Saturday, October 25, 2003 :::
New on the web: digitized versions of early printings of the Canterbury Tales.
::: posted by Steven at 11:30 AM
(0) comments
Friday, October 24, 2003 :::
Jonah Goldberg is telling us what he thinks of France:Because the war was unpopular with many liberals, it's assumed that France's actions are informed by the same principles as, say, Howard Dean's. I think Dean's positions on the war are scandalously dim-witted and ill-advised. But he still wants what is best for America and even Iraq. It is impossible to say the same thing about France. Even Kucinich, who wants to pull out of Iraq, probably really believes his position would be in America's interest. Francesca thinks we shouldn't have gone in, but that it would be a mistake to pull out, which I consider a respectable-but-mistaken position. Kucinich would be downright dangerous, but more naive than malicious. Unlike France.
::: posted by Steven at 6:26 PM
(0) comments
Colby Cosh has an entry primarily about the sale of his local AAA baseball club -- which is weaseling out of its agreement to lease the ballpark from the city for the next sixteen years, with the city's tacit consent. He concludes:In return for a short-term payoff, which the current members of city council will be permitted to spend in a highly visible way, the city will forgo the future revenue from the lease, which can only politically benefit a bunch of councillors who are now in junior high school.
I'm not all that busted up about losing Triple-A baseball in Edmonton, actually, but I've got a punch in the nose saved up for the next person who tells me the government needs to get involved in certain business enterprises because it offers "a long-term corrective" to the "short-term, bottom-line thinking" of companies who "don't look past the next business cycle" (etc., etc., ad naus.) Punch 'em for me, too, Colby.
::: posted by Steven at 4:27 PM
(0) comments
Yahoo! News - Donors Promise Some $40 Bln in Iraq Aid, Loans:International donors pledged around $40 billion in aid and loans over the next five years to help rebuild war-ravaged Iraq on Friday as the response to a U.S.-led drive for funds smashed expectations. I watched some news on TV last night. When they were talking about this story, it occurred to me -- they should set up a PayPal "tip jar", like so many bloggers have (though we don't), for voluntary contributions by individuals. I'll bet they could get several hundred dollars extra that way, if not more.
::: posted by Steven at 2:47 PM
(0) comments
The stock market, particularly the Nasdaq, has been more chutes than ladders the last few days, and I went to the other room to make a quick check of the television, wondering, "How low can it go?" It turned out they had Jerry Springer turned on in there.I report, you decide.
::: posted by dWj at 1:37 PM
(0) comments
Incidentally, if anyone wants to write a poem that includes the rhyming of something with "solar gales", I'd be quite eager to hear it. Obviously, it ought to include references to aurorae [sic?], radio interference, and/or any other related phenomena, with bonus points for overextending the weather metaphor.
::: posted by dWj at 1:35 PM
(0) comments
The ions from the sun make their way toward us; remember to save your work often, and look to the north for an aurora this evening.If anyone from USA Today comes by, you would have had the link if you didn't have a pop-up ad that gave my computer heartburn. We like our visitors, and try to send them to friendly web pages.
::: posted by dWj at 10:22 AM
(0) comments
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that an experiment conducted by University of Louisville psychologist Michael Cunningham found that while men had a 50/50 chance with a direct approach, their odds fell to 20% when they resorted to clichéd come-ons such as "haven't we met before?" By contrast, women who approached men enjoyed a 90% success rate regardless of what they said. As Prof. Cunningham concluded: "Men are still not hit on nearly as much as they want." This piece of breaking news brought to you by OpinionJournal, and passed along for the opportunity to point out that the danger of truly ... innovative pick-up lines is not that they might fail, but that they might work. Consider whom you want to pick up; you attract flies with honey, so if you don't want flies, you should probably use something else.
::: posted by dWj at 10:17 AM
(0) comments
Thursday, October 23, 2003 :::
We've been emailed evacuation instructions for our building. If you don't know why, and are registered for the Chicago Tribune, read up.
::: posted by dWj at 3:23 PM
(0) comments
More from North Korea:The report, by the United States Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a cross-party monitoring group, cites evidence from eight former inmates.
One described how a guard took a baby away from a woman married to a Chinese and put him in a box nearby. A doctor then explained that since the country was short of food, it should not have to feed the children of foreign fathers. When the box was full of babies, it was taken away and buried, she said. It was not clear whether they were alive or dead at the time.
::: posted by Steven at 2:57 PM
(0) comments
Wednesday, October 22, 2003 :::
The U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea has released a report on conditions. Read the press release, which sums it up.
