How Ya Like Me Now?

Fiddled with the template last night, switching to a three-column format so as to get the Rocky Top Brigade blogroll up to the top of the page. I'm also considering putting a PayPal link up in that corner. The page loads a bit slower now, yes, but I think I like this look a little better.

I tried an Arial font for the post body, from a Times New Roman, but I think it makes the whole blog look pretty samey. Maybe switching back to TNR? We'll see. (UPDATE: I switched back. Is the font too small to read clearly? Seems OK to me and I like the look.)

Both side columns shouldn't break any of the individual link names, although I had to specify width in pixels for the right column to work. It does fine unspecified when I do it locally on my browser, but when I load the template into Blogger, the right side column is far too narrow for some reason. Who knows why....

I also added a small banner-thingy over the center column where I can change the text whenever the mood suits, but still keep the "Reading the Memphis papers..." header. Folks seem to look for that. Anyway, the "world class" bit is a jab at our civic booster types' favorite adjective. Every time I hear that phrase, I instantly know that the project described is an expensive boondoggle.

Anyway, opinions solicited! Good, bad, indifferent, whatever. Except for the "white text on black background" thing. I'm sticking with that one. Deal with it.

Digi-Plex?

This is a damned good idea. It's about time it happened here. The fact that they are already set up for and can cater to digital films bodes very well for Memphis' indie film industry and the Memphis Digital Arts Co-op. I hope they succeed.

Now, what we need is a movie theater where folks can eat at tables, drink beer, smoke and talk and move around, sorta like the Alamo Drafthouse. Wasn't there an earlier effort at something like this?

Even So, More Questions Remain

The Gayoso House murder was quickly solved. Thank goodness, and the Memphis Police Department, for that. The reporting on her death leaves a few questions still.

In this Commercial Appeal story, we come into reporting the case through some blather about the climate of fear in the building and downtown, complete with pointless photo of a young white woman looking confused. This is a marked turn from the usual Commercial Appeal reporting about downtown, which is at pains to point out just how safe it is down there. There are big investments and a lot of money down there; can't have the tourists, drunks and creative classes getting spooked and bailing, can we?

Then there's this:

Much of the talk about the slaying this week revolved around questions as to how the assailant entered the secure building.

Residents are required to use a pass-card to enter while visitors must be buzzed in by someone inside.

However, as with many similar systems, it's not foolproof.

"For five years, (my art gallery) was over there," said Pam Craig, owner of the Rivertown Gallery near the apartments. "I would see people come in, hit the buzzer, then come around to talk to us when they couldn't get in. Then they would say, 'Never mind' and follow someone else in."

Wednesday afternoon, a man rang the buzzer in the rear of the building, said he was a Time Warner employee and was admitted, with no guard present.

Kelly said general deliveries are supposed to go to the security desk, but that "regular vendors" like postal carriers and cable workers are an exception.

In other words, the human element foiled all the security.

The side-bar story, which goes into more detail about the crime and its solution, mentions that the perpetrator was a former resident! Think that has anything to do with the above?

Police said Wednesday that Andrews ... knew someone who lived in the Gayoso, and that knowledge may have helped him slip past security Saturday night, police said.

That resident has been questioned, and had no hand in giving Andrews access, police said. Investigators would not identify the person, but said he lives on another floor in the building.

Again, security is only as good as the people who enforce it, and the extent of its deployment.

One thing I had wondered about was the presence of the FBI in the case. It turns out they played an important and revealing role:

...federal agents said there is technology available that makes it possible to trace the location of cell phone users.

I've seen this reported in a story about tracking Al Qaida through their use of cellphones. Apparently, some models come with built-in GPS tracking! It would seem that was the case. Makes you wonder, though....

This Is How To Do It

I do hate to keep tooting John Branston's horn, but damn, the guy gets it right most of the time. In this week's opinion piece, he nails it.

In his look at the proposed Promenade development, Branston starts:

Since it was created in 2000, the Riverfront Development Corporation has picked most of the low-hanging fruit -- landscaping and maintaining parks, putting a median strip in Riverside Drive, building stairways from the bluff to Tom Lee Park and a walkway above the cobblestones, holding a design competition for a new riverboat landing and observation point, and commissioning a master plan for the riverfront.

