Norman Borlaug, R.I.P.

A Nobel Peace Prize winner who deserved it. The real "Green Revolutionary." 1914—2009.

He left the world a better place than he found it.

Birds song

Five more-or-less parallel lines, with black dots on them. Looks a little like sheet music. That's what Jarbas Agnelli thought, and he did something about it. Click the pic. Thanks to Randy at Ambiance.

Apes laughing

They do, and they do it in different languages.

Can't embed the "tickling the gorilla" video here, so you'll have to go over to National Geographic to see it. Along with sound samples of other apes laughing: bonobos, chimps, orangs, you get the idea.

Here earlier: Rats laughing.

File this

Althouse commenter "montana urban legend" says "Hitler was much smarter than Bush."

The whole comment:

I don't condone comparisons of Mr Bush to Hitler. But the idea that you could force a Hitler comparison out of expanding access to health care is an even more desperate stretch than a comparison based on the violence of launching a war of choice.

And, oh yeah. Hitler was much smarter than Bush. Bush was kind of like a Forrest Gump figure, as far as presidents go. Likeable, lucky and oblivious. But not evil.

No fright here.

9/13/09 2:47 AM

I don't think Hitler was as smart as all that. Bush won his war, and retired from office alive, in a country that remains (aside from the WTC) intact, so far.

In the first sentence, MUL does not condone comparisons. In the fourth sentence he or she makes just that comparison. Short attention span? Or simply that "rules and laws are for the little people" attitude that we see so much of lately?

Big show in Washington

The September 12 Tea Party. Stephen Green rounds up some reports. Biggest D.C. demo ever? Maybe, but WaPo and NYT won't report it that way.

CNN, this afternoon, was focused on Obama's speech in Minneapolis. Since he was out of town, and did not see it with his own eyes, he will be able to pretend that the reports stating "tens of thousands" that are already appearing in the MSM are accurate. "Tens of thousands," that's, like, what, twenty thousand? Small potatoes. He will go on living in his own fantasy as long as he can sustain it. As long as it's "sustainable."

Update: Claudia Rosett has something to say about Obama's fantastic imagination.

Another update: A video report with not enough of Mary Katharine Ham, at Ace of Spades HQ. She's riffing in her introduction, referring to, among others, "political terrorists," a term coined by Rep. Baron Hill of Indiana.

Good news about ACORN

They might not be conducting the census, after all.

Will Obama try to change this?

9/11

A remembrance, at Looking At the Left.

Ralph Peters's take on the way things stand, now: "Betraying our dead."

There is some discussion of the Ralph Peters column at Power Line.

Bit his finger off

That's some rational debate. Or national conversation about health care.

The way to demonstrate the superiority of your argument is to bite off appendages of your opponent. This serves to elevate the level of discourse. If you're a lobster!

Dammit, we used to be mammals. Have 8 months of Obama reduced some of his supporters to the level of arthropods?

Free learning resources on line

Not an exhaustive list, but a good start. None of these offers actual college credits, so it's not a path to a degree, but to learning. Could be a supplement for enrolled students.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Sammy's Bar

I went down to Sammy's Bar
(Hey, the last boat's a-leavin')
By the shore at Pietà
(Call away the dghajsa.)

Maltese orthography is even worse than Gaelic. Paying attention to the letters will lead you far astray. How in the world do you pronounce "dghajsa?" I'd say "Die So," wouldn't you? You can reserve a dghajsa at Maltese Water Taxis dot com. And that beach. Eye 'n' Toughey, ya. Spelled Għajn Tuffieħa. And those haitches are not haitches, either, look close. Here's the best version (IMHO) currently on YouTube, sung by Jim Radford and friends:


There's a newish film in which some mimes sing this. They don't pronounce the Maltese right, and miss out on the English-language refrain. What would you expect, from mimes. A pleasant visual trip, though. But from xkcd, you would get some serious discussion. While I'm fussing about lyrics, I should mention that Jim Radford gets a word wrong in that video up above: The first line in the second verse should be, "And my real love, she was there." Not "true love." More poignant, less clichéd. As discussed at the next link.

The songwriter had this to say, about it all.

Cyril Tawney never wrote a bad song, not that I've heard, anyway. The Grey Funnel Line, for the tired, who wish they could escape; Chicken on a Raft, for the frustrated, who still manage to retain a sense of humor; On a Monday Morning, for the hung-over; The Oggie Man, for the wistful; Sally Free and Easy for the bitterly bereft.

In "The Grey Funnel Line," there is an image that I have found to be unforgettable.

