I got a misaddressed email from someone this morning.  Here’s the exchange so far:

Me:  Hello, I’m not the person you are trying to reach.  Please check your “To” addresses.  Best, Joshua H. McGee

W.W.:  Thank you so much. Sorry about that!

… And then W.W. forwarded me a copy of it.

Me:  Nope, still me.

W.W.:  So Sorry.  I am not sure why it is coming to you.  I am putting in [my email address].

Me:  Yes.  That is my email address.  To get it to someone else, you are going to need to send it to his address.

I found a short story I wrote, longhand, when I was fifteen years old.

Rex woke me this morning.  One moment I was asleep, dreaming that a crate of oranges had just been delivered to my door, and the next moment I was awakened by friendly snorts and whines coming from the speaker on my bedside table.

Rex is my dog.  Actually, Rex is a kind of hybrid of a computer dog and a Rolodex.  I programmed Rex in 72 hours straight.  About thirty hours of it was the actual skeleton of the program, and the rest getting Rex’s snorts and whines right.  I did it, finally.  It took me 42 hours, but I console myself with the fact that it was the 42 hours at the end of the programming rather than the beginning, and that about three hours into the snorting lessons my coffee machine broke down.

I got out of bed, cautiously, and tiptoed across the collection of coffee mugs that had accumulated on the carpet of my bedroom, to the bathroom first, then to the hall closet (this was a mistake; I am not a morning person), then to the kitchen.

I walked up to the counter and opened my high-use drawer.  It contains my keyboard, my pizza roller, my coffee filters, a box of pens, and my laser pistol.

I buy my pens from my baker.  He sells donuts by the “baker’s dozen” (13) and pens by the “baker’s gross”.  I get 156 pens in a box.  This is my baker’s logic.

He maintains that because a gross is a dozen dozen, a baker’s gross should be a dozen baker’s dozen.  I say that a baker’s gross should be 169 pens: a baker’s dozen baker’s dozen.  I still buy my pens from him, though.  My baker’s pens are cheaper than their office-supply counterpart, and I am in the habit of finding myself needing a loaf of cornmeal hearth bread more frequently than finding myself in need of a telephone answering machine.  After all, people stopped using telephones a hundred years ago.

My laser pistol qualifies as a high-use item due to the large number of people I have over for a cup of coffee and the corresponding number of people who have never seen a Smith & Wesson Mark VII Aility [sic] sidearm.  I traded my car for it at last month’s community swap meet.  It doesn’t work.  Neither did my car.

I removed my last pen from the drawer.  This was OK: I could use some more cornbread.  Four loaves.  I’ve gotten this down to a fine science: I go through 156 pens for every four loaves of cornbread for every 3 coffee mugs.

I was also out of coffee filters.  This was not OK.

So, car-less, coffee-less, wearing clothes I had slept in, and carrying my last pen, I made a plan:

• Buy coffee filters
• Buy pens
• Buy bread
• Buy car
• Wash clothes

Armed with this list, I set out to face the day, stepping over the crate of oranges outside my door.

So wordy!  But I don’t think too horrible for a 15-year-old.

1.  I think I won line of the night while out to dinner with Bob Mike.

Joshua:  The tasting notes on this beer include “A whirlwind of fruit and spice.”

Bob Mike:  That’s one of the lesser-known Dune novels.

Joshua:  Actually, I think it’s a magazine article about David and Victoria Beckham.

2.  Can anyone listen to Rifftrax audio and not picture Kevin and Bill as robots?  (That question makes sense even if you didn’t get it.)

3.  I met a guy today who introduced himself as “Persian”.  At first I thought he was lying: he didn’t look anything like Jake Gyllenhaal!  Then I deduced that not every citizen of a country has to look like the nation’s royalty; otherwise surely most Brits would have klled themselves by now.  Also, I deduced that he was Iranian but was uncomfortable introducing himself that way.  Those clever, clever terrorists.

4.  Since when do trees have roots?!

I often hear (or read) people opine that pre-teens and teens today have a wealth of information resources that “we” (with a vague referent) would have loved.  And I often hear people bemoan and bewail the loss of erudition in communication between “today’s youth”.  But something is often missed, I think.

We all — any “we” — said stupid stuff when we were kids.  We parroted stuff from our parents or other kids without thinking through it; we said self-serving lies; we were arrogant and brash; we (I would wager everyone) said things that disparaged entire groups.  Elaborating on the last one: although I consider myself, in retrospect, to have been more sensitive than many of my peers, I blanch at the memories of remarks that I made that sexualized classmates; at the gay jokes; at the Mexican jokes.  Yes, I did these mostly to fit in.  Every young person in history has done these things, to some degree or other, for the same reasons, because youth is a time when we have not yet formulated our identities, and we are trying on various ones to see if any fit.  Show me the man who acts as an adult the way he did as a child, and I’ll show you the man in prison.

But when I said such things, or when those born before (perhaps) the mid 1980s to early 1990s said them, they were spoken, to be heard by our peers — the ones we were trying to impress — and there is no record of them.  But when it’s done today, it can be forever.  An email or text message can be shared or archived, and I’m assuming many of those will come back to bite people later.  But a tweet or a Facebook status update or a blog post or (beware, kids) a YouTube comment will, with near-certainty, be archived on some hard drive or other and be digitally accessible in some fashion in perpetuity.

I was thinking of citing a number of examples I have seen recently of brash, arrogant, abusive, unthoughtful, and just idiotic things I had seen online — the items that made me think to write this post — but I needn’t, because every person reading this has his or her own examples.  But I don’t expect it will be any easier to teach kids to be careful to not write these things down, even when “all the kids do”, than it is to teach kids that they don’t need to say these things, even when “all the kids do”.

That’s because the “all the kids do” phenomenon is a manifestation of all kids going through the same awkwardness and fear and experimentation and self-definition together.  Adults know this, and they try to tell kids this, and the kids don’t believe them, because rather than realizing they’re discovering a world, they’re convinced that they’re inventing it.  That’s fine, they’re kids.  They are never going to grasp the real extent that their parents (and grandparents, and distant ancestors) went through the same stuff about sex, and peer pressure, and drugs, and bullies, and school, and criminal impulses, and masturbation, and suicide, and on and on and on.  As usual, Ed Vedder from Pearl Jam said it better than I: “The young, they can lose hope ’cause they can’t see beyond today; wisdom that the old can’t give away.”

• If you’re an adult:  I’m right, yeah?
• If you’re a teen:  Don’t put anything on the web that you wouldn’t want on your college admission or job applications.  You won’t listen to that advice, of course, but keep it in your mind for the stuff that might really come back to get you.
• If you’re a random kid/preteen:  You don’t belong on this site.  But, meh, you’re going to figure out how to read what you want.  Your mom and dad know this too.  Welcome to the world of “open secrets”.
• If you’re my kid/preteen:  There’s more on this site than I probably would have wanted to know about my father until I was in my twenties.  But if you’re here, and you’re reading all of this, you’ll know a lot about me.  We’re all — you, me, the world — in it together.  And I’m always here to talk.  No judgments.  Ever.

