New Review on Culintel

Finally had a chance to create some new content on the culinary intelligence site. Check out the review of the Sleek Chrome Beauty at CII.

What would Imus Do?

The vaguely libertarian hoonyack, Don Imus, whose contribution to American thought is somewhat less than that of George Will (although more coherent and generally more humanitarian) has gotten himself into a huge amount of trouble by referring to the Rutgers Womens' basketball team as "nappy headed ho's," apparently because they lost a game. This is what passes for logic on the talk radio circuit, I guess. Anyway, the following 1999 WCA article is the closest thing I could find to a related topic -- pretty thin, and the reference at the end is to Columbine, which makes it not especially funny, but you can always petition MSNBC to have me fired, right along with Imus.

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19990421

IMPLICATIONS, ASSERTIONS

Ann Arbor: So, we saw a fascinating bumper sticker this week: "Kids who hunt, trap, and fish don't mug old ladies."

Now, they couldn't put it on a bumper sticker if it weren't true, so we guess we must have missed the write-up -- probably it was that issue of American Demographics that we loaned to the neighbors -- on the research behind this striking fact. We assume it was survey-based, probably one of those questionnaires that say: "Please respond with a number from 1 to 10, where 1 indicates strong disagreement and 10 indicates strong agreement with the following statements: When I feel angry, I relax by visualizing small, furry animals caught in a steel trap until they drown or chew their leg off. I prefer to visualize old ladies drowning or chewing their legs off. If there are any legs to be chewed off, I prefer to do it myself..." You get the idea. Clearly, the outcome showed that killing small, defenseless creatures releases a substantial portion of the natural antipathy that most kids feel toward the elderly, and acts as a healthy, cathartic outlet for their entirely understandable disdain for persons of longevity.

Now, before any of our flannel-shirted friends start foaming at the mouth, let us hasten to point out that Wood-Charles is not agin a bit of huntin', no indeed. Nor are we supporters of that somewhat extreme group whose name a famous Ann Arbor system administrator paraphrases as People for the Eating of Tasty Animals. Nor do we condone the clandestine release of thousands of farmed mink into the peaceful English countryside, no matter how terribly, terribly funny ... sad! Sad, I mean, it might be. But we are and have long been keen supporters of People for the Profitable Use of Social Science, and barring a few quibbles about reproducibility, we see this as just the tip of a large, lucrative iceberg: consider the money to be made with bumper stickers of the form, " who do X, don't do Y."

"Code that checks return values doesn't seg fault."

"Presidents who bomb third world dictatorships are probably too tired to fondle the help."

"Kids who mug old ladies don't need to write stupid bumper stickers for a living."

"Old ladies who hunt, trap, and fish are too well- armed to get mugged."

Now, the above was written before this week's events in Colorado. Wonder if those boys were outdoorsmen?

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The WCA News Service has been brought to you by the Odd Town Tavern in foggy, damp downtown Ann Arbor, where the bumperstickers read, "Mini-vans don't drive the wrong way down Ashley: young parents with 3 children, a Chihuahua, and a cell phone do," and "When Volvos are outlawed, only people congenitally unable to drive will have Volvos, um, kind of like it is now, I guess, oh, never mind."

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Not exactly hardboiled eggs, but ...

An easter video starring Coney Dog.

Bad books by bad people

"The Secret" -- unmitigated rubbish, selling visiualization to po' folks. Why isn't this stuff illegal?

For no good reason except the weather ...

Here's a 1999 post from the Wood-Charles News Service -- sort of appropos, with all the Daimler-Chrysler news and so on, plus, hey, it's April 6th and it's snowed, off and on most of the day.

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I REMEMBER BABYLON

Ann Arbor: Transitional moments, moments of preparation, tinged with foreboding. So you're sitting around the table, finishing the toasted bagel, checking on a recipe to see what you might have to pick up for dinner, maybe still in your stocking feet. You're 'not ready' to go out yet. But eventually, the minute hand crosses a predetermined point along its arc, and it's time to 'get ready.' And lately, as we put on boots, rinse out the thermos mug, make sure the keys are in the proper pocket, grab the parka off the rack, I hear the soundtrack from Apocalypse Now in the background, the scene where Duvall's battalion is saddling up to go take Charlie's point away from him -- helicopter turbines spinning up, troopers loading magazines, someone's nervous musical quote: "dum da da DUM dum, dum da da DUM dum..."

