Plagarism

As our nation's youth prepares etc. I thought it would be a good time to talk about plagarism. I wanted to back when the Ben Domenech scandal was being blown out of proportion, but I didn't have a pulpit back then. So I had to keep my big ideas to myself, which will give me a stroke if I'm not careful. SO. Here they are.

Everyone tells the college students that plagarism is a crime (I think it is typically college policy to make them do that) but most of them go on, uninvited, to tell you that plagarism is a sin. It is stealing from writers' children. It is worse than stealing! It is like murder. Murdering the words that leave the writers' lips.

I think an important distinction, and where a lot of moralizers slip is that there are two very different kinds of plagarism. Neither one is pernicious, but they are very different. One happens when an important, well-known person steals the work of a nobody who has had a rare moment of genius. The important person adds the work to his heap of renown, which is fine for him, but the nobody remains in obscurity, possibly for the rest of his life.

This is clearly harmful to the nobody, and this kind of plagarism looks bad. But it doesn't happen very often. And a nobody who only has one clever idea in his lifetime probably deserves to stay a nobody.

The other kind is when a nobody steals from an important and respected source. This is even less harmful. Sure, the nobody achieves more fame than he ought to -- but think how many other people can say the same. As long as our president is in office, complaints about undeserved importance sound pretty hollow. If Mr. Domenech steals an essay from P. J. O'Rourke, who's harmed? Not O'Rourke; he's already as famous as he's going to get, and the number of readers he lost to Ben Domenech is probably less than one.

The most worst thing about anti-plagarism memos is when they talk about it as if it were a kind of theft. It's not. At best it is a "theft" of fame, but there are fundamental ways that stealing a CD player is different (and worse) than stealing fame. Most importantly, plagarism usually increases the aggregate fame, whereas item theft does not increase the aggregate number of items. So in conclusion: Plagarize this article. You know you want to.

Here You Will See the Items In My Yoda Collection

No, I really don't have anything to say about the motivations behind this one. I just like the "... and there's nothing you can do about it!" tone in the title. It's so appropriate. You really will see the items in his Yoda collection. Are you prepared?

I'm Not Afraid to Say It

They deleted the bumblebee article! The reason given? "Patent nonsense". The deed is recounted here.

User:NawlinWiki? You are a fascist. You may even be an Islamofascist.

Also: Since I am probably gaining new readers at a rate of 1 per week, here is the text, preserved for posterity:

"The Large Garden bumblebee is most typically a bee, that bumbles around a large garden. However, it could also be a large bee that bumbles around a more modestly proportioned garden."

Adorable.

A Sudden Thought

Why don't they make gourmet chewing gum? You only ever see wintergreen, mint, and cinnamon. I feel like chewing gum should get caught up in the foody craze as much as any other food. You might think no, gum is not classy enough to doll up. People who chew gum are poor and ugly, you say. But we already have designer cola (terrible) and potato chips designed by famous chefs(I think), so I wouldn't doubt there was a market.

If you already know about fancy gum, please don't tell me. I don't want to hear about it.

Your Wikipedia Sentence For Today

"It may be observed that, when the platypus dives, it sends up a bubble of air after approximately some time, then some time later it sends up another bubble of air, and some additional time after that, it surfaces, lies spread-eagled on the top of the water, and chews its food."

I really hate to pick on Wikipedia so much, but just you name one other part of our culture that deserves so many sneers.

Don't Say Vince Foster

Does anybody out there know who was the last politician to be assassinated in America? We had all those assassinations in the 60's of course, but then something happened. It's not like people calmed down; they tried to kill George Wallace and Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. I think the only one they actually got was the mayor of San Francisco and they might not have even been aiming for him. After 1981 it looks like they stopped even trying. Maybe they got discouraged. Or maybe they switched over to drug dealing turf wars. All the good assassinations happen overseas now, like Pym Fortuyn and Rafik Hariri. In any case. When was the last political murder in the US?

Eald Englisc

I don't want to make this a website that is just constantly about Wikipedia, but did you know they had an Old English website? The front "news" page is oddly timeless. They can't write conveniently about computers or airplanes or for that matter Wikipedia. At the end they just break down and talk about chemistry in English. Might be a good pattern to follow, for the whole venture. Next: Klingon, or Elvish?

Don't

If I could give one piece of advice to the chiefs of the art world, it would be "don't." No, really, it would be to please use more care in naming your movements. Here are the names of some art movements:

Neo-Classicism
Art Nouveau
Futurism
Modernism
Hypermodernism
Postmodernism
Remodernism

I realize the idea is to make your movment seem wow and now and hip, but come on. You are trying to create something for the ages. It does not work to name your movement in relation to the present time. It makes you seem short sighted and provincial when the next "Now" movement rolls around. The founders of postmodernism have dug themselves an especially deep hole. I don't think we're going to hear the end of postmodernism in my lifetime. It will hang on long past its artistic productivity and clog up the whole thing, simply because it's so hard to name movements beyond it. What could sound newer than postmodern? If the next art/social movement is called anythingmodernism, I will scream.

Commercials

I had an unsettling experience today. I was watching Star Wars 5: Episode: 2: Attack of the: Clones today, which is now the worst movie I have ever seen. It was on network TV of course, so there were a lot of ads. And all the ads seemed familiar. Some of them were very familiar, of course, like that Chrysler ad with the German guy. But all of them were at least a little familiar. There was no ad I could confidently watch and think "I have never seen this ad before. I am watching a new ad." I think it's the same way with the comic strips in the newspaper.