Has everyone watched the three episodes of “Sherlock”, the new, modern-day-set, Steven-Moffat-reimagined (!) version of Sherlock Holmes?  I have loved it.

I am one of those insufferable Holmes purists, and do not withhold my words against interpretations I dislike (I hated, and railed about, the Guy Ritchie, for instance).  But this interpretation has been marvelous.  It’s the first I’ve ever seen to have Holmes properly directed and acted as bipolar — which of course he was.  Doyle’s depictions, especially in the early adventures, read like case studies. (Or stories of other famous British bipolars, such as Johnson.  In fact, I’ve often wondered how much Holmes was based off of Samuel Johnson — doesn’t Watson’s Holmes read like Boswell’s Johnson?  Perhaps this is commonly written and I’ve never encountered it; or, worse, is so obvious that everyone recognizes it and no one bothers to mention it.)

In any case, the program is excellent — in writing, directing, and acting — and I cheerfully excuse the liberties taken.  The actor playing Holmes has the character’s moods down perfectly.  (By the way, yes: “Benedict Cumberbatch” is indeed the name he was born with.  I can say this because [1] I researched it and [2] no one in the world has the balls to pick a stage name that posh.)

The estimable (if not indeed inestimable) Martin Freeman, also, has Watson sorted.  I feel sorry for any other fortyish English actors of small stature able to play awkward men in a constant state of mild offense: Freeman’s landed John Watson, Arthur Dent, and Bilbo Baggins.  Anyone born in the late 60s or early 70s who wanted to inherit the David Suchet roles (the ones Suchet himself received as hand-me-downs from Ian Holm) must be rather sad right now.

A couple moments that struck me: in one episode, a theory of what has happened at a crime scene has been formulated.  A character says “Well, it does seem to be the only explanation of all the facts.”  Holmes barks: “Wrong!  It is one possible explanation of some of the facts!”

In another, a police technician (who hates Holmes) introduces him as a “psychopath”.  Holmes gives her a withering look and intones dismissively, “I’m a high-functioning sociopath, not ‘a psychopath’.  Do your research.”

A link?  Don’t mind if I do!  But check it out even if you don’t buy it through my affiliate ID:

Whoops!  Missed the anniversary by five days, but the ten year anniversary of the mcgees.org blog was on 15 December (mcgees.org itself predates this by almost a year, and my first personal website by five years.)

In that inaugural post I had to define for people what a “blog” was, how it worked, and indeed referred to it by the full name “web log”.

To put this in dramatic context: when my inaugural blog post was published, Clinton was in office.

December again!  This is the month when, among other things, I get to hear Protestants drone on about “putting the ‘Christ’ back in ‘Christmas’”.

A year ago I discussed a Garrison Keillor article entitled Don’t Mess With Christmas, including the sentence “Christmas is a Christian holiday — if you’re not in the club, then buzz off.”  (My reaction was then, and still is, “Wow.  OK.  ‘Club’.”)

But I don’t think most Protestants are as strident, if only because so few of them have thought this one through all the way.  I mean, what is the argument for not “messing with Christmas”, anyway?

If you are arguing:  That you shouldn’t celebrate traditions from a religion not your own
Then you need to give up:  Fir trees, yule logs, mistletoe, wreaths, and carols (aaaand a much longer list of more-fundamental traditions that I won’t begin because it will seem combative.)

If you are arguing:  That a religious holiday shouldn’t have a secondary effect on secular society
Then you need to give up:  Christmas as a national holiday.

If you are arguing:  That nothing new, recent, or contrived should be incorporated
Then you need to give up:  Santa Claus (in a non-vicious formulation), tinsel, electric Christmas lights, Rudolph, and basically everything from Dickens.

If you are arguing:  That nothing should be taken out of “Christmas”
Then you need to give up:  Your pretense of celebrating “Christmas” while taking the “mass” out of it.

Now, maybe you’re with Keillor, and are arguing that I shouldn’t even be talking about this, because I’m not “in the club” (and because I’m a big meanie, and because I can’t make nearly as cool a treehouse as you can, so I should just go play in whatever lousy clubhouse I can build for my lousy club.)  If so, and you really want to play that card — the SHUT UP, YOU’RE NOT OF THE MAJORITY RELIGION! card — then that saddens me a bit.  But if you think the traditions of your family from when you were growing up are definitive, original, and came from the sky fully-formed — they aren’t, and they didn’t.

Now, if you perform all these steps, you’ll be celebrating a fairly routine mass, delivered in droning Latin, inside a brutally cold chapel, with a priest railing against the evils of pagan symbolism, accompanied by none of the trappings-and-trimmings.  I don’t think you’ll enjoy it, but have at it: your “club” can have its stupid mass and not invite me!  Just see if I care!  I’ll be over here where it’s warm and nice.  You poopyheads!

Does Google crawl <IFRAME>-related tags?  Yes.

I created a page with this code:

<IFRAME src="URL1">
    <a href="URL2">URL2</a>
</IFRAME>
<NOFRAMES>
    <a href="URL2">URL2</a>
</NOFRAMES>

Each was only mentioned on this one page, and my web logs verified Googlebot was the only visitor besides me.

All three URLs were identified and crawled by Googlebot.  So, Google does crawl <IFRAME> “src” URLs, links in the interior of an <IFRAME>  (the “alternate text”), and links within the deprecated <NOFRAMES> tag.

There are few domains in which a simple query can have such an unhelpful response as when you ask questions about the Linux operating system.  Imagine if asking for cooking advice were like this:

mcgeesorg:  Hello!  Does anyone know the right temperature to use when cooking a turkey?  It would be a big help.  If I get a bunch of answers, here or offline, I’ll post a summary.  Thanks!

hiroptag:  That depends.  Do you have a gas or an electric oven?

mcgeesorg:  No, it really doesn’t depend on that.  I can guarantee that I’ll keep the temperature constant.  What is that temperature?

nyrd:  Turkeys taste great with stuffing, but please keep in mind that they require longer cooking times if the stuffing is cooked inside of them.  Yes, I learned that the hard way. 

mcgeesorg:  That’s awesome advice.  I appreciate it.  But do you know the temperature I should use to cook it?

msftw:  I agree with @nyrd, but even though this won’t be popular here, have you considered just buying one from Honeybaked???  They cost more, but they’re already fully cooked and come in a pretty box.

mcgeesorg:  I appreciate your suggestion, but I have a raw one sitting in my kitchen, and I just want to know the oven temperature.

helio:  What’s the real problem you’re trying to solve?  Maybe an oven isn’t the best approach.  It sounds like you’re trying to feed your family, right?

mcgeesorg:  No, what I’m really trying to do is find out the right temperature at which to cook a turkey.  Please, could someone just tell me the temperature?

linuxuser05484:  If anyone knows the answer, please tell me, too.

fadillest:  Where do you live?  I mean, are you asking in Fahrenheit or Celsius?  Because the scales are different.

mcgeesorg:  I realize the scales are different.  As long as you tell me which one you’re using, I can do the conversion from one to the other.  I just need a number.  Any scale, just the right number.

