History Is Bunk

This image via Reddit:



Hmm...not very readable. So from here:

He began by asking me what position I was going to be hired in or was being considered for, and I said it was as a professor in the history department. The very next words out of his mouth were -- and I'm not exaggerating; these were seared into my memory -- Elder Packer said, "I have a hard time with historians, because historians idolize the truth." I almost sunk into my chair. I mean, that statement just bowled me over.

Then he went on to say, quoting him as accurately as I can ...: "The truth is not uplifting. The truth destroys. And historians should tell only that part of the truth that is uplifting, and if it's religious history, that's faith-promoting." And he said, "Historians don't like doing that, and that's why I have a hard time with historians."

It's not hard to believe that a Mormon might have a hard time with history, because the founder of the religion was a scam artist and a nut who knew nothing. More plausible than Scientology though.

Data Porn

Go here for a bunch of ways to make information purty.



PROCESSING UPDATE:

Forgot about how easy it is to play with things in Processing. Code on the left, result on the right. I should learn more about it. I can't, however, figure out how I'm supposed to get the result onto Google's weird website templates.

Giving Republicans Advice

I dunno, when things are sucking you don't have to be much more than The Other Guy and try not to alienate people. A true believer like Scott Walker has a program to run against.

Symbolism

Some poor fool:

As we await today's major announcement from the OC, another sneak preview of what'll soon be the Catholic world's second-largest traditional instrument of worship....

Let us pause to snicker.

But HOLY SHIT the Crystal Cathedral is gonna be Catholic now.

God clearly thinks protestants aren't molesty enough.

OPML Update

Here are about two thousand feeds you can import to the RSS reader of your choice. I think I have all the duplicates eliminated, but I did add some reprehensible items via a little browse through Google's feeds and bundles so I may find out What Tom Friedman and Michelle Malkin think is important. The amount of programming content is somewhat balanced out now, but there's still a little too much marketing/business/motivational happy-talk for my taste. I find Google Reader sucks for this much stuff, but then I think Google Reader sucks anyway. There are plenty of alternatives out there that handle an information overload in a better way.

Even geekier portion of this post:

When I gathered all these feeds together there were a lot of duplicate feeds, and figuring those out was a pain in the ass because a lot of people had customized the names and descriptions and so forth. What to do?

It helps to know that an OPML file is just text, and that NetNewsWire will fetch descriptions for you. So here's a line of text representing the feed for Super Colossal (which is great but sadly not recently updated):

<outline text="Super Colossal" description="" title="Super Colossal" type="rss" version="RSS" htmlUrl="http://supercolossal.ch" xmlUrl="http://supercolossal.ch/feed/"/>

Pretty readable: there's text, an empty description, a title, and then some things that look less irrelevant. So, if we have a second line in the file that says

<outline text="Also Super Colossal" description="It's got stuff about building things" title="Also Super Colossal" type="rss" version="RSS" htmlUrl="http://supercolossal.ch" xmlUrl="http://supercolossal.ch/feed/"/>

it's going to appear out of order on the list and eliminating a duplicate is tough (time-consuming really). TextWrangler to the rescue, one of the ultimate Mac freebies for geeks. TextWrangler does grep, a very powerful and dangerous kind of search if you don't know what you're doing. I frequently don't know what I'm doing, but I just don't care, so on we went. Since we know NetNewsWire will fetch text and title and description, all we have to do is wipe those for the 2800 feeds in the file. Easy! So here's a search that more or less means look for anything that says 'title="anything"' and replace it with an emptied version:



And there's the result:



So you just do that a couple more times for the other fields - I guess you could do text=".*?" description=".*?" title=".*?" and get it all done at once but I wasn't smart enough to think of it at the time and grep and ambition don't match well with n00bs - and then the fields are wiped. TextWrangler can then put selected lines in order and then process them in various ways, like removing duplicate lines:



And there we go, a whole bunch of feeds eliminated. DKW would do it in Excel, but I swear TextWrangler is faster. Down to around 2100. Empty out NetNewsWire, reimport the cleaned up OPML and it'll acquire the right text and description and title on its own. And if the feeds vary slightly - one's RSS and one's Atom - it's pretty likely that when NetNewsWire gathers information about the feed it's gonna show up next to its not-quite-duplicated partner anyway, and you can get rid of that pretty easily.

Posting a Video

Sing along with me!

Bow Before Our Syllables

Here is a Microsoft computer geek jerking it:

You do want to remind your early adopters that they're dealing with things that are not completely baked. There are ways to do that, and there are other ways.

Here's us:

Disclaimer

This is a preliminary document and may be changed substantially prior to final commercial release of the software described herein.

