Category: society and culture

This includes the social impact of entertainment, but not books, media, and TV shows reviews—that stuff should be in arts and letters.

ID as nominal philosophy

LA Times reports on a California lawsuit concerning “Intelligent Design.”

Since Intelligent Design as a science was universally shut down, the idea this time is to nominally call Intelligent Design “Philosophy of Design” while teaching it as a science or religion course. It’s a lot like a long car trip with your older brother in reverse: you agree upon a line you cannot cross and then he puts his finger over, then his arm over, an escalates until you start fighting again. Amusing stuff.Continue reading →

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Real live Julie Keatons…

Heather Locklear as Julie Keaton on Scrubs Season 2

Scrubs from Zap2It/CBS.

The future Marketing division of Sirius Cybernetics corporation or proof that one industry has just too much money? Yet again, the pharmaceutical industry puts us horny computer nerds to shame.

You decide.

(A major difference is you can ignore my advice on what computer to buy, but You can’t be so cavalier with your doctor’s prescription.)

In related news… Scrubs Season 2 is out on DVD. As Dru would say, “So good.”

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Fox Snooze

book cover: Amusing Ourselves to Death

Amusing Ourselves to Death from Penguin Books

Former Fox news correspondent, David Shuster explains how Fox distorted the news to right editorially. While this is normally so obvious that it doesn’t deserve mention, there was an interesting quote from him:

“Editorially, I had issues with story selection,” Shuster went on. “But the bigger issue was that there wasn’t a tradition or track record of honoring journalistic integrity. I found some reporters at Fox would cut corners or steal information from other sources or in some cases, just make things up. Management would either look the other way or just wouldn’t care to take a closer look. I had serious issues with that.”

Continue reading →

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My reading list…

book cover: Bridge to Terabithia

Bridge to Terabithia from HarperTrophy

In light of it being Banned Books Week, I went back to the ALA’s list of most challenged books in the last decade and I was surprised to see Bridge to Terabithia made the top 10. This book was first published in 1977 and was one of my favorite books growing up. A quick net search told me it was challenged (and banned) because of offensive language and satanism.

What a laugh!

The only thing satanic about this book is the number of reviews on Amazon. Since the “satanic worship” done in the book is a bunch of children play acting Narnia, one of the most pro-Christian fantasy pieces of all time, the irony is stunning.Continue reading →

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The cost of two iPods…

This article merges two favorites of mine—politics and gratuitous references to Apple:

The public’s reluctance to contribute much more than the cost of two iPods [$600] to the administration’s attempt to offer citizens “a further stake in building a free and prosperous Iraq” has been seized on by critics as evidence of growing ambivalence over that country.

The English are funny.

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Jon Stewart Emmy Speech

John Stewart has a puppy for the Democrats and a Kitten for the Republicans about Hurrican Katrina

John Stewart’s two things uploaded by tychay.

Dru pointed me to an excellent Jon Stewart presentation of an award at the Emmy’s.

It’s quintessential Daily Show. He definitely wouldn’t have gotten away with this on CBS two years ago.

Another interesting thing is to see that the liberal blog linked got the video from a right-wing blog. It’s amusing to note that the amount of peer pressue that accompanies the vitriol in these right wing blogs—Ad hominems have more weight than logic, and if you aren’t a hard to the right you are barraged with threats of excommunication.

I wonder what will happen now that it is no longer “in” to be an idiotic right winger? Looks like we’re getting as fed up with this as we were with Political Correctness.

(The quality of the video sucks shit because it is transcoded from Windows Media. Some people have no pride in their piracy.)

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Since when did being a geek mean being moron?

A simulation of how filiaments might form as the universe evolves

A simulation of large-scale structure
formation, from University of Chicago Center for Cosmological Physics.

This Wired article is a wonderful example about how unpractical our country’s basic math education is.

The reporter wastes the first page on his idiot attempt to find a truly random playlist. A little knowledge is a highly dangerous thing. After learning that computer generated random numbers are not truly random, he assumes that this is why he sometimes gets his Rolling Stones songs clumped together.

The limitations of pseudorandomness is a serious issue in statistical physics (Monte Carlo simulations) and theoretical physics (modeling). In some cases, poor psuedorandom number generators have allowed people break encryption algorithms.

But even the most primitive random number generator causing a problem with your iPod playlist? C’mon!

One difficult issue when looking at maps of the large scale structure of the universe is that our eyes detect spurious filaments (chains of galactic structures) that aren’t there, even though such things have been found to exist.
Continue reading →

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Why I need an “abject stupidity” category

CNN:Police try to control the crowd rushing to get cheap iBooks.

So what sort of braintrust in Henrico thought up this clusterfuck?

Here is my favorite quote:

“It’s rather strange that we would have such a tremendous response for the purchase of a laptop computer—and laptop computers that probably have less-than-desirable attributes. But I think that people tend to get caught up in the excitement of the event—it almost has an entertainment value.”
—Paul Proto, director of general services for Henrico County, to CNN

“rather strange that we would have such a tremendous response” You knew it was going to be bad which is why you required proof of residency and changed the date.

“laptop computers that probably have less-than-desirable attributes…” STFU. You already had to issue a redaction because you said these iBooks were always broken and Apple wasn’t repairing them according to contract when the real reason you wanted to switch to Dell is because of MS Office (a totally valid reason).

“it almost has an entertainment value” Porquoi? What is so entertaining about your neighbors getting injured and peeing their pants?
Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 2