ForumBot:  Has the question been answered?  If so, Great!  Please mark it as “SOLVED”.

wonderland:  You bring up an interesting point.  I absolutely agree that this is a question that now needs to be asked.  Before British people moved to North America, winter holiday feasts included roast goose.  But, no, not any more!  Thank you.  I don’t normally read this forum, so I’m glad I saw your post!  (+repped)

mcgeesorg:  Glad my question was inspirational (?).  Do you know the answer?

stanford_jim:  You’re trying to microwave your turkey?!  That’s something most pro cooks advise against.  Just set a conventional oven to the right temperature and put the bird in.  I think it’s even easier than a microwave, despite what General Electric wants you to believe!

mcgeesorg:  Please read my question again.  I am trying to use a conventional oven.  What is the “right temperature” you’re referencing?

USSenterprise:  Careful!  There’s been a major recall by one of the big poultry plants.  Worries about salmonella or E. coli, I think.  Might want to look into that.

linuxuser06884:  I’ve been wondering the same thing for a while.  I was going to ask it myself before I saw that you already asked it!  Anyone know the answer?

DorkInNY:  There’s a great book called “Joy of Cooking”.  I bet you can find your answer in the index.  Search for it at Amazon or see if your local library has a copy.  Hope this helps.

mcgeesorg:  That’s a marvelous idea in general, but it’s Thanksgiving right now, and even if it weren’t, $20 or a trip to the library is a lot when all I need is a single number.  Does anyone know it?  A quote from “Joy of Cooking” would be completely satisfactory.

linuxrawks:  I’m pretty new at turkeys, but I’ve been cooking my whole life.  I don’t remember exactly, but I think it’s around 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit (or maybe Celsius?)  Whichever is the temperature that steel melts at.

mcgeesorg:  I’m fairly sure that’s not correct.  Other readers, please don’t try that 50,000° temperature.  It’s not going to give the result you want.

HotLuckyGirl99:  Best Taiwan farmss offers the best most flexible delicous turkey birds visit turkeycookeddeliciousbirds.tw.

linuxPRO_18:  Out of curiosity, @mcgeesorg, when you took the turkey out of the oven, did the juices run clear?  Because someone told me they’re supposed to “run clear”, and I’m not sure if mine did or not, because I don’t really know what that means, so given that you’ve done this, can you help a n00b haha!? 

mcgeesorg:  When people talk about “juices running clear” when cooking poultry, they mean for you to insert a thin blade into a thick meaty bit near a bone and observe the appearance of the liquid that drains from the incision.  It needs to be transparent, because if it’s pink, that means there is still blood in it, and the blood can harbor diseases.  But I haven’t cooked a turkey yet, because I don’t know the right temperature.  I just need this one datum.

MarvinSWheydlePhD:  Just a suggestion, and no offense meant, but I took a cooking certification course.  It was tough, but it really helped me when I was facing questions like this.

mcgeesorg:  Thank you.  Honestly.  I’ll consider that.  But it is Thanksgiving day, and already past noon, and I just want to know the temperature to set my oven to.  Again, even if someone wants to contact me by email, I’ll re-post it here.

wickeditor:  RTFCB!

pierre:  People have had success with a couple of temperatures, actually.

mcgeesorg:  Good to know.  Could you tell me one of them, please?

free-as-in-speech:  I stopped buying Butterball turkeys years ago, and started buying from small farms.  I assume you’re buying from small farms, too?  That’s a good step, but since then I’ve been buying Tofurky Feasts, and they are really tasty.

bonzabonza:  I hear claims like @free-as-in-speech‘s all the time, but non-Butterball turkeys aren’t really any worse than small farm ones.

betamax:  It’s not about flavor, @bonzabonza.  I think @free-as-in-speech was making a moral argument.  That’s why we all started eating turkeys to begin with, right?

bonzabonza:  Well, maybe it’s an issue, but for one turkey, once a year?  I think @mcgeesorg should just use a Butterball turkey.  But I agree with @free-as-in-speech that Tofurky can be quite nice, if he wants to go that route! 

mcgeesorg:  All these “you should try” answers are very interesting, but if it helps, just pretend I’m doing research for an encyclopedia article about cooking turkeys, not cooking one for myself, and I need to publish the cooking temperature.

skeletor:  I found this article through a Google search: [http://eceserv0.ece.wi...].  It’s for a slightly different setup, but it should still work.

mcgeesorg:  Thanks @skeletor, but that’s a guide to different tunings of a six-string guitar, and unless I’m missing something, I don’t think that applies here.

dru:  Sometimes it’s printed on the package.

mcgeesorg:  Yes.  But this time it’s not.

dru:  Sometimes it is there, though — just in small print.

mcgeesorg  Yes.  But this time the answer is not on the package.

dru:  They’re supposed to put it on the package!  WTF?!  Everyone write and complain, OK?!

best_researcher:  Turkey?  That’s Asia Minor, right?  Are you sure your oven supports Asian birds?

mcgeesorg:  It’s 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving now.  Thanks for all your help, but people are hungry, so fsck it.  I’m driving us to McDonalds, and tomorrow I’ll buy a dozen turkeys and spend this three-day weekend experimenting with different temperatures.  I’ll come back on Sunday night and let the forum know what I discovered, because it sounds like this might be useful to other people as well.

Adele_ForumModerator [Friday evening]:  Thread marked “Solved” and closed to comments.  Thanks everyone!

Glenn Beck claimed, on national television, that 10% of Muslims worldwide are terrorists.  To put this in U.S. terms, the number of people this includes is equal to the combined populations of:

New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, San Francisco, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, Austin, Columbus, Fort Worth, Charlotte, Memphis, Boston, Baltimore, El Paso, Seattle, Denver, Nashville, Milwaukee, Washington D.C., Las Vegas, Louisville, Portland OR, Oklahoma City, Tucson, Atlanta, Albuquerque, Kansas City, Fresno, Mesa AZ, Sacramento, Long Beach, Omaha, Virginia Beach, Miami, Cleveland, Oakland, Raleigh, Colorado Springs, Tulsa, Minneapolis, Arlington, Honolulu, Wichita, St. Louis, New Orleans, Tampa, Santa Ana CA, Anaheim CA, Cincinnati, Bakersfield, Aurora, Toledo, Pittsburgh, Riverside CA, Lexington KY, Stockton CA, Corpus Christi, Anchorage, St. Paul, Newark, Plano, Buffalo, Henderson NV, Fort Wayne, Greensboro, Lincoln NE, Glendale CA, Chandler AZ, St. Petersburg, Jersey City, Scottsdale, Orlando, Madison, Norfolk, Birmingham, Winston-Salem, Durham, Laredo, Lubbock, Baton Rouge, Chula Vista CA, Chesapeake, Gilbert AZ, Garland, Reno, Arlington, Irvine CA, Rochester, Akron, Boise, Irving TX, Fremont, Richmond, Spokane, Modesto CA, Montgomery, Yonkers, Des Moines, Tacoma, Shreveport, San Bernardino CA, Fayetteville, Glendale AZ, Augusta, Grand Rapids, Huntington Beach, Mobile, Newport News, Little Rock, Moreno Valley, Columbus, Amarillo, Fontana CA, Knoxville, and Fort Lauderdale

Actually, wait, I did my math wrong.  It is more than three times the combined populations of those U.S. cities.

