Link Banana

This may be the reason YouTube was invented.

(via Fimoculous)

Though I strongly suspect that much of my affection for this is because it features my alma mater, Stanley Fish offers a worthwhile argument against even mingling politics and academia.

The University of Colorado is considering a $9 million program to bring high-profile conservatives to teach on the left-leaning Boulder campus.

Embedded in this sentence is the following chain of reasoning: The University of Colorado, Boulder, is left-leaning and therefore it is appropriate to spend university funds (technically state funds) in an effort to redress a political imbalance.

Wrong on all counts. First, what does “left-leaning” mean? Does the university issue policy statements on controversial matters? Does its administration come out for gay marriage or for gun control or for reproductive rights? Does the university endorse liberal candidates, or criticize Supreme Court decisions, or contribute to Move On.org? If the answer to any of these questions were “yes,” “left-leaning” would be an accurate designation. It would also be a reason to deny the university its tax exempt status and demand that it register as a lobbyist. But of course the university does none of these things. How then does it lean left?

Another reason to love Wikipedia.

Two NYT Op-Eds from last Friday cry out for the good old days (and illustrate how broken my “readflow” is). They both make worthy points.

• Adam Kohen wants to know why states have been stripped of the ability to regulate many things they used to. Through the supremacy clause, the Bush administration stopped them from acting on, for example, sub-prime lenders before the crash.
• Meanwhile, Elizabeth Royte thinks that if big cities had more water fountains — as they did in the old days — there would be less demand for bottled water.

Because I didn’t know slugs could be so colorful.

(via kottke.org)

The nice way of saying “examining human excrement thoughout history.” Which is, of course, the nice way of saying “the history of poop.” According to the annoyingly anti-intellectual dispatch for Charlotte Allen, it was a hot topic at Kalamazoo’s midevilist conference.

(via Slate)

Because it gives me a small measure of comfort to know that even their fellow Europeans are capable of confusing Latvia and Lithuania, I note that the Czech soccer federation did the following:

The Latvian flag was in the game program along with a photo of the Latvian national soccer team. Before the match, Czech organizers played Latvia’s national anthem. However, the Czech Republic was facing Lithuania on Tuesday night, not Latvia.

America has more prisoners on death row than any country but Pakistan. (China’s figures are open to dispute.) It’s either a triumph of justice that they’re still alive — and likely appealing their cases — or a damnable pity that they’re there at all.

Apparently dogs, like people, are made peaceful by oppulence:

Adaptations by individual dogs have added up to a dramatic shift in canine culture. Begging is a submissive activity, so today there are fewer all-out interpack wars, which sometimes used to last for months, according to Mr. Poyarkov. Within packs there are more stable social hierarchies that allow the whole group to prosper.

(via kottke.org, where Cliff Kuang is making me feel like a chump)

Because I get sick of people judging whole “generations” of people (like in this 60 Minutes story, which re-aired over the weekend), I point to this line from a Newsweek story:

The old have been wringing their hands about the young’s cultural wastelands and ignorance of history at least since admirers of Sophocles and Aeschylus bemoaned the popularity of Aristophanes (“The Frogs,” for Zeussakes?!) as leading to the end of (Greek) civilization as they knew it.

These two things recently caught my eye.

• Kobe Bryant speaks Italian. Now you know. (via Neatorama)
• Chinlone is a traditional Burmese sport, whose ball is about halfway between a soccer ball and a hacky sack. That also approximates what it is. (via Good)

Short answer: no. Slightly longer answer:

Virtually no fuel is wasted during startup, and only a thimbleful is burned as the car roars to life. So forget about the 30-minute axiom you were raised on—the threshold at which it makes more sense to shut off rather than to idle should be expressed in seconds, not minutes.

A lot of environmental organizations advocate the 10-second rule: If you’re going to be stopped for more than 10 seconds, it’s best to shut off your engine.

When two publications simultaneously carry what is essentially the same — rather long — story, it’s got to be worth noting.

• In The New Yorker, Lawrence Wright has an exhaustive — 14 internet pages — profile of “Dr. Fadl”, who recently published a book admonishing Al Qaeda for it’s tactics.
• The New Republic’s (slightly) briefer article sees a trend of people like Dr. Fadl, who dissent from Al Qaeda’s tactics even if they share some of their aims.