When you notice that about your experience, things start to get pretty archetypal. I forgot most of these ads the minute I saw them, so I can't give you a good insight into what the everyad is like, but I can tell you one thing. In the everyad, everybody laughs with his mouth open. Bugs the hell out of me.

A Man After My Own Heart

This is my new favorite Wikipedia entry. Be sure to read it before the drones make it more true.

Update: Eek!

Pain Index

The federal government (or really any rich entity I am looking at you, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) could be doing so much more for humanity. Iraqi insurgents and malaria will always be with us, but once an index of pain is compiled, it isn't going to be changed soon.

The concept is simple. We must locate people who have suffered at least two painful events within vivid memory. Then we ask them to rate their painful events proportionately. We ask them, say, how much more painful is it to smash your thumb with a hammer than to stub your toe on the baseboard? Almost anybody can be a subject, of course, although people with really interesting pain opinions, people who have had brain surgery or been attacked by army ants will be naturally thin. We compile these scores, and compare them against one another to reach average pain differentials for every conceivable problem. Then publish these in a book. It will be an inestimable help to people, all over the world, planning their major decisions.

This comes to mind because of what seems like a recent uptick in pain equivocation. I have heard the following things described as the most painful pain:

Childbirth
Gout
Cluster headaches
Neuropathy
Kneecapping
Kidney stones
Strychnine poisoning
Severe burns

I'm not sure that some of these claims aren't silly or self-pitying, but it would be nice to know what to really fear. On a more pedestrian level, I have trouble remembering myself which is more painful, wasp stings or bee stings. Don't tell me they're equally painful; the venoms are very different. And to answer the earlier question, I don't know which is more painful, having your thumb smashed or having your toe stubbed. People all have to die of something -- ridding the world of fever or IED's won't make it a much better place -- but helping people avoid pain is inestimable.

Some Decontextualized Mnemonic Devices

Some men hate each other.
King Philip cuts open five green snakes.
Two old angels skipped over Heaven, carrying ancient harps.
Siegecaps.
Quick Miss Diane Jones can't rope any exes.
Me peculiar.
Chinpig.
Every person that gave me kisses has diarrhea.

Good Times

The cat tried to eat a stink bug today. He walked up to the stink bug, and poked it with his nose. He spent the next half hour running around the house at full tilt, sneezing continuously. Sneezing animals == adorable. I don't really have any more context to the story than that, but I just thought I'd share it with you.

Corporate Responsibility

Not only does Coca-Cola make a product capable of spilling into a keyboard (I would really prefer a more viscous drink next time) but their contests have been getting awfully lame. You open a bottle of Coca-Cola which confidently tells you you may win important prizes. It used to be that under the cap was "You Win $100" or something like that. That's satisfying. That's how winning money ought to be. You just turn a cap upside down and oh my god. I won twenty dollars once that way, and let me tell you, it was a delight.

They don't do that any more. Now you have to turn the cap upside down and find a code and enter it at the Coca-Cola website. If you think I am going to that website before I even know what I'm supposed to have won, think again. I don't know what happens when you enter the code. Probably you don't even win anything. I guess Coca-Cola developed this contest format to be able to say,"we're having a contest! Buy this!" but without the risk of anyone trying to collect. It's disgraceful. Nobody loves a corporate lottery more than me, but this is not the way to do it. You are antagonizing your most loyal fan here, Coca-Cola Corporation.

R.I.P

My 200th installment goes out to my dead homies. Meaning Pluto. Rest in peace.

I'm A Bad Doctor

I forgot to tell you! My keyboard broke last night. About 9 o'clock I was spinning around in the spinning chair, having a great time, when I somehow knocked over the Coca-Cola splash into the keyboard. At first it was pretty good. The mouse plugs into the keyboard, which plugs into the monitor which plugs into the tower.* When I spilled the cola into the keyboard, the mouse went out. These are the kind of conditions I have to live under.

Well I got tired of that soon (I don't know any of the keyboard shortcuts for Macintoshes*). So I decided to cure it. I unplugged the keyboard and ran the keyboard under water for a few minutes. I subjected it to the healing power of Jesus. I shook it out, and let it dry for a little while, and even ran a hair dryer over it, which just goes to show how seriously I take my profession.

My thinking was, it was just sugar atoms in there that were shorting everything out and if you wash them out, the keyboard would be as good as new. Once the water dried. It's not like the keyboard is water soluble. The water gushes in, the water evaporates, everything is as it was. Right?

I plugged it back in and the mouse was working again. But the A key and the S key were out. I think a few others were. Maybe the C key and some really useless ones like Z and tab. I'm strong. I can survive without the amenities but it is really hard to type anything without S. It's a much more essential letter than A, which I wouldn't have guessed before. Especially for short memos. It's impossible to type anything useful without either.

I got tired of that too, so back in the water. Fwoosh! I dried it out again. I thought maybe it wasn't dry enough, so I took off some of the screws and ran the hair dryer inside. Put it back together, marshalling the little plastic bits (that make the keys spring back up -- they are free floating in there and scatter everywhere if you open the keyboard*) inside with a pair of glasses as a hook. By this point the keyboard was very clean.

When I went to use it again, every key was out. The G printed 4's, the K printed 7's, the 4 printed two 0's (?) and the tilde was the new Enter. The mouse still worked though. Apparently mouse circuits aren't water soluble even if the rest are. I conversed in this vein for a little while (lots of 4's and cut-and-paste text from other sources) and went to bed.

