This is Fermi 2
Sounds like a Muppet name, doesn’t it?
Last week I drove to Michigan on business south of Detroit and saw these cooling towers in the near distance. I’ve seen them from I-75 before, but they always seemed so far off the highway. I was mesmerized, couldn’t get close enough. I asked the nice man at the gate if I could drive closer to take pictures and he said, “you can drive to those pylons up ahead and make a u-turn and get on outta here.” He didn’t say it, but “little Missy” was implied by his tone of voice.
The first Fermi reactor (Fermi 1) suffered a partial meltdown and a release of radiation in 1966 during a test run. Engineers were able to intervene and contain the radiation, but the accident caused quite a scare and even prompted some officials to initially consider evacuating portions of southeastern Michigan, including the city of Detroit. Fermi 1 finally began operating again in 1970, but shut down for good in 1972.
But everything’s okay now!
Our New National Pastime Is Reviewing Avatar
Even Slavoj Zizek gave his critique:
Cameron’s superficial Hollywood Marxism (his crude privileging of the lower classes and caricatural depiction of the cruel egotism of the rich) should not deceive us. Beneath this sympathy for the poor lies a reactionary myth, first fully deployed by Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous. It concerns a young rich person in crisis who gets his (or her) vitality estored through brief intimate contact with the full-blooded life of the poor. What lurks behind the compassion for the poor is their vampiric exploitation.
In Cameron’s defense, after District 9, every Sci-Fi film narrative is sure to pale in comparison. His was just the more glaring of failures.
Tonight’s awards should be interesting.
this unique 18-minute genre has its own requirements
From a Wired article on how to ace a TED Talk:
“I’m surprised to see that half the people here know my career in some detail and the other half don’t know who I am,” he says.
Science is fine, but not when it messes with our illusions.
If she had included solar power and African child warriors, it would have been so perfect a TED talk that there would have been no need for others.
Wolfram wraps his talk by saying that when it comes to trying to boil down the universe to a simple algorithm, “it’s almost embarrassing not to at least try.”
“Just because someone has an ego,” he says, citing a writer whose name I can’t read from my scribbled notes, “doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
myjumpsuit.com — Casual Jumpsuits for Work and Leisure
(via lonelysandwich)
In case you missed it
After passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights” — including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.
Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power.
“True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
By 1967, King had also become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — a year to the day before he was murdered — King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them.
Common life problems
This post from McSweeney’s is ten (10) years old and aging like a fine wine:
S O M E C O M M O N
L I F E P R O B L E M S , W I T H
P O S S I B L E S O L U T I O N S .BY TIM CARVELL
1. Have you ever noticed how, if you are with a friend — let us call him Gary, because I don’t actually know any Garys — and he is doing something annoying, like cracking his knuckles, and you say, “If you crack your knuckles one more time, Gary, honest to God, I’ll kill you right here and now”, and then, of course, Gary — because it would be funny — deliberately cracks his knuckles, and then what you do is, you lunge at his neck and scream this sort of exaggerated, joking scream, because that is what people do in this situation in cartoons. But then there’s always an awkward moment, once you’ve lunged, because you then need to stop lunging and sort of withdraw and compose yourself, because you’re not really going to kill him just for cracking his knuckles, but you did have to follow through on the premise of your joke. And now you’re both in this weird state of not having the joke followed through in a satisfactory manner, like it would be in a cartoon. I have a solution for this. I would suggest that, instead of saying, “If you crack your knuckles one more time, Gary, honest to God, I’ll kill you right here and now”, you should say, “If you crack your knuckles one more time, Gary, honest to God, I’ll gouge your eyes out with my thumbs.” And then, once he’s cracked his knuckles and smirked, you can wipe that smug fucking smile off his face by gouging out his eyes, and you’d be totally justified. Is my thinking.
2. You’ll notice how, when walking down the street, you’ll sometimes find yourself facing someone going in the opposite direction, and each of you is blocking the other, and when you move to the left, the other person (let’s say it’s Gary again) moves to the right, and vice versa, and after you’ve done this, say, twice, it’s almost impossible not to do it, and now you’re having far more interaction with this other person than you really want to have, and you’re both looking at each other all apologetic and embarrassed. It is an awkward impasse. My solution for this is to embrace the situation: If you two are going to keep blocking each other, make a game out of it and actually try and block the other person. Feint, dart, try and anticipate his every move just by watching his eyes, and for every time you block him, you get a point. And if he does manage to slip by, well, then, your awkward impasse is solved, now, isn’t it? It’s win-win. I am a genius.
3. Let’s say the cable installer (Gary) has just come to your home to install the cable. Actually, you had cable already: He just needed to flip a switch and turn it on. Took less than five minutes. Now, the question is, do you tip him for the visit? On the one hand, he did have to get into his truck and drive to your home. On the other, that is what he’s paid to do, and it’s not like he’s in the same situation as a waiter, where the restaurant pays them less than the minimum wage and then expects them to make up the rest in tips. And besides, maybe he’s a professional, and would be insulted by a tip! But on the other hand, does everyone tip, and do you look like a jerk if you don’t? Will he hate you? How do you make the cable person not hate you? There are two solutions here, it seems to me: The first is to simply ask, “So, do you guys take tips?” And if he says yes, give him some money — not a lot, a few dollars. The other solution is to think about all this, then show him to the door, and then feel guilty for not tipping him, and then pray the Hail Mary, over and over, and then touch all the doorknobs in the house in three sets of three, and then pray some more.
paraphrased quote out of context
Journalist: “The journey from Santo Domingo to Port Au Prince which normally takes five hours took twelve because there was so much traffic.”
