Quotulatiousness

October 7, 2010

Feschuk and Reid don’t think adding Moss will help the Vikings

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:22

The Two Scotts are rather sniffy about how much, if any, improvement the Vikings will see by adding Randy Moss:

Feschuk: So Randy Moss is back with the Vikings — because nothing inspires a veteran to new heights than returning to the scene of his greatest suckouts, hissy fits and feigned moonings that make Joe Buck cry. Clearly, this is an attempt to appease Brett Favre, which is a waste of time because everyone knows you can’t please old people.

     Coach Childress: Hey, Brett, look! I brought you a shiny new deep threat!

     Brett: Bah. Nobody visits me and ham doesn’t taste like it used to.

Pick: New York.

Reid: The Moss deal got me to thinking: Mabye we could get traded back to the PMO. Sure, Harper would be a bit different to work for than Martin — there would be fewer free-wheeling debates, more cats and way more waterboarding. But wouldn’t it be nice to tear it up big in the old town again? I guess that’s the nostalgic glow that’s roped Randy Moss back to Prince territory. Here’s a fun party game: Add Randy Moss’ age to the number of seasons Brett Favre has played, then divide by the total touchdown passes that Bernard Berrian has caught this year. If it comes out zero, congratulations. You’re not only correct, you’re Brad Childress — watching your season circle the toilet bowl. I’m not saying this looks desperate but the Vikings may have to change their name to Danny Bonaduce. Pick: New York.

Breaking: Historians confess they invented “ancient Greeks”

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:41

As many had suspected for years, the entire history of ancient Greece was fabricated by historians:

A group of leading historians held a press conference Monday at the National Geographic Society to announce they had “entirely fabricated” ancient Greece, a culture long thought to be the intellectual basis of Western civilization.

The group acknowledged that the idea of a sophisticated, flourishing society existing in Greece more than two millennia ago was a complete fiction created by a team of some two dozen historians, anthropologists, and classicists who worked nonstop between 1971 and 1974 to forge “Greek” documents and artifacts.

“Honestly, we never meant for things to go this far,” said Professor Gene Haddlebury, who has offered to resign his position as chair of Hellenic Studies at Georgetown University. “We were young and trying to advance our careers, so we just started making things up: Homer, Aristotle, Socrates, Hippocrates, the lever and fulcrum, rhetoric, ethics, all the different kinds of columns — everything.”

[. . .]

According to Haddlebury, the idea of inventing a wholly fraudulent ancient culture came about when he and other scholars realized they had no idea what had actually happened in Europe during the 800-year period before the Christian era.

I’m glad that they’ve finally come clean on this huge historical fraud. Especially The Iliad, which “was a bitch to write, by the way” but “it seemed to catch on.”

QotD: The dangers of being a novelist

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:30

I’m in the middle of starting a new novel right now, and the bad thing about that strange phase of existence is that everything you see and hear somehow relates, in the wankmulch your brain has become, to that novel. Even a shopping list becomes a mass of notation and connective lines — because you’re convinced that the six things on it reveal something phenomenal about the world and your place in it, and there’s a place in the novel where you can shove all that in.

Deep down, there’s a little James Joyce homunculus in our hearts, presumably chatting up a saucy-looking ventricle and asking it if it shags, and also spreading the beautifully toxic notion that his book Ulysses actually contains all of Dublin in it and, should it ever be destroyed, a new Dublin could be generated from it like a backup copy, if needs be. And so we peer around at everything, to see if we can image it on a hard drive of a book, ghosting the real world.

Also it’s important to note that when writers — or at least I — get into this condition, we talk very fast and make not a lot of sense.

Warren Ellis, “Ghosting the real world”, Wired (UK), 2010-10-07

Not only is the science not “settled”, we still need to learn far more

Filed under: Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:49

Counter-intuitively, although the sun has been going through a period of decreased activity over the last few years, a new study in Nature claims that there’s been an increase in the amount of visible light and near-infrared energy:

New data indicates that changes in the Sun’s output of energy were a major factor in the global temperature increases seen in recent years. The research will be unwelcome among hardcore green activists, as it downplays the influence of human-driven carbon emissions.

As the Sun has shown decreased levels of activity during the past decade, it had been generally thought that it was warming the Earth less, not more. Thus, scientists considered that temperature rises seen in global databases must mean that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions — in particular of CO2 — must be exerting a powerful warming effect.

Now, however, boffins working at Imperial College in London (and one in Colorado) have analysed detailed sunlight readings taken from 2004 to 2007 by NASA’s Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) satellite. They found that although the Sun was putting out less energy overall than usual, in line with observations showing decreased sunspot activity, it actually emitted more in the key visible-light and near-infrared wavelengths.

These shorter wavelength forms of radiated heat penetrate the atmosphere particularly well to heat up the Earth’s surface — just as the same frequencies get in through car windows to heat up its interior. The hot seats and dashboard — in this case the seas, landmasses etc — then radiate their own increased warmth via conduction, convection and longer-wave infrared, which can’t escape the way the shortwave energy came in. This is why the car, and the planet, become so hot.

Thus the Sun, though it was unusually calm in the back half of the last decade, was actually warming the planet much more strongly than before.

If this research is confirmed, it certainly provides a lot of ammunition to the folks who don’t want to spend huge sums to try to cut down carbon emissions.

Isn’t this a barbaric practice for a free society?

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:25

I’m generally fine with our American neighbours, our societies are similar in so many respects, but this whole “Pledge of Allegiance” thing is something that I just don’t get. A country that theoretically prides itself on being the “home of the free” can still put you in jail for failing to recite it on command?

Danny Lampley (who clerked for me in law school), was jailed by Chancery Court Judge Littlejohn in Tupelo for failing to recite the pledge of allegiance in open court today. Danny was one of the local lawyers who represented the plaintiff in the Pontotoc school prayer case years ago, working with the ACLU and People for the American Way.

I’m informed that Danny rose and was respectful, but did not recite the pledge.

Is this just Judge Littlejohn being a prick, or does this sort of thing happen regularly? What penalty would he get for not singing the national anthem?

H/T to Radley Balko for the link.

The sad tale of the used book hunter

Filed under: Books, Economics, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:04

By way of Walter Olson’s Twitter feed, a story of real life arbitrage — the Confessions of a Used Book Salesman:

I make a living buying and selling used books. I browse the racks of thrift stores and library book sales using an electronic bar-code scanner. I push the button, a red laser hops about, and an LCD screen lights up with the resale values. It feels like being God in his own tiny recreational casino; my judgments are sure and simple, and I always win because I have foreknowledge of all bad bets. The software I use tells me the going price, on Amazon Marketplace, of the title I just scanned, along with the all-important sales rank, so I know the book’s prospects immediately. I turn a profit every time.

I’m pretty sure I first heard about the practice of shopping for books with laser scanners in a story on NPR, which, as I recall it, disparaged their use as classless. And, really, it is precisely this. The book merchant of the high-cultural imagination is a literate compleat and serves the literate. He doesn’t need a scanner, because he knows more than the scanner knows. I fill a different niche — I deal in collectible or meaningful books only by accident. I’m not deep, but I am broad. My customer is anyone who needs a book that I happen to find and can make money from.

My economics side says this is a good thing: connecting buyers with their desired purchases. My bibliophile side says this is somehow morally wrong . . . or if not precisely wrong, then tainted or shady. I’m not sure how to reconcile my feelings.

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