The Evil Eyebrow

Category: Opinion

  • Southern Hospitality II

    Like wikipedia articles, breaking news stories are best left to sit and smoulder until the facts come out.

    Yesterday, I passed along quotes from an AJC article concerning the arrest of a British historian for jaywalking.

    Well, there’s another story today, with the officer insisting that he used an “excessive amount of discretion.” Here’s the link to the story (registration required). To sum up, the professor claims abuse, the officer claims snootiness, and given the statement from the police department, “He is an oustanding officer,” said Maj. James Sellers. “We’ve never had a complaint about him before,” I’m inclined to go with the officer on this one.

    But wait! There’s a nail in this coffin that I can personally attest to! One of the professor’s original claims was that the officer was not in uniform. However, he was working part time directing pedestrian traffic across a busy downtown street at the Hilton. I’ve seen many officers working this same duty, and they are always in uniform. Take that, British historian! Hah!

    Still, not good publicity for Atlanta, which retains the title of “Most Tacky Olympics.”

  • There Is No Hope…

    …as long as journalists use phrases like this: (from the NY Times)

    Referring to a new test rocket by Blue Origin (an experimental spaceflight company).

    When the company performed the first test launching on Nov. 13, it made no announcement.

    And that was it, pretty much, until last week, when the Blue Origin Web site (www.blueorigin.com) showed the first pictures and video of a gumdrop-shaped test craft, dubbed Goddard, rising from the West Texas launch site to 285 feet and then, eerily, returning gently to the pad.

    [emphasis added]

    Eerily? Why is it “eerie” to see something go up, then come down under control? Helicopters do it. Birds do it. Planes do it. Parachutes do it! Hell, the Russians have been doing it since the late 60’s!

    Blah blah blah. Here’s another good quote from this article:

    The Goddard has a science-fiction sleekness. Videos show the craft taking off and landing again with a loud whooshing sound.

    Science fiction sleekness? Whooshing sound?! Does anyone at the NY Times actually watch science fiction? Did they pay any attention to the moon race, because I’m not seeing any extraordinary features on this image. Blue Origins Rocket on its Lauch Pad in West Texas I agree that it’s sleek, but “science-fiction sleekness?” And don’t get me started on “whooshing sound.” That’s ridiculous.

    At least the article mentions that this craft looks similar to the DC-X which was a government funded project to develop an uncrewed single-stage-to-orbit vehicle. Probably because some of the same engineers working on the DC-X were hired by Blue Origins.

    When will space enthusiasts stop getting second tier columnists? Of course, John Schwartz of the NY Times has been covering space and technology for a while, but that does not excuse him for using such trite phrases as are in this article.

  • Big Pharmaceuticals Aren't Evil Dictators?

    In a post about the current regulatory environment around medial care today, In The Pipeline is maintaining the the NYTimes seems to be adopting a conciliatory attitude toward big pharma.

    I have no idea.

    I personally find this post interesting because of the quotations he digs out of the original NY Times article.

    Q. Wouldn’t your solution require a dramatically different regulatory environment?

    A. It differs state by state. In Massachusetts, nurses cannot write prescriptions. But in Minnesota, nurse practitioners can. So there has emerged in Minnesota a clinic called the MinuteClinic. These clinics operate in Target stores and CVS drugstores. They are staffed only by nurse practitioners. There’s a big sign on the door that says, “We treat these 16 rules-based disorders.” They include strep throat, pink eye, urinary tract infection, earaches and sinus infections.

    These are things for which very unambiguous, “go, no-go” tests exist. You’re in and out in 15 minutes or it’s free, and it’s a $39 flat fee. These things are just booming because high-quality health care at that level is defined by convenience and accessibility. That’s a commoditization of the expertise. . .

    Keep in mind that I am a medical industry noob. I know nothing. Yet, this strikes me as emininently reasonable! It doesn’t take a M.D. to diagnose your flu or sinus infection. Even if your horribly deadly disease were something that initially presented “flu-like symptoms” I have reservations that a doctor would be likely to pick it up without first treating you for the flu. Occam’s razor and all that.

    I personally would love to see the mentioned clinics, staffed by trained professionals, available to the public without having to go through the rigamarole of a doctor’s office visit or, god forbid, the ER.

