“This”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004576.html is a nice story. The latest issue of Southwest Airlines’ inflight magazine features some “recommended diversions”:http://spiritmag.com/clickthis/8.php. They include the usual summer books, movies and music, and a plug for “Language Log”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/ as blog reading. Academic blogs have come a long way if they’re being recommended in inflight magazines. Now we only have to get them to be promoting other academic blogs the same way.

I’ve been seeing a lot of references to Language Log around the web recently, particularly to their prescriptivist-bashing posts. I particularly liked this attack on the “alleged rules for using less and fewer”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/, complete with examples from King Alfred’s Latin translations. It’s an example of how academic blogs can make an impact on public life not by dumbing down their work, or by stretching to find alleged applications, but simply by setting out their work in a clear and accessible way. Or, to bring things back to a favourite theme of mine, of why academics should get credit for successful blogs not necessarily as examples of research, but as examples of service to the community. Now giving people diversions alongside summer blockbusters isn’t quite the same kind of service as solving their medical or social problems, but it is a service, and a praiseworthy one.

I read the other day that a recent Gallup poll found that about 83 percent of Americans felt interracial dating was OK, and I believe this was a new high-water mark for this view. There was a degree of understandable concern about the remaining 17 percent, but (some people said) it’s only been forty years since _Loving vs Virginia_. And, as it turns out, it could be worse. The idea that the Earth orbits the Sun has had rather longer to catch on, but my colleague Omar Lizardo over at OrgTheory brings us new data from this year’s General Social Survey on the popularity of _that_ idea. It turns out that almost three quarters of Americans now subscribe to the Galilean view. Click through to Omar’s post for data on the percentage of Heliocentric-Positive Americans who think the Earth takes a year to orbit the sun, as opposed to a day, a month, or some other time period.

One of my students, herself surprised to discover the left-wing of Christianity, lent me Shane Claiborne’s Irresistible Revolution to find out what I thought. I read it on a flight into Philadelphia, for a short stay in which I knew every minute of my time was booked, and became increasingly frustrated that I couldn’t take some time out to go and visit the Simple Way community, just to tell them how much I liked the book. And, although I know that it is impractical to demand as much of most people as Shane Claiborne and his community demand of themselves, and that there is a place for many different roles in the world, the book was deeply humbling, at least for me at this stage in my life.

It’s so hard to write about the book mainly because it is not written for me or, I guess, for most CT readers. Claiborne is not bringing us atheists the good news about Christ, but bringing the not-so-good news about what Christianity demands to his fellow Christians. I’ve looked all over the place at blog posts and reviews, and almost all are by Christians (and, interestingly, almost all are positive)

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Remember that weird spam we were recurrently getting in our index.php file? I spent several days looking for the source of it, to no avail. Turns out that our host, DreamHost, had been hacked and several thousand account passwords obtained. These were used — in our case I guess more than once, but details are still extremely hard to find — to access the index files of many sites. DreamHost have apparently sent out a letter to affected customers, but we were affected and haven’t heard a word, and as yet there’s nothing on their website, either. Here’s another person who was affected. All very frustrating. We’ve changed our shell passwords and all that, so I suppose we’ll just wait for some details and an explanation from DreamHost.

_Update_: I wrote to DH techsupport this morning, and just received a response. They say, in part:

bq. We had not sent out the emails regarding dedicated machines yet, as we
were performing additional research. Those emails will be going out very
shortly. I do apologize for the delay, and discovering this on another
blog. To secure your account you will need to change your FTP password. The
logins that we were noticing tended to be automated, and frequently would
overwrite the same files repeatedly. While perhaps not comforting, this
does mean that they generally weren’t looking for personally identifiable
information or uploading other hacking scripts that could serve nefarious
purposes. … Again we are very sorry for the trouble this may
have caused; the email will be going out shortly.

So if they were aware that users with dedicated as well as shared servers were affected, maybe they’re weren’t undercounting the number of people hit by this. But if so then it wasn’t really true when they said all affected customers had been notified.

I heard via Desmond Carrington that Dick Vosburgh died several weeks ago. He wrote for…well, just about everyone, even, it turns out, John Cleese. In recent years his voice has become familiar to listeners to all those cheap documentaries about the Comedy Greats that Radios 2 and 4 put out. There’s a nice obit in the Independent here. I liked these bits:

Only occasionally did Vosburgh perform himself. “I was cast in a TV series,” he said in a 1960s interview, “as an obnoxious comedian, very vulgar and unfunny. That was OK until I saw the cast list. It said ” Dick Vosburgh as himself”.

and

Dick was the warmest and most generous of men, but occasionally there would be someone who was difficult to work with – [the notoriously difficult and ungenerous — HB] Arthur Askey for instance. If you told Dick later that you were going to be working with such a person again, he would say, “Be sure to give them my loathe.”