::: posted by Steven at 5:04 PM
(0) comments
Some Eastern Malaysian states where Parti Islam SeMalaysia is strong want to impose Sharia law, whereby they can stone to death adulterers and so on. Much of The WestTM is opposed, but I think we should keep track of priorities here.The first thing we want from a state is not to send people to blow us up, with not to harbor people to blow us up following very closely on its heels. Complying with basic international rules of state-to-state relationships — broad keeping of agreements and contracts, that sort of thing — comes next. Human rights and, farther down the list, well-constructed democracy, those promote stability, and to the extent they increase the likelihood that the state will continue to be run by a regime that will not lead to our being blown up, etc., those, too, are things we can cheer on. Once the right of exit is granted, though, and a basic rule of law established, I become much more reluctant to use force or even direct pressure to dramatically improve things. Frankly, while I can get myself upset about stoning rape victims, it seems reasonable to me that some people would want to live in a community where women are conservatively dressed and adultery is criminal. It can be (or, in any case, is) argued that a privacy right protects a human right to adultery; at the very least, this isn't terribly low-hanging fruit. If you want to promote global adultery, stick to leadership by example.
::: posted by dWj at 10:22 AM
(0) comments
Tuesday, October 21, 2003 :::
College Football
By the way, NIU is going to lose to Bowling Green this weekend. In other college football news, Princeton finally won a game this past weekend, winning 34-14 against Brown; the Tigers stand a chance against Cornell and Dartmouth later this year, but the other three games can pretty much be written off. The Ivy League is going to be Harvard, Yale, and Penn; one wants to cheer against Penn because, besides the obvious, it would make the Harvard-Yale game at the end of the season that much bigger. (N.B. The Ivy League champion is not automatically B.C.S. bowl eligible.)Penn hosts Yale this weekend.
::: posted by dWj at 5:32 PM
(0) comments
Barbara Bush has a new book out, and a portrait at MSNBC.To ward off libel suits, [her husband] says, “the publisher had to take a lot out.”
::: posted by dWj at 3:41 PM
(0) comments
How idiomatic is the Arabic language? (Steve?) Would intelligence analysts with the simplest imaginable software, translating word-for-word, have trouble understanding Arabic intercepts?
::: posted by dWj at 3:39 PM
(0) comments
The first BCS ratings have been released, and NIU is tenth. Remember that the computers have been forbidden to use margin of victory data, so that Oklahoma would record exactly the same performance, as far as they can tell, against NIU's competition. Billingsly explicitly penalizes teams from non-major conferences — if that were well publicized, the normal BCS critics would have a lot of fun with it — and the NYTimes, though tight-lipped about its methodology, presumably uses the same heuristic of severely penalizing a team with a weak schedule. In general, though, the computers with nothing but win/loss and schedule to go on have Northern Illinois in the top ten, while those that use margin of victory place the school around twentieth, which is probably closer to the truth than even the #12 ranking the AP has assigned.
::: posted by dWj at 12:33 PM
(0) comments
Monday, October 20, 2003 :::
At the Corner, Jonathan Adler writes:Law professor and sometime Cornerite Randy Barnett notes a Life magazine story about how the taste of victory may be turning sour. The date? January 7, 1946. At the time many thought America was losing the peace in Europe, and we all know how that turned out. Come to think of it, they kind of had a point.
::: posted by Steven at 10:17 PM
(0) comments
How FDR exacerbated the great depression.
::: posted by dWj at 3:21 PM
(0) comments
I have registered with PayPal, now owned by Ebay, and got a "please update your PayPal information" message once; it turned out it was sending information back to paypa1.com. I don't know whether it did any good, but I reported it to PayPal.
::: posted by dWj at 9:24 AM
(0) comments
Sunday, October 19, 2003 :::
I just got a couple of emails with the subject line, "Please update your e-Bay account information". In the body of the message is a link to a web page with an eBay logo and a form asking for information. There are several reasons I consider this to be at least moderately suspicious.- I received it twice, in quick succession.
- It was sent to a mailing list I'm on (not to me personally).
- Said mailing list happens to get a lot of spam.
- I have never registered with eBay.
Finally, the URL looks a little bit like it refers to an eBay machine(http://scgi.ebay.comindexupdateyourinformationsecure@211.35.244.54:199/index.htm), but it isn't really at eBay. It appears to be a site collecting eBay user information from the gullible.
If you aren't careful about these things, here's how you should be: if you get email like this, and you think there's a possibility it's legit, don't follow the link. Instead, open a new browser window, go to www.ebay.com yourself, and update your account info through the usual process.
::: posted by Steven at 3:48 AM
(0) comments
|
