad name.
10:59:42 AM Permalink
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War College Study Calls Iraq a 'Detour'. Bounding the Global War on Terrorism
Of particular concern, has been the conflation of al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a single, undifferentiated threat. This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored critical differences between the two in character, threat level and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has been an unnecessary preventive war a against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault from an undeterrable al-Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the Global War On Terrorism but rather a detour from it.
Full text: HTML or PDF See also War College Study Calls Iraq a 'Detour' [MetaFilter]
10:20:36 AM Permalink
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Return of the damned after 400 years. From the Guardian: Return of the damned after 400 years. Archaeologists have uncovered a mass grave which may throw lights on one of the strangest and most gruesome events of the Elizabethan age: the curse of Roland Jenks. More than 60 skeletons have been discovered between Oxford's former prison and its old castle. It is thought that many of them could be related to the fate of Jenks, a ‘foul-mouthed and saucy’ bookbinder who was convicted in 1577 of supporting the Pope. For his temerity he was sentenced to be nailed by his ears to the local pillory and responded... [mirabilis.ca]
9:47:33 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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