Et Cetera

Via “Dave Weeden”:http://backword.me.uk/2006/August/why_i_can.html, the “latest moneyspinner”:http://www.sptimes.com/2006/05/06/Tampabay/Scientology_nearly_re.shtml/ to emerge from the “muppet labs”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/12/further-muppet-resistance/ at Scientology HQ in Clearwater, FL:

Under wraps for decades, Super Power now is being prepped for its eventual rollout in Scientology’s massive building in downtown Clearwater. … A key aim of Super Power is to enhance one’s perceptions – and not just the five senses we all know – hearing, sight, touch, taste and smell. Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard taught that people have 57 “perceptics.” … Hubbard promised Super Power would improve perceptions and “put the person into a new realm of ability.”

How much would you pay to receive this marvellous training? Five thousand dollars? Ten thousand? Don’t answer yet! There’s more. The 57 Perceptics (not a brand of tomato sauce or an unsuccessful doo-wop outfit) include Timen Sight [sic], Tasten Colorn Depth [sic], and Personal Size [if you know what I mean].

Asked about Super Power, church spokesman Ben Shaw provided a written statement: “Super Power is a series of spiritual counseling processes designed to give a person back his own viewpoint, increase his perception, exercise his power of choice, and greatly enhance other spiritual abilities.” Shaw would not say how much the program will cost. Upper levels of Scientology training can run tens of thousands of dollars. He declined to provide further insight into Super Power. “It’s not something I’m willing to provide to you in any manner,” Shaw said.

Comic Book Guy Alert! No information will be imparted to you whatsoever until you answer me these questions three, and also sign over the deeds to your house.

Super Power takes “weeks, not months” to complete, said Feshbach. He would not discuss the specific machines and drills that former Scientologists said are used to enhance perceptions. The perceptics portion of Super Power is one of 12 “rundowns” in the full program … Details of Super Power training have been kept secret even from church members. Like much of Scientology training, details aren’t revealed until one pays to take the course.

Notice the 11 extra rundowns that have just been added to the program, of which Super Power Perceptics is only one! _Now_ how much would you pay? Sign up now! Remember, your very willingness to cough up large amounts of cash for this stuff is evidence that you need professional training to heighten your preceptual awareness of the world and the sort of people who live in it.

Then click here.

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Now that there’s something like a ceasefire in Lebanon, I think what needs to happen is for Hezbollah to relocate to the DC area and start firing rockets at suburban homes in the region. This would have the advantage of combining two of “David”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_08_20-2006_08_26.shtml#1156342789 “Bernstein’s”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_08_20-2006_08_26.shtml#1156382394 three main interests in life. I imagine gleeful posts about the sudden drop in housing prices combined with dark suspicions over photos of dead realtors being carried out of the rubble. If the rockets could be launched from the safety of campus free-speech zones, we’d have the trifecta.

I was catching up with a friend recently who, after receiving a Master’s degree, decided to move to a professionally less-than-ideal location for personal reasons. She’s been doing okay by picking up work here and there, but it’s been a long process. She was explaining to me the frustrations of being told that you are overqualified for a job. I could definitely see her perspective and was nodding throughout her desciption of various recent experiences. But after the responses I received to my recent post here about outsourcing advice, I am starting to understand the other side’s position better. A few people emailed me offering their services. The problem is, pretty much all of them seem to be overqualified, which puts me in a difficult position.

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Soon after I moved to the United States in the autumn of 1995, I went to visit a friend in Boston. We went to a pub in Cambridge called — possibly — Grafton Street. It was an early example of the Irish Pub in a Box, sold as a unit and built to look like a slightly heightened version of the real thing back home. On the way I asked whether was like an Irish pub really, or just a poor imitation. “Well,” my friend said, “it’s not too loud, the tables are clean, and you can find the bathrooms. So not like an Irish pub at all.”

“Via Alan Schussman,”:http://www.schussman.com/article/1364/foode-newse I see that a similar thing has arrived in Tucson, just down the road from my office. (Or, if it’s good, just up the road from my old office.) The “website”:http://www.aulddubliner.com/Tucson/ says the pub will “echo the pathos of rural Ireland to a tee,” which does not augur well. [click to continue…]

I am very pleased to be introducing a dear friend, Matthew Bishop, as CT’s guest blogger this week. Matthew is a fellow Fellow of the Twenty First Century Trust (Henry and I are also fellows.). His biog at the Economist tells us that, apart from being ‘Chief Business Writer/American Business Editor’ of that newspaper, Matthew has written several worthy sounding books. I can add to the official blurb that while Matthew was on the Advisors Group of the United Nations International Year of Microcredit 2005 he met and briefed Angelina Jolie on micro-finance. Rmphf!

