Dave Kreiger has some amusing anecdotes about his adventures as a scientific fact checker for Star Trek:TNG

It confirms what I’ve said before about television and movie writers and producers being willfully, even joyfully ignorant about basic science and logic.

I have nothing to say about yesterday’s atrocity in Israel but, as usual, Lileks does. The contrast technique of his prose is staggering.

Also, lots of good related discussion over at Charles Johnson’s site.

I have nothing to say about yesterday’s atrocity in Israel but, as usual, Lileks does. The contrast technique of his prose is staggering.

Also, lots of good related discussion over at Charles Johnson’s site.

I have nothing to say about yesterday’s atrocity in Israel but, as usual, Lileks does. The contrast technique of his prose is staggering.

Also, lots of good related discussion over at Charles Johnson’s site.

Den Beste has a good piece debunking much of the press hysteria about “dirty bombs“.

Reader Randolph Addison writes:

Peter Jennings is in the Palestine/Israel region right now [on ABC radio] interviewing people and getting their feelings on the violence. Had I not heard this from his own mouth, I would have simply not believed the depths of moral relativity that exists in this man. To quote as closely as possible, he said, “…when I interview Israelis, it’s almost exactly like interviewing the Palestinians…no, wait, not exactly but very close to. They are both mired in distrust for the other side and feel as though they are entrenched in violence and cannot think of [this is the best part] an imaginative solution…” And he said some more about their distrust and similar feelings, etc.

Yes, because Palestinians who celebrate the death of babies are exactly like Israelis who just want to exist and will retaliate against Palestinian soldiers and militia infantry. I figure if I interview a rapist and his victims, I will get exactly the same interview from both sides. The rapist will say, “Gosh darnit, them there people were asking for it by being all damned snippy and haughty towards me after I cleaned their windows, looking all fancy…they’re just trying to rub their wealth in my face by hiring me.”

And the victims will have roughly the same story of, “…I just don’t see why I had to provoke him by acting as though I was better just because I go to work every day and make a good living. I should not have hired him to clean our windows because it just highlights in the financial disparity of our backwards capitalist system.” Yep.

I never liked Peter Jennings for his haughty more-pious-than-thou attitude on everything (even when he is clearly wrong and should know it). This took me over the edge. To draw moral equality between them is just…well, amazing.

One more reason that fewer and fewer watch network news.

Reader Randolph Addison writes:

Peter Jennings is in the Palestine/Israel region right now [on ABC radio] interviewing people and getting their feelings on the violence. Had I not heard this from his own mouth, I would have simply not believed the depths of moral relativity that exists in this man. To quote as closely as possible, he said, “…when I interview Israelis, it’s almost exactly like interviewing the Palestinians…no, wait, not exactly but very close to. They are both mired in distrust for the other side and feel as though they are entrenched in violence and cannot think of [this is the best part] an imaginative solution…” And he said some more about their distrust and similar feelings, etc.

Yes, because Palestinians who celebrate the death of babies are exactly like Israelis who just want to exist and will retaliate against Palestinian soldiers and militia infantry. I figure if I interview a rapist and his victims, I will get exactly the same interview from both sides. The rapist will say, “Gosh darnit, them there people were asking for it by being all damned snippy and haughty towards me after I cleaned their windows, looking all fancy…they’re just trying to rub their wealth in my face by hiring me.”

And the victims will have roughly the same story of, “…I just don’t see why I had to provoke him by acting as though I was better just because I go to work every day and make a good living. I should not have hired him to clean our windows because it just highlights in the financial disparity of our backwards capitalist system.” Yep.

I never liked Peter Jennings for his haughty more-pious-than-thou attitude on everything (even when he is clearly wrong and should know it). This took me over the edge. To draw moral equality between them is just…well, amazing.

One more reason that fewer and fewer watch network news.

Reader Randolph Addison writes:

Peter Jennings is in the Palestine/Israel region right now [on ABC radio] interviewing people and getting their feelings on the violence. Had I not heard this from his own mouth, I would have simply not believed the depths of moral relativity that exists in this man. To quote as closely as possible, he said, “…when I interview Israelis, it’s almost exactly like interviewing the Palestinians…no, wait, not exactly but very close to. They are both mired in distrust for the other side and feel as though they are entrenched in violence and cannot think of [this is the best part] an imaginative solution…” And he said some more about their distrust and similar feelings, etc.

Yes, because Palestinians who celebrate the death of babies are exactly like Israelis who just want to exist and will retaliate against Palestinian soldiers and militia infantry. I figure if I interview a rapist and his victims, I will get exactly the same interview from both sides. The rapist will say, “Gosh darnit, them there people were asking for it by being all damned snippy and haughty towards me after I cleaned their windows, looking all fancy…they’re just trying to rub their wealth in my face by hiring me.”

And the victims will have roughly the same story of, “…I just don’t see why I had to provoke him by acting as though I was better just because I go to work every day and make a good living. I should not have hired him to clean our windows because it just highlights in the financial disparity of our backwards capitalist system.” Yep.

I never liked Peter Jennings for his haughty more-pious-than-thou attitude on everything (even when he is clearly wrong and should know it). This took me over the edge. To draw moral equality between them is just…well, amazing.

One more reason that fewer and fewer watch network news.

It’s been brought to my attention that I (and anyone else who may be running my script) may be making the Blogspot problem worse with all the hits it gets from my status tests.

While there are some things that can be done to the script to mitigate some of the problems, I’m going to take it down for now, and am asking any others who may have done something similar to it to do the same. I’d also like to initiate a discussion about whether a) such a thing is a good thing to have (as several have told me) and b) if so, what the best way is to achieve it without exacerbating it.

[Update at 9:27AM PST]

Carey Gage comments:

Since you started your status check, I’ve been coming here, checking both your content and blogger’s status before going to any blogspot sites. I think your idea was a good one, if only in terms of convenience.

But having ten blogs hitting on blogspot to check its status once every minute will undoubtedly aggravate his traffic problem and is also much more than is needed. One non-Blogspot site, checking once every five or ten minutes would be a convenience and would not add excessively to Blogspot’s traffic.

Which one? You thought of it, you implemented it. I think you should do it to the exclusion of everyone else. If that gets you extra hits, well and good (if you want them). Can you handle the extra traffic generated by being a blogspot “gateway” without incurring the same traffic problems as he does?

Well, getting hits for the sake of hits was not necessarily the goal. I really did it for my own use, and for the use of my regular readers. I suspect that if people are coming just to see Blogspot status, they’re not necessarily hanging around to read anything else. If that’s the case, then it would make more sense to set up a separate page just for that (with a separate link to the blog), to minimize my own bandwidth.

Once every five minutes is twice as much as once every ten. It’s a matter of how much data resolution we want to get. Just going from twice a minute to once would reduce the load by half.

Other thoughts?

Can anyone remember the last time an Arab nation (or for that matter, an Islamic nation) won a war unassisted?