Each time I gaze behind the screws
Makes me long for St Peter's shoes
I'd walk on down that silver lane
And take my love in my arms again

Saint Peter's Lane, which you need Saint Peter's shoes to walk on, is the silver path the full moon makes on the sea. I tried taking pictures last summer. They looked good in the camera, but not so good when uploaded to the computer. I need to figure out how to do longer exposures. "Grey funnel line" refers to the Royal Navy. Steamer lines such as Cunard, White Star, and the rest, painted the funnels of their ships distinctively. The Royal Navy paints everything grey, hence, "grey funnel line."

While I'm dumping links, there's a clever parody by Bob Williamson:

I went down to Sammy's Bar
(Hey, the lamp-posts are leaning)
Just went out to have a jar
(On me way up Hyde Road.)

Althouse, pushing the envelope of pithiness

Possibly the shortest blog post ever?

My comment was much too long.

Feds are interested in your yard sale

CPSIA begins to get its feet under it, going forth to wreak havoc.

Seller, beware: Feds cracking down on garage sales

WASHINGTON — If you're planning a garage sale or organizing a church bazaar, you'd best beware: You could be breaking a new federal law. As part of a campaign called Resale Roundup, the federal government is cracking down on the secondhand sales of dangerous and defective products.

The initiative, which targets toys and other products for children, enforces a new provision that makes it a crime to resell anything that's been recalled by its manufacturer.

"Those who resell recalled children's products are not only breaking the law, they are putting children's lives at risk," said Inez Tenenbaum, the recently confirmed chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The crackdown affects sellers ranging from major thrift-store operators such as Goodwill and the Salvation Army to everyday Americans cleaning out their attics for yard sales, church bazaars or — increasingly — digital hawking on eBay, Craigslist and other Web sites.

Told you. And furthermore,

President Barack Obama and Democratic congressional leaders are crafting an appropriations bill that would boost the agency's funding next year by more than 11.4 percent — to $117 million — and it's already hiring new inspectors and other employees in anticipation of the funding infusion.

they'll have plenty of your money to do their surveillance of you. Of me? us? We all need watching. Just in case something fishy might be going on. Or, you might say, "De minimis nunc curat lex."

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Sweet bird of youth, you must be laughing

The song. (First version is the one from the album, second from a live performance, sort of eerie.)

The play, which the song is referring to.

The bird.

The bird.

Up at the mountains, we watched the old Studio One production of "The Trial of John Peter Zenger," from this set of movies. We had a pretty good conversation about the importance of the Zenger verdict to American jurisprudence. I think I said, "This was the case that established freedom of the press in America, even before America existed." I thought there should have been a few more minutes to it, to give some attention to the jury's deliberations. The way it was presented made it look like Andrew Hamilton simply won Zenger's case, but the way the jury reached their verdict was just about as important as the verdict itself. The film skipped over that entirely.

But much more conversation resulted from the fact that this old TV show included three Westinghouse commercials, with Betty Furness selling a refrigerator, of course, and a TV, and something else, an air conditioner, it might have been.

So the daughter said, of Betty Furness, "When was it that people stopped wanting to look like that?" Like adults, she went on to explain. Which I thought was a good question, and we went down a winding conversational path having to do with neotenic behavior among baby-boomers.

Now I'm back in the world which includes an Internet, and I see that Morgan Freeberg has done some redecorating at The House of Eratosthenes, and that he has a post there with a clip from the late night Scot, dealing with this very issue. So check it out.

Buffet

Sprats.

Some wine and cheese.

Olives.

Anchovies.

Too much crystallized ginger. An aid to digestion. If someone does not steal it. About the right amount.

"… who would hide
"behind your chair
"and steal your crystallized ginger?" (At 4:21.) Have some quarter-tones, maybe some eighth- or sixteenth-tones, with that, and a good night.



Part 2 ["amoebas are very small," also long time sun, and pure light]:



Cockles, and whelks, and big winkles! (Video, NSFW.)


Calimari passim, search for critters.

Bon appetit.

Possibly interesting to bloggers

If I could manage to dig out my old copies of Richard Geis's wonderful magazine, The Alien Critic, later Science Fiction Review, I might be able to find an article by E.C. "Ted" Tubb called "I have just cleaned and oiled my typewriter, which was a wild and crazy thing to do." Or something a lot like that.

