And now for something completely different — babies tasting a lemon for the first time.
For some reason, this reminds me of Jack Benny’s crack that no one knew what a cramp looked like until Fred Allen was born.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Watch Your Blood Pressure
American phrases that make Brits crazy:
46. I hear more and more people pronouncing the letter Z as “zee”. Not happy about it! Ross, London
Gee, they’re starting to act like the French. Two people separated by a common language.
[Via Geek Press]
Non-Intuitive
A few years ago, on a Delta flight, I noticed that the airline was boarding people in the middle first. I asked the flight attendant about it, and he said that studies had shown that it was faster than back to front, which surprised me, because the latter had always been conventional wisdom and industry practice. Now, American claims that, based on simulations, random boarding is better yet. I’d be interested to see a plausible explanation for this, if true.
Marshall McLuhan
An essay on his incomprehensible nonsense. I still enjoy that scene from Annie Hall, though.
Takes One To Know One
Apparently, Larry Summers did call the Winklevoss twins @n@l orifices, and is unapologetic about it.
Science Fiction
Why we should read it. It’s not a new thought, but it’s always a useful reminder that it helps us be prepared for the future. Of course, from that perspective, “speculative fiction” might be broader and more useful genre.
The Shuttle’s Ignominious Conclusion
Thoughts from Ed Driscoll, over at PJM. As he notes, Lileks has some reflections as well:
NASA is keen to tell you there’s a still a future for sending Americans into space, but there’s a general cultural anomie that seems content to watch movies about people in space, but indifferent to any plans to put them there. This makes me grind my teeth down to the roots, but I suppose that’s a standard reaction when the rest of your fellow citizenry doesn’t share the precise and exact parameters of your interests and concerns. That’s the problem when you grow up with magazines telling you where we’re going after the moon, with grade-school notebooks that had pictures of the space stations to come, when the push to Mars was regarded as an inevitable next step.
Just got hung up on the “why?” part, it seems. Also the “how” and the “how much” and other details. I can see the reason for taking our time – develop new engines, perfect technology, gather the money and the will. It’s not like anything’s going anywhere. But it’s not like we’re going anywhere if we’re not going anywhere, either – when nations, cultures stop exploring, it’s a bad sign. You’re ceding the future. If you have a long view that regards nation-states as quaint relics of a time in human history when maps had lines – really, you can’t see them from space! We’re all one, you know – then it doesn’t matter whether China or the US puts a flag on Mars. It’s possible a Chinese Mars expedition would commemorate the first boot on red soil with a statement that spoke for everyone on the planet, not a particular culture or nation. It’s possible. But history would remember that they chose to go, and we chose not to.
No signs that anyone is serious about choosing to go to Mars, other than Elon Musk. For the record, I think that it’s important that we carry Anglospheric and western values into the cosmos, and I’m pretty confident we will. I am equally confident that we won’t do it if we persist in thinking (like the Chinese) that it will be done with a Twenty-Year Plan.
I’m wondering what the thirty-somethings are thinking today. They don’t really remember a time when there wasn’t a Space Shuttle, either under development, or flying. And for most of them, Apollo is just a history that their parents lived through and told them about (as the Depression and WW II are for me). But I suspect that they, and the generation behind, will get pretty used to the idea of a real American space industry taking people into orbit, sans a government mission-control room with lots of desks. I hope that, for them, space will finally become a place instead of a program.
[Update later morning]
More lunacy and inability to read for comprehension or discern human emotions, from Mark Whittington, who fantasizes that I am “dancing on the Shuttle’s grave.”
Completely Useless
…signs.
[Update a few minutes later]
Someone had too much time on their hands: the physics of Superman.
The Core Belief Of Leftism
The far future seems to have put Frase in full flaming far mode, declaring his undying allegience to a core ideal: he prefers the inequality that comes from a government hierarchy, over inequality that comes from voluntary trade.
Yes, he prefers a world in which everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. And as Glenn notes:
I always figure that people who feel this way do so because they think they’re better at sucking up to authority figures than at creating value on their own. And my guess is, they’re right about that.
And the president is a canonical example.
The Hate
…that dare not speak its name:
Since Hitler’s death, the world has defined anti-Semitism down. Nurturing ancient fantasies of secret Jewish cabals that control the media and play politicians like puppets on a string, and making political judgments based on these fantasies isn’t sort of or almost anti-Semitic. To believe that Jews control public discourse and the media and bend the gentile masses to their sinister agenda is the essence of old fashioned anti-Semite. In some countries these beliefs are so common that they are no longer recognized as an aggressive and communicable mental disease. These ideas have become so widely accepted that they are seldom questioned or examined; when that happens, a whole society is poisoned and distorted.
The irony, of course, is not that it has become so prevalent on the left, but that those same leftists continue to attempt to rewrite history and claim that Hitler was of the “right.”