Here's them:

Not for the faint of heart
Canary is designed for developers and early adopters, and can sometimes break down completely.

Nightly updates
Canary changes almost every day.

So...is this post manifesting some level of shame? I'll set aside my general whining about Google and take the last one thanks.

Meet the New Boss

He ate the old boss:

And what a business it is. The firm was forced to pull back the curtain on its famously secretive doings to go public, and what it revealed shocked even seasoned commodities traders. Glencore, which Reuters once called "the biggest company you never heard of," turned out to be far more globally dominant than analysts had realized. According to its 1,637-page IPO prospectus, the company controlled more than half the international tradable market in zinc and copper and about a third of the world's seaborne coal; was one of the world's largest grain exporters, with about 9 percent of the global market; and handled 3 percent of daily global oil consumption for customers ranging from state-owned energy companies in Brazil and India to American multinationals like ExxonMobil and Chevron. All of which, the prospectus said, helped the firm post revenues of $186 billion in 2011 and employ some 55,000 people in at least 40 countries, generating an average return on equity of 38 percent, about three times higher than that of the gold-standard investment bank Goldman Sachs in 2010. Since then, the company has only gotten vaster in scale. It recently announced a $90 billion takeover of Xstrata, a global mining giant in which it already holds a 34 percent stake; if the deal goes through, Glencore will rule over an "empire stretching from the Sahara to South Africa," as the Africa Confidential newsletter put it. As it is, Glencore already trades, manufactures, refines, ships, or stores at least 90 commodities in some three dozen countries. "Glencore is at the center of the raw material world," said Peter Brandt, a longtime commodities trader. "Within this world there are giants, and Glencore is becoming a giant among giants."

Eventually there will be one thing to rule us all.

Low-Quality Reportage

Important!



The problem with this story is that they could have done a little basic journalism and chose not to: do these animals really have a shot at predicting the winners of Euro Cup games? Pick up the goddamned phone and consult the psychic chicken.

TIMELY COMMENTING UPDATE:

Over here:




Piglet is a regular contributor.

The Utility of Hippies

Vancouver is one of those lucky places in which the people who initially mapped out the city - elites for Christ's sake - did a bunch of good stuff by setting some land aside for, um, the future of civilization or something. Stanley Park is a great example. Except for kicking out those natives who already lived there of course. WHOOPS.

Another example of native-kicking-out-and-setting-land-aside is this, the UBC Endowment Lands. Both properties are now the most valuable land there could possibly be in the city, and yet nobody's sold it all to developers from Hong Kong.

Look:



The end of the little penis sticking up is Stanley Park, a short walk from anything downtown, and the end of the big penis sticking out to the left including that awful greenish infection it has is pretty much all university land.

On the university's land there is a research farm set up by people who sing songs and write poems and also have advanced degrees. The Lovely Daughter is lucky enough to have one of these hippies as her teacher, so her class heads out to do some farming every second Thursday. FOR NO PAY.

[COMMENCE THUNDERBLOGGING]











Above I was being a little idealistic about our fabulously wise use of land. Here go some trees just outside the farm's parking lot:



But even that stuff has the hippie tinge.

ALSO:

The Stiff Upper Lip

David Pryce-Jones on some fucking jubilee thing:

The weather was miserable, with much cold rain. Nevertheless a million people at the lowest estimate lined the river’s embankments, and they cheered and waved Union Jack flags all day long. What explains the enthusiasm running so wild? Well, the boats were an unforgettable spectacle, a Canaletto painting come to life for an occasion that will never be repeated, with allusions to Handel’s “Water Music” and Dunkirk 1940. It was also possible to sense in the camaraderie of the crowd something more profound. The standing of the country is not what it was; the Empire is no more; nobody can be sure whether there are now any moral absolutes governing behavior; and tomorrow may see a variety of political and economic crashes. None of this is the Queen’s fault. She’s setting the example of how to carry on regardless.

You'd all stop your whining if you'd just be billionaires.

Don't Learn This Stuff and America Will Be Stronger

Mr. Atrios often points out that trains don't seem to have TSA issues, but across borders they do.

MONTREAL (CUP) — On May 1, 2010, Pascal Abidor was riding an Amtrak train from Montreal to New York. His parents live in Brooklyn, and he was on his way to visit them. The school year at McGill had just ended, and he felt relieved and calm as the train rolled south towards America.

At about 11 a.m., the train arrived at the U.S. border and made a routine stop. A team of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers boarded the train and advanced through each car, questioning passengers. Pascal had made this trip countless times before, so when a customs officer approached him, he didn’t give it a second thought.

But Pascal had never met Officer Tulip.

After looking over Pascal’s U.S. passport and customs declaration, Officer Tulip asked two simple questions: Where do you live, and why?

