dog whistle politics n. a concealed, coded, or unstated idea, usually divisive or politically dangerous, nevertheless understood by the intended voters. Also dog whistle issue.(The expanded entry contains citations and source information.)
Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:Here's an excellent tutorial on Audacity from the public radio site Transom.org.
- Record live audio.
- Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
- Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files.
- Cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together.
- Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
- And more! See the complete list of features.
Type 2 diabetics got a new option to help control their blood sugar Friday, a drug derived from the saliva of the Gila monster--but one that must be injected twice a day.The mind reels. I need to do some further research and digging here. Who was the bright boy (or girl) who came up with the idea of shooting diabetics full of lizard spit? (And what was he or she smoking, and where can I get some?)The Food and Drug Administration approved Byetta, known chemically as exenatide, the first in a new class of medications for Type 2 diabetes-- but for now, it's supposed to be used together with older diabetes drugs, not alone.
Makers Amylin Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly & Co. said the prescription drug would begin selling by June 1, but wouldn't provide a price.
A key observation, buried deep in the article:"THE time when we could count on cheap oil and even cheaper natural gas is clearly ending." That was the gloomy forecast delivered in February by Dave O'Reilly, the chairman of Chevron Texaco, to hundreds of oilmen gathered for a conference in Houston. The following month, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez gleefully echoed the sentiment: "The world should forget about cheap oil."
The surge in oil prices, from $10 a barrel in 1998 to above $50 in early 2005, has prompted talk of a new era of sustained higher prices. But whenever a "new era" in oil is hailed, scepticism is in order. After all, this is essentially a cyclical business in which prices habitually yo-yo. Even so, an unusually loud chorus is now joining Messrs O'Reilly and Chavez, pointing to intriguing evidence of a new "price floor" of $30 or perhaps even $40. Confusingly, though, there are also signs that high oil prices may be caused by a speculative bubble that could burst quite suddenly. To see which camp is right, two questions need answering: why did the oil price soar? And what could keep it high?
Supply constraints coincided with a huge boom in oil demand. Global oil consumption last year increased by 3.4% instead of the usual 1-2%. Nearly a third of that growth came from China, where oil consumption rocketed by perhaps 16%. One senior European oil executive claims that, in contrast with the embargoes and supply-driven price rises of the past, "This is the first demand-led oil shock."The print edition of this week's Economist contains a 25-page "survey" on the topic of oil. All of this content is available at their website, but most of it (other than the article I've linked to above, which is free to all) is "premium" (or subscriber-only) content. If you're interested in the topic, but don't subscribe to the magazine and can't find it at a local newsstand, you can buy a PDF of the April 2005 Oil Survey for $4.95.
Takashi Hashiyama, president of Maspro Denkoh Corporation, an electronics company based outside of Nagoya, Japan, could not decide whether Christie's or Sotheby's should sell the company's art collection, which is worth more than $20 million, at next week's auctions in New York.
He did not split the collection - which includes an important Cézanne landscape, an early Picasso street scene and a rare van Gogh view from the artist's Paris apartment - between the two houses, as sometimes happens. Nor did he decide to abandon the auction process and sell the paintings through a private dealer.
Instead, he resorted to an ancient method of decision-making that has been time-tested on playgrounds around the world: rock breaks scissors, scissors cuts paper, paper smothers rock.
The results? Christie's defeats Sotheby's in the first round. The winning throw? Scissors cut paper. In what was probably a key element in their victory, the Christie's rep in Japan got strategic advice from the 11 year-old twin daughters of a Christie's executive.
A broad investigation into Internet abuses led the New York attorney general to file a lawsuit on Thursday accusing a California company of clogging computers across the nation with secretly installed spyware and adware, which can vex users and impede the flow of commerce on the Web.Go, Eliot. Go, baby, go.The attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, sued Intermix Media, a large Internet marketing firm, accusing it of embedding "several types of invasive and annoying" programs on its Web domains that can pop up, route users to unwanted sites or link them to Intermix's services and clients. The accusations were in a complaint that was filed on Thursday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.