The essential point of both, as stated in TNR:

Although Benotman’s public rebuke of Al Qaeda went unnoticed in the United States, it received wide attention in the Arabic press. In repudiating Al Qaeda, Benotman was adding his voice to a rising tide of anger in the Islamic world toward Al Qaeda and its affiliates, whose victims since September 11 have mostly been fellow Muslims. Significantly, he was also joining a larger group of religious scholars, former fighters, and militants who had once had great influence over Al Qaeda’s leaders, and who — alarmed by the targeting of civilians in the West, the senseless killings in Muslim countries, and Al Qaeda’s barbaric tactics in Iraq — have turned against the organization, many just in the past year.

Daniel Bergner’s profile of Shurvon Phillip, a man struggling against his body since he sustained a brain injury in Iraq, is a sometimes difficult read. The conclusion:

And sometimes impossible to overcome, too, was the idea that Shurvon’s life might not be worth living; that I, in his place, would rather stop breathing, cease thinking, that I would prefer to die.

Whenever this idea took hold, I recalled a medical ethicist at R.I.C. telling me about studies showing that doctors and nurses tend to rate the quality of life of severely impaired patients to be far lower than the patients do themselves. The ethicist had spoken, then, about the ways that a life acquires meaning. And I thought about Malik scrambling onto Shurvon’s bed to show him pictures, and about Malik and Kyla curled and comforted on the floor below him. I thought, too, about a kind of exercise that Shurvon’s family discovered recently by chance and that Gail described: with Shurvon sitting in a wheelchair in the driveway, his nieces and nephews tossed inflatable beach balls, one pink and another blue, softly toward him, and he tried to move his arms to bat them back. “They were cheering like at a baseball game,” Gail said, remembering the first time the children did this. “ ‘Yeah! Go on Ya-Ya!’ ” Beach balls and high voices of excitement floated in the air around him.

Pretty much all you need to know.

(via kottke.org)

Firm evidence that high gas prices really make people think more and drive less.

At 11 billion miles less in March 2008 than in the previous March, this is the sharpest yearly drop for any month in FHWA history.

(via Marginal Revolution)

By now, everyone’s probably seen this. But We Made This’s theory that it was actually viral marketing is interesting enough to note:

A lot of people are saying that either the GPS signal wouldn’t transmit through the metal exterior of a plane, or that the flight plan would simply be too damned expensive, even if DHL are footing the bill. So did it actually happen, or is just a (rather finely crafted) viral? The site seems oddly free of the expected background to the genesis of the project, and Nordenankar seems to have very little web presence before doing it… though he did win a D&AD student award in an advertising category last year…

UPDATE (5/27/2008): The page has been changed to refelct that it is, indeed, a work of fiction. More at The Telegraph. (via waxy)

Senator Obama’s body man, Reggie Love, offers some stunningly out-of-touch details on the candidate.

DISLIKES

• Mayonnaise
• Salt and vinegar potato chips
• Asparagus (“if no other vegetables are available, he’ll eat it”)
• Soft drinks (he prefers water)

I was just thinking that the oft-mentioned dollar-a-day poverty line seems rather arbitrary. The Economist reports that it’s being reconsidered:

They gather 75 national poverty lines, ranging from Senegal’s severe $0.63 a day to Uruguay’s more generous measure of just over $9. From this collection, they pick the 15 lowest (Nepal, Tajikistan and 13 sub-Saharan countries) and split the difference between them. The result is a new international poverty line of $1.25 a day.

I rather enjoyed Terry Eagleton’s exploration of anonymity in literature for the London Review. He begins:

All literary works are anonymous, but some are more anonymous than others. It is in the nature of a piece of writing that it is able to stand free of its begetter, and can dispense with his or her physical presence. In this sense, writing is more like an adolescent than a toddler. I might pass you a note at a meeting, but a note is only a note if it can function in my absence. Writing, unlike speech, is meaning that has come adrift from its source. Some bits of writing – theatre tickets or notes to the milkman, for example – are more closely tied to their original contexts than Paradise Lost or War and Peace.

Also worth noting in that issue: Kevin Kopelson’s diary.