Lazy Friday Links Mike Hatch: A
wrongful 'need to know'. Minnesota's attorney general takes on the
Information Awareness Office.
Katherine Kersten of Minneapolis's own Cato-clone, the
Center of the American Experiment wrote an
opinion piece for
the Star Tribune on Thursday bashing the liberal bias of American
universities. But today's
Letters to the
Editor took her down a notch. Kate Mudge of Minneapolis writes, "Not only
does Kersten cite notoriously liberal schools to prove her 'point' (Brown,
University of California at Santa Barbara) that all liberal academics are
out to promote their 'liberal orthodoxy,' but she herself makes a
ridiculous claim that it is the conservative worldview that is most
concerned about freedom of religion, speech and civic virtue." No kidding!
My favorite economist/pundit, Paul Krugman wrote an excellent article
Victors and Spoils about the
real story behind Bush's plan to cut 850,000 federal jobs.
Also, I'm glad I'm not the only one concerned about Bush being openly
compared to Andrew Jackson, one of the most corrupt and ignorant
presidents of the 19th century.
Sheldon Drobny, Salon:
What would
Moses drive?. Jews used their economic power to punish German and
Japanese car companies after World War II (and Ford, too, because Henry
Ford was a racist fuck). Drobny suggests it's time to do the same for
gas-guzzling SUVs. "I'm sure there are plenty of Jews who send money to
Israel, and then turn around and send money to its enemies, every time
they fill up their SUVs with gas....I hope other Jews will join me. It's
nice to have no guilt about subsidizing Islamic fundamentalists, or
ruining the environment, either." That's a great idea. And it's good to
see boycotts as a serious part of capitalism, too. Labor unions and
consumer boycotts help keep corporate power in check.
TeleRead has some
great stuff
about poor kids who grow up in book-rich households. Here's a hint:
they're more likely to succeed.
Tom Tomorrow has a weblog: This Modern
World. I've checked it out before, but I think I might start reading it.
I can't find an RSS feed for it, unfortunately.
The Singularity
When I read about the Singularity (the idea that technology is advancing
exponentially and will continue to do so until it reaches a point where it
instataneously surpasses our ability to understand it), I can't help but
think of the parallels with religion. There is a huge leap of faith to
believe that progress is always positive and always increasing. There's a
further leap of faith to believe that AI or brain replication will enable
humans to make the jump into the enhanced, sped-up conciousness that the
Singularity demands to maintain its progress. The evidence that this is
possible just isn't there. It makes great, entertaining fiction (some of
my favorite SF books, including Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution series, deal
with the Singularity; and of course the concept was invented by SF author
Vernor Vinge). But I don't believe it for a minute.
Slashdot recently had a story about
some people who want to build an interstellar lifeboat for humanity to
preserve some vestige of humanity from the Singularity.
A comment by Artifice_Eternity just nails it:
The "Singularity" =
the Rapture for atheists. "I like Vinge's fiction, but the Singularity
thing strikes me as an apocalyptic/transcendent/eschatological scenario
for people who can't stomach the Book of Revelation."
AP News:
Appeals court upholds Louisiana's 197-year-old law against oral and anal
sex. Morons.
Kevin Burton:
Emacs Needs Floating Windows (Advanced Tooltips for IntelliSense
Support). Preach it, brother! This is the only feature of IDEs that I
miss in Emacs.
Some worthwhile links for today...
In the face of budget deficits as far as the eye can see, the administration...must make a show of cutting spending. Yet what can it cut? The great bulk of public spending is either for essential services like defense and the justice system, or for middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare...Privatizing federal jobs is a perfect answer to this dilemma. It's not a real answer -- the pay of those threatened employees is only about 2 percent of the federal budget, so efficiency gains from privatization ... will make almost no dent in overall spending. For a few years, however, talk of privatization will give the impression that the administration is doing something about the deficit.
Posted at 23:25
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My First Word Unmunger Comment That's the kind of thing that makes you feel good.
I just got my first comment about the
Word Unmunger: This is a
beautiful thing. Thank you!
Posted at 16:20
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DayPop is Back! I wonder why DayPop went down. In my imagination, I think it would've been
really cool if they simply went down to study what the Blogsphere is like
without DayPop constantly reporting the top links. There must be a
feedback loop. For example, I try not to make my weblog a constant copy of
the DayPop Top 40, but I've found a few stories of interest there. What
was the difference when that feedback loop didn't exist?
My news aggregator suddenly started reporting results from
DayPop again today. It's been patiently asking for
DayPop's RSS feed for the last few weeks as DNS lookup failed over and
over again. But today it was welcomed by the bitstream of fresh RSS
goodness. A short message on DayPop's homepage says simply: "Daypop is up
and running again. Sorry for the inconvenience."
Posted at 15:59
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