Who says there are no benefits to blogging? If it wasn’t for CT then I would never have met Matt Gordon and would never have been invited to his wonderful Seder last night. Thanks, Matt!
We talked about lots of things, among them how most Haggadahs lack enough information for a newcomer to really get the Passover story while making the central role of He Who Has No Name unmistakable (even while the rest of the story might remain a bit blurry and I don’t just mean because of the amount of wine consumed).
But we also talked about other things, for example: how one comes to name machines in one’s lab. Perhaps not surprising given my previous post, the machines in my lab have Star Wars references. This idea dates back to the machines in the offices of one of my college mentors: Joe had a big black Next machine that was called Darth and the little white Mac I used was called Yoda. So when I started populating my lab with machines I named the white one Yoda and the two black ones Darth and Vader. [click to continue…]
Commemorating the 30th Anniversary of Star Wars, the USPS is coming out with Star Wars stamps in May. Woohoo! Limited edition express mail envelopes will also be available and this fact has me contemplating what I should send to myself in express mail. Yes, it’s a great marketing ploy, I am sold.
The site is collecting votes for the stamp that will “reign above all others”.
And now, for only the second time in its 256-year-history, the U.S. Postal Service invites you to vote for your favorite stamp. The winning stamp will become its own stamp sheet.
Cast your vote today. C-3PO seems to be ahead, which is not a horrible choice, but personally I’d rather see either Yoda or Darth Vader win.
More on my dedication to Star Wars in another post.
Thanks to Scott Feldstein for the above photo. Apparently there’s such a mailbox in Palo Alto as well, I’ll have to look for it.
Over at his “other digs”:http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2007/04/depth_takes_a_holiday.html#more, Scott responds to Ann Althouse’s YouTube video of herself watching American Idol, by Youtubing a video of himself watching Ann Althouse watching American Idol. Ladies and gentlemen; place your bets on how close we can get to infinite regress before it’s all over …
Update: “Tim Lambert and his dog respond”:http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/04/i_join_the_vlogging_craze.php.
The cover story to this week’s issue of The Nation is an article by Christopher Phelps on the new Students for a Democratic Society. I read it in a couple of earlier drafts, and can’t imagine anything more fair to the young people who are being radicalized by the war. As Phelps says, it’s not that they tend to know a lot about the old SDS and want to relive it. They aren’t antiquarians. But “democratic society” just sounds like a good a name for what they want — and they know better than to think they are living in one now. [click to continue…]
Spotted at the “Economist’s Free Exchange blog”:http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2007/03/airlines_and_inequality.cfm :
bq. According to the new tax data, the income gap has widened. This has led to more speculation that we will descend into a Dickensian dystopia full of the have and have nots. I recently experienced this type of reality when I had the opportunity to fly business class on a trans-Atlantic flight.
Possibly this is an attempt at irony by La Galt; possibly the gap between first-class and regular transatlantic passengers really does make her think of _Bleak House_ or _Oliver Twist_ . Either way, there’s a kind of disconnect here that I have trouble getting my head around.
After a moderately funny NPR April Fool’s piece on banning ringtones in New York, this sponsor announcement made me laugh out loud.
On the news headlines that followed, the lead item was that the U.S. was scrambling to complete a huge free trade deal (“the biggest since NAFTA”) with North Korea.
Certainly, if you want info on the baraminological status of kangaroos, you’ll find it in Bozell’s preferred source and not in the liberal-controlled Wikipedia, which characterises the whole business as a pseudoscientific theory.
All of this, and the continuing sales of the Left Behind series, lead me to wonder if this construction effort will actually be successful. Maybe with sufficient will, the wished-for universe will be brought into existence, and the entire Bush support base raptured into it.
In anticipation, I’ll say farewell and good luck. Just don’t expect me to feed the cat.
In response to popular demand (well, a single request from vivian) I’m going to try to do a semi-regular recipe post. I’m aiming for one every couple of weeks or so, but if Eszter, Belle and others join in perhaps we’ll manage weekly. I’m hoping they join in, because my recipes tend to be so be so unhealthy that we’ll kill off the readership.
Today’s recipe is Treacle Tart. Treacle Tart is completely familiar to our British readers, but unheard of by most of our US readers (and I don’t know about the rest of you). If you have a Whole Foods near you you can find Golden Syrup in the syrup section, or, amazingly and very cheaply, at amazon. (It’s also great on pancakes or, if you don’t care what the neighbours think, and I don’t, on toast).
Update: Of course, all our American readers have heard of treacle tart, I apologise. As the last person left in the world who has not read Harry Potter, I didn’t realise that treacle tart had become world famous. This is it, and golden syrup is the key. Now American CT readers can delight their children. Serve with heavy whipping cream, unwhipped. Or, if you dare, Bird’s Custard.