Then today there was keyboard buying. I found out that A) almost nobody makes keyboards for Macintoshes* and B) almost everybody makes keyboards that cost a hundred and fifty dollars. One of these keyboards had a little LCD screen on it. I am not sure what the screen was for. I was also not able to tell the function of any of the other dozens of buttons that were on these keyboards but are not on mine. I am not able to imagine what they could be for. You are probably able to imagine the boring rest of the story.

*Ask me why I hate Macs.

What Was She Using It For?

An old lady at the grocery store today was buying 8 quarts of half and half. Let's play what was she using it for?

• Ice cream, the hard way (she wasn't buying any sugar though, so maybe she has tons of that already).
• Bridge tournament hostess
  
• Very large family which all likes coffee
• She just likes to drink it?
• She thinks it will keep for months and months
  
• Bad-milk-related practical jokes
• Low-quality Camembert
• Senility (theory supported by her other purchase, a gallon of vinegar)

Planets

Along with JonBenet Ramesy, the only thing on anybody's mind these days is planets. Apparently we have some new planets, although they aren't the ones I would want to flee to when life on Earth becomes intolerable. I would rather live on Callisto, which looks like it is sick.

Astronomers were so short-sighted in the nineteenth century. You would think when Uranus and Neptune were discovered, they would all think, "Gee, lots of other planets are right around the corner. We had better husband our best names and not waste them all on tiny specks." Here are some very important Roman gods whose names have been wasted on crap:

Asteroids:
Juno
Cybele
Metis
Pallas and Minerva
Proserpina
Eos
Bacchus
Ceres (now a planet, which goes to show that it will all work out in the end.)
Heracles

Symbols of non-planets:
Apollo/Sol
Diana/Luna
Gaia
Vulcan (Vulcan is a planet that doesn't exist.)

That's why the only name left for this new, left-over planet is Xena. Honestly. That might even be worse than Sedna, which was named after an Eskimo god. If we had only saved our names, these planets could be called something decent. But we wasted them on lame-0 asteroids. Now the only thing to do is to blow these planets up. We have the technology, we just need to put it to use. It will save us grief, in the long run.

Update!!!!
Some people would say this article was a gaffe, because I wrote it the day before Pluto became Not A Planet (and so did Ceres, Charon and Xena). I say no, I got it in just on time. I got to expose you to my Important Ideas at the last possible moment before they became useless. Now I have the cachet of having been there. If I had kept my theories about planets to myself until Pluto was out of the woods, they would be dead weight now. As it is, they're down on paper, the time stamp is plain for all to see, and nobody can take that away from me, not even the International Astonomers Union.

Postsecret.com, Pt. 2

I gleefully read the little memo at the bottom of this week's episode of Postsecret.com: "The next PostSecret book will be going to press in 8 days. All postcards received between now and then will be considered, especially optimistic and funny secrets and secrets from men."

What this means, of course, is that the author has received too many sorry-for-myself secrets from women. Gosh do you think? I don't know why else he would go into this business. "My father raped me when I was two. He died last year. I still hate him."

If you don't want to get that kind of thing hundreds of times a week, don't become a post-card-therapist. Funny secrets from men are very well (I'm thinking of Animal House type things here even though those aren't funny) but they're not the kind of things you mail in on a tearstained postcard. People read Postsecret.com to see tiny, sensational stories about human suffering. It's a bad habit, but don't let them down.

I Am Being *Timely*

I wasn't paying attention back when JonBenet Ramsey died in the first place. I think I was only 11 back then. All I remember thinking was that she had a stupid name. I certainly can't remember whether anyone else thought so. I'm sure they did, but were they hiding their dislike in their grief? Or were they sneering outright?

I don't think of JonBenet Ramsey that way any more. It's bad for the spirit to be so cynical. I think it helps to consider her a tiny messiah who came to Earth to save us all from sin but was cut down by the forces of Hell. You should try to think of annoying people in your life as saviors. Then you can either embrace them, which makes you feel saintly and forgiving, or continue to avoid them. If you hate them you get to consider yourself an iconoclast. If you are a damned heathen, you are definitely doing better than somebody who is bothered by a long dead girl.

I have a JonBenet question though, for all of you little girl watchers out there. How do you pronounce her name? Is it like John or like Zhawn? The temptation to do the second one is pretty strong. All the newsreaders do it. But I'm not sure.

I Forgot

I'm back and boy was it a good time. I can see you all now, jealous. Anyway. I had lots of important ideas but no notebook. It's probably just as well because if I had a notebook I would have to have a pen and the pen would leak all over my pocket (I never take the pens out of my pocket when I wash them). So I forgot all the ideas I had. Well I am sure they will come back to me and then you will be the beneficiaries of them aren't you lucky.

I do remember that I watched a television show about an MIT psychologist who was classifying people into categories based on how evil their murders were (the people were murderers). There were 22 categories. The show was very lurid. I don't think they got deeply enough into the psychologist's methods. They seemed pretty ad hoc. Mostly just going to jails and reading transcripts of trials. Apparently not saying you're sorry is good for 5 or so ticks up the evil scale. There was no word on what moral philosophy the psychologist subscribed to. He did not attempt to classify either George Bush or Osama bin Laden (or Hitler!), and neither did the narrator. Conclusion: exploitative, but not exploitative enough. Also: There were a lot of pesticide ads on during the program. I was a little creeped out.

