DISQUS

Excellent post! You cover the downsides to blogging as well as the greater upsides -- which is why the article works so well. Too many critiques of blogging (or unrestrained praise in support of it) start with the premise, "well, I (emphasis on the "I") wouldn't blog well, so why should anyone else!" or, "I'm a fantastic blogger and it works well for me; it will work for everyone in the same way." Characterizing the pre-blogging survey of information as "silent intake" is especially keen.

70% - nice and even!

Glad to see you've read your Hitchens, too, Ashish, but I actually don't have a strong opionion about Mother Teresa or Che. That is in large part my own fault -- I just don't really know much about them beyond the common parlance -- but I don't know enough to make any judgments. I agree with you that one need not personally know a person to make a judgment about him or her, however.

I think the fact that Taylor and I had a similar reaction to your post, Ashish, might indicate that regardless of what you may have meant it to say, it indeed came off in a particularly venomous manner. The phrase "Snow was by no means a “really genuine guy'" is especially strong, and surprising insofar as it is not grounded in any basis of judgment.

But moreover, "by NO means" is an exceptionally strong choice of words for judging the character of a person you never really met. Again, for a philosophy major, I'm surprised to find that your logic is so messy: what does it mean, Ashish, to be a "genuine" person? Are people, whether genuine or not, always consistent, and must one be consistent across public/private lines to be genuine, and by whose measure? I, for one, would like to hope that I am a genuine guy, but I certainly have my fair share of lies, deceptions (to myself and others), and often say one thing and do the other.

As to him interrupting you and not letting you finish -- call it rude if you like, but to call it skillful isn't to morally evaluate it. It was skillful in that he used tact to defuse your question, which was patently neither tactful nor productive, and not well formulated or presented. Your question began with a paragraph-like statement, which given the Q&A circumstances, struck several people sitting near me as rude in itself.

Ashish, as skilled at political philosophy and rhetoric as you are, it's disappointing that the tack you take in critiquing Snow never really appropriately matches the venue. Case in point being that this was a letter to the editor -- and a personal one at that -- not a political encomium, and a political response to it makes its point indelicately and therefore ineffectively. It wasn't my title, but "Tony Snow off Camera" is an apt one for the letter, yet your response is about "Tony Snow" only insofar as he was the White House Press Secretary for a short time.

Also, anyone who knows me knows that I disagreed with him as much as you do.

The key difference, however, is that during the Q&A session, you tried to pull a "gotcha" with him -- and he rather skillfully pushed your question aside and ended your exchange. He and I, however, went on for a good while, and I was able to critique him far more stridently, and make far many more political points, than you had. So who got carried away?

I vote for "Stained Glass." But I would retitle it to "teh stained glass." Also, rename the blog to "teh tropophilia."

One of the issues other scientific thinkers have with Kurzweil's projections is that computing already exceeds the capacity of the human mind, quantitatively speaking. Even the massive, hundreds-of-cubic-feet mainframe computers out-computed the human brain exponentially. I think Kurzweil himself admits, though, that the human brain cannot be measured in terms of mere computing capacity. I like his writings and the concept of the Singularity as an abstract (though still quite grounded) explanation of the ride of computing power; the devil here is in the details, when one tries to apply it too strictly.

Eet is not that eet was easy, but zat it was ze motherland!

*first heavy-weapon parade in years, that is...ha...

That, sir, would be the Kremlin and Red Square beside it, as best evidenced by Saint Basil's cathedral on the right. Was the scene first of Russia's first heavy-weapon military parade a few days ago, and the inauguration of new Russian President "Med-ve-whatever" today.

Oil refinery?

I'm not enough of a biologist/ecologist to know the difference, but I'm pretty certain that what plays the largest part historically in which species we eat is their cultivatability (is that a word?) -- or which animals are most easily husbanded, kept domesticated, etc.

Does anyone else remember reading about a handful of studies recently that pretty convincingly showed that there are certain nutrients (or proteins or something?) that are only found in meat? Point being that while we do eat way too much meat as a society, the moral consideration of the abstract individual isn't entirely settled. We have evolved to be human, in large part, because we eat meat. Although, our mastery of technology may preclude us evolving along true lines of "natural selection" anymore, so that too may be moot.

Just an interesting fact, that adds to Ashish's final factoid: "The United States kills 8 BILLION chickens a year." (David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. Oxford UP, 2007. page 174)

Oh, agreed! Also, apparently the Grateful Dead are coming out with a new album, called "Steal Your Facebook."

if Google Chat is known as "gchat"... will Facebook Chat become "fchat"?
'cause that just doesn't look so great.

From Huxley's "Brave New World":

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. "You're welcome," he said.

What worries me most about our world is the "long silence" in contemplating what alterations are possible to the human being via applied technology - "comfort," in this instance. Just because human disease is regrettable, sometimes awful and horrible, does not mean that it is "bad." And similarly, the mere fact that we have the capability of installing such a brain chip implant, does not mean that we should. Awful as the symptoms of the disease are, I'd stick with the perils of Alzheimer's over the implant - it's the right to preserve the integrity of the (natural) decline of the body.



(NB: I'm not against medicine, nor am I pro-syphilis!)

Also, wasn't Gandhi, it was Obama.

Ashish, I quote Nellie McKay to you:

"Feminists don't have a sense of humor / Feminists and / Vegetarians...."

:D

Coming later this spring: a brilliant new scholarly work on the Apollo missions, from MIT professor David Mindell:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262134977/ref...

If you enjoyed the movie, you'll love this book.

This influx of snakes has long been predicted by badgers:
http://www.badgerbadgerbadger.com/

@Jarred: this is half-serious, half-joking, but do gchat users really know what they want? Do we think Google implemented it unilaterally, or because of feedback -- and if it is the latter, how do they measure that? I live and die by what Google allows me to have and to hold, so who knows.

Jarred is right - there is already an "invisibility" option with the "block" function. I also always thought that the Red "Do Not Disturb"-esque status indicator was supposed to display to your friends the equivalent of, "no frivolous conversations, please," but it seems that user habit has trumped design - about 1/2 of my gchat contacts keep this status up at all times.

::high-five::

"What is timeless, Steve, is story, and that’s why people will never stop reading."

True. But I'm getting more and more of my storylines, my fictional narratives, not from reading, but from my little red friend, Netflix. Great article; wish the author had defined what "reading" means!

Definitely a Vauban fort...hmm.

Would that be the FutureGen "clean coal" power plant, located in Mattoon, IL?