Daily Lunch

2006-08-29T15:31:00.000-04:00

Iacta alea est

Well, the half-a-site I had mentioned before is now up: my new blog, here, in conjunction with my new homepage. Yes, I've decided to de-anonymize. I expect to have a higher online profile soon, as a result of the projects I'm working on, so I wanted a site to go along with it. I expect the new blog will be more think-y and less random than the current one (although making it any less random than all the unfocused crap I've put up here over time would probably have taken a real effort). It'll probably be less political, although I haven't written the political stuff here in a while. Let me say it'll be less partisan.

Please update your links.

One other thing: don't be alarmed if I have a link to you here but not over there; I'm still trying to work out the whole blogroll on that side.

2006-08-25T18:11:00.000-04:00

Sign o' the times

This is how I work at the computer... or is this how everybody works?

2006-08-23T12:06:00.000-04:00

Pluto apparently no longer a planet

Well, the world didn't end, but it appears that today might be the day we lost Pluto. Well, I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted, because this thrill ride is coming to a close. Yeah, aren't you regretting you didn't sign that petition now? Too little, too late.

Then again, it was always a bit of a weak excuse for a planet - as we learned in school, just a big, dirty ball of ice that's essentially a glorified comet. If it were any closer to the sun, if it would have just melted. Can planets melt?

Also, it's the only planet named in part after a person - Percival Lowell (that's the "Pl"), who predicted it before his death, based on the movement of nearby planets. That doesn't seem like one for the ages. In time, I bet it'll look like one of those ideas from the 30's that seemed good at the time but then just went on too long, like farm subsidies.

2006-08-21T17:59:00.000-04:00

World to end tomorrow?

Tomorrow, August 22... the day of an Iranian nuclear-powered endgame involving an attack on Israel or the U.S.?

Or is it all, as the Guardian's Middle East editor puts it, "utter tosh"?

We'll find out tomorrow... hopefully tosh is the word.

2006-08-18T15:06:00.000-04:00

Not everyone's a slacker

I spent the week working on my various projects (three-and-a-half sites right now, it's really getting ridiculous). Apparently I'm a bit of a nomad, too, by my count I worked at two apartments and five different internet cafes over the week.

And clearly I'm also such a slacker that I didn't notice until today that Chainik Hocker got engaged! Though he announced it over a week ago, and he was dropping mega-hints before, so I should have seen it coming. Click the link for the lovely photos, including some first-class hat-rocking.

2006-08-11T11:47:00.000-04:00

Post-birthday wrapup

Ivan is too kind. Well, just to me; on my girlfriend he's strictly an objective reporter.

I had a very good time. Though it's too bad about news of the major terrorist plot coming out right on my birthday. Not to mention a really torrential downpour that happpened during the early part of the evening. Frankly, I question the timing.

2006-08-09T15:14:00.000-04:00

By the way

It's my birthday tomorrow!!! Yay for me. 29 years young. My girlfriend and I and some other people are going out to a bar tomorrow night... let me know if you're in interested in going and I forgot to email you.

2006-08-09T14:55:00.000-04:00

What I saw at Wikimania

Posting's been sporadic... I had somewhat of a long journey home from the Wikimania conference, including a stop at my parents' house, and now I've been trying to catch up on everything I was doing before the weekend.

I had grand plans to move everything to a new blog, a real one with my full name on it and such, and have the Wikimania post be the first one on it, but that's not going to happen. No time, and too many things going on. Maybe that'll happen next week...

So, Wikimania was neat. Something like 400 people from all over the world coming together to discuss a single piece of software technology. But, of course, as technology wikis aren't even all that impressive - they're basically yet another content-management system, like a message board or any community site. So what people were really coming to discuss was the idea of open content creation, having a large group or in some cases literally everyone in the world be able to modify a document at the same time. The talks ranged from the anthropological (what are the current barriers to acceptance in various cultures?) to the policy-based (how best to handle vandalism and disagreements?) to the entrepreneurial (how do you create your own successful wiki?) to the quasi-political (the closest there is to a unifying message among the wiki crowd is "information should be free"; in practice that comes out to limits on copyright protection).

