"But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland."
Strange mixed metaphor! (The red pill is supposed to get you to reality, but Wonderland is a dream.) But mixing metaphors doesn't make your idea wrong, and Sebastian Thrun is a professor of computer science, not a professor of rhetoric. He's leaving his tenured position at Stanford to found Udacity:
January 24, 2012
Romney's federal tax returns: "he is likely to pay a total of $6.2 million in taxes on $45 million in income over the two tax years of 2010 and 2011."
The NYT reports:
Mr. Romney said last week that his effective tax rate was “about 15 percent,” a figure lower than that of many affluent Americans. But his returns suggested that he paid an effective tax rate of nearly 14 percent.That's a heavy-handed "but." 14 is "about 15."
“I pay all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more,” Mr. Romney said during Monday night’s debate. “I don’t think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes.”Exactly! The question isn't what he paid — unless he cheated — but what his tax policy for the country would be. Still, he really needs to be able to explain cogently and persuasively why capital gains are taxed the way they are. And he really needs to be able to convey why we should want a man who mostly worked in private finance to help us out with our finances.
Mr. Romney, a Mormon, has long said that he had promised to give 10 percent of his income to his church. His tax return shows that over two years he and his wife, Ann, gave $7 million in charitable contributions, including $4.1 million to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.So he gave more money to his church than to the federal government. Is "gave" the right verb for both of those payments? Perhaps it's not the right verb for either. Tithing is compulsory in the church, is it not? In both cases, he's relinquishing was is due under a requirement.
"Were there any Oscar surprises?"
The nominations were announced this morning.
The nominees for best picture are “The Artist,” “The Descendants,” “The Help,” “Moneyball,” “Hugo,” “War Horse,” “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” “The Tree of Life” and “Midnight in Paris.”I've only seen "Midnight in Paris," so I'm not a good judge of whether any of this is a good idea, though I will say I've seen the trailers for “The Help” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” and believe them to be the kind of sententious treatment of an important subject that I avoid. All the others, except "War Horse," I could be prodded to see, except that I already feel overprodded about "The Artist," and I'm getting cranky. (Sorry, movies are mainly about emotions, and these are mine.)
The nominees for best actress are Michelle Williams (“My Week with Marilyn”), Meryl Streep (“The Iron Lady”), Viola Davis (“The Help”), Glenn Close (“Albert Nobbs”) and Rooney Mara (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”).Is there an iota of suspense about that one?
January 23, 2012
Watching the GOP debate tonight.
1. Yes, again. I'll do numbered updates.
2. Gingrich — who looks tired and badly made up — is asked about electability. He says "a solid conservative... who has the courage to stand up to the Washington establishment" is exactly what the American people want.
3. Gingrich will have a website responding to the "at least 4 things" Romney just said that are false.
4. Santorum gives a great answer to the question why he lost his Senate seat in Pennsylvania.
5. Romney isn't going to apologize for his success or for free enterprise, and he's critical of Gingrich for picking up the "weapons of the left," attacking capitalism.
6. Romney and Gingrich are given free rein to go back and forth against each other, with Romney accusing Gingrich of "influence peddling" and Gingrich seeming quite angry and defensive.
7. Gingrich opines that Castro will not "meet his Maker," because he's going to Hell. I suddenly figured out what's likeable about Gingrich: his unlikeability.
8. From my son John's live-blog: "Brian Williams asks Gingrich a ridiculous question: whether he'll shift in his views on foreign policy in order to get Ron Paul's endorsement. Williams seems like he isn't even trying to do a good job of moderating the debate." Ha ha.
2. Gingrich — who looks tired and badly made up — is asked about electability. He says "a solid conservative... who has the courage to stand up to the Washington establishment" is exactly what the American people want.
3. Gingrich will have a website responding to the "at least 4 things" Romney just said that are false.
4. Santorum gives a great answer to the question why he lost his Senate seat in Pennsylvania.
5. Romney isn't going to apologize for his success or for free enterprise, and he's critical of Gingrich for picking up the "weapons of the left," attacking capitalism.
6. Romney and Gingrich are given free rein to go back and forth against each other, with Romney accusing Gingrich of "influence peddling" and Gingrich seeming quite angry and defensive.
7. Gingrich opines that Castro will not "meet his Maker," because he's going to Hell. I suddenly figured out what's likeable about Gingrich: his unlikeability.
8. From my son John's live-blog: "Brian Williams asks Gingrich a ridiculous question: whether he'll shift in his views on foreign policy in order to get Ron Paul's endorsement. Williams seems like he isn't even trying to do a good job of moderating the debate." Ha ha.
