• I’ve always wanted to know the word for those things floating around in my eyes. Now I know: they’re called floaters (heh) and are an example of entoptic phenomena -- that is, “visual effects whose source is within the eye itself.” (via mefi)

    (1) #
    11/14/2007

  • While I like what Ron Paul symbolizes in the Republican primary – namely, the awakening of a segment of the Republican party that its positions as represented by its mainstream candidates are anti-freedom, pro-torture, and generally unethical – this list of bills that he sponsored, co-sponsored, or supported in Congress disabuses me of any notion of ever supporting him in the general election. I don’t disagree with every bill on the list, but the sum gives me a general idea of where Paul’s priorities lie. (via andrew sullivan)

    (8) #
    11/13/2007

  • CNN is not allowing Mike Gravel to participate in Thursday’s Democratic debate being held in Las Vegas because he hasn’t raised at least a million dollars from individual contributions. So instead he’ll be holding his own one-man debate elsewhere in Vegas, where he’ll be responding to the live debate questions anyway. You have to admire his determination.

    (0) #
    11/13/2007

  • Thomas Pynchon should take note: Italian scientists are saying that they found a crater left by the cosmic object that caused the Siberian Tunguska Event in 1908. Until now, no physical evidence has been found of the object that caused an explosion that released 1000 times more energy than the Hiroshima atom bomb. (via bb)

    Update: Note that this finding has already been disputed -- but evidently not conclusively.

    (0) #
    11/12/2007

  • Norman Mailer dies at 84. From my youngish perspective, Mailer is often grouped together with Updike, Roth, and Bellow as one of the great white post-war American novelists, but I haven’t read a drop of him. Should I?

    (8) #
    11/10/2007

  • MIT is suing famous architect Frank Gehry for “providing deficient design services and drawings” regarding his firm’s work on the Stata Center academic complex. Evidently, there are persistent leaks, cracks, a mold problem, and falling ice and snow blocking emergency exits. They should claim it’s susceptible to earthquakes, too, as any superficial glance at the building will make you think one already hit it. (thx, flea)

    (0) #
    11/8/2007

  • A friend of mine who is a member of the Writers Guild of America is blogging the strike. She includes lots of pictures of union writers marching around with signs.

    (0) #
    11/6/2007

  • Andrew Sullivan makes the case for Obama in the latest issue of Atlantic Monthly. Some choice quotes:

    At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce…

    A Giuliani-Clinton matchup, favored by the media elite, is a classic intragenerational struggle—with two deeply divisive and ruthless personalities ready to go to the brink… She and Giuliani are conscripts in their generation’s war. To their respective sides, they are war heroes…

    [Clinton] has internalized what most Democrats of her generation have internalized: They suspect that the majority is not with them, and so some quotient of discretion, fear, or plain deception is required if they are to advance their objectives… She’s hiding her true feelings. We know it, she knows we know it, and there is no way out of it.

    I’m with Sullivan – I’m done with the Boomers.

    (12) #
    11/2/2007

  • Many of you wondered what the point was of Error Morris’s 25,000-word trilogy of blog posts about two 1855 Roger Fenton photographs. Jim Lewis at Slate wonders as well, but in the process shows his appreciation of Morris’s blog opus.

    [I]t’s a very charming and enjoyable journey, with all sorts of hypotheses entertained, and computer analyses, and a great deal of slightly neurotic second-guessing and self-doubt. It’s a shaggy-dog story, a monumental procedural in which it’s revealed, at the very end, that the butler did it after all.

    (14) #
    11/1/2007
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