Categories
Personal

Out of Town

I’ll be out of town for the remainder of the week, travelling to Vegas, and then on to Anaheim for a convention. Blogging will be really light, but I’ll try to make up for it when I return. Lots of things rolling around in my head to talk about, just no time to get them out.

Categories
Digital Culture Personal

Esquire and Idiot America

Phenomenal article from Esquire about the increasing contempt in our society for intelligence in general, and science specifically. A few selected quotes from the article:

LET’S TAKE A TOUR, shall we? For the sake of time, we’ll just cover the last year or so. A federally funded abstinence program suggests that HIV can be transmitted through tears. An Alabama legislator proposes a bill to ban all books by gay authors. The Texas House passes a bill banning suggestive cheerleading. And nobody laughs at any of it, or even points out that, in the latter case, having Texas ban suggestive cheerleading is like having Nebraska ban corn. James Dobson, a prominent conservative Christian spokesman, compares the Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan. Pat Robertson, another prominent conservative preacher, says that federal judges are a more serious threat to the country than is Al Qaeda and, apparently taking his text from the Book of Gambino, later sermonizes that the United States should get with it and snuff the democratically elected president of Venezuela.

The Congress of the United States intervenes to extend into a televised spectacle the prolonged death of a woman in Florida. The majority leader of the Senate, a physician, pronounces a diagnosis based on heavily edited videotape. The majority leader of the House of Representatives argues against cutting-edge research into the use of human stem cells by saying that “an embryo is a person. . . . We were all at one time embryos ourselves. So was Abraham. So was Muhammad. So was Jesus of Nazareth.” Nobody laughs at him or points out that the same could be said of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or whoever invented the baby-back rib.

…and later in the article….

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents—for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

Now…those of you that actually follow this blog may have issue with my love of this paragraph in light of my open distain for appeals to authority when questions of truth come into play. This is, as I see it, not in disagreement with that position. I don’t mind experts…hell, I strive to BE an expert on a lot of issues. The purpose of being an expert, however, is not so that people believe you without thought. I expect that, even if I know more about a subject than anyone else on earth, that to be intellectually honest is to verify my positions when they are stated, and not take them at face value because I’m an authority.

Finally, we saw the apotheosis of the end of expertise, when New Orleans was virtually obliterated as a functional habitat for human beings, and the country discovered that the primary responsibility for dealing with the calamity lay with a man who’d been dismissed as an incompetent from his previous job as the director of a luxury-show-horse organization.

And the president went on television and said that nobody could have anticipated the collapse of the unfortunate city’s levees. In God’s sweet name, engineers anticipated it. Politicians anticipated it. The poor in the Ninth Ward certainly anticipated it. Hell, four generations of folksingers anticipated it.

Indeed.

Fights over evolution—and its faddish new camouflage, intelligent design, a pseudoscience that posits without proof or method that science is inadequate to explain existence and that supernatural causes must be considered—roil up school districts across the country. The president of the United States announces that he believes ID ought to be taught in the public schools on an equal footing with the theory of evolution. And in Dover, Pennsylvania, during one of these many controversies, a pastor named Ray Mummert delivers the line that both ends our tour and, in every real sense, sums it up:

“We’ve been attacked,” he says, “by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture.”

Indeed. I say it’s time that we attacked a bit more forcefully. ID is the poster child for Idiot America as a “fight” to be “won.” There is no fighting fact, and science is not the opposition of faith. Whether it’s global warming, the energy crisis, genetic engineering, stem cell research, evolution, or a dozen other scientific concepts that this country is unwilling to accept: we need to get with the rest of the world, or learn to speak Chinese. Cause if we fall behind, they will pick up the pieces.

Categories
Library Issues Personal

More Blaise

From Jessamyn, over at librarian.net:

More on the Blaise Cronin/blogger back and forth. Apparently the story of Cronin’s lambasting from the blogger community has taken on legs of its own and is quoted in this Christian Science Monitor article about anonymity.

