Steven den Beste always makes me think, regardless of the topic he is covering.

Predictably, much of the major blogosphere's coverage of the Superbowl has focused on Nipplegate.

By contrast, Den Beste provides a more thoughtful commentary on the importance of the [non]event.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:48 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 55 words, total size 1 kb.

A few weeks ago, I noted the strangely poetic nature of some spam that I had received.

James Lileks works this theme to better effect in this Backfence article.

Best lines: "The purpose, I think, is to see whether or not the e-mail address is valid. If the letter doesn't bounce back, then the address is valid. It's spam designed to sense whether you exist. It's almost metaphysical in its intent."

Read and enjoy.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:36 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 78 words, total size 1 kb.

Some of you may remember Robert Tilton, the smarmy televangelist who used to broadcast from Carrollton, Texas (just a 'burb or two over from here).

A good friend of mine in Iowa sent me this hilarious video of Tilton at his slimy best, with some extra sound effects. Warning -- make sure you do not have any drink in your mouth while viewing this. I will not be held responsible for any damage to monitors or keyboards if you disregard this warning.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 86 words, total size 1 kb.

Strategy Page has a video demonstrating the effects of LSD on British troops in a test that appears to have been conducted in the early 1960s.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 32 words, total size 1 kb.

Growing up in the Cold War, I remember when I first grokked the irony of the communist party's propaganda rag being named "Truth." I wonder what old Trotsky would think if he were alive today to see the mouthpiece of the most murderous regime in human history turned into a sad imitation of the National Enquirer: UFOs, dragons, Noah's Ark, X-ray vision, and other apocryphal or mythical tales reported as fact.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 77 words, total size 1 kb.

Check out the new Priceline commercials here.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:36 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 13 words, total size 1 kb.

I meant to link to this last week, when I first saw it on Geekpress.

Amazing. Kitschy. Fun. The QRIO.

Posted by: JohnL at 08:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 24 words, total size 1 kb.

Scott Burns, a financial affairs columnist for the Dallas Morning News, has an excellent piece today spelling out the true impact of the recent Medicare expansion. (Free registration required. Destined for the archives in the near future).

Scott is a member of the boomer generation, but his thinking on this issue is, refreshingly, fair and clear. He calculates the bill that our current elders are presenting to my children as $43.5 trillion. He essentially restates the libertarian nugget "TANSTAAFL." At some point benefits must be decreased or taxes increased (no!) to prevent a massive default under the system.

I hope in my lifetime to see some significant extension of the human lifespan. I expect it, actually. I am ready for the future of Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire,
even its dystopian aspects.

As a consequence, I think we need to be ready to rethink our "social obligation" to our elders. Medicare and Social Security, in my mind, are unconstitutional -- they are well beyond any reasonably necessary or proper enumerated power of the federal government. But are we ready as a society to take more personal responsibility for saving, for being ready to work in our retirements, to take care of our parents and grandparents? We need to be. Fortunately, if we do see some sort of "boosterspice" in our lifetimes, we will be young and healthy enough, even at the age of 65, 70, or even 90 to continue to be active and productive citizens and not wards of the state.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:51 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 263 words, total size 2 kb.

Scott Burns, a financial affairs columnist for the Dallas Morning News, has an excellent piece today spelling out the true impact of the recent Medicare expansion. (Free registration required. Destined for the archives in the near future).

Scott is a member of the boomer generation, but his thinking on this issue is, refreshingly, fair and clear. He calculates the bill that our current elders are presenting to my children as $43.5 trillion. He essentially restates the libertarian nugget "TANSTAAFL." At some point benefits must be decreased or taxes increased (no!) to prevent a massive default under the system.

I hope in my lifetime to see some significant extension of the human lifespan. I expect it, actually. I am ready for the future of Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire,
even its dystopian aspects.

As a consequence, I think we need to be ready to rethink our "social obligation" to our elders. Medicare and Social Security, in my mind, are unconstitutional -- they are well beyond any reasonably necessary or proper enumerated power of the federal government. But are we ready as a society to take more personal responsibility for saving, for being ready to work in our retirements, to take care of our parents and grandparents? We need to be. Fortunately, if we do see some sort of "boosterspice" in our lifetimes, we will be young and healthy enough, even at the age of 65, 70, or even 90 to continue to be active and productive citizens and not wards of the state.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:51 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 263 words, total size 2 kb.

