I may have to subscribe to the Guardian. Any paper with their level of real news coverage, and that has time for lots of Pullman and Mieville is OK with me. Hell, I subscribe to all their RSS feeds (well, OK, not the Sports or Football ones, I admit) and read most of the stuff, so I probably ought to… Read more →
Month: November 2004
US Currency Part N+1
Continuing the trend of looking at the weakening US dollar, we’ve got a couple of new articles. First, an analysis post from Kitco, a gold bullion dealer, looks at the potential effects of Japan and China cutting back on, or dropping their support for the US dollar. For a while now the US has been pressuring China to let its… Read more →
Halifax prepares for George Bush visit
CBC News: Halifax prepares for George Bush visit I plan to protest. Creative suggestions welcomed. I can’t wait to tell my boss (a rabid, pro-Bush Republican) that I want the time off to go protest. Should be fun. Read more →
Diametrically opposite models
I still can’t believe it’s 2004 and I’m devoting this much time to reading about religiously-based arguments against evolution. Sigh. There’s a nice round-up of evolution vs. “intelligent design” stories over at Orcinus. (I should add a filter so that any comment that includes “intelligent design” without the scare quotes would be instantly deleted. ) Even more important than the… Read more →
Permanent Damage
So, I read comics. Yes I am an adult, no I don’t read about super-heroes. We can have this tired argument later. The point is that as a reader of comics, I also read a number of online resources about comics. Consistently the best of these, to my taste, is comic writer Steve Grant‘s weekly column, Permanent Damage. Typically the… Read more →
He’s not Bob Geldof
I ran into the Czeslaw Milosz (that’s “Nobel Laureate Miolsz” to you) poem below, in one of this month’s magazines. I avoided typing it in by finding a copy already on the web along with a reading of the poem in it’s original tongue. Song on the End of the World On the day the world ends A bee circles… Read more →
I love Harper’s
What you will find below are sample quotes from Precalculus For Christians, a text book published by that bastion of scientific thought, Bob Jones University, as reported in this month’s Harper’s magazine. Apparently the text is designed to help students “conform their thinking to biblical precepts.” (As an aside, I am stunned to realize I got my first Harper’s subscription… Read more →
So Yesterday
So, let’s talk for a little bit about Scott Westerfeld. I had been hearing his name for some time in regards to his Succession series (well, two books might not officially be a series, so we could just refer to them by title as The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds) which always came up in that Intelligent New… Read more →
‘Economic Armageddon’?
Wow, I thought I was getting close to tinfoil hat territory on the whole currency/economy thing, and along comes Morgan Stanley’s chief economist who makes me look like Pollyanna. Here’s the first few paragraphs, but you’ll want to read the whole thing: Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, has a public reputation for being bearish.… Read more →
Textbook disclaimer stickers
Taking the evolution sticker comedy one step further Read more →
Nerd Dad Fashion Sense Part 2
A followup to the earlier post. Ladies, and Gentlemen, I present yet another photo of Sarah Kathleen McLaren. I’m burning the comedy ones onto a disc that we will use to embarrass her for many, many, years to come. Read more →
Blogger As Developer
Warning: this will be a very geeky post about WordPress internals and a bug I just fixed in the current version. Feel free to skip this if that stuff isn’t up your alley. So, this PHP stuff is pretty easy to figure out compared to the stuff I do every day at the day job. I had been unable to… Read more →
Songs Stuck in Your Head
I’ve been walking around all day humming and singing bits from Danny Michel‘s alt.country cover of David Bowie’s Young Americans. Of course, this isn’t such a bad thing–if you have to get a song stuck in your head, it might as well be something good. Last week it was Ice-T going on about how “my lethal weapon is my mind”… Read more →
Religious Red Code
You know, looking at this map ( from the Glenmary Research Center) of the US by primary religious group, all I can see is a really scary game of Core Wars being played out. I’d love to see a time-lapse animation of this–I bet the explosion of the Southern Baptists and the slow creeping of the Mormons to infect Utah’s… Read more →
Even Greenspan is worried about the dollar
Of course he won’t come out and say it in those terms, but his statement at a banking conference in Frankfurt (as reported in Reuters) is about as close as he can get” “It seems persuasive that, given the size of the U.S. current account deficit, a diminished appetite for adding to dollar balances must occur at some point,” Greenspan… Read more →