In between there was some technical discussion, which was what I had mostly come for (little tidbit: the most important new change coming to Wikipedia will be a URL field you can add to give you the "most recent validated" (as in, vandal-free) version of a page. Coming soon, and it should help a lot with the credibility problems some people perceive with Wikipedia and wikis in general.) What I was really there for was all the "semantic wiki" stuff: plugins that allow contributors to add computer-readable data to a page, instead of just text. For instance, IMDb is pretty neat, but what if there were an IMDb-like site that was a wiki, allowing anyone to add or modify all the information, in a way that could be accessed and searched by any other site? The technology is already there (well, pretty much), so all you'd have to do would be to create the site and the structure and let the contributor community fill in the content. Maybe IMDb wasn't the best example, because that one already exists and works quite well.... but you could imagine any other kind of data.

So I went to all those talks, and spoke with the semantic wiki creators, who are all German guys, and swapped some ideas with them. Quite a lot of Germans at the conference, by the way. Apparently they've really embraced the wiki thing over there; the German-language Wikipedia is the 2nd-largest.

Photo not by me... stolen randomly via Flickr "wikimania" tag

I felt nicely retro with my pen and notebook there; everyone else seemed to have a laptop and sometimes a camera too, and were simultaneously blogging, IRC'ing, emailing, listening to the lectures and looking up things the lecturers were talking about. Well, I'm blogging now.

2006-08-03T20:50:00.000-04:00

Conference-bound

I haven't posted in a while, and I probably won't be posting again till next week: tommorow I'm heading off to Boston for the Wikimania conference tomorrow. It'll be my first-ever conference, at least for me to personally be attending; my parents used to take me to their scientific conferences a lot when I was a kid. I probably won't be able to see anybody from Boston (I mean, among the people who read this) while I'm there, unfortunately; it's sort of a packed schedule. I'm going because, besides the fact that I do some Wikipedia editing, one of the projects I'm working on involves a wiki-based online database... it'll be pretty neat, I think. All will be revealed soon, I hope.

2006-07-25T16:49:00.000-04:00

Quick hits

T. of Johnny Triangles, whom last we saw trying to get Gawker commenter invites, is now armed with a fistful them. He already got one account banned from Gawker. Crime: "Making us feel bad about our unfinished novel manuscript, defending Ann Coulter."

A page of retro calculators! Groovy. (Via Signals vs. Noise)

Can't really dispute this: arguing on the internet is like competing in the Special Olympics. No offense to Special Olympians, they put in a lot of work.

There was some big story going around about psychedelic mushrooms giving people a transcendent religious experience. Ivan Lenin, who has some experience in the matter as well as apparently being a Russian mushroom himself, says "If I were yo mama, I would certainly tell you not to put those things in your mouth."

2006-07-25T12:50:00.000-04:00

WWIII thinking

Are we already in the middle of World War III? Or World War IV, if you're one the people who go in for that?

Two underreported facts to corroborate that idea:

Six to nine Iranian soldiers have been killed fighting in Lebanon (via Protein Wisdom).

And Hezbollah has been heavily aiding the anti-American insurgency in Iraq since the beginning of the war.

So there's a clear alliance on the other side.

I think the reason there's no consensus on the "World War III" thing is that, strange as it sounds, "war" doesn't really exist in 2006. The idea of nations or tribes fighting each other, pitting one army or air force against another doesn't happen anymore, even in less-developed areas. "Fighting" in Rwanda, for instance, mostly meant civilians being hacked with swords. In the Iraq War, that conventional form of fighting lasted less than a week, and really it was only about two days before the Iraqi Army was decimated. Nowadays evil regimes mostly fund organizations to do their fighting for them (you could call it - outsourcing?). And these organizations tend not to have military goals, just the idea of causing chaos by killing whomever they can - Iraqi civilians, Israeli Arabs, whoever.

So, yeah, I don't know.

2006-07-21T13:45:00.000-04:00

The rules are changed, it's not the same

What happens when Europe and the Arab world's basically aesthetic dislike for Israel comes in conflict with their real fear of Iran, and their new experience with local Islamic terrorism? Mark Steyn, in a radio interview, says Israel wins the debate:

Normally, by this stage, the public rhetoric of the Europeans and the Arabs would be ferocious. And instead, I think both of them have been very circumspect in public. And certainly, the ones I've talked to in private are in fact, in a strange way, and possibly unprecedented, at least in the last thirty years, they're rooting for Israel.

I don't think that any of the people of these countries, or their governments, like Israel any more than they used to. But realizing that your country and Israel share most of the same enemies certainly seems to help clarify the mind.