Also, and perhaps this is where the professionalism of journalists trumps us amateurs, Matthew is a consummate hack (in a good way). Several years ago, Matthew and I were at an after-dinner speech by a former prime minister of a slightly out of the way country. The PM’s heavies all wore Pele style mullets and insisted that the drink stop pouring during his speech. The speech went on and on. Several people nodded off. I believe Matthew snored, but maybe that’s embroidery on my part. I mostly stared into the middle distance and fretted about the lack of booze. The speech abruptly stopped. Our devilishly handsome chair thanked him and asked desperately for questions. Our minds were blank. The silence was painful. Someone gave Matthew a dig. He spluttered awake, took instant stock, and asked a very clever and well-backgrounded question on the politics of that country. What a pro. While others are asleep with drool on their chins, the hack is awake (just) and parlaying a little knowledge into a lot of kudos. That, I said to myself, is a man born to blog.

Over at TAPPED, it being a Friday evening, Michael Tomasky complains about “receipts”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/2006/08/post_1036.html#005644.

bq. What bugs me is receipts. In this town, sales clerks everywhere are ceaselessly forcing sales receipts into your hand. What the hell is this about? I go into a CVS (a horrifying experience under any circumstance). I get a couple things. It comes to $4.38. Do most people really want a receipt for $4.38? Who still goes home and enters $4.38 into a checkbook? I simply cannot believe that 51 percent of consumers really want their receipts for small purchases like this.

He wouldn’t want to be “travelling to Italy”:http://www.iht.com/articles/1992/04/10/rece_0.php any time soon.

bq. It was a classic stakeout: for some time government agents had the Bar Venezia in Stigliano, a small town in Italy’s deep south, under surveillance. This February, as Salvatore, oblivious of the trap about to be sprung, came out into the street the team moved in with cool efficiency. … The crime: dealing a 100-lire bag of popcorn without a scontrino (cash register receipt). The penalty: a 300,000-lire (about $240) fine for the bar owner who had sold the popcorn, and one of 33,000 lire for Salvatore – who had to be bailed out by his father, seeing that he is only 7 years old.

In Italy, if you purchase something, you need to get the receipt and keep it handy for a few minutes. Otherwise, you’re liable to be fined if a member of the Guardia di Finanzia asks you to produce your receipt and you can’t. The rationale is that shopkeepers aren’t liable to ring up purchases and provide receipts if they can get away with it; the cashflows from receiptless purchases are easier to hide from the relentless gaze of the tax inspectorate. Thus, the law tries to force the issue by pressganging citizens into demanding receipts under the threat of (admittedly not very large) fines. It’s a bit of a shock to the system for people brought up on Anglo-American notions of the law (certainly, I found it rather surprising when I found out about it myself).

Update: “Bruce Schneier”:http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/aligning_intere.html has an interesting essay on the ways in which receipts help counter fraud.

Cosma’s review of “Stephen Wolfram”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/, linked to below, says that:

bq. Wolfram refers incessantly to his “discovery” that simple rules can produce complex results. Now, the word “discovery” here is legitimate, but only in a special sense. When I took pre-calculus in high school, I came up with a method for solving systems of linear equations, independent of my textbook and my teacher: I discovered it. My teacher, more patient than I would be with adolescent arrogance, gently informed me that it was a standard technique, in any book on linear algebra, called “reduction to Jordan normal form”, after the man who discovered it in the 1800s. Wolfram discovered simple rules producing complexity in just the same way that I discovered Jordan normal form.

I’m in no sense of the word a mathematician, but I too made a “discovery” in my teenage years, and found out years later that I wasn’t alone – Samuel Beckett, since we’re already talking about him, describes the technique in _Watt_. In Beckett’s words:

bq. In another place, he said, from another place, he might have told this story to its end, told the true identity of Mr Nackybal (his real name was Tisler and he lived in a room on the canal), told his method of cube-rooting in his head (he merely knew by heart the cubes of one to nine, and even this was not indispensable, and that one gives one, and two eight, and three seven, and four four, and five five, and six six, and seven three, and eight two, and nine nine, and of course nought nought).

In other words, each single digit number has an unique cube, and if you know this cube, and do a bit of memorization (e.g. that the numbers 0 to 9 have cubes between 0 and 729, that 10-20 have cubes between 1000 and 8,000, and so on), you can derive the cube roots of quite large sounding numbers very easily (as long as they’re whole numbers). For example, to figure out the cube root of 103,823, the final digit is a 3, which means that the final digit of the cube root is 7, and since 103,823 is between 64,000 (the cube of 40) and 125,000 (the cube of 50), the cube root has to be 47.

I’m presuming that if this trick occurred to me and Beckett independently, it must be common knowledge, but haven’t seen it written up anywhere else. I’d be curious to know if someone else (Martin Gardner???) has described it.

Le Blog Bérubé “last Friday”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/abf_friday_bonus_edition/

bq. I will therefore postpone the next installment of Irish Blogging (Beckett’s _Murphy_ is on tap for Monday) and devote the day to promiscuous linkdumping and an installment of our ever-popular Arbitrary but Fun stuff.