Now comes the hard part -- the proposed makeover of the Promenade, including private high-rise developments, demolition and relocation of public buildings and parking garages, a controversial land bridge, and the money to do these things. And what about Mud Island River Park and The Pyramid?

Branston then goes on to make specific suggestions, naming names, on how to approach the "question" of what to do "about" the Promenade. He points the way to a whole lot of good questions to ask and people to interview. He is skeptical, but he keeps his eye on the central question, "What's best?" He's knowledgable and he employs that knowledge usefully.

I really wish this town had a dozen more reporters and journalists just like him.

Trolley Folly

I meant to get to this a while back, but it got lost under a pile of paperwork on the desk.

The week following the Memphis Flyer story about the Madison Trolley, the Commercial Appeal produced their own story to counter it. Where John Branston of the Flyer found much to be desired, the CA story comes across more as eager spin.

Fortunately, Callahan had access to numbers for us to crunch. He reports 35,631 riders on the full trolley line (the north-south Main Street line and the east-west Madison Avenue line) for the first month of operations. But he reports that for the last three weeks of that period there were only 19,627 riders. So, for the free introductory week, we have about 16,000 riders, but the regular fare week after we get about 6000 per week. Quite a dropoff. Callahan quotes MATA officials as saying weekly ridership is expected to increase to almost 15,000, or a 250% increase.

Yeah.

Like Branston, writer Jody Callahan rides the trolley to mixed result, but the article is filled with hopeful predictions and a lot of the usual sunny-side spin, with a side of the obvious. The article begins with the story of a man who went from catching the bus near his home to walking 12 minutes to catch one trolley, transfer to another, then walk some more to work. It ends with a woman who says problems would probably cause her not to use the trolley.

Nice try, CA.

One note: I meant to mention this earlier, but one of the hallmarks of the trolley is supposed to be no more than a 10 minute wait between cars. I wonder how long they'll keep this up? Nearly every bus line in the City varies between a fifteen to hour-long wait, depending on part of the city, time of day, and direction of travel. If busses ran in the most used lines every 10 minutes, all day and well into the night like the trolley, a lot of folks would be very, very happy. But we're told MATA can't afford that. They can, however, afford to do it for the downtown trolley.

Must be nice, huh?

This'n'That

I've added some more graphics to the Kerry Mockery Page and two to Carol Chumney's Wallop Page! I redid the Kerry page using Java and thumbnail-ish images to reduce bandwidth usage. It's also been renamed "Kerry Mockery & Other Political Shenanigans."

Still no word from Chumney's attorney. Harharhar....

As I thought, traffic for the Kerry page topped out just over 4000 hits Monday night. I'm now seeing secondary referrals from folks who saw the Instapundit mention and are now linking from their own blogs. Like netWMD or BaneDad.

More to come later. Thanks for stopping by!

Southern English

A Southern accent, at least in Hollywood, has always been code for stupid and bigoted. So when a study some years ago announced that an Appalachian dialect was amazingly close to Elizabethan English, it caused no small amount of area pride. We weren't backwards, we were Shakesperean!

Geitner Simmons takes a look at some mis-history by going to 19th and 18th century sources. It's not long and it's fun history.

Even though I have lived my whole life in the South, and have a father who is from Georgia and Florida, I constantly get asked where I'm from. I had almost no Southern accent growing up and only have a mild one today after years of working at it. My mother is French-Canadian, and my father was a banker who erased his accent to speak in basic Midwestern television-news English. Use of "y'all" in their home was ruthlessly quashed.

I'm better now. And even more strange, my mother never did teach us French.

Lileks

If you don't have James Lileks on your daily reading, you are missing out. He can say things so well, certainly far better than I:

Which brings us to gay marriage. Earlier that day I’d heard an interesting debate on the Dennis Prager show. He had two anthropologists as guests, both tenured professors who favore of elastic definitions of marriage. One of them said the most extraordinary thing, which prompted me to finally say something about it here. I’ve avoided the topic because A) I really don’t have any observations not covered elsewhere by other fine commentators, and B) expression of opposition to gay marriage often leads to a distortion of one’s views. After the constitutional amendment issue was floated, I caught a couple examples of TV commentators calling it “a ban on gay unions,” which is an utter mischaracterization of the issue. As if the government was going to find gay couples, crowbar them apart and make them live alone in dismal one-room apartments. And I’ve heard callers to radio hosts insist that in the end it’s all about homophobia, or religious intolerance, no matter what arguments the host might put forward.

