Pressure of work meant that I missed Bush’s televised speech on Iraq, so I was forced to rely on the transcript and the pronouncements of the pundits to determine what he said. And that’s a pity, because I’m sure I missed something – a subtitle, or an ad-lib that wasn’t captured in the transcript. How…
Read More Were there subtitles?Earlier today, I posted a little piece about a classic children’s book on computing. When I got home, I found in my inbox an announcement of the latest edition of The Edge. It begins with a simple and thought-provoking assertion: One aspect of our culture that is no longer open to question is that the…
Read More How far we've comeCheck out Michael Shermer’s delightful creation myth parody over at the Huffington Post: all the way from: “In the beginning – specifically on October 23, 4004 B.C., at noon – out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang. The bang was followed by cosmological inflation. God saw that the Big Bang was very…
Read More Michael Shermer channels the Intelligent DesignerSomeone has scanned in all the pages of the 1971 and 1979 editions of the Ladybird book How It Works…The Computer. This is wonderful stuff. I remember using the 1971 edition to explain to relatives (elderly, young, and just plain confused) what it was that I did for a living; I also bought the 1979…
Read More How It Works…The ComputerAccording to today’s Guardian: Channel 4 has teamed up with the award-winning film director Michael Winterbottom to make a docu-drama about three British Muslims who were incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay as “enemy combatants”. The Road to Guantánamo will tell the story of the so-called “Tipton Three”, who were released without charge from the US government’s…
Read More Reality TVFrom Friday’s Guardian Review, “Tom Reynolds, author of I Hate Myself and Want to Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You’ve Ever Heard… offers his top 25 miserable tracks.” A classic list, including such ghastly dirges as Tell Laura I Love Her and Seasons in the Sun, as well as Bobby Goldsboro’s excruciating Honey: The…
Read More Sad songs say so muchI just installed the latest version of Apple’s iTunes on my PowerBook, along with an updater for the software on my iPod. Perhaps I should have read my horoscope first, or consulted the i ching. Whatever the reason, when I started iTunes it showed me an empty library, rather than the 18GB of music that…
Read More Somewhere, an Apple engineering manager is committing seppuku….Over at Balkinization, Jack Balkin discusses Scalia’s uncompromising dissent in McCreary County v. ACLU, the courtroom 10 commandments case: Scalia forthrightly explains that the Establishment Clause is not about preserving neutrality between religion and non-religion. It is not even about neutrality among religions. Rather, it requires neutrality among monotheistic religions that believe in a personal…
Read More So long, 14th Amendment! Welcome to Scalia's two-tier USAIn his attempt to beat out Karl Rove for the title of Most Shameless Fabricator of Guilt by Association, Senator Rick Santorum explains the origins of child molestation by Roman Catholic priests in Catholic Online: “It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have…
Read More Santorum on Catholic clergy sex abuse: it's all because of liberals….Over at whitelabel.org there’s a brilliant analysis of the state of the London Underground: “In Britain, where trains are so routinely late that punctuality has been redefined as ‘within 20 minutes of scheduled time’ and even then only around 80% can make it, the people have forgotten that it doesn’t have to be this way,…
Read More Visualising chaos