Old Ex Cathedra

Screenhead, whose logo isn’t animated but can still give you a grand mal seizure, reports on a contest to remix The Shining, into a chick flick. The winning trailer: The Shining, Redux.

If you’ve seen Elvis Mitchell’s interview show on IFC, Independent Focus, you’ve probably seen the interview where Paul Thomas Anderson says “Philip Seymour Hoffman is ham and cheese.” Sorry, Paul, no one tops Jack Nicholson, who’s still picking splinters of scenery from The Shining out of his teeth.

The creepy thing is, Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall could have fit right into a film for vagino-Americans.

For the second time in several weeks, I’ve caught a joke in the process of evolving.

from rec.humor.funny

Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: “Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed.”

“OH NO!” the President exclaims. “That’s terrible!”

His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits, head in hands.

Finally, the President looks up and asks, “How many is a brazillion?”

I found this one yesterday.

I read it in the guise of a “Blonde” joke only the weekend before ..

who was it said “I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers…”?

Dutch apology for deporting Jews

Dutch Railways (NS) has apologised for the first time for its role in the deportations of 100,000 Jews to Nazi death camps during World War II. …
By Geraldine Coughlan
BBC News, The Hague

We get to balance this, I guess, with the story of Anne Frank.

Tolerance.

yeah.

In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so. — Gregory Paul, reported in Times Online

Via Gullibility Isn’t in the Dictionary.

I know what post hoc ergo propter hoc means, and I’m not dumb enough to suggest that the American propensity for belief in the supernatural causes all those problems. In fact, I suspect it’s only one of many factors. It may even be an effect of something else in the national character. And of course there’s money involved.

From the article:

Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.

So the claim isn’t mine. It’s the believers who are making that claim. And it’s false. I think we’d better tell some people, don’t you?

I’ve posted before about friend and fellow Stan Kenton fan, Terry Vosbein. His latest work, Paris Quintet, is yet another delight. At that link he talks about the inspiration for the piece and how he stayed in a little place right off the Seine while he was writing it. A serious hardship when you compare it to how he usually spends his summers, at the library of the University of North Texas — let’s see: Denton, Texas or Paris, Denton, Texas or Paris (don’t rush me) — but clearly one that paid off in the music.

First impressions: the music just flows from instrument to instrument. And it seems like each of the instruments is playing naturally in its own characteristic style. I thought some of his earliest works seemed to be saying, “Listen to this, dammit!” That’s far behind him now. His music soars and sings.

The performance is masterful, and this may be one piece from Terry’s catalog you might have second thoughts about giving to students, because the slightest touch of unsureness or heaviness would kill it, I’d think. It’s hold-onto-your-hats, let’s-play-this-sucker, musicians only, please. It was recorded at a new music festival in Birmingham, Alabama last July, and after I’d posted part of this review to the Kenton list, Terry told me about the players: a group called Luna Nova:

Flute – James McMurtery (lives in NY and freelances), Clarinet – Ted Gurch (Atlanta Symphony), Violin- Helen Kim (Julliard grad, wife of Ted Gurch), Cello – Craig Hultgren (Birmingham Southern College), and Piano – Adam Bowles (Birmingham Southern College).

And he commented on their performance:

This was their third performance of the composition and they finally hit it. When they began the third movement at a much quicker tempo than the previous performance a few months prior, I was nervous. But they soon showed me I had nothing to worry about.

It’s a pure joy: a meringue of cool, clear light filled with tart raspberries and whipped cream. Go listen, follow along in the score if you like, and let me know what you think.

I’ve been noticing quite a few comment spams from casinos, so I updated some of our spam blockers. I took off Kitten’s Spam Words because Kitten isn’t updating it any more, I upgraded Spam Karma to Spam Karma 2, and I installed Bad Behavior.

If you find any problems (e.g., posting a comment), please send me an email (it’s in the upper right-hand corner, suitably munged, just underneath the title).

Pen Island. Slogan: “The best pens on the internet!”

What do you suppose its URL might be?

Agent 86 has joined 99 and the Chief in that eternal Cone of Silence.

No wonder the world is slowly falling into KAOS.

Next thing you know, THRUSH will take over. Open channel D… Mr. Waverly? Mr. Waverly?

One day my husband and I were talking about women’s clothing. I asked him what he likes and does not like about the way conservative women dress. His answer shocked me.

