an amateur social scientist has tagged his garage door with some crime statistics for his census tract [sic]. not sure what it means (is that year? a month? what’s the reporting period?) but it’s plainly something he feels strongly about. 55 residential burglaries seems kind of high, but again, I have no idea if that’s over a year (1/week) or a month (2/day).
If you’re curious, you can learn about your census tract here.
Category: del.icio.us
indulgences
Is buying a new diet book every January an updated form of buying indulgences?
mystic bourgeoisie: four out of ten:
The four diet books at the right are currently listed among Amazon’s top-10 bestsellers. Is it any wonder how much the rest of the world loves America? Here’s another weight-loss option to consider. Send the money you’d normally use to buy the crap that’s making you so fat to people who don’t have anything to eat.
well, the stuff I eat that’s making me fat (if I can call it that: is weighting 195 @ 6 feet tall and BMI of under 25 fat?) is good food, mostly, just too much of it.
A better idea might be to donate the cost of one of these books to the food charity of your choice. And just push back from the table a little sooner, whydontcha?
Me, I am working on the ‘eat like an ape‘ diet, at least during the day. Fruits and raw veg and simple grains.
[via]
links for 2007-01-26
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Set the Wayback Machine for 20,000 years ago, Sherman, and watch closely.
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just bought a copy last night. Looking forward to it,
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not the list I would have chosen. Some more with-it Beatlemaniac can come up with a better list, both better than this one or mine.
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Ah, memories.
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Here’s another guy who would take one of these.
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huh. Perhaps there is a war on terror, after all.
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“After all, she said, Starbucks spends more annually on employee healthcare than on purchasing coffee”
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I used to hear him all the time on NPR in Atlanta: his voice was instantly recognizable. Disturbing to hear his take on the diaspora of art and creativity from NoLa.
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why are we paying for this?
hasn’t he done enough?
On the other presidential candidates, Gingrich says, “We’re not in the same business. They are running for the White House. I am trying to change the country.”
Please shut up, you fathead. You already changed the country once when you enabled and empowered Tom Delay and his cronies. Now that we’ve gotten rid of them, you can stay gone as well.
Global Warming Trend
Professor Brad Delong points out what the climate change ignoramuses don’t understand: plant and animal life will migrate with the temperature changes, as best they can. Imagine the American grainbelt migrating to central Canada. I guess I expect farmers to be more active on this, but perhaps that’s a testament to the imbalance of big agribusiness concerns vs small family farms.
serendipity
I was directed to this book after installing a wiki (it was mentioned in the documentation).
This is the core of it:
I read the book in about an hour. It was like reading a book I had already read, recently, though I had never heard of it before.
I am in the midst of preparing an artist’s statement for a portfolio workshop I am doing and this fits in quite well with what I have been saying in a less concise way. This puts a name to this idea and helps refine my understanding. The page linked above might be interesting to programmer/hacker types as it uses XP/pair programming as a manifestation of wabi-sabi.
I was also reminded of this:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
It really did feel as if I was returning to something I had already read.
alchemy: how film works
Nice: an old school movie on the process of exposing and developing film.
It’s a movie about the chemicals and science behind movie film. However, it is a great watch if you ever wanted to know the basics of b&w film. I was finally able to understand how everything works from start to finish and I didn’ t have to read a thing.
From the Prelinger Archives:
Part 1:
www.archive.org/stream/Alchemis1940/Alchemis1940_256kb.mp4Part 2:
www.archive.org/stream/Alchemis1940_2/Alchemis1940_2_256k…
Takes me back to my school days before we had VCRs and TVs or the internets.
bumper stickers
Gotta be some way to work in how they both got a smooch from W: will their experiences make him their Judas?
Borrowed from comments over here.
is our children learning?
He’s only 5 years younger than I am, and Vietnam doesn’t register with him? Nixon’s resignation — he would have been 7 but perhaps it came up at the dinner table? The lingering history of Watergate? Iran-Contra? None of this registered as more meaningful than a failed rescue mission?
Rod Dreher: “Hadn’t the hippies tried to tell my generation this”?:
As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool’s errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic.
But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool.
In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Carter did.
The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government’s conduct of the Iraq war have been shattering to me.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Not under a Republican President.
I turn 40 next month — middle aged at last — a time of discovering limits, finitude. I expected that. But what I did not expect was to see the limits of finitude of American power revealed so painfully.
I did not expect Vietnam.
As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.
I had a heretical thought for a conservative – that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word – that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot – that they have to question authority.
On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn’t the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?
Will my children, too small now to understand Iraq, take me seriously when I tell them one day what powerful men, whom their father once believed in, did to this country? Heavy thoughts for someone who is still a conservative despite it all. It was a long drive home.
What’s with the need to claim that you’re a conservative when everything you believe, everything you have learned to be true, goes against that? I really think JSMill was onto something. Isn’t questioning authority the quintessential American value? Have these people ever read — let alone studied — the Declaration of Independence where the list of grievances against the King are spelled out so clearly?