sheer potentiality

I was directed to this survey recently. A few interesting notes:

• Why are Jews less popular than blacks among liberals? And Hispanics even less?
• Why didn’t anyone ask about Muslims?
• The popularity of hypothetical black candidates has skyrocketed in the past 40 years.
• The Jews and Catholics improved significantly between 37 and 67. Women too.
• Mormons are less popular!
• Atheists and blacks have dropped since 1999.
• Homosexuals gained between 20-30% since the 80’s.

If anyone is reading this blog from Boston, Massachusetts, it is very possible that you are an idiot. I have taken it upon myself to educate the people of Boston, Massachusetts about a very important issue. If you are from Boston, please read this message.

Below you will see two pictures. Before you look at these images, I would like to personally assure you that my website is not an explosive device, so do not panic when you see these pictures. One portrays cartoon characters, and the other portrays an explosive device. Almost everybody who is not from Boston, Massachusetts can correctly identify which is which:

Stumped? Well, here is the correct answer: the first picture is of cartoon characters, while the second picture is of an improvised explosive device discovered in Iraq.

Pictured below is one thing. Your challenge is to identify whether this is an explosive device, or a representation of a cartoon character.

Now, there are many clues that we can use to determine what this device actually is. For instance, we can surmise from the glowing lights that this device is supposed to be obvious, and is clearly meant to be seen. This is not uncommon. Billboards, for instance, are often well-lit because advertisers intend for motorists to see them. People who plant bombs, on the other hand, generally do not want the bombs to be seen, because that would lead to their discovery. Instead, they want to hide bombs alongside roads, in trash cans, or in other places where they will not be discovered until they blow up.

(The people of Boston should know this second part very well, because their distant relatives in Ireland spent most of the last century doing this throughout England, often with the financial assistance of American Irish, from Boston and other American cities.)

Still, many people in Boston were confused and thought that the above advertisement was in fact a bomb. The Attorney General of Massachusetts, Martha Coakley, said the following:

“It had a very sinister appearance. It had a battery behind it, and wires.”

source

I assume by “a very sinister appearance”, she means that the Mooninite was scowling, with furrowed eyebrows, and a raised middle finger. I’ve never been to Boston, but from what I’ve gathered, that would describe the appearance of many drivers one would encounter in that city, and no one ever thinks they’re going to explode. As for the battery and wires…well, I see I have more work to do than I thought I did.

You see, things like lights are powered by something called electricity, which is an efficient way to transmit energy. Electrical charge can be stored in batteries, and is transmitted from a source (such as a battery) along something called a circuit, along wires. This is normal, and present within all sorts of devices, including cellular phones, computers, iPods, and other electrical devices. Even the electrical devices in your home use wires to connect to wall sockets, which themselves use a complex network of wires to connect to power plants.

Pictured below are a couple everyday items that are powered by large D-cell batteries:

None of the above items are bombs.

I hope this clarifies things.

So I got “Rush Replay X3″, a DVD re-issuing of three Rush concert videos: Exit…Stage Left (1981 Moving Pictures tour), the 1984 Grace Under Pressure tour, and A Show of Hands (1989 Hold Your Fire tour).

• During the 80’s, Geddy Lee developed an incredible mullet. And in these videos, you can see it grow stage by stage. In Exit…Stage Left, the Geddy-Mullet wasn’t even a mullet per se, just long hair with bangs. By Grace Under Pressure it had developed into a true mullet, but (in parallel with the decline in Rush’s new album output), A Show Of Hands featured a horrifically bad ponytail-mullet.
• Speaking of the decline in Rush’s new album output, the first half of A Show Of Hands (where they play songs from Power Windows and Hold Your Fire exclusively) is pretty much disposable, except for a couple good songs. The second half features such classics as “Closer to the Heart”, “La Villa Strangiato”, and the opening two parts of 2112 is pretty cool, but you can kind of tell they’re not fully into it. Well, watching Geddy and Alex interact on stage is entertaining enough.
• On “Vital Signs” from the Grace Under Pressure DVD, Geddy clearly sings “aboot”. On “Tom Sawyer” from A Show Of Hands, Geddy clearly sings “catch the fish”.
• “Xanadu” from Exit…Stage Left—Alex double-necking the 12 string, and Geddy double-necking a 4 string bass and 6 string guitar, as Neil plays atmospheric chimes and bells. Virtuosity. Pure virtuosity.
• “Closer to the Heart”. I never got why it was so popular (although now I’m getting more into it), but they played it on like, every tour ever since it was written.
• “The Weapon” on Grace Under Pressure was introduced by Count Floyd, who strangely asserted that the song was “scary” and exhorted the audience to put on the 3-D glasses (”if you don’t have your 3-D glasses, you’ll only be seeing this in…one-half D!”), for no apparent reason. This made little sense to me, until I learned (from that actual Wikipedia link, oddly enough) that Count Floyd was a Canadian TV character whose schtick was comedically insisting that non-scary things were actually quite scary, and shilling 3-D glasses. Oh, Canadians.

