Archives for June 2006
My thoughts exaclty
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Cast a vote, win $1 million
Insanity. The Arizona Republic reports today that the state has certified a ballot initiative for November that, if passed, in future elections will award $1 million to a random voter. The money would come from unclaimed lottery payouts. I guess it would be too hard to hold elections on weekends, and make voting periods 48 hours long, in order to encourage voting by folks who would vote but for the fact that they place a higher value on their time. It’s much easier to encourage people with no interest in politics and who value their time less than a one in two million shot at the prize. Democracy rocks.Nasty bits
So I finally started to read Anthony Bourdain’s latest book this morning. Here is the first sentence: “I went seal hunting yesterday.” I love that guy.The effeminate sheep and other problems with Darwinian sexual selection
Interesting article about a biologist’s attempt to address that nagging footnote in the theory of sexual selection: homosexuality. “Being gay clearly makes individuals less likely to pass on their genes, a major biological faux pas. From the perspective of evolution, homosexual behavior has always been a genetic dead end, something that has to be explained away. But [Joan] Roughgarden believes that biologists have it backwards. Given the pervasive presence of homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom, same-sex partnering must be an adaptive trait that’s been carefully preserved by natural selection.”I’m not convinced by her conclusions since they depend on group selection (the idea that genes that are good for the species–as opposed to the individual–will somehow get passed along), which Richard Dawkins has thoroughly dispatched. I think there needs to be a distinction between exclusive homosexuality (which does fly in the face of natural selection) and homosexuality that is practiced in addition to reproductive sex. It seems like the many examples of animal homosexuality that Roughgarden cites are of the latter type, while the former, as far as I know, is a relatively modern phenomenon that is exclusive to humans. If that’s the case, then a good argument can be made that memes and not genes are responsible.
Stoney’s is reopening
Fantastic news! The wonderful dive/cop bar Stoney’s, which was a favorite during my Cato days, is reopening across from Whole Foods on P St. in Logan Circle. Not only is it great that this institution is back, but now my neighborhood is complete–a real honest-to-goodness corner bar was the only thing missing.It’s a Bird… No, It’s a 3-D Movie, And More of Them Are on the Way
The WSJ reports that “A stream of 3-D films is about to be unleashed to moviegoers, starting with ‘Superman Returns’ today.” The movies will be available in Imax and conventional theaters. 3-D was a gimmick (along with smell-o-vision, Cinerama, and others) that Hollywood employed in the 50’s to compete with television. It looks like they’re using it again to fight the threat of enhanced home entertainment, including video games, the internet, and the DVD death spiral. I’m not sure why the second time should be a charm, but hopefully it’ll be as fun as the first go-round.In defense of diving
There’s an article in Slate today defending the practice of flopping in soccer–that is, falling to the ground at the slightest touch by an opponent and writhing in pretend agony so as to get the ref to call a penalty. The author claims that this is part of the drama of soccer and that it is only done to bring attention to legitimate fouls. Whatever the case, I think it’s probably one of the main reasons why the sport will never be embraced by Americans. Flopping looks too much like cheating to sit well with the American character (Dave Eggers calls it “a combination of acting, lying, begging, and cheating”), and it’s become too integral a part of the game to be avoided. Here’s a fun allegedly undercover video of the Italian team practicing their flopping:DIY, or How To Kill Yourself Anywhere in the World for Under $399
This book by artist Joe Scanlan “presents — in extremely dry and methodical detail — a plan for how to go into any IKEA store in the world and buy materials with which to build your own coffin.”Greetings from Airworld!
Travel writer Wayne Curtis has a wonderful article in the current Atlantic in which he recounts his vacation visiting five U.S. airports in six days and never setting foot outside of any of them. He’s obviously a fan of the unique architectural possibilities that airports permit and how that architecture has had to change as security precautions have increased. The story begins with him amazed that a guard won’t let him photograph Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal at JFK.