Dear Mr. Beck:  Do you know why you had no idea the number was that large?  Because most of them are quiet, law-abiding, and keep to themselves.  Do you know why we know your name?  Because you shout hate and lies on the national airwaves.  I think you may have this one exactly backwards.

Before you believe something, and definitely before you pass it on, perform these steps:

1.  Type it into Snopes.  Has Barbara already done the research for you and shown it to be inaccurate?  She’s pretty good at that stuff, and it’s her full-time job.

2.  If there are quantifiable elements, punch the figures into a calculator.  Do the numbers check out?

3.  Does the claim violate what are generally accepted as fundamental ways the physical universe works?  If so, ask how much of human knowledge, research, and understanding would have to be overturned.  If it’s “a great deal”, consider whether it’s more likely that the claim is untrue.

4.  Would the claim’s truth or falsehood have any easily-observable effects?  If so, are they happening?  For instance, if people could psychically predict cards, would casinos still be in business?  If any newspaper psychics could foresee the future, how did all of them miss the 9/11 attacks?

5.  Consider if the claim immediately benefits the claimant.  If so, be on your guard.

These are all before you even have to start wondering whether someone’s personal testimony is reliable, whether data was collected rigorously, whether testing procedures were adequate, etc. — even before you worry about whether the people in the story actually exist or not.

Never quite sure what the right and wrong audiences are for breaking news like this, and whether it’s always a good idea to put it up online.  But from what I know of who attends to this site and who doesn’t, I’m putting it here instead of Facebook: My grandfather just died.

Shit.

I’ve changed the canonical domain of this site from “www.mcgees.org” to “mcgees.org”.  I’ve gone back and forth with this a few times, but now that I’m also using the domain as a link shortener — and in that capacity I do strip the “www.” to save four characters — I decided to unify it.

I think I have made sure that everything still works (or, rather, works now), but if you see something broken, please let me know.

I wondered if I could get Google Translate to speak English in foreign accents by using clever enough spelling, the hack to have Google translate a language to itself, and the text-to-speak synthesizers for the various languages.  For example, if I could use French→French translation to get a French accent.

Looks promising!  Follow these links and hit “Listen”:

Ze que ique braune fox jumpd auvere ze laisie dog.

Nâu ise ze taîme faure aulles goude meine tu comme tu du aiduve daire conte ries!

Oui caime tu bairie Saissare, naûtes tu praîzze îmes.

Maî hauvercreft ise foules auvîlzes.

Feel free to post yours here, for any language.

Summary: GOP gets a president sort-of-almost-OK-not-really elected ten years ago.  The president pays back his millionaire supporters by giving them huge tax breaks, using the Ayn Rand logic that by giving them tax cuts, we help the economy and create jobs.  To get it passed, he concedes a date at which they will expire.

Under this president’s policies, the economy all but collapses.  Banks almost fail, and people become unemployed in droves.

New president inherits this mess.  President is of the same party that controls the Senate.  This party thinks, “Hey, maybe the idea that giving millionaires and billionaires money so as to give everyone else necessary money is a bullshit, self-serving, now proven lie!”  So they decide to allow the tax cuts on millionaires to expire as planned.

Twice, with different pay ceilings, the Senate votes with a 53 out of 100 majority to allow this to pass.  A majority.  The minority party says they will delay all other legislation until this is addressed, and uses a maneuver that requires the controlling party to have sixty votes to keep this from happening.

The minority party rails in bewilderment, mocking the idea of allowing the tax cuts to expire as the craziest idea they have ever heard, to “raise taxes” during a recession!  And they have the audacity and sheer wickedness to hold our country and citizens hostage to millionaires and billionaires, and then accuse the people wanting these cuts to expire in the first place of “class warfare”.

I.  Do.  Not.  Have the vocabulary.  To insult these motherfuckers.

The caffeinated malt beverage “Four”, sold in formulations called “Four Loko” and “Four MaXed”, has been ordered withdrawn from sale by the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.  The FDA has called them a “public health concern”.  The reason given is that caffeine can mask sensory cues of intoxication, and therefore caffeine is an “unsafe food additive” in alcoholic beverages.  (Four also contains guarana and ginseng — those make up the remainder of the ingredients that suggested the name of the product — but those can be safely ignored for this discussion.)

Let’s take this apart a bit.  First, the FDA is not saying that caffeine is itself an unsafe food additive.  It’s still present in other foods, beverages, and snacks, and I’m not aware of any restrictions (if nothing else, I’d expect to find ThinkGeek’s range limited if there were), although my ultimate point is not especially harmed if there are restrictions.  But my understanding is that giving the FDA the authority to ban food additives is to ban additives that are themselves unsafe.  No Red Dye #2, no strychnine, etc.  Making it illegal in one domain seems silly — but even if it were in-principle defensible, what bugs me is the doth-protest-too-muchedness of this issue: caffeine is not safe.  Caffeine is a psychotropic, addictive drug that has some nasty side-effects.

Which is fine, as far as it goes: I’m not in favor of outlawing caffeine any more than I am of outlawing alcohol, although I do wish sales of both were age-restricted, with the threshold age as 18.  But note that it’s not illegal to sell them together, just to mix them together before sale.  Anheuser-Busch could legally produce alcoholic malt beverages and high-caffeine products, and even request retailers to sell them next to each other in the same case, and not be breaking the law.

I think a way to understand this weird position is that there are some implicit arguments being made, that might be unpopular were they stated outright.  One is that by selling them mixed into one drink, and selling them so cheaply, one is encouraging their purchase and use by young buyers without much money.  So let’s work through the math — I did some research at my corner market (El Monte, Los Angeles County, California, USA in late 2010) to see what I could figure out.  There will be some numbers, so bear with me.  All prices are after tax.

1. A “unit of alcohol” — one “drink” — is formally defined as 20ml of pure ethanol.
   
2. Prior to the removal from sale, Four Loko was $3.25, sold in 23.5oz cans.  That’s $3.25 per 0.7l, or $4.68/liter.  The cans were 12% alcohol, so the liter contained 120ml of ethanol, or six drinks.  Thus, alcohol is $0.81/unit in Four Loko, with the smallest purchase being four drinks’ worth.
   
3. Let’s say you want to concoct your own carbonated high-caffeine sweet alcoholic drink.  The most straightforward seems vodka and Monster drinks.  At this store, vodka is $6.60/750ml bottle, or $8.80/liter.  A liter of vodka at 40% a.b.v. contains 400ml of ethanol, or 20 drinks.  Thus, alcohol is $0.44/unit in vodka, with the smallest purchase being 15 drinks’ worth.  Monster drinks are $3.25/24oz, or $4.58/liter.
   
