March 2006

An entertaining “howler”:http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5575262 at the _Economist_ this week; one of its leaders has the grand title:

bq.

From Karl Marx’s copybook: Efforts to block foreign takeovers rest on a deceit about ownership and interests

and continues:

bq. PATRIOTISM, said Samuel Johnson, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. That may be unfair to the proper sort of patriot, but it would be an entirely valid comment about politicians today who make a fuss about foreign takeovers in their countries, in the name of “national interests”. The truth is that they are not defending their nations’ interests at all. They are defending their own interests and (often) those of their cronies.

Rather unfortunately for the leader writer, who seems never to have read Marx, there’s no support in Marx’s writings for economic patriotism or for defending national interests. Indeed, if you care to consult the man’s works, Marx was enthusiastically in favour of the bourgeoisie’s penchant for ripping down barriers to international exchange. From the “Communist Manifesto”:http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html:

bq. The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

Now, of course, “Karl Marx’s copybook” stands in the leader-writer’s vocabulary for “vaguely left-sounding ideas that I don’t like and want to discredit by association.” But Karl Marx’s actual copybook would suggest that if anyone’s ideas are to be discredited by association with the work of disreputable lefties here, it’s those of the _Economist_ (not that I personally consider Marx to be a disreputable leftie, of course, but I do enjoy seeing a lazy attempted smear boomerang right back into the face of the smearer).

In my role as a music reviewer for Bristol and Bath’s “Decode”:http://www.decodemedia.com/tiki-index.php magazine, I got to see “Buddy Miller”:http://www.buddyandjulie.com/ on Tuesday night. I’m not sure that music reviews are my forte, but you can read my effort “here”:http://www.decodemedia.com/tiki-index.php?page=Buddy+Miller . Miller really is a remarkable guitarist and a pretty good singer too. I guess he’s “officially” “country” (whatever that amounts to) , but he’s really someone who transcends genre. He’s made some important records with some famous people (he’s Emmylou Harris’s guitarist) , but his own material (and that with his wife “Julie”:http://www.buddyandjulie.com/biojulie.html ) is also fantastic. His religious affiliations (Christian) are pretty much to the fore in his most recent record — “Universal United House of Prayer”:http://www.buddyandjulie.com/house.html — though they weren’t on Tuesday. UUHP is sort of country/rock/gospel crossover (if it even has a genre) with the highpoint being his cover of Dylan’s With God on Our Side (Miller plainly doesn’t think that God is a Republican). Anyway, check him out.

I started playing ping pong again a few weeks ago so I may appreciate this more than most, but I don’t think you have to be a practitioner for it to be worth a look.

While we’re on the topic of ping pong, check out this massively multiplayer online pong game. It’s not so much that it’s hours of fun (it’s not), what’s intriguing is that people come up with and create these things.

If all this has gotten you in the mood for some pong then try king pong [requires Shockwave]. It’s a pretty good version of a game that probably has hundreds if not thousands of variants.

I guess at this point I should probably include this here: .

UPDATE: The world smallest pong game is also worthy of a link here (I forget how I first came upon it a few weeks ago).

Thanks to Geeked for the Ping pong link and Waxy for the MMOP link. I found King Pong all by myself (well, with a little help from a search engine).

Hot off the presses. No idea when I’ll have time to read it, on account of me being so ‘time poor’ that I may as well have a peptic ulcer.

Via “Bitch Ph.D”:http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2006/03/better-late-than-never.html some advice on recovering from “going AWOL”:http://www.insidehighered.com/workplace/2006/03/01/mckinney, i.e., catching back up again after becoming overcommitted and falling way behind on promised deadlines, etc. A much better name — and solution — for this problem, which alas I can’t claim credit for, is “Declaring Intellectual Bankruptcy.”

Listening to the radio on an airport shuttle last night — some CBS news station, I think — I heard the presenter interview a correspondent about the new “videos and transcripts”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/national/nationalspecial/02katrina.html?ex=1298955600&en=0201f0653564ac8b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss of the White House’s response to Hurricane Katrina. At one point she asked whether this would make any difference to President Bush, or whether it was all “just water under the bridge.” To be fair, she realized just before she said this that it might not sound quite right, but was trapped by the need to maintain the flow of talk. So she could only manage “I hate to use what may sound like an inappropriate metaphor, but …” by way of rescuing the situation. A little later she said it again, this time without comment. (It would have been better if she’d asked whether this controversy was now all blown over or a wash for the President, or something.)

This was a very mild version of the situations Erving Goffman analyzes in “Radio Talk”, an essay from his book “Forms of Talk”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/081221112X/kieranhealysw-20/. The CBS announcer was unusual in that she flagged the problem with what she was saying. More often, as Goffman documents, the announcer ploughs on (often in deadly serious manner, to prevent the flow of talk from breaking down into giggles), as if daring the listener to think anything inappropriate has been said. Thus, “She’ll be performing selections from Bach’s Well-Tempered Caviar”, or “”Good evening, this is the Canadian Broad Corping Castration” are passed over in silence. It’s better to push on, as efforts to save the interaction may end up doing even more damage, as in “Tonight I am going to consider the films of Alfred Hitchcack … cock! CACK!”

A propos gender, I wanted to say a few words about some recent photo interests. A few months ago I decided to start taking pictures of gender signs. The most obvious location for these is restroom doors. I haven’t encountered any awkward situations yet running around public bathrooms snapping photos, but I can imagine eventually I may get some curious glances.