"My hands are so cold, I can't even blog."
"I'll be right back. Can't afford to lose any more followers."
This Samsung ad that got my attention:
Notes:
1. Bloggers don't call their readers "followers." That's Twitter talk.
2. I know from browsing through other Samsung ads, looking for this, that the people camping out are waiting in line to get into an Apple store, but when we saw the ad — during one of yesterday's football games — we thought the campers were "Occupy Wall Street" folk.
This Samsung ad that got my attention:
Notes:
1. Bloggers don't call their readers "followers." That's Twitter talk.
2. I know from browsing through other Samsung ads, looking for this, that the people camping out are waiting in line to get into an Apple store, but when we saw the ad — during one of yesterday's football games — we thought the campers were "Occupy Wall Street" folk.
"Cathy N. Davidson, an English professor at Duke, wants to eradicate the term paper and replace it with the blog."
Matt Richtel writes in the NYT:
Andrea A. Lunsford, a professor of English at Stanford, says "that students feel much more impassioned by the new literacy. They love writing for an audience, engaging with it. They feel as if they’re actually producing something personally rewarding and valuable, whereas when they write a term paper, they feel as if they do so only to produce a grade."
There's a certain sort of teacher who's always imagining stimulating the students to new levels of passion. I suspect students can find this quite annoying and burdensome. Not only does the student have to write a lot, he's supposed to be all excited about it. Because teacher says blogging is exciting. But the blog can be a slog. It's not a slog for me, because I'm motivated from within. I make my own projects and do what I want. The intrinsic reward is fantastic. But I don't imagine that I could make students feel the same thing if they have to write when and where I tell them to and submit to my judgment for a grade.
Here's Davidson's book —which I just bought — "Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn." I'm interested in this subject, but also skeptical. Back in the 1960s I read "The Medium Is the Massage," by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, and I chanced upon a copy of it last week at Waterloo Records in Austin — the greatest record store in the country (maybe!). Yeah, I bought a book about media in a record store. One of my reading things is to read books that were once and within my memory a big deal in our culture.
On the drive home from Austin to Madison, as the passenger, I read the entire old book out loud. It's full of effusions about how are brains have changed because of "the high speeds of electric communication." McLuhan and Fiore were talking about television.
(Yes, yes, maybe we are crazy now. How would we know? By looking at election results?)
IN THE COMMENTS: FedkaTheConvict said:
Across the country, blog writing has become a basic requirement in everything from M.B.A. to literature courses. On its face, who could disagree with the transformation? Why not replace a staid writing exercise with a medium that gives the writer the immediacy of an audience, a feeling of relevancy, instant feedback from classmates or readers, and a practical connection to contemporary communications? Pointedly, why punish with a paper when a blog is, relatively, fun?That's a bogus complaint. Just require the blog posts to be well-written! Davidson has her students "regularly publish 500- to 1,500-word entries on an internal class blog." These are as long as the essays law students write on the exams that often constitute the entire basis for their grade in a semester long course. These entries are essays, and they are no more "personally expressive" (read: indulgent) than a term paper if the teacher states that the assignment is to write something structured/neutral/scholarly (or whatever the directions for a term paper are).
Because, say defenders of rigorous writing, the brief, sometimes personally expressive blog post fails sorely to teach key aspects of thinking and writing. They argue that the old format was less about how Sherman got to the sea and more about how the writer organized the points, fashioned an argument, showed grasp of substance and proof of its origin. Its rigidity wasn’t punishment but pedagogy.
The debate about academic writing has given rise to new terminology: “old literacy” refers to more traditional forms of discourse and training; “new literacy” stretches from the blog and tweet to multimedia presentation with PowerPoint and audio essay.These are just different ways of publishing. It's the content that matters. But, obviously, different technologies promote different kinds of thinking and writing. For example, when we used typewriters, we didn't do as much redrafting as we do with computers, and when we publish on line, we tend to go public faster.
Andrea A. Lunsford, a professor of English at Stanford, says "that students feel much more impassioned by the new literacy. They love writing for an audience, engaging with it. They feel as if they’re actually producing something personally rewarding and valuable, whereas when they write a term paper, they feel as if they do so only to produce a grade."
There's a certain sort of teacher who's always imagining stimulating the students to new levels of passion. I suspect students can find this quite annoying and burdensome. Not only does the student have to write a lot, he's supposed to be all excited about it. Because teacher says blogging is exciting. But the blog can be a slog. It's not a slog for me, because I'm motivated from within. I make my own projects and do what I want. The intrinsic reward is fantastic. But I don't imagine that I could make students feel the same thing if they have to write when and where I tell them to and submit to my judgment for a grade.