If you own a typewriter, take it to the typewriter shop. If you can find one. Trying to do the maintenance on it yourself will lead to all the problems Tubb described in that piece. Mostly, you'll use the wrong kind of oil and put it in all the wrong places, where it will attract molecules of dust that had not even existed prior to the oil application, and which will be the grit that gums things up even worse than they were before.

I have not owned a typewriter for decades. So this is about something else. [Will you just get to the point, for crying out loud?]

I backed up the blog. [Oh, so that's it.] Now I have about 200 MB on my local hard drive, the whole thing, pictures and all. It felt like a daring thing to do. But I may do it again, on another computer. And then I might copy the whole mess to a CD. Don't try to stop me. When I get an idea in my head, I'm gone.

The tool I used was Httrack. It took about half an hour over a fairly quick DSL connection. But now I have a copy of all my wonderful, important words and pictures [Stop that chortling in the peanut gallery!] that is not in the cloud, but right here. It got everything but a couple of the Javascript widgets on the sidebar, and I can browse it locally just the same as online. Comments and all, yes, comments and all.

Now if I could only remember to back up the local disk.

Secret origin revealed: the shallowness of Paul Krugman

He read Isaac Asimov's Foundation books, loved them, and failed to understand them. Understood about the first twenty percent or so, the setup of Hari Seldon's idea of psychohistory. If he'd been paying attention through the rest of the stories, he would have seen that psychohistory was doomed to fail.

This explains much.

TigerHawk has the story, and the comments.

And Ramesh Ponnuru has something to say.

It's a pity his school librarian didn't give him some Heinlein.

A few days in the mountains ...

… with no Internet, and all heck breaks loose. Sotomayor's on the Court, ObamaCare protests are breaking out all over, and Althouse is married.

I'll get caught up.

Ilya Somin: "If You're Reading This, You're Probably a Federal Criminal."

Nice of Professor Somin to post a follow-up to my earlier post on The legal system.

(Just kidding. It's not a follow-up. I doubt any of the Volokh Conspirators know that I exist, and that's OK with me.)

He and the Conspiracy commenters give this idea a much more thorough workout than I did.

Working towards happiness

Here's an interesting idea, taking form as a blog, on the way to becoming a book: The Happiness Project. Gretchen Rubin is a lawyer with top credentials, having been editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal and clerk for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Her goal with this is to test ideas about what leads to happiness, or, here, I'll quote her:

I'm working on a book, THE HAPPINESS PROJECT--a memoir about the year I spent test-driving every principle, tip, theory, and scientific study I could find, whether from Aristotle or St. Therese or Martin Seligman or Oprah. THE HAPPINESS PROJECT will gather these rules for living and report on what works and what doesn’t. On this daily blog, I recount some of my adventures and insights as I grapple with the challenge of being happier.

Post that caught my eye:

How Do You Remember to Count to Ten?

I'm quick-tempered, and one of my greatest happiness-project challenges is to bite my tongue; an excellent way to boost my happiness is to keep my resolution to "Leave things unsaid." In the end, I'm always happier when I don't make some angry or snarky comment. But easier said than done.

I'm all in favor of increasing the general level of happiness, one person at a time. (That lets out such government-type measures as culling the unhappy, or soma for the masses.)

Humanity resembles a pulsating mass of maggots

Oh yeah? I think we're a lot more like a writhing mass of maggots. If we're going to be maggots at all, we should writhe.

Michelle Malkin has been keeping up with looking into John Holdren. Read them all. The "maggots" business comes from this article, "The Challenge of Man's Future," by Harrison Brown (PDF).

[A] substantial fraction of humanity today is behaving as if it would like to create such a world. It is behaving as if it were engaged in a contest to test nature's willingness to support humanity and, if it had its way, it would not rest content until the earth were covered completely and to a considerable depth with a writhing mass of human beings, much as a dead cow is covered with a pulsating mass of maggots.

Writhing mass, dammit. Or perhaps we could pullulate.

What our masters think of us. In their rare candid moments.

Human beings are a resource, not a liability. Affluence is a goal, not a problem. People who tell you that affluence is a problem — those people are a problem.

Added, after commenting here: Holdren's plenary address to the AAAS in 2007 can be heard here, or downloaded as PowerPoint. It is dedicated to Brown: "My pre-occupation with the great problems at the intersection of science and technology with the human condition – and with the interconnectedness of these problems with each other – began when I read The Challenge of Man’s Future in high school. I later worked with Harrison Brown at Caltech."

Update: On rereading, I see that I was so irked by the pulsating that I missed the writhing, which was indeed mentioned. So that's better? Anti-humanists ought not to be in government. It's like hiring a vegetarian chef at a steakhouse.

