On & Offline

Musings and Maunderings

G*O*D
Turb [free book]
DrugTest
Advice To Young Poets

lighght

Mailto:: rur42 at yahoo.com

 
Breathalyze us all

At this year's prom, Westwood High School students will have to embrace a new rite of passage before stepping into the dance hall: Proving that they haven't been drinking.

What's the problem? I say, let's all take drug and alcohol tests.

Teachers. Administrators, Politicians. Supremes (any one recall Renquist's addiction?)

Drug Test Us All.

.
posted by degustibus at 6:47 AM

 
The Real OC?

One of the brilliant guilty defendants:

Haidl has been held in county jail since November, after a series of brushes with the law that include a statutory rape charge related to another 16-year-old girl he met at a party the night of the mistrial.

.

posted by degustibus at 6:42 AM

 
Morality by Enron

In paen to The OC, "The OC Rebellion" Cal the villain aptly described:

body had been engineered by NASA and behaves as if his morality had been engineered by Enron

via Gawker, jeez

.
posted by degustibus at 7:59 AM

 
Deadwood Legend & The Prepared Mind

The New Yorker’s 14 Feb double-issue features a profile of David Milch, co-creator of “NYPD Blue” and the man responsible for the riveting, foul-mouthed and thoroughly excellent HBO series “Deadwood,” an intensely brutal Western set in a real South Dakota boom town in the late 19th century. As is the New Yorker’s wont, the article is unavailable online — or if it was at one time, I was, as always, too late in catching up on my issues to be inspired to go seek out the online version.
Khoi Vinh

In the New Yorker piece, Mark Singer mentions David Milch's "prodigious memory."

Milch:: You know, the chemist Fredrich August Kekule worked for twenty years trying to figure out the structure of the benzene ring., and he couldn't do it And then one night he was sleeping , and he had a vision of a snake swallowing its tail. So he tld his students about it, and they said, "Not bad. You go to sleep and you wake up with that." And he said, "Visions come to prepared spirits."

What Kekule really said:

One fine summer evening, I was returning by the last omnibus. I fell into a reverie and lo, the atoms were gambolling before my eyes! Whenever hitherto these diminutive beings had appeared to me, they had always been in motion; but up to that time I had never been able to discern the nature of their motion. Now, however, I saw how, frequently, two smaller atoms united to form a pair; how a larger one embraced two smaller ones; how still larger ones kept hold of three or even four of the smaller; whilst the whole kept swirling in a giddy dance. I saw how the larger ones formed a chain, dragging the smaller ones after them, but only at the ends of the chain...The cry of the conductor: "Clapham Road," awakened me from my dreaming; but I spent part of the night in putting on paper at least sketches of these dream forms. This was the origin of structure theory (Schaffer, 1994, p. 23). cited by Michael E. Gorman, University of Virginia, Transforming Nature, Chapter 2, Boston: Kluwer Academic Press, 1998 link

Michael Gorman adds:

Kekule also provided other accounts of his discovery, including one involving circling snakes that suggested the way the atoms might be linked. Kekule no doubt saw part of the solution in dreams and reveries, but the working out of the rest was time-consuming, difficult and involved frequent negotiations with others; these stories helped establish Kekule's priority and originality. Indeed, Kekule's address resulted, in part, from a deliberate effort by the organizers of the conference to establish him as a scientific hero (Schaffer, 1994). All of this is not to say that Kekule was lying. Human memory for complex events is reconstructive, and tends to reflect what we thing ought to have happened, not what actually happened (Neisser, 1982).

Kekule: “Let us learn to dream, gentlemen: then perhaps we will find the truth. But let us beware of publishing our dreams until they have been tested by the waking understanding.” – August Kekule von Stradonitz (taken from The Scientific Attitude, 2nd Edn by Frederic Grinnell)

The prepared mind? That was Louis Pasteur.

The great tragedies of science are the slaying of beautiful hypotheses by ugly facts.
(That's T. H. Huxley)

& tha-tha-thah-that's all folks (Porky Pig).

.
posted by degustibus at 7:46 AM

 
Read The Seattle Times takedown of Infospace and then gabble on about the virtues of privatizing Social Security:

InfoSpace's lazy Susan and stock-warrant arrangement with netgenShopper were not the only questionable deals the company crafted during volatile 2000 as a way to create revenue, thereby fooling investors and shareholders.

InfoSpace had another trick for boosting revenues: Swapping free advertising with other Internet companies. Known as "barter revenue," such swaps were allowed at the time by accounting rules, though the maneuver was controversial because no cash is exchanged.

By the end of 2000, InfoSpace counted at least $22 million in 2000 revenues from stock warrants and $32 million from "related party" and lazy Susan transactions. Together with barter advertising, these deals accounted for more than a quarter of InfoSpace's revenues that year.

These accounting gimmicks fulfilled the forecast of finance director MacLeod, who had warned earlier that hitting revenue targets will be tough "unless we buy revenue."

