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19 December 2001  

World Scrabble Championship 2001

I just found out via Evhead that the World Scrabble Championship 2001 ended a couple of days ago. The defending champion was a Canadian, Joel Wapnick. He went to the final round this time, but finally lost to Brian Cappelletto of the US. The games page lets you view the board at each step of every game. Very interesting stuff for Scrabble aficionados.

One word that I noticed popped up in a couple of games is "gajo". Of course, I couldn't find it in any normal dictionary, but I figured it would be in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. Not there either, and I have the latest edition of that. Alas, this wonderful word I was hoping to play against my Dad (we play using the CD-ROM version over the internet) is found only in the Official Scrabble Words list (OSW), which is apparently used only in certain competitions. The CD-ROM game definitely won't know about it. I might consider trying to play it anyway, but Dad is much better than I at memorizing those 2-, 3-, and 4-letter word lists. He'd probably bust me in a second.

In a bizarre postscript, curious what this word meant, I googled it and found this page. "Gajo" derives from the name "Ghazi," which belonged to "a Mohammadan warrior, a slayer of infidels" who ruled around 1000 AD from his eponymous city, located in—yep, you guessed it—Afghanistan.

11:32 PM |

Zwicker on "Terrorism"

Looks like someone has been reading his Chomsky. (Via Damian)

02:29 PM |

Why I Am Not a Muslim

Why I Am Not a Muslim looks interesting. According to Chris Mooney of the American Prospect:

[it] makes Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses look like bush-league blasphemy. A dense treatise modeled after Bertrand Russell's famous 1927 essay "Why I Am Not a Christian," the work presents a strident historical, moral, and philosophical indictment of Islam and advocates not just a firm separation of mosque and state but outright atheism.

The irony of fundamentalist Christians purchasing this atheistic tome is not lost on [Ibn] Warraq [the author], who comments, "The Christian right will find my book extremely embarrassing."

01:55 PM |

Chomsky Exposed

I was introduced to Noam Chomsky's ideas ten years ago in a York University Socialist Indoctrination—um, I mean Social Sciences—class. I remember being amazed at the lunacy of his conspiracy theories, and struck by the paucity of evidence backing them up. As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Chomsky, however, seems content to suggest and imply evidence where none exists. Or, just make things up. Here's a nice article exposing and analyzing some of his lies and distortions regarding the war. (Via andrewsullivan.com)

08:09 AM |

18 December 2001  

Roolaart on Winer vs. Locke

harryroolaart.com has a play-by-play account—complete with color commentary—of the Winer vs. Locke Microsoft debate I mentioned a while back.

08:42 PM |

17 December 2001  

Eva Cassidy

Rosie O'Donnell had Tim Allen on today promoting his new movie Joe Somebody. Not being a huge Tim Allen fan, I was preparing to tune out as they rolled a clip. But I was stopped short when I heard the background music: Eva Cassidy's "Songbird".

I discovered Eva Cassidy about a year ago and was just floored by her gorgeous voice and her way with a song. Her cover of Sting's "Fields of Gold" is shiver-inducing, as is her treatment of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow". She makes you forget anyone else ever sang those songs. Eva Cassidy died in 1996 at age 33, never having had any commercial success.

Hearing "Songbird," I checked out the main site for Eva Cassidy information and found that the Songbird album hit Number 1 on the UK charts back in March and remains hovering near 50th position today. Incredible. I hope it's just the beginning of her music's climb to the stature it deserves.

10:38 PM |

Drivel From Bifurcated Rivets

Bifurcated Rivets points to the NSA museum site, which mentions the National Vigilance Park. The NSA says:

The Park honors the many aerial reconnaissance crews who lost their lives in the performance of their duties. The Park currently hosts two displays; one dedicated to a C-130A which was downed by Soviet fighters over Soviet Armenia on 2 September 1958, and a U.S. Army RU-8D dedicated to those who served in the Army Airborne Intelligence program during the Cold War.

...amazing the double standards here. The spies who get shot down by Russians whilst invading their airspace are hnoured, but if they caught any Russians doing the same they would be evil scum!

11:28 AM |

Lileks Doubleheader

Lileks has two pieces up today! The bleat covers his failure to get a job due to the diversity police and the rant dissects Ted Rall's "We Lost the War" column.