Here earlier: Let's take a closer look at that book.

A tale of two transcripts

Efforts to marginalize Sarah Palin are becoming risible and transparent. This bit on the Conan O'Brien show, with William Shatner reading a few sentences from her farewell speech as beat poetry, to the accompaniment of bass and bongos, is schoolyard-level mockery.

It's instructive to compare the transcripts offered by a hostile site and by a friendly one. The HuffPo's AKMuckraker has a transcript with the ums and hesitations preserved, some dialect spellings, and very little punctuation. This seems to be the one that's going around.

For contrast, Townhall has one with correct spellings and punctuation. (And paragraph numbers! If you find the paragraph numbers intrusive, try this version at Free Republic.) These transcription tricks are reprehensible, but they further the narrative, which is all that counts.

For an example of how NPR routinely cleans up interviews, see NPR news, "fake but accurate," here earlier. All of the media that present these transcriptions of Palin with the dialect spellings and um's preserved should do the same for everyone they quote. Pigs will be flying on that day.

Bill Whittle on "The Destruction of Sarah Palin"

It's a must-see, so go on over there to PJTV. Or read it, if you'd rather.

It might better be titled "The Attempted Destruction of Sarah Palin." I don't think she's destroyed, just yet. The efforts to damage her keep making her look better.

Thanks to The Crack Emcee, commenting at Althouse. Crack Emcee's own blog, The Macho Response, is well worth a look, by the way.

This gets a "psyops" label because of the Alinsky references.

Captain Stargood

This is a lot of fun. Here's the trailer:


More at Captain Stargood dot com, naturally. Not suitable for kids! Thanks to Kevin MacLeod at Incompetech, who did the music.

Something about this reminds me of Captain Video. I was a big fan, back when. (Ha! Not very big, at age 5 or 6.) My favorite bits were the "exterior" shots of the spaceships. The Galaxy and Galaxy II were good-lookin' rocket ships. They were miniatures, of course, but pretty darn good ones. There are a few shots of some of those miniatures at the bottom of this interview with Harry Persanis, who worked after school for the effects studio. The Internet Archive has a couple of episodes. Because most of the DuMont network archives were destroyed, those two are a fair proportion of all that remain.

Federal Marshals will be coming in to clean up this town

Or, Yes we can stop the signal.

The wild and wooly Internet, it's a wonderful place. No restrictions, freedom everywhere you look. Pretty much. Some of that pr0n might be a problem. But at least as far as speech is concerned, or writing, really, anything goes. I don't like using cusswords on this site, because I keep hoping my daughter will read it, and once in a while she does. But I could if I wanted to. So that's OK. My choice.

But now comes Cass Sunstein, Harvard law prof and head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (I think — I have been poking around the dot gov website and can't find any names), to say that what is said on the web needs policing. Not so much for cusswords or naked pictures, but for "falsehoods." Falsity of those "falsehoods" to be determined by Prof. Sunstein, or someone much like him. First Amendment, I loved you — but they took you away!

Sunstein is a likely Supreme Court nominee.

Read this, by Kathy Shaidle at PJ Media, and then this, by Kyle Smith at the NY Post. The days of Wild West anarchy and, you know, freedom, on the Internet, are under more serious threat than they have been since the Great Opening of the Doors back in 1992. The doors will be closing again, if these Democrats have anything to say about it. And you know they will.

These are the good old days.

Update: I could not find Sunstein's name at that site at the time that I wrote this, because he had not been confirmed yet. He was confirmed on September 10.

Try it a little slower

Thanks to Theo Boehm, a post at On An Overgrown Path which asks the question: Is classical music too fast?

We know that the standard orchestral A has been creeping sharper for a while. Everybody wants that little edge, and one way to get it is by going a little higher. It's a testimonial to how well those Strads and Guarneris were made that they don't collapse under the additional string tension from being tuned to modern pitch.

So it would follow as the night the day that musicians searching for edge by tuning sharper would also want to gain some more edge by playing faster. (Lizst? Paderewski? known for that.)

I do like a musician or singer who can take his or her time with a piece. I had the pleasure of opening for Paddy Reilly a few years back. He's a man who can take his time with a song. A few examples from Youtube: Rose of Allendale. The Town I Loved So Well. Carrickfergus. Flight of Earls. The Rare Old Times. Come Back, Paddy Reilly, to Ballyjamesduff. (That last song was written well before the singer was born. I didn't think to ask him if it felt funny to sing a song with one's own name in it.)