A review of Ian McDonald’s new novel _Brasyl_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/s?kw=Ian%20McDonald%20Brasyl&PID=29956, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591025435?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1591025435 ,first 48 pages available “here”:http://www.pyrsf.com/chapters/Brasyl/Brasyl.htm), as a taster for a longer essay which will appear sooner or later (more on that anon). I’ve written “briefly”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/28/hugo-nominees/ about McDonald’s previous book on India, _River of Gods_. As I said of that book:

McDonald has been engaged in a very interesting effort over the last ten years to re-imagine science fiction from the perspective of the developing rather than the developed world,… I’m not sure whether the book is (or even tries to be) authentic in any strong sense of the word (I’d be fascinated to hear the opinion of anyone who’s from India and has read it), but it’s exciting, thought-provoking, and (once you come to grips with the many viewpoints that McDonald uses), very entertaining.

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Bush has gone wrong by steering too close to Crunchy Condom

Taken in isolation, a suggestive phrase. From this portion of Ross Douthat’s exchange with Jonah Goldberg.

I was going to venture more substantive critique, but I have to go to dinner. Perhaps more to follow later. (Goldberg’s follow-up. Douthat’s response.)

Our Harry writes:

We had a scare last year; our eldest was warned that she might need very expensive orthodontistry in order to be able to be a fully-paid up participant in the ideology of perfect teeth.

It seems to me that the answer to this problem is to combine it with themes we have seen of late. Heterodontics will be like heterodox economics (heteronomics, if you don’t mind thorough butchery of etymology), but about your teeth. Then, if things get really bad, just go to a freakodontist. (Since poor dental care is a problem in America, as Harry points out, maybe you could get some right-wing thinktank money to sponsor a study of the surprising value, to the poor, of freakodontics.)

I’ve just returned from a thankyou event held by the Leukaemia Foundation of Queensland for participants in the World’s Greatest Shave, for which my son and I shaved our beards (here’s the result, and many readers of CT and my blog gave generous donations. Together we raised over $6000, which was in the top ten efforts for the entire state.

The thankyou event was both interesting (I’ve never seen so many women with the identical haircut in one place) and inspirational (talks from leukaemia patients, family members and fundraisers really brought home how much this effort means). The $3.6 million raised this year has enabled the Foundation to clear the debt on this new accommodation facility for families of leukemia patients. This is a huge boon. Thanks again to everyone who contributed.

“Linda Hirshman”:http://www.tnr.com/blog/openuniversity?pid=111777 pronounces from on high on how opinionators in the Mommy Wars should use data:

What’s the difference between our decisions to publish? Well, Morgan Steiner knew about the studies that showed the opposite of what she was saying. Not quibbles at the margin; the opposite conclusions. She even cited the author of one of them in her article. Her distinction was risible and easily falsified. But more to the point, her report was not only factually unreliable, it was also dangerous. Her “good news” could lead women on the fence to quit, thinking they could always go back. Back, yes, but not back to the future.

Good for Linda! But it reminds me that CT never linked to this “Linda Hirshman thread”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=02&year=2007&base_name=post_2671 in which she gets comprehensively pwned by Mark Schmitt for herself abusing data in the cause of a convenient story. Mark sums it up (rather more politely than I would have done) “thus”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=02&year=2007&base_name=post_2671#comment-2229788.

Linda, on one more point — you say: “the Don’t Know argument, btw, had you bothered to look, has been definitively refuted by Luskin and Bullock, whom I cite for that point in my post. You know you can learn a lot from reading your adversary’s writing before you respond” …So because of my own dedication to actual facts, I made my way through this paper. Lo and behold, just a single mention of gender in the entire paper! … This is not a “definitive rebuttal” in any sense — they concede the point. … I hadn’t previously questioned your three paragraphs on the data, but I’m beginning to think that you have simply strip-mined the academic literature for evidence that proves your point, rather than evaluated it seriously..

To which Linda’s “devastating comeback”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=02&year=2007&base_name=post_2671#comment-2231272 is:

Mark, we’re even boring me. Have a nice weekend.

If I’d ever misused data that badly, and been caught at it, I think I’d have wanted to disappear into a hole for a year or two. I certainly wouldn’t start pronouncing anathemas on my opponents for ignoring inconvenient evidence (a sin to be sure, but a rather more venial one than the one that I myself would have been guilty of). But then, I’m not Linda Hirshman.

