READER BRUCE KLINK EMAILS: “The Cult of the iPod insists that you blog on when, and to what, that you upgrade to from the awful earbuds that Apple supplies…”
Actually, on the recommendation of several readers, I got a pair of Sennheiser PX-100 collapsible headphones. Pretty cheap, and better than the Apple earbuds — though I don’t like earbuds of any kind.
HE MAY BE ON VACATION — or maybe it’s a “workation” — but Andrew Sullivan certainly found a truly delightful quote from Kos.
This one, though, is less delightful.
UPDATE: Frank J. is uncharacteristically unhumorous.
IN THE PAST, InstaPundit has been criticized for not paying enough attention to healthcare blogging. But I’ve outsourced a lot of that to the medical professionals at Grand Rounds, and this week’s installment is up for your enjoyment. There’s even an item on new treatments for baldness. Healthcare blogging you can use! Well, some of you, anyway.
LITTLE GREEN SQUEEGEE MEN? I linked to an earlier report of this phenomenon a while back, but it keeps happening:
An unexplained phenomenon akin to a space-borne car wash has boosted the performance of one of the two U.S. rovers probing the surface of Mars, New Scientist magazine said on Tuesday.
It said something — or someone — had regularly cleaned layers of dust from the solar panels of the Mars Opportunity vehicle while it was closed down during the Martian night.
The cleaning had boosted the panels’ power output close to their maximum 900 watt-hours per day after at one stage dropping to 500 watt-hours because of the heavy Martian dirt.
I, for one, welcome our new squeegee overlords, and when they arrive on Earth I will entrust them with the care of my Passat wagon’s windshield.
MICKEY KAUS: “Andrew Sullivan goes on vacation and his blog gets better!” Yeah, that happened to me, too.
BLOGCRITICS HAS A ROUNDUP OF HARRY POTTER NEWS, including more information on the forthcoming 6th book, and a review of the Prisoner of Azkaban DVD.
THE WASHINGTON POST has bought Slate. I hope they won’t screw with Kausfiles, which is perfect as-is, except for the lack of permalinks.
UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt’s take:
Howard Kurtz reports that the Washington Post has bought Slate, which I think boils down to buying Kaus and some office furniture. Best first move for the Post management team: Put Dionne to work in some obscure corner of Slate and get a couple of print columns a week out of Kausfiles.
And give Kaus a raise!
LANCE FRIZZELL’S BLOG is the subject of a TV report. There’s a video link at the lower left, but — as is annoyingly common with such things on TV websites — there’s no way to link it directly. (Via Bill Hobbs).
IT’S LIKE JOINING A CULT: Yesterday’s mention that the iPod had arrived has produced a deluge of email recommending accessories (this wireless transmitter looks kinda cool, but I think I’ll hold off). I’m listening to the Crystal Method’s Legion of Boom right now, and it sounds pretty good. Well, if you’re going to join a cult, it should be one with good tunes.
THANK YOU, Steven Den Beste. Yes.
PERCENTAGE PACKING: Interesting blog post on the percentage of adults with gun-carry permits, by state.
It’s 3.45% in Tennessee — I guess the motto is “always outnumbered, never outgunned!”
UPDATE: Somewhat different demographic information in this map.
THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE LIBERATED, a roundup of posts from Iraqi bloggers, is up. And don’t miss this post from Iraqi bloggers Omar and Mohammed, who are now back in Iraq after visiting the United States:
Those days were very special ones and we never felt like strangers there; we were surrounded with love and respect where ever we went. We were amazed by the endless support and good will that the American people have for Iraq.
Everyone was saying “we’re praying for your people and your country”. It’s been a great opportunity to meet many of our dear readers and respectable bloggers like Jeff Jarvis and Roger Simon and many other friends who kept following and supporting “Iraq the Model” throughout the past 13 months.
I wish that I had been able to meet them.
HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE MUBARAK? Joe Katzman has a roundup on Egypt over at Winds of Change.
DAVID BROOKS WONDERS why prospects in the Middle East look so much better than people expected:
After all, here is a man who staffed his administration with what Juan Cole of the University of Michigan called “pro-Likud intellectuals” who went off “fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv.” Under Bush, the diplomats agreed, the U.S. had inflamed the Arab world and had forfeited its role as an honest broker. . . .
And yet here we are in this hopeful moment. It almost makes you think that all those bemoaners and condemners don’t know what they are talking about. Nothing they have said over the past three years accounts for what is happening now. It almost makes you think that Bush understands the situation better than the lot of them.
Surely not. He’s from Texas.
THE NEXT HARRY POTTER BOOK, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is finished, and will be out in July. They’re not taking orders yet, but it’s already showing a sales rank on Amazon, which is odd.
FREEDOM HOUSE has downgraded Russia from “partly free” to “not free.”
BUSH GOT A LOT OF FLAK FOR THE DEFICIT: Now he’ll get more for trying to cut it. In fact, it’s already started. I hope he succeeds, though his ambitions seem rather modest to me.
LEGISLATION MATTERS: That’s the recurring theme of this interview with Michael Powell in Reason. But there’s lots of interesting stuff.
THE BAZEE.COM SCANDAL: An Indian blogger looks at the arrest and its implications for e-commerce. Just keep scrolling.
ONE OF THE FUN THINGS ABOUT BLOGGING: Saying I told you so!
ARTHUR CHRENKOFF has more underreported news from Iraq. “The latest poll of 5,000 people in and around Baghdad suggests that an overwhelming majority are prepared to make a clean break with the past and pursue democracy–now.” Read it all.
Meanwhile, here’s an interesting article from The Guardian on the explosive growth of Iranian blogs — and guess who’s involved:
In September 2001, a young Iranian journalist, Hossein Derakhshan, devised and set up one of the first weblogs in his native language of Farsi. In response to a request from a reader, he created a simple how-to-blog guide in Farsi, thereby setting in motion a community’s surreal flight into free speech; online commentaries that the leading Iranian author and blogger, Abbas Maroufi, calls our “messages in bottles, cast to the winds”.
With an estimated 75,000 blogs, Farsi is now the fourth most popular language for keeping online journals.
Very impressive, and it bodes well for the new Arabic blogging tool being supported by Spirit of America, and Iraqi bloggers Omar and Mohammed.
PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE compares the United States and the European Union and suggests that Timothy Garton Ash is overstating the case for E.U. primacy. “If Ash were right, and the EU really were equal in power to the US, I would argue that that would be cause for great concern. I’m not convinced that the EU is a force for good within its own borders, let alone in the wider world, where appeasement and coddling of dictators seems to be the order of the day. The good news therefore is that the EU is not equal to the US in power. The even better news is that the trendlines are in our favor; not theirs.”
I’m concerned not about power balances as such, but about cultural issues. Even phenomena that some Americans like to make fun of — such as the sitzpinkler phenomenon — are unfortunate in themselves, and are likely to produce a rebound that is even less fortunate.
DAVID ADESNIK: “I guess the United States doesn’t really have to promote democracy in Iraq — the insurgents are already doing that for us.”
PROGRESS TOWARD ARTIFICIAL LIFE:
The soft cell walls are made of fat molecules taken from egg white. The cell contents are an extract of the common gut bug E. coli, stripped of all its genetic material.
This essence of life contains ready-made much of the biological machinery needed to make proteins; the researchers also added an enzyme from a virus to allow the vesicle to translate DNA code.
When they added genes, the cell fluid started to make proteins, just like a normal cell would.
Very interesting.
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