The 1974 Nobel-prize winner in economics.

The author of The Road to Serfdom.

One of the great proto-libertarians of the twentieth century.

That's who.

But if you're reading this, you probably already knew that. Virginia Postrel has an excellent background on this champion of liberty here.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 56 words, total size 1 kb.

If you haven't read Atlas Shrugged, you may want to skip this post, as it contains a mild spoiler.

William H. Stoddard at New Troy has an interesting article about the ethics of Ayn Rand. As he explains, objectivist ethics rely upon the premise that it is only the concept of life that makes value possible. As value is something that one acts to gain or keep, all ethical actions should be directed to keeping oneself alive. Thus every function of a living organism is (or should be) directed toward a single goal: the organism's survival. But, as Mr. Stoddard illustrates, this isn't, in general, true. He uses the tale of the "Wet Nurse" (Tony) in Atlas Shrugged to illustrate that
merely preserving one's life is not always the ethical choice. Instead of a pure "survival" ethics, Mr. Stoddard posits a "legacy" ethics, the selfish desire to have something of value survive beyond one's own life.

I particularly like his discussion of the possible influence of Aristotle's metabiology on Rand's thinking here, when Darwinian biology would point more towards a legacy system of ethics. If you are into Rand, objectivism, darwinism, or any of the above, read the whole thing.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:41 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 204 words, total size 2 kb.

. . . . Or do they?

Robert Heinlein once stated:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and lastly die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

For my entire adult life, I have avoided specialization, maintaining a broad range of interests and pursuits (while semi-specializing in a couple -- at least enough to make a living!) And in fact the conventional wisdom holds that evolution favors generalist species over highly specialized ones. Carl Zimmer summarizes this wisdom and points to the early hominid Paranthropus as the classic example of an over-specialized evolutionary dead-end. But then he points to an abstract of an article "in press"(*) that challenges this conventional view of Paranthropus and concludes that Paranthropus was likely an ecological generalist like early Homo.

If true, then why did Paranthropus die out and Homo survive? Are we technologically-empowered super-generalists secure in our evolutionary niche? As Carl concludes: "Paranthropus looks on our happy beliefs from its oblivion and wonders."

(*)"In Press" here means the article has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication, but not yet published.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 232 words, total size 2 kb.

Last weekend in his regular "Libertarian Bookwork" post, Tim Sandefur recommended Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand. In the process, he provided us with a very well-written overview of Ayn Rand's life and her work.

I would recommend this essay highly to anyone new to Rand's works, and even to those who have read her before.

Like Tim, The Fountainhead is my favorite of her fictional works, although I also love Anthem.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:47 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 77 words, total size 1 kb.

Through her blog, Virginia Postrel points to a couple of her recent articles (subscription required to access the WSJ piece) on the economic implications of Christmas lighting.

This isn't the first time she has touched on the topic of Christmas lights (visit here and here and scroll down or search for "lights").

Her Reason piece highlights elegantly how global capitalism leads not only to more affordable lights for the retail customer, but also to a specialized service industry that installs professional lighting displays for people who are not necessarily the most affluent customers. The article concludes with a nod to the real benefits of free trade and the value of aesthetics:

"We mourn the loss of manufacturing jobs - 'real jobs' - and ignore growing aesthetic professions, from installing holiday lights and landscaping lawns to giving manicures and facials, from designing brochures to crafting granite countertops. "Yet in an advanced economy, in which competition is pushing the prices of goods ever lower and their quality ever higher, enhancing the look and feel of people, places, and things will become more and more important over time. Just as surely as the horsepower of a car engine or the warmth of
a blanket, the pleasure of twinkling Christmas lights offers real value."

I don't think I could wrap this up any better than that.

Posted by: JohnL at 01:47 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 226 words, total size 2 kb.

[Warning! Spoilers Ahead!]

