Accidental Blogger

Curious Parallels (Sujatha)

Every now and then, I see something going on in American politics, and then pause to think "Haven't I seen a similar scenario, before , only a continent away and 10 years ago?"

Then,regional politics in India:

Jayalalitha: brought in to 'sex up' campaign of an elderly MGR
Regional politician (was Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu state in India) with national ambitions
land scandal in 2000 leading to her removal/resignation
Still a force in regional politics
Actress background

"THE charges in the first case are that Jaya Publications, in which Jayalalitha and Sasikala were partners, bought 3.07 acres of land and a building belonging to the government-owned TANSI Foundry at Guindy in Chennai at a price much lower than the guidel ine value and gained more than Rs.3.5 crores in the transaction. The sale took place when Jayalalitha was Chief Minister (1991-1996). Jayalalitha "abused her official position at every stage" in the property deal although no public interest was involved, the charge-sheet said. Since Jayalalitha was Chief Minister when she bought the property, she attracted the provisions of the PCA."

Now, Fourth of July Fireworks of a different sort:

Sarah Palin: brought in to 'sex up' campaign of  an elderly McCain
Regional politician with national ambitions
House scandal (RUMOR ALERT - this may or may not be the reason for her precipitated resignation):

"A list of subcontractors on the job, obtained by the Voice, includes many with Palin ties. One was Spenard Builders Supply, the state’s leading supplier of wood, floor, roof, and other “pre-engineered components.” In addition to being a sponsor of Todd Palin’s snow-machine team that has earned tens of thousands for the Palin family, Spenard hired Sarah Palin to do a statewide television commercial in 2004. When the Palins began building a new family home off Lake Lucille in 2002—at the same time that Palin was running for lieutenant governor and in her final months as mayor—Spenard supplied the materials, according to Antoine Bricks, who works in its Wasilla office. Spenard actually filed a notice “of its right to assert a lien” on the deed for the Palin property after contracting for labor and materials for the site. Spenard’s name has popped up in the trial of Senator Stevens—it worked on the house that is at the center of the VECO scandal as well.

Todd Palin told Fox News that he built the two-story, 3,450-square-foot, four-bedroom, four-bath, wood house himself, with the help of contractors he described as “buddies.” As mayor, Sarah Palin blocked an effort to require the filing of building permits in the wide-open city, and there is no public record of who the “buddies” were. The house was built very near the complex, on a site whose city purchase led to years of unsuccessful litigation and, now, $1.3 million in additional costs, with a law firm that’s also donated to Palin collecting costly fees from the city."

Gov of AK
Still a force in politics (?)
Beauty pageant/TV background

Sarah Palin's beyond-bizarre resignation announcement:

"My choice is to take a stand and effect change – not hit our heads against the wall and watch valuable state time and money, millions of your dollars, go down the drain in this new environment. Rather, we know we can effect positive change outside government at this moment in time, on another scale, and actually make a difference for our priorities – and so we will, for Alaskans and for Americans."

There the similarity stops for now. It's anybody's guess as to whether Palin manages to stage a revival (Jayalalitha did manage it, after all). That's highly dependent on the quotient of true Palin-believers to those who will write her off after her shaky and scared TV performance.

The confounding factors are many. Jayalalitha had little to no family to worry about, while Palin has her large brood of children in dire need of attention. Jayalalitha was able to still cling to the aura of the 'generous mother' while it might be harder for Palin to do so.

As Palin famously states in her speech : "Only dead fish go with the flow." The question remains as to whether she is a dead fish or a live one.

NCBI ROFL (Joe)

Bringing new meaning to navel gazing and much, much more, is NCBI ROFL. Am I just giving a shout out to a friend's blog? No -- I'm giving a shout out to a friend's blog that posts abstracts from real scientific research articles that are often hilarious enough to have you rolling on the floor laughing. So check it out!

Defeat and Victory (Joe)

1. Minnesota finally has its fair share of representation in the U.S. Senate, assuming we think a system that gives Montana and California the same number of senators is fair. But at least Minnesota's now caught up with important places like Montana, not to mention Idaho, Vermont, and of course, Alaska. But this does mean the Democrats now have 60 senators! Granted, you're only supposed to need 51 votes to pass legislation because the Constitution says so, but 60 is "filibuster-proof." That's a good thing, because it means our legislative agenda can now come to fruition. From what I've read, this evidently means that our legislative agenda is doing nothing about climate change and passing useless, in-name-only health-care reform. Oh, and to keep screwing over gay people despite the costs even to non-gay society.

2. The U.S. won another important battle in the war on people. Matt Yglesias thinks we should be leaving Iraq with our heads held high, presumably because good posture is important for spinal health, since there's obviously nothing to feel good about. Well, "nothing" is too strong of a word, because now we're more equipped to back up Israel in the upcoming battle in the war on people, to save Iran from all those damn Iranians.

I forgot where I was going with this. I think (1) was going to be defeat -- even with massive public support, a tremendously popular president, and a filibuster-proof majority, Democrats can't do anything useful -- and (2) was going to be victory -- we did cause the deaths of 1 million Iraqis, after all, which I believe was our military and humanitarian objective -- but I lost my train of thought while inserting all those hyperlinks and can't be sure I didn't mix that up. Still, there's always the bright side that since none of us are professional cyclists, we're not destroying our skeletal health as rapidly as we could be!

The Future of Jazz...By Way of South Indian Carnatic Music (Andrew)

One of the out-of-left-field suprises in jazz last year was the album Kinsmen, by Indian-American saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa.  As a self-deprecating ethnic joke, his brother had given him a CD called "Saxophone Indian Style" -- but when Mahanthappa listened to it, he was amazed to hear South Indian Carnatic music played so well on the Western instrument of the saxophone.  Mahanthappa eventually sought out the saxophonist from "Saxophone Indian Style," who turned out to be Kadri Gopalnath, an acknowledged legend of Carnatic music -- and proposed that the two make an album together.

And the results have turned Mahanthappa into a critical darling.  He's been lauded by Gary Giddins, perhaps the most insightful jazz critic writing today, and Kinsmen's been named one of the best jazz CDs of 2008 by NPR, the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and the Village Voice.

So my question for ABers, particularly any that have familiarity with Carnatic music, is what do you think? Is this CD getting overhyped due to the novelty of the concept, or is it truly, as Giddins puts it, "astonishing," "fascinating," and a "momentous achievement that will be around for a long time to come?"