Well, I have no religious opposition to homosexuality. I think civilized society recognizes that a small percentage of its citizens are drawn to the same sex, and that’s no reason to gather up the pitchforks and flaming torches, okay? Live and let live. Consenting adults, etc. And it's not one of those "you repulse me, and you should be glad I tolerate your presence" things. It's just no big deal for me. Not on the radar. I have no problem with civil unions; I have no problem with gay adoption, either. We had a piece in the paper a few months ago about a gay couple who’d adopted six HIV-positive children from other countries. Six! And I’m supposed to stand in judgment of them?

But what perked up my ears was one of the anthropologist’s assertions that there is no difference between a two-parent / two-sex family and a two-parent / same-sex family. None. He said: Any preference for a traditional mom/dad family was based in a “superstition.” His word: “Superstition.” Because, you see, there was no evidence that two moms were different in any important way than a mom and a dad. Belief in werewolves, belief in the evil eye, belief in the walking undead or the superiority of a mom-dad household: superstition.

In his zeal for a brave new world, this fellow managed to insult and demean everyone. And I mean everyone. Moms? Any guy can do your job. Dads? Your son or daughter doesn’t need to grow up with a male role model in his or her daily life. It’s the sort of pernicious nonsense that thinks gender is an arbitrary social construct. It’s not enough, apparently, to say that gay couples can be great parents. You have to insist that heterosexual couples have no inherent advantages. It’s not enough to say that kids raised by gay couples can grow up well-adjusted. You have to deny the advantages of growing up in a family where the child is exposed to both male and female role models on a molecular level. It’s not enough to support the rights of a lesbian couple to bring life into this world; you have to stifle your own suspicions that having a dad in the house is better than not having one. Otherwise you’re one of those curious old things who lives in a world dominated by superstitions. Quaint, amusing superstitions.

This is what dismays me: no matter how much I may support gay rights, in the final analysis my belief that my daughter needs a dad brands me as a reactionary.

Well, at the risk of making it worse: A mom cannot be a dad. And a friend or uncle who comes around for trips to the ice cream store might be that vaunted “male role model” but he’s not going to magically impart values just by showing up for an hour or two every fortnight. Just because gay couples can’t be excellent parents doesn’t mean that the inherent nature of the relationship is equal to the inherent nature of heterosexual parenting. But nowadays we cannot make value judgments about these things. If you say that heterosexual parenting arrangements have a built-in advantage you're somehow delegitimizing the very notion of homosexual parenting.

I think this is obvious, and I am mystified why this should somehow become a referendum on homosexuality. But alas. I’m sure this makes me, in the eyes of some, a hopeless bigot. It would be different if the advocates admitted the difference and insisted that it doesn’t matter in the long run. No: they refuse to admit that there’s a difference at all. Moms? Dads? Play-acting roles, Mere inventions, lead aprons we drape on manikins.

I don’t mean to suggest this is the opinion of all advocates of gay marriage; for all I know most regard this a self-refuting drivel. Of course kids need dads and moms! But it’s not the first time I’ve heard it, and it seems to be a favored argument by those who are approaching the same-sex marriage issue not as a civil rights issue, but as a means of enshrining gender-studies grad school nonsense in public policy. Rather than explore the fascinating differences between men and women, they shake the Etch-A-Sketch and insist there were never any differences anyway.

To paraphrase Prager, it takes a Master’s degree to believe something as stupid as this.

Alternate History

Following links around, I discovered this. It's a review of a book written in another universe where George W. Bush did as many seem to want him to have done and arrested 20 young Arab men on the morning of September 11, 2001. Strangely enough, things didn't go well for him there either:

Like Watergate, “Saudigate” (a wince-making name but the one that has stuck) began with a small, attention-grabbing event. On the morning of September 11, 2001, FBI agents arrested 19 young Arab men, almost all citizens of Saudi Arabia, as they boarded four domestic airline flights. The Saudi government naturally protested, and Attorney General John Ashcroft responded by publicly making an astonishing accusation: that the 19 had intended to hijack the airplanes and crash them into the White House, the Pentagon and the two main towers of the World Trade Center. This plot, more like a Tom Clancy novel than a real world occurrence, had supposedly been set in motion by Osama bin-Laden, a Saudi businessman living in exile in Afghanistan who called himself the leader of a shadowy, and probably shadow-thin, network of religious fanatics. Ashcroft dubbed the group“al-Qa’eda” (“the Foundation”), a name that some of those involved may have used but that is more firmly linked, as Blumenthal notes in one of many enlightening asides, to the science fiction novels of Isaac Asimov. The SF resonance evidently appealed to the White House aides who were primarily responsible for manufacturing a “crisis” to shore up a tottering administration. Blumenthal credits the idea to a second-level speech writer named David Frum, a Canadian import whose wife is a best selling novelist.