Here's Davidson's book —
On the drive home from Austin to Madison, as the passenger, I read the entire old book out loud. It's full of effusions about how are brains have changed because of "the high speeds of electric communication." McLuhan and Fiore were talking about television.
Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors in the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active interplay.That was in 1967! If what they're saying were true when they wrote it, by now — with the internet and mobile devices — we'd all be crazy.
(Yes, yes, maybe we are crazy now. How would we know? By looking at election results?)
IN THE COMMENTS: FedkaTheConvict said:
Duke's Group of 88 Cathy Davidson?Oh, my... The internet comes back to bite a pundit of internetology.
"What could we put on the air that would soften their hearts to the church that we had invested so deeply in?"
The Mormon public service ads of the 1970s and 80s.
"Before Homefront began airing, when we did surveys asking people, when you hear the word ‘Mormon,’ what comes to mind, the answers were Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Osmonds, polygamists, racists. Those were the top four answers. After seven, eight, nine years of Homefront airing, when you asked the same question, the No. 1 answer was always family."Check out "Julie Through the Glass":
When "the Government trespassorily inserted the information-gathering device" on a car, it was a search within the meaning of the 4th Amendment.
Says the Supreme Court, this morning, in United States v. Jones. Scalia writes the privacy-protecting opinion, joined by Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, and Sotomayor.
There's no dissent, but Alito writes a concurring opinion which is joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan. Alito characterizes the majority of using "18th-century tort law" to interpret the 4th Amendment and says the question should be analyzed in terms of reasonable expectations of privacy.
It is important to be clear about what occurred in this case: The Government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information....Despite the deviation — which worked to protect people using public phones and so forth — the Court rejects the Government's argument that Jones had no "reasonable expectation of privacy" with respect to the underside of his Jeep and where the Jeep was when it was driving about on the public roads. The Katz test was about extending the scope of an individual's privacy, not cutting back on traditional property-based protections.
The text of the Fourth Amendment reflects its close connection to property...
Consistent with this understanding, our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence was tied to common-law trespass, at least until the latter half of the 20th century....
Our later cases, of course, have deviated from that exclusively property-based approach. In Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347, 351 (1967), we said that “the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places,” and found a violation in attachment of an eavesdropping device to a public telephone booth. Our later cases have applied the analysis of Justice Harlan’s concurrence in that case, which said that a violation occurs when government officers violate a person’s “reasonable expectation of privacy”....
There's no dissent, but Alito writes a concurring opinion which is joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan. Alito characterizes the majority of using "18th-century tort law" to interpret the 4th Amendment and says the question should be analyzed in terms of reasonable expectations of privacy.
William Kristol: "A Candidate to be Drafted Later?"
He floats the possibility and ends the post: "I notice a new online petition was launched Saturday night to try to produce one possible outcome. It’s at runmitchrun.com."
"The right to petition your government is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution."
"We the People provides a new way to petition the Obama Administration to take action on a range of important issues facing our country. We created We the People because we want to hear from you. If a petition gets enough support, White House staff will review it, ensure it’s sent to the appropriate policy experts, and issue an official response."
This is an interesting part of the official White House website, which I noticed for the first time last night when I was blogging about Christopher Dodd and discovered the petition demanding an investigation of his lobbying activities on behalf of the movie industry. (Is "lobbying" the wrong word?)
There were 10,378 signatures on the petition when I put the post up, and there are 16,459 now. (I'm not claiming credit for the increase.) 25,000 signatures are needed to force the White House staff to review it and respond. Note that you have to "create an account" on the White House site to sign, and if you sign your first name and last name initial, along with the name of your city, will be posted on the site. So that's something of a deterrent to signing. It's a bit of a test of how much you trust government.
When fascism comes to America, it will be with a smiley face (as George Carlin famously said (and Jonah Goldberg turned into a book cover)).
The White House will have your information, correlated to the petitions you've signed. You can see the subject matter of the currently open petitions. Click on filter by issue to get a sense of the issues raised by the people who trust the website with their information (and believe there's some point in petitioning this White House). That seems to explain why there are 0 petitions in the category "Firearms," but 15 in "Civil Rights and Liberties" and 13 in "Human Rights."
You can also filter by the number of signatures, and at the moment, the petition with the most signatures says: "Actually take these petitions seriously instead of just using them as an excuse to pretend you are listening." Well, naturally... what did you expect? How seriously should the government take 25,000 signatures?