You can get a taste of the sound of the Kinsmen band for free with the videos on Mahanthappa's MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/dakshinaband

A more powerful way of naming names (phi-to-the-large-power D)

It is a just and proper convention we use in naming authors and thinkers that the immortals have only last names. After all, to name an author is to enter into a game where we are to rank them in an implicit list by excellence, profundity and significance. Hence, to Gustave a Flaubert is to commit a faux pas, while depriving a Roth of his Philip sounds odd. I have been using this elegant and delightsome signaling scheme for years now, though in my college years when I hadn't yet mastered its intricacies I did commit some few gaffes. Still, the skill has now been acquired, so I rejoice in seeing its proper use in others, and police violations diligently.

And yet, and yet. This venerated scheme is obviously too simple to be perfect. We perforce Emilify and Charlottize our venerated Brontë's, and this when we yearn so earnestly to deprive them of those cumbersome affixes. Then too, rare names seem to unfairly boost reputations. Hence DeLillo or Dawkins, and this while poor Adam shall never be a Smith. And then there are those annoying writers of whom we know no other name other than the one in common use. Both Aristotle and Adonis are known by a mere single name. What a pity to be unable to mark just and proper distinctions in these cases! And, to get to the very core of the issue, does not the mind of delicacy rebel at the coarseness of a mere binary distinction where so many finer gradations may be fruitfully deployed?

Allow me these simple suggestions:

1. Since the great thinker is firstname-to-the-zeroth-power lastname, and the rest are firstname-to-the-first-power lastname, mayn't we make this explicit? Then we may speak properly of Adam to the zeroth Smith and Nico to the first Malebranche.
2. Immediately as we recognize this, we are able to shake ourselves free of the binary hypnosis, and perceive the number line in all its elemental glory. For if firstnames are an embarrassment, how much worse it should be to have them repeated, and what an honor it should be to have the first name divided away from the last! Properly, we may speak of inverse-leo-to-the-sixth Tolstoy, Kant by Immanuel-to-the-fifth or Jacques-cubed Lacan. He who is as yet unconvinced needs merely repeat 'Yann-to-the-fourth Martel' a few times to recognize the wisdom of our proposal.
3. The problem of missing firstnames is adequately dealt with by means of introducing the null first name (denote phi). Then, Voltaire by phi, but also phi Cher, inverse-phi-squared Pele and so on.

Bugs doubtless remain to be fixed, chief of which seems to me the inability of many rendering schemes to properly do mathematical exponents as in 2. Still, at least the explicit accounting of 1. may be achieved by writing firstnames, then striking them through when appropriate. This scheme, if followed, should make discussions of the more intellectual sort rather more exact, and by virtue of its more fine-grained telegraphical nature, superior at concise assessment. Alternately, we might name people pragmatically as we please, but this is less excellent.

Moonwalks (Sujatha)

 RIP, Michael Jackson.

------------

 Buzz Aldrin wanted to be the first Moonwalker, but thwarted, in the final moments, by simple logistics.

"In the end the decision came down to logistics. The lunar landing craft's hatch was located on Armstrong's side. It would have too cumbersome, and perhaps even dangerous, for Aldrin to have climbed over his mission mate, so Armstrong went first."

 -------------
Here's a Mr.Bean who is a real artist, as opposed to a mere curator.

 "It has been nearly 40 years since Alan L. Bean walked on the moon as an Apollo astronaut, but he still wrestles with the experience every day, trying to recapture what he and other astronauts saw and felt in the medium of paint."

 

(The original Mr.Bean is of course, the one and only Rowan Atkinson.)

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Bloggers Under Scrutiny

Bloggers can continue to rave and rant about anything that suits their fancy. But now the Federal  Trade Commission plans to monitor their claims, especially if money or freebies are changing hands.

Savvy consumers often go online for independent consumer reviews of products and services, scouring through comments from everyday Joes and Janes to help them find a gem or shun a lemon.

What some fail to realize, though, is that such reviews can be tainted: Many bloggers have accepted perks such as free laptops, trips to Europe, $500 gift cards or even thousands of dollars for a 200-word post. Bloggers vary in how they disclose such freebies, if they do so at all.

The practice has grown to the degree that the Federal Trade Commission is paying attention. New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers - as well as the companies that compensate them - for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts

It would be the first time the FTC tries to patrol systematically what bloggers say and do online. The common practice of posting a graphical ad or a link to an online retailer - and getting commissions for any sales from it - would be enough to trigger oversight.

"If you walk into a department store, you know the (sales) clerk is a clerk," said Rich Cleland, assistant director in the FTC's division of advertising practices. "Online, if you think that somebody is providing you with independent advice and ... they have an economic motive for what they're saying, that's information a consumer should know."

The guidelines also would bring uniformity to a community that has shunned that.

As blogging rises in importance and sophistication, it has taken on characteristics of community journalism - but without consensus on the types of ethical practices typically found in traditional media.

Journalists who work for newspapers and broadcasters are held accountable by their employers, and they generally cannot receive payments from marketers and must return free products after they finish reviewing them.

The blogosphere is quite different.

More here from the Associated Press Report.

Estivate, Baby. Estivate.

Summer has arrived early in Houston this year. June, usually a much cooler month than July and August, is sizzling. Most years around this time, it feels more like late spring or early summer with temperatures in the mid to upper 80s. Instead, the thermometer has hovered around readings more reminiscent of broiling mid-summer for the past several weeks. After a long spell of near 100 degree temps, there is still no respite in sight in the coming days. We've also not seen any rain for the last one month, a rare occurance in the coastal city. 

I am no new comer to blazing summer heat, having grown up in North India during pre-air conditioning days. In those days ceiling fans and desert coolers provided some respite inside the home. Outside, we carried umbrellas and tried to stay in the shade. From April onwards until the refreshing monsoon showers broke the enervating spell in early July, folks adjusted their lifestyles to accommodate the unrelenting assaults of heat and dust. We learnt ways to survive the inferno with simple, common-sense coping methods  - frequent cold showers and change of sweat soaked clothes, avoiding the mid-day sun, wearing cotton, sleeping in the open air at night (on roof-tops and courtyards), drinking cold drinks made with yoghurt and roasted green mango and eating light, bland, torpor inducing foods. (see my last comment on this post) Air conditioning has improved things in India, at least for those who can afford it. But people still treat north Indian summers with prudence and resigned caution.

Houstonians too have their own ways to deal with the persistent summer heat. In principle, they are not very different from what we did in Delhi. The bottom line is that those who must put up with extreme heat, sometimes wish for a prolonged sleep of oblivion. Some surely wish they could escape the weather through estivation.  From Saturday's Houston Chronicle:   

Summer officially starts tomorrow, but in fact, the season oozed up weeks ahead of schedule, the way it always does in Houston. And just as predictably, it’ll refuse to leave in September, when the calendar says it’s fall’s turn. Summer here isn’t the fleeting visitor so beloved in more temperate climates. It’s the overbearing roommate you can’t evict, the unwanted house guest who decides to move in. It is the season that tries the Houstonian’s soul.

