linkfarming

Ladies and gentlemen: The Ira Glass Sex Tape!

• "A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine From N-Methylamphetamine"
• Can't figure it out? Ask the duck.
• The real story behind how sodomy laws became unconstitutional.
• Critics of the social safety net often need it most.
• Do you know the original, "official" meaning of "begging the question"? Do you care? You poor, suffering soul.
  

linkfarming

I've been reading a lot of nerd stuff for work, but...

• One chart showing the entire deficit discussion is a fraud: if Congress refrains from acting, the deficit will go away pretty quickly.
• Why don't we have autopsies any more? (When one of my relatives died of complications from cancer/chemotherapy years ago, I don't think there was an autopsy, and the hospital refused to release even the toxicology data they had, so we don't really know what happened.)
• Ben Bernanke paraphrases John Maynard Keynes.
  
• A glorious review of the original 1972 The Joy of Sex.
• Not quite the least ethical study ever conducted, but wow, what a candidate.
• The NYPD has its own CIA. Trained by the real CIA, even.
  
• Finally, an outstanding rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus.

linkfarming

Okay, the linkfarming posts are a cop-out. But I read and see so much cool stuff! Some of it's not even gross!

• Chinese typewriter, 1978.
• A professor talks with a professional paper writer.
• A bobcat on a cactus. You heard me.
• The real origins of food safety rules. Yes, you are overcooking your food for no good reason.
• The female body. Safe for work, not what you think, and sadly thoughtful.

Finally, go watch Stephen Colbert.

"If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus is just as selfish as we are or we've got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition... and then admit that we just don't want to do it."

More of my profound and brilliant writing is coming soon, I promise.

linkfarming

• Interview with an autistic 9-year old boy.
• Designer treehouses for adults.
• Referenced in the treehouse article.
  
• Unusual bookshelves.
• The charms of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Finally, you might not know that the technology of video projection has jumped leaps and bounds in the past decade, turning into an art form of its own. You also might not know that in Prague's Old Town is a very old and complicated astronomical clock. Behold, the two combined, for the clock's 600th anniversary. Bear in mind, this is stuff being projected onto the clock.

Projections on the Prague Astronomical Clock from the macula on Vimeo.

linkfarming

I'm finding a lot less time to read, but still enough, especially since I save everything to Pinboard.

• Bureaucratics. A photo set.
• Keynes vs Hayek: FIGHT! Round One and Round Two, both quite remarkable. (Dead but modern macroeconomists. Keynes has been updated and corrected; Hayek was substantially wrong, but had some cool ideas and arguments. Both men's views now distorted beyond recognition by American conservatives.)
• While we're at it, watch a hot nerd girl sing a love song to Hayek.
• Is sugar toxic?
• The worldwide war on baby girls.
• Starbucks is actually good for local coffee shops.
• We equate poverty with hunger, but other things might be more important than food.
• Finally: Gentleman Squid.

linkfarming

Busy with work! But the memes never sleep.

• Putting out fires with electricity.
• "Frivolous lawsuits" that weren't. Includes the McDonald's coffee lawsuit, which is actually extremely reasonable when you learn the details.

And finally, OMG CUTE:

linkfarming

I've mostly been reading nerd stuff, which I won't torment you with.

• Typesetting and paste-up, 1970 style.
• Kevin Smith tries something new to distribute his latest movie: showing it one city at a time.
• What is your favorite intellectual joke? (Brutal.)
• Antarctica in Color: Photos from Shackleton's 1915 expedition.
• Perfect albums.
• Esoteric punctuation history.
• The youth unemployment bomb.

Actual writing soon, I promise.

linkfarming

I've been busy studying to get a job, but somehow I always find time to read...well, mostly crap, really, or things you would find breathtakingly dull, but here are some interesting bits.

