Cato points to an AP story which reveals that the prevalence of outlets for fake IDs in Iraq is saving lives by allowing people to mask their tribal affiliation from those who engage in sectarian violence. But I thought that centralized, tamper-proof, top-down, biometrics-enabled national ID cards were the only answer to all of our security problems!
Wikipedia’s article on the serial comma is interesting, succinct, and well researched. And you can see where I stand on the debate.
The 1898 luxury tax on long-distance telephone service imposed to help fund the Spanish-American War has finally been repealed, just a few days shy of 108 years since the Treaty of Paris.
From the IMDb page listing goofs for Back to the Future Part III comes this marvelous entry:
bq. *Incorrectly regarded as goofs:* The complex logic, and conflicting theories, of time travel have resulted in a great many potential plot holes, especially when the movie is viewed in the context of the whole trilogy. But time travel movies are like that.
I find it highly amusing (and a bit disturbing) that people on the IMDb message boards are still to this day debating the logical inconsistancies of the Back to the Future time travel storylines. I could not possibly think of going into that movie as a “serious” treatment of time travel. I mean, they have hoverboards and ads for _Jaws 17_ and Michael J. Fox plays his own daughter. Not hallmarks of a “serious” time travel movie.
U.S. citizens suspected of terror ties might be detained indefinitely and barred from access to civilian courts under legislation proposed by the Bush administration. Freedom is slavery. Yay!
Cheyenne Mountain is being closed down? How sad. Maybe they’re afraid of the WOPR.
Roger Ebert’s 1986 review of SpaceCamp pulls no punches. Nothing he says is wrong.
“[I]t would be a lot easier to accommodate allergies graciously if I felt like I could tell the rationally neurotic parent with the extremely allergic kid from the crazy neurotic parent with the slightly allergic one. And I can’t.”
Email Note
For various and sundry reasons that are boring and not worth blogging about, I’m without my computer for the next week or two, and, along with it, all of my email. If you’ve sent me anything deserving of reply and I haven’t gotten to it, please resend it, because I don’t have access to any of my last five years of mail.
Last year, Anil Dash got married: “The defining trait of marriage in these contexts is that the commitment comes first. It doesn’t occur to most people to get upset that they don’t get to choose their siblings; You just love your brother or sister, or you try to, and you fight sometimes and you disagree, and then you get over it, and that’s what family is about. And in some ways, marriage can be like that, too. There’s a liberation in knowing you don’t have an easy out: You know you’re going to make it work, and you’re not going to give up.”
Movie time
Sitting home, feeling crappy, can’t really blame me for blowing a hundred bucks on a dozen DVDs from Amazon’s summer sale. All movies I remember fondly from my childhood. I’ve often wondered if I was actually supposed to have been born in the 70s (and that’s why I missed the dot-com boom), and my love of these early-eighties movies perhaps bears that out. Or maybe it was just that the little video rental store in Lake Arrowhead that we frequented had an odd selection.
The spoils:
* The Last Starfighter (1984)
* Explorers (1985)
* Ghostbusters 1&2 (1989)
* WarGames (1986)
* Space Camp (1986)
* D.A.R.Y.L. (1985)
* Clue (1985)
The rest of the things I got were newer, and include The Bourne Identity, Gattaca, Starship Troopers, and Minority Report. Like I said, I was sick, so I can’t be blamed for what I might do. And this is my last chance to spend a bit before I’m saddled with a mortgage. 😉
On competence
From the article on Zingerman’s Family of Businesses referenced in the previous entry:
There’s a concept taught in ZingTrain’s seminars concerning the mastery of a skill. When you know absolutely nothing about a skill, you are unconsciously incompetent — that is, you don’t know what you don’t know. As you learn more, you become consciously incompetent: you know what you don’t know. With training and practice you can become consciously competent, while total mastery makes you unconsciously competent, meaning that you use the skill so effortlessly that you’re not even aware you’re doing it.
Makes sense to me. Easy to apply to life. At Berkman I started off unconsciously incompetent, over a bit of time I realized how much I needed to learn about systems administration (conciously incomptent), and lately I’ve reached conscious competence — I have a fairly good idea of how to do things and know which weaknesses I still need to address. If I continue down this path I might eventually reach unconcious competence, but I’m not there yet by a ways.
When I was in Ann Arbor in 2004 Adam took me to Zingerman’s Deli, a fascinating place with yummy food, and I noticed signs for additional Zingerman’s businesses such as ZingTrain, which I found interesting, but never really followed up on. Now Kottke has posted a 2003 article about Zingerman’s that sheds a lot of light on the business and its philosophy. I like it.
Shall we play a game?
I’ve just re-read a 2002 interview of Neal Stephenson by _Reason_ magazine, and recommend it. Stephenson is, as always, an interesting subject. Choice bit: “Since our prosperity and our military security for the last three or four generations have been rooted in science and technology, it would therefore seem that we’re coming to the end of one era and about to move into another. Whether it’s going to be better or worse is difficult for me to say. The obvious guess would be “worse.†If I really wanted to turn this into a jeremiad, I could hold forth on that for a while. But as mentioned before, this country has always found a new way to move forward and be prosperous. So maybe we’ll get lucky again. In the meantime, efforts to predict the future by extrapolating trends in the world of science and technology are apt to feel a lot less compelling than they might have in 1955.”
Jacob Weisberg argues that the _NYTimes_ should not have published its story about CIA tracking of transactions made through the international bank clearinghouse known as Swift. His points are sound, but I suspect part of the reason the _Times_ and others published the story over government objections was because they’ve heard the same objections time and again to stories about programs that are less effective, far more legally questionable, and much more impactful to the public discourse. By playing all their cards in defense of programs far more pernicious (and less legal), the government lost any standing it had to reasonably argue for this story to be killed.
Derek Lowe, on behalf of scientists everywhere, asks that photographers stop “sexing up” science with colored liquids and fancy backdrops. Each comment is more hilarious than the last. Who knew scientists were, collectively, so pissed off about this?
SvN makes me want a Woodflame grill. It uses a very smart design to turn tiny amounts of wood into fuel for a large grilling surface area.