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Tuesday link clearing festival
- Noir is a new club/restaurant in Atlanta that just opened up, decorated entirely in a film noir motif. They have movie nights too. Sounds perfect for me. The AJC review is here.
- WikiBroker and Zillow seem quite handy as well. The Zillow link is set to where I am thinking about moving.
- Robert Patterson (a blogger new to me) posts this excellent link to the Battle of Algiers.
- The Chinese ARE building the first affordable electric cars! Which is one of my predictions from a while back.
- Curiously underreported story about Global Warming.
These graphs were created by NASA’s Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data. . . .
NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.
- PurpleSlog responds to my 8 Random Facts Question. His blog tagline is now “Accepting the World As It Is Until Robots Get Better”
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Random links from the laptop
- Christianity and China – history is going to be interesting for a long time to come.
- Confessions of a BBC Liberal – The politics of it aren’t terribly interesting, but the illustration of groupthink is. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of party affiliation by profession.
- Nerds One and Two: The Hyperwhite – It seems that someone did research on nerdiness. Some choice excerpts –
Nerdiness, she has concluded, is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, “hyperwhite.”
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In a 2001 paper, “The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness,” and other works, including a book in progress, Bucholtz notes that the “hegemonic” “cool white” kids use a limited amount of African-American vernacular English; they may say “blood” in lieu of “friend,” or drop the “g” in “playing.” But the nerds she has interviewed, mostly white kids, punctiliously adhere to Standard English.
The author seems not to realize that the appeal of hyper-proper English is that the rules are memorable and never change, which reduces the aren’t tied to a peer group to stay current. That’s my theory anyway.
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Jury Duty Again!
And only two years after the last time.
And question #4 on the questionnaire (along with name, address, etc) is “Are you Hispanic?”
Weird.
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The rest of the Chicago photos
I’ve finished processing the pictures from my small Canon camera from the Chicago trip. I wasn’t able to bring the big Nikon into the event, so this gallery consists of the road photos and the non-closeups of the Crossroads Guitar Festival.
As you might guess from the quantity of photos, there was a long wait outside Buddy Guy’s nightclub.
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Some of the Chicago photos are up
I could only bring my small Canon to the actual festival. Here are some of the shots I took with the big Nikon. All of the Superman stuff is from Metropolis Illinois, where they do in fact have a 30 foot high Superman statue, as well as endless fields of corn.
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The report of silence
It didn’t work for very long. Working without music focused my attention for several hours, but after that my attention span dropped. A good experiment nonetheless.
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The sounds of silence
In the spirit of the books Getting Things Done and the Four Hour Workweek, I’m attempting to go an entire day of working in silence. I’ll let you know how it goes.
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Thoughts on the surge and ethnic cleansing
While it’s common now to hear reports of the surge working, I’m curious to know how much the drop in violence correlates to the ethnic cleansing that’s been happening in Iraq for the past few years. All of the Iraqi on Iraqi violence is purposeful, i.e. designed to drive the Sunni out of Shia neighborhoods and vice versa. What if the militias and insurgents are just wrapping up the ethnic cleansing and there’s no one handy to kill?
I imagine it’s hard to find mixed neighborhoods these days, which would make the murders and bombings more difficult to commit. A good way to test the theory would be to see if inter-ethnic violence increases as extra-ethnic violence decreases. The recent tribal push against AQ is some evidence of that as without readily available Shia AQ has nothing to offer the Sunni tribes.
So many questions, so little data. I guess another way of putting it is “what if Iraq completed it’s civil war while everyone was debating the meaning of “Civil War”? (note, I still dislike the term to refer to the conflict, Gang war is the better term.).
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What I’m reading while uploading…
- Hardcore Troubadours – a bio of the Old Crow Medicine Show
- Catalogs of Data Visualization on Coding Horror
- Minorities become the majority in 10 percent of U.S. counties – which has the interesting quote
In northern Virginia, Teresita Jacinto said she feels less welcome today than when she first arrived 30 years ago, when she was one of few Hispanics in the area.
“Not only are we feeling less welcome, we are feeling threatened,” said Jacinto, a teacher in Woodbridge, Virginia, about 20 miles southwest of Washington.
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“I think across the board all of us feel like we’re not welcome,” said Jacinto, who was born in the U.S. and volunteers for an advocacy group called Mexicans Without Borders.Perhaps it’s because she’s feeling unwelcome because she’s advocating an unpopular cause?
- The Old Crow Medicine Show on AT & T Blueroom
- Green Fakers on Radar. The celebrity excuses are funny.
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Cell phone advice
I’m thinking of getting a Blackberry 8700G. Does anyone know anything about this phone? I would like to use it as a secondary internet connection as well as a phone/pda.