A lot of people arguing to justify torture are arguing that torture is necessary in order to protect our civilization from a terrorist threat. What they are missing is something I consider a far more important point: why does our civilization deserve to survive? The greatest achievement of American civilization is, by far, individual rights. We are the first people to found a nation based upon ideals of democracy and individual freedom. Our civilization is at no greater risk from the terrorists than we were from the British at our outset, and yet we did not torture the British. Our civilization is at no greater risk from the terrorists than we were from the Nazis, yet we did not torture German troops. But even assuming we were facing a threat that absolutely necessitated torture, this still leaves an important question unanswered. To become a civilization that engages in torture, widescale espionage against our own people, and arbitrary imprisonments *without* the right for those imprisoned and tortured to contest their treatment in court would be a significant betrayal of the founding principles of our civilization. We are a nation of laws, checks, and balances, in which no group is given unchecked power and in which significant human rights are recognized. To betray these principles is treason. For years, our civilization placed itself at the peril of absolute destruction in order to prevail over fascism and communism simply because the fascists and communists engaged in the very tactics that we are now adopting. For those of you serving in the military: your predecessors fought and died on the shores of Normandy, the islands of the Pacific, the streets and fields of western Germany and France, the frozen wilderness of the Chosin Reservoir, and the jungles of Vietnam in order to preserve civilizations where people were not tortured or imprisoned at the whim of their leaders. How dare you betray them by allowing your own civilization to become the very evil they fought to destroy?

You also claim that torture is an effective means of interrogation—in other words, that torture elicits useful information. It is interesting, then, to note that coercive interrogation techniques are generally considered ineffective by almost everyone who’s seriously studied the question. For instance: Somebody placed under torture does not necessarily tell the truth; they tell you what you want to hear so you stop torturing them. If you capture and torture an innocent person by accident, they will confess to being a terrorist and invent whatever details they think will convince the interrogator. I think a lot of what motivates torture isn’t the belief or the hope that torture will be effective. Rather, the motivation appears to be a bit more primal than that. Simply put, “the terrorists” murdered 3,000 Americans five years ago, and you want revenge. I don’t blame anyone for feeling that way, but we are intelligent human beings, and one of our responsibilities as such is to recognize our primitive urges for what they are instead of trying to rationalize them. What in essence is happening in this country is that, out of fear, we are abandoning our principles in order to satisfy primal urges. We are abandoning our humanity.

On instant messenger today:

Philip Welch: I have a prediction.
Mike Klein: Predict on.
Philip Welch: The Democrats will win the 2006 elections and take control of the House and potentially the Senate.
Mike Klein: What effect will this have on my life?
Philip Welch: The news will become a more reliable source of entertainment.
Mike Klein: Good answer.

I’m starting a new political movement. It’s called “Prohibition is over, so give it up, you dorks!”Our goal is the privitization of liquor stores.

Sure, back when Prohibition was the status quo, it seemed like a good compromise. “OK, alcohol is legal, but you can only buy hard alcohol at state owned liquor stores.” I can easily see them doing the same thing now with marijuana—legalizing possession, but requiring you to buy it only from licensed locations or state-owned stores. But today, state liquor stores are just a strange historical artifact. I propose that we preserve one state liquor store in each state as a museum to Prohibition and its historical consequences, set up the rest to operate as private businesses, and allow others to compete with the newly-privatized liquor stores.

He won.

From the Seattle PI (also available at a shitload of sources at Google News):

ATLANTA — A former Marine used a pocket knife to fend off a group of would-be robbers, killing one and wounding another, police said.

…

One of the attackers had a shotgun and another had a pistol, Stephens said.
The suspects caught up with Autry, who yelled for help and pulled a knife out of his backpack. He kicked the shotgun out of one of the attacker’s hands and stabbed both a 17-year-old girl who jumped on him and a man who also attacked him.

The suspects fled in their car but police found them later at a hospital where the girl was pronounced dead. The man stabbed in the incident was in critical condition, Stephens said.

(Emphasis mine.)

HOLY SHIT! It takes quite the badass to, when accosted by armed robbers with guns, grab a pocketknife, flip out, and stab them. Normally I wouldn’t endorse this kind of response to this situation, but holy shit. If you can pull it off, go for it. (Here’s a tip though: unless you’re a Marine or other certified badass, you can’t pull it off. And no, being a black belt in Tae Kwon Do doesn’t make you a certified badass, at least not to enough of a degree to stab armed robbers.)

I think it’s fair to say I’m an intelligent student capable of performing well in class. At least I like to think I am, and here is why: generally when a professor makes a class easier rather than harder, I’m more disappointed than relieved.

In one of my classes in the College of Business (which will remain un-named), the professor recently went over mid-semester evaluations and granted a popular request to announce quizzes beforehand instead of having unannounced pop quizzes throughout the semester. This disappointed me, and I think I understand why.

