Month: November 2010

Alan Jacobs annihilates Micah White's case for a "public search engine" similar to a public library, without advertising:

What exactly is White asking for? A universal prohibition on internet advertising, brokered by the U.N.? An international tribunal to prosecute Google for unauthorized indexing? Yes, it would have been wonderful, as Robert Darnton has pointed out, if universities and libraries had banded together to do the information-indexing and book-digitizing that Google has done — but they didn’t.

So here we are, with an unprecedented and astonishing amount of information at our fingertips, and we’re going to complain about ads? — the same ads that give us television, newspapers, and magazines? Please. Why not just come right out and say “I want everything and I want it for free”?

Ken MacQueen profiles two four-year old conjoined twins:

Tatiana and Krista are not just conjoined, but they are craniopagus, sharing a skull and also a bridge between each girl’s thalamus, a part of the brain that processes and relays sensory information to other parts of the brain. Or perhaps in this case, to both brains. There is evidence that they can see through each other’s eyes and perhaps share each other’s unspoken thoughts. …

The way their heads are joined, they have markedly different fields of view. One child will look at a toy or a cup. The other can reach across and grab it, even though her own eyes couldn’t possibly see its location.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

Rick Perlstein on how the FNC/RNC/Limbaugh propaganda network insisted that Obama raised taxes, when he lowered them.

Columbus, Ohio, 10 am

A movement is born. I didn't realize he was 5' 3".

"When Palin talks, my whole being wails, like Nancy Kerrigan after Tonya Harding's ex-husband knee-capped her: 'Why? Why? Why?'" – Nancy Franklin, in the new New Yorker.

Patrick Kurp relives the "almost indecent" genius of Keats' poetry, prose, and his letters. It's amazing to think he did it all before dying at 25. A short excerpt from one of his letters:

I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a Stoat or a fieldmouse peeping out of the withered grass – the creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with it. I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along – to what? the Creature has a purpose and his eyes are bright with it.

But then, as Wordsworth says, `we have all one human heart’ – there is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify – so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it: as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.

Richard K. Betts reviews the work of Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, and John Mearsheimer. He concludes:

The most significant similarity, and a dispiriting one, is that all three authors were out of step with the attitudes that have dominated U.S. foreign policy and made it overreach after the Cold War. … The problem is that Davos-style liberalism and militant neoconservatism have both been more influential than the three more profound and sober visions of Fukuyama, Huntington, and Mearsheimer. If good sense is to shape U.S. foreign policy, there needs to be a fourth vision — one that integrates the compatible elements of these three in a form that penetrates the American political mainstream.