How red is the country, and how blue are we? Well, even in 2000, I wanted to see the colors of the states mixed, so we could see how purple each one was. Go here to see a variety of ways of looking at the red-blue situation from the 2004…
I’ve been thinking about this since the initial post on our biases and all the responses. In the course of trying to come up with an “appropriate” response to the world, we often find ourselves caught up in endless exception-making, fudging, attempts to shoehorn certain proclivities and habits into convenient moulds so we don’t go through our days constantly flinching at our inadvertant insensitivities.
Does it do any good? The flinching? I mean, after the Sixties, one had to have been living on Mars for half a century not to be aware that there had been a Big Shift away from what might be called Gross Cultural Reliance to a more nuanced approach which has been (often derisively) termed Political Correctness. The former is a condition wherein one “borrows” wholesale from the culture to make associational choices. It doesn’t occur in this instance to question the wisdom of the culture–it’s what it is, and we are part of it, ergo…
But we realized that the Culture At Large was in many ways an Idiot. It stepped on people. It made too little room for variation. It tried to be all things to all people, but it was necessary that all people somehow be The Same in order for that to work. Those with a vested interest in keeping everything the same mightily resisted movement to change the rules.
We never did come up with a solid formulation that allows for prejudice.
You have to, you know. What we ended up …
Just yesterday, I saw on the news that Bush has a new strategy for Iraq: he'll be giving a series of (ridiculous) speeches aimed at justifying his invasion of Iraq. He still believes his poll numbers are in the tank because Americans have a perception problem. That's perhaps why he…
To optimize next-generation action-items, it is important to enable leading-edge models to enable one-to-one solutions thereby facilitating aggregate robust portals. Of course, to benchmark front-end paradigms and thereby embrace user-centric architectures is probably a better way to engineer leading-edge metrics.
If you’re wincing at the above paragraph, please forgive me. I’m just having a bit of fun, thanks to a site called “Web economy bullshit generator.” Whenever you press the “make bullshit” button, the site gives you an impressive sounding phrase. This site has many “uses.” For instance, see the comments to the site:
The Web Bullshit Generator is phenomenal…my resume never looked so good!
—Cory L.This is a great job interview prep tool and provides fodder to use on chicks at the bar. I’m also going to use this in preparation for my high school reunion.
—Ryan F.
No one could ever fall for such stilted, meaningless and concocted gibberish, right? Not so fast! Using big words and proper syntax goes a long way to making something appear meaningful. For example, the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, a leading journal of cultural studies contained an article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The author was Alan Sokal, a real life physicist at New York University. As indicated here, in an article by the Skeptical Inquirer’s Martin Gardner:
…[Sokal’s] paper included thirteen pages of impressive endnotes and nine pages of references.” But Sokal had actually submitted these 13 pages
If you want to know what our government approving as sex-ed these days, go ahead and take this simple 10-question test published by Naral. It only takes a couple of minutes. Your answers will be scored and explained and you'll probably be shaking your head even if you've been keeping…