Blog posting about science article

General observation about something in the world. Segue to specific topic with new development. Link to online article about new development.

Personal opinion about new development. Statement considering straw-man version of opposite point of view, followed by refutation and return to original opinion.

Question to solicit comments?

Onion: TV News sucks

Great piece of satire about how dumb TV news is.


Reporter In Helicopter Pretty Sure Landslide Down There Somewhere

Westism

The New York Times' Western correspondent wrote a post today about bias against the West. He had me at Ore-uh-GUN. (I was saddened when I heard They Might Be Giants in concert persist in mispronouncing my home state, years after I'd heard an entire Portland audience correct them - causing them to nod in shame.)

Oregon and California may have enabled the voters to pass lots of tax cuts and mandatory spending measures, putting our legislatures in impossible situations making them responsible for massive cuts in schools and police without giving them the power to actually fix the system. But we're cool.

I suppose I shouldn't get too aggrieved. The Times is probably about to print another story about how all the restaurants in Portland are made of gold, and how we're all skinny from riding our bicycles everywhere to our supercool rock concerts. And then all their unemployed college students will move here and boost our unemployment rate back up above Michigan's.

Secrets

You have to wonder about the motivation of the scientists who did this one. Did they survey any men at all? Seems like we gossip, too.

Allegedly, women tell secrets in 2 days or less. I think that result is plausible, but I doubt there's anything special about women.

And this definitely goes in the "sure glad we cured cancer and war so we have time for stupid stuff like this" file.

Lawyer Fail

A lawyer bragged on TV that he would give a million dollars to anyone who could prove his client COULD have committed the crimes he was accused of.

Then a guy did. On video tape. Oops.

Even if he doesn't have to pay a million dollars, now there's video tape evidence undermining his case. Oops.

McClatchy vs. Daily Show

Here's the thing: The Daily Show sent a "reporter" to Iran to cover the elections. McClatchy Corp, owner of 32 daily newspapers, sent no one.

I can see that they couldn't afford to, and it's much easier to reprint whatever the New York Times produces. But this is exactly the sort of hole in reporting that I hope we figure out how to fill. Maybe the Huffington Post will eventually have a foreign correspondent doing reporting like this. But the Daily Show? Really?

My brain hurts.

NY Times still <3 Portland

I guess the New York Times reporter who loves Portland so much is still in town, and going to be for a while. At least he's moved on from cool places to playing golf. Which is remarkably less elitist out here than in most places. But it's still golf.

New York <3 Portland

Apparently the most emailed article today from the New York Times is about how affordable Portland is. My first instinct as a native is to hang my head and sigh, "Oh, no." I'm just sure that droves of hipsters will flock to my fair city and revel in our authenticity. Reading the story, I feel like they don't realize that one of the reasons prices are lower here is because wages are lower, not to mention 2nd highest in the nation unemployment. So hordes of unemployed hipsters moving here will just make matters worse. In the short term, anyway.

Of course, the Times was agog about our restaurant scene a couple years back, and I didn't see a huge shift in population then. But I haven't been studying the demographics closely.

Death of the Seattle PI

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is no more.

If all the reporters who got laid off had other work, and the stories they report on were still being reported, it would be a quaint anecdote about technological change, like the stopping of manufacture of Betamax tapes or tape cassettes or 8-track tapes. Tapes.

But since craigslist mortally wounded the financial model of the newspaper, no one has figured out how to fund professional reporters finding out stuff that bad people don't want us to know. Hopefully some genius will crack the code and make millions.

The New York Times collated several opinions observing that we're going through a revolution. That in time we will find ways to get and share news that will make the newspaper seem silly in retrospect. I just hope we get something better than what TV provides now, because TV news sucks. (Except Jim Lehrer, but nobody watches him.)

It's not the crime, it's the coverup

Just like Portland's current mayoral scandal, not to mention our past senatorial scandal, it seems like Illinois' new junior senator is in trouble. And not necessarily for what he did, but for lying about it.

First, "I never talked about fundraising for Blagojevich".
Then, "We talked about it, but I refused."
Today: "Well, I did try to raise money for him, but I didn't succeed."

God help us if this guy gets reelected. Politicians never learn from Jerry Springer's example. If caught doing something bad, admit it, apologize and move on. Trying to cover it up just makes it worse in the end.

Methane buses

The transportation of the future is here! The source of the new wonder fuel, which is powering Oslo buses? It's people!