I'm Leaving You

I'll be all busy this coming week. I will be having fun. You only wish, all of you, that you were having as much fun as I'm about to. Hoo boy. So I'll be having fun instead of writing love letters to the internet. Don't worry. I will probably make about the same number of excellent observations per day that I currently do. I'll just save them up, see? Maybe I will carry around a little notebook, and write my observations. Like a journalist -- of fun! I will leave you with this:



FUN

What Happened To County Design?

Half way through the colonization of the US, something strange happened. Americans forgot how to make counties. Now I'm not going to say this has to do with the American inability to make flags, which I think get (on average) better as time goes on. (Although Oregon's two-sided flag is one bit of 2nd District Trivia I would have preferred to remain ignorant of.)

But America definitely started with a good idea of what counties should look like. They should be about square, all the same size, and follow either natural boundaries (in areas that have those) or straight lines in the flatter parts of the country. I would say the county system was excellent east of the Missouri, with the partial exceptions of Minnesota, Florida and Maine. Those states are exceptions, of course, because they were the most inhospitable ones in the nineteenth century.

I guess about 1870, the county system broke down. You can see that pretty clearly in Texas. In the southeast part of the state which had been settled for 50 years by then, the counties are decent looking, matching with the counties in neighboring Louisiana and Arkansas. In the north of the state, which was settled later in the 1870's and 80's, the counties are all square. In the south of the state, however, the counties are a mess. They get bigger as you go south and west, like the state just didn't have the energy to try any more. Lots of people live in those parts of Texas. Lots more than ever lived in northern Texas. Lots more farmers even.

It gets even worse in the later states. California was settled early, and the areas around Sacramento are decent -- even though little agriculture was happening there. When you get to the later-settled south, the counties get huge and gross (except for Orange County which is dainty and small for some reason). Idaho has counties of all sizes. There are two XXL counties, one in the southwest and one in the center, and the rest are normal counties that are packed around them (to keep them from shifting).

Arizona is one of the last states admitted, and it clearly shows Americans in the final stages of county fecklessness. There are three counties that run lengthwise for more than half of the height of the state. In between them is a huge lump county. I know agriculture is not a big thing in Arizona, and that is the reason to draw counties carefully. But what possible reason could there be to make your counties five times as long as they are high? I am beginning to think that corruption is involved.

It's Time!

It's Saturday, and that means it's time for 2nd District Trivia!

What states border Oregon’s Second Congressional District?

One of the Second District’s counties is home to Oregon’s two known geysers. Which county is it? And what are the names of the two geysers?

What is the sister city of Medford, Oregon?

How many National Forests are located in Oregon? How many of these are in the Second Congressional District?

If you can answer those questions, you are a Second District Trivia Champion. Hooray!

Bobby Won't Live Long

Now you know I love Chick tracts. If being witnessed to is as much fun as reading one of these tracts, I wish someone would preach the gospel to me right now. Usually they only touch on one apostasy, sometimes Catholicism or Mormonism or selling your soul to the devil (that one is particularly incoherent). They only offer the Communist one in lots of ten thousand or more, so don't buy them unless you are Anastasio Somoza and you want to quell a rebellion by airdropping them or something.

If you're short on time, though, you can get through the litany of dislikeables by reading the one above. In order: Catholicism, Supreme Court, UN, divorce, witchcraft, belief in reincarnation, anti-corporal-punishment, New Age religion, psychiatry, pacifism, and drugs. And codpieces. Amen.

Now what I want, is facts.

So, continuing the series (my blog! Featuring series that are never more than two elements long) on Islam, this article on Islam in Iceland totally fails to deliver. I went into this article on Islam in Iceland with one question and I came back out with it. This article also does not mention. You would think "how do you avoid starving when Ramadan is in summer at a high latitude" is a rude question or something. It's not. I really wonder. Iceland is almost at the arctic circle. During the summer, it never gets really dark. How is this not a problem that is worth mentioning? I bet all the Muslims in Iceland are just ashamed to admit that they're not good Muslims.

Fascists

Did you hear that the President identified our enemies out there, at last, as "Islamic fascists?" I have two comments on his choice of words. First. "Islamic"? I wasn't paying close attention, to be honest, but were we using this word before 2001? It isn't a word. Or at least it doesn't need to be. The word is "Muslim". That is the adjective to describe things that involve Islam. Not "Islamic". Where did that term come from? It came from out of the blue as far as I can tell, that's where.

Second, I am gratified that the president didn't use the word "Islamofascists". Since he is such a bad speaker, I have to think he was trying to use it, but failed. Still. Where did that term come from? I think you have to go all the way back to anarcho-syndicalism to find a similar construction. Is that what they had in mind when they coined it? Islamofascism. The connecting vowel is all wrong. It gets even worse when partisan spite transforms it into "Christofascism". That is an ugly word.

All this puffing about fascism doesn't worry me. People can call Nasrallah or Bush fascists all they like, but I'm not fooled. I know when we will have arrived at fascism. A state is only fascist if it has a curfew. I saw V for Vendetta. Curfews didn't get to be the #1 fascism movie cliche for nothing. Hollywood, show us the way!

I Give You...

big fat hen.

Some Stars, And the Diseases They Would Treat If They Were Drugs

Etamin: Birth control
Altair: Seasonal nasal allergies
Bellatrix: Women's sexual dysfunction (as seen in spam ads)
Girtab: Epilepsy
Aludra: Incontinence
Kappa Velorum: Memory loss*
Procyon: HIV
Gacrux: Bacterial infection (antibiotic)
Miaplacidus: Muscle relaxant
Avior A: Asthma (over-the-counter version)

*The FDA has not evaluated these claims. This product is not intended to treat, cure or prevent any diseases.

