|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
|
|
|
|
|
|
Saturday, January 18, 2003 :::
What I hate about fall and winter isn't the cold — much as I like to complain about that, and you can expect more of that, as we're scheduled late next week for the kind of weather Amnesty International has outlawed in three European countries (the other two are Pete Carrill and Bill Carmody — I'm just typing whatever goes through my head now). What really gets to me is the lack of sunlight. Leaving work yesterday, though, I saw in the western sky a distinct twilight, rather than the pitch dark to which I've started to become accustomed. Happy, happy.
::: posted by dWj at 8:22 PM
(0) comments
Animal 'Rights' Activists Confront Homosexuals Over Leather 'Pride'
"We decided to come to the Mid-Atlantic Leather Weekend in our 'pleather' [false leather] and 'animal friendly' gear so we could show our gay friends that you can have just as sleazy a look without killing any animals," said Dan Mathews, a homosexual PETA campaign coordinator outfitted in "pleather" from head to toe.
All roads lead to Instapundit.
::: posted by Steven at 8:56 AM
(0) comments
Howard Bashman of How Appealing has added us to his blogroll. This must be out of reciprocity, since he certainly has too much taste for that to be a factor.
And, of course, I should have checked his site for the amicus briefs before I ever ended up at the Washington Post. He linked to them very shortly after they were filed.
::: posted by Steven at 12:11 AM
(0) comments
Friday, January 17, 2003 :::
For those interested -- the amicus curiae briefs filed by the administration in the U Michigan affirmative action cases can be found (in PDF form) here and here. Links from the Washington Post.
::: posted by Steven at 6:12 PM
(0) comments
More on punctuation:
Wouldn't the sentence "I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign" have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?
::: posted by dWj at 6:05 PM
(0) comments
Lily Malcolm on expensive burgers. I went to an eight-dollar-burger place last night (as opposed to an eight-dollar burger-place; you understand the hyphenation?), and it seems to me that the meat in any case is certainly no tastier than that of a quarter pounder. The superiority to McD's is clearly in the tomatoes that evoke the impression of a tomato and the bun quality. I wonder whether McD's could improve either of those for not too much money.
::: posted by dWj at 6:03 PM
(0) comments
Yale to win handily against Brown tonight, but Penn to win the league.
::: posted by dWj at 3:44 PM
(0) comments
Banana extinction?
::: posted by dWj at 3:42 PM
(0) comments
Tivo can be set up to skip commercials, right? Can it be set up to skip the show and only record the commercials?Super Bowl is a week from Sunday.
::: posted by dWj at 1:44 PM
(0) comments
A couple weeks ago, driving into Iowa, I found a high school basketball game on the radio, and I found I had no interest in it. Driving through Ohio on a Friday night once, I listened to much of a high school football game between two teams whose names I wouldn't even recognize today; I'm not sure why I find college basketball interesting but no other level, while in football I have a reasonable level of interest in any of it. (I do think one of the problems with the NBA is that it emphasizes its individuals; thus while some argue that they're losing viewers because they lack stars, they lose me because they have them. College basketball, especially in the Ivy League and especially women's, are still team sports. The NBA shot clock doesn't even allow you to set up a play.)
::: posted by dWj at 1:44 PM
(0) comments
I wrote a letter to the Boston Herald based on Wednesday's anti-anti-smoking diatribe; I'm told it's in today's paper.
Here's what I wrote; I don't know what was published:
Let me get this straight. [I like starting letters to the editor with this line; it's more condescending than I'd use in most contexts, but mild arrogance seems appropriate on the letters page. -- ed.]
Tom Keane acknowledges that Brookline and Braintree already prohibit smoking in all bars and restaurants, that Boston, Framingham, and Saugus have bans coming into effect soon. Somerville, Chelsea, and Everett are close to imposing bans. Meanwhile, four fifths of Cambridge establishments prohibit smoking under current regulations -- and Keane thinks it's an imposition on him that the other fifth hasn't been forced to follow suit?
He thinks his desire "to go where [he wants] and not have to suffer exposure to smoke" should outweigh the desire of smokers to continue to have just a few places where they can go for a drink and a smoke. The arrogance of his position is appalling. I hope the City Council will show more respect for their constituents.
Actually, I hope they edited it a bit more. On second thought, I wish I had edited it a bit more; it seems insufficiently tight. Anyway, there it is.
::: posted by Steven at 12:47 PM
(0) comments
Martin is refused parole as 'danger to burglars' Tony Martin, the farmer jailed for shooting dead a teenage burglar, had his application for parole rejected yesterday.
The three members of the Parole Board, who met in London to review his case, gave no reason for turning him down.
A friend of Martin's claimed that it was because a probation report branded the 58-year-old "a danger to burglars".