Funny…my lambasting from back in April has my name right at the top. Fancy that.

Categories
Personal The Living Dead

Bluegrass Zombie Action

Evidently, every year in Lexington, there is a group that gets together on Halloween and re-creates Michael Jackson’s video Thriller.

Why?

Who knows.

Thriller in Lexington

All I know is that zombies + Lexington is teh hawt.

Note the movie theatre marquee in the picture…that’s the Kentucky Theatre, where I spent many a teenage evening watching films of all sorts, from the Blade Runner director’s cut to Fritz the Cat. Makes me miss the bluegrass.

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Personal

Happy Halloween!

Had a pretty quiet halloween here on the homefront. Only one trick or treater, a mini-spiderman. We spent the rest of the evening watching Dawn of the Dead and drinking hot chocolate. All in all, not the night of debauched trickery that some may have had, but an ok evening for us.

Next year, though: party!

Categories
Digital Culture Personal

WordPress.com

It appears that the gang behind WordPress is launching a blogger-like hosted blogging solution over at WordPress.com. I got a sneak-preview invite to it, and here’s my thoughts.

Dashboard

The admin area looks much like the standard area for the “standard” version of wordpress, and includes the Dashboard area. I’d love for this area to include the ability to personalize the RSS feeds coming in…we’ll see if that pops up in the full release.

Write

They’ve snuck a couple of fancy new AJAXy features in to the Write panel, including a drag-n-drop photo area which takes the guesswork out of dealing with photos.

wppresentation.jpg

For some reason, the presentation aspect of the site is very limited…only a very small number (8) of different themes to choose from, and no ability to format the CSS/HTML directly (unlike blogger, where you can make changes to the actual HTML of a given template). According to the FAQ, they’ll be changing that in the future to give people more control.

They’ve made WordPress categories more “taglike” and included a useful little popup that suggests other “tags” when you create a new category (much like del.icio.us).

Overall, it’s an interesting option in the hosted blogging world. I’ve been using the server version of WordPress for a long while now (since the .9, I believe) and have been incredibly pleased. If they can carry over the same usefulness to the hosted version, it should be an excellent option.

wpflock

Looks like wordpress.com is in league with Flock…an interesting pairing. They certainly seem to appeal to the same demographic.

If anyone got this far, and wants an invite, it looks like I’ve got one to give out. Give me a yell if you want to use wordpress.com as your blog, and I’ll send it your way.

Categories
Personal

Back

After a truly trying week, I’m back at work and trying to pick up various pieces of things that fell through cracks while gone for 9 days.

Hopefully, all will return to normal soon, and I’ll be blogging regularly. For now, I’m beat. Pithy comments and neat technology will be heading your way soon.

Categories
Personal

Thanks

I’d like to thank those that sent condolences, and for the few random readers who might not know, and might care…my mother-in-law, Beverly Sandlin, passed away this past weekend. Betsy and I have spent this week with her family, and while it’s been a terrible time, the support of friends and family have gotten us through this initial grieving.

Thanks to everyone, and I hope to be back online soon and back into a routine.

Categories
Digital Culture Personal

New stuff

So…I’ve decided to try out Google AdWords. You can see them in the left hand column, and I hope that they are not particularly intrusive. This is literally just an experiment, to see if people actually click them, especially on a blog with as low traffic as mine. If they become an issue…off they go!

Plus, if you just want to throw some support my way…click away! 🙂

EDIT: Justin left a comment, but I’m interested in hearing from anyone…what do you think about adwords on blogs? Is advertising the devil? Are there different levels of hell depending on how it’s done? I’m curious what people think/feel about ads on a private (that is, non-directly-commercial) site.

Categories
Personal

Can’t take the sky from me…

Serenity

Short review of the new Joss Whedon film Serenity:

It rocked my face right off. Seriously. I’m looking around for my face right now. Has anyone seen it?

Go see this movie right now so that Joss may make many more of these.