You know the drill. You leave a super-chilled building — an airport, the grocery store, your office — and walk into air warmer and more humid than your exhaled breath. You open your car door, stepping back to avoid the oven-like blast of heat. You swat a mosquito, then wipe your own blood from your hand.

Summer is the season of warnings: air-quality warnings, hurricane warnings, warnings to your kids that if they don’t do something besides play on-line games, their brains will melt and leak out through their ears. You’re warned to avoid the heat of midday, to exercise in the morning, to water your plants in the evening.

Use sunscreen! Stay hydrated! Never leave your dog in the car! In other places, it’s winter that kills. Here it’s summer.

To survive, we go to ground. “Estivate” is the word. A zoology term, it means “to pass the summer in a dormant or torpid state.” It’s the hot-weather version of hibernating.

In humans, estivation involves long naps, tall iced teas and shade. Icehouses, movie theaters, swimming pools, hammocks: They’re our versions of the cool, safe hole in the ground. No-brain TV shows, shallow summer movies, paperback thrillers, Popsicles, margaritas: Count them as aids to mental hibernation, necessary to lull your brain into a survival-enhancing state of rest.

Sooner or later, summer will end. We forget that it will, but it always does. The kids quit running through sprinklers and go back to school. The mosquitoes die. Hurricanes give way to northers.

On some crisp morning, months from now, we’ll no doubt return to our old productive selves: Full of projects, full of plans. But that bright day is a long way away. Right now, we’re in the teeth of summer, and we’re struggling to hang on. Wake us up when it’s over.

Father's Day

President Obama on fatherhood. Happy Father's Day to the dads among our readers.

Hand - Eye Coordination

If only the problems of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel-Palestine, N. Korea and the Republican right were as easy to swat away! (Link via a friend's e-mail)

Green Revolution? (Sujatha)

Much discussion is on in the media and blogosphere over the violent clashes in the aftermath of the Iranian elections. Was the election rigged or not?
A collection of interesting links and stories:
In which Juan Cole thinks that it's highly likely that the elections were stolen: A list of possible indicators that the results were fraudulent, followed by a disclaimer of sort.
"So, there are protests against an allegedly stolen election. The Basij paramilitary thugs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will break some heads. Unless there has been a sea change in Iran, the theocrats may well get away with this soft coup for the moment. But the regime's legitimacy will take a critical hit, and its ultimate demise may have been hastened, over the next decade or two.

What I've said is full of speculation and informed guesses. I'd be glad to be proved wrong on several of these points. Maybe I will be."

In which Nate Silver thinks that a statistical analysis doing the rounds does not prove fraud, though he believes that fraud occurred and might not be evident from the statistics.

""Still, though, would it really be all that hard to rig an election in a way that would be hard for statistical analysis to detect? Suppose that you're Ahmadinejad, and that you become convinced based on the actual vote totals that you're on track to lose by several points. Could you not simply take every tenth vote, or every fifth vote, that came in for Moussavi, and count it for yourself? This would preserve an element of randomness and would make the province-by-province results look reasonably correct relative to one another.

My point, I suppose, is this. Out of all the things you'd need to do to rig an election, coming up with a set of results that managed to avoid easy statistical detection would probably be one of the easier ones. So I'm skeptical that statistical analysis alone is going to turn up evidence of fraud. But I'll be keeping an eye out for other approaches, particularly from those who have a deeper understanding of the Iranian state than I do."

NYT's Bill Keller:
"On the street, the speculation focused more on how the election was manipulated, as many voters insisted it must have been for Mr. Ahmadinejad to score such a preposterous margin of victory.

One version (from somebody’s brother who supposedly knew someone inside) had it that vote counters simply were ordered to doctor the numbers: Make that 1,000 for Ahmadinejad a 3,000.

Others pointed out that the ballots seemed designed to lead opposition voters astray. Voters were obliged to choose a candidate and fill in a code. Though Mr. Moussavi was candidate No. 4, the code No. 44 signified Mr. Ahmadinejad.

One employee of the Interior Ministry, which carried out the vote count, said the government had been preparing its fraud for weeks, purging anyone of doubtful loyalty and importing pliable staff members from around the country.

They didn’t rig the vote, claimed the man, who showed his ministry identification card but pleaded not to be named. They didn’t even look at the vote. They just wrote the name and put the number in front of it."

A Leftist view of Moussavi's earlier stint in the government:

"As prime minister from 1981 to 1989, Mousavi oversaw social austerity measures imposed to finance the Iran-Iraq war. At the time, he was a proponent of normalizing relations with the US and recognizing Arab regimes. In the lead-up to the American Iran-Contra scandal in the late 1980s, as the US and Israel sold weapons to Iran, Mousavi organized arms purchases from Israel and oversaw the repression of opposition to the negotiations with US officials on weapons—including the execution of prominent Iranian politician Mehdi Hashemi, who had led a Tehran demonstration against these covert arms deals."

The article contends that Khatami might have been a more radical rival to Ahmadinejad had he not pulled out of the election, but that he did so in hopes that Moussavi would be able to collect a larger proportion of the centrist as well as progressive vote.

A skeptical voice (Abbas Barzegar) who mistrusts the story pushed by the Western media:
"As far as international media coverage is concerned, it seems that wishful thinking got the better of credible reporting. It is true that Mousavi supporters jammed Tehran traffic for hours every night over the last week, though it was rarely mentioned that they did so only in the northern well-to-do neighborhoods of the capital.
Women did relax their head covers and young men did dance in the street.

On Monday night at least 100,000 of the former prime minister's supporters set up a human chain across Tehran. But, hours before I had attended a mass rally for the incumbent president that got little to no coverage in the western press because, on account of the crowds, he never made it inside the hall to give his speech. Minimal estimates from that gathering have been placed at 600,000 (enthusiasts say a million). From the roof I watched as the veiled women and bearded men of all ages poured like lava.
...
In the last week Ahmedinejad turned the election into a referendum on the very project of Iran's Islamic revolution. Their street chants yelled "Death to all those against the Supreme Leader" followed by traditional Shia rituals and elegies. It was no match for the high-spirited fun-loving youth of northern Tehran who sang "Ahmedi-bye-bye, Ahmedi-bye-bye" or "ye hafte-do hafte, Mahmud hamum na-rafte" (One week, two weeks, Mahmoud hasn't taken a shower).