Nonprofit news

I'm not the only one who thinks that the future of journalism is in the non-profit sector. It's a tough problem. Our government needs a robust press watching it to keep it honest. But most of the real work of journalism is done by newspapers, and several factors are driving newspapers out of business.

We need to keep journalists on staff, even as running a newspaper ceases being profitable. Even if newspapers go fully electronic, like the Christian Science Monitor, they still won't be profitable.

So we should stop expecting them to be. The New York Times should become a charitable non-profit. 501c3. You'd still sell copies of the paper, and you'd still sell ads (although you'd call it corporate sponsorship or partnership like public radio and TV do) but you'd accept donations and give tax deductions and stop trying to make a profit. Over time, the paper will go away and it'll all be online, and the fact that the profit evaporates won't matter so long as you can at least pay your bills.

It's problematic to try to get all the local city papers to do it too, but at least their future selves won't have to carry national news because the national news foundations will.

Grammar Police

Interesting column by Steven Pinker about the grammatical confusion by Chief Justice John Roberts at the inauguration. Seems Roberts was trying to avoid splitting an infinitive.

Pinker gives some amusing familiar examples, and makes the case that while you can't split an infinitive in Latin, it's not only possible in English, but it's completely natural to often split them.

Sad Day for Geeks

Today we learned that Patrick McGoohan and Ricardo Montalban have passed away.

Hopefully the afterlife is nothing like The Village or Ceti Alpha.

No home newspaper delivery Mon-Wed in Detroit

I guess I should have seen this coming, with the Christian Science Monitor dropping its print edition entirely.

The Detroit Free Press is suspending home delivery of its paper 3 days a week.

The downfall of journalism is tragic, and I hope society figures out a way to fill the void that dying newspapers leave. I'll keep my newspaper subscription for as long as it exists to subscribe to, but at some point I guess it'll just stop coming. I guess I'll have to start finding new places to get my local news.

The Second Coming!

I think the Messiah has been born on Earth.

This child being born is a miracle. The mother was on The Pill. And after she got pregnant, because the embryo very likely had (in fact does have) a genetic kidney disease, she had an abortion.

But the fetus survived the abortion procedure, not to mention ovulated right through the pill's hormonal restrictions. And now has been born, and is relatively healthy. (Apart from only having one working kidney.)

I think they should have named him Jesus. What kind of name is Finley for a Messiah?

My free internet is going away

Stupid free internet. Apparently the provider I use at home is shutting down in a month. I wish they would just turn off the free service, and I could start paying them.

I only used the free because it was available. They still are better than Comcast or Qwest. Now I have to choose between the lesser of two evils again.

And dammit, Comcast is just more competent. I'd rather give lots of money to competent evil than incompetent evil. But I'd rather pay some other provider for internet. Grr.

Plastics poison?

The mounting evidence that some plastics are poisonous is causing Nalgene to stop making polycarbonate bottles.

I'm frustrated that we need the Canadian government to make sure our water bottles don't poison us. I want the EPA and the FDA and the CPSC to do their jobs, and detect toys with lead and poisons in the water, and plastic bottles that are bad for you.

Dammit.

Here's the Oregonian's AP story.

We're engaged!

Last Saturday, I proposed to my girlfriend Katy. Well, now my fiancé, Katy.

I surprised her in the Rhododendron Garden with the help of her friend Cassie.

The ring you see is my great-grandmother's engagement ring.

And yes, we've talked about timing. We're contemplating June 2009.

Autism

A few stories in the news lately about autism.

First, a fascinating story in WIRED about an autistic girl who uses technology to communicate. Probably. She made a video of herself being very autistic, acting in ways that seem very wild and strange. And then captioned it with an inner monologue that makes a kind of sense. Autistic people tell us that they live in a different world from the rest of us, but one with just as much internal consistency and reason as our own. This girl advocates for acceptance of that other way of knowing as equally legitimate.

And then there's the parents who are freaked out by their kids becoming autistic around the time they get vaccinated. I'm sorry for their anguish and pain, but I get frustrated by their inability to recognize that vaccines don't cause autism. And more frustrated when NPR reports on a recent court settlement where parents are getting money in compensation for autism, but don't report the bare fact that vaccines don't cause autism. I wish we knew what the cause was. But we do know it's not vaccines.

These parents allege that the mercury-based preservative thimerosal is to blame. In Denmark in 1992, thimerosal was removed from all vaccines. Autism continued to increase. In 1999, thimerosal was removed from US vaccines. Autism has continued to increase. It ain't the thimerosal.