Link from The Corner
::: posted by Steven at 11:57 AM
(0) comments
Dean commented on the size of Microsoft's dividend. My way of looking at it was that if operations provide nothing, and they put their current cash into T-bills, that's enough to produce sixteen cents per share per year.
::: posted by Steven at 11:35 AM
(0) comments
Of course, MSFT is not the first company to put forth a niggardly but positive dividend. Warren Buffett has said that if Berkshire Hathaway declares a dividend, it will be something substantial.
::: posted by dWj at 10:30 AM
(0) comments
Kuviasungnerk — I looked up the spelling; we called it "Kuvia", which is easier to spell — is the University of Chicago's annual week-long winter festival, and this is the best link of it I could find. (A better link would be attached to the first word of this post, but that didn't seem worthy.) It got most of a minute on WBBM this morning. They're finishing up today; my first year at the University, the morning calisthenics were called off on a day when the high would be -12 and the winds were blowing all day. I missed the cold when I went out East, though to be honest I didn't miss the that cold.
::: posted by dWj at 10:26 AM
(0) comments
Kind of a begrudging dividend, I think. At this rate, if they quit generating cash flow, they'll run out of cash in fifty years. It looks more like they're trying to be able to say, "look, we have a dividend!" than they are actually trying to have a dividend.
::: posted by dWj at 10:19 AM
(0) comments
Thursday, January 16, 2003 :::
"Scrubs" (NBC, Thursdays at 8:30 Eastern) is one of those shows that I see every few months and wonder why I don't seek it out.
In completely different news, the February edition of SmartMoney Magazine profiles Morningstar's Domestic Stock Fund Manager of the Year Joel Tillinghast.
The Wizard of Fidelity
He's shy. He's low-profile. And he's whipped the S&P during the past three years. He's Joel Tillinghast, manager of Fidelity's Low-Priced Stock fund.
That's all they mention on the web site, but the article mentions that his "main social outlet is the weekly happy hour of the Boston Mensa Society." He only shows up for that once every few weeks; those of us there tonight (which didn't include him) headed over to Borders afterward to get the magazine.
::: posted by Steven at 9:11 PM
(0) comments
Microsoft Declares Annual Dividend and Announces Two-for-One Split On Common Stock
They've never paid a dividend before. With the share split, they'll pass GE as the company with the most shares outstanding.
::: posted by Steven at 4:57 PM
(0) comments
The new governor has taken office in Illinois with a significant budget deficit — not atypical of states today, really — and there was a discussion on TV the other night of how to handle it. One participant suggested an increase in public works projects, because the federal government provides matching funds for those. We can suppose he meant to suggest that we do those projects for which federal matching funds are available instead of those for which they aren't, but what he actually said was just so amazingly dumb I felt I had to share it.
::: posted by dWj at 11:27 AM
(0) comments
Wednesday, January 15, 2003 :::
This article on Girl Scout cookies tells you how to order if you don't know any Girl Scouts (or their parents).
Orders for eight varieties of Girl Scout cookies are being taken now through Jan. 25. Cookies will be delivered the week of Feb. 24. Contact your local troop leader or call the hotline at 1-800-33-MINTS. Orders can also be faxed or mailed in with order sheets available online at www.ptgirlscouts.org/cookie.htm.
::: posted by Steven at 2:54 PM
(0) comments
I've refered to Tom Keane as one of my favorite Democrats, but I disagree with his column today in favor of a Cambridge smoking ban.
For a long time, the hospitality industry maintained that if nonsmokers didn't like smoke, then they shouldn't go into places that allowed it. Few buy that argument any more.
Wishful thinking, Tom. Plenty of us still "buy" it.
Nonsmokers want to go where they want and not have to suffer exposure to smoke as the price they pay.
Yes, and I want to go where I want and not have to suffer a lack of hamburgers. Every restaurant in Cambridge should be required to serve hamburgers. They should be decent hamburgers, and cheap, and come with a slice of tomato -- not the flavorless kind one so often finds. I demand a decent, tomato-flavored tomato.
I'm sorry -- I had to get that out of my system.
Let me back away from my gut libertarianism for a moment and make a pragmatic argument. Cambridge has no shortage of smoke-free restaurants -- they outnumber the ones that allow smoking by about four-to-one. These few establishments don't just have to agree to allow smoking, making a conscious decision to put off people who don't like cigarette smoke; they also have to jump through hoops to get licenses for it. Why not leave these last few places for people who want a smoke with their drink?
George Will has said that modern liberals don't really care what people do, so long as it's mandatory. That's the only real explanation for Keane's stance. Is it really a problem for Tom Keane that he only has three hundred plus establishments he can visit in Cambridge (I believe this number and the ratio I gave above are places with liquor licenses; I don't remember with much certainty), and I'm sure there are thousands in Boston. The real issue is that there are a few places that haven't yet conformed to his tastes.