He said that women dressed in denim skirts and jumpers all the time reminded him of Fidel Castro….

He went on to explain. Castro and his minions wore army fatigues all the time; it was their uniform. They did not look happy, they did not look pleasant; they looked angry and militant. He thought it was the same with many “jumper moms.” — Elissa Kroeger, Ladies Against Feminism

Oh yeah.

Say, do you suppose Amanda Marcotte has something to say about that?

[I'd tell him] “Jesus H. Christ, what the fuck do you want? I dress like an idiot, I dutifully endure missionary position sex once a week with you, I cook fucking casseroles, and I write for a website that lectures feminist women for not being subservient enough! And still you call me militant?! That’s it, I’m taking my shrill, hysterical ass and starting a lesbian commune.”

It gets even funnier than that. Go read it.

And while you’re over there, can you ask Amanda if I can have her babies?

I could have written this. So could you. But PZ Myers actually did it: the perfect metaphor to explain to lay audiences why theory matters.

The “puzzle” metaphor has unclogged a little of my own thinking. I recall from the jigsaw puzzles I’ve solved, you’re always making and testing hypotheses: is that piece part of the sky or the lake?

Sometimes you’re able to construct one of those critical experiments every scientist dreams of: if theory X is true, then the outcome will be this; if theory Y is true, it’ll be like that. Most of the time you can’t come up with one of those monster theory-busting experiments. Instead, you’re able to put two or three pieces together. And maybe you can put together a larger chunk or combine smaller chunks. You still don’t know where it fits in the big picture, but if you add up enough of those chunks, eventually only one theory can possibly fit.

Well done, PZ Myers! Let’s see if we can’t get this meme out on the street.

Complain bitterly when one of your people isn’t on the agenda, but never allow an opponent within a hundred miles of your events.

5th sentence from an article on how to be a good little conservative, my 23rd post, back when this was the engine that powered Ex Cathedra.

Via The Green Knight:

Instructions for fellow bloggers:

1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

Pass it on.

Clevr.

Last night I saw a show on the History Channel about the Bible Code. I need to stop taking such long naps. A whole pseudoscience seems to have sprung up while I was snoozing.

Let’s be clear about what the bible coders aren’t doing. They aren’t using gematria and other well known and well respected techniques either for straight exegesis (for example, some names in the Bible itself were “coded” using a substitution cipher called atbash) or as a way of further illuminating the meaning of passages. This practice is strongest in Jewish and Christian mystical traditions, but is by no means limited to them. Even numerology pops up from time to time in very orthodox contexts.

Bible coders aren’t doing any of that. Their contention is that someone (they sometimes call him the Encoder) used transposition ciphers — patterns that look like “word search” puzzles — to conceal mostly secular predictions in the sacred text.

Let me tell you about Ted Annemann. Ted would travel around the country, and in each town he stopped in he’d visit with the editor of the local newspaper, he’d write down a prediction, seal an envelope, and have the editor lock it in his safe. A few days later he’d return, the editor would open the envelope, and he’d find that Ted had predicted that day’s headline.

The reason Ted was traveling around the country was that he was a stage magician, and that trick — of course it was a trick — was such good free publicity that his shows were standing room only.

A while later, Annemann published a book for the magical fraternity that showed how several very similar tricks could be performed. Other magic books, like the famous Tarbell series, give detailed explanations of prediction tricks. Or just search a magical supply house for “predict” and you’ll see how many ways there are to give people the impression you can predict the future.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of schoolchildren know how to do it. And yet bible coders can’t even match that.

Never mind finding “two towers” and “bin laden” and “clinton” and “impeachment” after the fact. Write down a prediction. Give it to someone tustworthy. After a year or two, open it up and see how you did. Because if you can’t do what the kid down the street can do, what good is your so-called science?

There’s plenty of other criticisms I could go into. For instance, do the bible coders seriously mean the Torah isn’t the word of God, but mere window dressing whose purpose is to conceal a message about Bill Clinton’s sex life? Or the pretty much fatal problem that their entire science is predicated on the existence of a document (the original Torah) that patently doesn’t exist. Or the fact that transposition ciphers are seldom used today because adding or dropping a single character destroys the message — and that’s the least of what happened to the Torah in its journey that ended with the text we have today. These prophets and seers (some say the Encoder is God himself) couldn’t manage to predict that they’d chosen a kind of cipher that was among the least likely to preserve their message?