Perhaps from the start Mousavi was destined to fail as he hoped to combine the articulate energies of the liberal upper class with the business interests of the bazaar merchants. The Facebook campaigns and text-messaging were perfectly irrelevant for the rural and working classes who struggle to make a day's ends meet, much less have the time to review the week's blogs in an internet cafe. Although Mousavi tried to appeal to such classes by addressing the problems of inflation and poverty, they voted otherwise."

BBC's latest: a solid and succinct analysis.

AP: not too bad, either.

Not tired of links yet? Check The Lede for practically hourly updates.

Though, the comments are more entertaining and possibly illuminating, as is Reza's smart zinger:
"Comment:
Reza
Sat, 13 Jun 2009 10:13:19 GMT
Are you people high or just uneducated, brainwashed people? A.) The ballots are done by hand in Iran, not electronic and somehow they have counted the majority of the votes this fast?! B.) Iran is not a real democratic country, the president has no real power. This is a joke and so are the majority of the delusional people that are commenting."

So we have the puppet master manipulating the strings behind, hewing closely to Stalin's dictum that"He who votes decides nothing; he who counts the votes decides everything."

In the US, we've had the Supreme Court in their black robes 'pick' winners of our elections before. Iran has Supreme Leaders in black robes who still 'pick' winners of their elections, the will of the people be damned.

I think that the Obama administration will monitor but not interfere in what is happening with Iran, unless the CIA has a mind of its own and continues with shenanigans a la Mossadegh coup.What must be will be, and has to be organic and coming spontaneously from the people. If they have the numbers and support, maybe it will be the new Green Revolution in Iran.

Publius (Joe)

Some snippy conservative twit outed Publius, of Obsidian Wings fame (measured relative to the blogosphere, of course, which still puts him WAY behind that guy in his mother's basement who suggested some baseball player in Philadelphia might be using PEDs, let alone people anyone actually cares about). He's some law professor, not that it matters (although it matters to him, obviously, since he blogs/blogged pseudonymously).

Anyhow, I'm saddened over the loss of Publius's pseudonymity. Not because of the larger debate about pseudonymity and outing pseudonymous bloggers (Leiter goes off here, for example, making points about consequentialism, fairness, etc. Typical of a law or philosophy professor, of course, Brian fails to mention that the only reason Whelan outed Publius is that Whelan is -- and was particularly being -- a snippy twit. An annoyed child acting out of spite. I think this is also a deontological fail for Whelan, but again, the petulant child/brat angle is what actually stands out to me).

Instead, I'm sad because that's one fewer blogger I can claim to be. Thank goodness there's still Giblets. And, in a pinch, Michael Bérubé.

Once more on Sotomayor and judicial temperament (Joe)

I just love this quote: "How dare she be smart and aggressive?  Wait, she’s a lawyer and a judge."

Plantinga. Also bloody babies. (D)

It seems Alvin Plantinga has written a popular account of his evolutionary argument against naturalism, viz. that evolution selects beliefs for survival value, not truth, so that while our beliefs may be useful we've no reason to think them true. I've nothing much to say about the argument itself...lots of people have written about it, and there's a plentiful academic literature in any case. [I do note that in this popularization at least, he follows up with some pretty trippy math that suggests that if our prior probability that one useful belief is true is a half, that the probability that a set of one hundred beliefs is true is one over two to the googol'th power. Such assumptions of total independence between utility and truth, between the truths of related beliefs, such maximally in-coherentist ideas seem more than a bit dubious to me. Incidentally, a surprising number of iffy probabilistic arguments seem to involve assumptions of independence followed by simple multiplication. Break thee free man, of the tyranny of the product sign! Rejoice, for not all probabilistic reasoning needs sixth grade maths!]

What puzzles me about Plantinga is not the extent to which he doubts naturalistic reason, though I don't think he sufficiently respects the resources a naturalist has. What surprises me is his sense that his own beliefs do - or should - give him a strong degree of extra confidence in his accounts of nature:

Clearly this doubt arises for naturalists or atheists, but not for those who believe in God. That is because if God has created us in his image, then even if he fashioned us by some evolutionary means, he would presumably want us to resemble him in being able to know; but then most of what we believe might be true even if our minds have developed from those of the lower animals. On the other hand, there is a real problem here for the evolutionary naturalist.

Let us not here get into tediously evaluating these religious beliefs for plausibility. Indeed, let us grant Plantinga all he'd hope for, a God in heaven and several larks and snails squishing about. Going from even there to a strong confidence in beliefs about the world seems to me like an odd path for a Christian to follow. From this outsider's perspective, one of the most striking aspects of that belief system is its keen appreciation of our finitude and fallibility - sin disorders minds, and distance from God causes error. Nor does accepting Christ make you intellectually or ethically more than human. Christians are not perfect, just forgiven, as they say. The dark glass remains, all that good stuff.

Indeed, that we get things wrong, that we make mistakes, that our cognition is error prone, that we fuck things up, that in our Rumsfeldian world we face each of known and unknown knowns and unknowns, this is as close to being a brute fact as anything I can think of. If your metaphysics can't admit to the possibility of error, so much the worse for it. No well-represented philosophy I've come across tries to sell that snake oil. Even traditions marking a less stark separation between man and God, between the circumscribed and the limitless, all have the sense to stay away from such ideas. After you gain enlightenment you must still chop wood and carry water. Whether or not you know that you are that, you must listen to the mahout when he yells at you to get away from the mad elephant. It is just especially strange coming from a Christian. I'm reminded of that cute thing Chesterton said:

If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.

Anyhow. On the off-chance that you've not seen it already, I think this is in the coolest video (and child) on youtube. Maybe it's me, but when I see it I keep thinking of Basil Fawlty yelling 'fire' in his hotel...the same helpless inability to convince others to take one seriously.

Esa-Pekka Salonen and Los Angeles (Dean)

Last month, Alex Ross contributed a worthy and encouraging account of Salonen's long career with the LA Philharmonic and his recent departure from the musical leadership of the orchestra. Salonen really is a marvelous musician, composer, and conductor, but as Ross' story suggests, his decision to end an era was perfectly timed and exquisitely executed. I rarely attended full-on LAP performances, but I made it to several Green Umbrella programs over the years while it was "a sparsely attended specialty offering" at the Japan America Theater in Little Tokyo. The JAT has to be one of the best musical venues for small and chamber ensembles in the world. I appreciated its pristine acoustics and the intimacy of the house and stage. When Salonen performed there, sometimes featuring his own compositions, I could tell he was as eager to explore challenging new (experimental, avant-garde, noisy...) music as the attendees were to hear the result.