::: posted by Steven at 2:45 PM
(0) comments
I was one of the few people in the Chicago area cheering for Pat Summitt last night, when she got her 800th win at the expense of DePaul. For those who don't know, she's one of the three all-time great college basketball coaches — along with Pete Carrill and Bill Carmody.
::: posted by dWj at 11:58 AM
(0) comments
Here's the "Order of the Phoenix" press release.
As The Leaky Cauldron is pointing out, Scholastic's stock price is jumping. I don't get that -- was there really that much risk that a date wouldn't be set?
::: posted by Steven at 11:39 AM
(0) comments
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is due to be published on June 21.
Link from Instapundit.
::: posted by Steven at 10:48 AM
(0) comments
Yesterday I posted a math question; last night 1/(log(z)+i*pi) hit me upside the head. For |z| between .5 and 1.5 with the negative real axis removed and the principal branch of log, not only do the limits from different sides of the boundary differ greatly, approaching z=-1 diverges from one side but not the other.
It's interesting how this sort of thing works; I had been mulling over this for a week, but it was only after sharing it that I quickly came upon an answer. I have a book on the computer language C that refers to "confessional programming" at one point, where one solves a problem by explaining it to someone else, who often doesn't have to say a thing.
::: posted by dWj at 9:55 AM
(0) comments
Tuesday, January 14, 2003 :::
More on the ongoing speculations regarding who will play Dumbledore in the Prisoner of Azkaban movie.
::: posted by Steven at 10:51 PM
(0) comments
If you need pointing to the Kitchen Cabinet, here. I've suggested that journalists are more anti-rural than they are liberal, but perhaps there are other correlated characterizations — such as "secular" — that represent the cultural domination of the major media better.
::: posted by dWj at 4:35 PM
(0) comments
Consider a simply connected region of the complex plane with two open, disjoint subsets A and B whose boundaries intersect at the boundary of the region. (Conceptually, the boundary of the region can be approached from either side. E.g. an annulus about the origin with the negative real axis removed; A and B consist of those elements with positive and negative imaginary parts, respectively, then their boundaries intersect along the real line, and part of that intersection is on the boundary of the region.) Now consider an analytic function f on the region (e.g. log(z)); are there any good restrictions on how the limit of f|A compares to the limit of f|B as we approach [a connected piece of] the boundary of the region? (Conceptually, we approach the boundary from different sides. In the case of log, the two differ by an amount that is constant along the relevant stretch of boundary; this seems like too much to ask for in general. On the other hand, I can't construct an analytic function for which this isn't true.)
::: posted by dWj at 4:33 PM
(0) comments
The WSJ reports that of married couples who describe themselves as very unhappy, half of those who divorce are happy five years later, while 80% of those who do not are.
::: posted by dWj at 1:04 PM
(0) comments
Bjorn Lomborg responds to a ruling of the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty. There's context here.
::: posted by Steven at 12:59 PM
(0) comments
Last night caught the first part of the PBS "American Experience" on Chicago. Second part airs tonight, third tomorrow. In Iowa they start on Wednesday. I don't know the schedule elsewhere. The first part made me proud; it had a certain amount of populist disdain for the city founders.
::: posted by dWj at 11:08 AM
(0) comments
It's unseasonably cold. Thing about that is that, this time of year in Chicago, the seasonable kind is sufficient for most people. One doesn't get a lot of "I wish we could shake these double-digit temperatures".
::: posted by dWj at 11:08 AM
(0) comments
Monday, January 13, 2003 :::
Link from Kate Malcolm on a fellow who tried to teach in an inner-city school:
Ms. Savoy unexpectedly instituted a policy allowing teachers to ship their two or three most disruptive students to the computer lab to be warehoused and supervised by teachers’ aides. My classroom’s behavior and attentiveness improved dramatically for two weeks.
I was wondering if this wasn't the solution; perhaps a charter school should be started, teachers hired from nearby schools, and have the teachers bring with them the students they want; then dispense expulsions freely. [When I wrote this, I had in mind what is described in the second to last paragraph of the article. Not the second one mentioned, but the first; I'd like to think that kids who want to learn but have fallen behind or are just not that bright can be accommodated.] The kids who stay — the kids who want to stay — get a chance to learn. I know a public school teacher — in better environments than this, mind you — who opposes truancy laws, on the grounds that the kids who don't want to be there would cause less trouble out of the school than in. Requiring attendance at a special "school" (even if in name only), though, might enable them to cause less trouble than out.
::: posted by dWj at 4:12 PM
(0) comments
Grandma mentioned Saturday night that George Ryan is being talked about as a potential recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. "I'm sure that occurred to him," I responded.
