In a review of The Google Story, Richard Lowenstein chastises the authors for failing to probe deeply enough. He provides the following as an example:
For instance, they note – without comment – that Google earns millions of dollars a year from pornography ads. (Yes, this is the same company whose motto is “don’t be evil.”)
NewMexiKen asks: Is accepting pornography advertising evil? Is this just an economic fact, or is it a sociological phenomenon that requires analysis?
Astronomer Edwin Hubble was born on this date in 1889.
During the past 100 years, astronomers have discovered quasars, pulsars, black holes and planets orbiting distant suns. But all these pale next to the discoveries Edwin Hubble made in a few remarkable years in the 1920s. At the time, most of his colleagues believed the Milky Way galaxy, a swirling collection of stars a few hundred thousand light-years across, made up the entire cosmos. But peering deep into space from the chilly summit of Mount Wilson, in Southern California, Hubble realized that the Milky Way is just one of millions of galaxies that dot an incomparably larger setting.
Hubble went on to trump even that achievement by showing that this galaxy-studded cosmos is expanding — inflating majestically like an unimaginably gigantic balloon — a finding that prompted Albert Einstein to acknowledge and retract what he called “the greatest blunder of my life.” Hubble did nothing less, in short, than invent the idea of the universe and then provide the first evidence for the Big Bang theory, which describes the birth and evolution of the universe. He discovered the cosmos, and in doing so founded the science of cosmology.
Source: TIME 100: Edwin Hubble
The President reacts when he finds the door locked as he tried to leave a press conference in Beijing.
There’s no way out, Mr. President.
At the Freakonomics Blog, Steven Levitt wonders whether “fresh fruits, whole-grain bread, and a salad bar are the real way to fight crime.” He’s doubtful, but it’s interesting.
The last dozen shuffle play (well, Joe Walsh was intentional):
The score doesn’t do it justice.
NewMexiKen watched the second half of the USC-Fresno State game last night (it lasted until after midnight Mountain time). Sports can be more dramatic, but it just doesn’t get much more entertaining.
Down 21-13 at the half, USC scored 21 points in four minutes early in the third quarter to go up 34-21. With that momentum, and superstar Reggie Bush on a record-setting tear, it would be all USC now, right? Wrong. After the teams exchanged touchdowns, Fresno came back with two more TDs (one after a Bush fumble) and the Bulldogs led the number one Trojans 42-41 with 9:47 to play. USC scored again, missed the two-point conversion, but then got a field goal to lead 50-42. Fresno State drove 47 yards to the USC 25, but with a minute left the underdog Bulldogs went for the end zone and were intercepted. Game over. Phew! 58 points in the half.
Bush, despite a key fumble and an unfortunate personal foul, was incredible. Every time he got the ball you expected a 50-yard run. Nearly forced out at the left sideline Bush stops, cuts and scores crossing into the end zone near the other sideline. He had 513 all-purpose yards, including 294 rushing. The 513 was the second best ever in Division 1-A.
A report on the legislation in The New York Times begins:
Private companies and individuals would be able to buy large tracts of federal land, from sagebrush basins to high-peak hiking trails around the West, under the terms of the spending bill passed Friday by a two-vote margin in the House of Representatives.
On the surface, the bill reads like the mundane nip and tuck of federal mining law its authors say it is. But lawyers who have parsed its language say the real beneficiaries could be real estate developers, whose business has become a more potent economic engine in the West than mining.
Key point: “Environmental groups, looking to the database of mining claims created by their colleagues at the Environmental Working Group, say private owners could gain title to 5.7 million acres of federal forests, rocky promontories and grasslands.”
Another: “‘They’d have to be willing to defraud the U.S. government,’ said Carol Raulston, a spokeswoman for the mining industry’s trade group, the National Mining Association.”
Anyone think developers and mining companies wouldn’t be willing to try and defraud the government?
While environmentalists worry about the backyard of ANWR, the developers are stealing the whole house.
An interesting take on children’s literature by a Brandeis professor in The Boston Globe: The way we were.
Our adult delight in children’s literature is not an innocent delight. As adult readers of children’s stories, we’re aware, as children are not, that their robust confidence in the world, at least while they are enraptured by a story, is ephemeral and fragile, endangered by every step they take toward adulthood. For us, the child becomes almost another character in the story, responding with a wonderfully heedless delight or dismay to things as unreal as the adult world she imagines. But we know what’s coming, how evanescent the child’s world is-and we feel for her what she cannot possibly feel for herself.