He'd hang out with the audience during breaks. In fact, the GU series was a wonderful opportunity for an amateur to rub elbows with masters of contemporary music. I recall hearing a world premiere of a piece by Harrison Birtwistle, at which the British composer was in attendance, seated directly behind me. Once Betty Freeman, patron of the arts and dedicatee of John Cage's impossible and intense Freeman Etudes, thought she recognized me and asked if I had recently attended such-and-such a party. "Uh, no, I think you've mistaken me for somebody else." But the music was enthralling and it kept us renewing our subscriptions.

I no longer live in LA, but while Salonen remained at the helm I suspect the GU was not compromised, despite its growing popularity. I hope the program continues to flourish during Dudamel's tenure with the orchestra. Still, I'm no special fan of Disney Hall as an architectural design--Gehry's late work is gaudy--and I can't speak to its acoustics. Ross complains of the sound system, which was not an issue at JAT. I think I'm finding myself happy for Ross' recognition of LA's longstanding contributions to contemporary classical music, while at the same time I'm missing the good old days of new music.

Summer Hiatus

I will be posting very infrequently in the month of June. Unless my co-bloggers find the time to write, there will be little new material on the blog until the middle of July.

SHOULD’A / WOULD’A (Narayan)

Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama's pick for the Supreme Court has been characterized by right wing rabblerousers as a racist and a militant femme. She has caught a lot of flak, particularly for one statement she made in a 2001 speech at the University of Berkeley entitled, ‘A Latina Judge’s Voice,’ during which she elaborated upon her experience on the bench as a woman of Hispanic background. Her critics have interpreted the statement as racist and biased against white males (some of them are backtracking now).

Reader Narayan Acharya, who has contributed several interesting opinion pieces here, speculates that Sotomayor was not making a political statement at all when she brought up her race, gender and life experience. The much reviled, awkwardly worded sentence was the result of thinking in Spanish and speaking in English. The grammatical differences of the two languages may have crossed wires in her brain, according to Narayan.  Specifically, Sotomayor was tripped up by the "subjunctive!"

Narayan explains:

What Sotomayor said was :

"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness o f her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life."

This is a daunting sentence to analyze. By now we know all the negative meanings and implications that have been imputed to the speaker by those with an axe to grind. But is there something more subtle going on in the rendering of the sentence? I think so, although I find it difficult to clearly identify it. Simply parsing the sentence is futile because mere structure is not what I’m after – deconstruction is needed. Let me strip it to its skeleton anyway :

“I would hope that X would U than Y who hasn’t V” where X is ‘a wise Latina woman’, U is the verbal phrase ‘reach a better conclusion’, Y is ‘a white male’, and V the verbal phrase ‘lived that life’.

One cannot quarrel with the sentence except to quibble that a strict grammarian of a generation or two ago would take issue with the opening verbal phrase saying that ‘I should hope that’ is the only admissible form. I recall being shown a typescript of a primer that claimed that ‘should’ also signals the subjunctive mood, but have not been able to confirm the validity of this claim from other sources. Fowler states that the pairing of ‘I’ and ‘would’ is an “invasion from the other side of the Atlantic”, and that ‘should’ is the correct word to use with the verbs like ‘like’, ‘prefer’, ‘care’, ‘be glad’, ‘be inclined’ etc.

The crux of the matter, I believe, is that Sotomayor is bilingual, and though she may be a native English speaker, her mother tongue is Spanish. We can agree that she is also a native Spanish speaker without debating which came first. Undoubtedly she learnt both languages at an early age when speech is established through imitation rather than formal learning. At that age one learns to speak correctly memetically, without knowing the whys and wherefores. I maintain that Sotomayor must have learnt the use of subjunctive verb forms well before she knew why they were needed.

I do not recall being taught about the subjunctive in English and didn’t know of its significance until I embarked on a course in Spanish. Since then I have discovered that, except perhaps for the uneducated, Spanish speakers use the correct verb forms when the subjunctive mood is called for. English speakers, even the best educated, are sloppy in this respect, using the indicative where the subjunctive is called for, arguing that the meaning is understood anyway by the context.

 From “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage”, H.W.Fowler,1965

“Subjunctive … a verb-form different from that of the indicative mood in order to ‘denote an action or a state as conceived (and not as a fact), and [expressing] a wish, command, exhortation, or a contingent, hypothetical, or prospective event’ – OED. About the subjunctive, so delimited, the important general facts are : (1) that it is moribund except in a few easily specified uses; (2) that, owing to the capricious influence of the much analysed classical moods upon the less studied native, it probably never would have been possible to draw upon a satisfactory table of the English subjunctive uses; (3) that assuredly no one will ever find it either possible or worth while to do so, now that the subject is dying; and (4) that subjunctives met with today, outside the few truly living uses, are either deliberate revivals, especially by poets, for legitimate enough archaic effect, or antiquated survivals giving a pretentious flavour to their context, or new arrivals possible only in an age to which the grammar of the subjunctive is not natural but artificial.”

From “The American Language”, H.L.Mencken

1936 ed : “…virtually extinct in the vulgar tongue”

 1948 ed : “On higher levels, of course, the subjunctive shows more life, and there is ground for questioning the conclusion of Bradley, Krapp, Vizetelly, Fowler and other authorities that it is on its way out.”

From “Modern Spanish Grammar – A Practical Guide”, J.Kattán-Ibarra & C.J.Pountain, 1997.

“Sometimes the subjunctive is automatically required by another element in the sentence such as a verb or a conjunction. Sometimes there is a choice between subjunctive and indicative, in which case there is always a difference in meaning between the two. The subjunctive is not ‘avoided’ in Spanish, and is not in any way old-fashioned or unusual.”

Writing about Work (Dean)

Last week, Ruchira featured an article by Matthew Crawford about the redemptive value of manual labor. My comment begins, "Crawford is full of it." Read the comment if you care to know why I think so. Now, thanks to Ron Silliman's blog, I see another "philosophically" styled column by Alain de Botton in the Boston Globe about a purported dearth of novels in recent years dealing with work life. (The scare quotes respect Wikipedia's report that de Botton is a writer with a philosophical style, i.e., not a working philosopher. Certainly the column consists mostly of leisurely musing, nothing remotely philosophical in an academic sense.)

De Botton evidently would like to see more literature about all kinds of work contexts, including the corporate offices shunned by Crawford in favor of a motorcycle repair shop. But his advocacy for such literature stems from a sense that the work can indeed be mind-numbing and alienating. It would be literature's job to depict in modern work life "new varieties of sensory deprivation, melancholy, boredom, passion, eroticism, vindictiveness, charity, triviality, and seriousness." Novels about website optimization and telephone company management would assist readers to see the richness of these enterprises.