As a good conservative, I'm wary of any government enterprise, especially one that can result in death or otherwise relies on a degree of perfection. A healthy concern about flaws in the death penalty, perhaps to the point of abolition, is a position for which I have a fair amount of respect. The wonton, indiscriminate use of the pardon and commutation power to accomplish a legislative purpose one couldn't accomplish legislatively is not something I respect.
The legislature couldn't reform it. Lawmakers won't repeal it. But I will not stand for it.
In other words, he's right, the legislature is wrong, and he's going to throw his toys at passing strangers from his pram. It's this very moral superiority that is at the heart of most of the arrogance of public officials today.
Far and away the clearest evidence, though, that this is an act of arrogance above all else is its timing. The moratorium was in place, and going to stay there; nobody was about to be executed if he didn't act. The only significant event that he was trying to precede was that the power to do this would have gone to someone else.
The death penalty in Illinois is not imposed fairly or uniformly because of the absence of standards for the 102 Illinois State Attorneys, who must decide whether to request the death sentence. Should geography be a factor in determining who gets the death sentence?
Sure it should. He complained elsewhere in his speech — I'm drawing on memory here, having listened on the radio — that murderers were five times likelier to receive the death penalty in rural counties than in Cook County (of which the county seat is Chicago). Shouldn't the people of Cook County have the right not to use the death penalty? Does he think they should be required to do so?
He complained that only 2% of murderers get a death sentence. If that number were higher, he'd be happy? He commuted a death sentence to forty years last week because that was the sentence a co-defendant got. (Pickering's in all kind of trouble for using that logic.) If they should have both received death, do we count as progress making the sentencing twice as erroneous? If more people should be executed, shouldn't we at least get started on the ones that the courts will let us?
Again, I support the death penalty more in theory than in practice, for exactly the same reasons as Governor (as I post this) Ryan. (I probably support it in practice as well, but less than in theory.) What galls me, though, is his refusal to accept the opposing point of view as valid, and his use of a power for purposes for which it was not intended. At one point, he asked the purpose of the death penalty. I wish instead he had asked the purpose of the commutation power.
::: posted by dWj at 12:35 PM
(0) comments
Colby Cosh writes:
I think nearly everyone already agrees that Easy Rider is unwatchable nonsense.
Really? I thought it was just me.
Rear Window is wonderful, but to echo my earlier comments about Scorsese, a lot of people could make a wonderful movie starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly.
I'd rather watch a good story with bad acting than the other way around. I greatly enjoyed the first Harry Potter movie, which got me reading the books, but I don't think much of Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter. He seems to over-act.
I've also heard negative comments about Emma Watson as Hermione; I'm not sure whether this is because the critics have more refined taste in acting than I do, or because they don't know that Hermione is supposed to be an obnoxious know-it-all, especially toward the beginning of the series. I also thought Rupert Grint was fully convincing as Ron caughing up slugs in Chamber of Secrets. Maybe that's just my willingness to suspend disbelief again.
::: posted by Steven at 12:21 PM
(0) comments
Lileksism of the day:
The movie-editing software was aimed at the consumer, much in the same way that North Korean artillery is aimed at Seoul
He also talks about "Men in Black II". I haven't seen it, but I side with his reaction to the opening scene.
::: posted by Steven at 11:49 AM
(0) comments
Sunday, January 12, 2003 :::
The American Broadcasting Company decided that they could make a good show by finding a bachelor, finding him twenty-five prospective wives, and having them fight for his affections for a few weeks. Low and behold, Americans watched. Fox, having used a single-evening version of this concept once (remember "Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?"), thought that this was a great idea with some life left in it, but that it needed a little something extra, like fraud. Fox also, I learn, is about to show something called "Man vs. Beast", in which they pit fifty midgets (I swear I didn't make this up) against an elephant in a feat of strength.
I applaud this.
I suppose most of you think this is a further example of the degeneration of our culture -- you can already hear the Marge Simpson of a few years hence commenting that "Fox became a hard-core sex channel so gradually, we hardly even noticed." And I suppose that, normally, I'd agree with you; however, I've recently learned that PBS will be broadcasting a new show called "Sandwiches that You Will Like". It's entirely possible that "Sandwiches" will be a fine show. Perhaps the title is meant to be lame, in an ironic, "That '70s Show", kind of way. But it strikes me as the title of a game show developed by the BBC in one of its more continental moments, or maybe a Japanese show that loses something in translation. Maybe something developed by the CBC, specifically to draw a contrast with the hoodlums down south. It is, at any rate, a distinctly unAmerican title.
I've always maintained that, while I have too much shame and/or self-respect to be a regular viewer of "The Man Show", I'm pleased to live in a culture that would create such a thing. I stand by that. Bring on the midgets, and don't change the channel. Especially not to PBS -- I might get queasy.
::: posted by Steven at 1:28 AM
(0) comments
|
|
|
|
