March 4, 2005

Drive-By

ROCKENOMICS: "As Coldplay's recording budgets have grown, so have its reverberation times."

HOW TO BUILD A Gauss Rifle at home in your spare time: "This very simple toy uses a magnetic chain reaction to launch a steel marble at a target at high speed."

IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME: Stop or I'll Shoot This Koran: "Sure," I said. "I use Korans for everything: Oven mitts, ash trays, air sickness bags and car wash shammies. You never know when one'll come in handy."

JEFF BROKAW on why blogging has become notably more tedious recently: "The strategic value and global nature of much of the news post-9/11 was just a much better input source for blogging than what we’ve had since about summer 2003, when the constant negativity started from Iraq."

DONALD SENSING describes two of the Seven Habits of Highly Dysfunctional Media: ".... just as pernicious to the MSM’s collective gestalt to ignore stories or important aspects of stories is the entrenched practice now of over-covering stories of, really, fairly little importance."

OLE EICHHORN observes that "Howard Dean's specialty is flat-out lying." But we knew that, right? Right.

ALTHOUSE ASKS "Why do Americans with distant immigrant ancestry think we need to structure education to spare our kids any contact with rote learning?"

ITS THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT: "A range of fashion clothing for chickens has been launched by a group of designers working in Austria and Japan."
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JON HASTINGS GUTS Oldboy and the revenge movie genre with one hacking stroke: "Out of all the stylish, artsy revenge movies I've seen over the last year or so--including Man on Fire, Kill Bill, and Sin City--the widely-praised Oldboy is the most unpleasant, the most pretentious, and the most preposterous."

THINGS MAGAZINE ASKS IF things fall apart: "Is it possible for the internet to dry up? It feels as if it's contracting a little, pages falling apart, slipping away."

THE INSANELY GREAT CLOSET OF Steve Jobs.

A SCRAP OF POESY BYLILEKS (James): "I think that I shall never see / a tax not called a user fee."

WHEN WILL IT BE YOUR TURN to be Hitler for 15 minutes?
Note: Lileks was first out the door with [ this one too.]

CAN SHE GIVE YOU FIVE GOOD REASONS why "social networking isn't really that tenable an idea after all?" Yes, she can.

BEETHOVEN'S 9 SYMPHONIES: Download the whole set, free.

STEVEN DISCOVERS an unusual property of Red Bull: "I swear to God it makes my left nipple vibrate."

I'd say that as long as they are not exploding with delight he's got a handle on it.

WANNA BET? :John Naughton @ The Observer misunderestimates 'never' with: "Blogging won't wipe out journalism, for the simple reason that journalism requires skills and resources that bloggers will never have. "

I put 'never' at about five years at the outside.

SLASHDOT HEADLINES TO TREASURE: Europe Home to Majority of Zombies

CRAIGSLIST HUMANS SEEKING ALIENS postings to be beamed into outer space.

UNESCO'S LIST of the world's irreplaceable cultural heritage by country.

JENEANE SESSUM cuts to the core function of News Aggregators: "Aggregator 2.0 lets you avoid more than 2,000 blogs in a single frame--several times each day! The more they write, the more you can think about reading and then just skip the whole bloody thing."

THE ANCHORESS identifies the bizarre "Gospel of Judith Christ" as sheer idolatry: "With the publication of this "gospel," this mania for "gender inclusiveness" has slipped the bonds of sanity and moved into idolatry: My gender is my god, I will have no gods before it!"

PAUL MARKS @ New Scientist reports that: "... advances in organic electronics - conducting and semiconducting plastics - are finally going to allow gadget-stuffed garments to handle that most violent of environments: the automatic washing machine."

OS GUINESS @ The Wilson Quarterly observes: "Freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith (of some sort), and faith requires freedom. If the Framers were right, then as faiths go, so goes freedom—and so goes the Republic."

CHRIS LEHMAN @ The Boston Phoenix shoots and scores with: "Getting the New York Times to explain the real operation of social class in America is, at the end of the day, a lot like granting your parents exclusive license to explain sex to you..."

KEITH @ To-done has "a few suggestions for a more productive and less stressed Friday. Oh, and a better weekend too!"
1) Plan Better
2) Avoid Friday Deadlines
3) Avoid Friday Afternoon Meetings
4) Leave early
I'm especially fond of #4.

SCOTT McCOLLUM @ IMAO sums up the hybrid car scam with I Can Buy a LOT of Gas for Five Grand: "The most striking example of this is the similarly-sized Toyota Prius vs. Toyota Corolla: To get your money's worth out of the more expensive hybrid Prius, gas would have to be $10.10 per gallon. Either you'd have to pay over $10 per gallon or you'd have to drive 66,500 miles per year at current gas prices (avg. $2.50 per gallon) in your hybrid."

ONE MORE STEP towards nanotech: "A team from the University of Alberta has proven for the first time that a single molecule can switch electrical currents off and on, a puzzle that scientists worldwide have been trying to crack for decades."

EFFECTIVELY TELLING Tom Friedman, Amnesty International, and other Gitmo whiners to sit down and shut up Wretchard @ The Belmont Club observes: "The devices of open cities, clearly marked ambulances, zones of safe passage, armbands for humanitarian personnel, etc are usages whose practical utility has expired under the deceptions of terrorist warfare, but their intent -- that of marking the limits of licit violence -- is sound. It is a distinction which can be based only on intellgence. Without that, humanitarian law is form without function on the modern terrorist battlefield, 'a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'."

THE ALWAYS DEMENTED Jeff Goldstein seems to have lost all sense of proportion and is typing posts with his nipples: "N FVR4L;K' ']..MK dvfv" We have alerted the proper authorities and his wife.

GARY CRUSE notes that we may be "too sensitive to prevail.... Deprived of a sense of outrage, we are converted from flag-waving patriotism to yellow-ribbon yearning.  It is an ongoing process that makes success in warfare inversely proportional to the length of the war." 

STEWART BRAND says "Let's go nuclear."

"Everything must be done to increase energy efficiency and decarbonize energy production. Kyoto accords, radical conservation in energy transmission and use, wind energy, solar energy, passive solar, hydroelectric energy, biomass, the whole gamut. But add them all up and it's still only a fraction of enough. Massive carbon "sequestration" (extraction) from the atmosphere, perhaps via biotech, is a widely held hope, but it's just a hope. The only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere is nuclear power."

Posted by Vanderleun at March 4, 2005 5:00 PM
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"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper N.B.: Comments are moderated and may not appear immediately. Comments that exceed the obscenity or stupidity limits will be either edited or expunged.

Just as someone who works down the hall from a lot of people doing molecular electronics, let me suggest that any claim of a single molecule device needs to be taken with a grain of salt - this has been claimed before and turned out as artifact. It's really hard to make a good electrical connection between the macroscopic world and just one electron. Because of this, people doing conductivity measurments on DNA have variously claimed that it's an insulator, a conductor, and a superconductor. Excluding their measurement apparatus, someone's wrong. Likewise, let's see a few more groups reach the same result, and then pop the champaign.

Anyway, love your links.

Posted by: Mike Beversluis at June 4, 2005 12:41 PM