4. So we’re going to mix vodka and Monster to get the equivalent of a can of Four Loko.  To figure out the ratio of vodka to Monster, we need to dilute 40% alcohol to 12% alcohol.  So we need 3 parts vodka to 7 parts Monster.  So to get a liter of Loko-equivalent, we need 300ml and 700ml, respectively.  This will cost $2.64 for the vodka and $3.25 for the Monster, or $5.89/liter, for $0.98/unit of alcohol.  This is 26% more money than Four Loko (it also tastes a hell of a lot better, but that’s not relevant here).  If you buy one bottle of vodka and two cans of Monster for $13.10 (as the minimum purchase), you can do this, and get the equivalent of 3 cans of Four Loko with some vodka left over.  So all you need is three people to pool their money.
   
5. Can we do better?  How about a Black Russian?  Use the same $8.80/liter vodka.  The cheapest coffee at that store seems to be Folgers Crystals, which is $2.99 for a jar that makes 2.84l, for a mere $1.05/liter.  I don’t know if one needs to use a smaller or larger measure of coffee crystals to get Four Loko-level caffeine, but let’s say you just want to mix vodka into coffee reconstituted at the suggested strength (if not, the coffee is super-cheap anyway).  Using the same logic with Monster above, add 300ml vodka ($2.64) into $0.74 of coffee.  This makes a Four Loko-strength concentration $2.37, or $0.59 per unit of alcohol, or 28% less than Four Loko.  A bottle of vodka and a can of crystals would run $9.59 for the minimum purchase and would make more than 3½ cans of Four Loko, with a whole bunch of coffee crystals left over.  Water is generally free, and at a convenience store one can usually mooch sugar packets and ice.

OK, sorry for all that.  But I needed that to get the right number.

When the FDA took Four Loko off the market, they made caffeinated energy drinks 26% more expensive and increased the minimum purchase size by roughly three.  (It’s of course a smaller minimum purchase if you buy 200ml or 325ml bottles of vodka, but they are much more expensive per unit volume, and I didn’t research their prices.)  Black Russians remain 28% cheaper.  How to account for this?

I don’t want to get all bleeding-heart tin-foil-hatty here, but this has got to have something to do with market demographics.  Young men of racial minorities are key purchasers of Four Loko.  Young whites drink “Red Bull and Vodka”, which is basically what we’re talking about with the Monster concoction.  Adults (mostly white?) drink Black Russians.  So they’re not banning caffeine; they’re not restricting sale of caffeine and alcohol together; they’re not demanding a 26% increase in the price of Four Loko, which would have the same effect — they’re just banning it.  And the market segment has no powerful lobby.

Anyone else reminded of harsher penalties for crack cocaine possession than powdered cocaine?

Hey, do you live in Southern California?  Was your Internet access mysteriously down for some time this afternoon and evening?  You’re not the only one.

The reason traces back to Time Warner.  If you were offline as part of the outage, your Internet service is provided by that company, although it may have been rebranded by the time it gets to you.  As of this writing, news sources are reporting that they Time Warner hasn’t publicly revealed why.  It’s not clear if they know yet, or if they will reveal the reason when they know it.  And when and if they do {dons tin foil hat} there’s no good reason to trust the answer they give.

My guess is something known among network engineers as “backhoe attenuation” or “backhoe reconfiguration”: the loss of signal caused by a piece of construction equipment severing an important line.  And Time Warner’s cables are very important: 14 million residential customers in the U.S. get their Internet service from this company.

This time it was an accident.  But if I were writing a modern action novel, and I had a terrorist group that wanted to swarm a neighborhood or attack a key target in that neighborhood, what would I have them do first?  Sever the major network lines that run to it and disable the cell towers that cover it.  In most neighborhoods critical cables run under public land, buried quite shallowly, and cell towers are on the premises of churches, community organizations, and so on with almost no security.

There is nothing that makes more sense than this as a first step.  These telecommunication assets are soft targets and hugely important — the latter largely because they are taken utterly for granted these days.  If a group of heavily-armed people started swarming your street or apartment complex, what would you do?

No, seriously, what would you do?  You’d pick up your cell phone to call 911, or turn on your VOIP client and call the police switchboard directly, right?  Network cables and cell towers are even more vulnerable than traditional telephone service infrastructure, and without them, a neighborhood might as well be in the middle of the Sahara.

When the idea for what was to become the Internet was being discussed in technology and government circles, the worry was that old-fashion Ma Bell long-distance-telephone nodes were obvious targets for strategic strikes by a foreign power.  Of course, right?  So the plan was to create a distributed-enough network with sophisticated enough routing algorithms such that most failures — even massive, widespread failures — would be mostly irrelevant.  The system would just reroute communications around the points of failure.

When this was devised, it was an attempt to guarantee necessary communication channels to keep the government functioning in the case of an attack, by keeping lines open between the two coasts of the U.S., and between all major installations and all major cities.  The responsibility for the development was to be given to ARPA (the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency, also known as “DARPA” — the word “Defense” stuck in front — when hawks control Congress.)  It was to cost a lot of money.

Quick historical aside, because it still pisses me off: fortunately there were some very astute members of Congress at the time who bothered to listen to scientific and tech advisors.  These politicians are collectively known as “smart people”.  They realized that even though the project would cost a great deal of money, it was really-super-crazy-OMG important as a defense expenditure even though it didn’t actually blow anything up.  One of the key smart people who championed this project was a young man from Tennessee named Al Gore.

So, when he said “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet,” he was uttering something from the class of statements known as “facts”.  I can understand how strongly-conservative commentators, columnists, broadcasters, journalists, and politicians would have been confused and used the remark to depict Al Gore as a clown for “claiming he invented the Internet” — after all, these people are largely unacquainted with this class of statements being discussed.  But it still pisses me off.

ARPANET morphed into the Internet, and branched to non-military departments of the U.S. government, higher education institutions, large businesses, and on and on until the mid-1990s, when it “just sort of appeared” to most people.  A big part of this was the invention of the World Wide Web which became popular for a means of gathering information, and, later, for communication.

Aside:  the World Wide Web is a system of protocols understood by particular kinds of software that runs on top of the Internet.  It itself is very, very different from the Internet. 

As a parallel, say you have a nerdy pen pal overseas, and the two of you play chess-by-mail in the old fashion: you each have a board set up, you receive a single move in the mail from him, you translate his move onto your board, you spend hours thinking about your next move, and then send a letter to him the next day.

The WWW/Internet conflation error is no less severe than referring to the combined postal administrations of all the countries in the world and their international treaty bodies as “The Chess-By-Mail”, and when passing your local post office, pointing to it and saying “There’s my chess-by-mail building!”

Amazon?  Yahoo?  Google?  Facebook?  Twitter?  Yeah, no.  Not the point of the Internet.  The point was to guarantee communications in the case of an attack.

I’ve never really talked about this, because there didn’t really seem a “right time” to bring it up.  This probably isn’t one either, but I’m going to go for it.  On September 11, 2001, when Manhattan was attacked, the South Tower collapse pretty much shut down mobile phone service to Manhattan.  Land lines were completely swamped: the number of simultaneous long-distance phone calls that can be made into and out of New York City is orders of magnitude smaller than the population of the city, based on the logic that it is unlikely that everyone will need to use this service at the same time.