I wonder whether there is in fact a void of recent literature about work. De Botton points to recent Booker Prize winners, a sample that is surely skewed. But how would one search for novels about work, anyway? You could search your local library for books with a subject like Work -- Fiction, but there are drawbacks to such an approach. For one, that particular Library of Congress heading is intended for children's books. More significantly, there are obviously many work related topics that would not be described as fiction about "work," "labor," "employment," i.e., the general theme of de Botton's piece. There are also books about blue collar workers, working women, and so forth, as well as about particular jobs and professions. Searching Berkeley Public Library's collection for works with the keywords "corporate" and "fiction" produces 41 results, many recent, and many of which would seem meaningful to de Botton. Admittedly, he probably wouldn't enjoy Personal Days by Ed Parks, which is perhaps not in the tradition of Balzac and Dickens.

Nevertheless, I don't think de Botton has really done his homework. By focusing on a narrow, elite arena of literature he precludes, in a sense by definition, works that would satisfy his desideratum. But this move serves him well, because it permits him to claim as his own (rather than any mere Booker Prize recipient's) the observation that seemingly dull work can be interesting. In this respect he shares with Crawford a view, either naive or condescending, that the appreciation of work requires a special kind of philosophical or literary insight.

DIY Electric Car: If you can't buy it, make it (Sujatha)

From the Indychannel:

Patrick Roth uses a fully electric car to take his daughter to school and run errands, 6News' Jennifer Carmack reported.The car may look like any ordinary Ford Escort, but a closer look reveals that it's anything but. Roth didn't buy the car that way. He built it himself

Here's a step by step link to how he did it, all at the cost of about $13,000, including the car.

Now again, why did GM kill the electric car?

I should be a sports columnist. (Joe)

Vince Young, the (currently backup) quarterback for the Tennessee Titans, recently said in a radio interview that he wants to start, and if he's not going to remain on the bench for the Titans, maybe it would be best for his career to move on to a team that wants him to play. Paul Kuharsky, an ESPN.com NFL blogger, had this to say:

I'm guessing he doesn't realize that recent comments to a Baltimore TV station will cause a big stir, or maybe he intended for them to. Either way, it's already under way.

Yes, those are the two options: he either knew, or did not know, that his comments would cause some sort of local media controversy. Quite the guess there, Paul. Way to really go out on a limb and guess that it was either one or the other, when it had to be one or the other. (To be fair, though, it's not clear exactly what is supposed to now be underway. "It." The "big stir," which Kuharsky seems to be in the process of creating?)

Seriously, ESPN (and Sports Illustrated; I don't discriminate), I'm pretty sure I can do a better job for you -- and at a lower salary -- than some of the people you're currently employing. You know where to find me when you want to start negotiating.

Computering Bleg (Joe)

I want a to-do list on my Windows desktop.  Creating a Word/Notepad/etc. document that I have to open is no good; for much the same reason, anything web-based (e.g. something like Google Calendar) won't really work.

I really just want to be able to write, "Look for plane tickets," "Send thank-you card," "Buy groceries," "Find a copy of Abbey Road,"¹ and "Consider studying for the bar," and have it stay on my desktop.  I need a reminder that's there, not one that I have to look for.

Suggestions?

---
1 - Why aren't the Beatles on iTunes?  This is odd.  And not a good business strategy -- I would've paid my $9.99 to download it yesterday, but it's not there, and while I don't plan on violating any copyrights (and, um, if I did I wouldn't admit it publicly), this has to mean lost revenue.

Monday Mixer

Feeling too lazy to write at length on anything (an increasingly frequent occurrence of late). So here are a few links to stories that I heard, saw or read in passing over the last week.

No Smiley Faces On DMV Mugshots:

Few places in Virginia are as draining to the soul and as numbing to the buttocks as the branch offices of the Department of Motor Vehicles. And yet, until recently, smiling was still permitted there.

No more. As part of the DMV's effort to develop super-secure driver's licenses and foolproof identification cards, the agency has issued a smile ban, directing customers to adopt a "neutral expression" in their portraits, thereby extinguishing whatever happiness comes with finally hearing one's number called.

The driver's license photo, it seems, is destined to look like a mug shot.

DMV officials say the smile ban is for a good cause. The agency would like to develop a facial recognition system that could compare customers' photographs over time to prevent fraud and identity theft. "The technology works best when the images are similar," said DMV spokeswoman Pam Goheen. "To prepare for the possibility of future security enhancements, we're asking customers to maintain a neutral expression."

At a Manassas DMV branch yesterday, that translated to a simple directive: "Don't smile."

No Liberty For Democrats:

Liberty University has revoked its recognition of the campus Democratic Party club, saying “we are unable to lend support to a club whose parent organization stands against the moral principles held by” the university.

“It kind of happened out of nowhere,” said Brian Diaz, president of LU’s student Democratic Party organization, which LU formally recognized in October.

Diaz said he was notified of the school’s decision May 15 in an e-mail from Mark Hine, vice president of student affairs.

According to the e-mail, the club must stop using the university’s name, holding meetings on campus, or advertising events. Violators could incur one or more reprimands under the school’s Liberty Way conduct code, and anyone who accumulates 30 reprimands is subject to expulsion.

Hine said late Thursday that the university could not sanction an official club that supported Democratic candidates.

“We are in no way attempting to stifle free speech."

Mixed Race Americans - Fastest Growing Demographic Group

WASHINGTON — Multiracial Americans have become the fastest growing demographic group.

The number of multiracial people rose 3.4 percent last year to about 5.2 million, according to the latest census estimates.

First given the option in 2000, Americans who check more than one box for race on census surveys have jumped by 33 percent and now make up 5 percent of the minority population — with millions more believed to be uncounted.

Demographers attributed the recent population growth to more social acceptance and slowing immigration. They cited in particular the high public profiles of Tiger Woods and President Obama, a self-described "mutt," who are having an effect on those who might self-identify as multiracial.

Measured by percentages, Hawai'i ranked first with nearly 1 in 5 residents who were multiracial, followed by Alaska and Oklahoma, both at roughly 4 percent.

Population figures as of July 2008 show that California, Texas, New York and Florida had the most multiracial people, due partly to higher numbers of second- and later-generation immigrants who are more likely to "marry out."

Rick "Secessionist" Perry: "no" to stimulus money; "yes" to home improvement.

AUSTIN, Texas – While Gov. Rick Perry is criticizing Washington bailouts, state lawmakers are planning to use $11 million in federal stimulus money to help rebuild the badly burned Texas Governor's Mansion.

Approximately $10 million in state tax money will also be spent on a renovation, which is expected to cost about $20 million, officials said Thursday. A House-Senate committee agreed on the expenditures late Wednesday night.

