Google's New Goodies

Ever innovative, Google raises the stakes again this week by adding some incredible functionality:

• Enter a flight number: results show the flight's status and a map indicating its progress
  
• Enter an area code: get a MapQuest.com map of that area
  
• Enter a UPPS tracking number: receive a page denoting tha package's delivery status
  
• Enter a VIN number: get a page with the car's year, make and model
  
• Enter a UPC number: results include the product name and sites selling it

Not too shabby. What'll they think of next?

In the future, I want the following:

• Buy a traditional-looking paper-based book: it incorporates a search engine (voice recognition?) and you can search for any word or phrase in the book - I know you can practically do this online at Amazon already and we'll all have wireless web-based evices within five years or whatever anyway, but . . . this is just a fetish
  
• Whistle or sing a tune into any device: it recognizes the song and can name the tune and tell you who wrote, most popular recordings, verisons, etc - never worry what the name of that/who wrote that ear worm again!
  
• Replace my own already badly faltering memory

Also, Google may be getting into ad-based email al la Hotmail and Yahoo.

Do Despair

Fun stuff at Despair, Inc. for folks who hate motivational speakers, programs, posters, etc.

Amish Gone Wild

The fascinating documentary The Devil's Playground depicts the period of rumspringa, during which Amish teens pretty much get to run wild--drinking, smoking, sleeping around, whatever. All that fun stuff is pretty much forgiven when they return to the Amish community.They have the option to stay out of the community, too, and when they return, they'll apparently be welcomed with open arms. If they return, however, and later decide abide within the Amish system anymore, then, I believe, they're kicked out for good. Many kids return from rumspringa to lead proper Amish lives. As the documentary depicts their community, these kids are so unprepared for the real world, it's no wonder they come running back to the fold.

Anyway, I should've guessed when I watched the documentary that some joker would come up with an idea for a reality TV show.

Stephen Glass at the New Republic, Jayson Blair at the New York Times. Now add to the liars' club Jack Kelley of USA Today. Nominated by that paper five times for the Pulitzer Prize.

Says former foreign editor of the paper, Johanna Neumann:

"He was this very earnest, moralistic Christian reporter,'' she said. "It made people trust him in ways they didn't trust other reporters. If he was reporting he had the diary of a Serbian girl, and no one else had it, you tended to say: 'He just has a way with people. People just respond to him.' ''

Kelley had claimed to be in possession of a young Serbian girl's diary. He quoted from this diary in his writings, and when the paper asked him to find out her full name so they could authenticate his article, he came up empty, despite help from United NAtions workers in tracking her down.

Kelley later claimed to possess a notebook with notes which linked Slododan Milosevic to "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo. Kelley asked a woman to pose as the translator of the notebook, but eventually admitted--upon confrontation--that he had fabricated her role.

Kakutani on Perle & Frum

Guess we shouldn't be surprised that someone like Richard Perle would have the audacity to name his new book An End to Evil. Perle and David Frum wrote the book to share (as the book's subtitle explains) How to Win the War on Terror. Michiko Kakutani rips the book to shreds in her NYT review.

Making its points with all the subtlety of a pit bull on steroids, "An End to Evil" is smug, shrill and deliberately provocative. Which might not be so surprising given the authors' track records. Mr. Frum, a former White House speechwriter who helped coin the "axis of evil" phrase that President George W. Bush used in his 2002 State of the Union address, adopted a similarly bellicose manner in his 2003 book "The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush." Mr. Perle, a hawkish member of the Defense Policy Board and an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, acquired the Washington nicknames Prince of Darkness and Darth Vader in the 1980's for his combative, take-no-prisoners pronouncements.

David Frum responded in the National Review Online that Kakutani's wrath stems from resentment that "The New York Times no longer decides what Americans will read and what Americans will think about what they read. Rather than look inward, they blame talk radio and the Internet and Fox TV."

No, Mr. Frum, she's enraged by your astonishing arrogance. She is angered by the apparent pride with which you and Mr. Perle espouse policies which are dangerous, uncivil and outmoded. You and Mr. Perle, you just don't get it.

Responding to the Economist's criticism that the book isn't "nuanced" enough, Frum says that "nuance [is] a euphemism for 'accommodationist.'" This argument is typical of the neo-cons: decry a policy as being block-headed and simplistic and they accuse you of not being prepared to defend America.

Kakutani even mentions a quotation from the book to that end in her review:

"There is no middle way for Americans," they write in the opening chapter. "It is victory or holocaust. This book is a manual for victory."

This is the bullying language of dull punks.

Disgust is good. Disgust works.

This New Science article discusses the science of disgust. It doesn't much address the potential for socially-determined disgust to be harmful, though.

Lance Workman, a psychologist at Cardiff University says, "In some parts of the world people eat tarantulas, which is something that would disgust most people." The article says Workman believes such people have learned to suppress their disgust.