It has been very hard for Americans -- lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring -- to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.
Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life -- not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense -- you name it.
The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.
The article is exceprted from a book, called The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century, that just went on my Amazon order list.
Cookie Monster, the biscuit-eating puppet on US children's show Sesame Street, will cut down on his favourite food as part of an anti-obesity drive.What's next? Are they going to send Oscar the Grouch to charm school? Are Bert and Ernie finally going to come out of the closet and fly off to Vermont for a civil union ceremony? Will Grover go on lithium?The blue-furred muppet who used to sing "C is for Cookie" will now tell viewers that "A Cookie is a Sometimes Food".
Each episode of the show's new series will begin with a "health tip" about healthy foods and physical activity.
A Sesame Street representative said the popular character would be "broadening his eating habits" in future.
Around here you can give those excess cell phones to the YW (not YM) CA and they will re-program them to dial 911 only. They distribute them to women in precarious situations (e.g. domestic violence). Perhaps your local YW does something similar.New York City has such a program, and it's coordinated through Verizon Wireless. This weekend, I'm going to go down to the local Verizon Store with a box of old phones collected from our apartment building (I am sure that there are other folks in my building with old cells lying around.)
It was called the American Flyer, and its goals were ambitious: to speed train travel between Northeastern cities, steal customers from air shuttles, provide the model for a nationwide fast rail system and help its deficit-prone parent, Amtrak, earn a profit. "These trains will enable Amtrak to carry its customers into the 21st century aboard 21st-century trains," said Thomas M. Downs, Amtrak's president, at a 1996 ceremony announcing a $611 million contract for the new trains.It's a long article, but well worth a read, especially if you're a railfan.Today that train is called the Acela, and instead of being Amtrak's savior, it has become a frustrating burden. On Wednesday, the company announced plans to sideline all 20 Acelas until summer to replace cracked brakes. It was the third major disruption of the high-speed service since it came on line in 2001.
The tale of the Acela is in many ways the story of Amtrak itself, where political pressures, tight budgets, contested regulations and design changes turned a high-speed train into something slower, more expensive and less reliable than what Amtrak had promised.
Your Linguistic Profile: |
40% General American English |
30% Dixie |
15% Upper Midwestern |
10% Yankee |
5% Midwestern |
"I went with him once," said Konrad Baumgartner, the head of the theology department at Regensburg University. "Afterwards, he went into the old cemetery behind the church.Mister Gato (who, long experience has taught us, is of the Chew-ish faith) heartily approves.
"It was full of cats, and when he went out, they all ran to him. They knew him and loved him. He stood there, petting some and talking to them, for quite a long time. He visited the cats whenever he visited the church. His love for cats is quite famous."
"When we were on vacation, a cat, a little kitten, would come by, and he'd be giddy, almost giggling with joy," she said." Cats love him; they always go to him straight away. And he loves them back."That's so wrong, I don't even know where to start. He's the Pope, which has got to be at least as stressful as being a CEO or a head of state, and he's an old, old man. Let the man have a cat in the Vatican if he wants one.
He doesn't have a cat, however. [The housekeeper] doesn't think he can have one living in the Vatican.
"He was always content to play with the street cats," she said. "I don't know much about Rome, but I know there's no shortage of cats there."
VATICAN CITY (AP) - Got a prayer or a problem for the new pope? Now you can e-mail him. Showing that Pope Benedict XVI intends to follow in the footsteps of John Paul II's multimedia ministry, the Vatican on Thursday modified its Web site so that users who click on an icon on the home page automatically activate an e-mail composer with his address.I wonder what the Pope's spam filter looks like.
In English, the address is benedictxvi@vatican.va. In Italian: benedettoxvi@vatican.va.
We are [company name] of [a really ghastly NYC suburb out on Long Island] with 25 years experience. If you are looking for an opportunity as an Architect, please send your e-mailed resume to [my equally clueless colleague/minion.] Call at [redacted.]My response:
Hi, [clueless] (and [clueless's minion]),
Wow, I'd love to work as an architect. The trouble is, I have no training (formal or informal) as an architect, have never designed or built anything in my life unless you count a bird-feeder when I was a Boy Scout, and certainly have never worked as an architect.