And don’t forget the teensy little problem about how often the bible coders brazenly fudge the text to make the answers come out right.

It’s always fun to use the cranks’ own techniques against them. Perhaps the most famous example is when the Friedmanns “proved” that not only had Francis Bacon left hidden messages in the Shakespeare plays that show he was the real author, so had Mickey Spillane! That episode is described in David Kahn’s marvelous book, The Codebreakers. Recently Australian television personality John Safran did the same thing: he used the bible coders’ methods to show that not only did the messages encoded in the bible “predict” the 9/11 attacks, so did messages encoded in Moby Dick and the immortal lyrics of Vanilla Ice.

But none of that matters, because unless the bible coders can make real predictions, then at best what they’re telling us is that the God of the Bible is mischievously and maliciously teasing us with clues we can’t figure out until it’s too late and the catastrophes have already happened.

The show on the History Channel didn’t even pretend to give fair coverage or explain the worst of the errors. It must have knocked at least two IQ points off of anybody that watched it. But it did have one purely delightful moment: we got to see a bible coder (Harold Gans) say that the other guys’ (in this case the Nostradamus fans’) pseudoscience was a crock, while his own crank pseudoscience was the real deal.

But wait, there’s more. Just in case his pseudoscience doesn’t deliver the goods, Gans is ready: if it fails, it obviously means the Encoder doesn’t want us to know in advance about the thing it failed to predict.

I need a racket like that.

Attaturk’s comment on this picture is priceless.

To balance the awfulness of the last article, here’s something downright joyful: Opera is free. That beautiful, fast, standards-based web browser no longer requires a license fee to turn off the ads. I’ve been an Opera fan off and on for a long time, and I’ve been paying the license since version 3 something. Actually, I think the way it worked out is that the major version bumps were free half the time and cheap the rest of the time. So it didn’t amount to a huge or even noticeable amount of money: no gripes at all about my having had to pay for what the rest of you bums are getting for free.

Either Opera has finally got their business to a point where cell phone and PDA makers are paying enough for customized products that they can keep the company going with that, or they’ve just told the band on deck to play “Free Bird” as they slip beneath the waves. I hope it’s the former. There’s some nice folks there I got to know in my days as an active beta tester.

Go getcha some.

FBI supervisors meeting with new interim U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta in Miami recently learned what kind of investigations and prosecutions the current Republican administration wants to make their number one priority. Not terrorism, not organized crime, not immigration, not public corruption. Obscenity. Obscenity is number one.

Wait. It gets worse. According to the article by Julie Kay at law.com, we aren’t talking about child pornography, we’re talking about “pornographic material featuring consenting adults.”

His own prosecutors have warned Acosta that prioritizing adult porn would reduce resources for prosecuting other crimes, including porn involving children. According to high-level sources who did not want to be identified, Acosta has assigned prosecutors porn cases over their objections.

Wait a minute. Did she imply that FBI agents would be taken off cases where they’re protecting children so they can prosecute adult pornography? No implication about it:

Sources say Acosta was told by the FBI officials during last month’s meeting that obscenity prosecution would have to be handled by the crimes against children unit. But that unit is already overworked and would have to take agents off cases of child endangerment to work on adult porn cases. Acosta replied that this was Attorney General Gonzales’ mandate.

FBI agents are saying this porn squad is a joke, calling it “Things I Don’t Want On My Resume, Volume Four” and “I already gave at home.” But this is no joke. These aren’t new agents. These agents are being taken off other cases.

Just in case it wasn’t already crystal clear, if you voted for the Republicans in this administration you voted for people who believe it’s more important to prosecute people for making and selling pictures of consenting adults doing something lewd and lascivious than it is to investigate and prosecute terrorism, organized crime, corporate corruption, political corruption, illegal immigration, or crimes against children.

You want obscenity? That’s obscenity.

Ex Cathedra has a nice little following of regular and occasional readers. We’re no Boing Boing, and that suits me right down to the ground. Things have stayed this way, all snug and cosy until a few weeks ago when a tiny breeze blew across our tranquility. I got a package of loot: three sudoku books by New York Times crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz. One of the Volume One (mostly easy) and two of the Volume Two (easy to hard).

