ANOTHER SATISFIED READER: Bill Sheldon emails from Baltimore: “Thank you. After recently reading your posts and the comments from readers on knives, I found a local sharpener of commercial kitchen knives today and picked up three very good and sharp used knives for $4.20 total with tax.” Can’t beat the price! But you should really thank John Morgan.
Archive for 2007
August 23, 2007
STEVE CHAPMAN: “The crucial message of his article is not how much Obama would change President Bush’s approach, but how little.”
BLAMING EVERYONE BUT BEAUCHAMP. More thoughts here.
WHOLE-AIRFRAME PARACHUTES meet very light jets.
DO FACULTY MEMBERS HAVE A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO SLEEP WITH STUDENTS?
THOUGHTS ON “dumb kids’ toys.”
CHINESE BLOG-SERVICE PROVIDERS AGREE TO “SELF-DISCIPLINE” — or, in other words, to censor their users so the government doesn’t have to.
WELL, GOOD: Survey: Seniors Have Sex Into 70s, 80s.
A RASMUSSEN POLL ON THE WAR ON TERROR: “Republicans, by a 58% to 19% margin, believe the U.S. and its allies are winning. Democrats, by a 43% to 24% margin, believe the terrorists are winning. Among unaffiliated voters, 38% believe the U.S. team is winning while 32% say the opposite. A separate survey found that American voters are evenly divided as to whether they trust Republicans or Democrats more when it comes to handling the War on Terror.”
FRAUD CHARGES: “Special prosecutors appointed by a federal judge on Tuesday hit nationally known plaintiffs attorney Richard Scruggs and his law firm with criminal contempt charges over his handling of insurance documents related to Hurricane Katrina claims.” More at the WSJ Law Blog.
MICHAEL SILENCE HAS QUESTIONS on newspapers and proper blog attribution. I think the lesson is that people who work at newspapers — even some people who blog at newspapers — don’t follow links the way that bloggers do, and don’t expect readers to do so, either.
OPENING UP AMERICAN LAWBOOKS? From Tim Wu: “I wanted to write to tell you about the launch of the world’s first completely free and public domain legal search engine: altlaw.org. Right now, legal search is dominated by a duopoloy — Westlaw and Lexis — that charge hundreds of dollars an hour for searching the nation’s laws. Altlaw.org is a pilot project to make the nation’s caselaw freely searchable by anyone. The nation’s laws are supposed to belong to the people, yet they are amazingly hard to get access to.”
CRISPIN SARTWELL SAYS THAT ACADEMICS ARE on the wrong side of the copyright wars.
Richard Epstein is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, and the author of Overdose: How Excessive Government Regulation Stifles Pharmaceutical Innovation
These are topics of particular interest to us, as Helen is kept alive by Tikosyn, a somewhat unusual anti-arrhythmic drug. We talk to Epstein about the pharmaceutical industry, its critics, and what to do to promote new drugs and treatments for problems that people are dying from today. Epstein also discusses some criticism in The New Republic, something he has answered at greater length here.
You can listen directly (no downloading needed) by going here and clicking on the gray Flash player. You can download the file directly and listen at your leisure by clicking right here. And you can get a lo-fi version suitable for dialup by going here and selecting “lo-fi.” As always, you can get a free subscription via iTunes and never miss another episode. You can’t beat free.
This podcast is brought to you by Volvo USA. Music is by Mobius Dick.
UPDATE: That was fast.
CLINTON, THE CIA, AND BIN LADEN: Clinton didn’t actually authorize the CIA to kill Osama, as he’s claimed, according to Newsweek. Someone should ask Sandy Berger about this. (Via Don Surber).
UPDATE: More thoughts from Captain Ed. “I’ve written before that pursuing partisan blame for 9/11 is a waste of time. It gets in the way of determining where failures occurred and developing the proper approaches to avoid them in the future. The truth is that the issues that created these failures stretched back for years, probably decades in terms of interpretation of intelligence law. However, it gets difficult to remember that when former presidents essentially lie about their roles on national television. Given Clinton’s unique history, this prevarication and self-aggrandizement comes as no surprise, but it is still pretty disappointing.” This won’t help Hillary.
ANOTHER UPDATE: More thoughts from Ron Coleman.
U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT: Momentum shifting to GOP in Iraq debate.
UPDATE: Useful roundup here.
MICKEY KAUS: “It’s not bloggy to let a few little disagreements get in the way of mutually beneficial traffic-sharing. Enmity is so print. The Web’s win-win!”
FLIP-FLOPS CAN BE bad for you.
THE RISE OF THE MACHINES: Arm-wrestling machine recalled for breaking arms.
Combine one of these with an electronic voting machine and you’ll have something that breaks your arm if you vote for the wrong guy. That could prove popular in some quarters.
A VIRTUAL EPIDEMIC mirrors the real world:
An outbreak of a deadly disease in a virtual world can offer insights into real life epidemics, scientists suggest.
The “corrupted blood” disease spread rapidly within the popular online World of Warcraft game, killing off thousands of players in an uncontrolled plague.
The infection raged, wreaking social chaos, despite quarantine measures.
The experience provides essential clues to how people behave in such crises, Lancet Infectious Diseases reports.
In the game, there was a real diversity of response from the players to the threat of infection, similar to those seen in real life. Some acted selflessly, rushing to the aid of other characters even though that meant they risked infection themselves.
Others fled infected cities in an attempt to save themselves.
And some who were sick made it their mission to deliberately infect others.
Researcher Professor Nina Fefferman, from Tufts University School of Medicine, said: “Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour.
“The players seemed to really feel they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously, even though it was only a game.”
Read the whole thing.
IS THERE A LIBERTARIAN THEORY of animal rights?
CITIZEN INITIATED Infrastructure.
CONTROLLING THE NARRATIVE. But, er, not very well, apparently: “Me, I post about doing yoga and wearing bike shorts. I could care less whether Neiwert or Marcotte or David in Austin or Tbogg find me ‘masculine’ or not. In fact, I tend to poke fun at the fact that they seem to think I actually care about such things.”
It’s that cognitive simplicity of theirs.