09:46 AM |

16 December 2001  

Philosophical Health Check

Just what we all needed: another quiz! This one (from the same guys as this one) purports to "identify tensions or contradictions (a Tension Quotient) between various beliefs that you have." I have a very low 7% tension quotient. In only one pair of questions did they detect a contradiction:

You agreed that:
The environment should not be damaged unnecessarily in the pursuit of human ends
But disagreed that:
People should not journey by car if they can walk, cycle or take a train instead

11:35 PM |

Kottke's "Exhausive" Social Criticism List

Jason Kottke points to what he calls an "absolutely exhaustive list of articles on social criticism." Well, if you're a technophobic, anti-capitalist, anti-individualist, environmentalist, anti-business, anti-science, anti-American animal rightist, then yes, it will probably be all you'll ever need on the topic. The rest of us will have to keep looking, I suppose. (I did like the Megway spoof, though.)

10:17 PM |

The Golden Ocean

I finished Patrick O'Brian's The Golden Ocean this past week. To be honest, the adventure-on-the-high-seas genre has never attracted me too much, but when the author died a couple of years ago, there were so many positive things said about his books that I made a point of picking up one. The unread pile here is very high, so The Golden Ocean just recently made it to the top.

This book is not one in his more famous Aubrey/Maturin series. It predates those novels and, in fact, was the very first sea novel O'Brian ever wrote. The book is about Commodore Anson's circumnavigation of the globe starting in 1740, a very rough voyage, with only one of the initial eight ships surviving the entire trip. The story is told through the eyes of Peter Palofox, a boy who, along with his friend Sean Courtney, sets out from his Irish village to join the British Navy.

Sean was my favorite character. He's a simple kind of fellow, but he knows what he values and fights hard for it. Here's a bit from the book showing what I mean. Peter and Sean are discussing a Spanish galleon that they hope to attack and thereby earn a share of the booty:

"Where is this ship, Peter, tell me true?" cried Sean, pinning Peter's arm. "She is somewhere between this and the East," replied Peter, pleased at having so powerfully attentive an audience. "So we must rush over that old mountainy New World," said Sean gazing eastwards to Panama. "The Dear knows it will be the weary road with all that silver on our backs, but what is a mountain, and what is the load at all —" "Wisha, it is not that way, Sean, my dear," said Peter. "The East is in the west here, because the world is a ball, and we the other side of it." "For shame, now, your honour," said Sean reproachfully, still staring across the sea. "To make a game of a poor ignorant fellow ... is no sport at all for your father's son." "But the world is round," said Peter. "It is not," said Sean. "How can you say such a wicked thing? Fie." "But it is," cried Peter, "and if we go on, we shall come back to where we began." "Of course we shall," replied Sean, "but that is because it is shaped like a cheese. You may go round, as Loegaire did: but you may not go up or down forever or you will fall off the ends .... But for all love let us not be gossiping like a pair of old cats in the sun—where is she for sure, this beautiful ship?" "By now," said Peter, considering, "she may be somewhere between 150 and 140 degrees of longitude west." "Then why do you sit there, man alive?" cried Sean. "Why do we squander the minutes? Why?" he cried springing to his feet, "do we let those false yellow dogs gloat over my five hundred pounds—and your honour's share, too, which is far greater, as justice demands, for are you not the learned man of the ocean? Why do we sit admiring the turtles? Come, we will tell the Commodore how it is the way we must sail on the instant."

I gave up looking up all the unfamiliar nautical terms a few pages into the book, but I don't think that diminished the enjoyment too much. I was engrossed with story — the setbacks (many) and the triumphs (few) — and also with the depiction of Peter and Sean's strong friendship. There were both tear- and cheer-inducing moments along the way. Bottom line: a great read, and I'm sure I'll be adding more O'Brian to that towering to-read pile.

09:38 PM |

11 December 2001  

Google Newsgroup Search Out of Beta

Everyone will be blogging this, but: Google's newsgroups search is out of beta, and their archive goes back to the very beginning. Their timeline of notable firsts is fascinating. Here's a less interesting first. (Via MetaFilter)

Update: Another interesting query.

11:42 AM |

5 December 2001  

Morality Play

From TPM Online comes Morality Play:

In this activity you will be presented with 19 different scenarios. In each case, you will be asked to make a judgment about what is the morally right thing to do. When you have answered all the questions, you will be presented with an analysis of your responses which should reveal some interesting things about your moral framework and how it compares to others who have completed the activity.