2006-07-17T10:22:00.000-04:00

Inconvenient burger

I knew eating meat had a big environmental impact, but I hadn't seen a direct analysis until this:

According to a recent University of Chicago study, a meat-free diet reduces greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide per year - as much as switching from an SUV to a hybrid car.

Personally, I don't care about global warming, though, if you didn't know, I am a vegetarian; together that must put me in some upper echelon for smugness. Seriously, though, if you happen to be concerned about global warming, I really suggest you look into eating the veggies. You'll feel healthier, and you'll do your part to prevent coastal cities from getting flooded. Or freezing over. Or baking. Or whatever it is is supposed to happen.

2006-07-14T16:04:00.000-04:00

Reconsidering a bit

Okay, so the situation's worse than I thought it would be...

Apparently the evidence that the Syrian and Iranian governments is strong enough that even our Secretary of State is willing to say it openly:

Rice said there are ``very direct links'' between Syria and the Hezbollah attacks on Israel and said ``it would be unthinkable'' that Iran is not also playing a role.

Then again, there was some story that Iranian "Revolutionary Guards" were firing into Israel, as evidenced by an Iranian-made missile hitting Haifa. Now that appears not to be the case.

Then again, by the Bush doctrine, since the governments provide material support to Hezbollah, there's already more than enough of a pretext for Israel or the U.S. to attack either Syria or Iran and depose their governments.

Will that happen? I doubt it. I'm sticking to my belief that this crisis will involve nothing more than a lot of mutual shelling and air strafing, and no ground fighting.

Other links... Esther, currently in Israel, is fine. Chainik has a prayer. Ace has evidence that, as I said before, the Lebanese government is basically on Israel's side. Karol hates France.

2006-07-13T16:21:00.000-04:00

Is this war?

Well, it is in that there are rockets being launched in multiple directions, by both Israel and various terrorist groups. It isn't in that no governments besides Israel have gotten (or, I think, will get) involved. (I'm not counting the Gaza Strip, because the people in charge there are not a government in the sense of being able to accomplish anything). It's Israel fighting against terrorist groups being funded by the governments of Syria, Iran, and, indirectly, the European Union, the United Nations, and, sadly, the United States as well, to a smaller extent. Which isn't really anything new: the last time Israel fought against other countries was in 1973; since then it's been wars of attrition against the PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah in various combinations, with the EU, the UN and the US taking the place of the Soviet Union as the source of Western funding.

This time they hit Haifa, my old home town, which I don't think has been hit since Saddam launched some Scuds there during the Gulf war. So that's an escalation.

Still, war? The governments of Syria, Lebanon, even Iran have known for the past 30 years that they can't get into a direct war with Israel; their government buildings would be obliterated. And other things have changed: Iraq is now a United States ally. As of last year, Lebanon is a quasi-democracy with a pro-U.S. prime minister (Fouad Siniora) whose government is almost as threatened by the presence of Hezbollah as Israel is. There's no more heart left in the Arab world for a ground war with Israel (a single nuclear attack, maybe). So, if anyone cares about my opinion, I don't think a war is coming.

2006-07-10T15:01:00.000-04:00

Updates, updates

I wrote before that I stopped listening to Kings of Convenience, because Erlend Oye's solo album had a lyric that read "one Jew that was never invited". Well, now I'm going to start listening to them again, because... it turns out I misunderstood the lyrics. As I recently discovered, he explained in his online forum that the lyric is somewhat personal:

The jews have historically been the outsiders.
Dispite the fact that they always been very talented artists,
business men, scholars. Or maybe excactly for that reason.

In this respect I have often felt like a jew.

Okay, so, bigoted: no. Twee: very much so. So I apologize for the aspersion.

One more "Fountainhead Cafe" update: so the soon-to-be-Objectivist in the West Village cafe was fully back to just being "Fuel" a few weeks ago, having removed even the "Fountainhead Cafe" sign. Today the cafe was closed. Have renovations started? Who knows!

Project's going fine. There's now two others which are happening at the same time, which is slowing things down.

There's some small chance I'll be at the anti-New York Times protest today in midtown New York at 5. I fully agree with Karol that "protesting is sort of dumb" (at least, if you live in a democracy, with other options available to you), but, hey, a more pro-America attitude on the part of the press seems like a good cause.

If you watched that world cup: that bizarre head-butting incident that may have lost France the title may have been prompted by the Italian calling the Algerian-born Zidane a "terrorist". Way to push some buttons!