Impeachment comes up, too.

Don't Tell

Detroit is experimenting with high-tech parking meters that cost up to $7000 each. Don't let the Memphis City Council know about this. God knows what Myron Lowery might want to do....

Punishing Profilers for Protecting Passngers

This hasn't gotten much play, except on a few websites, but it seems the Clinton administration was fining airline security personnel if they even appeared to be racially insensitive to Arab men.

"We had testimony a couple of months ago from the past president of United, and current president of American Airlines that kind of shocked us all," Lehman told me. "They said under oath that indeed the Department of Transportation continued to fine any airline that was caught having more than two people of the same ethnic persuasion in a secondary line for line for questioning, including and especially, two Arabs."

Wait a minute. So if airline security had three suspicious Arab guys they had had to let one go because they'd reached a quota?

That was it, Lehman said, "because of this political correctness that became so entrenched in the 1990s, and continues in current administration. No one approves of racial profiling, that is not the issue. The fact is that Norwegian women are not, and 85-year-old women with aluminum walkers are not, the source of the terrorist threat. The fact is that our enemy is the violent Islamic extremism and the overwhelming number of people that one need to worry about are young Arab males, and to ask them a couple of extra questions seems to me to be common sense, yet if an airline does that in numbers that are more than proportionate to their number in particular line, then they get fined and that is why you see so many blue haired old ladies and people that are clearly not of Middle Eastern extraction being hauled out in such numbers because otherwise they get fined."

Un-freaking-believable. No word on whether this is still true today, but based on stories floating around, it seems to be.

Holy Crap!

Strong Bad answers his email, but Homestar Runner shows off his pimped-out propellor beanie! It's got skirt-effect lights!!

(Note to Homestar newbies: run your cursor over the text on the final screen to find the Easter eggs.)

Sounds About Right

You are 41% geek

You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator. Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend. You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You'll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines! Geek [to You]: I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals! You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

I took version one and got 53%, a low-level geek. This score sounds about right to me.

Build a Desk-Top Trebuchet

That's a catapult, for those of you who don't know. Now, you can lay siege to desks and cubicles all around you!

Columbine

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School, an event of near-equal proportion to Oklahoma City and 9-11. It marked a wake-up call and a sobering moment for America.

The CNN story is nothing new: hidden information will be rediscovered for decades to come. It's the old story of government power being used to cover asses and sweep problems away. Unanswered questions still remain: The famous UN truck. The teacher who reported a "man" (not kid) coming into the school to kill. The chorus of warnings right after Columbine that more kids had been involved and wanted to "finish the job." We likely will never know.

Slate has an excellent re-examination of Columbine, one that dispels much of the common wisdom and presents a scarier picture still. FBI and other specialists now believe that Eric Harris was a psychopath kept in check long enough, and simultaneously supported by, Dylan Klebold so that they could plan and execute a monstrous scheme:

They bragged about dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled their bloody performance for its anniversary. Klebold boasted on video about inflicting "the most deaths in U.S. history." Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they hadn't been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The climax would be captured on live television. It wasn't just "fame" they were after—Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term—they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.

In other words, they weren't revengers, but terrorists.

I had always accepted the not-much-talked about belief that Harris and Klebold were two screwed-up kids who were pressured by jocks and preps until they broke. Rather than kill themselves as past generations often did, they used a new plan -- one from movies and video games, made possible by passive parenting -- to get revenge. Certainly, I would often plot of my beating the thugs who ruled my school.

I was far from alone. Right after Columbine, Jon Katz started a message thread on Slashdot that exploded within days into what he called "Voices From the Hellmouth."