Braiding Hair

Because I know you are interested in my little failures, I will tell you. I can't braid hair. I know how it's supposed to go; the middle bunch goes under (or over) alternate left and right bunches. I just can't seem to make it work. At least not when I braid my own hair.

Unlike some of our nation's greatest hair stylists, I don't have three (let alone four) hands. So the problem is that I have to hold two bunches of hair in one hand, while keeping all the individual hairs in those bunches together. No. The problem is even worse than that, because I have to pass the bunches from one hand to another. How can you pass hair from one hand to another without losing strands? My fingertips aren't sensitive enough to keep a hold of every hair.

It's even worse, because unless I am too stupid to think of a better way, you can only hold one bunch between your left thumb and index finger, and one bunch between your right index finger. The remaining bunch has to go between an index finger and its corresponding middle finger.

So one "stroke" of a hair braiding technique would be this: You start off with bundles of hair between your thumb and index finger in each hand, and a bundle of hair between your middle and index finger in your left hand. Then you pass the hair between your left index finger and thumb to your right index finger and middle finger. Then you pass the hair between your left index finger and middle finger to your right index finger and thumb. Then repeat with left and right reversed.

How is it possible to do that? Whenever I try I end up with a snarl by the fourth stroke. Are there any techniques I am not picking up on? Grease the hair before you start to braid it? So it will stick together? I don't recall seeing people do that. Don't tell me it would work better to braid someone else's hair. The problem here is one of manual dexterity. Not perspective. Maybe there's just something wrong with my hair personally. Maybe I have too much static charge. Maybe not having braidable hair goes along with not being able to grow dreadlocks. Does anybody else have this problem.

Tobacco

It doesn't take a genius to tell that three huge fads in America today are home gardening, smoking, and insane libertarianism.

So why don't people grow their own tobacco? It may just be that the kind of people who are interested in home gardening are not interested in smoking. I can believe that to some extent, although the sheer number of annoying people who grow tomatoes and zucchini and raspberries suggests that at least some of them must be smokers.

If they are, think how much money they could be saving. The government taxes the hell out of tobacco, and people just sit there and take it. And if they don't take it, then they buy black market Mafia cigarettes. If Goodfellas was right, I don't think I would want to buy cigarettes from anybody who swears as much as mobsters. What if it rubbed off on me? Even if you don't smoke yourself, you can give your smoking friends the tobacco you grow. I am sure they will appreciate it. They will love to roll thousands of their own cigarettes from the tobacco you give them. I know it.

Tobacco, I understand, is a hard plant to grow, but not hard in the sense that orchids or Venus flytraps are hard. Tobacco is labor-intensive. It needs to be hand transplanted, pruned, and picked (in several passes). Some of these tasks can be partially automated, but some can't. Was there ever a better crop for the home gardener? Growing ten million tobacco plants is a real chore and requires either hundreds of slaves or thousands of dollars of equipment. Growing fifty tobacco plants is something that anybody could do in his spare time. And you can even cure it in your attic. I am so excited about this idea.

Side question: Is it possible to grow coca in Flagstaff, Arizona? Is it possible to grow coca anywhere in the United States? Has anybody tried?

Kitty Hawk

Big breakthrough today. You know how the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics from Dayton? Sure you do, it's not like Ohio licence plates don't have "Birthplace of Aviation" on them like being the home of Wilbur Wright was the best thing the sixth most populous state ever did. If I were them I would mention something about my nice shape. Anyhow.

I bet you wonder why, if the Wright Brothers lived in Dayton, the first powered flight happened in North Carolina, right? Now I know why. It's because the wind at the Outer Banks is so strong. They were hoping that they could get an extra boost to their airplane from the onshore wind. That is, they were hoping they could get their airplane off the ground as a kite.

There is an ugly word for this, my friends, and that word is "cheating". The Wright Brothers need to be stripped of their record. It should be given to someone who actually first achieved real powered flight. I wonder who that was. Probably the Wright Brothers. But the date of the record should definitely be changed.

Another Reason Harper's Is My Favorite Magazine

Remember when I had that outstanding idea to do an in-depth study of happiness? Well, Harper's today published a single, almost contex-free sentence: "Scientists said that the best way to measure happiness is simply to ask people how happy they are."

First of all -- what the hell? I hope these scientists aren't behaviorists who have a theory of happiness, where X's happiness is equal to X's reported happiness. If they do, they are weird, alien scientists, who shouldn't be studying anything as anthropological as happiness. They should study magnetic field deflection or something bloodless like that.

If, like most of us, they think happiness is something other than reported happiness, then how could they posssibly know? I am having a really hard time thinking of an experiment you could perform, where the resulting data forced you to conclude that the best way to measure happiness is to ask people how happy they are.

Perhaps the scientists compared people's reported happiness with the results of a brain probe measuring their happiness-related brain waves, and found that they correlate highly. Okay. That's plausible. I don't believe that those two measurements would correlate highly, but whatever. The point is, in doing that experiment, you are tacitly assuming the brain probe is the best way to measure happiness. Aren't you? Is there any other way to do an experiment like this and get the result reported in Harper's? I'm pretty sure there's not. Scientists get it all wrong, from start to finish.

