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I’ve been to more than my fair share of art galleries but I’ve never seen any artsy photo that has packed as much pathos as this one.

I mean, we’ve all been there, at least metaphorically and isn’t that what great art is all about?

So, I’m listening to the Dropkick Murphy’s version of Finnegan’s Wake (best version ever) and it struck me that I really don’t understand what triggers the fight that spills the whiskey on Finnegan.

The relevant lines are:

His friends assembled at the wake
And Mrs. Finnegan called for lunch,
First they brought in tea and cake
Then pipes, tobacco and whiskey punch.
Biddy O’Brien began to cry
“Such a nice clean corpse, did you ever see?
“Arrah, Tim, mavourneen, why did you die?”
“Ah, shut your gob” said Paddy McGee!
Then Maggy O’Connor took up the job
“O Biddy,” says she, “You’re wrong, I’m sure”:
Biddy gave her a belt in the gob
And left her sprawlin’ on the floor.
And then the war did soon engage
‘Twas woman to woman and man to man,
Shillelagh law was all the rage
And the row and the ruction soon began.

Is Biddy O’Brien saying that Finnegan doesn’t look dead and Paddy McGee takes offense at the raising of false hope? (Back in the day, it wasn’t always evident that people were dead. Typhoid in particular produced a paralysis that could be mistaken for death.)

Does Biddy O’Brien punch Maggy O’Connor just because O’Connor gainsaid her or is there some subtle insult implied?

I know we Irish are quick to fight but I think there is more to the story. Anybody know?

Tim Cavanaugh at Reason, observes that the peak of the dot-dom bubble was reached ten years ago today. The dot-com bubble and other technology bubbles are often held out as examples of the irrational nature of market economies by those who think they could do a better job of running the planetary economy than the rest of us can.

This is myth. Booms and busts represent two equal and necessary phases of technological development. A bust looks ugly but so does the birth of child. The busts are every bit as necessary as the booms and every bit as good for the general society and economy.

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Here’s a fact you won’t see mentioned in the public policy debate over “alternative” energy:

There exists no alternative energy source, no combination of alternative energy sources, and no system of combinations of alternative energy sources that can fully replace a single, coal fired electric plant built with 1930s era technology.

Nada.
Zero.
Zilch.

Yet many want to make this group of functionally useless technologies the primary energy sources for our entire civilization.

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As much as leftists like to call Sarah Palin stupid, I’m think I can confidently assert that she knows the difference between liability and comprehensive automotive insurance.

I have long assumed that the demagoguery by Obama and other leftists against the insurance companies was just cynical “eat the rich” politics. I assumed that behind closed doors, these Ivy League grads did actually understand that insurance provides protection against statistical risk only and not protection against absolute certainties. I assumed they understood that money being payed out in claims has to be balanced out by money paid in as premiums or the entire system will collapse very quickly.

However, hearing the President speak on the matter of insurance over the course of the past year, I’ve come to the conclusion that he, personally, simply does not understand how insurance works. I fear that no one else around him really understands either.

I say this because if he did understand how insurance worked, he would know that the story about his car insurance would make him look like an idiot.

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So, I bought this little iPhone app called “Sleep Cycle alarm clock“.

It’s an interesting idea. It uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to monitor the motion of your bed while you sleep. Like so:

It uses the motion of the bed as a proxy measurement for your REM states. When you’re not moving much you are more likely to be deep asleep and when you move more it means you’re more likely nearly awake. You set a 30 minute time window in which you wish to awake and the app wakes you up when your motion peaks so you wake up alert instead of dragging yourself up out the depths of REM and starting the day feeling vaguely stunned.

It’s a neat idea and the basic idea is scientifically sound but that’s not what I’m blogging about.

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see more funny facebook stuff!

I really shouldn’t be seeing grand political metaphors in a Failbooking post, but I just can’t help seeing Obama’s emotive, metaphorical, fantasy-driven worldview in the first post and the real-world-grounded, non-leftist worldview in the second.

All the more since it turned out that chanting “Yes, we can,” wasn’t an actual plan for governance.

Prompted by an Instapundit link to a THE BEST SPORTS CALENDAR EVER!!!!!!

… I now present “The Invention of Curling”

Scene: Scotland circa a long time ago.

Duncan: “Och, Angus tis winter! There’s nay work, nay hunt’en and nay fight’en. We’re bored.

Angus: “Oh, aye, we’re bored.”

Duncan: “We’ve got naught to amuse our persons with save a frozen pond, some smooth river boulders and our wimmen’s brooms.”

Angus: “Oh, aye, and we’re drunk.”

Duncan: “And we’re drunk.”

End scene.

Yes, like all winter sports, curling began as a drunken bet. (Come on, you can’t tell me that the luge, ski jumping or ice dancing were invented by sober, thoughtful people!)