• Road safety over the past century.
• Starbucks' new 31-ounce "Trenta" size vs. the human stomach.
• Up to half of Americans under 65 can be denied insurance due to pre-existing conditions.
• The Atlantic has an essay about the culture of Duke University. It's based on a slideshow a Duke student made and sent around, graphically detailing the 13 men she'd had sex with. I haven't finished the slideshow, but the essay seems spot-on.
• "Sheikh's father is also a rat catcher. His brothers sell vegetables from a cart and wish they could be rat catchers too."
• The Conservative Constitution of the United States.
• I SUPPORT EVERYONE'S TROOPS. Ouch.

linkfarming

I've been sick and my sleep has been broken, so coherent insights have been few. But the Internet never rests!

• An active-duty Army Ranger is one of the world's 3 top pastry chefs.
• There's a fight over the next version of the Big Book of Mental Illness. (Psychiatry is rightfully afraid of embarrassing itself.)
• You're not allergic to MSG.
• Alexandre Dumas's misadventures with duelling.

Sleep well.

linkfarming

THE INTERNET NEVER SLEEPS.

Bruce Schneier says that rather than put airport-style security on the Washington Monument, we should close it. I agree.

An empty Washington Monument would serve as a constant reminder to those on Capitol Hill that they are afraid of the terrorists and what they could do. They're afraid that by speaking honestly about the impossibility of attaining absolute security or the inevitability of terrorism -- or that some American ideals are worth maintaining even in the face of adversity -- they will be branded as "soft on terror." And they're afraid that Americans would vote them out of office if another attack occurred. Perhaps they're right, but what has happened to leaders who aren't afraid? What has happened to "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"?

An empty Washington Monument would symbolize our lawmakers' inability to take that kind of stand -- and their inability to truly lead.

...

We can reopen the Washington Monument when we've defeated our fears, when we've come to accept that placing safety above all other virtues cedes too much power to government and that liberty is worth the risks, and that the price of freedom is accepting the possibility of crime.

Remember integral calculus, which most of us learned in high school or college (sometimes both), concerned with finding the area under curves? A medical researcher not only "discovered" it, but published a paper on it, and the paper has 75 citations. The blog post author is a bit kinder than I would be.

Roger Ebert has a rant about how religion views women, especially in the Catholic Church.

If you're curious about the kind of subtleties that go into computer user-interface (UI) design, here's a short piece about why Google Maps labels are so much more readable than other sites. It's good to remember that our experience of computers is determined just like our experiences of chairs and cars and amusement parks: some human designed it that way. Often, they didn't do the best possible job.

Finally, the President of SUNY-Albany apparently decided to cut the French, Italian, Russian, Classics, and Theater Arts programs, and did so without a great deal of courage. Biochemist Gregory Petsko wrote an excellent open letter.

linkfarming

The Internet has been busy!

• Thailand takes moral panic to a new level.
• Different maps of Europe.
• Incentives in baseball: batters about to finish the season with a .299 or .300 average hit .463 in their last at-bat.
• Video of 24 different English accents. He's really good. Contains profanity, but it's funny.
• An excellent New Yorker essay on the origins of the modern conservative nuttiness.
• For people like NPR-guy-turned-Fox-stooge Juan Williams: Muslims Wearing Things.

Finally, an awesome Atlantic piece about a meta-researcher who's busy proving the failures of modern medical research. It's of a piece with Michael Pollan's more specific discussion of nutritionism, since scientific food recommendations are driven by all this shockingly flawed research:

"Studies have gone back and forth on the cancer-preventing powers of vitamins A, D, and E; on the heart-health benefits of eating fat and carbs; and even on the question of whether being overweight is more likely to extend or shorten your life. How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all."

Or, put another way: "one large randomized controlled trial even proved that secret prayer by unknown parties can save the lives of heart-surgery patients, while another proved that secret prayer can harm them."

And people think the way I choose what to eat is weird. (It is--the only thing weirder than the system itself is that it works.)

what Chileans eat

During a discussion about trying to find a high-end pisco, Steve pointed me to this blog, Eating Chilean. There's a particularly fine post called "What Chileans Eat." He also did the research on the pepino I ate, a funky-looking striped fruit with the exact taste, color, and texture of cantaloupe (though he and his texts say honeydew, which is completely different, but whatever).