Ways to Sell Your Stuff

A Survey

In this sad solemn world, there is basically only one way to sell something. You put it in your store, or on the internet, and list a price. Whatever price you think is best according to the laws of supply and demand which you keep in your breast pocket. Then you just wait for people to get interested. If they want to pay the advertised price, they can have the item, no strings attached. If they don't think the price is worth paying, they can leave.

But the truth is, there are a bunch of other ways to sell stuff. Let's compare the merits of the systems, hm?

Modern style sales. As I said, this is the system we use for 90 percent of our sales today. The merit is clear. It doesn't require much labor at all. It just requires someone to read the price tag to make sure it hasn't been doctored, and accept the money. This is a low skill job. At a supermarket or Wal-Mart, it might be the only system that is practical. I don't think it would work to force people to go through the whole rigmarole when they are trying to buy a pack of chewing gum. I don't think they would stand it.

The drawback is equally clear. If the posted price is not what people want to pay -- if you could make more money selling your vacuum cleaners for $50 instead of $60 or vice versa, you won't know unless you do a set of complicated experiments. Of course, this is not a big problem for selling little things like chewing gum. Wrigley's has undoubtedly done extensive research to determine that their gum will make the most money selling at price X.

When to use: When you are selling something cheap whose value is not hard to determine.

Haggling. Do they still sell things this way in the Middle East? Even small things (like Middle Eastern chewing gum? What must that be like)? Well I guess they can afford to. With the economy in such bad shape there, the only thing that's cheap is labor. Haggling, as of course you know, involves the seller quoting way too high a price for his item, and the buyer quoting way too low a price. Then they argue one another to a reasonable middle price. They do this in America too, sometimes. I understand that when you try to buy a car or a house or some other huge expensive thing, that the process is practically the same as in the souks.

If you can afford to waste your time and mental power arguing over the price of a flyswatter, that's great, but very few people in the West can. Moreover, you can't use any unskilled jerk as a salesman. He needs to be better at arguing prices than average, and anyone who is really good at bargaining is not going to want to take a job at a convenience store.

On the other hand, it easily solves the problem of mis-pricing your items. Since the seller chooses a price that is obviously too high, and the buyer chooses a price that is obviously too low, the correct price is somewhere in between, and it will be arrived at, provided the customer and dealer are both good arguers. Of course, if the seller is a bad arguer, he will wind up with prices that are consistently too low, but he shouldn't have gone into selling if he was bad at haggling.

When to use: When the value of the item you are selling is high relative to the cost of labor.

Raffling. Raffles are not used very often. That is one of the reasons I am sad, because raffles are one of the neatest ways to sell stuff. Here is the method: You offer something for sale, typically a big valuable thing. People then buy tickets for it. They can buy as many as they want. Everyone gets his name written on his tickets, and all the tickets are placed in a drum. One is drawn at random, and the person with his name on the ticket wins the item.

This is a pretty unorthodox way to sell things. You see the differences? Probably the biggest problem is that people are afraid of risk. Even if the expected value of buying a raffle ticket is quite high, they will tend to shy away, because the chance of winning is so low. On the other hand, some people thrive on risk. You could probably sell a lot of tickets to a compulsive gambler. And sometimes a raffle is the only way to sell something. The golden ticket game in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a kind of a raffle. There was really no other fair way to distribute the golden tickets, when you come to think of it. And in doing so, Mr. Wonka certainly sold a lot of candy. The raffle in Patience is another excellent example, where a mere sale might not have been sufficient.

When to use: When you are selling an item, of severely limited quantity, that is indivisible, or that you absolutely have to sell, like Wonka Factory Tours, or Reginald Bunthorne.

Lottery. Lotteries are very similar to raffles, but infinitely more popular. Lotteries work like this. People buy tickets in advance, as many as they want. When they buy each ticket, they request a number, from 1 to X. That number gets stamped on their ticket, irrespective of whether it's on anybody else's. Later on, a number is drawn at random. Everybody who has a ticket with that number submits it, and the prize gets divided evenly among them.

The two differences between this and a raffle should be obvious. First, it is not certain that anybody will win. If the winning number was 666 and nobody drew that, then nobody wins the prize, and the seller keeps it. Second, if more than one person chooses the winning number, the prize has to be divided.

Now. I am not sure that a lottery is better than a raffle in any way. Lotteries are definitely more popular, but only because it was hard to organize a statewide raffle in the pre-information age, whereas statewide lotteries are simple. We could just as easily do state raffles now if we wanted to, but tradition is a strong force. I don't even know whether lotteries make more money than raffles. Somebody ought to do a study.

When to use: When you are selling something infinitely divisible, and a raffle would be too weird or difficult to set up.

Auction. In the auction, lots are put up for sale. Many people gather in one place, and bid on the lots. Whoever submits the highest bid gets the item. The auctioneer runs the sale, and attempts to encourage higher bids.

As you might think, auctioneering is a highly skilled job. Auctions happen fast, and if you can panic people into placing high bids, then you stand to make a lot more money. Likewise, auctioneering suffers the same problems as haggling. If you get a dud auctioneer, he can let his lots get away for a lot less than they're worth. If your lots aren't worth very much, the money spent on a highly skilled auctioneer is wasted. And if you don't get enough people at your auction, you won't get very many successful bidding wars. Imagine the horrifying auction that only one person shows up at. He gets all his lots for whatever he chooses to pay.

Nevertheless, auctioning is a powerful way to sell stuff. I understand that people at auctions often bid much more than they would be willing to pay for the item in a modern market, probably due to the sense of competition with the fellow bidders. So if you can set it up, an auction is a good way to stampede people into paying way more than they ought to. The government might want to criminalize the more aggressive forms of auctioning as fraud, come to think of it. The government likes to do that kind of thing.