And just how real were the numbers? Again, MacLeod said in an e-mail to Jain that the stock-warrant deals "are driving revenues artificially high."

But the investing public had no idea at the time. Only InfoSpace insiders knew the extent to which their dot-com was built on artifice. They also knew what they had to do next.

Lovely....................................

More skulduggery: from 2-25-02 New York Mag :::::::::::::::::

The Spinner's Circle

Wall Street keeps looking for the next Enron, but the real nightmare is Global Crossing, whose method for spinning gossamer profits is perfectly legal -- and much more widespread. By James J. Cramer

The first time I ever heard the term lazy Susan -- when it was not in connection with the round platform that revolved on my mom's dining-room table -- was eighteen months ago, and I couldn't believe my ears. An executive, a prominent executive of a major communications company, had told me how it worked. He said that he would give my company, TheStreet.com, a $6 million investment -- his company was brimming with cash, flush from an underwriting -- and then I would give it back in return for, well, doing nothing. We would get the imprimatur of the transaction with someone "respected" in the business, and his company would book the revenue. Let me get this straight, I said, you would give us an investment, but it would just be put right back to you in the form of some services payment? He nodded. "Sure, like a lazy Susan, you know," he said, and flicked his wrist as if to spin that lazy Susan filled with goodies toward me and then flicked it again so it was clear that it would come back to him. "Everybody's doing it."

Ya gotta just stand back and view with jaws gaping the awesome chutzpahhhhhh of these characters.

.
posted by degustibus at 1:12 AM

 
Not on the front page.

The Nation | Blog | The Daily Outrage | The Real Story of the Insurgency | Ari Berman
posted by degustibus at 3:06 PM

 
Shriveled Genitalia & Genitalia Terrorism

Gad -- the laws against genitalia terrorism are spreading:

I cannot, in other words, imagine living in Alabama. Or Texas. Or Louisiana. Or Georgia. Or Tennessee. Or in any of the handful of terrified and morally convulsive states where they prohibit such activities, where the selling of "genital stimulating devices" is outright illegal and deeply dreaded.

And stores that sell such nightmare devices are declared a threat to the community and a hazard to the soul and a sure sign of the devil and if you are caught selling a vibrator or using a dildo you could get 10 years in prison and/or be condemned to live in Alabama for the rest of your life.

*******************************************************************************

Oh, it is fun to laugh. It is fun to mock and point and say, aww, how cute, those lost and weird and backass Southern states where most people are just trying to live noble upstanding honest lives but where they still insist on putting stickers on biology textbooks to warn of the "dangers" of the theory of evolution.

Places where raw honest sexuality is a foreign language and homosexuality is considered a disease and where they lovingly allow sales of Viagra and Cialis and where they inject vats of Prozac and Xanax into their bodies alongside truckloads of deep-fried obesity-happy everything, but the thought of someone using a sex toy to please herself or her lover and to add to the overall positive orgasmic vibe of the planet is considered on par, legally speaking, with pedophilia, or burglary, or being from France.

And it's nice to think that, with the exception of a handful of sexless lawmakers and deeply repressed religious leaders who apparently possess genitalia so shriveled and sad not even their favorite Thai prostitutes can revive it, the vast majority of Americans scoff at this sort of law, sigh and shake their heads and move on. Yes, even those who live in Alabama, or in Texas (certainly in Austin, which mostly sort of pretends it's just visiting Texas and doesn't actually live there).
Mark Morford

Amen.

Next to be outlawed-- hairbrush handles, buggy whips, middle fingers, hairy palms, stick shifts (four on the floor gearshift, creature of urban legend, spanish fly)

But. It's okay if you have a prescription: Regina Lynn, Wired's cybersex reporter, says:

I have tendonitis in both arms, a chronic condition that causes me quite a bit
of pain if I'm not careful. I use various devices to help me work around it,
including a wireless curved keyboard and an ergonomic mouse that I can use with
either hand. If I have a bad flare-up, I stay off the keys for a day or two and
hire my sister to type for me.

And I never masturbate by hand anymore.

[Woo! Woo! To much information, Regina!] Hence the need for legal sex toys for those with disabilities. The Alabama law recognizes that sex toys are not inherently criminal. It exempts sexual devices used "for a bona fide medical, scientific, educational, legislative, judicial or law enforcement purpose." It just isn't clear on what qualifies as "bona fide" -- or who makes that decision.

Lynn also notes:

Very few sexual aids have been recognized by the FDA as medical devices. One is
the Eros Therapy, a suction cup that is placed on the clitoris. Another is the Ferticare, a sleeve-style vibrator designed for men with spinal cord injuries.
Both are available by prescription, and may be covered by insurance. The problem is that even if this particular type of sex aid works for you -- and I can tell you right now that a suction cup doesn't do anything for me -- not everyone can use them easily.

Thus a new hustle is born, the sextoy script doc.
.
posted by degustibus at 9:57 AM