The first thing that strikes me is how all the questions ask about your level of responsibility to other people. "What is your level of obligation to someone else in situation X?" is the form of most questions. And all the scenarios concentrate on what effects your actions will have on others.

You pass someone in the street who is in severe need and you are able to help them at little cost to yourself. Are you morally obliged to do so?

You are able to help some people. Unfortunately, you can only do so by harming other people...

You are contacted by a refugee group which desperately needs somewhere to house a person seeking asylum who is being unjustly persecuted in a foreign country....

Every moral issue these guys could think of involves how you treat other people. In other words, altruism is taken for granted. It's some one else's well-being that should be your standard of value. There were no questions concentrating on your well-being, what choices you would make about your career or family when you alone are the main person affected by your actions. What level of "obligation" you have to yourself in a particular situation is a question that does not occur to the TPM folks. Either that or they consider it outside the realm of morality.

The second thing I notice is a related bias in their scoring method of "moral parsimony." As they describe it,

Moral frameworks can be more or less parsimonious. That is to say, they can employ a wide range of principles, which vary in their application according to circumstances (less parsimonious) or they can employ a small range of principles which apply across a wide range of circumstances without modification (more parsimonious).

But look at one of the things they use to gauge parsimony: family relatedness:

In this category, we look at the impact of family loyalty and ties on the way in which moral principles are applied. The idea here is to determine whether moral principles are applied without modification or qualification when you're dealing with sets of circumstances and acts that differ only in whether the participants are related through family ties to the person making the judgement.

(For what it's worth, my parsimony score was a higher than average 80% which they evaluate as follows: "you have utilised a somewhat smaller range of moral principles than average in order to make judgements about the scenarios presented in this test, and that you have, at least on occasion, judged aspects of the acts and circumstances depicted here to be morally irrelevant that other people consider to be morally relevant.")

11:22 PM |

Hoff Sommers Told to Shut Up

Kevin pointed me to this interesting article on how Christina Hoff Sommers got some pretty rough treatment recently from more of those tolerant leftists.

CSAP official Linda Bass summarily interrupted, and commanded Sommers to end her talk. Minutes later, as Sommers was forced by a hostile crowd to defend her claim that scientific studies ought to be used to help evaluate the effectiveness of government drug-prevention programs, Professor Jay Wade, of Fordham University's Department of Psychology — an expert on "listening skills" — ordered Sommers to "shut the f*ck up, bitch," to the laughter of the others in attendance.

08:55 PM |

BerstAlert

ALERT! Dave Winer says he's debating "some Ayn Rand guy" tonight on Jesse Berst's radio show. The description from the show's web site:

How Microsoft Is Destroying the Free World. Gotta hand it to Microsoft. First it tramples all its competitors. Then it kicks the government's butt and escapes virtually scott-free from the anti-trust conviction. Now it is using its monopoly profits to invade several new markets. Some experts say this is a good thing. Others warn that Microsoft is stifling innovation. We'll hear both sides tonight.

UPDATE: The "Ayn Rand guy" is Dr. Edwin Locke. Should be good. (Thanks to Betsy for the detective work.)

06:20 PM |

4 December 2001  

Travis

Straight men may move on to the next entry while the rest of us enjoy this. I'd somehow managed to escape seeing these ads. The attached article also introduced me to my new favorite putdown: "dumb as a box of Triscuits."

07:34 PM |

Worthwhile Canadian Weblog?

I wonder if this place will ever be called a Worthwhile Canadian Weblog? I hope not. Come to think of it, though, that's a great name for one.

12:56 PM |

Lard thunderin' Jesus, by!

Lard tunderin' Jesus, by! I just discovered the most excellent blog of fellow East-Coaster Damian Penny of Corner Brook, Newfoundland. It's called Daimnation!. He even shares my love of Christie Blatchford, one of the few columnists (if not the only one) who can make me laugh and cry, often in the same column.

10:17 AM |

3 December 2001  

Boffin

Fun word of the day: boffin.

11:56 AM |

2 December 2001  

Goldstein to Gay Right: You're Enemy #1

Speaking of leftists who tolerate no dissent, the Village Voice's Richard Goldstein thinks the ideas promoted by "gay right" writers like Andrew Sullivan are "the most dangerous thing" faced by gay people today. And he urges activists to "speak out against them" and "combat their ideas."