Emerson (not our John) writes:

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

But, in honor of this panel from Tales of Woodsman Pete, with full particulars [highly recommended!] …

… I thought I would recommend a few good comics about people with powers. [click to continue…]

I’m confused. According to the many media reports, the UCU, successor to the AUT and NATFE and the main trade union representing British academics, “has voted to reinstitute the boycott of Israeli universities”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/worldwide/story/0,,2091769,00.html that the AUT finally rejected last year. But in fact, _as far as I can tell_ , the UCU Congress has done no such thing. Rather it has passed some rather wooly pro-Palestinian resolutions and has ordered its executive to promote discussion of the boycott at branches over the next year or so. The practical effect of this in the world is at best close to zero. In fact it is almost certainly negative: no-one actually gets boycotted but the worst elements of the Israeli right (and the likes of Alan Dershowitz) get a renewed opportunity to portray themselves as victims.

Aside from the general stupidity of the boycott campaign (well “summed-up”:http://unspeak.net/exclusion-wall/ by Steven Poole last year), it promises to consume a lot of energy in fruitless arguments that go nowhere. Last time this happened “I stood up on my hind legs at my local AUT branch and opposed the pro-boycott motion”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/03/ariel-sharon-and-the-aut-boycott/ . I’ll vote against it again this time, when the opportunity presents itself. I have to say though, that I’m a lot less motivated to oppose the boycotters than I was. They are just as wrong as they ever were, but I’ve been sufficiently disgusted by Israeli conduct over the past year (especially in Lebanon) not to feel all that much enthusiasm for making a big effort. And then there’s the fact that when I did speak up against the boycott I received a load of offensive email. Normally, you’d expect to get such email from the people on the other side, telling you what a horrible sellout you’ve been. But I didn’t receive a single bit of hostile email from a pro-Palestinian persepective. Rather, I got a good deal from Likudniks and their American friends who mistakenly assumed that if I opposed the boycott I must share their vile perspective on Arabs generally and Palestinians in particular. (No thanks. Go away! I don’t want email from people like you.)

“Martha Nussbaum’s article in Dissent”:http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=811 puts the case against the boycott pretty well. However there’s one pro-boycott argument that she doesn’t address and which I’ve not heard a good reply to. It doesn’t, for me, outweigh the arguments against, but I do think it weakens the often-put “double standards” argument that anti-Israel measures unfairly discriminate against Israel since there are far worse countries in the world. (This is often accompanied by the further claim that because Israel is picked out whilst other countries are worse, the motive of the boycotters must be sinister and is probably anti-semitic.) The argument is this: that the Israeli perpetrators of injustice are far more vulnerable to outside pressure than, say, the Chinese or the Russians are. Measures taken against Israel therefore stand a better chance of being effective. The Russian treatment of the Chechens or the Chinese treatment of the Tibetans may indeed be worse than the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. But we can take action _now_ to force the Israelis to negotiate and to end the injustice of the occupation, whereas we cannot act with similar prospect of success against Russia or China. Obviously that argument depends on a number of facts about the way the world is. And those facts are highly contestable. But it doesn’t depend (to the contrary!) on any claim that Israel is uniquely or even especially evil or unjust.

… is a term from chess meaning compulsion to move. Most of the time, it’s an advantage to have the next move, but there are situations, particularly in the endgame when you’d much rather it was the other player’s turn.

So it has been with climate change, at least for some players in the game. The big divide in the negotiations for the Kyoto protocol was between the more developed countries, which had created the problem and continued to produce most emissions of greenhouse gases, and the less developed, which were the main source of likely future growth. The agreement reached was that the developed countries would make the first round of cuts, reducing emissions below 1990 levels* by 2012, after which a more comprehensive agreement would require contributions from everyone.

As soon as the Bush Administration was elected though, it denounced this as unfair and said the US would do nothing unless China and India moved first. The Howard government, until then a fairly enthusiastic proponent of Kyoto, immediately echoed the Bush line. Meanwhile, not surprisingly, China and India stuck to the agreement they’d signed and ratified.

The resulting standoff suited lots of people. Most obviously, while the Bushies were denouncing the unfair advantages given to China and India, they were also pushing as hard as they could to ensure that they and other developing countries did nothing that would facilitate a post-Kyoto agreement. And of course plenty of people in China and India were happy enough not to have to take any hard decisions on the topic.

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I know I speak as a Mac user and thus by definition in thrall to the Steve Jobs RDF — though I am not in the market for a phone right now — but looking at these new commercials, it does seem as though the iPhone is going to be a license for Apple to print money. When was the last time you saw a cellphone ad that just went through some of the things the phone could do? And what phone on the market does these things in remotely as integrated and elegant a fashion? It seems like the main unknown is the physical stuff: will it scratch, will the screen get greasy, and all that.