Nothing to Say and Saying It Loudly

Rice’s Appearance Draws Protests in Boston:

Ms. Rice told students of what she believed to be the five responsibilities of educated people: find your passion, be committed to reason, reject false pride, be optimistic and reject prejudices.

“There is nothing wrong with holding an opinion and holding it passionately,” Ms. Rice said. “But at those times you’re absolutely sure that you are right, go find somebody who disagrees. Don’t allow yourself the easy course of the constant ‘Amen’ to everything you say.”

Committed to reason - hmm.

There is some curious addition going on in this New York Times article:

But say you’ve got a modest music library of 50 songs, a dozen movies, five years of tax returns, several sets of vacation pictures — plus a lot of documents. That would add up to more than 100 gigabytes of data, which amounts to stacks of disks as well as a lot of time and patience identifying the files you want to save and then inserting and ejecting disks during the backup process.

I have over 4,000 songs, 3,000 pictures, 6,500 emails, and 10 years of documents. And all that totals less than 50 gb. So I don’t know where this mysterious figure of 100 gb comes from.

I looked around for someone to complain to, but there was no email address.

In The New Yorker:

I thought I would enjoy buying a human skeleton, but, looking through the shop window, I felt a familiar tug of disappointment. This had nothing to do with any moral considerations. I was fine with buying someone who’d been dead for a while; I just didn’t want to have to wrap him. Finding a box would be a pain, and then there’d be the paper, which would have to be attached in strips because no one sells rolls that wide.

There is an excerpt from the water/land transition chapter from a new book (Intelligent Thought) on science and “intelligent design” at edge.org.

More thoughtful commentary from David Byrne: this time about being in public and fair use. I remember the album cover for Norman Cook’s You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby with the photo of a morbidly obese kid in a shirt reading “I’m #1 So Why Try Harder.” It was the UK release only, as I recall (or at least not the US version, note the different PMRC-style warning).

I saw it in London and thought about getting it there, but I figured I would just wait until I got home, because most CDs are cheaper here than there (Stone Roses singles excepted). I was disappointed to find that the US album art was different.

For posterity, here is the image:

Wired reports on simulations that show present airline boarding schemes are inefficient.

Didn’t I propose a similar method? Ah yes - almost exactly a year ago.

It would be nice to think that there are still Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, but it is hard to have much faith when this is your basis:

Trace back the involvement of the Department of the Interior, Cornell University, the Nature Conservancy and a half-dozen other groups on the ground, and you’ll find that all of them, arguably, owe their presence in Arkansas to a tent-dwelling courthouse dropout taking her guidance from an ivory-bill whisperer on a cellphone.