I'm not sure of the author's complete story: it sounds like he got divorced and retired from being a professor, moved to Chile, married a Chilean and started another family. Either way, he's enthusiastic enough to read historical primary sources about Chilean food, which is doubly interesting if you read Spanish. Anyway, check it out.

linkfarming

I haven't been reading as much stuff, since I've been watching Lost (all done, finally). Also, 99% of everything is crap, so why would I inflict it on you?

• A professional wrestler writes about how Tori Amos has changed his life.
• The Americans who know the most about religion are...atheists. And Jews.
• Finally, science fiction author John Scalzi explains what he thinks about Atlas Shrugged, and boy, is it awesome.

Enjoy your weekend!

teachers' unions: failure in action

Marginal Revolution pointed out that the L.A. Times has taken the extraordinary step of analyzing student performance data on 6,000 L.A. Unified School District teachers, and then releasing it. LAUSD could have done this, but (rightly) feared a union fight.

The union leader has called for a boycott of the Times.

Performance on standardized tests isn't a perfect metric, but it's the one we've got and it seems pretty clear that it's a lot better than nothing.

Publicly releasing individual data on 6,000 teachers is a little dodgy. But the thing is, this shouldn't be the Times's job. When you organize a union, you're taking some of the power of monitoring the workers away from management, who are usually incentivized to abuse that power. The tradeoff is that the union itself accepts the obligation of that monitoring: the union makes sure its members do sufficiently high-quality work.

Here is where teachers' unions have utterly failed. They've succeeded in keeping teachers from being fired, but in the process eviscerated the fundamental teaching mission of helping students to learn stuff. They can rant all they want about the unfairness of the modern educational reform movement and how it's an "assault" on the teaching profession, but that movement, and now the Times, is doing what the unions should have done decades ago and have refused to do: provide accountability for the quality of its members' work.

The unions had their chance and they blew it. Time's up.

Prop 8 gets mightily overturned

Bye-bye Prop 8! The homophobic cohort schemed and slimed their way into amending California's constitution--which isn't at all difficult, by the way, be careful where you sneeze or you'll amend the state constitution by accident. The lawsuits started flying immediately, but before the "OMG TEH GAY" contingent won a temporary victory, 18,000 gay couples had received marriage licenses. Said contingent immediately violated their promise not to try and have those marriages invalidated. Good work, guys! It must be nice to have a God of love and forgiveness who hates all the same people you do.

Today, however, Judge Vaughn Walker of the Northern California District Court--

I'm sorry, I have to interject here with a Wikipedia quote.

Walker's original nomination to the bench by Ronald Reagan in 1987 stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee because of controversy over his representation of the United States Olympic Committee in a lawsuit that prohibited the use of the title "Gay Olympics". Two dozen House Democrats, led by Rep. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, opposed his nomination because of his alleged "insensitivity" to gays and the poor. Years later, the San Francisco Chronicle noted the irony of this opposition due to Walker's sexual orientation.

Right, so the judge is an openly gay Reagan appointee. Moving on.

The case is Perry v. Schwarzenegger, and here's why it's awesome:

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

Here's the PDF of the full decision. Here's a few more juicy quotes from Talking Points Memo. And here's a CNN bit describing the next steps through the appeals process.

I can see where the Supreme Court wouldn't want to touch this with a ten-foot pole: this would be the defining decision on gay rights. I imagine the Ninth Circuit will let the decision stand, and then the Supreme Court decides whether to hear it or not. If they don't, it becomes binding precedent for the Ninth Circuit, and just strongly advisory for the other twelve circuits (most of which are far more politically conservative than the Ninth). They might not hear it: I can see them not wanting to touch this with a ten-foot pole, and they sometimes like to have conflicting circuit court decisions before they hear an issue.

Who knows? In the meantime, it's a strongly-worded, heartwarming decision.

(UPDATE: FYI, the "God hates all the same people you do" isn't original to me. It's an anecdote from Anne Lamott, who seems to me more quotable than readable..)

linkfarming

Enough about me. What's the Internet been up to?