Thanks to Veronica for the link.
… to comedian Dick Smothers. The straight man of the duo is 67.
… to Veronica Hamel of Hill Street Blues. She’s 62.
… to Joe Walsh of The Eagles. He’s 58. Life’s been good to him so far.
I have a mansion forget the price
Ain’t never been there they tell me it’s nice
I live in hotels tear out the walls
I have accountants pay for it all
They say I’m crazy but I have a good time
I’m just looking for clues at the scene of the crime
Life’s been good to me so far
My Maserati does 185
I lost my license now I don’t drive
I have a limo ride in the back
I lock the doors in case I’m attacked
… to Bo Derek. She’s nearly five 10s now. She’s 49.
Robert F. Kennedy should have been 80 today. He was assassinated at age 42.
Unable to get into Chicken Little and not wanting to see that Satanic Harry Potter, NewMexiKen went instead this evening to view Walk the Line. It’s quite good. The performances by Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter are excellent. The Cash music — performed quite well by Phoenix — keeps the film from sinking under the weight of its own sad story (though it is a story with a happy ending). Witherspoon’s portrayal of Carter also brings welcome humor and a light touch to the film. She’s terrific. No car chases; one small ‘splosion.
Four-and-a-half ristras on the NewMexiKen scale, five being best.
(I was kidding about Little and Potter.)
“Woodward, Miller, Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper and NBC’s Tim Russert are less tragic figures in a grand journalistic drama than they are sad — but willing — bit players in somebody else’s rather sorry little charade.”
Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times. The sorry little charade is the “Bush administration’s efforts at press manipulation.”
From a report in The New York Times:
JACKSON, Miss., Nov. 19 – When the federal government and the nation’s largest disaster relief group reached out a helping hand after Hurricane Katrina blew through here, tens of thousands of people grabbed it.
But in giving out $62 million in aid, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Red Cross overlooked a critical fact: the storm was hardly catastrophic here, 160 miles from the coast. The only damage sustained by most of the nearly 30,000 households receiving aid was spoiled food in the freezer.
The fact that at least some relief money has gone to those perceived as greedy, not needy, has set off recriminations in this poor, historic capital where the payments of up to $2,358 set off spending sprees on jewelry, guns and electronics.
For NewMexiKen’s part, I’m perfectly happy buying jewelry, guns and electronics for the fine people in Jackson, Mississippi, with my tax dollars, aren’t you?
… of Larry King. He’s 72.
… of Dick Cavett. He’s 69.
… of Ted Turner. He’s 67.
… of Calvin Klein. He’s 63.
… of Ann Curry. She’s 49.
… of Allison Janney. She’s 45.
… of Meg Ryan. She’s 44.
… of Jodie Foster. She’s 43.
… was established on this date in 1919.
Zion is an ancient Hebrew word meaning a place of refuge or sanctuary. Protected within the park’s 229 square miles is a dramatic landscape of sculptured canyons and soaring cliffs. Zion is located at the junction of the Colorado Plateau, Great Basin and Mojave Desert provinces. This unique geography and the variety of life zones within the park make Zion significant as a place of unusual plant and animal diversity.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
“Unfortunately, calling him a coward was not enough. It gained us nothing but America’s hatred. You should have done more. You should have sent your flying monkeys to knock him down, take the stuffing out of him, and light it on fire.”
Jesus’ General letter to Rep. Jean Schmidt. On the House floor Ms. Schmidt said. “He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message: that cowards cut and run, Marines never do.”
Murtha is a decorated Marine veteran.
… but a new website analysis tool reports that NewMexiKen is the 780,081st most popular website in the world. I’m not sure, but I think that is pretty good.
More later after I can analyze the data (and tweak the site to improve my score).
Photos of pages from the 1979 Sears Christmas Wish Book. Ah, memories.
Wow! This is a 500X500 pixel gif image repeated to fit the screen. Caveat: Loud music.
Via Ann Bartow via Discourse.net
From Lifehacker, a good rundown on how to revitalize and protect a Windows PC.
A cute little game to calculate your life expectancy.
NewMexiKen was awake much too early this morning. As I lay there watching the ambient light from the moon give way to the ambient light of dawn I started thinking. And for some reason I started thinking about when I was in school.