Yesterday’s Terminal of Tomorrow (Terminal 3, originally the Pan Am Worldport, also from 1960) is a good example of what happens when the optimistic, outward- looking World’s Fair attitude collides with the post-9/11, hunkering-down worldview. It still has its great, gravity-defying umbrella of concrete, but has been recast as a House of Security Horrors, with clunky partitions, nonexistent directional signs, and, during my visit, the edifying sight of a family late for a flight running up an automobile ramp while dodging oncoming cars.
One neat nugget of travel know-how Curtis imparts is a pointer to sleepingairports.net, “a user-compiled directory of where to find quiet corners, and benches without armrests, at airports worldwide.”
Quitting politics via text message
“When Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jose Ramos-Horta resigned from his East Timor government posts, he did so via a mobile-phone text message,” Reuters reports. Ramos-Horta sent an SMS message to the prime minister “announcing his intention to quit on Sunday, and received a reply in the same format from the premier. … The country has been embroiled for months in a political crisis, and text messaging has emerged as the fastest and most reliable means of communication.”If you build it
The NYT has an interesting article on Taipei’s floundering municipal wi-fi network. “Despite WiFly’s ubiquity — with 4,100 hot spot access points reaching 90 percent of the population — just 40,000 of Taipei’s 2.6 million residents have agreed to pay for the service since January. … That such a vast and reasonably priced wireless network has attracted so few users in an otherwise tech-hungry metropolis should give pause to civic leaders in Chicago, Philadelphia and dozens of other American cities that are building wireless networks of their own. Like Taipei, these cities hope to use their new networks to help less affluent people get online and to make their cities more business-friendly. Yet as Taipei has found out, just building a citywide network does not guarantee that people will use it. Most people already have plenty of access to the Internet in their offices and at home, while wireless data services let them get online anywhere using phones, laptops and P.D.A.’s.”Are gravestone carvings fair use?
The Telegraph. via UPI, reports that after having a stillborn baby, an English couple sought permission from the Walt Disney Co. to have the image of cartoon character Winnie the Pooh engraved on the child’s gravestone. Initially, the company denied the request, warning that a stonemason would breach copyright if the image was engraved. It later reversed its decision. Boy, that’s a lawsuit I would have loved to have seen.It died for us
NYT food critic Frank Bruni has a neat little column on the inconsistencies and contradictions of ethical eating. All I know is that I’m feeling a bit guilty for not doing more to help fight the smoking ban in D.C. I’m reminded of Martin Niemöller’s poem about the complacency of German intellectuals during the rise of the Nazis.First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.
As Bruni writes, “The Chicago City Council recently outlawed the sale of foie gras to protest the force-feeding of the ducks and geese that yield it. California passed a similar law, which doesn’t take effect until 2012, and other states and cities are considering such measures.” I swear, if that ever happens in D.C. I will become militant. Maybe Ban the Ban can be repurposed.
~Picnic Wine Table
Nothing but brilliant. A picnic wine table. Available from Crate & Barrel. This is why I love design.