Since I only mentioned sudoku in passing, and it’s Tim who wrote an actual article on sudoku (mostly), it’s a dirty trick for me to keep those books. I think one of them (the duplicate, of course) ought to be winging its way toward him shortly. If he doesn’t mind erasures, I’ll send the first volume as well.

What was I going to do with them? Was there some mistake? Well, if so, tough luck, publisher, you aren’t getting them back. But I was obviously expected to review them. OK. Let’s think about that.

Back when I reviewed a few books for the local newspaper, the deal was that you could keep the book in return for the review. So I’m not a complete stranger to loot. In fact, I was brazen enough to write the publisher of Art Siegelman’s phenomenal Maus when I’d been given volume 2, and offered to buy volume 1, but they sent it to me at no charge. I hope I did it justice — while being utterly certain that there is no way to do those books justice.

At my 3D site, the VRMLworks, I accidentally fell into a policy of not reviewing products that I hadn’t gotten the way pretty much anybody could have gotten them. For example, if a book or a program was a giveaway at a conference or if I was given a free copy of a program in return for being a very active beta tester, that was OK.

The idea was that I wanted to be the anti-Jerry Pournelle. You remember, his “user’s” column in Byte was filled with tales of company presidents coming over to his house to fix bugs and other perks that the average user was never going to get in a million years. I was a user, and I didn’t want to take advantage of such celebrity as I had — and yeah, in a tiny little pond, I was a tiny little celebrity for a short while. Talk about taking myself way too seriously!

And it probably helped that the books I’d received from their publishers for free, I’d also previously bought. So I had a paid-for copy of The Annotated VRML 2.0 Reference Manual at home and a freebie copy at work, and I could say that I thought it was the cat’s pajamas with a smile on my face. And I could say I thought half of Mark Pesce’s first book was indispensible and the other half was unfortunately padded with stuff that was going to be of nothing more than historical interest in a very short time — with an equally big smile. I’d paid for those books like everybody else.

Well, my 15 minutes is long past and now that I’m not being innundated by products to review, I realize that publishers get something of value for having somebody with a little bit of momentary fame review one of their products, even if it’s a bad review. God only knows what publishers get from having it reviewed in Ex Cathedra, but from now on, if a publisher is fool enough to send me a book, I’ll review it. Unless it falls so utterly outside my expertise or interests that I wouldn’t have anything to say about it. Let’s be sensible here. And perhaps I’ll start passing the overflow on to my co-bloggers. So publishers, send me your loot!

My co-bloggers don’t get these Sudoku books, though. I’m keeping them.

I have to confess my previous experience with Sudoku was visiting the Daily Sudoku site, printing off a copy of one of the puzzles, filling in a couple of numbers, and saying “Yeah, I could do that. That looks like fun,” and handing it to my wife who, after some grumbling, solved it. So I had a true beginner’s mind. And I read the instructions and followed along solving the example puzzle easily.

That sent me into the book and into puzzle number 1 with confidence, and sure enough, I whipped right through it. OK, sez I. Let’s turn to puzzle 90, the last of the “easy” puzzles. Here it is:

Hokay! Evidently there’s some stuff between 1 and 90. And yes, it is an easy puzzle, in the sense that no guesswork is required. And there are puzzles that have even fewer starting numbers filled in. But this one sure gives a good workout to the two rules I condensed the puzzle’s rule set into: you can’t have more than one, and you gotta have one.

What else to say? It’s pretty clear the puzzles increase in difficulty (OK, I’m only certain 90’s a good deal harder than 1, but I don’t expect fraud here), so if you want to get good at Sudoku, running through these puzzles looks like a good way to do it. And the easy easy one I did was just like popcorn, so I want to stop typing this review and get back to do some puzzles. In fact, the hard one was kind of salty and buttery too.

And the puzzles are printed plenty big enough, good for those of us who type so much our handwriting has regressed back to 3rd grade. My only complaint is that the pulp paper they’re printed on makes it hard to completely obliterate what’s there with my regular white retractable eraser (see, Tim, I’m thinking of you). Not that it’s cheezy: it’s perfectly clean, high quality pulp, nicely opaque, just like a crossword puzzle book.

Value for money? US$6.95 for 100 graded difficulty puzzles: that’s a bargain. You’d have to be a bigger tightwad than I am to copy the pages to share it with other folks in your family. And while the instructions seem kind of terse, it’s all there, and you learn by doing.