The mansion was burned in an arson fire last summer.

Perry has railed against federal bailouts and what he called the free-spending, power-hungry ways of Washington. In January, he said Texas was endangered by Uncle Sam's "audacity."

Perry spokeswoman Allison Castle released a short, written statement late Thursday when asked about using stimulus money to renovate the mansion.

"We are continuing to work with lawmakers on the budget," she said.

The $11 million for renovations would come out of the $700 million rescue package for Texas, lawmakers said.

"If we're going to fix it up we're going to have to use stimulus money," said state Sen. Steve Ogden, R-Bryan. "We've made a decision to use the stimulus money. This is a good use of it."

The governor has been living in a three-story, limestone home with a heated pool, an outdoor cabana and a guest house.

The state is paying some $9,900-a-month in rent while the Governor's Mansion undergoes renovations, records show.

George Tiller, "Abortion Doctor" (Joe)

So, you know, he was killed today by some anti-choice nut.  (Sad, etc.)  Actually, in this case, let's call the person who killed Tiller a "pro-life" nut -- it's more ironic than usual.

"Abortion doctor" -- don't we have a better label than this?  I've seen this term used in CNN and NYT headlines.  It's better than "abortionist," I suppose, but it's still on the disrespectful/demeaning end of things.

We have oncologists and dermatologists and orthopedic surgeons, not cancer doctors and skin doctors and bone-setters.  We have to be able to do better than abortion doctors.

Do a Google News search -- no one is calling him an obstetrician, or an OB-GYN.  I haven't done my fact-checking (as was pointed out in the comments on one of Ruchira's posts, we're not journalists here), so it's possible there's some reason that term doesn't fit, but in that case wouldn't even "abortion provider" be better?

Smart and not-so-smart judges (Joe)

I don't doubt that some of the "Judge Sotomayor just isn't smart enough to be a justice" criticism is racially tinged. It's probably sexist, too. But I'm not writing to defend Sonia Sotomayor -- I'm writing to defend Clarence Thomas (who I am distinctly not a fan of).

Because, of course, on the left -- and in the rush to defend Sotomayor -- there is crap like this at the Huffington Post:

Speaking of Thomas, I find it interesting that Republicans talk a great game about picking only the best and ignoring racial considerations. Eighteen years ago, Thomas was considered by many to be a lightweight who only got in because Thurgood Marshall was leaving, and Republicans wanted credit for appointing an African American to replace him. They denied this, of course, and said Thomas would go on to greatness. Two decades later, we're still waiting for the guy to ask a question, author a memorable opinion, or be anything other than Antonin Scalia's sidekick.

First, point out that Justice Thomas was appointed because he's black, wrongly suggesting that this means he was appointed only because he's black, i.e. that his race was his sole qualification.

Second, mock his silence at oral arguments. I'm actually more concerned with judges -- especially judges with the tremendous resources that SCOTUS Justices have -- changing their minds based on which side has the more articulate litigator at oral arguments, but that's just me. In any event, no one has ever suggested a plausible theory on how Thomas's lack of questions at oral arguments is meaningfully probative of his intelligence, and I'd be surprised by a compelling argument in favor of it revealing anything about his quality as a judge. Cubias (the HuffPo author) certainly doesn't give us anything along those lines here. Just point it out condescendingly, hope the reader understands the meaning.

Third, well, obviously he must be Nino's stupid sidekick. They're both conservative after all, but Scalia was there first and he's snarky at oral arguments and has written lots of sarcastic and angry dissents in which he is lauded for his style (by lawyers who are terrible writers and have probably never read a word of Atwood or Conrad) for his overuse of italics to emphasize lots of phrases. Scalia is just so damn glib! Plus Scalia's the white one. Ignore all those times where Thomas has disagreed with Scalia. Ignore all those times where Thomas has gotten it substantially more right than Scalia. From what I've seen, Thomas is actually more consistent, which means that he's also more intellectually honest on the bench, if you care about those things. I'd also note here that with respect to this nonsense about "memorable opinions," this disparity isn't really there from a lawyer's perspective, and from a non-lawyer's perspective no one on the current Court wrote Roe, Brown, or Miranda (Kennedy did give us Lawrence, but his talent for getting the juicy opinions lies more with his supermedian-justice status).

Fourth? Okay, Cubias only did one through three. But I want to put as four here, "Look like a racist." This is really a cumulative thing: 1 + 2 + 3 = 4. This line of attack on Justice Thomas is a fiction designed to discredit or trivialize him, and I'm sick of seeing it.

It would be nice, as liberals seek to defend Sonia Sotomayor from unfounded attacks, if they wouldn't rehash the unfounded, racist attacks on Clarence Thomas.

The Philosophy of Motorcycle Maintenance

A very interesting article in the New York Times about the joys of manual labor. (link via Leiter Reports) The author of the piece has a Ph.D in philosophy. He runs a motorcycle repair shop in Virginia. 

The television show“Deadliest Catch” depicts commercial crab fishermen in the Bering Sea. Another, “Dirty Jobs,” shows all kinds of grueling work; one episode featured a guy who inseminates turkeys for a living. The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in the fact that such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. “Dilbert,” “The Office” and similar portrayals of cubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar jobs.

Is there a more “real” alternative (short of inseminating turkeys)?

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.

This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale. A car mechanics’ trade association reports that repair shops have seen their business jump significantly in the current recession: people aren’t buying new cars; they are fixing the ones they have. The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers. The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in India.

The article is six pages long. Do read the whole thing.  Matthew Crawford, Ph.D in philosophy, fascinates with his perspective on work and satisfaction with life. The paradox here of course is that had Crawford not gone through the initial "safe" life trajectory of higher education and cubicle jobs of "ideas," he wouldn't probably have developed such a carefully weighed and regret-free appreciation for manual labor and nor perhaps the facility with words to make his case so succinctly for the cost-benefit of the informed choice he made. 

Crawford begins his piece with a reference to a television show.  That reminded me of another TV show, also to do with jobs. I am not much of a TV watcher. But during our brief stay in Germany in the early eighties, I used to watch a fair amount of TV with my two small children partly out of boredom and partly in order to get a grip on the German language. A game show called "Was bin Ich?" (a spin off of the American game show, What's My Line?) used to air on German TV in those days.  I remember noting with interest that some of the hardest vocations for the hosts to guess were manual jobs, even though one would think that such work would offer up more concrete clues than amorphous intellectual pursuits.  But then as Crawford notes, inseminating turkeys is working with your hands but who would ever guess that someone actually does it?  Similarly, I remember that on "Was bin Ich?" one guy's job completely stumped the hosts and he ended up earning a sizable prize for keeping them in suspense for the entire episode. He turned out to be a "Totenkopf Maler." ( see translation) Evidently, there is a market for painted skulls - at least, there must have been one in Germany!