When to use: When you are selling fairly valuable things, and can expect a lot of buyers.

Secret Auction. These seem neat but I have no idea how well they work. An item is displayed for sale. Everyone who wishes to buy it writes a price on a slip of paper, and hands it in, without letting the others know how much he's bidding. The person who submits the highest price gets the item. I have no idea how well this works. Does it make more money than a normal auction? I doubt it, since otherwise it would be more popular. It seems pretty hit-or-miss, like it would depend a lot on the crowd you had. Probably too unstable to use regularly, but a neat concept all the same. If you found a buyer who really wanted the lot for sale, you could probably get him to pay as much as ten times its value. If you found two buyers who really wanted it, well who knows what they might pay? You could make a killing.

Fordlandia

Fordlandia!

Where are the weirdo tycoons today? Bill Gates is not weird. Bill Gates is b-o-r-i-n-g. Bill Gates is interested in eradicating malaria. That is boring. And Bill Gates isn't even a tycoon any more. Who are the big names in business these days? Nobody knows, cause they're boring.

Palatin Technologies Holds Our Cultural Future In Its Hands

As of course you know by now, Palatin Technologies, apparently a leader in protein design, is testing the new sex drug, chemical name bremelanotide. Everyone has already gotten ahead of me in opining that this is going to change the world, or other important utterances. It probably would too, although I am reasonably sure the FDA will shoot it down.

Anyway. The important thing here is what Palatin Technologies, if their drug is approved, will call it. When John Lennon was christened, it was an important moment in cultural history. People said John Lennon's name billions of times. But at the time, nobody knew Lennon would be important at all. It was not a momentous decision for Mrs. Lennon.

On the other side, we have every reason to think that bremelanotide will be the next big thing. Remember how many times in your life you have heard "Viagra"? It hasn't really died down yet. If Palatin Technologies wants millions of people around the world to say "Fart Drug #1" or some other embarrasing name hundreds of times each, it has the power.

I'm not sure I could handle such an important responsibility myself. If I were CEO of Palatin Technologies, I would probably kick the task down the chain of command until the mail boy was in charge of naming the next big thing in sex drugs. Some leadership I'd show.

I Have a Libertarian Impulse

I just found out today that it is illegal to tamper with your car's odometer. Now I can understand some of the reasoning behind that law. Selling someone a car that has run for five million miles when the odometer says it has only run for five hundred is not something the government wants to encourage. It could destroy faith in the used car industry.

But the way the law is designed is very odd. It is a crime to reset your own car's odometer. Even if you have no intention of selling it. What harm could a mis-set odometer do you if you aren't intending to defraud anyone? What if you just wanted to create upside-down calculator-style words like 58008? Laughs aplenty that the government doesn't want you to have.

Maybe they want to limit your opportunites for false alibis. "But how could the defendant have been in Fairbanks at the time of the murder, like he claims, if there are only 2000 miles on his car?" That aside, I don't even see the purpose of even a stripped-down law. Why should it be a crime to sell a car with a tampered odometer? It could be a novelty car shop! Buy a car with Pi on the odometer. Buy a car with the first letters of the Torah in numerological format. Buy a car with an odometer permanently set to 666. Just so long as the salesman tells you how many miles are on the car, there's no problem.

Not only is this a stupid law, it's unenforceable. The government shouldn't waste its time on this stuff. They should concentrate on making the X-ray laser. Kaboom!

Acronyms & Etymology

Second (out of two) in our articles-about-concepts-described-by-words-that-sound-like-etymology series, let's talk about future etymologists. Past etymology has always been easy. You look at old words and see what still older words they look like. If you are fanciful, you can draw maps that show the words moving around the continent. (Be sure to use those big red stylized arrows that start off real wide at the ends and get narrow just before the tip where they get wide again. Those are historical map arrows!)

Acronyms screw up the whole process. "Laser" doesn't sound like any word that comes before it. If you didn't know it was an acronym, you would have no way of guessing. It's even worse, because those scientists treacherously dressed it up to look like a real word, i.e. a laser is something that lases.

You can already see the corrosive effect acronyms have on our etymology. Every time a weird new word like Chav comes up, one of the most popular explanations for its origin is always some kind of acronym. When the origin of any word could, for all you know, be an acronym, you have no reason to assume it's anything else. Just make up a string of words that could fit.

Acronym Question: What is the deal with the DEA? Is "Drug enforcement agency" the best they could do? Is there some law that federal agencies may only have three letters for their acronyms, and DEA was as coherent as they could make it in three words? Drugs don't get enforced. That's just silly.

What Makes Invertebrates Mad?

If I were a zoologist who wanted to really benefit mankind, I would write that pamphlet. There are lots of different kinds of invertebrates that harm us directly. Bees, wasps, ants, crabs, jellyfish (do they get mad? I don't know) spiders, scorpions, sea anemones, octopuses and cone snails. And those are just the ones I can think of. What makes them want to attack you? They are all very simple creatures, but all different. There is not much to the behavior of any one invertebrate species (I once read a whole book on what makes bears mad) so it wouldn't be hard to write if you knew a little about entomology.

Now there is some obvious variation here. Some of the things that make killer bees mad (robbing their hive) are not going to upset hiveless bumblebees. Fire ants are not going to think like army ants, and hornets are a lot more irascible than sea urchins.