Yet, now there is something relentlessly bourgeois about curling (and it’s not just because the players wear polyester slacks and sensible shoes). Curling is a sport of thought and patience. It is the sport of moderation. It’s the sport for people who get up in the morning, every morning and quietly go forth to make the world work.

I find it endlessly fascinating and I can watch it for hours. I was born in the wrong clime for I should have been a curler. I tried Texas style curling by shoving armadillos across the hot asphalt at discarded tires…

… but it’s not the same.

This morning, my spouse intercepts me coming out of the bathroom ask, “I’m going to the store, do you need anything?”

“Yes,” I replied, “I need some [blank] and some [blank] because I have [insert graphic and colorful description of a minor but disgusting personal problem].”

My spouse looked startled. Confused, I looked around.

“Oh,” I said, “You might have informed me we have company.”

Every day I grow more convinced the universe is a cosmic conspiracy to rob me of my dignity.

Why do these murdering nut jobs so often target the IRS?[h/t Instapundit]

At first, one might presume they do so out of ideological resentment, but as I noted in my previous post, these nuts tend to pick and choose from various ideologies depending on what is best for them at the moment. If so, why do so many of them perform their final detonation at the IRS?

I think it is because the IRS is the one institution that no one can ever escape.

You can’t escape death and taxes, and the IRS is always the latter and sometimes the former.

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[I did a post on this thread over at Reason and it went long so I decided to turn it into post here. I apologize for the sloppiness. I am pressed for time.]

We have a modern ritual in which we try to see which political ideology is reflected in the murderous actions of people like Amy Bishop and Joseph Andrew Stack. This is especially true in the case of Stack who left a suicide blog post.

The key to understanding this guy (and others like him) is to grasp the staggering depth of his narcissism and self-absorption.

People who carry out these types of crimes have an incredibly invariant profile. It’s always the same in every single one of these crimes.

(1) They have a seriously inflated sense of their own competence. They believe they are in the top 1% of their chosen field when they are usually merely average or sub par. Since they believe they deserve the top rewards but only get the average rewards, they constantly believe themselves cheated out of money, jobs and status.

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A small, single-engine plane has crashed into a building here in Austin. It’s national news being covered on all the cable networks.

The site of the event is about five miles to the South of my house. I’ve driven by that building literally thousands of times…

… but for all that the crash directly affected me it might as well have been on the other side of the planet. Had my spouse not called, I wouldn’t have know about it until I did my lunch-break scan of Instapundit. I can’t even see the smoke. Everything I know about the event comes from the TV news.

In short, I have as much information about this local event as does someone elsewhere in America or, indeed, even the world.

Prior to the Internet, most news was local. An event such as this would have been known to the local population via the local media, and then only an abbreviated story would make it to the national news and no one outside the country would ever have heard of it.

What are consequences of this delocalization of news? Any individual only has so much time to spend consuming news. If we spend time consuming reports from all over the world, that means we displace our consumption of local news. We end up in the perverse situation wherein we know more about a community on the other side of the world than we do our own.

Will this further decouple us from our local communities? I know that in recent years I have paid less attention to the local news than I did pre-Internet. Will we grow more concerned about distant problems over which we have little to no input, and neglect local problems that we could actually fix?

I don’t know what the future will bring but this event feels very surreal.

[Note :I wrote this as a comment to this Victor Davids Hanson post but it ran long enough that I think I will make it an actual post.]

Way back in the ’80s the columnist William Raspberry wrote about a conversation he had at a Washington party.

Looking around at the collection of lawyers, bureaucrats, journalists, academics, etc., he turned to a friend and asked:

“Do you know anybody who makes anything?”

It had suddenly occurred to Raspberry that his entire professional and social circle was comprised of people who more or less did nothing but talk for a living. He had no personal contact with anyone who participated in the creation of any material good. After asking around, he found that he didn’t know anyone who even made things as a hobby. He said, “I couldn’t even find anyone who had made so much as a bookcase.”

That little newspaper column opened my eyes up to the most profound division in modern society. It is not rich vs. poor or ethnic-group/race A vs. ethnic-group/race B or male vs. female etc. It is the division between those who create the real physical wealth of our civilization and those who merely manipulate others by persuasive communication.

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This is taken from Failbooking.com which is a site that collects humorous Facebook posts.

see more funny facebook stuff!

Just substitute “Socially/Economically/Environmentally Conscientious Voting” for “texting Haiti to 90999″ and “my taxes” for “my phone bill”.

This line really sums up the leftist point of view:

It’s not my money, Hah!

But in the end, you’ve got to pay your bills, even when you’re being ostentatiously compassionate while you think you’re spending other people’s money.

Via Slashdot comes this article in the Guardian that reinforces the points I made in my previous post: No One Peer-Reviews Scientific Software, Scientists are Not Software Engineers and Scientific Peer-Review is a Lightweight Process.