In the days after the Littleton, Colorado massacre, the country went on a panicked hunt the oddballs in High School, a profoundly ignorant and unthinking response to a tragedy that left geeks, nerds, non-conformists and the alienated in an even worse situation than before. Stories all over the country embarked on witchunts that amounted to little more than Geek Profiling. All weekend, after Friday's column here, these voiceless kids -- invisible in media and on TV talk shows and powerless in their own schools -- have been e-mailing me with stories of what has happened to them in the past few days. Here are some of those stories in their own words, with gratitude and admiration for their courage in sending them. The big story out of Littleton isn't about violence on the Internet, or whether or not video games are turning out kids into killers. It's about the fact that for some of the best, brightest and most interesting kids, high school is a nightmare of exclusion, cruelty, warped values and anger.

The big story never seemed to quite make it to the front pages or the TV talk shows. It wasn't whether the Net is a place for hate-mongers and bomb-makers, or whether video games are turning your kids into killers. It was the spotlight the Littleton, Colorado killings has put on the fact that for so many individualistic, intelligent, and vulnerable kids, high school is a Hellmouth of exclusion, cruelty, loneliness, inverted values and rage....

People who are different are reviled as geeks, nerds, dorks. The lucky ones are excluded, the unfortunates are harassed, humiliated, sometimes assaulted literally as well as socially. Odd values - unthinking school spirit, proms, jocks - are exalted, while the best values - free thinking, non-conformity, curiousity - are ridiculed. Maybe the one positive legacy the Trenchcoat Mafia left was to ensure that this message got heard, by a society that seems desperate not to hear it.

Columbine seems to have been the exception to that. And why someone like Harris got away with it so long seems obvious, but may never get publicly admitted.

But I think we shouldn't let this view of Columbine color the other school shootings of the era. Paducah, Pearl, Oregon and others were loners under severe stress from bullies. In the Paducah case, the shooter targetted the popular, Christian kids who tormented him. This group met every morning at the school flag pole for morning prayer. The shooter struck them there. In fact, his worst tormentor was later hailed a hero for stopping him. (Please note I'm not glorifying the shooter or reversing the situation.)

Video games did have a role in that shooting. A man (Goldman?) who designed simulations for the military to get troops prepared for shooting to kill studied this boy and noted that although he had never fired a gun before, he was able to get a majority of head and torso shots, something incredibly unlikely in a first-time shooter. Goldman found that the kid had had hundreds of hours in training, playing video games.

I'm not demonising video games, but they do cast a shadow. Playing cops and robbers, or cowboys and Indians, as a kid meant a brief time in the afternoon, with fingers or plastic guns you had to provide your own sound effects for. Sitting for hours and hours, day after day, playing realistic blood-spatter games is a whole 'nother matter. The whole culture casts shadows in many ways over kids. Add up enough and cast them over one troubled, angry kid and you get explosion.

Or so I've always thought. Now, I'm not so sure. Read the Slate article and the sidebar especially. Something else to note is that while shootings at school happened before the early Nineties and still happen today, it was during the Clinton era when it was most in the news and on our minds. I am not blaming Clinton, but what in that era was different enough to have contributed? Did something in the way school adminsitrators handled kids reach a head then, only to subside with new approaches? I don't know, but it seems worth asking.

Anti-government Radicals Fire on Troops; Many Dead and Injured

National guard attempts to confiscate banned weapons from right-wing tax protest group.

BOSTON - April 20

National guard units seeking to confiscate a cache of recently banned weapons were ambushed on April 19th by elements of a para-military extremist faction. Military and law enforcement sources estimate that 72 were killed and more than 200 injured before government forces were compelled to withdraw.

Speaking after the clash Massachusetts Governor Thomas Gage declared that the extremist faction, which was made up of local citizens, has links to the radical right-wing tax protest movement. Gage blamed the extremists for recent incidents of vandalism directed against internal revenue offices. The governor, who described the group's organizers as "criminals," issued an executive order authorizing the summary arrest of any individual who has interfered with the government's efforts to secure law and order.

The military raid on the extremist arsenal followed wide-spread refusal by the local citizenry to turn over recently outlawed weapons. Gage issued a ban on private ownership of weapons and ammunition earlier in the week. This decision followed a meeting in early this month between government and military leaders at which the governor authorized the forcible confiscation of illegal arms. One government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, pointed out that "none of these people would have been killed had the extremists obeyed the law and turned over their weapons voluntarily."

