So now I’ve seen the very last episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Gotta say the final season drags more than a bit, because of a near absence of the lighter “Monster of the Week” episodes that, in most seasons, roughly alternate with those that advance the “Big Bad” storyline.
Didja notice that in season 7’s title montage the final shot, for a change, is not of Buffy?
Gary Becker and Richard Posner have a blog (any day now)
Mike Linksvayer attended a lecture on “Changes in the Disparities in Chronic Diseases During the Course of the Twentieth Century”.
Perry Metzger shares a report (pdf) on infrastructure in Somalia. (Later: Michael Tennant comments on it at Strike The Root.)
Mike also has a map showing the potential partition of Ukraine. He wraps up:
It’s time to stop thinking of nation states as sacred and inviolable entities that must be held together with violence in opposition to the wishes of inhabitants, [rather than] as service providers that must peacefully change and differentiate to best meet the needs of inhabitants.
. . . .
So long as freedom to live and work in all parts of the formerly unified state is maintained for all citizens of the smaller states, there need be no negatives for individual citizens, apart from a loss of irrational nationalistic feeling for the unified state, which will eventually transfer to the smaller states in those with the need for such feelings. I’d be happy to see the U.S. split into fifty separate countries under such terms.
(afterthought 2009) I would hope that most citizens keep an attachment to the wider region’s culture, rather than to the successor state.
I[dentifying]D[ocument]s and the illusion of security, op-ed by Bruce Schneier.
Identification and profiling don’t provide very good security, and they do so at an enormous cost. Dropping ID checks completely, and engaging in random screening where appropriate, is a far better security trade-off. People who know they’re being watched, and that their innocent actions can result in police scrutiny, are people who become scared to step out of line. They know that they can be put on a “bad list” at any time. People living in this kind of society are not free, despite any illusionary security they receive. It’s contrary to all the ideals that went into founding the United States.
Some little while ago, I changed the name of a file used in the comment process, and submission of comments by spambots ceased. Comments are now open, until another wave breaches the battlements. I’m betting that the number of good comments that I won’t have to moderate before then will exceed the number of spamments that will get through before I see it and flip the switch again.
Spent yester evening with stepbrother and his rentmate. Conversation was largely about mathematics, and at some point they both got the giggles because (they said) I was manifesting mannerisms that they recognized from having taken physics from the same professor.
They did not go so far as to tell me what mannerisms.