Larry: “Aid coming in?”
Journalist: “I saw a lot of journalists, not much food and water.”
Design Within Reach, fall from grace
Design Within Reach used to offer beautiful, original modernist furniture. Apparently, now they have taken to manufacturing and selling knock-offs of the furniture they used to sell at the same price as the originals.
Fuckwads.
Sperm whale foreskin is supposedly the softest leather on earth
Warning: if reading the word “penis” over and over again makes you uncomfortable, you might want to avert your eyes.
from the comments
And I had a postcard once that I wish I could find again. It featured a park at the center of some town in Wisconsin (or some nearby state), and the results of the annual fox roundup. Apparently the whole population of the town would get out, form a large circle of beaters around the town, herd all of the foxes into the park–where all the little boys were put to work with clubs to bash the foxes. The postcard shows the jovial crowd looking on with approval as a boy with a club poses, foot resting on a pile of fur and legs and noses. This is the way humans invented evil, in my view. Or at least an indication of how people don’t see evil when they are doing it, but then do when it is turned on them.
think Roomba
From an article about the legal, social, and ethical consequences of living with robots:
After returning to visit the Stanford hospital several years later, Horvitz noticed a sign hanging above the spot where he had his harrowing experience. It read: “Please Do Not Board The Elevator With The Robot.”
How to buy on eBay
I am continually amazed at how many people incrementally bid up an item they want six days before an auction is over. It’s like watching someone walk around with a switch unknown to him flipped permanently to stupid. It’s easy, really. All it requires is patience, knowing what you want, what it is worth, what you are willing to pay for it, and then, again, and this is the important part — waiting.
g v e
Tyler Cowen on good vs evil thinking:
An alternative response is 5. “Sooner or later the Republicans will in fact win and I cannot prevent that. Right now the Democrats should spend less money, given the truth of #3. In this regard the Republicans, although evil, are in fact correct in asking the Democrats to spend less money, if only to counterbalance their own depravity.”
reprogramming predators
Ultimately, it’s an ethical choice whether intelligent moral agents opt to create such a world – or instead express our natural status quo bias and perpetuate the biology of suffering indefinitely.
(via marginal revolution)
is it wrong to
Which miniature animals make good pets?
Micro pigs are the new must-have pets.
See more micro pets.
Last night
Vacuuming mosquitoes.
This type of place will break you down, man.
Dear clusterflock
Do you poke at ant piles?
moral hummers
As we studied American Hummer owners and their ideological beliefs, we found that they consider Hummer driving a highly moral consumption choice. For Hummer owners it is possible to claim the moral high ground… The moralistic critique of their consumption choices readily inspired Hummer owners to adopt the role of the moral protagonist who defends American national ideals.
quote out of context
Now heaping praise on the “black, African, Kenyan” President of the United States.
You can’t have your lamb and eat it too
So a group of children at Lydd primary school decided to eat it. I might understand an uproar if the teachers said, “Well, I reck’n it’s about that time. Say g’bye to Marcus,” but the kids decided it.
Nietzsche or Aristotle?
A long interview that about seven people will care about in which Alasdair MacIntyre describes the trajectory of his intellectual life and philosophical career. I feel great affinity for his thinking since he finds himself straddling the ancient celtic (for me, biblical and, oddly, the postmodern return to) narrative tradition and the modern, Anglo-Saxon utilitarian tradition. This man is one of the most strikingly brilliant, level headed, and relevant thinkers I have ever encountered.
In effect, at least since your book After Virtue, you have concentrated on restoring political legitimacy to the so-called great questions. How did these efforts contrast with those of the analytical establishment?
What analytic philosophy gains in clarity and rigor, it loses in being unable to provide decisive answers to substantive philosophical questions. It enables us—at least it enabled me—to rule out certain possibilities. But while it can identify, for each alternative view that remains, what commitments one will be making by way of entailments and presuppositions, it is not capable in itself of producing any reason for asserting any one thing over any other. When analytic philosophers do reach substantive conclusions, as they often do, those conclusions only derive in pan from analytic philosophy. There is always some other agenda in the background, sometimes concealed, sometimes obvious. In moral philosophy it is usually a liberal political agenda.
I particular love this snippet, if you would forgive me my vanity, since it reminds me of something I noticed about historical memory in culture:
Do you believe you have complete control of the ”ideological” net that governs your thought?
It was in the latter part of my analytic stage, around the mid-sixties, that I developed a new agenda. I had come to recognize that a second weakness of analytic philosophy was the extent of the divorce between its inquiries and the study of the history of philosophy, and that analytic philosophy, and more especially its moral philosophy, could only itself be adequately understood if placed in historical context and thus understood as the intelligible outcome of extended argument and debate [emphasis added]. So I wrote A Short History of Ethics, a book from whose errors I learned a lot.
Family values legislator
has a broad definition of family.
Overheard during the investigation of the burglary of Menkaure’s tomb
Guard 1: Pepi just can’t seem to keep his hands on the reins.
Guard 2: I’ll say. This never would’ve happened when Khufu was God-on-Earth.