In the sixth grade, I was in the school choir for Christmas midnight mass. It was a parochial school, St. John’s in Fenton, Michigan. I can remember being taken into the hall for an audition, certain I couldn’t sing. Surprise, I made the team. I sang in the seventh and eighth and ninth grades, too. In junior high I was not only in the chorus, but sang in a double-quartet and a quartet. I remember the four of us — Bill Smith, Jerry Hart, Joe Mosier and I — singing “Night and Day” and “My Buddy,” the latter surely more mournfully than even the writer of that World War I song would have liked. In the ninth grade, in Tucson, I was again in the chorus. Then, for some reason — my voice changing? — I stopped. And I haven’t sung in public again since.
Singing wasn’t my only artistic endeavor, though. I liked telling jokes, a skill I learned from my mother and her step-father (grandpa to me). Even as a kid Mom would tell me “dirty” jokes and I’d re-tell them, sometimes at school. I was paddled by the principal in the eighth grade for telling dirty jokes in class. I learned from the paddling never again to tell dirty jokes where they could be overheard by someone who might tattle.
That same principal — her name was Bertha Neal — has a school in that town, Durand, Michigan, named after her now. Lord knows, she earned it. When I was there they had all 12 grades and kindergarten in one building. And she was the principal of it all. My joke-telling was probably the least of her worries.
I remember an awards ceremony at the end of that same school year. Some graduating senior boy won the attendance award. He’d been there every day of high school. In fact, this kid had only missed one day in all 12 years of school. I remember thinking that was impressive — and pathetic.
I missed a lot of school as a kid. I had appendicitis, and pneumonia, and strep more often than I can remember. And Mom let us take the occasional mental health day, too. But when I got to senior year in high school for some reason I modeled myself after that award winner back in Durand. First eight months of the school year I didn’t miss a class.
We had an English term paper due May 1, and a friend and I pulled an all-nighter to get ours done. This meant we went to the library late on the afternoon of April 30 and started writing later that evening. Sometime around dawn I finished and was ready to get to school on time. Bill was still finishing up though and, as he was my ride that day, I waited. We got there about 11.
It seemed that every kid and every teacher in the school knew why we were late. We were guilty of what had to be the most heinous crime committed since the Lindbergh baby was snatched. Bill and I got detention for being late without an excusable excuse and — even though we weren’t late to her class — the nun in English refused to accept our term papers for credit. She took them and read them, but didn’t grade them. After all that work they would have no affect on our course grade. A bitter incident and one I still think was unfair. (She later told the class mine was the best of all the papers — a rare moment for me.)
I took several mental health days in the three weeks remaining before graduation. So much for perfect attendance. Ferris Bueller was right.
The year before in high school we’d gotten a new gymnasium — a million dollar gift from a benefactor. It was confusing those first few weeks what with boys locker rooms and girls locker rooms and all. I was drying after a shower one day — Ted Barrasso was next to me. We were, obviously, naked. The door opens and Mary Anne comes in, looks around, shrieks and barrels out. Poor Mary Anne. Within an hour the entire school had heard of her mistake and every girl was giving her sympathy and comfort, in person or to anyone else who would listen. Poor Mary Anne. I don’t remember anyone ever asking Ted or me if we were embarrassed or if we were OK. I came to understand then that in stripper-bars and topless joints the patrons who “barge in” are always more uncomfortable than the naked people who belong there.
In international terms, Microsoft just gave diplomatic recognition to the new nation of Firefox.
“A Plug-in is a helper program that can be downloaded and installed to extend the functionality of a Mozilla-based Web browser. You may download and install the Windows Genuine Advantage Plug-in in order to use this web site for validation of your copy of Windows.”
Get the plugin: Genuine Microsoft Software
Link via Ed Bott. Ed has good Windows tips and Microsoft news every day.
Amazon has not only pulled all of Sony’s rootkit-infected CDs from its catalog, they’re also contacting everyong who bought a rootkit CD and offering a full refunds, whether or not the CD has been opened.
Now this is a textbook example of how retailers should be responding to the news that Sony tricked them into selling CDs that screwed up their customers’ computers.
Source: Boing Boing
The Good is Amazon.
The Bad and the Ugly is Sony BMG. A list of the culprit CDs.