So a thumb up here for each of these books. Better take your time doing them. There’s only 5,472,730,538 essentially different Sudoku puzzles, so once you’ve worked your way through volume fifty million and something, that’s it.

A Rasmussen poll shows that the President’s speech, posed in front of a scenic and fairly well preserved part of New Orleans, not only failed to boost Americans’ assessment of how well he handled the Hurricane Katrina disaster, it drove this Republican President’s performance ratings down even farther, from 39% who thought he’d done a good or excellent job to only 35%. Over half the people polled gave him fair or poor ratings, with 41% (up from 37%) giving him the lowest “poor” rating.

I would dearly love to find out how many people saw the speech. Nobody I know saw it. They mostly felt the way I did: this was his third trip, and if he hadn’t managed to find the killer photo op, he probably wasn’t going to find it this time. Besides, the guy’s irrelevant.

But I suspect the Republican loyalists dutifully tuned in, because on the day after the speech, the conservatives on the USENET newsgroups where I regularly spread love and flowers went dead quiet. So I suspected then that it didn’t give his supporters quite the boost they’d hoped for. And sure enough, we now find out that the percentage of Republicans rating his performance on Katrina good or excellent plummeted from 71 to 63.

Are conservatives actually starting to see what the rest of us have been seeing in this Presidency? Have they read Frank Rich’s brilliant editorial on the unmasking of these Wizards of Oz? Is this the long awaited buyer remorse from the techies and soccer moms who now realize what kind of car they ended up with (“You may hate it now, but just wait”).

Maybe. When a CNN/USA Today poll shows the Americans’ approval of the President (46%) is way behind our approval of the media (77%), the ground is certainly trembling. It’s tempting to conclude this is the real thing. But since signs of buyer remorse in lefty blogs have proved to be as much a will-o-the-wisp as evidence of Iraqi WMDs in conservative blogs, I’m not talking yet. I’ll believe it when Hannity turns on his “wise commentator” expression and says the President’s had it, and it’s time to make room for fresh faces.

I’m actually looking forward to that. When they look around and discover that between the Donner Party mentality that’s used up Republican after Republican chasing harebrained White House schemes, and the death penalty they inflict for even momentary lapses in loyalty, their fresh face cupboard is empty, I’m gonna have a huge grin.

Can you say “one-way flow of loyalty”, boys and girls?

With You, Fair Maid

I knew you could, and that brings up a very interesting point — you’ll be reading it here first. But before we get to that, if you haven’t read Frank Rich’s piece, go read it. Writing like this is the worst nightmare of the corporations that own, and thought they controlled, the media.

Everybody back? Good.

Karl Rove is definitely the most interesting person in Washington these days. Yes, they’re going to play the “you can’t indict the man who’s running the disaster cleanup” card, and there’s no doubt Rove is brilliant at making appearance triumph over reality — remember the photo op in front of the forest fires? The President had cut the funds that could have prevented those very fires, and nobody called him on it!

And then there was the Hate Amendment. Everyone said, that’s Rove’s fatal error. We couldn’t have been more wrong. We were playing chess. Rove was playing 3D meta-chess. The Hate Amendment brought out enough homophobes and hicks to give a plausible cover story for the voting machine tampering that probably got him the election. Rove knew what the rest of us never even suspected: all he had to do was make it appear that the President won. Rove plays a deep game. So I’m not going to be the one to say that there’s no way Rove can pull this off.

But being married to the proprietor of one of the Net’s best regarded Tudor history sites has its perks. I remember that when Henry VIII had decided one of his counselors was a liability, he promoted him. And it wan’t long until that newly elevated nobleman was a guest in the Tower and the headsman was asking his preference in axes.

So just where is Karl Rove in this President’s affections?

When Karl Rove moves from a position where he’s got the President’s ear a dozen times a day to a job that has to actually accomplish something, even if it’s only to construct a Potemkin flood relief, the sun may be setting on him faster than anybody imagines.

This is too good not to pass along … a link to it was posted to the mailing list for a group I belong to.

the Laws of Japanese Animation

It’s that day again, the holiest day o’ the yearrrrrrrrr, ye scurvy bilge rats. To help ye celebrate good and proper like, here be a keyboard.

And (tip o’ the three cornered hat to Boing Boing), play this here MP3 of the Pirate Training Day sketch if ye knows what’s good for yer.