On that day, and during the following weeks, I heard something like the following sentiment a total of — well, I lost count how many times, but it can’t be less than 50 — times:

“It was so weird!  I knew someone in New York, and I couldn’t get in touch with her by cell phone, and I got the ‘all circuits busy’ recording when I tried to call her home, but I sent an email and she responded right away, and one of us suggested trying instant messaging, and she was right there!”

And 9/11, even for someone as socially-inept as I, seemed a really poorly-calculated time to say something like “Yes: That’s. What. It’s. There. For.”  I would only have been tempted to deliver it that cruelly if I knew the person had voted for Bush instead of Gore (not that the “number of votes” thing really ended up mattering too much) at least partially based on thinking Gore was a clown.

Except, I would have been slightly wrong, for at least a couple of reasons.  One thing I glossed over is that cables that run to important government assets are redundant and properly-secured to make them much less susceptible to the Time Warner-style outage, and if residential Internet service on Manhattan had been the target of the attacks, it is not redundant enough to survive.

But more importantly, ARPANET was designed to ensure continuity of government communication in the case of an attack.  But now everyone has access!  And some people are Bad Guys!  And in our “Post-9/11 world”, it’s important for the government to be able to deal with them!

This should not be an unexpected reaction.  After what was previously the most-famous attack on U.S. soil — the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 — Congress similarly freaked out, passing the “Communications Act”, which had a nothing-to-see-here-move-along provision allowing the President to seize control of all the broadcasting radio stations in the country in the case of a future attack.

How about now?  Three U.S. Senators, the most prominent being Joe Lieberman, drafted a “cybersecurity bill”, one provision of which would give the President the authority to shut down portions of the Internet in the event of “an emergency”.  I don’t think it’s on the record, but newspapers regularly quote “sources as saying” that Obama personally asked for this.  It passed the Senate Homeland Security Committee in June of this year (2010).

To their credit, the Republicans threw a fucking fit over the provision giving the President this power.  But that’s because they argued that it was the military that should be given the power to shut down parts of the civilian Internet in the “case of an emergency”.  Harry Reid knew his the-President-should-have-the-authority provision would face opposition, so the plan has been to chop this act up into little pieces and incorporate them into spending bills and other regular legislation.

You knew about this, right?  No?  Huh.  You need some techno-liberal and techno-libertarian news sources incorporated into your media intake.

Are you pissed about this, now that you know?  Yeah, thought you would be.  Contact the people you elected.  Tell them this.  They are not guaranteed to be “smart people”, so they might not have properly listened to technology advisors, and you might have to take it at half-speed.  But I suggest you use The Chess-By-Mail to send it.  You never know when a cable of the World Wide Web might be severed.

One of the most fascinating rap feuds I’ve seen.  Eminem (who also performs under his birth name Marshall Mathers and a stage persona Slim Shady) and Everlast (who also performs as Whitey Ford and in/as House of Pain) —  both white rappers who have faced scorn by some for co-opting the hip-hop art form — were trading swipes in diss records back and forth. 

Pay attention to the consistent topics of the insults:  inauthenticity; speculations about the other’s sexuality; relationships with family and women; size of fanbase; strength, toughness, and level of bravery; medical problems (Eminem battles drug dependency and depression and Everlast a congenital heart condition that has caused heart attacks); and condemning each other for being poser Caucasians.  Also, each refers to the other by his unflattering given name rather than his stage personae.

The more context and history one knows about each respective MC’s problems, the more interesting this is, but here’s a lyrical sampling:

Everlast:

What?  Did I hurt your feelings?  I’m supposed to be scared, now, right?  I’d like to dedicate this record right here to Mr. Marshall Mathers’s mother.  Here’s one from your moms: …

With your candy-ass name, you’re a candy-ass rapper… You just a fake tough guy, trying to act hard, but won’t walk a lobby without your bodyguards…  With your platinum-blond Caesar, you look like a ho, like Eminem stands for “Marilyn Monroe”…  You punk ecstasy-junkie, you waste of skills: stop riding my deals, stay high on pills…

You won’t be slapping me with no empty gun…  You can’t keep your woman from going astray.  Better run and check that kid for your DNA…  I take care of my moms, but you get sued by yours…

You wanna talk shit, money?  Come and talk it with the hands.  I ain’t wasting no more time with you, man, fuck this shit, that’s it.

Eminem:

I dedicate this to all my fans… Let’s tell this Whitey Ford to go fuck himself…

I knew you was jealous from the day that I met you…  I’m even liked more by your niece and nephew.  And now you hate [rock musician] Fred [Durst] because [DJ] Lethal left you?!  …

Got in touch with his roots, found a redneck in his blood, and said “Heck, country/western rap records are good!”  So he picks a guitar up, strums a couple of notes.  He can’t rap or sing, but he wants to do both…  I punch your fuckin’ chest till your heart kicks in gear.

You talk about my little girl in a song again, I’ma kill you…  And Im’a tell these motherfuckin’ fans the truth, the reason why you dissed me first and I answered you: … Back in ’94, ripped opened a show for you; rocked the crowd better, and stole your whole show from you.  Took your motherfuckin’ DJ, and stole him, too…  So fuck you, white boy, drop the mic, let’s fight.

Here’s what interests me most about the phenomenon of rap diss tracks:  This whole pattern is as old as the hills.

Nothing in the topics or motivations is historically novel; the demands that the other man stop talking and fight, even having the threats delivered cleverly and in verse, is part of culture.

Yes, there’s yucky and offensive stuff here.  But anyone who thinks it’s rap music that’s introduced this is mad.  Capulets and Montagues is the same thing.  Cyrano is the same thing.  Throwing down gauntlets is the same thing.  Pistol duels over insults or affaires de cœur are the same thing.  16th century Roman pamphleteering?  Same.  Thing.

And all those things are studied in history and lit classes.  These feuds will be, too, once they’re over suitable generational horizons.

Perhaps even more intriguingly:  If I put you in a classroom and asked you to brainstorm the obvious topics of insults between young, male, savannah-dwelling nomadic hominids in small groups, what would you come up with?  I imagine the list would include the other man’s physical strength, his courage, his ability to accumulate wealth, his level of respect in the community, his sexual prowess, his trustworthiness, his outward signs of masculinity and virility, his ability to gather and keep-loyal sexual partners capable of reproduction, and his health and likely longevity.  Because these are all so relevant to survival of a tribe and the appropriateness of that male breeding, and disparaging him on these topics increases the likelihood of the accuser mating.

So, yes, when they call each other homosexual cowards who are loathed by everyone, it’s uncomfortable, and it’s not admirable — but it’s not unique and it’s not novel.  Context is essential much of the time — but in social behaviors, it’s everything.

Twitter: Concisely

Six Minute Story: Eloquently

YouTube: Animatedly

MetaFilter: Cautiously

io9: Helpfully

mcgees.org: Openly

email: Sparingly

Facebook: Begrudgingly

I’ve created a new account at etree.org — a site for traders of legally-redistributable live music — given the loss in April of almost all my bootlegs.  I had one years ago, but long enough ago that I don’t remember my username, and no longer have access to the email account I used at the site.