I ventured out to see the 10:00 PM showing of The Return of The King last night, continuing my tradition of viewing the Lord of the Rings movies on opening night. While I'm reserving final judgment until I have seen it again in the theater and, more importantly, until I have seen the extended version on DVD, I can say that, purely as a movie, this is the best of the three.

But as an interpretation of Tolkien in letter and spirit, it ranks second behind The Fellowship of the Ring, which I think was most faithful to the source material, and well ahead of The Two Towers, which is in a distant third. I can look over the minor quibbles I have with some of Jackson's choices (like giving new footage to Pippin while deleting key aspects of Faramir's and Denethor's characters), because when Jackson gets it right, he gets it perfectly right -- The Ride of the Rohirrim, The Death of the Witch King and of King Theoden, and the entire Cracks of Doom sequence. And I can't complain about his omission of the Scouring of the Shire, which, like the Tom Bombadil chapter in the first book, would have been nice to see, but not essential to the story.

Update: What he said.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:21 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 224 words, total size 1 kb.

Now this makes me soooo proud to be a Texan.

Good coverage of this particular case on Instapundit, Volokh, and Freespace. And be sure to check out the comments at Hit and Run, where I first learned of this particular bust.

Posted by: JohnL at 10:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 51 words, total size 1 kb.

Lenny Kravitz fans and old movie aficionados shouldn't have any problem recognizing the potential in this concept (WARNING -- not a family-friendly link).

Glenn Reynolds, from whom I first learned the term "robosexual," reveals another new coinage -- "prosthetute" in this TCS article about robots and unemployment. He also links to this excellent, if not a little creepy, Salon article that made him aware of Real Dolls.

Gene Expression picked up this theme today (linked article has a moderately racy picture!) reviewing the Salon article and then running with the concept (linking to sites covering all the tech needed to create a Stepford Wife). It's neat that the good SF seems to come true around us all the time, but if we get the personal communicators, world-wide-web, and nanobots, then we should also expect to get some of the tech envisioned in the B-movies.

Posted by: JohnL at 10:59 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 158 words, total size 2 kb.

Back on October 28, I linked to a site devoted to awful plastic surgery.

Of course, the self-styled king of pop makes quite an awful appearance on the site (and see this, which is linked from there).

All this is a setup for this image of what Michael Jackson would possibly look like today, had he foregone all the surgeries (using forensic age projection from a picture of a younger, unmodified Michael).

Posted by: JohnL at 10:31 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 82 words, total size 1 kb.

Growing up in Texas, I remember real blue laws, which forbade sales of anything other than basic foodstuffs on Sundays. Thank the maker those were repealed several years ago so that I can now buy batteries or paper or hardware on Sundays. But our alcohol laws continue to reflect early-twentieth-century sensibilities, and efforts to change them usually arouse quite a bit of controversy.

The city I live in, Plano, allows sales of beer and wine in grocery and convenience stores 7 days a week (you have to wait until after noon on Sundays). Still, to buy anything else (port, sake, tequila), I need to drive 20 minutes or so to a "wet" area of Dallas. Many towns around here (including many areas of Dallas proper) are completely dry. This article and this one nicely summarize the situation in Plano (free registration required to read the Dallas Morning News article).

So I could really appreciate Mike Alissi's report at Reason's Hit and Run blog about some surprising bedfellows in Connecticut who would like to keep Sundays dry there.

Here's the money 'graph:

"Bottoms up to the bizarro world of booze politics where liquor store owners team up with MADD to keep Sundays dry, and proponents of allowing retailers to serve customers whenever they want are considered enemies of free enterprise."

Read the whole thing.

Posted by: JohnL at 11:12 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 235 words, total size 2 kb.

Are molecular assemblers feasible? As I pointed out here, an Israeli team has reportedly used a DNA molecule to assemble a transistor.

Yesterday, Glenn Reynolds posted a wealth of links on the debate over the feasibility of nanotech molecular assemblers. I like how he works Clarke's first law
into his commentary, too: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

Lots of good stuff there, so read the whole thing, along with the linked articles.

Posted by: JohnL at 10:41 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 99 words, total size 1 kb.