But big buildings and cool houses absolutely fascinate me.
If you're still willing to consider me as a candidate for jobs in architecture on that basis, let's talk!
Best regards,
Barry Campbell
Walkin’ through the slush to catch an "A" trainLike I said, it was a perfect spring afternoon. I got some sunshine (I'm mildly burned, actually; being one of the Whitest People Ever, that happens to me quickly) ate some good falafel, and heard some great new music.
Thinking back to those buildings before the planes
I read through the manuscripts on my couch back when I was editing the things, and got so ravenously hungry I would have been sorely tempted to rip a candy apple out of the hands of any passing girl scout. Then the books' agent read through them, and called me up like a starving man in a desert - literally wheezing from hunger, his voice unrecognizable. The Penguin editors and proofreaders all underwent similar crises. These books are like diabolical hunger pills from the Twilight Zone. It's sick, eerie, and slightly scary. The web site makes people pretty hungry, and is kind of addictive, but these books appear to be pure crack for the hunger reflex. They should come with a warning label. I'm kind of hesitant to unleash them on an unsuspecting world.Newsweek magazine has noticed, and this Monday's edition documents a chowhounding expedition to Newark, NJ led by Mr. Leff (lucky reporters!):
Jim Leff speaks in a breathless staccato: "Incredible barbecue. In a shack. In Newark." He's raving about his newest restaurant find, which he says serves some of the best South Carolina-style mustard sauce in the Northeast. You may not think of Newark, N.J., as a culinary capital, but Leff has a knack for sniffing out great food in unlikely places. He shares his discoveries with readers of Chowhound.com, where thousands of food lovers swap tips on everything from which Queens street cart sells the best Indian dosas to how to get a reservation at Napa Valley's The French Laundry. Next week Leff's wisdom, along with that of his site's most loyal contributors, will be published in two new guidebooks: "The Chowhound's Guide to the New York Tristate Area" and "The Chowhound's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area" ($18 each). We tagged along on a recent scouting trip to Newark to figure out how he can find a great meal anywhere.(Read the whole thing.)
"Carnival of the cats Ug."But, as the old saying goes, there's no such thing as bad publicity. Just make sure you spell the URL right, even if you can't spell "Ugh."
Duff: Well, Homer, your hunger strike lasted twelve amazing days.T-shirts are available. (Hint: if you look in the "discontinued" section, there are some nifty and very cartoonish ones for nine bucks. Nine bucks!)
Homer: Oh, me so hung-y.
Duff: Of course you are, Hungry Hungry Homer. So why not break your fast with our new Isotope Dog Supreme.
[Duffman presents a hot dog loaded with toppings]
Homer: [sniffing] Oh, oh, so hard to resist. Mesquite-grilled onions, jalapeño relish ... wait a minute, those are Southwestern ingredients. [the crowd gasps] Mango-lime salsa? That's the kind of bold flavor they enjoy in ... Albuquerque! [the crowd gasps again]
Lenny: [in the stands] He's right!
Moe: Yeah, and the wrapper says, "Albuquerque Isotopes."
Mel: Homer was right! They're planning to move the team!
The total vote was 6,830 in favor of Q62 and 5,102 opposed. It was close, but the "Pro-62" crowd took the vote by a 14-point margin. With 5.4 million people in the state, roughly 0.2% of the state turned out to vote. We actually had more people sign our anti-62 petition (over 21,000 so far) than the total number of people that showed up to vote at the county hearings.(Here's the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources' official statement.)
A proposal to legalize the killing of feral cats is not going to succeed, Gov. Jim Doyle said Wednesday.If you signed a petition, made a phone call, wrote a letter to the editor... thanks.
