Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat. New technology and methods have changed the rules for surveillance, but the informed public debate about those changes has never taken place. Maybe we should get on that.
Category Archives: Aside
One thousand, six hundred and six days ago — do you remember what it felt like? I remember. It felt like nothing.
TV vs. iTunes, round 2: Matt Jacobs calculates his cable costs vs. the cost of buying all the shows on iTunes. His results are the opposite of I got in my study on the subject, soon to be revised and re-posted.
The Undercover Economist strikes again with an explanation of rude waiters at fancy restaurants. The explanation echoes his similar essay about Starbuck’s elusive “short” cappuchino. This is quickly becoming my favorite Slate column — sorry, Explainer!
Why Lawyers Are Liars — Michael Kinsley wonders when it became accepted belief that lawyers will never have their own opinions.
There have been several of these, but this isn’t a bad explanation of why geeks and nerds are worth dating. It’s even sorta funny!
In what is ostensibly a review of the book _Rainbow Party_, Caitlin Flanagan hashes out an incredibly detailed and complicated look at teenage sexuality and how it has changed over time. She describes recent trends and media scares (I was unaware of how big of a deal oral sex has become among 13-year-old girls, and their parents) and traces a path of awakening and shifting cultural mores from Judy Blume’s original groundbreaking work in the 1960s right up to the culture and media of today. The pictures she paints — complicated, conflicted, tinged with self-doubt and uncertainty — is an upsetting one. But in many ways, as much as I don’t like to admit it, she is probably right.
Not sure I’ve ever noted here the Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech, a marvelous little introduction to cryptography.
Pictures of metallic things that have flown into MRI machines – the key word here being “magnetic,” of course.
Imagine a world in which there were no more actors, just stars
The poor state of the American healthcare system has become abundantly clear to me in theory, but John writes about his experience in practice, trying to find health insurance for his family after leaving his job. His first entry describes the problem and commenters offer some suggestions, his second elaborates a bit more and asks commenters for more information about other countries’ health care systems. Hearing how the system works in Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and the UK is interesting and enlightening. There are clearly problems with many implementations of socialized medicine, but I would contend there are far greater problems with the US system. Many people have stated that we have a looming healthcare crisis, and yet no one in government seems to be willing to start having the inevitable difficult conversations.
Microsoft is rolling out a new Mac-specific wireless keyboard and mouse combo. I’ve used MS peripherals in the past and generally been pretty happy with it. If my current mouse dies and their setup uses Bluetooth, I’d probably buy it. Hopefully, however, my mouse won’t die, cause I like it a lot and Logitech discontinued the model. 🙁
When you start to look closer, Apple’s new MacBook Pro gets less and less appealing. The first thing I noted was the lack of any advertised battery life. He noticed several other problems, not the least of which is the stupid, stupid name.
For those of you interested in MRIs and brain research who don’t have someone working in the field to talk to (that we could all be so lucky!), this Slate article about experiments using functional NMR imaging is a good starting point. Also, here’s a previous found object on this topic.
Aaron Swartz has decided to turn off another emotion: “Turning off an emotion is always a tough decision. I remember how a couple years ago I decided to say goodbye to anger. Sure, anger has its bright moments — you haven’t really lived until you’ve known that special joy of hurling a chair across the room — but it’s also quite time-consuming. Every time someone comes up and hits you, you have to run around chasing after them.” He is well on his way to becoming a highly efficient human being. Now if we could just get rid of self-doubt.
I haven’t been paying too much attention to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal that is ensnaring many major Republican congresscritters, but this explanation of how the whole scandal came to light amuses me greatly.
_Harper’s_ Yearly Review for 2005 – I love _Harper’s_ because its so scatter-brained, like America.