2006-07-07T00:57:00.000-04:00

Armond's right, again

This is a little late, but Armond White nailed it in his review of Nacho Libre:

First, notice the color scheme of Nacho Libre. Its hues are vibrant and intense like luminous bible illustrations. In outdoor scenes, characters stand out against the slightly surreal backgrounds as if figures in religious chromos or Catholic prayer cards. Director Jared Hess instantly communicates his beatific view of ordinary things. Whether focusing on homely or misfit people—the demoralized monks who work at a Mexican orphanage, the pudgy yet hungry foundlings, the impoverished townfolk or the hapless, rotund title character played by Jack Black—Hess’ imagery remains unexpectedly radiant.

...

When Nacho teams with a homeless man, Esqueleto (Héctor Jiménez), to win the Lucha Libre competition, he becomes infatuated with a novice nun, Sister Encarnación (Ana de la Reguera), who stirs his ego and tests his faith. This trio flips and reworks Don Quixote, yet the film’s rousing theme song “Hombre Religioso” (“I am, I am/A real religious man”) sets a devotional comic tone. The pastoral landscapes where Nacho and Esqueleto practice their wrestling moves recall Rossellini ("The Flowers of St. Francis") and DeSica ("Miracle in Milan") while the hostile, sardonic Lucha Libre confrontations evoke Buñuel ("Nazarín"). Hess’ counterpoint of saintly and worldly experience is not new; it’s just rare in American pop culture. When Sister Encarnación warns that luchadores fight for vanity and power, that they are “false idols,” it comments on Hollywood’s routine hero-worship. Hess and Black find something deeper.

It's rare to see a Hollywood movie with a real moral center to it - Adam Sandler's movies, I mean the ones he's produced, definitely have one (think of all the times bullies get karmic retribution for their sins in his movies); other than those I can't think of any off the top of my head, at least not from anytime recently. Some people have accused the movie of being immoral, saying it's anti-religious in that it makes the priesthood look drab and priests look silly, but as White points out, it's just a comic take on the real-life struggle between materialism and spirituality that 99% of other movies can't even bother to deal with. How many other movies can claim a man of the cloth as a hero (an action hero, no less)?

By the way, if you're as obsessed as I was for a while with the theme song, it's a 1975 song by the Mexican band "Mister Loco", and Some Velvet Blog has it plus a few other songs from the soundtrack, like Os Mutantes' "Bat Macumba". (Update: it's not actually Os Mutantes' version, it's the original. Never mind!).

2006-07-05T20:57:00.000-04:00

Midwest tour

A college friend of mine got married in Minneapolis over the weekend, so my girlfriend and I took it as an excuse to make a mini-tour of the Great Lakes Region, AKA the Midwest, AKA Real America. In addition to the Twin Cities, we got to see Chicago, Madison, and Milwaukee. It's nice to see the middle of America, which until the weekend was, seriously, pretty much unknown to me. I had a good time.

Of all the places we visited, Chicago was the most impressive, especially after we saw all the gleaming architecture, but I think the most liveable was Minneapolis. Chicago has areas that are a little bit run-down and scary; Minneapolis is supposed to have those too, according to the Powerline guys, but I didn't see it. All we saw were the nice parts, including, of course, the nearby Mall of America, giant shrine to consumption:

You can buy stuff there too.

I got some nice shirts at Express and H&M. For a big city they're pretty politically laid-back too: their county went 60-40% for Kerry over Bush in 2004, compared to the ridiculous 82-17 in the People's Republic of Manhattan. It just seems like a really nice area, and the wedding was a lot of fun too.

2006-06-28T16:52:00.000-04:00

Milton Friedman on limited government

...now on Google Video.

Here he's laying down basically the entire case for free-market economics on the half-hour PBS show "The Open Mind", from an episode sometime in the early 70's. The clip's half an hour long.

I only saw about the first 10 minutes, but I downloaded all of it to my iPod (it turns out Google Video makes it easy to do that), so I'll be checking it out soon.

(Via Protein Wisdom)

2006-06-22T15:04:00.000-04:00

No time, world cup

I've been busy lately with a bunch of random commitments - between the friends' weddings, and a visiting cousing, and shuffling around between boroughs, it appears that even holding down a self-employed job is a luxury I just don't have the time for.