"I don't think Wisconsin should become known as a state where we shoot cats," said Doyle, a Democrat who neither hunts nor owns a cat. "What it does is sort of hold us up as a state that everybody is kind of laughing at right now."
He told reporters his office had received calls from around the country denouncing a proposal adopted Monday at meetings of the Wisconsin Conservation Congress, a public advisory group, that would classify wild, free-roaming cats as an unprotected species that kills song birds and other wildlife.
<...>
Doyle said he respects the Conservation Congress but "on this one I think everybody recognizes it's not going anywhere."
Health experts have begun to destroy samples of a potentially lethal flu strain sent to laboratories around the world by a US testing organisation.As astute readers will have deduced from the "s" in the word "organisation" above, this story comes to us courtesy of the BBC. There's more coverage from the AP (via the New York Times) and a relatively calming statement from the WHO (are they still smashing guitars onstage?)The samples are of Asian flu, which killed between one and four million people in 1957 but disappeared by 1968.
Testing kits containing the virus were sent to more than 3,700 laboratories in 18 countries from Brazil to Lebanon.
The World Health Organization said the virus could "easily cause an influenza epidemic" if not handled properly.
The first exercise I want to offer this morning is an exercise in imagining what a human adult might be like. If you are asked what are the characteristics you would regard as marks of maturity, or having grown up as a human being, what would you say? Let me try a few suggestions. The human adult I imagine is someone who is aware of emotion but not enslaved by it. A human adult is someone who believes that change is possible in their own lives and the lives of those around them. A human adult is someone who is aware of fallibility and death, that is who knows they are not right about everything and that they won’t live forever. An adult is someone sensitive to the cost of the choices they make, for themselves and for the people around them. An adult is someone who is not afraid of difference, who is not threatened by difference. And I would add too, an adult is someone aware of being answerable to something more than just a cultural consensus – someone whose values, choices, priorities are shaped by something other than majority votes; which is why I add – in brackets, but you’d expect me to – that I think that an awareness of the holy is an important aspect of being an adult, however you want to phrase that.
Now I think that without a working definition of maturity, whether it is that one or something like it, we can’t even begin to understand the process of formation. I’ll say it once more because it is worth saying: if we don’t know what it is we are ‘inducting’ people into when we try and help them grow as humans, we cannot be surprised if chaos results.
All people have a "tact filter", which applies tact in one direction to everything that passes through it. Most "normal people" have the tact filter positioned to apply tact in the outgoing direction. Thus whatever normal people say gets the appropriate amount of tact applied to it before they say it. This is because when they were growing up, their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all!"
"Nerds," on the other hand, have their tact filter positioned to apply tact in the incoming direction. Thus, whatever anyone says to them gets the appropriate amount of tact added when they hear it. This is because when nerds were growing up, they continually got picked on, and their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, "They're just saying those mean things because they're jealous. They don't really mean it."
When normal people talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they say, and no one's feelings get hurt. When nerds talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they hear, and no one's feelings get hurt. However, when normal people talk to nerds, the nerds often get frustrated because the normal people seem to be dodging the real issues and not saying what they really mean. Worse yet, when nerds talk to normal people, the normal people's feelings often get hurt because the nerds don't apply tact, assuming the normal person will take their blunt statements and apply whatever tact is necessary.
So, nerds need to understand that normal people have to apply tact to everything they say; they become really uncomfortable if they can't do this. Normal people need to understand that despite the fact that nerds are usually tactless, things they say are almost never meant personally and shouldn't be taken that way. Both types of people need to be extra patient when dealing with someone whose tact filter is backwards relative to their own.
Copyright © 1996 by Jeff Bigler. Permission is granted to redistribute this text in its entirety for non-commercial purposes, provided that this copyright notice and either the URL for the page (http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html) or a link to it is included. All other rights reserved.
We are Unitarian Jihad. There is only God, unless there is more than one God. The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God, with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was noted with love by the secretary.Related: Get your Unitarian Jihad nom de guerre at the Unitarian Jihad Name Generator. (I will henceforth be known as "The Machine Gun of Sweet Reason.")