This according to an article by Jennifer Vanasco. Vanasco reports on a speech given by Goldstein in which he explained his view that these gay conservatives share inferior "masculinist" values (e.g., militaristism, aggression) as opposed to the superior feminist values (e.g., nurturing). "If these people prevail, the masculinist version of homosexuality will come to dominate the movement.... It is the most dangerous thing we face today, I believe," he is quoted as saying. Is this man on crack? As Vanasco puts it:

The "most dangerous thing"? Think about that. Our country was attacked by fundamentalists, our movement is regularly stormed by the Christian right, yet Goldstein believes that the most dangerous thing our movement faces is Andrew Sullivan?

12:01 AM |

1 December 2001  

Dissenting Voices

It's disturbing how dissenting voices are being squelched so thoroughly by the establishment these days. Anyone who has an opinion outside the mainstream is vilified and ridiculed mercilessly. It's a situation that makes you almost afraid to speak up in defense of alternative ideas.

I am, of course, talking about how any criticism of environmentalist orthodoxy is met with outrage and harsh denunciation from the greens. (What's that? You thought I meant something else? Sorry for the confusion.)

The list of beleaguered questioners of the status quo includes:

• Julian Simon, author of The Ultimate Resource. As an Amazon reviewer says, "Julian Simon was vilified in his life by the vocal ecology campaigners (special and dishonorable mention should be made of the egregious Paul Erhlich, he of the Population Bomb and other wholly fictitious disasters). Why did Simon attract this venom from people who dub themselves 'scientists'? Simply this: he dared to challenge the orthodoxy that human beings are an ecological cancer that is busy raping the planet and drowning in its own filth."


• John Stossel, ABC News journalist whose specials and 20/20 pieces seek to explode accepted myths, including environmental ones. Stossel got himself into hot water again this past summer with his "Tampering With Nature" special. It included a segment showing how schools are indoctrinating kids with environmentalist ideology. Parents who'd previously given permission for their children to be interviewed retracted their consent when they realized that the show would be using their statements to criticize environmentalism rather than promote it. Predictably, Stossel has been widely condemned for his temerity. (Others see it differently.)
  
• Art Robinson and his Access To Energy newsletter. The usually iconoclastic Andrew Sullivan recently took a swipe at an AtE article describing how the "demonization of asbestos, a very useful and safe substance" contributed to an increased death toll in the WTC atrocity.

Bjorn Lomborg is merely the latest to get himself into trouble by daring to dispute the validity of the science upon which environmental alarmists base their calls for drastic controls on industry. Lomborg is an interesting case, however, because he started out as a member of that mainstream he now finds himself being pilloried by. Once a member of Greenpeace, he began writing his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, with the intent of debunking the aforementioned Julian Simon. As described in an interview with Tech Central Station's James K. Glassman, in researching environmental data in order to refute Simon's claims, Lomborg instead found that the data largely supported them. "Wait a minute," he said to himself. "Why is it that [the statistical information] just does not match up with what we usually think?"

But as a more recent TCS article points out:

Suggesting to ideological environmentalists that the natural world is not about to collapse under the assault of a greedy and heedless humanity is akin to telling a convention of Southern Baptist preachers that gambling, drinking and dancing are not sins.

The World Resources Institue and the scientific journal Nature, among others, have come out with press releases and reviews harshly critical of Lomborg's book. There is even an Anti-Lomborg website. The site features a prominent picture of Lomborg after being hit with a pie at a bookstore appearance, along with a press release that explains:

Pie-man Mark Lynas said he was unable to ignore Lomborg's comments on climate change. "I wanted to put a Baked Alaska in his smug face," said Lynas, "in solidarity with the native Indian and Eskimo people in Alaska who are reporting rising temperatures, shrinking sea ice and worsening effects on animal and bird life."

But the TCS article does a good job of showing that Lomborg's scholarship is solid and that it's the environmental establishment that is blinded by a fervor that brooks no opposition to its dogma. The religious parallel is echoed in an heroic quote from Lomborg. Asked if he considered giving up when his research started showing that his initial theories were wrong, he answers:

No, not at all. That's why I'm an academic; I want to find out what is true. It's much more fun to be right on a controversial issue than to be right on a trivial issue. It's much more fun to say the sun is in the center of the universe, when everybody thinks the Earth is the center of the universe, than going around saying the Earth is round today, when everybody knows it is round.

Let's hope that one day soon our modern-day Galileos get the respect they deserve.

02:31 PM |