Government troops initially succeeded in confiscating a large supply of outlawed weapons and ammunition. However, troops attempting to seize arms and ammunition in Lexington met with resistance from heavily-armed extremists who had been tipped off regarding the government's plans.

During a tense standoff in Lexington's town park, National Guard Colonel Francis Smith, commander of the government operation, ordered the armed group to surrender and return to their homes. The impasse was broken by a single shot, which was reportedly fired by one of the right- wing extremists. Eight civilians were killed in the ensuing exchange. Ironically, the local citizenry blamed government forces rather than the extremists for the civilian deaths.

Before order could be restored, armed citizens from the surrounding areas had descended upon the guard units. Colonel Smith, finding his forces overmatched by the armed mob, ordered a retreat.

Governor Gage has called upon citizens to support the state national joint task force in its effort to restore law and order. The governor has also demanded the surrender of those responsible for planning and leading the attack against the government troops. Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and John Hancock, who have been identified as "ringleaders" of the extremist faction, remain at large.

First reported on April 20, 1775

Journalists and Junk Science

Very good article from Catherine Seipp in National Review Online on Media & Junk Science. She write how journalists and editors, through a combination of ignorance, laziness and bias, let some egregious bad science go through the media. She has examples!

Me, I've firmly believed that all journalists should be made to take basic sciences and math in college as a requirement for a journalism degree. For my psych degree, I had to take statistics and that has helped me enormously to understand real statistics and meaning from the junk that slips through. ("Bush Leads Kerry by 3%" for example. If the margin of error in the poll is 3%, then it's a statistical dead heat.)

I've heard too many reporters and journalists joke that they went into journalism to escape the hard sciences to not take some truth from the statement. Too many articles will contain whopper errors, especially in environmental or medical reporting, that a simple knowledge of science can cure.

Another example? In this otherwise good UPI analysis of the match between a Martian rock and some asteroidal rocks found on Earth, the author says this:

During the early eons of the solar system, planetary impacts were downright common. Given the relative proximity of Earth and Mars, it is easy to accept the possibility that materials propelled upward from one planet eventually could make their way to the other.

The first organisms on Earth originated around 3.5 billion years ago and maybe earlier. Back then, impacts from asteroids and comets still were common. It is conceivable that material ejected from Earth by those impacts could have landed on Mars carrying some of those organisms -- or their raw ingredients. The converse also is possible -- early organisms from Mars could have landed on Earth.

The discovery of Bounce raises the distinct possibility that life arising from a common source could have existed for a time on both worlds.

Well, not quite. Simple physics and some environmental science would show that it's highly unlikely any rocks from Earth made it back to Mars, while the opposite is much more likely. Martian gravity is a fraction of Earth's, meaning it takes less impact energy to send rock into space. Mars' atmosphere is also a fraction of Earth's, meaning the rocks can surpass atmospheric friction on Mars more easily than Earth.

Mostly, though, our solar system is like a large, circular slope, with smaller round slopes inside it. The Sun is one giant gravity well, pulling everything out to the Kuiper Belt into it. Anything ejected from Mars will start to slide inexorably into the Sun, passing Earth's smaller gravity well in the process. Whereas anything ejected from Earth must work against the Sun's pull to move outward to Mars. All that adds up to a far tinier likelihood of Earth being a seed for Mars than the other way round.

Chemistry, math, physics, statistics, history, psychology, economics, sociology, biology, earth sciences, atmospheric sciences, a working knowledge of all these would be immeasureable aids to reporters and journalists. It strikes me as intuitive that they'd be somewhat better educated in these subjects than many of their readers. It would allow them to recognise false claims, to spot spin by funding and headline seekers, to stamp out bias that serves a political agenda. It would certainly make reporters better at their jobs.

One thing I've always wondered at was the frequency with which you see reporters labelled as "specialists" in some field by dint of nothing more than reporting on it for some period of time. No college background, no study, nothing. This is especially true for reporters covering business and economics, where seeing through government and opposition spin is vital to accurate reporting.

Take for example the Kerry "middle class misery index." There is an economic tool called the "misery index." It's a defined and specific measure. The Kerry campaign simply selected some random economic measures by which they could claim that things are worse today than under Clinton. Then they named it too-closely to the real thing. Many reporters simply passed along the MCMI without noting, or bothering to note, the distinction and its problems. Some sharp-eyed folks noticed that under the MCMI, the best time in America was under Jimmy Carter! Folks who remember then would beg to disagree. All it would've taken is a simple understanding of economics to stop that spin cold.