I wrote an intro basically saying “Hey, I’ve been trading for a long time, but I’m starting over, so I’m going to be humble about all this.”  Except for touching upon a pet peeve of mine:

I’m an audiophile, but I’m also a scientist — so I will happily accept 256 or 320Mbps MP3s of audience DATs.  To argue that the psychoacoustic modeling in the compression of an ultra-high-bandwidth MP3 is the limiting factor for audio quality when the audio is from a guy standing in the audience with microphones in his hat (that he hopes will pick up speaker output more than audience noise around him), and the microphones are in turn connected to a pocket device that is itself doing digital sampling, is rather silly (exactly what information do self-styled audiophiles think they will lose with an MP3 in this situation?)  But if you want audience DATs “lossless”, sure, I can swing with that. 

On 28 June 1999, I, and I expect everyone else watching the X-Games live from home, was standing up in his or her living room.  It’s pretty clear that everyone with functional legs in the stands was also on his or her feet.

It was the skateboard “Best Trick” competition.  Tony Hawk had already landed a Varial 720 with uncanny beauty, which was itself considered an impossible trick for a long time.

So, yeah, what now?  He’s nailed a crazy-hard trick in competition.  He has the last run.  Under X-Games rules, he gets three tries.  He drops in, builds up speed, and … wipes out.  But … “WTF?!” says everyone watching.  “Seriously, what was he going for?  He’s not actually trying to land a 900 degree turn, in competition, on live TV, is he?”  By this point, with intense work on the trick by the world’s best athletes for 10 years, many skaters and commentators were starting to believe it was literally impossible.

So the cheers start.  Second run.  Drops in, builds up speed, goes up, starts spinning, and … wipes.  Damn.

Everyone is standing.  Third and final run.  The world holds its breath.  This is the moment.  He will land it on his last try in a televised competition.  He drops in, goes way above the deck, spins forever, and…

Wipes out.  Hard.  We wonder if he’s broken a couple of ribs.

“God,” we thought in the audience.  “He was so close.  The X-Games will remember this forever.”

Tony stands to walk out of the ramp, a camera zoomed in on his face.  And he throws this determined glare up to where the producers are sitting.  I’ve talked to other friends, and we all report whistling and thinking “Oh, fuck!”  I don’t think there’s a possible read of that look other than “If you want to get me off this ramp, you will send in a team of horses to drag me off.”

So he walks back up to the deck.  The commentators are sort of flailing around.  One says something like, “Ohhhkay.  I guess he’s still skating.  Folks, we’re making this up as we go along here.”

Tries again, his fourth run.  When he misses, he misses in a way that the impact could have shattered his kneecaps even with his guards.  But he got the board under him.

The commentators are asking if they’re still on the air.  The broadcast has gone over time, and other ESPN programming is being bumped.  To my knowledge, this is the first time ESPN had given preference to an “extreme” sport over something else.

Fifth run … and the board slides out from under him.  Walking off the ramp, he looks pissed off.

Bucky Lasek, who had beaten him in vert the day before, starts tapping his skateboard against the edge of the pipe — the “applause” among skateboarders.  Andy Macdonald, Tony’s long-time doubles partner, starts slamming his against the edge.  Tony goes for it … and so close on his sixth!

Back up to the deck.  He’s pouring sweat and looks like he’s been in a fight.  He’s exhausted.  Andy goes over to him and talks quietly to him, looking supportive, looking determined, and making me wish I could read lips.

The audience starts chanting “Tony!  Tony!”  Then the commentators start chanting that on the air.  I’m chanting at home, for the utter lack of good that will do. 

Seventh run … oh, man, that was close.  And they’re still on the air!

He climbs up again, and the best skateboarders in the world lay their hands on him, as if in benediction.  Eighth run.  Goes above the deck and spins, and at full broadcast speed it looks like it’s in slow motion.

And Tony lands it.  Tony lands what was considered an impossible trick.  I’m shouting in my living room.  He’s dogpiled at the bottom.  Cheers from everyone, including screams from the commentators.  When the crowd gets off him, ESPN gets a camera and a mic in his face.  Tony points at the crowd and says “If it wasn’t for you people I would have never made that.  Thank you.  This is the best day of my life.”  Beyond humble.  Beyond awesome.

Here’s the bit that no one ever talks about:  The judges are in a weird place now.  Unless they rewrite the rules on-the-fly, the 900 cannot count towards his Best Trick attempt.  Are they really going to take Tony Hawk’s earlier 720 and compare it to everyone else’s tricks, ignoring the 9?  That would be correct, but obscene. 

So the judges are trying to figure out what to do.  The other competitors quickly huddle, talk to each other, and say they want to speak to the judges.  They say to the people scoring: “Nah, don’t bother.  The rest of us withdraw our runs.  Tony is the only one who skated today.”  Problem solved.  Gold medal to Tony Hawk, and no silver nor bronze medal awarded at all.

And that is the number one, but number one among many, reasons I prefer the culture of X-Games competitions to traditional, huge-salary sports.  The support, the humility, the sort of charming naïveté that still exists in the rules and judging.  It’s the visual grace of one-on-one performance events — Olympic-style stuff — plus the moral grace of a community of jam musicians, versus the crass venality one finds too often in more-traditional competition events.

Here’s the best YouTube video I could find, with someone else’s similar, but different, take on things.  And please forgive the overwrought prose — attribute it to my inability to otherwise express something with such great emotional impact on me.

I’ve encountered some tab notation I’ve never seen before:

e:-------|-----------------------------------------------|-----|
B:-o-///-|-----------------------------------------------|-o-/-|
G:--///--|r(7)--r(9)--r(7)--------r(7)--r(9)--r(7)-------|--/--|
D:-///-o-|------------------r(7)--------------------r(7)-|-/-o-|
A:-------|-----------------------------------------------|-----|
E:-------|-----------------------------------------------|-----|

1.  Do r(7) and r(9) mean to pluck a string already bent a quarter tone above frets 7 and 9, respectively, and release the bend while the string is still sounding?

2.  Can someone explain how to interpret the notation of what I assume are slides at the beginning and end?

Please comment here.  And if this should be obvious, my apologies.

OK, grammar geek time.  A huge pet peeve of mine is lie/lay conjugation and construction errors.  I don’t know what to say: memorize them and practice them until they sound right in your ear?  Or read more?

1.  to lie, intransitive, meaning “to intentionally tell a falsehood”:  I lie, he lies, I am lying, I lied yesterday, I have lied.

2.  to lie, intransitive, meaning “to be prone or supine”:  I lie, he lies, I am lying, I lay yesterday, I have lain.

3.  to lay, transitive, meaning “to cause something to lie”:  I lay it, he lays it, I am laying it, I laid it yesterday, I have laid it.

Is that messy?  Yes.  Is it hard to remember?  Yes.  Will it always be this way?  Maybe not.  Is it still the case that you will sound like a dolt if you mess this up?  Oh, yes.