• The special nature of a Chinese ghost town.
• The latest moral panic: special music to induce "drug-like effects". There's so much stupid in that article I don't know where to start. Dear Parents: I realize you have to protect your kids. Now grow the hell up and act like rational adults.
• Birdemic: Shock and Terror
• Martin Wolf of the Financial Times explains why supply-side economics is bullshit, and why it's politically successful, and why that's a bad thing.
• The 10 Most Important Things They Didn't Teach You In School. On self-defense: "Oh, there are guys out there capable of kicking ass. They're called criminals. They're good at fighting because they have poor impulse control and anger management, and thus are constantly getting into fights. If you, on the other hand, are going to be civilized and successful parents and homeowners and taxpayers, the odds are overwhelming you will not ever be good at fighting. This fact is thus reflected in our curriculum."
  

There you have it. I read the Internet, so you don't have to.

nope, we still need "feminism"

Via the Bookslut blog, author Piers Paul Read says in an interview:

"It's partly this feminist historicism, which I think is false, that women have been somehow oppressed by men throughout the ages. You don't find any evidence of women being dissatisfied with their condition before the 18th century and then it's just a few spoilt bluestockings and servants who get bored... I think women saw it as the natural order that the man should be head of the family - it's also Christian teaching - and that they played this domestic role. And I think the feminists stirred up a sense of resentment against men that persists today."

Riiiiiight. It's rare to see something so hatefully wrong not coming from a Republican. (Mr. Read is British.)

Hannah Betts has a few good things to say about that.

It is a lamentable idiosyncrasy of feminism that, unlike other rights movements - the campaigns against prejudice based on race, class, or sexuality - its beneficiaries take their emancipation and run. Many women will not even countenance the F-word, being prepared to concede only: "I wouldn't say I'm a feminist, but..." But what? That I like being paid an equal wage, having the right not to get raped in marriage?

The disavowal of "feminist" always confused me during my years at Northeast Liberal Arts College, although if feminism's campus representative was the Women's Studies professor, she was pretty abrasive all around and seemed to concentrate on how it was important that she and other women enjoy hunting. Very postmodern (good riddance, late 90s!), but not exactly a standard-bearer for why the ideas of feminism are still important to today's young women (and men).

Then again, that was the age of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, and paranoid political correctness that seems to have matured into a more rational sensitivity and even genuine tolerance, especially in younger generations, who have since done things like electing a black President, and overwhelmingly supporting gay marriage equality.

Much like people, you never know where ideas will end up, however screwy they are at the time.

a worthy anecdote for third-hand blogging

From Anne Schwartz, via Dan Meyer (who adds light commentary and his blog is prettier):

student: why do you want to be a teacher ms. schwartz?
me: have you meet you? you're awesome. i get to hang out with kids like you all day!
student: okay but why do other teachers want to be teachers?
me: probably for the same reason, because kids are awesome.
student: that's not true. you're the only teacher i have who likes us.

That's awesome. And sad. And awesome. And sad. And awesome.

I'm glad my kids know I like them. And they like me, or at least if there are any who don't, they're quiet about it. I do have to admit that "hanging out with 14-year olds" was not on my list of why I wanted to teach. I originally signed up to teach adults, because I thought it'd be more manageable (and I was probably right). Then again, I guess to decide that I'm going to teach kids really is signing up to hang out with them all day.

Some parts of this project I thought through really well. Others, not so much.

interlude: link farming

I still find time to read much of what Google Reader brings my way.

Michael Kimmelman has a fine piece in the New York Times about Greece's latest request that Britain return the Elgin marbles, and more generally about the nature and motives of those kinds of arguments.

This is a nation with priorities. My school is planning to run the games throughout the building to five big projectors.

I'm not the only one who goes on quests in foreign cultures. This guy tried to take a book out of the Delhi library.

More motivation to go make a ton of money somehow.

And finally, here's a guy who had an opening experience, and kept going with it to discover what's underneath. Not a perfect article, but it's pretty good.