Unexpected Star Wars Encounter

verb ( labeling ) [ trans. ]

• give a name to (something) : she labeled his new Riviera a “Star Wars” car.

Via the OS X dictionary app.

Fear the Boom and Bust

Via NPR’s Planet Money:

a story about a cable tv producer from New Jersey, a podcasting libertarian economist, an international pop superstar and the two dead economists who brought them all together.

The Planet Money podcast is highly recommended. Always interesting and never failing to inform or make you think about economics in new ways.

Dunk!

More at Dunking Devils, and of course YouTube.

On the Productivity of Video Conferences

Ooh yeah ♪

 

Hawaiʻi Five-0

The Rap Guide to Evolution

After winning critical acclaim for his award winning Rap Canterbury Tales, Baba Brinkman has leveraged his “Lit Hop” skills for The Rap Guide to Evolution.  Commissioned for the 2009 Cambridge Darwin Festival in honor of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, The Guide is a “peer-reviewed” hip-hop exploration of modern evolutionary biology. He is offering the CD as a free promotional download during the month of August.  If you miss that, you can also try the special The Naked Scientist podcast for his performance at the Cambridge Darwin Festival.

10 Performance
20 Feedback
30 Revision
40 goto 10

How the Orbital Mind-Control Lasers Work

You may have missed the recent announcement by researchers at the FLASH facility in Hamburg, Germany nibbling at Star Trek’s transparent aluminum tech, but even if you didn’t, did you consider the full implications? Luckily, ZPi examines the theoretical basis for concern on AFDB efficacy and generally allays them by enumerating the drawbacks of utilizing the published technique.

There is a misconception among novice paranoids that the so-called “mind-control lasers” control minds directly from their locations in orbit. In reality, these lasers only facilitate conventional psychotronic mind-control coming from either orbiting psychotrons or ground-based stations. But how do the lasers do this?

A recent experiment leaked to the public via Nature Physics — presumably as part of the continuing strategy of conditioning orthonoids to accept a more conspicuous New World Order, as well as morale-disrupting propaganda aimed at paranoids — revealed the shocking truth about how these lasers work — they turn aluminum foil transparent

via Zapato Productions intradimensional

See also: MindGuard

Do the Right Thing

A Right to Marry? Same-sex Marriage and Constitutional Law by Martha Nussbaum in the summer issue of Dissent does an excellent job expressing my views on the subject. Or maybe I just regard it highly because I happen to agree with it. It’s perhaps a bit long by web drive-thru standards, but it is refreshing to see such a “nuanced, and sustained, analysis and critique of the various arguments against gay marriage“. I wish our politicians were required to read it and respond where they differed. As a friend said though, “Yeah, good luck with that“. The publication also provides online responses from Martha Ackelsberg, Stephanie Coontz, and Katha Pollitt also worth reading that address aspects of the essay.

The future of marriage looks, in one way, a lot like its past. People will continue to unite, form families, have children, and, sometimes, split up. What the Constitution dictates, however, is that whatever the state decides to do in this area will be done on a basis of equality. Government cannot exclude any group of citizens from the civil benefits or the expressive dignities of marriage without a compelling public interest. The full inclusion of same-sex couples is in one sense a large change, just as official recognition of interracial marriage was a large change, and just as the full inclusion of women and African Americans as voters and citizens was a large change. On the other hand, those changes are best seen as a true realization of the promise contained in our constitutional guarantees. We should view this change in the same way. The politics of humanity asks us to stop viewing same-sex marriage as a source of taint or defilement to traditional marriage but, instead, to understand the human purposes of those who seek marriage and the similarity of what they seek to that which straight people seek. When we think this way, the issue ought to look like the miscegenation issue: as an exclusion we can no longer tolerate in a society pursuing equal respect and justice for all.

See also: Your choice of lifestyle is an abomination.

The Good the Bad and the Ukulele

hu – ah
hu – ah

hu — AH!

Induced Insomnia

Dog sniffs along shins.
Recalled from Nod. Wait — not… dog?
Aaaaahhh!  Something crawling?!?