Please scrutinize the above table.  In none of these verbs is there an intransitive simple present of the form “lay”.  There is only a transitive one.  So if you say “I want to lay down,” my brain is waiting for an object, and when it doesn’t come, my brain tumbles a bit.  The educated ear is expecting something like “I want to lay down the remote control and go outside.”  If you mean that you desire to intentionally become horizontal, you say “I want to lie down.”

Likewise, you cannot say “He went in the back and laid down.”  That, too, needs an object: again, something like “he went in the back and laid down the law,” which, while pretty awesome-sounding, is almost certainly not what you meant.  If you expressing a simple past action, you say “He went in the back and lay down.”

You do not say “my cat is laying on me”, unless you mean that you have some weird atavistic female feline who produces eggs instead of live kittens.

And you will explode some people’s skulls if you say “He went and lied down”.  That’s … just … that’s completely wrong.  It’s up there with “Me and you’re cousin’s am gonna go bring the dog to the vet for it’s shots.”

Start warming up your wrist joints.  You’re going to need them for a facepalm in a short bit.

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa has offered, over the past few years, several theories often labelled “controversial”.  Here’s an overview, via The Independent:

1. Beautiful people are more likely to have female children than male children
2. Liberals and atheists are more intelligent than conservatives
3. Muslim society has applied evolutionary pressure to make it much more likely for a Muslim to be a suicide bomber than for anyone else to
4. Men are selected to prefer blondes
5. Humans are evolved to be more prone to polygyny than polyandry, because historically a woman would be better off with a fraction of a rich man’s attention than all of a poor man’s, and the reverse was not true
6. Married couples with sons are less likely to divorce than those without
7. Adolescent peaks of criminality and creative endeavors have the same cause: evolved sexual competitiveness at that age
8. It is not that men have evolved a mid-life crisis.  Rather, it is a behavioral response to their wives’ menopause
9. It is to be expected, evolutionarily, that male politicians will risk their careers for an extramarital affair
10. Sexual harassment does not indicate the presence of anti-female sentiment; rather, it indicates that men are indiscriminating, because they abuse, harass, and degrade men as well

Woo-hoo!  Take your pick!  What offends you?  “Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct,” he states.  See that?  Short, inflammatory, and quotable!

OK, tabulation: what offends me?  That this fucker’s logical reasoning is pervasively flawed.  He repeatedly conflates correlation and causation; he relies on debunked, inaccurate, and culturally-dependent measures such as I.Q.; he assumes a person’s religion is the religion of his forebears; he relies on too much armchair reasoning and too little field investigation; he takes as a given that a six-point gap in I.Q. will be evident in first meetings of strangers; and generally he just acts like an imbecile.  If he’s right, he’s right for the wrong reasons.  And that’s worse than being wrong.

Are some of his theories speculations correct?  Maybe.  It is almost certain that some things labelled “political correctness” at some times and in some places are inconsistent with some facts of evolutionary development.  Well, duh.  But it’s not binary, and it’s not monolithic.  Why is he willing to make such a facile statement as “human nature is simply not politically correct”?  Not quite sure — but one can be certain that this willingness to dichotomize and falsely generalize characterizes his entire approach to the subject matter.  I think it worth noting that Steven Pinker, working in a related field but who has different horses in the race, has quote-reasoned-unquote his way to opposite conclusions, such as his claim that the validity of political conservatism over political liberalism is confirmed by the observation that artificial intelligence software with distributed rather than top-down organization functions better (I did not make that up.)

This should be a “move along, folks, nothing to see here” — except that many who deny evolution are likely to be offended by some or all of this (Especially Claim #2.  If you disagree that political conservatism and religiosity have a strong positive correlation with denial of evolution, I would love to know how you get Internet access on whatever planet you’re living on.  [↓Insert obvious comparison to Kanazawa's reasoning here↓])  And if it’s used as reinforcement that evolutionary theory must be nonsense and hateful and eugenic, and resisted at all cost, the … um … someone will have won.  And someone will have lost.  Or something.

Yeah.

Anyway: that is what pisses me off.  Fucker.

Reading H. Beam Piper’s Murder in the Gunroom, the main character was told “If, when you return, there are four cars in the garage, counting the station wagon…”

And I asked myself, why wouldn’t he count the station wagon?  They established that it’s functional.  Why, they used it just the previous day: they carted someone and his … his, er, luggage, from … from the … train station.  Huh.  Is that why it’s called that?  Because, originally, a station wagon does that?

I’m getting a bunch of hits on an old recipes page that’s no longer linked from the main site, but that Google still checks.   I first posted them in 2001.   Enjoy!

Hey, readers, that time of the year again, when I ask you to help support this site by using my Amazon referral link for holiday gifts (or other items) you might be buying anyway!

Drag this to your bookmarks toolbar: Amazon.com

And thanks!

Niall:  Daddy, what’s that buzzing noise?

I look for the source of the sound.  It’s coming from a power pole.

Me:  It’s a transformer.

Niall looks to the pole, eyes widening, widening, widening.  Then I figure it out.

Me:  Oh, no!  Sorry, Niall!  Not a giant robot!  Something that helps take electricity to the houses.

I’ve made three LOLs in the cheezburger fashion this week.  They appear below, with spoilers appearing as “[?]“.

“Whoa, doodz! Thoze burrds Я fucking peristeronic as shit!!” [?]

Labels: “Head. Fieldy. Munky. KoЯn.” [?]

“Frown lines?  Dissolve them … with LOL CREME!” [?]

Seventeen years ago, Damien Echols (of what are now called The West Memphis 3) was sentenced to death, courtesy of gross police incompetence and disbarment-level legal proceedings, on the grounds of being an outspoken young man who liked Metallica and fit in poorly with conservative Christian culture.  Essentially all testimony against him has been recanted, police coercion is evident, and DNA evidence not only exonerates him but implicates two others.  At least some family members of the victims now believe him to be innocent.

As part of the wicked, tragic, and profoundly stupid “Satanic ritual abuse” moral panic in the United States, Echols was swept up in the superstitious bigotry of 1993 Arkansas.  Among other absurdities, black concert t-shirts he owned were displayed in court as evidence of his “satanism”.  Along with Echols, two other teenagers were arrested, tried, and given life sentences.

He has now been granted a new hearing for his innocence.

On behalf of people who were outspoken heavy-metal-listening black-t-shirt-wearing 19-year-olds in opposition to conservative Christianity; on behalf of opponents of state-sanctioned murder; on behalf of citizens concerned about abuse of law enforcement and judicial authority; on behalf of all who possess a modicum of human rationality and resistance to gross superstition about the “supernatural”; on behalf of those who are aware that “satanism” is not “devil worship” and that neither of those is a frightening scourge in America but that Bible Belt conservatism is; on behalf of, I hope, everyone reading this:  ABOUT.  FUCKING.  TIME.

In a just society, Echols and his alleged accomplices would be released, and several police officers, a judge, and the real murderers would replace them behind bars.  But these seventeen years should irrefutably attest that this is in no way a just society.