Disregarding third-party candidates, Professors DellaVigna and Kaplan found that towns that offered Fox by 2000 increased their vote share for the Republican presidential candidate by 6 percentage points (to 54 percent, from 48 percent) from 1996 to 2000, while those that did not offer Fox increased theirs by an even larger 7 percentage points (to…
The PoMos are right: Narratives don’t get built out of facts. Narratives tell us which facts matter. Within a narrative, it’s important that journalistic reports be accurate. But accuracy is not enough to bring about intelligibility or to tear down an existing intelligibility. —David Weinberger —Jay Rosen’s New Lessons (Joho the Blog) A great take on…
Existing legislation already prevents non-official sponsors from using distinctive “Olympic marks” like the Olympic rings. But the new bill will make it illegal to combine words like “games”, “medals”, “gold”, “2012”, “sponsor” or “summer” in any form of advertising. —Olympics bill comes under attack (BBC) Note that the Olympics Bill seems to apply only to advertising…
The skinny bar is made up of old and red stars and is about 27,000 light years in length, about 7,000 light years longer than previously believed. The bar is at a 45 degree angle to the line between our Sun and the center of the galaxy and may put the Milky Way in a…
Oh give me some foam, whose pieces won’t roam, from the tank, on which its attached, with seldom the sight, of pieces in flight, the shuttle, it hardly gets scratched. Foam! Foam on the tank! Stay stuck, to the place you’re attached! With seldom the sight, of your pieces in flight, The shuttle, it hardly…
A magical Walt Disney World family vacation was ruined last weekend by the stringent policies and protocol of the Walt Disney Company. […] The Mahaffeys’ dissatisfaction began soon after their arrival. Despite being in a huge, open park with dozens of attractions, the family was unable to roam freely, confronted at every turn by signs…
Jesus suffered (i.e. “permitted”) the little children to come unto him. Some were probably squalling. Emily Kasky blogs about an inconsiderate mother who didn’t take her disruptive child out of Mass. I wouldn’t be so hasty to equate non-spanking with lack of discipline, or to equate spanking with the teaching of empathy. I don’t mean…
If daily life is not concerned with familiar economic activities and the whole of life is not informed with religious purposes, then what is life all about in Star Trek? Well, the story is about a military establishment, Star Fleet, and one ship in particular in the fleet, the Enterprise. One might not expect this…
In 2003, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey reported that his group had found “the biggest dinosaur that we know of in Virginia.” Earlier this year an Indian newspaper reported on a dinosaur discovery that they termed the “oldest fossil record from Dhar district in Madhya Pradesh.” Not long after, papers in Rio were…
Bangerter and Heath studied 500 US media reports between 1993 and 2002 to see how classical music became a must for children, and considered in which states the articles were published. They found a correlation between unsatisfactory education systems and the number of reports published about the effect. Some states even heavily promoted the use…
Insane, right? I mean, let’s say our friend John has his Bonebiter (one of countless powerful weapons in WoW) and a man steals it somehow. Should the thief be convicted of a crime and punished in the real world? Did you snort with laughter at that question? Why? The victim worked many hours to “earn”…
E.D. Nixon, then a leader of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, had been waiting for a test case to challenge bus segregation and vowed to help Colvin after her father posted bail. But then came the second-guessing: Colvin‘s father mowed lawns; her mother was a maid. Churchgoing people, but they lived in King Hill,…
He was as rabidly hostile to conventional family life as Marx or Engels, but he was a much more effective and powerful critic, because his criticism did not remain on the level of philosophical abstraction. On the contrary, he laid bare the factions and revolutions of family life, its lies and miseries, in compelling and…
In August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first website. Fourteen years on, he tells BBC Newsnight’s Mark Lawson how blogging is closer to his original idea about a read/write web. The idea was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an…
It’s a beautiful day in this bloggerhood A beautiful day for a blogger Would you read mine Could you read mine It’s a bloggerly day in this bloggerhood A bloggerly day for a blogger Would you read mine Could you read mine I’ve always wanted to read a blogger just like you I’ve always wanted…
—Writing Machines (Flickr) Great photos of old typewriters and old computers. Similar:The girl around the house casually dressed "as a Jacobite."AmusingStephen Coles’ The Anatomy of Type, reviewed.Talk nerdy to me. You’re my type. What …AestheticsJuly 7, 1936: Get a Grip — Phillips Screws Up the ToolboxThis Wired article also mentions the Can…BusinessTechnical and Literary Writing: What’s…
When the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad was being built in the mountains just after the Civil War (last week I walked on its old tracks), the work crews were worked hard. The most famous worker was John Henry, a steel driver who hammered spikes into the mountainside to make space for sticks of dynamite that…
In the 1960s, Walt Disney joked that one day he’d replace his elite corps of animators, known as the “Nine Old Men,” and their slow, expensive way of making hand-drawn movies, with Audio-Animatronic figures. At the end of last month, Walt’s joke came true. The studio bearing his name announced that, due to a “changing…
Today is the 10th anniversary of the Netscape initial public stock offering (IPO). To say that the IPO changed things is an understatement. —Dan Gillmor —The Netscape IPO, a Decade Later (Dan Gillmor’s Blog) Similar:When Robert Pinsky Wrote a Video Game[F]or a brief time in the mid-nineteen-e…CultureThe Evolution of 'Star Trek'(Infographic) | Space.comThe first 45 years…
· 50 million U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005. That is roughly 30% of all U.S. Internet users and 1 in 6 of the total U.S. population · Five hosting services for blogs each had more than 5 million unique visitors in that period, and four individual blogs had…