Month: June 2010

Comic Sans delivers an enjoyable foul-mouthed rant.

A reader writes:

The success of the US in the World Cup won't be the impetus for a large growth in soccer fandom in the US.  The World Cup only happens every four years and people’s memories are short.  When we are producing worldwide stars – and better yet, if they are playing regularly in the US – that will bring the fans.  We Americans love winning, but we love stars more.  If the US is able to produce a Pele, Maradona, or even a Beckham, soccer will grow in popularity more than FIFA success.  Look at basketball; it wasn’t extraordinarily popular until Larry Bird and Magic Johnson and then Michael Jordan appeared on the scene, and now viewership of games involving Kobe Bryant or Lebron James are much greater than games involving good teams without huge stars.

Another writes:

I have no stake in the argument about whether soccer will or will not become a major sport in the US. However, as a historian, I like to remind people that up until the Second World War, three sports dominated the USA: baseball, boxing and horse racing.  To have suggested that basketball or football or stock-car racing would be major sports then would have been met with disbelief.  None of us knows what sports will become popular in the future.

David McRaney takes on hindsight bias, i.e. how you " often look back on the things you’ve just learned and assume you knew them or believed them all along":

You are always looking back at the person you used to be, always reconstructing the story of your life to better match the person you are today.

You have needed to keep a tidy mind to navigate the world ever since you lived in jungles and on savannas. Cluttered minds got bogged down, and the bodies they controlled got eaten.

Once you learn from your mistakes, or replace bad info with good, there isn’t much use in retaining the garbage, so you delete it.

Today on the Dish we covered the president's big Gulf speech. Larger reax here, a reader reaction here, and the Oil Drum explained why the gusher is growing. Netanyahu budged a bit on the Gaza blockade. Closing coverage of the Prop 8 trial here and here. Andrew lauded the forefather of the gay rights movement, James Risen lashed out at bloggers, Drum diagnosed the Tea Party, and a reader dissented over Andrew's diagnosis.

In Palin coverage, O'Reilly put some heat on her, a reader shrugged, Patt Morrison was outraged over her attempt to exploit Thatcher, and Scott Morgan gave her props over pot tolerance. Tons of Wasilla gossip here and here.

In Cup coverage, Drezner wondered when the US will seize upon soccer and Yglesias responded. Get your vuvuzela fix here and here. Senior citizen prognosticating here and here. People were flooding into Texas. In assorted commentary, Tim Kowal cornered op-ed writers on the Middle East, Jay Rosin put the press corps under a microscope, Cameron Abadi looked at Neda's doppelganger, Yglesias defended gerrymandering, and Robin Hanson talked celebrities and evolution.

Gaga is still no Madonna. MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here.

— C.B.

(Image via The Ecoterrorist)

Evgeny Morozov reviews Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger:

Mayer-Schönberger fails to recognize that it is reminiscence—not forgetting—that faces extinction in the digital age. As Facebook and Twitter prioritize the present—our most recent updates always appear first while older ones have a shelf-life of half an hour—our digital lives are increasingly detached even from the most recent past. (The ubiquitous ADHD does not help either; Mark Helprin recently observed in The Wall Street Journal, “With the American attention span being what it is, time capsules are now retrieved 45 minutes after they are buried.”)…It would be disastrous to let the fears about digital forgetting blind us to the new possibilities for reminiscence created by digital remembering.

Talbot talked to David Boies this morning:

Boies said he thought it likely that Judge Walker would issue his ruling in August—my own hunch is that he will rule for the pro-same-sex marriage side—and that either side would appeal immediately. Indeed, Boies and Olson hope the Perry case will be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court, and that they will ultimately win a decision comparable to Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court case that declared laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional.

The Oil Drum provides one answer:

Gas flows more easily through cracks than oil, and the disaster was first evident when leaking gas reached the drilling rig, and then ignited. The BOP then, at least partially, functioned. After the rig sank, the riser also sank, bending the pipe just above the BOP. At that time there were reports that a Coast Guard ROV examined the underwater assembly and did not see any obvious oil leaks. A couple of days later the flow was suggested at about 1,000 bd, and this then escalated to 5,000 bd. As cameras began to publicly monitor the outlet of the riser the estimates started to grow, but a not-well-publicized effort measured the flow out of the riser, and found that it was around 8,000 bd, with allowance for leaks, the overall flow was estimated to be perhaps 12,000 bd. Once the broken part of the riser was removed and a cap placed over the well, a significant portion of the escaping oil was captured and could then be measured as it flowed into the surface vessel recovering it. Those values are currently at around 15,500 bd. BP is currently planning on additional capture this week of up to another 10,000 bd, and preparing for a worst case scenario with a flow rate of 80,000 bd. These numbers vary a lot, and yet they could all be correct.

Why? Well, its called erosion, and simply put, the oil and gas that are flowing out of the rock are bringing small amounts of that rock (in the form of sand) out with them. Rocks that contain lots of oil are not that strong and are easily worn away by the flow of fluid through them.

(Image: TPM)

Meishan pigs walk through their enclosure at the Tierpark Friedrichsfelde zoo in Berlin on June 15, 2010. The animals were originally held as domestic pigs in China. By Barbara Sax/AFP/Getty Images.

The answer from the readers is clear: we will keep the format as it is every day, with a contest once a week on Saturday. No jumps! And I hope you've noticed we've cut down on them as much as we can in the last month or so.

You get idiotic and offensive statements like this about the president invoking prayer for those in the Gulf last night:

[GRETCHEN] CARLSON: But Mr. Speaker, did you find it at all disingenuous, because some people are analyzing that this morning as saying it was disingenuous from a president who does not go to Church on a regular basis?

You mean: like Bush and Reagan? See where you end up with this pious bullshit?