Journalism and paper
Yesterday Slate held the symposium “Online Media and the Future of Journalism” at the New York Public Library, featuring Michael Kinsley, Jacob Weisberg, Malcolm Gladwell, Arianna Huffington, and Norman Pearlstine. It’s mostly terrific and you can listen to the whole thing online (mp3). Gladwell makes the point I’ve made many times before, that paper is going to be with us for a long time because it’s going to be very difficult to improve on that technology. But Weisberg smartly retorts that while that may be the case for books, maybe it’s not for newspapers. We’re waiting for the iPod of reading, he says, “but the iPod of reading may be the iPod.” Andy Bowers adds that the iPod has such great market penetration that it wouldn’t be too difficult to add a successful reading functionality. This makes me think that beyond the existing penetration, the one feature that might make people look past the drawbacks of reading on a device that isn’t as elegant as paper would be connectivity: the ability to get whatever you want whenever and wherever you are and have that info be up-to-the minute. You can wait a couple of days to read that new book, but not the latest news story or blog post. So maybe ebook readers will never take off until they can be wirelessly connected to the web.More new stuff
Here are some links to my recent output. I recently moderated a roundtable discussion on net neutrality with panelists from Heritage, PFF, Public Knowledge, and Free Press. Audio and photos of the event are online. Also, the June edition of AFF Radio, which I host, is also online. The show features James W. Antle on what Democrats can learn from Republican foreign policy, Brooke Oberwetter on the truth about global warming skepticism, and Will Wilkinson on how free labor markets contribute to individual happiness. Finally, if you’d like to subject yourself to an hour of me speaking non-stop, you can download audio (mp3) of my recent lecture to Hill Staffers on the subject of copyright, incentives, and orphan works. The slides (pdf) are also online, but they’ve been converted from Keynote to Powerpoint to PDF and they don’t look to great.For your protection
The Washington Post reports today that “Virginia’s public and private colleges and universities soon will be required to submit the names and Social Security numbers of tens of thousands of students they accept each year to state police for cross-checking against sexual offender registries.” The law, recently signed by Gov. Tim Kaine, is aimed at tracking sex offenders. It “also requires Department of Motor Vehicles officials to turn over personal information to police any time a Virginian applies for a license or change of address.”“I’ve got two kids in college right now,” said Kenneth W. Stolle (R-Virginia Beach), the bill’s chief sponsor in the state Senate. “You’re going to have a . . . hard time explaining to me why my daughter is living next door to a sexual offender. My guess is every parent out there would have the same expectation that I do.”
Since it doesn’t take more than a stolen laptop to put 2.2 million identities in jeopardy, and since one person’s Social Security number can be used fraudulently by up to 80 different people, I’m not sure I want my information spread any wider than it already has to be. And it’s not clear to me why I, an innocent (I assure you) private citizen is forced to get a background check before I can enroll in a private institution, which may otherwise not care about my background. If your daughter is living next to a ex-offender, it’s because that’s life. What’s next? Legislating safety scissors and circles of paper?
Cross-posted at TLF. You can leave and read comments there. →
Offered without comment
“Hip hop artist 50 Cent is in talks with Apple about a 50-cent branded Mac that is affordable for inner-city residents according to Forbes.”An open letter to Frank Gehry
Jonathan Lethem tries to shame Frank Gehry into walking away from the 16 towers that have been proposed for Brooklyn along with the New Jersey Nets’ new arena. He writes, “Your presence is intended to appease cultural tastemakers who might otherwise, correctly, recognize this atrocious plan for what it is, just as the notion of a basketball arena itself is a Trojan horse for the real plan: building a skyline suitable to some Sunbelt boomtown.” Lethem goes on to outline several seven problems with the project, including: “The principle of eminent domain. … in the present scheme, publicly owned resources–i.e., the demapped streets and an active rail yard–are here being converted into private property: commonwealth in reverse.” This is especially troubling given concern number one: “The primary objection to your project always was, and always will be, its outlandish disproportion to the neighborhoods around it.”I recently saw the Sydney-Pollack-directed Gehry documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry, and thought it was little more than an homage to one self-absorbed pseudo-artist by another — and commissioned by the first, as we learn in the first minutes of the movie. Given the glimpse into Gehry’s ego the documentary allowed me, I’m not surprised by Lethem’s concerns. Maybe more than ever we need to defend Brooklyn.
Miami-Dade School Board Bans Cuba Book
The NYT reports today that “A children’s book about Cuba will be removed from Miami-Dade County school libraries because a parent objected to its contents, saying it contains deceptive information and paints an idealistic picture of life in Cuba.” This is so typical of the Miami Cuban community. It’s like they have no sense of irony. And it doesn’t bode well for a future free Cuba, either.-
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This is the personal site of Jerry Brito, a lawyer and writer in Washington, D.C. He’s an academic researcher and the creator of Unclutterer and several other blogs. More »
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