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Got up a little later than usual after having stayed up late, and went off to watch little sister play in basketball band. The basketball teams both won their games in a fairly convincing manner - the women rained down three-point shots from all places, and the men played a strong game. After that, dinner, shopping, and now I’m sitting at the machine with a list of links to look at and a lot of code to organize and print out. Hopefully, I’ll do the printing before I go to bed.
More poisoned foodstuffs greets us (it keeps getting bigger daily, by the news) by saying some Dole cantaloupes have salmonella and some Earth's Best Organic 2 Apple Peach Barley Wholesome Breakfast Food might have the botluism-causing bacteria. (That’s a really long name for a baby food.)
The inventor of the remote control, Robert Adler, is dead at 93 years of age. Couch potatoes everywhere, click your clickers in salute to the man who invented your tool of choice.
In much less scary baby things, an adoptive parent finds out to register for Amazon.com's baby registry, one must put in a due date. Obviously as adoptive parents, they have no due date. This does not please them, and they feel that it’s a way of making adoptive parents feel second-class. America does have a rather strong emphasis on women being able to have children, having children carried to term, and being in the motherly role. But I wonder if this was a database decision when the registries were created, assuming that the grand majority, if not everyone, who has a registry is already pregnant.
In the kitchen, guys are asserting themselves as being able to do the cooking. In some kitchens, in fact, the men may become 'alpha chefs', sometimes this causes their significant other to stew. Iron Chef battles in miniature, with the betas being reduced to the menial tasks. That doesn’t sound like a recipe for a healthy relationship, but some make it work in their own way.
This was definitely going to happen at some point in our lives. After all, you can’t make fun of one side of the spectrum without someone aiming for the other side. "The 1/2 Hour News Hour" aims to mostly make fun of the things that liberals hold dear. If they can do it well, then they’ll be funny, and possibly get people to think a bit about what they’re saying, even if it’s not nearly as caricatured as what will appear. That said, Fox has only ordered up two episodes. I wonder what they’re afraid of...lots of Fox seems to snap up shows that aim to seriously take on liberalism, why not some comedy, too? After all, Stephen Colbert has his own ice cream flavor. Surely a little ol’ comedy show won’t be too problematic?
Speaking of the bastions of liberalism, American Samizdat has a good list of quotes - all talking about how lethal the global cooling period was going to be. Another of those beautiful things about science - you can admit you’re wrong, and there’s no penalty. And part of what you’re supposed to be doing is seeing whether everything that’s been concluded before is still right or wrong. So maybe warming will turn out to be just as wrong as these cooling statements. That’s not to say we still can’t do some good for the environment anyway. We’ll just have to see whether we’re wrong.
As part of his contribution to Black History Month, J. Brad Hicks provides a timeline of how black Americans continue to have the promise of the American Dream taken from them, by force, fraud, or politics, just when black Americans had the Dream working for them. This long timeline serves as justification as to why New Orleans has not been properly rebuilt yet, when Miami, which got razed by Hurricane Andrew, had been totally rebuilt by this amount of time afterward. Either latently or actively, he argues, white people have always been working to kick blacks back to the curb once they start making money and improving their status.
8 Syndromes that produce superhuman results. A lot of these are caused by things that are not necessarily helpful to the rest of the body, or that can cause complications in daily life. Still, if you were going to catch something exotic, these are the ones you might want to get for neat effects.
Even though the upcoming (arrived?) Lunar New Year is that of the Boar, the state television of China has banned pig images to avoid offending the Muslim minority. I’m just waiting for a conservative somewhere to accuse China of caving in to the radical Muslims, and to declare that communism in China will soon be replaced with fanatical Islam.
The domestic politics race has a lot of potential “first X” candidates. The Christian Science Monitor reports on generic polls asking whether people would vote for “a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be [fill in the blank].” The results: Woman? Yeah. Minority? Yeah. Mormon? Not so much. Old guy? Not a chance. But that’s just generics. Maybe when applied to specific people, we’ll see a much different story.
A new toy for those who believe strongly in VR gaming as a wave of the future - Virtusphere, a human hamster ball that allows freedom of movement in all directions without actually needing much more space than said hamster ball. With a good set of VR equipment, maybe this is the last thing we need to really push up for VR. Although, that does mean that our games will be limited by our abilities and stamina. So no more marathon Battlefield sessions, I guess.
As fanfic proliferates, on occasion it actually attracts the notice of some people. Reason Magazine has a look at fanfic's popularity (or lack thereof) and some arguments for and against its existence and legitimacy. From which afterwards, one of the writers mentioned, Lee Goldberg, responds by saying Reason misrepresented his position, drawing forth a follow-up from Reason clarifying the arguments and positions taken. Of course, there’s also the comment war that happens, too. As someone who has read some fic and written a little, it’s interesting to see people taking a look at it and evaluating it almost individually now, rather than categorically. Maybe it’s because we’ve all been exposed to fic-like material (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, perhaps)? Or is it because fic writers are (have always been) at the level of the original authors? Or is it something else?
Next-to-last bit of interesting material - Praising one's kids too much on their intelligence or other abstract qualities may end up making them less likely to take risks. They don’t do things where they might end up failing at them, and thus looking bad, or not smart. By failing, they take the message as “You’re not smart enough, not as smart as you think”, rather than “It’ll take a little more effort to get good at this.” Those praised on effort or tangible qualities didn’t have this particular problem, taking failure as a lack of effort, rather than as a personal affront against their intelligence or innate qualities.
Something I have to smile at - someone asks librarians whether we're really as ideal, or embattled, or whatever, as we are, and solicits some responses. What she gets in the comments is stuff from librarians and users that shows, like any other profession, we’ve got good people, not-so-good people, our own opinions, which filter into the collections at times. And we’re also routinely worried about not making enough money, or funding woes, like any other public institution. Your services may vary, but ultimately, it’s library users and funders that have to be convinced of the importance of libraries.