  • Why You Shouldn't Recommend Books

    I have given up taking book recommendations from the masses. I am a quick reader, but I won’t read things if I don’t like them, or if they don’t entertain me. I have developed opinions about novels over the course of my reading career and I don’t like to force a novel past my eyes. I haven’t read past the first chapter of Moby Dick, and probably never will. I did not particularly like Neuromancer. Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle is horribly long-winded and if I wasn’t already hooked by his other books, I never would have gotten past the third chapter. The Jungle put me to sleep, depressed. Yet there are books I love that I know would make people scratch their heads and wonder what I was smoking.

    Recently there was a call from Pharyngula to recommend Science Fiction books for young readers. The conclusion I drew from reading the responses was that it was a bell-shaped distribution ranging from crazy to excellent. Most of the responses (in my opinion, of course) were reasonable, while some steered people away from (imo) good books and others steered people toward bad ones. The final decision: Mass Book Recommendations are utterly useless. Or maybe udderly useless as you get stampeded toward the mainstream (Of course, there are some excellent books that everyone has read. “Exception to every rule,” and all that).

    I am personally of the opinion, as evidenced in the Harriet Klausner post, that you should take a book recommendation with a large grain of salt until you and the reviewer develop a relationship. I have friends whose book taste I know and vice versa. I don’t feel like I’m leading them astray when I tell them “read this, don’t read that.” Likewise, there are a few professional reviewers that I trust to accurately predict my enjoyment of a book (there are those reviewers whom I can trust to hate anything I’d like, too, which is an accurate prediction.)

    Of course, you shouldn’t depend on anyone’s judgement for reading. Not mine, not your brother’s, not the NY Times, not anybody! You should merely pick something up and read it. If you don’t like it, move on. That’s a great way to review books!

  • Harriet Klausner

    You learn new things every day. Not necessarily useful things, but things. Possibly, these various items may pop up in a bar quiz someday. I can only hope.

    Today’s thing is Harriet Klausner. This was clued to me by one of SFSignal’s various tidbit posts. This post lists a comment train that has been continuing for over 3 years now and is quite educational.

    Harriet Klausner is Amazon.com’s #1 reviewer. “She” has reviewed more books than anyone else. As of today, she has written 12,939 reviews in almost the exact same format (three paragraph summation with a 4 or 5 star rating). This woman is either a front for a large set of people or someone who might possibly be lying to us.

    I base this on the following data, drawn from Amazon’s list of her reviewed books.

    • She reviewed 19 books on December 10 2006
    • 59 books on December 9 2006
    • 3 on December 8
    • 1 on December 7
    • 1 on December 6
    • 15 on Decmber 3
    • 10 on December 2

    I gave up at this point. I went to page 99 intending to find the date of the last review on that page. Then I decided to make sure I counted all the reviews done that day. I ended up on page 106! The date was August 2, 2006. Checking all of the August 2 pages, it ends up that 102(!) reviews were published that day.

    So, if I do my math right, between August 2 and December 26 we have 146 days. Over the course of that time “Harriet Klausner” has posted 7.27 reviews per day. But, let us not discount what she said in her Wired interview.

    Klausner, for one, has a day job to supplement her income. She works as a paid columnist in two national magazines, Porthole Cruise Magazine and Affaire de Coeur.

    Also

    She never deliberately criticizes an author and she doesn’t accept gifts or money when writing about a book.

    So, here’s a woman with a day job, who never deliberately criticizes authors, yet (from not-so-random-sampling by yours truly and through affirmations by others) never gives less than 4 stars on Amazon, and reviews 7.27 books per day. The first ten books in her reviewed list as of today, the 26th of December, averaged 423 pages. So she reads and reviews 3075 pages every single day, including weekends, while holding down a paying job, and presumably reading the first 50 pages of at least the occasional novel she does not like. Let’s be generous and reverse Sturgeon’s Law and call 90% of the novels she reads good and the last 10% crap. That leaves us with a grand total of 3113 pages per day every day all year long.

    She must be keeping bandage companies in business with all of her paper cuts.

    This is a bunch of crap. No one can honestly, ethically, review this many books every day and have more to say that banal generalities that we can get from the book jacket. If she is telling the truth and does read this much, I have no need to read her stuff; it will be trite and useless to me. If she is not telling the truth and has a team behind the name, then why don’t they publish better reviews? Read some if you don’t believe me…

    I have nothing deep to say about this, other than it reinforces my belief that you cannot trust book reviews or reviewers unless you actually know the person who did the reviewing.