The purpose of this exercise is to see what are the core essential elements that the designers of such signs decide will be enough to distinguish between men and women. We are all used to the stick figures, with and without the skirt (or would that be a dress?). But how about the more innovative approaches? In the Hungarian Parliament, the emphasis on the signs seems to be on differences in hairdo while the signs in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences emphasize some facial feature variation (lips vs moustache) in addition to hairdo distinctions and some differences in clothing. (It would be interesting to know the date of these two pairs of signs, I guess I didn’t do adequate research.) In other cases, the focus is on how men vs women tend to go about their business. At times, the distinctions are not completely obvious (these tend to be some of the most intriguing cases).

I have compiled my photos on the topic into a set on Flickr. More interestingly, I also started a public group on Flickr, a pool of pictures to which any other Flickr member can contribute. This has led to some great additions by others, for example: this Ken and Barbie pair at the Shirn museum in Frankfurt.

The rule for the photo pool is simple: post images that have both the male and female symbol (either in one or two pictures) and give some description of where the signs are located in case others want to find them. I welcome contributions! Join the trend, don’t be shy to whip out your camera next time you spot a pair of gender signs.

Eventually, I could see this project leading to.. well, perhaps not a coffee table book, but maybe a bathroom book?

When I first saw this Fox caption capture from Media Matters linked at Surfdom, I thought it was some sort of aberration. But the idea that civil war in Iraq would be a good thing has already made it into the opinion pages of The Australian , propounded by Daniel Pipes. The same from James Joyner and Vodkapundit, though Glenn Reynolds demurs mildly.

Meanwhile, as Tim D notes, doublethink is SOP at Fox. As far as I can tell, the official pro-war position now emerging is

* there is no civil war in Iraq
* there will be no civil war in Iraq
* if civil war comes, it won’t be our fault
* when civil war comes, it will be a good thing

Unfortunately, at this point there’s not much anyone can do. The US and Uk have long since lost control of the situation, and the dynamic has gone beyond the control of any individual or group in Iraq. We’ll just have to hope that the Iraqi leaders (Sistani and Sadr on the Shia side, and the various groups contending to represent the Sunni Arabs and Kurds, among others) can pull something out of the fire between them.

The “Ken Livingstone”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4758246.stm affair and the “Jowell/Mills/Berlusconi”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4761194.stm business have both focused attention on various “codes of conduct” which set out what public officials may or may not do, when they should declare an interest, etc. These were all brought in after the “Nolan committee”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Nolan%2C_Baron_Nolan , which was UK central government’s response to scandals such as “cash for questions” (a scandal involving central government). I won’t go so far as to say that the various codes make interesting reading, but there are some notable differences between them, especially as concerns what constitutes a relevant “interest”. Basically, if you are a parish councillor, with the power to do just about nothing, then you should recuse yourself if your niece’s live-in boyfriend might be affected more by a decision than someone else in the parish. On the other hand, if you are a member of the Cabinet the circle of persons in whose interests you are taken to have an interest is drawn much more tightly.

The codes for local government are on the “Standards Board for England”:http://www.standardsboard.co.uk/TheCodeofConduct/IntroductiontotheCodeofConduct/ website, the ministerial code is at the “Cabinet Office”:http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/propriety_and_ethics/ministers/ministerial_code/ site.

UPDATE: Specifically on Jowell/Mills/Berlusconi, this “Guardian profile of Mills”:http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labour/story/0,,1716785,00.html makes interesting reading.

“David Bernstein”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_02_26-2006_03_04.shtml#1141069946 quotes from a _National Review_ article on GMU law school:

bq. “If the market discriminates against conservatives, then there should be good opportunities for hiring conservatives,” says [current Dean Daniel] Polsby. This is exactly the sort of observation one would expect a market-savvy law-and-economics scholar to make. Manne and his successors were able to act on this theory, and though Mason has in recent years expanded its recruitment of non-economics specialists [in part because law and economics scholars have gone from undervalued in the market when Manne was dean to a highly desired commodity], it has stuck by the core observation that law schools routinely overlook raw talent. Associate professor Craig Lerner, for instance, studied under the political theorist Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago and worked for Kenneth Starr on the Whitewater investigation. Listing either of these experiences on a résumé might easily turn off a hiring committee dominated by liberals, which is to say a hiring committee at just about every other law school. And so Lerner turns out to be exactly the type of candidate that attracts GMU. “Have you read Moneyball?” asks Todd Zywicki, another one of Mason’s bright young profs, in reference to the best-selling book by Michael Lewis on how the Oakland Athletics franchise assembled playoff-caliber teams on a limited budget. “We’re the Oakland A’s of the law-school world.”

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Linda Smith is dead.

I saw her only once, when she was unkown, as the cabaret act at a Socialist Outlook conference in the 1980’s. A small and intimate setting and she was simply one of the funniest people I’d ever seen in my life. I couldn’t believe it when I subsequently saw her on afternoon TV some 10 years later. She was terrific on The News Quiz, especially, for some reason, when Alan Coren was on too. Only, in my opinion, A Brief History of Time Wasting was not so good, but even that I’m pleased to have a bunch of tapes of. A nice tribute by Jeremy Hardy here. Obit here.

Sometime in the next couple of days, the one-millionth article will be added to the English-language version of Wikipedia. It’s an impressive achievement for a project that’s only five years old , and it’s already clear that Wikipedia has surpassed its main competitors, Encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft’s Encarta in many important respects. Neither Britannica’s 200-year history and expert staff nor the Microsoft juggernaut have proved a match for Wikipedia’s ten thousand or so regular contributors, and thousands of occasional helpers. While many criticisms of Wikipedia have been made (as with most things, the most comprehensive source for such criticisms is Wikipedia, none has really dented either Wikipedia’s credibility or its growth.

Still, as Bismarck is supposed to have said

If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.”

The process by which Wikipedia entries are produced is, in many cases, far from edifying: the marvel, as with democracies and markets, is that the outcomes are as good as they are.

I’ve been active on Wikipedia for several months now, and had some interesting experiences.

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