But this is one way the internet is working now, for what it's worth. Check out the video they used to announce the new petition function. (This came out last August, and I didn't notice.) I am amused by the effort — by the White House! — to display youthful innocence and enthusiasm. Very smiley face:
"It's an official way to make your voice heard.... And if your petition is among the most popular, a group of White House policy officials..." Video frame suddenly widens to show 9 young people in suits sitting around a White House table. They smile and wave at us. "... like this good-looking bunch, will review it, make sure it gets to the right people in the Obama administration, and craft an official response."
The right people in the Obama administration? But will they be a good-looking bunch? Because I want good-looking bunches crafting a response. An official response. Because it's an official way to make my voice heard. And policy officials will be reviewing my official petition to give an official response. Are you sure all this is official? And is everybody good-looking? Okay, then. Start crafting responses. Because after you've given me this official way to blow off steam, what will help me reach closure in this process is a well-crafted response. Official response. Official and well-crafted.
Thank you, President Obama and your good-looking bunch of officials. Thank you for this official outlet for all our frustrations with government.
This is an interesting part of the official White House website, which I noticed for the first time last night when I was blogging about Christopher Dodd and discovered the petition demanding an investigation of his lobbying activities on behalf of the movie industry. (Is "lobbying" the wrong word?)
There were 10,378 signatures on the petition when I put the post up, and there are 16,459 now. (I'm not claiming credit for the increase.) 25,000 signatures are needed to force the White House staff to review it and respond. Note that you have to "create an account" on the White House site to sign, and if you sign your first name and last name initial, along with the name of your city, will be posted on the site. So that's something of a deterrent to signing. It's a bit of a test of how much you trust government.
When fascism comes to America, it will be with a smiley face (as George Carlin famously said (and Jonah Goldberg turned into a book cover)).
The White House will have your information, correlated to the petitions you've signed. You can see the subject matter of the currently open petitions. Click on filter by issue to get a sense of the issues raised by the people who trust the website with their information (and believe there's some point in petitioning this White House). That seems to explain why there are 0 petitions in the category "Firearms," but 15 in "Civil Rights and Liberties" and 13 in "Human Rights."
You can also filter by the number of signatures, and at the moment, the petition with the most signatures says: "Actually take these petitions seriously instead of just using them as an excuse to pretend you are listening." Well, naturally... what did you expect? How seriously should the government take 25,000 signatures?
But this is one way the internet is working now, for what it's worth. Check out the video they used to announce the new petition function. (This came out last August, and I didn't notice.) I am amused by the effort — by the White House! — to display youthful innocence and enthusiasm. Very smiley face:
"It's an official way to make your voice heard.... And if your petition is among the most popular, a group of White House policy officials..." Video frame suddenly widens to show 9 young people in suits sitting around a White House table. They smile and wave at us. "... like this good-looking bunch, will review it, make sure it gets to the right people in the Obama administration, and craft an official response."
The right people in the Obama administration? But will they be a good-looking bunch? Because I want good-looking bunches crafting a response. An official response. Because it's an official way to make my voice heard. And policy officials will be reviewing my official petition to give an official response. Are you sure all this is official? And is everybody good-looking? Okay, then. Start crafting responses. Because after you've given me this official way to blow off steam, what will help me reach closure in this process is a well-crafted response. Official response. Official and well-crafted.
Thank you, President Obama and your good-looking bunch of officials. Thank you for this official outlet for all our frustrations with government.
January 22, 2012
"With surprising candor, Chris Dodd tells Obama that the Hollywood purse strings are about to get tight."
A Metafilter post, linking to this Fox News piece, and continuing:
Angry over the Obama administration's siding against SOPA and PIPA, Dodd says openly that the money the Democratic party regularly counts on Hollywood for might not be there this election cycle. One view is that Hollywood considers that it bought something very specific with it's money, and it's angry it's not getting it. Should Obama be worried about this? Perhaps not. The guys from Freakanomics say that our assumption that money is the most important factor in deciding elections is a fallacy.The 3d comment says:
We petition the Obama administration to: Investigate Chris Dodd and the MPAA for bribery after he publicly admited to bribing politicans to pass legislation.It's up to 10,378 as I write this. Christopher Dodd has learned something in the last few weeks about how the internet works in a democracy. I suspect he's about to learn a whole lot more.
(currently 7,312 signatures out of 25,000 needed for response)
Obama sings a bit of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" to an audience at the Apollo Theater that includes Al Green."
"I'm... so in love with you..."
Beautiful!
IN THE COMMENTS: Writ Small said:
Beautiful!
IN THE COMMENTS: Writ Small said:
There was more likeability in that 55 second clip than in the last two months of the GOP race.♫ Loving you whether, whether times are good or bad, happy or sad... ♫
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