"I don't know, Sir. It's pretty hairy out there. That's Charlie's driveway!"

"CHARLIE DON'T SHOVEL!"

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DESTRUCTIVE ANACHRONISM

Ann Arbor: There was a story in UPI's Michigan daybook, quoted here in total:

"Man Holds Up Bank With Crossbow - (MATTAWAN) -- The F-B-I says they have never seen a robbery quite like it. A man brandishing a mini-crossbow held up a bank in Mattawan. There's no report how much cash was taken in the robbery at the Kalamazoo County State Bank. There are no reported injuries and police have no suspects. Authorities say it's the first time they've ever heard of a crossbow being used to rob a bank."

Later reports indicated that police are seeking a short, bearded man, dressed in striped tights and a slashed white overshirt with a bright red undershirt pulled through the slashes. He was said to be wearing a leather jerkin and a floppy hat with a long feather, carrying a katzbalger as well as the crossbow, and driving an unlicensed oxcart with the bumper sticker, "Free the Canton of Uri." Although no one was injured in the incident, the bank manager was forced to stand with an apple on his head until the perpetrator had left the bank.

In an apparently unrelated incident, a convenience store in Wayne was held up by a large group of men and women dressed as Munro's regiment of foot, circa 1745. They took all the brown ale the store had, but fled at the appearance of an off-duty Wayne police officer, dressed as Prince Charles Edward Stuart.

Meanwhile, Ford Motor Company, rumored for some weeks now to be in search of a foreign acquisition, set aside stories of a merger with Volvo, BMW, Honda, or Moto Guzzi, and confirmed that it would be attempting a hostile takeover of the Duchy of Milan. That some action was forthcoming had been indicated by ads being run in German, French, and Genoese newspapers, offering "well-paid, temporary employment" to experienced pikemen, arquebusiers, and doppelsoldners, and the otherwise inexplicable presence of a large train of siege guns in Ford's booth at the International Auto Show.

Ford President and CEO, Jac Nasser, reiterated his commitment to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, but would not rule out the use of trebuchets to fling dead horses at the Milanese legal team.

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The Wood-Charles news service has been brought to you by the Odd Town Tavern, located at the corner of a large pile of snow and a vast, frozen pile of snow, in beautiful downtown Pile 'o Snow, Michigan, and by a shadowy group of investors, dressed as the Guise family and Don John of Austria.

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Who's an expert, again.

Another take on blog-dom, Wiki-wackiness, and the odd notion that if you can type, you must know something.

Enthusiams and necessities coincide

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A few years back, I built a collection of newly-manufactured, retro-form pocket knives from Queen Steel's Schatt and Morgan label -- among the styles I liked were "Doctor's Knives," or "Pillbusters," so-called because they featured a flat bolster on the back, suitable for crushing a pill into powder, and usually a long, spatula-shaped blade for counting pills. Never thought I'd actually use one of them, but here it is, pressed into service for counting out 10 4-mg decadron tablets every morning.

French Release UFO Archives

If you saw this or one of the similar articles, you probably tried to look at it and discovered that the demand had crashed the server CNES was using. Now, several days later, they've recovered and you can actually get to the PDFs. My French is just barely up to reading the academic lingo, but I've waded through a couple of statistical articles, and it's way slow going -- perhaps a preview of how not-earth-shaking it will be when and if the US Govt is coerced into releasing more of the data it has. As the skeptics say, "no little green men yet, guys."

French UFO Info

Cabinet, W-house staffers Fire Bush

Karl Rove, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Harriet Myers, and Vice President Dick Cheney held a joint press conference this morning to announce that they had asked President George W. Bush for his resignation. "We just thought it was time," said Rove, "kind of a first strike sort of thing."

For another April 1st take on this, see the lead story on DefenseTech.

Who's an expert?

