Month: April 2007

A vain attempt to reacquaint her with a sense of shame.

Minneapolis, Minnesota, 10.30 am.

So little time.

And I thought the dinosaur DNA was cool. Details here.

"The admission of need for something called a Bloggers Code of Conduct is about more than just the Web. The deeper import of what may be happening here should be evident in Mr. O’Reilly’s remark, which was the final sentence in a long New York Times article on the subject last Sunday: ‘Free speech is enhanced by civility.’ It is difficult for me to imagine a more revolutionary sentence. One might call it ‘subversive.’ ‘Free speech is enhanced by civility.’ The revolution comes at the end of that sentence. Free speech we know about. Civility we have forgotten. Ask Don Imus." – Daniel Henninger, WSJ.

They’re addicts too. Of course, Islamist countries are the worst.

A reader writes:

You make a very salient point about the changing culture of America. I work in the software industry. It is pretty common to have a young, more progressive (yet still predominantly white male)  engineering staff, with Imus-aged rich white guys running the company. I’ve had many discussions with the old guard who are very disturbed by the fact that racially charged words have different effects in different contexts. "How is it that a rapper can say the n-word but a white guys can’t?!!"

This always creeps me out. The world is full of double standards. Congratulations, you found another one. Now, why again is it that it pisses you off that you can’t say the n-word without being labeled a racist?

Some really cool photos.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that it would be much more energy efficient to use a single, reusable, rewashable, ceramic cup – rather than dozens of disposable styrofoam versions. But it’s not as easy as that. What about dishwashing? Yes, there’s been a study:

The results are extremely sensitive to the amount of energy the dishwasher requires for cleaning each cup. Hocking’s choice for the dishwasher, requiring 0.18 MJ/cup-wash, is barely less than the manufacturing energy of the foam cup, 0.19 MJ/cup. If Hocking had chosen even a slightly less energy-efficient dishwasher as his standard, then the reusable cups would never have broken even with the foam cup.