More poisoned foodstuffs greets us (it keeps getting bigger daily, by the news) by saying some Dole cantaloupes have salmonella and some Earth's Best Organic 2 Apple Peach Barley Wholesome Breakfast Food might have the botluism-causing bacteria. (That’s a really long name for a baby food.)
The inventor of the remote control, Robert Adler, is dead at 93 years of age. Couch potatoes everywhere, click your clickers in salute to the man who invented your tool of choice.
In much less scary baby things, an adoptive parent finds out to register for Amazon.com's baby registry, one must put in a due date. Obviously as adoptive parents, they have no due date. This does not please them, and they feel that it’s a way of making adoptive parents feel second-class. America does have a rather strong emphasis on women being able to have children, having children carried to term, and being in the motherly role. But I wonder if this was a database decision when the registries were created, assuming that the grand majority, if not everyone, who has a registry is already pregnant.
In the kitchen, guys are asserting themselves as being able to do the cooking. In some kitchens, in fact, the men may become 'alpha chefs', sometimes this causes their significant other to stew. Iron Chef battles in miniature, with the betas being reduced to the menial tasks. That doesn’t sound like a recipe for a healthy relationship, but some make it work in their own way.
This was definitely going to happen at some point in our lives. After all, you can’t make fun of one side of the spectrum without someone aiming for the other side. "The 1/2 Hour News Hour" aims to mostly make fun of the things that liberals hold dear. If they can do it well, then they’ll be funny, and possibly get people to think a bit about what they’re saying, even if it’s not nearly as caricatured as what will appear. That said, Fox has only ordered up two episodes. I wonder what they’re afraid of...lots of Fox seems to snap up shows that aim to seriously take on liberalism, why not some comedy, too? After all, Stephen Colbert has his own ice cream flavor. Surely a little ol’ comedy show won’t be too problematic?
Speaking of the bastions of liberalism, American Samizdat has a good list of quotes - all talking about how lethal the global cooling period was going to be. Another of those beautiful things about science - you can admit you’re wrong, and there’s no penalty. And part of what you’re supposed to be doing is seeing whether everything that’s been concluded before is still right or wrong. So maybe warming will turn out to be just as wrong as these cooling statements. That’s not to say we still can’t do some good for the environment anyway. We’ll just have to see whether we’re wrong.
As part of his contribution to Black History Month, J. Brad Hicks provides a timeline of how black Americans continue to have the promise of the American Dream taken from them, by force, fraud, or politics, just when black Americans had the Dream working for them. This long timeline serves as justification as to why New Orleans has not been properly rebuilt yet, when Miami, which got razed by Hurricane Andrew, had been totally rebuilt by this amount of time afterward. Either latently or actively, he argues, white people have always been working to kick blacks back to the curb once they start making money and improving their status.
8 Syndromes that produce superhuman results. A lot of these are caused by things that are not necessarily helpful to the rest of the body, or that can cause complications in daily life. Still, if you were going to catch something exotic, these are the ones you might want to get for neat effects.
Even though the upcoming (arrived?) Lunar New Year is that of the Boar, the state television of China has banned pig images to avoid offending the Muslim minority. I’m just waiting for a conservative somewhere to accuse China of caving in to the radical Muslims, and to declare that communism in China will soon be replaced with fanatical Islam.
The domestic politics race has a lot of potential “first X” candidates. The Christian Science Monitor reports on generic polls asking whether people would vote for “a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be [fill in the blank].” The results: Woman? Yeah. Minority? Yeah. Mormon? Not so much. Old guy? Not a chance. But that’s just generics. Maybe when applied to specific people, we’ll see a much different story.
A new toy for those who believe strongly in VR gaming as a wave of the future - Virtusphere, a human hamster ball that allows freedom of movement in all directions without actually needing much more space than said hamster ball. With a good set of VR equipment, maybe this is the last thing we need to really push up for VR. Although, that does mean that our games will be limited by our abilities and stamina. So no more marathon Battlefield sessions, I guess.
As fanfic proliferates, on occasion it actually attracts the notice of some people. Reason Magazine has a look at fanfic's popularity (or lack thereof) and some arguments for and against its existence and legitimacy. From which afterwards, one of the writers mentioned, Lee Goldberg, responds by saying Reason misrepresented his position, drawing forth a follow-up from Reason clarifying the arguments and positions taken. Of course, there’s also the comment war that happens, too. As someone who has read some fic and written a little, it’s interesting to see people taking a look at it and evaluating it almost individually now, rather than categorically. Maybe it’s because we’ve all been exposed to fic-like material (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, perhaps)? Or is it because fic writers are (have always been) at the level of the original authors? Or is it something else?
Next-to-last bit of interesting material - Praising one's kids too much on their intelligence or other abstract qualities may end up making them less likely to take risks. They don’t do things where they might end up failing at them, and thus looking bad, or not smart. By failing, they take the message as “You’re not smart enough, not as smart as you think”, rather than “It’ll take a little more effort to get good at this.” Those praised on effort or tangible qualities didn’t have this particular problem, taking failure as a lack of effort, rather than as a personal affront against their intelligence or innate qualities.
Something I have to smile at - someone asks librarians whether we're really as ideal, or embattled, or whatever, as we are, and solicits some responses. What she gets in the comments is stuff from librarians and users that shows, like any other profession, we’ve got good people, not-so-good people, our own opinions, which filter into the collections at times. And we’re also routinely worried about not making enough money, or funding woes, like any other public institution. Your services may vary, but ultimately, it’s library users and funders that have to be convinced of the importance of libraries.
