stopped for speeding?

Yesterday I saw Officer Friendly take a man’s pulse. Why?

I didn’t see the beginning of the encounter. They were standing on a street corner; there was a bicycle standing by, apparently belonging to the examinee, who showed no obvious signs of distress or impairment. Two black-and-whites were parked nearby, presumably having disgorged the pulse-taker and his backup (who was standing ready to ensure that Bicycle Guy didn’t try anything funny).

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keep the customer occupied

I have an idea for an automatic cat-teaser. (Too bad I haven’t tried to build anything since childhood.) It consists of a double pendulum driven by two perpendicular oscillators.

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photorealistic animation

– clikclak – the movie – (Quicktime) (cited by Scott McCloud)

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busted?

Today an anonymous user made controversial changes to Wikipedia’s article on the Second Amendment and five related pages. The IP address used, 141.156.208.66, belongs to bradymail.org, i.e. Handgun Control Inc. the Brady Campaign to Monopolize Gun Violence. Who’d have thunk it.

Meanwhile on my side of the fence, Mike Lorrey was temporarily banned from Wikipedia for unnecessarily insisting on loaded language like fascist. Some people never learn.

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incomplete information

Another copy of the balloonist joke. I still wanna know what the second man is doing in the deep ocean.

I also wanna know, LJ experts, how I can become a real boy in the eyes of LJ’s comment machinery without creating a redundant Journal.

Posted in blogdom, humanities | 2 Comments

the trouble with neutrality

Alan Bock writes:

So it was time to break out one of the oldest canards in American political discourse – the assertion that anybody who questions any particular military adventure is – cue the boo track – a nasty old isolationist.

In a reasonably sane world such an assertion would have little or no traction. Impatience with wasteful spending and the unnecessary loss of American lives is hardly the same as wanting to withdraw from the world. The notion that military force is the most constructive way to engage the world is more than a little strange to begin with. To suggest that questioning a particular use of military force is tantamount to wanting to retreat behind our borders and have no contact with the outside world is almost beyond absurd.

The trouble, you see, is that all the other ways of engaging with the world are not orchestrated by The State, and therefore can’t be any good.

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Colorblind Web Page Filter

Ever worry about how your webpage looks to the colorblind? I am pleased to find that my doodles page looks pretty good in gray. (Cited by Sam Logan.)

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