Cross posted on Stand Down A famous anecdote about Reagan has it that, when presented with some numbers which seemed to tell against one of his policy goals, he simply told an aide: “well, get me different facts, then.” Flash-forward to the ouster of economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, who was tactless enough to give a […]

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Look’s like Ms. Tushnet’s shooting for a 2003 “best series” award. Check it.

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So the whole “no TV” thing had prevented me until now from catching Joss Whedon’s new sci-fi series “Firefly“, an error I’ve finally rectified. This makes me hopelessly late to the ball — the thing started airing in September — but I figured I’d formally register my approval. It’s not as relentlessly clever in the […]

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Hey– free idea if someone with a far better programming hand than mine feels like putting in some long nights: write a client to work with TiVo boxes that’ll put them on the Gnutella network or some variant thereof. Trade episodes directly (no idea what format TiVO uses) or compress to MPEG on the fly.

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So there’s been controversy over whether this story reported by 2600 is true or bogus. In a nutshell, Denver guy claims he was harassed at length for the “crime” of taking photos near the VP’s hotel;Denver PD and Secret Service claim it didn’t happen. 2600 bemoans the lack of a “smoking gun” to settle the […]

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Tom Palmer recently blogged about his visit to Britain’s “Eden Project,” where to his incredulity, he found a largely spurious piece of spam presented as “educational material.” The spam purports to describe what the composition of a “global village” would be like if we compressed the world’s population into a hundred person town. A little […]

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To my suprise, Dad offers the following commentary on the mall piece below: About the malls, you fellows are going the wrong route. Malls are the replacement of the “agora,” the “plaza mayor,” or the “forum Romanum.” With suburban changes, the places of trade or exchange of ideas have shifted. Teenagers, or other more rational […]

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I’d expected, on the basis of an earlier tangential encounter, to be rubbed the wrong way by later Wittgenstein. As I keep on through Monk’s biography, though, I find myself reminded of something I think Robert Nozick tried to do. The title of his second book, Philosophical Explanations, refers to his idea of a “second […]

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Malls are much worse when you see why they make sense. Typically, I waited far too long to do most of my Christmas shopping. I had hoped to take a good half day ambling about Manhattan looking for cool, interesting gifts for the various people on the list, then realized I had to be somewhere […]

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The final twelve issues of the epic comic book series The Invisibles have finally been compiled in the trade paperback The Invisible Kingdom. Like the final episode of The Prisoner, a series itself frequently referenced in the comics, it requires a certain amount of backtracking and rereading before it makes much sense, but it’s well […]

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