Maria, I'll never stop saying Maria!

No, this is not a trip down the memory lane to West Side Story but an instance of another irate Republican putting his foot in the mouth regarding Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's pick for the US Supreme Court. Mike Huckabee, one of the GOP presidential contenders of 2008, railed that Maria Sotomayor, coming from the "far left" would turn the Supreme Court into a version of the "Extreme Court." Huckabee called the judge "Maria" - her name is Sonia. What was he thinking?  Was he merely inattentive to the news reports about Sotomayor or does he think that all Hispanic women are named Maria? (What happened to Lupe, Juanita, Teresa or even J. Lo?) 

Huckabee is not alone in making a fool of himself over Sotomayor's nomination. With future elections weighing on their minds most Republican senators are being cautiously cryptic about their opinion of Sotomayor lest they offend Hispanic voters with their rude and injudicious comments. But right wing commentators, erstwhile leaders of the Republican Party and some GOP House members are shooting their mouths off with abandon, calling Sotomayor a racist, ultra leftist activist and intellectual light weight. And all this from some who wanted Harriet Miers, a tsunami force of legal scholarship, on the Supreme Court and some others who broke US laws by writing illegal torture memos.

The story of the life of Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s first nominee to the Supreme Court, reads much like his own. Judge Sotomayor grew up in a public housing project in the South Bronx, her father passed away when she was nine, and her mother raised her while working as a nurse.

She was valedictorian of her high school class, and won a scholarship to Princeton where she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. From there she went to Yale Law School and was editor of the Yale Law Review.

Since then she has been an Assistant District Attorney, a corporate litigator, a District Court judge, and in 1998 was nominated by President Clinton to her current position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Sounds like the American dream and a person eminently qualified to sit on the highest court in the land, right? Not so says the vocal Republican opposition.

GOP leader Rush Limbaughcalled Judge Sotomayor a “horrible pick,” the “antithesis of a judge,” a “hack,” a “racist,” an “extreme left-wing radical,” an “anti-Constitutionalist” and said that she would be “a disaster on the Court.”

Karl Rove said Judge Sotomayor lacked “intellectual power.”

Senator James Inhofesaid he is concerned that Judge Sotomayor might be unduly influenced by “her own personal race, gender, or political preferences.” I wonder if Sen. Inhofe had those same concerns about Samuel Alito and John Roberts? Probably not.

Former Arkansas Governor and Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee said “Sotomayor comes from the far left and will likely leave us with something akin to the Extreme Court that could mark a major shift.” That was after he finally got her name right.

Pat Buchanan said, "She is not that intelligent."

Former Congressman Tom Tancredo agreed with Chairman Limbaugh, “I'm telling you, she appears to be a racist. She said things that are racist in any other context.”

But the piece de resistance comes from John Yoo, yes THAT John Yoo, who questioned Judge Sotomayor’s “excellence” and “intellect.” For that statement Mr. Yoo is the unanimous winner of the Brass ‘You Know What’ Award for 2009.

Meanwhile a friend forwarded me a list of Judge Sotomayor's more notable professional credentials:

Go Green, Don't Eat... Lamb? (Joe)

Apparently lamb is a particularly bad (i.e. high-carbon) food because sheep burp a lot of methane. They're actually worse than cows.

On the other hand, lamb is delicious. And I can't stop laughing at the thought of choosing food based on how much methane it burps.

Who's Up For The Top Quark?

3 Quarks Daily, a blog that I read regularly and where I have made many friends, has announced an  exiciting event - recognizing bloggers with cash prizes for the best writing. Please follow the link and find out the details. If you can remember a blog post in any of the four categories that you feel deserves the recognition, this may be a good opportunity to show your support. The first category to be judged is science and the deadline is approaching fast.  

The Google (Joe)

When did Google -- or google -- become a verb?

Or scratch that. New question: WHY did google become a verb?

Ten years ago, people used to say "do an internet search." We would "do an internet search on snow leopards." Now we "google snow leopards." This wasn't the pre-Google era, exactly, but at that point probably most people used Yahoo! -- but you would never see Yahoo! as a verb ("Yahoo the snow leopard"). Yahoo and Google are both two syllables, and yet only the more recent one became a verb.

And just as important, it became a generic verb. If I am going to wikipedia Tibet, I am going to look up the Wikipedia article on Tibet. If I am going to google Tibet, I am going to run an internet search on the term "Tibet," and I may or may not actually use the Google search engine.

Yeah, Google is the dominant search engine. And yeah, a single two-syllable word is simpler than a few words signifying a web-search. But isn't it just a bit odd that the public created this word (or verb form of a word) to capture a preexisting meaning for something that was surely somehow already in the common lexicon?

Where Life Is Good ....

That would be in Japan and the European micro-nation of San Marino, according to a recent WHO report.  The two top the list for the highest life expectancies in the world - Japan for females and San Marino for males.

A girl born in Japan today will likely live to celebrate her 86th birthday, the longest life expectancy anywhere in the world. Men fare best in the tiny European nation of San Marino, where the average boy will live to 81, the World Health Organization said Thursday.

The West African country of Sierra Leone has the shortest life expectancy for men — just 39 — while Afghanistan fares badly for both sexes, with men and women living on average to 41 and 42 years respectively.

The figures in WHO's annual World Health Statistics report are from 2007, the latest year available.

They show that some countries have made remarkable progress in increasing life expectancy since 1990 — partly by ending wars, partly through successful health initiatives.

Eritrea increased its average life expectancy by 33 years to 61 for men, and by 12 years to 65 for women. In Liberia the figure for men jumped 29 years to 54, and rose 13 years to 58 for women. Angola, Bangladesh, Maldives, Niger and East Timor also increased the average life expectancy for men and women by 10 years.

Other countries showed a sharp decline over the same period.

Women's life expectancy in Zimbabwe fell by 19 years to 44; Zimbabwean men live to 45 on average, compared to age 57 in 1990. Lesotho recorded a 16-year drop for both men and women to 43 and 47 respectively. Women in Swaziland live to 49 on average, a drop of 14 years. Men's life expectancy in the southern African country declined by 12 years to 47.

Botswana, Congo, Kenya, South Africa and Zambia also reported significant drops in life expectancy for both sexes.

In the United States, the life expectancy for men rose to 76 from 72 years, and for women to 81 from 79 years.

The most significant indicators for lower life span and higher infant mortality continue to be poverty, war and disease. Cessation or control of any of those circumstances improves the lives of people.  The report also found the following: