The Dish

Your machine has arrived.

Another Bill Clinton quote that makes me want to throw up:

"If [Barack Obama] wins this nomination, I’m going to do what I can to help him become president… After all the mean things they said about me, I can’t believe I’m saying this."

Shameless.

A debate as inevitable as it is exhausted. Take it from an expert in genetic epistemology:

The problem with trying to be a reasonable skeptic is that one easily makes enemies on both fronts of any debate: you acknowledge that genetics does set limits to human characteristics, and you get accused of being a genetic determinist and possibly encouraging eugenics. You grant that the environment plays a sometimes major role and you are ridiculed as an anti-scientific fuzzy thinker. Wake up, ladies and gentlemen on both fronts: the reality is both more complex and more fascinating than either caricature would allow. It is neither nature nor nurture, it is — as the title of an unusually balancedbook by Matt Ridley puts it — nature via nurture.

There goes the rest of the afternoon. Hat tip: Utne.

Backward, according to Freedom House.

A convergence? From Tom Breihan:

The shift started a few years ago with female vocalists, as glassy cyborgs like Ciara came to supplant belters. But lately, that effect has bled over not only into male singers but into production techniques: T-Pain’s track for Flo-Rida’s "Low," for instance, boasts so many faux-epic synth-trills and jittery bass-farts that it wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a Ministry of Sound trance compilation in 1999.

Bass-farts?

It exists – and we’re all pretty good at it:

Ambady and colleague Nicholas Rule, both at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, wondered about sexual orientation. They showed men and women photos of 90 faces belonging to homosexual men and heterosexual men for intervals ranging from 33 milliseconds to 10 seconds. When given 100 milliseconds or more to view a face, participants correctly identified sexual orientation nearly 70% of the time. Volunteers were less accurate at shorter durations, and their accuracy did not get better at durations beyond 100 milliseconds, the team reports in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. "What is most interesting is that increased exposure time did not improve the results," says Ambady.

Hat tip: 3QD.

Noemie Emery:

Looking ahead to the general election, Democrats were prepared to describe any critique made of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton as an example of the racism and sexism that they like to believe permeates the Republican universe. But this was before their own race became quite so close, and so spirited.