Late last year, I had <a href=”http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i16/16a00801.htm”>lunch with David Horowitz</a> on the <i>Chronicle of Higher Education</i>’s dime, and this world-historical event was noted on <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2006/12/05/horowitz-v-berube/”>this very blog</a>. Alas, not everyone understood what I was trying to do in that little encounter. Moreover, those who did understand my approach, including various CTers, disagreed as to whether I did the right thing. <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2006/12/05/horowitz-v-berube/#comment-181414″>Harry</a> thought I pretty much blew it, whereas <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2006/12/05/horowitz-v-berube/#comment-181433″>Henry</a> thought I took exactly the right tack. Which is fine, really, because as you’ve already gathered, I seem thoroughly incapable of winning universal assent to stuff I say. I’m tempted to blame this on <i>the very structure of language itself</i>, but much of the time it’s my fault; my tactics misfire, I misgauge the occasion. And sometimes people just disagree with me.
But here’s what I was thinking at the time: OK, I’ve agreed to meet David Horowitz. In this context — the <i>Chronicle</i>, as opposed to <i>Hannity & Colmes</i> — this grants Horowitz, and his complaints about academe, a certain legitimacy. My job, therefore, is to contest that legitimacy, and to model a way of dealing with Horowitz that does not give him what he wants: namely, (1) important concessions or (2) outrage. He feeds on (2), of course, and uses it to power the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Massive Persecution Complex he runs out of Los Angeles; and most of the time, we give it to him by the truckload. Liberal and left academics need to try (3), mockery and dismissal, and thereby demonstrate, as I put it <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/its_just_lunch/”>on my blog</a>, that when someone tries to blame tuition increases on Cornel West’s speaking fees, that person needs to be ridiculed and given a double minor for unsportsmanlike bullshit.
Rather worrying news from Ireland where figures from the last quarter of 2006 show that, as expected, new building is declining, but also that exports dropped by 10% when they’d been expected to rise by more than 2%. [click to continue…]
Google Maps has the answer for me if I am headed from Stanford to Budapest. The only part left for me to figure out is how much to subtract for driving from California to Massachusetts and then from France to Hungary. Subtracting that from 31 days 14 hours I should have the answer. Alternatively, I can do a search for Boston to Brest, France and calculate it from that although I don’t get why they’re making me reach the coast at Le Havre since that’s quite a bit of extra swimming. Google Maps estimates that trip at about 29 days 5 hours, which makes me wonder how they got 31 days 14 hours for the other trip.
Hmm.. maybe I’ll stick to flying.
(Skip down to direction #33 on the first map or #9 on the second if this is all too cryptic.)
This is just too funny. John Lott, having had his lawsuit against Steven Levitt and _Freakonomics_ thrown out, has gone and written a knock-off called — I’m not making this up — Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Freaky Theories Don’t. The jacket design is right out of the “David Horowitz playbook”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/22/cover-story/, too.
Presumably it’s blurbed by Mary Rosh. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get back to the final chapters of my two forthcoming books, Greedonomics: A rogue trader shoots first and Fritonomics: Exploring the hidden side of snack foods.
A new “bloggingheads”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=233 between Dan Drezner and meself is up, in which, as the blurb puts it, “Dan and Henry analyze Bh.tv’s new business model and then defy it by failing to yell at each other.” One of the topics we discuss is the economic future of the EU, and Andy Moravcsik’s recent “article”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17659940/site/newsweek/ on it. As a slightly belated EU 50th birthday post, and an addendum to my previous “disagreement with Andy”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/16/not-frightening-the-horses/, I’d like to point to this “brand new paper”:http://www.mpi-fg-koeln.mpg.de/pu/mpifg_dp/dp07-4.pdf (pdf) by Martin Höpner and Armin Schäfer at the Max-Planck Institut in Cologne. The take home point is that the EU’s market integration processes aren’t neutral and technical, as they are often described as being, but are instead highly political, and have adverse consequences for coordinated market economies. This feeds into the EU’s legitimation problems.
Deregulating the economy is a genuinely political decision that cannot be left to independent agents. … Whether the member states need a ‘neo-liberal’ corrective is not for the observer to choose but must be the result of public deliberation and parliamentary decisions – otherwise, the price to pay is a serious democratic deficit. However, instead of a strengthening of input-oriented legitimacy, we witness ongoing – yet increasingly unsuccessful – attempts to de-politicize EU politics. European-level actors transform essentially political matters into apparently technical ones. An extensive interpretation of the ‘four freedoms’ of the European Treaty allows Commission and Court to enforce
liberalization measures juridically. The law shields these attempts from political resistance especially in organized economies.
Which leads me to wonder, after having read Dani Rodrik’s “critique”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/1b13320e-dbb5-11db-9233-000b5df10621.html of the cheerleaders of globalization in the _FT_ yesterday whether the EU isn’t being badly misinterpreted by outside observers, especially in the US. The usual claim that one reads is that the EU’s problems are the problems of creaking economies refusing to modernize, rejecting sensible proposals such as the original, tougher form of the Services Directive etc. But can’t this be interpreted from the other direction? Couldn’t one reasonably argue that the near-stalling of the EU’s market integration process demonstrates how over-strident efforts to deregulate are liable to result in political stalemate and backlash from an increasingly truculent public? In short, can’t the EU’s political problems be interpreted not as a failure of the European social state, but as a demonstration of the political limits of attempts to introduce global deregulation, free trade in services _und so weiter_ without real public discussion?
. (It’s also great on pancakes or, if you don’t care what the neighbours think, and I don’t, on toast).