Pascal answered that he lived in Canada. He lived in Canada because that’s where he was pursuing a PhD in Islamic Studies.

The rest is the standard story, but at least he didn't end up tortured in prison.

The Happy Warrior Is Called Home

Via this.

SCAM UPDATE!

Via Smut someone with a good memory remembers where the original of this image came from.

It is a sad sad day when cynical individuals exploit the purity of the Tea Party movement for personal gain.

War

I wonder what the response would be if Iran unleashed this on America:

WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

Stuxnet was an impressive weapon and quite destructive:

The first attacks were small, and when the centrifuges began spinning out of control in 2008, the Iranians were mystified about the cause, according to intercepts that the United States later picked up. “The thinking was that the Iranians would blame bad parts, or bad engineering, or just incompetence,” one of the architects of the early attack said.

The Iranians were confused partly because no two attacks were exactly alike. Moreover, the code would lurk inside the plant for weeks, recording normal operations; when it attacked, it sent signals to the Natanz control room indicating that everything downstairs was operating normally. “This may have been the most brilliant part of the code,” one American official said.

Later, word circulated through the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog, that the Iranians had grown so distrustful of their own instruments that they had assigned people to sit in the plant and radio back what they saw.

“The intent was that the failures should make them feel they were stupid, which is what happened,” the participant in the attacks said. When a few centrifuges failed, the Iranians would close down whole “stands” that linked 164 machines, looking for signs of sabotage in all of them. “They overreacted,” one official said. “We soon discovered they fired people.”

The Economy Would Improve If You Could Beat Your Wife

David French:

My favorite chapter of Jonah’s book was his multi-page exploration of the utter meaninglessness of the term “social justice.” Yet the term’s almost infinite malleability doesn’t stop progressives from browbeating Evangelical Christians in particular with the idea that pro-life conservatism is inconsistent with Christ’s alleged devotion to this extra-biblical socialist construct.

Well, after three-plus years of high unemployment, stagnant wages, crippling debt, and — oh yes — absolute commitment to abortion on demand (including sex-selective abortions), I must ask: Is this what social justice looks like? One of the most striking aspects of the social-justice movement is its unyielding devotion to economic, cultural, and moral principles that are least likely to bring about the outcomes they so fervently desire. Give a social-justice advocate the policies they want, and the social injustice only deepens.

The Golden Age happened centuries ago.

News On Shuffle

I'm visiting fewer websites directly for news and using an RSS newsreader to skim headlines. Unfortunately I had a hard drive die and I hadn't exported an OPML file from the program I'm using, so getting all my feeds back as they were will likely never happen. I suppose that I wouldn't have had a problem if I used Google Reader, but why encourage those fucks?

So, for the Mac folks out there, what I use is NetNewsWire, which at this point is adware: a corner on the bottom left is an ad until you cough up dough. Not too bad. It has a built-in browser but I have it spit the linkage into Firefox, which I have set to open new tabs when another application knocks on its door: do a little headline skimming and soon you have 50 tabs loaded up in the background and you close tabs as you're done with the items. If you're on some kinda portable thingie that's going to be out of range of wireless for a while that's pretty useful.

So about the feeds: I did have a very old OPML file around so I added that, and then I found a bunch of news and photography and design and geek stuff. Most of the nifty OPML files you can find around are pretty old though, as it seems to have been a Hot Thing for a little while and then people forgot they could share. This is one of the easiest-to-find files out there, but it's got a lot of computer stuff and business stuff and a bunch of the feeds are dead (NetNewsWire is pretty good at letting you know which feeds are toast).

The real strength of NetNewsWire is this: it can line up all the headlines from every feed in alphabetical order.



Here you can see that only news organizations start items with quotes.

Mashing all the headlines together means that it isn't absurd to have a bazillion feeds, because you're skimming every feed at once and the luck of the draw pushes items to the top of the list. As with iTunes and shuffle it suits the way I like to do things in any case, and it pushes things in front of my eyes that I otherwise wouldn't choose to navigate to out of the blue.

So: this may be unwise to download and use unless you're some future version of me with the same kind of reading style, as adding thousands of feeds to the average newsreader might not work out so well and I haven't yet deleted all the .NET developers and venture capitalist assholes, but all of these feeds have been updated in the last three months. There's a bunch of news, a far larger amount of geeks (geeks are good because they can't maintain a focus and throw out good links now and again), a bunch of pretty graphics stuff for computers, some photography, some chemistry for some reason, and god knows what else. Instapundit I think, HA HA. Nearly nobody from my blogroll: I like to actually visit those sites and not lose them to the chaos of thousands of other items.