Couple of things in the media recently, along the general lines of who really should get to be heard, in the context of clue sufficiency. First, one of my long-standing betes noires, the wiki idea and Wikipedia in general, is getting some competition from what will amount to a real, as opposed to a fantasy, web encyclopedia, Citizendium.

Interestingly, one of the claims made for Wikipedia is its huge base of "contributors," cited as being 3 million accounts. In fact, though, few of those accounts actually do anything -- a Washington Post article says:

"Wikipedia's own statistics show that in September, the most recent month for such data, 43,000 people were considered "active" _ they each contributed to more than five articles for the English site. The category of "very active Wikipedians" _ those who worked on more than 100 items _ numbered 4,330."

So what Wikipedia actually consists of is a tiny number of people with too much time on their hands, joined by about ten times the number of occasional contributors, and a vast number of lurkers -- gosh, that sounds a lot like ... news groups! Yes, it's just alt.flame writ large and somewhat better looking on screen.

Whether Citizendium will be any more useful remains to be seen.

Elsewhere, Harry Collins writes in New Scientist about technological populism and a "periodic table" of expertise -- his example is the media frenzy that occurred when a small set of highly inexpert parents extrapolated from MMR vaccinations to autism, without any basis. He also cites the South African government's decision to withhold AZT from HIV patients, on the grounds that President Thabo Mbeki believed he'd seen a "controversy" over its effectiveness in scientific literature he wasn't qualified to interpret.

His real point is that only the people practicing a particular area of science know whether a dissenting position represents a valid, "we just don't know yet" situation or whether a small group is being subsidized by, say, the tobacco industry, the energy industry, a religious group, or someone else with an axe to grind. And since the popular media are neither themselves qualified or motivated to distinguish, it's frighteningly easy to create bad policy by whipping up technological populism.

And John Hritz has some points to make, in his blog.

Anyway, good stuff to look at on a Tuesday morning, as the coffee takes hold.

And by the way, I believe it's now possible for you to add comments to this blog, although they are going to be moderated, since as you can probably tell from the above, I believe firmly in the repression of dissent of any kind.

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An undated piece from the old WCA News Service, with an extremely tenuous connection to the foregoing:

THANKS FOR YOUR CONCERN

Ann Arbor: A Livingston County legislator is agitating to suspend some levels of state revenue to Ann Arbor unless the city brings its marijuana penalty into line with the state's. A tiny minority of his colleagues are pointing out that, while they fully agree with and support his courageous zeal in defense of our threatened children, his measure is illegal. But, hey, somebody's got to keep those lazy bums on the Supreme Court busy, huh? Actually, it seems like a good idea to us -- meddling in your neighbor's politics -- and so WCA has funded a massive lobbying effort to shut off all state and federal monies to Livingston County until:

- It brings its traffic enforcement into line with Ann Arbor's; the current disgracefully low level of parking citations written in most Livingston County municipalities sends a disastrous message to their kids -- "Hey, park anywhere man, it's cool."

- It ensures that each city and township has at least one International Center for Tibetan Buddhism, located no more than 30 feet from the Baptist Church and the VFW hall. Religious diversity is horribly threatened by the current, whitebread approach to faith in the County, and it seems only fair that if they're going to get any of our hard-earned tax money, a representative proportion of their population should be forced to convert to Roscicrucianism or the Arian Heresy.

- Stop endangering our children by electing morons to the legislature. Henceforward, an aggregate IQ score for all Livingston County lawmakers will be computed each year, and no revenues will be transferred in any year in which the score continues to be below 38, as it apparently is now.

ANN ARBOR CONDUCTS NUCLEAR TESTS

Ann Arbor: "We have to protect ourselves from Livingston County," said a spokesman. The CIA, which was taken completely by surprise ("Ann Harbour? Huh?" said a CIA spokespook), is reported to be monitoring the situation, having done a quick MapQuest search.

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The WCA News Service is brought to you by the Odd Town Tavern and its credible nuclear tempeh deterrent. "We have to protect ourselves from Andy Gulvezan," said a bartender who could hardly be heard above the Baby Elephant Walk, playing on the bar's sound system.

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