Anyway, I did get to see the last two US World Cup games. How do you say "total disappointment" in English? Anyway, most of the commentators said that the U.S. team looked sluggish, but I blame anti-American officiating, especially on the fouls, especially the one that led to the penalty kick in the Ghana game. The replays showed clearly how much of a non-foul that was. Yes, I'm playing the victim card. But, you know, against the Germans that's pretty much a no-brainer.

2006-06-15T15:41:00.000-04:00

Hello, East Coast

Well, I'm back from California; it's nice out there! Apparently it's a popular area for tourists. I even gained some appreciation for LA, which seems calmer and less snobby than I thought it would be. There I go, taking lessons from "Crash" again!

Even though no one bothered to guess at my fun trivia question, let me give you the answer anyway: according to the Wikipedia article "List of actors who played President of the United States", it was not until 2000, with the Mel Gibson Revolutionary-War epic "The Patriot", that a film thought to portray George Washington. The honor fell to someone named Terry Layman, in a small role.

And of course, it had to be Mel Gibson, an Australian, who did it. Score one for the immigrants!

I hope you all are astounded by this fun fact, though my guess is none of you are.

2006-06-09T13:49:00.000-04:00

Updates

So Zarqawi is dead. Y'all have seen the Allahpundit airstrike "Sabotage" video already, right? If not, it's a treat.

Speaking of important flight missions, I'm heading out to the West Coast later today for a five-day trip. I probably won't be posting anything here during that time, just so you know; feel free to use the comments section for random inanities.

Ooh, I've also got a good trivia question, if you're interested: what was the first major motion picture to have an actor portraying President George Washington? Okay, that's all.

2006-06-07T17:43:00.000-04:00

Say it loud: plus, a definition

I apparently outed myself as a conservative two posts ago, even though I used to tell people all the time that I was a libertarian. So I might as well come out and say it: I'm Spartacus (the non-libertarian)!

At heart it's pretty much a meaningless distinction: among the 100 definitions of "conservative" and the 80 definitions of "libertarian", with some "neo"s tossed in there, there are some that are identical. Libertarians are supposed to like guns and drugs, but conservatives, especially the Midwestern ones, are just as gun-crazy if not more so as any black-helicopters libertarian, and the National Review has supported marijuana legalization since the beginning.

Abortion and gay marriage are supposed to be another point of contention, but my experience is that your average Northeast conservative supports both of these things (though as long as they come through legislation and not court decree). Meanwhile, it's quite possible to imagine a strict libertarian argument against abortion: if a fetus is a full human being, then it should be covered by existing laws against murder.

And the difference that probably gets the most play these days is foreign policy: conservatives are supposed to be more in favor of foreign intervention, while libertarians support it only for self-defense. But a "neolibertarian" like this guy would argue that the War in Iraq, say, is self-defense: as Sept. 11 underscored, cheap air travel and technology mean that a dictatorial, terrorist-supporting regime anywhere in the world is a constant threat to the people of the U.S.; any action to take down any of these regimes is at least morally justified. Meanwhile, old-school Robert Novak-style conservatives are isolationists.

So, what's the real difference between a libertarian and a conservative? I've thought about it, and I contend that it has to do with none of these things: rather it's strictly an aesthetic issue relating to how you feel about your personal privacy. How much does it bother you that various aspects of your life, like your fingerprints, your call records, your library records, your financial transactions, etc. are sitting on a government computer somewhere waiting to be accessed by a greasy-fingered FBI lackey? (apologies to any government lackeys reading this). Every other position has adherents on both sides, but I contend that a libertarian has a revulsion at the thought of having his/her "facts on file", while a conservative has almost none.

So there you have it, I am a right winger. Awaiting your hate mail.

2006-06-04T16:23:00.000-04:00

Pick one

Okay, one more thing on global warming - if you really think fossil fuel consumption is going to lead to environmental devastation, you should probably be in favor of the current high gas prices, since high prices are the single most effective way to get people to reduce their consumption; and you should probably be applauding President Bush for whatever part he's played (minimal) in the current prices. Many people, like George Will, have already noted that.

So, you can complain about high prices, or about global warming, but not both. The Democrats should really pick one or the other and stick with it. Right now Nancy Pelosi complains about high gas prices, and Al Gore complains about global warming.

2006-06-02T00:05:00.000-04:00

Links update

I added Johnny Triangles, a fellow Brooklynite conservative, who wrote me recently. He's right about many things. Give the man a Gawker invite, if you can!

Also, I removed "The New Vintage"; word on the street is that its author decided to make a blogging retirement.