If I have any sense I'll post an updated version once I've done some more culling. If you can export an OPML file share it: I will incorporate it into this mess and maybe post a consolidated file one day.

ALSO:

But for the single item in the feed for A Welsh View I would never have seen this:



Boy am I grateful.

Another Kooky Libertarian Thread at Crooked Timber

Given that the title is "Fuck me or you’re fired!" it could have been far worse, but comments are still open.

News

From here.



Even worse:

“Rudy was not a face-eating zombie monster,” said his high school friend Victoria Forte. “The Rudy we know was a nice gentleman with a warm smile, and funny.”

Sequencing

The little black bits from the Conrad Black post were actually supposed to make a travelling line: the GIFs are really three layers, two transparent and one black layer in the middle, and I change the timing of the preceding and following layers while keeping the total timing the same. It seems most web browsers just won't load the fucking things in order though, and maybe can't keep them in sync anyway. You may put them in proper sequence if you wish.

The Hideous Rebekah Brooks

Via Crooked Timber a story about Rebekah Brooks:

He said: "It was hardly appropriate... At that time, [September 12, 2001] [when] we were working on the assumption that up to 50,000 people had been killed, I was required to parade myself around morning conference dressed as Harry Potter.

"What person with any journalistic integrity can be humiliated like that or told to perform like that?"

Begley then told assistant news editor Greg Miskiw: "I don't want to criticise [Rebekah] in a phone call, but I can't see how the editor of the - as we're always reminded - best paper in the country could expect a reporter to do that... That was just too much."

When Miskiw asked Begley to return to work, Begley refused, stating: "I haven't toed the line for the editor's pet project. I didn't prance around while the World Trade Center was being bombed for her personal amusement. I can't just stroll in."

Miskiw responded: "Why not? Charles, that is what we do. We go out and destroy other people's lives."

The problem with suicide is that it requires you to feel bad about yourself. How can we encourage the people without any feelings at all to kill themselves?

The Business

Let's guess!

It was close, but no cigar for former media baron and convicted felon Conrad Black at this year’s XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX Book Award ceremony in Toronto.

This year's what? Oh right, that's the guessing part.

Black, one of three nominees, was a candidate for the prize for penning A Matter of Principal, an autobiographical yarn about his conviction and 42-month jail sentence in the United States for fraud and obstruction of justice. The award, sponsored by XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, was given out Monday at the Ritz-Carlton hotel.

Well done, Toronto Sun! I believe A Matter of Principal is Seymour Skinner's autobiography.

The 67-year-old Black, who returned to Canada on May 4 after serving time in a Florida prison, told the Toronto Sun he was “astounded” he had been nominated, and never expected to win.

“I’m not disappointed,” said Black, who lost to veteran XXXXXXXX and his book, XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX: XXXXX XXXXXX XX XXX XXXX XXX XXXX, XXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXX.

Whoa, that is a long title for a book competing with Mr. Black's no-doubt succinct boo-hoo for getting caught on video carting off evidence.

“I was astounded that I was nominated ... I didn’t expect to win. I don’t win an awful lot of CanLit awards, you know,” said Black.

Are you Canadian or something?

Also nominated was XXXXX XXXXXX for his book, XXX XXXX: XXX XX XXXXXXX XXX XXXXXX XX XXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX.

Last year’s winner was XXXX XXXXXX for his book, XXXXXXX XXX: XXX XXXX XXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXXX.

All right then, three books with colons in the title and at least one written by an asshole can only mean Conrad Black was nominated for the National Business Book Award. I may have to borrow the Riddled Time Machine and steal the American Psycho manuscript for nomination at next year's ceremony.

ALSO:

Love! You don't love anybody! Me or anybody else! You want to be loved - that's all you want!

Black said he intends to apply for full citizenship in two years when "it is clear that I don't have cloven feet and wear horns."

He said he would reconsider applying to regain his citizenship if there were significant public backlash against his bid.

"I am not going to do anything that is going to lead to gratuitously antagonistic people making apparently plausible claims that I am morally unsuited to be a citizen of this country," Black said.

NDP leader Thomas Mulcair:

“Mr. Speaker, the member for Trinity-Spadina and I last year asked why Gary Freeman, who lived in this country peaceably for 40 years and had several children, was not being allowed back in the country. The answer was an event that happened in Chicago in the sixties and he had served a short jail time. They said that because he was not a Canadian he was not allowed back in,” the leader of the opposition recounted.

“We just learned that the British criminal Conrad Black will be allowed in despite serving a second term in a federal American penitentiary,” he reported. “Why the double standard?”

The New Democrats seated around him stood to applaud.

If that keeps Conrad Black out of the country Mulcair will win votes.

How to Improve Pornography