    While paging through her listing of reviewed books, I noticed that one of them was a book of photography. I might be able to believe she can speed read her way through 3113 pages, but a book of photography is not a novel. It would require a different mindset to “speedread.” Yes, I realize it’s only one book, but it’s proof of principle. My principle.

  • War on Christmas

    There is a new perpetrator in the media-hyped “War on Christmas.”

    This “new aggressor” (as mentioned by The Moderate Voice) is shamefully ignoring its own conservative base, the very ones who initiated and continue to perpetuate this mythical “War.”

    I need to “use” more “quotations” in this entry to make it seem more “visual”

  • Polar Ice Albedo and Ponderings

    I’ve been reading (not exhaustively) Realclimate.org since it popped up on the 2006 Best Science Weblogs nominations.

    I like science blogs that stretch what I know about topics, yet are not so far past me that I can’t make heads or tails. This entry I find cogent and fascinating. It reminds me that topics such as global warming (just for one example) are always more complicated that than appear and require dedicated study to truly understand.

    It also reminds me why I usually dislike discussing “science” topics with people. I am science-knowledgeable enough to know what is fact, what is fiction, what is still under debate, and most importantly, what I don’t know enough about to have a legitimate opinion. However I’m not a professional scientist and I don’t have practice convincing lay persons that what they hear or read in the media is not everything to it. I especially find it difficult explaining that having a useful discussion about a slippery and detailed scientific field of study requires both persons involved having some expertise. “‘Cause I heard it on the TV,” is difficult to slap down when it’s considered gospel.

    Nevertheless, I try and explain without being insulting that the person may want to seek multiple sources of input before chiseling their opinion in stone. Practice makes perfect.

  • A Traitor to her Sex

    This evening on NPR’s All Things Considered, Nadia Colin (spelling uncertain) of Texas was quoted saying that women shouldn’t be elected president. She said, “Coming from Texas, I think the majority of us feel that with a male leader we feel safer. I would not vote for a woman president, ever.”

    It is the year 2006. If anyone had uttered a sentence like that substituting “black” or “hispanic” for “woman”, they would be strung up and left to rot. The fact that anyone, anywhere still has these sorts of attitudes both depresses me and reaffirms my belief that all people are not created equal. They are indoctrinated from birth with preconceptions that they fail to question.*

    What is wrong with America, represented by this woman, that they cannot conceive of a woman wielding effective power? The quoted woman must reexamine her priorities. If women are only for cooking and making babies, she is hypocritical being interviewed on the radio. She is not qualified; she is a woman.

    Let us stamp out this stereotype. The best thing you can do for a woman is what you would do for anyone. Support their goals, don’t condescend, and above all, be aware that on average, 50% of women are smarter than you.

    *All high school frosh should be issued this bumper sticker.

  • Winter Solstice

    At 00:22 GMT on December 22nd, the world will celebrate once more its free annual trip around the sun. This equates to 18:22 (6:22 PM EDT) 19:22 (7:22 PM EST) December 21st for those of us sitting on the east coast of the United States.

    To commemorate this occasion, and its companion solstice during the summer, I usually provide my office mates with a few dozen Dunkin Donuts. This both let’s them know that the zenith of the sun will be rising again, and that I disdain their too-sweet Krispy Kremes.

    Perhaps I will stand eggs on their ends inside the donuts to round out the occasion.

    Whatever you do, even if it is a pale shadow of the Christmas and New Year’s holiday celebrations, make sure you remember the significance of this event. We are whizzing through space at a speed that is literally mindblowing, following a path ~942 million kilometers long every year. Standing on this big ball of rock coated in a skin of air, most of us have difficulty comprehending that it is a ball, and not a plane. Wrapping your mind around that is difficult, but doable with images from planes and spacecraft. Imagining the distances invovled within the solar system becomes much more abstract, and trying to encompass galactic or intergalactic scales is nearly impossible. The solstices (and equinoxes) are a good time to remember where we stand in the great scheme of things, “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy…”* But despite our cosmic insignificance, we are here and equipped to wonder why we are so insignificant, and that’s something.

    *Douglas Adams, The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy.

  • Dating Ad Seen on Fark.com

    Dating Site AdvertisementYou can join this site, because there are over 11,000,000 members, and every single one of them is a girl under 25. It’s too bad I didn’t grow up in hornysville like these women.

    I chose to remove the name of the site. You can go to Fark and maybe it will still be there.