Le Blog Bérubé “yesterday”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/thanks_for_the_memories/

bq. Today was supposed to be Beckett Day on this blog, but we interrupt our brief foray into Irish Literature Blogging to bring you this important Lieberman Bulletin.

I think we’re beginning to get the joke …

Update: and “today”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/blogging/

bq. One more thing while I’m working away on my Beckett post (which I will begin writing real soon, I promise).

…, …, …!

I’m going to Australia in about two months. I’ve been interested in visiting ever since I read Jill Ker Conway‘s Road from Coorain, which was almost 15 years ago.

The reason I’m particularly excited about all this today is because I just received my tourist visa. Via email. Cool. Yes, talk about a good use of IT by government services. I had submitted my application just four days ago. (Anyone want to tear into this regarding security concerns?)

I got very anxious earlier this week when I realized I needed a visa to go to Australia. I feel like I’ve done my fair share of standing in lines for visas at 5am. Luckily, after a bit of browsing I realized that citizens of certain countries could apply for visitor visas online.

I HATE getting tourist visas. I don’t like the process involved in getting student/work visas either, but tourist visas bother me more. I don’t see why Australia needs to know so much about my various medical conditions just to allow me to visit for a week. In any case, being able to fill out the form in my living room without having to run around for x copies of y dimension passport photos made a big difference.

My most frustrating visa experience to date was at the Canadian embassy in NYC a few years ago. It was unbelievable how they treated people. They also sent people home, one after another – after the requisite five hours of standing in the freezing cold, of course – for paperwork that they never stated was required. I decided not to return to Canada until I could go without having to obtain a visa.

Senator Ted Stevens is getting a lot of stick for “his description”:http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/index.blog?entry_id=1512499 of how the Internet works:

bq. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now, Net Neutrality is great and everything, and Stevens is on the wrong side of that issue (and many others), but why all the snickering? Sure, he rambles a bit, and in the long version he accidentally says “an internet was sent by my staff” when he clearly means “an email.” It seems, though, that it’s his saying “tubes” and “a series of tubes” that’s provoking most of the derision. But network nerds the world over regularly refer to the availability of bandwidth in terms of fat or narrow “pipes”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Pipe, which is essentially the same imagery. Odd.

Is “this”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/worldcup06/2006/07/02/zidane_conjures_up_more_magic.html some kind of record?

bq. France began this tournament saddled with worries about the ageing legs at the heart of their team, but they have changed their tune.

We’re just missing a fascist octopus singing its swan song.

Over at “the Valve”:http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/ John Holbo “has an epiphany”:http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/i_have_not_thought_it_worth_while_making_the_small_alterations_deemed_neces/ upon reading the Author’s Note from Stephen Potter’s classic “Lifemanship”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1559212969/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20 (a kind of joke English Bourdieu _avant la lettre_, or vice versa, but that is for another day). Here’s the author’s note:

bq. I have reprinted these lectures more or less as they were delivered. I have not thought it worth while making the small alterations deemed necessary. Any inaccuracies or repetitions must be put down to the exigencies of the platform – to the essential difference between the Written Word, which is inscribed, and the Spoken Word, which is, essentially, speech.

John says: “I was rereading Derrida on “Plato’s Pharmakon”. And then beneath my eye happened to fall the Author’s Note … Imagine the crackle in my brain as I realize: that’s _all_ of Derrida, _right there_. ”

Imagine further, then, the corresponding crackle in _my_ brain. My immediate reaction upon reading John’s post was that Potter is eerily foreshadowing “a different Author’s Note”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674598466/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20 provided by an author with a cult following in some ways not unlike Potter’s — or Derrida’s — own.

bq. In January of 1970, I gave three talks at Princeton University transcribed here. As the style of the transcript makes clear, I gave the talks without a written text, and, in fact, without notes. The present text is lightly edited from the _verbatim_ transcripts; an occasional passage has been added to expand the thought, but no attempt has been made to change the informal style of the original … I hope the reader will bear these facts in mind as he reads the text. Imagining it spoken, with proper pauses and emphases, may occasionally facilitate comprehension.

So, the content of Derrida, the style of Kripke, and both encapsulated in one note.

Just before lunch, I had the following conversation on the phone:

[Phone rings]
KH: Kieran Healy.
Woman: Oh, so you are a man.
KH: Uh, yes, I am.
Woman: This is [someone] at the editorial desk of the _New York Times_. We referred to you as a woman yesterday in a post on our _Opinionator_ blog. We’ll change it now.
KH: Oh, OK.
Woman: Thank you. Goodbye.
KH: Goodbye.

The Opinionator is behind the Times Select Paywall, so I haven’t seen the original reference or the corrected one. Someone else told me yesterday is was a quote from the “Brights post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/25/dim-bulbs/.