Same for many "environmental" reporters who haven't studied anything scientific in college, but are motivated by the desire to fix the world. That's why the global warming debate is so muddied. Too much bad or malicious information is unknowingly passed along. Same for "medical" reporters who will jump on the latest study as "proving" something, when that likely hasn't happened, or who will promote the latest diet silliness uncritically. Same for "political" reporters who don't know their history, political history, or political and sociological science. Same for "education" reporters who never studied education themselves. Same for "business" reporters who have never run or managed a business, nor studied regulation or market economics.It especially pains me when reporters new to the city get sent to report on events that have deep local history; they simply don't understand the resonance and subtler implications of what they cover. Their readers or viewers suffer

Replace "feelings" (note that I'm not saying "intuition") and journalistic templates with some sound groundings in the basics of science and the quality of journalism and reporting would definitely go up. Readers benefit and the community is better served.

Sounds of Silence

I've been going through changes my whole life, but only since I turned thirty have I even started to watch them. One recent change, happening over the past year and a half, has been my turning away from constant media noise in my environment. That's a fancy way of saying I turn off the television, radio and stereo a lot. During the day I might listen to talk radio some; at night I may watch certain, specific shows or occasionally have the television on for background noise. I hardly ever listen to music any more, something I used to do a whole lot.

I enjoy the quiet, or at least as quiet as it gets living in the middle of Midtown Memphis with Union Avenue a block away. Wind, traffic noise like a rush of wind, neighbors up and down the street, planes overhead are my background now. I kinda like it.

Sometimes I have to deal with loud, ignorant neighbors, or the bozos who walk down my block. "Udi. Udi! UDI! I'm talking to you! Hey. HEY! HEY MAN!! Wait up." Or cars with killer stereos or a clutch of people hanging out on the sidewalk talking mindless trash. But I can live with that.

The past couple of days have seen steady winds up to twenty MPH, so that mostly covers a lot of the unpleasant stuff. I don't turn on the television before 6PM any more, sometimes not until 8, if at all. I never listen to radio past late afternoon. I don't listen to music at all. That's not to say I don't keep up with news. I do, usually through the Internet, which is silent and I can control it.

I've disconnected from the media fog that usually surrounds us and I like it. Going into restaurants where the big-screen television is always on distracts me fiercely now. I'll have to make adjustments to find other, quieter places. The pace of life is a little bit slower, more human-scaled. My anxiety levels are way down; I'm less enervated. My connection to the world around me feels more real, instead of edited, mediated and poured all over me like goo.

It's nice. Try it some time.

Razzum-frazzum-dazzum-zazzum

Grrrrrrr! I was supposed to post some stuff I had bookmarked. Instead, I spent Sunday afternoon and evening rewriting the HTML of the Kerry Mockery Page. Traffic went through the roof starting Friday, thanks to both Instapundit and a mention on FreeRepublic. I blew through my whole month's bandwidth in 36 hours! It didn't help that all those fat graphics were loading with every page call.

So, I made smaller GIFs and then had to learn JavaScript to make a simple popup window link for each image. I had to learn parameters. It took a whole lot longer than anticipated and was frustrating as all hell. But the page is done. Just don't look at the source code. Oooooh, what a mess.

As long as folks don't look at every full-res JPG, it should save me some bandwidth. If you have problems with the page, let me know. Alternatively, if you have suggestions on the HTML or JavaScript coding, I'd like to hear them. My code is so inelegant.... Functional, but brute force and repetitive. Email addy is up to the left.

By the way, I added about six or seven new graphics to the page. Enjoy!

I have chores and errands to do today, so further updates will be later this evening. See y'all later!

Wendi, This Is For You

In Sunday's Commercial Appeal, columnist Wendi Thomas wonders at the lack of photos of coffins returning from war, as compared to previous wars. She blames the Pentagon.

Me, I blame a lack of intrepid photographers, and the editors & publishers willing to motivate and support them in the quest. The pictures are there, if they are willing to go after them. In fact, during the Kosovo war, there were photos of American caskets returning to America through Greece that never ran in American papers. (Sorry, couldn't find the link anymore.) Greek papers ran them, though. I guess it was different then....

Anyway, if you look around, you can find these pictures. Wendi, this is for you.