In “How to Make Wealth”, one of Paul Graham’s essays, he talks about solving not just valuable problems, but hard problems as important for startups:

 This is not just a good way to run a startup. It’s what a startup is. Venture capitalists know about this and have a phrase for it: barriers to entry. If you go to a VC with a new idea and ask him to invest in it, one of the first things he’ll ask is, how hard would this be for someone else to develop? That is, how much difficult ground have you put between yourself and potential pursuers? And you had better have a convincing explanation of why your technology would be hard to duplicate. Otherwise as soon as some big company becomes aware of it, they’ll make their own, and with their brand name, capital, and distribution clout, they’ll take away your market overnight.

Challenging course requirements serve the same function. They allow the more talented, ambitious, and hardworking students to become obvious in their talent. Employers look at your transcripts. They read your grades. The grade in the transcript should accurately reflect the student’s value to the employer, and the best way to do that is by making the class difficult enough that the more talented can get a high grade while the less talented get a lower grade. Trying to give everyone a good grade only puts less talented candidates in competition with more talented candidates while clouding the employer’s ability to tell the difference. It represents a fundamental failure of the university’s duty to provide educated, qualified professionals to the work force.

(This is my review of the “Conviction” pilot, which I’ve also posted to iTunes.)

Imagine, for a second, that “Law and Order” had around five prosecutors instead of two, that they were all in their mid-20’s, and that the series followed all the prosecutors around all day instead of watching a single case from investigation to trial, and you have “Conviction”. The idea seems intriguing, but is ham-handedly executed. The supposed premise of this spinoff—that of developing the prosecutors as fully-rounded characters—is, as of the pilot, a tragically unrealized ideal. In trying to portray the young prosecutors as overwhelmed by taking their first cases, creator Dick Wolf overshoots and takes the series straight into farce. One prosecutor leaves evidence in the courtroom (evidence which incidentally includes crack cocaine), vomits from sheer stress, and apparently forgets how to correctly question a witness and has to get tips from the baliff.

There are some redeeming performances but overall nothing worthy of note. If you want a legal drama with interesting characters, “Boston Legal” is a much better choice. If you want to watch a realistic, focused, and compelling legal drama, “Law and Order” is still the gold standard. And if you want to watch a compelling character drama, simply look elsewhere.

Stephanie Vita: Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. I hate Valentine’s Day.
Philip Welch: Why don’t you like the anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre?
Philip Welch: You should take the opportunity to celebrate your Italian heritage.
Stephanie Vita: *laughs*
Stephanie Vita: I don’t have a boyfriend. So the romantic part of it is just crappy to me.
Philip Welch: There’s a romantic part to Valentine’s Day!?
Stephanie Vita: Yea, Phil. Where have you been?
Stephanie Vita: You know, couples, flowers, hearts, jewelry.
Philip Welch: Shhh!
Philip Welch: I’m trying to block that all out!

Join my crusade to take back St. Valentine’s Day. Romance is overrated. Celebrate the massacre instead, and deny that the holiday has any other significance! That’s what I do.

So how exactly do you celebrate the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre? (Note: The following suggestions are only valid within the United States, since that’s where the massacre took place. If you’re outside the United States, don’t celebrate American holidays. There’s probably something that happened in your country on Valentine’s Day, so celebrate that instead.

• Organize a tournament of your favorite violent multiplayer video game.
• Paintball and laser tag are also excellent ways to stage your own massacre.
• Re-enact the actual massacre. 1920’s-era dress and firearms optional, but they add to the authenticity. (Be sure to use blanks!)
• If you can’t stage a full-scale re-enactment, just go for the 1920’s-era dress. Violin cases are optional.
• Celebrate the Prohibition era in general by making some moonshine and smuggling it to your friends, listening to some jazz, or having a closed-doors party in your basement with plenty of liquor.
• Organize some crime yourself! You probably don’t want to go for violent crime, but most non-violent drug crimes are well within the spirit of Al Capone while remaining safe and victimless. Smuggling alcohol to your friends who are younger than 21 works, but you don’t want to do it in a disorganized manner. Organized crime is what we’re celebrating here! If you’re a complete coward, get some friends to jaywalk with you, or drive in a convoy 10 miles per hour above the legal limit. If, like Al, you don’t get caught until two years later, you’ll have good luck for seven years!
• While wanton violence and lawlessness is a key aspect of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre anniversary, don’t forget to celebrate your Italian heritage as well. Even if you don’t have Italian heritage, pretend that you do. It’s great practice for pretending to have Irish heritage next month. While Columbus Day is usually the day to celebrate Italian heritage, it’s also offensive to Native Americans because of Columbus’s involvement in slavery and genocide against their people. True, Italians might not want to celebrate their heritage by celebrating organized crime, but I fail to see how celebrating slavery and genocide makes them look any better.