But I don't have a lot of knowledge about any of them. I think a lot of this has to do with how alien they are. Bears, for all their deadliness, behave a lot like people. You can predict how a bear will respond to a stimulus based on how you yourself do, and even cast bears in starring roles of movies convincingly.

But if I hadn't been told that scorpions never sting people if they can help it, and that fire ants seek out people to sting, I never would have guessed. I might as well have thought it was the other way around. If I could just have a little book, with a paragraph-long sketch of what you can safely do to each of the invertebrates, I would feel a lot better.

They Don't Want No Dumb Phone Sex

Harper's is my favorite magazine in the world. Their target audience is A) people who already work for Harper's and B) directors of left-wing foundations (send money!). At the same time, Harper's has the world's most delirious ads. Better even than the New Yorker, because C) champagne socialists who want to know what are the haps actually read the New Yorker. So here for your enlightenment, is what A and B are spending their money on.

• FREIGHTERCRUISES.COM

• PLANETARY BIRTH PATTERNS of achievement and eminence. www.cd-b.com

• BRIGHTS: SUPERNATURAL-FREE. People. Vision. Aims. Actions. Community. www.the-brights.net

• BREAKTHROUGH IMPRESSIONISMS: SCIENCE AND METAPHYSICS www.freethought.8m.net/about.html

• THE WAR AGAINST TOENAIL FUNGUS. Graphic reportage of combat with Lamisil tablets, Penlac Nail Lacquer, and other pharmaceutical weapons. "Dwight Thomas has written a tale of triumph" -- Wall Street Journal.

• European Beret $10

• Read RC Allen's Solitary Prowess. Find out how Emily Dickinson's poems fit into the context of universal cosmic conciousness.

• ACADEMY OF REMOTE VIEWING. [i.e. ESP. Wordy ad. They say it increases intuition 1000 percent]

• WWW.ANAGNOSTICCHRISTIAN.COM [a Christian's blog. 5 posts in the last 2 months and one comment.]

• U.S. SUPREME COURT SODOMY Protecting the WASP autocracy by creating WASP agency "attack dogs," such as FEMA, Department of Education, etc., which terrorize the non WASP population. Last count, 1100 deaths caused by FEMA; elderly and disabled dead due to confiscation of their social security by the Dept. of Educ. To learn more, track1776@yahoo.com

• ADULT CONVERSATION with intelligent, erotic women.

• EROTIC, INTELLIGENT, imaginitive conversation. Personal, experienced and discreet.

• ALLURING, ARTICULATE Donna Dione Hill, your charming and imaginitve phone companion.

Spiritual People, You Are In Good Company

Complete Google results for "mealy-mouthed SOB:"

Joe Biden
The MSM
Colin Powell
Chris Carter, New Zealand MP
Tony Blair
"A Mate" -- definition
An internet commenter, who is also a "lying sack of shit" and "fucking mental".

What Is It Like to Be Religious?

As some of my wiser readers have guessed I am not religious. No, not even a little bit. I'm not even one of those mealy-mouthed SOBs who describes himself as spiritual-but-not-religious. I don't think I ever will be religious but of course you never know. I have a question for my religious readers, and I know this is a useless question because I am certain I don't have any (I have never even met a religious person did you know that?). What is it like to be religious?

Now on one level this is probably an unanswerable question. Lots of religious people, the ones who have been religious from birth, are going to say "I could turn around and ask you the same question, mutatis mutandis. What's it like to be godless?" I know there are some atheists who have converted to religion, but I get the feeling that they were never atheists like me. They were probably the kind of atheists who see meaning in a sunset and read books on metaphysics (but not the good kind!) Then one day they read the Tao Te Ching and their life turned upside down. I have a sad idea that being religious is like being one of these atheists.

So what is it like, then, to see meaning in a sunset or wonder what your purpose in life is, or look at all of creation and think that someone just had to have designed this? I can scarcely imagine. I would guess that belief in God is not the same kind of thing as belief in chairs. All those Thomistic arguments that God exists are really rationalizations, whereas arguments that chairs exist can be constructed that are convincing in and of themselves. (ex. You see chairs every day, you sit on chairs every day, certain foundational beliefs that underlie sensory experience are true, ergo chairs exist. That is a tacit argument we use every day to convince ourselves chairs exist) Is that a reasonable view?

So what is belief in God like? If it's not like the usual kind of belief, what is it? Is it like other instinctual unreasoning beliefs, like fear of death, or a belief that you exist? That kind of belief is definitely atypical, and for there to be a belief like that that some of us don't share is even rarer. So while it may be impossible for a religious person to give me a complete account of what it's like to be religious, I think I would really benefit from a partial one. For instance, what's it like when you're thinking about God? Is it like thinking about a really mighty emperor? Or a wizard? Or what? What's it like to want to know the meaning of life (as opposed to being preoccupied with more pedestrian matters)? Give me something to go on please, religious types.

FreeCell

The man who wrote this thinks people will remember him when he dies. He hopes they will lift up their sunglasses when the hearse passes by and say there goes a real gift to humanity. Maybe he's already dead. I didn't notice a big flood of mourning. Unless the man who wrote this is actually John Paul II. I guess in that case the pope thought he needed that little extra bit of notoriety. You know, in case this pedophilia thing blew up and he needed something to fall back on, that thing could be FreeCell. He will also solve any FreeCell game for a "nominal fee of $5". So he is all set for if they depose him and force him to live on his own money.

Things you will learn: FreeCell game number 617 has a "reputation".