Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
Physicists study whether or not dice tossing is really random.  However, they neglected to include “Did the luckless ranger touch them before tossing?” as one of the variables in the simulation.  There’s a guy in my D&D group who will confirm that this is the most crucial variable of all.

By Mona
Casual prejudice and even contempt for atheists has long been an affront to me. And I’m especially disappointed to find it among some progressives, as I just wrote about at AoTP.

By Thoreau
Over at Scienceblogs, they’re discussing the case of a chemistry grad student who turned out to be REALLY good at organic synthesis.
To me, the real issue here is not drugs and background checks.  The last thing I want to do is tell a person with a criminal conviction that he cannot go to school […]

Doesn’t "Little Jackie Paper" sound like a mafia nickname?

Julian has an acute and entertaining take on the "Free Sarah Palin" boomlet:
Sure, we can look back and find instances where she’s handled herself more competently, but her gaffes have not been, as some of her apologists seem to want to imply, a matter of getting flustered by her failure to recall the name of […]

By Thoreau
Waves are waves, whether they are waves of water, waves of light, waves of electrons, waves of sound, or waves of whatever else.  For the last few years there has been a lot of work on using exotic new materials to bend light around an object and make an invisibility cloak.  The concept has […]

By Thoreau
New research shows that Neanderthals ate a lot of seafood.  So much for the theory that Omega-3 fatty acids will keep you from going extinct.
No word on whether they got drunk while hanging out at the beach.

Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates on the racial implications - or not - of John McCain’s studied avoidance of gazing into the presumably Gorgonian visage of Barack Obama Friday night, this occurred to me: McCain and his handlers may or may not have been conveying a specifically racist contempt for Obama. Beats me. But, a racist audience […]

By Thoreau
It has been suggested to me that there are some good pro-bailout arguments, and that I’m being too knee-jerk.  I will evaluate those arguments when I get the chance and (for now at least) turn down the rhetoric one notch.  In the mean time, two thoughts:
1) If the concern is that our economy needs […]

By Thoreau
1) The latest grant is due tomorrow. I wrote a draft Wednesday night/Thursday morning at 1am, circulated it for signatures on the cover page, and put it aside to work on teaching. Now I’m looking at it again and DAMN WHAT I WROTE AT 1AM ACTUALLY MAKES SENSE!!!!!
Either that or I’m […]

By Thoreau
The logic of the bailout appears to be that if you recklessly loan too much money to people who probably can’t pay it back, you’ll be taken care of. Of course, if you happen to profit, you’ll get to keep those profits, but if you lose out, you’ll be taken care of.
If you […]

By Thoreau
The editors of the Economist say the following early on in their editorial about the Paulson Manifesto*:
Spending a sum of money that could buy you a war in Iraq should not come easily;
Indeed! Why, I do believe I said something similar recently…
Of course, they go on to argue that the solution to this […]

Diplomacy is the art of picking up a nice doggie and sitting on a rock.

By Thoreau
The Editors (who are pretty smart for a bunch of experimentalists) have the best comment on McCain in the debate:
Also, John McCain kept talking about how many foreign countries he went to and how many big shots he could name check. Pretty elitist, if you ask me.
But fear not! He’s still just […]

By Thoreau
The blatant welfare-seeking behavior of Wall Street this week makes one thing clear: There are working people, and there are bankers. Bankers have got to go. Every time workers try to have a good time and get ahead in this economy, bankers have to come along and mess it all up. […]

As a symptom of the constriction of elite opinion, the debate was instructive less for the answers than even the questions. “Foreign policy” consists of wars and nothing but wars. It’s about whom you bomb or don’t, and whom you do or don’t convince to help you bomb someone. Does anyone among our rulers think […]

By Thoreau
Interesting profile on an Australian oilman trying to harness ocean waves for energy.  Especially interesting is his proposal to use wave energy for desalination.
Prediction:  If desalination ever becomes cheap, that will do more for world peace than just about any other advance imaginable.  Whatever the ostensible cause of most conflicts, people usually fight over […]

By Thoreau
If Wachovia fails, does that mean that I was a sucker to make those payments on my student loans?
You might say it’s naive to think that I don’t have to pay my bills if one of the parties to the transaction hits dire financial straits, but all the banks are demanding bailouts after the […]

By Thoreau
So, inspired by Schneier’s Giant Squid Friday, I hereby declare Friday to be Mountain Lion Friday at UO.  Combine this with Monkey Tuesday, and we’re already 28% animal-blogging.
Our first installation is the heroic tale of a brave mountain lion who fended off a group of hikers.  As a libertarian, I naturally applaud the mountain […]

By Thoreau
OK, let’s break down what actually happened and who actually got hurt:
What happened? A bunch of loans were made to people who couldn’t afford to pay them back, and these loans were made for houses sold at the top of the bubble. Now the people who took out the loans can’t pay […]