The article makes that same points that (1) there is little to no professional quality-control in the creation and maintenance of scientific software and (2) scientific software should be as open and scrutinized as scientific hardware.

This observation is especially important:

Computer code is also at the heart of a scientific issue. One of the key features of science is deniability: if you erect a theory and someone produces evidence that it is wrong, then it falls. This is how science works: by openness, by publishing minute details of an experiment, some mathematical equations or a simulation; by doing this you embrace deniability. This does not seem to have happened in climate research. Many researchers have refused to release their computer programs — even though they are still in existence and not subject to commercial agreements.

(Note: In this context, “deniability” means that the hypothesis or theory must be constructed so it can be proven wrong, i.e., that you can deny the truth of it.)

Scientific hypotheses differ from hypotheses in other fields specifically because scientific hypotheses can be conclusively proven wrong by experiment.

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Mark Steyn says:

Like all the poodles of the environmental beat, Margot O’Neill repeats those magic words “peer review” every couple of paragraphs like a talisman to ward off evil deniers.

From my “Scientific Peer-Review is a Lightweight Process” :

By the way that proponents of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) wave it about as a talisman to ward off criticism, a lay person could be excused for thinking that peer review is a rigorous process that is central to the functioning of science and that verifies the conclusions of a scientist’s research.
 
Peer review is nothing like that.
 
Peer review isn’t even central to science. Science functioned fine for centuries without peer review and scientists who work in secret or proprietary environments do not use it. Instead, peer review serves economic and social functions related to scientific publishing and does nothing else. Peer review somewhat protects the integrity of scientific media, not the quality of science itself.

I would just like to point out that Mark Styen steals from the best. ;-)

Because, people, the suspense is killing me.

If you went back in time to 2002, at the time of the initial release of Mac OS X, and told everyone that over the next eight years not a single Mac OS X virus or worm would be found in the wild, everyone, including me, would have called you barking mad.

Ever since Apple began the transition to Mac OS X in 1999, computer security experts have every week of every month of every year confidently told us that Mac OS X is just as vulnerable on a technological level as Windows or any other operating system. By that they mean that it is just as technically easy for a malicious programmer to write a program to hijack the operating system of Mac as it is to write a program to hijack a Windows machine.

Several times a year, they demonstrate flaws in Mac OS X that they claim could be used to spread viruses. They complain about Apple’s insular, arrogant and cavalier attitude toward finding and patching these security flaws. They tell us that all these factors make Mac OS X a ticking bomb and that “any day now” Mac users will face a sudden tsunami of self-propagating viruses and worms just like Windows users do.

They tell us the exact same thing every week, month and year.

They told us that in 1999 with the release of Mac OS X server.
They told us that in 2000.
They told us that in 2001.
They really told us that in 2002 when Mac OS X shipped widely for desktops.
They told us that in 2002.
They told us that in 2003.
They told us that in 2004.
They told us that in 2005.
They told us that in 2006.
They told us that in 2007.
They told us that in 2008.
They told us that in 2009
And they continue to tell us that in 2010.

Yet, der Tag never comes and waiting for it is giving me ulcers.

So, I have to ask: How many more years have to elapse before we begin to suspect the security experts (and everyone else, myself included) have misunderstood something critical about how the Mac OS X security model works out in the real world?

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I took advantage of my Apple Developer’s account to glance over the newly released Developer’s documentation for the iPad. I don’t want to go into any specific details because I believe some of the information is covered under my Developer’s non-disclosure agreement.

However, I can morally answer the question that I had previously about the then-rumored iPad. I have long wondered if it would be fusion or hybrid between the iPhone and a standard Mac. Well, it isn’t. It’s basically a giant iPhone without the phone. It runs a new version of iPhone OS and uses iPhone-style apps.

I’ll have more to say about the iPad later.

James O’Keefe, the investigative journalist who uncovered the corruption of ACORN, got busted in a (possible) attempt to bug the phones in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office. [h/t Instapundit] It’s clearly a case that comes from a Greek tragedy in which success leads to hubris which leads to the hero’s downfall. I rather expected something like this to happen to O’Keefe or someone seeking to emulate him.

However, when I first read this story, the first thought that popped into my mind was, “What was he looking for?” You don’t go around randomly bugging the office phones of US Senators. No, O’Keefe must have some information that made him think bugging Landrieu’s phones would reveal information damning enough of Landrieu that people would overlook the wiretapping when he made it public.

What does O’Keefe suspect about Landrieu and is he right about it?

[Update: I though the entire Greek tragedy bit explained what I thought but just to be clear, I'm not excusing O'Keefe if he did in fact try to wiretap a US Senator. That is very serious if no other reason than US Senators deal with National Security information and we wouldn't want to establish a precedent were anybody could listen in on them. Non-leftist should always be aware of the dangers of setting a dangerous precedent merely for short-term gain because leftist certainly won't.]