Interesting how he supposes that we should have a predisposition towards disgust for tarantulas. What if it's socially acquired? Learned? The article does point out that some people have an irrational disgust for cancer patients, despite the fact that the condition isn't contagious, but it doesn't really discuss the harm that sort of disgust could engender: alienation, deprivation of much-needed touch, affection and compassion.

My concern lies in that I could see some folks justifying their hate, bigotry, homophobia, etcetera, by asserting that it's "natural" disgust for the unclean or the "unnatural," as so many gaybashers like to say. (Interestingly enough, the survey which this study was based on didn't include disgust of a sexual bent.) Just because something is "unnatural" doesn't make it wrong or worthy of our contempt. Or disgust.

In fact, I'd argue that determing what's "natural" versus "unnatural" is an often difficult and sometimes futile enterprise. The idea tha "natural" is somehow automatically better than "unnatural" is certainly fallacious. It's quite "natural" for some creatures to eat their spouses or to kill their young. It might be quite "natural" for a virus to extinguish all of humanity within a matter of weeks. I'm sure we'd all agree, however, that it'd be mighty nice for a scientist to come up with a counteragent, however "unnatural" which would deliver humanity from the brink of extinction.

Another example: It's arguably "unnatural" for us to live into a tenth decade. What's probably "natural" is for us to succumb to some sort of virus or disease in our mid-40s. But few people seems to decry the idea that we should pursue longer lives through science, medication, surgery, cryogenics, whatever--even in pursuit of immortality. Arguably, we're motivated by disgust to pursue immortality, too--by our disgust with death. So, in this case, we're motivated by digust to do something "unnatural."

In other words, we're pretty selective with our disgust. Guess that's because death is something that affects us all.

Proof from Calpundit that Richard Perle truly is a few sandwiches short of a full picnic. His inane ideas about warfare and foreign afairs apparently extend all the way back to Afghanistan in the early 1980s.

But how do guys like this end up running the country? How do they manage to stay so influential for so long? Sheer persistence of will, I suppose. Guess that explains the success of more obvious crazies like Fred Phelps, too.

Good on Wesley Clark for speaking out against the Confederate flag.

“I don’t believe we ought to be standing on keeping that flag out there on state grounds like that. The flag that ought to be flying around this country is the American flag.”

The flag flew atop the Capitol dome until 2000 when it was removed and placed at a Civil War monument--still on the State House grounds. When I lived in South Carolina, it still adorned the Capitol and I wanted to rip it down myself.

The State raised the flag there in 1962, and some believe the all-white legislature did so at the time in direct defiance of the Supreme Court and the Civil Rights movement. Whether that's true or not, the flag has come to reflect a culture of hate for many black people. And that's reason enough for it to go.

Besides, the Confederate States of America surrendered to the Union in 1865. Almost 140 years ago.

MLK Day

And since it's MLK Day on Monday: Even now, in 2004 Greenville is the only county in South Carolina that doesn't observe Martin Luther King Day. County employees cannot take the day off with pay. Given the opportunity to vote on the matter last May county workers rejected the move.

South Carolina only began celebrating the holiday as a state in 2001.

Wal-Mart's in trouble again. This time for locking its workers in over night.

"My ankle was crushed," Mr. Rodriguez said, explaining he had been struck by an electronic cart driven by an employee moving merchandise. "I was yelling and running around like a hurt dog that had been hit by a car. Another worker made some phone calls to reach a manager, and it took an hour for someone to get there and unlock the door."

Apparently, for the past 15 years Wal-Mart has had a policy of locking its employees in many of its Wal-Mart and Sam's stores at night to reduce crime.

For any one who loves David Levine's caricatures, The New York Review of Books has thoughtfully archived them for us here.

The caricature above is of Julian Barnes, one of my favorite writers. The ark is a reference to Barnes' wonderfully satirical book A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. The part about the flood is told by a stowaway woodworm on the ark.

Florida's Theocracy

According to Miami Daily Business Review, Florida judicial nominees may hafta answer some fairly personal questions about their views on various religious issues. For example:

• Whether they are active in their church.

• Whether the candidate is a "God-fearing person."

• How they feel about the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 ruling striking down a Texas law criminalizing homosexual activity.

• How they would feel about having the Ten Commandments posted in their courtroom.

For real.

One female public defender was even asked the following during a judicial screening:

"Will you be able to balance your duties as a single mother of twins with your duties as a Broward judge?"

Isn't it, like, illegal for employers to ask these questions of anyone? Regardless of he irony isn't amusing. The nominees are being questioned by members of the 15th Judicial Circuit Judicial Nomination Commission.

Apparently, the biggest offender is O'Neal Dozier, the pastor of the fundamentalist Worldwide Christian Center in Pompano Beach, Florida. He was appointed by Governor Jeb Bush. As recently as November 30th 200, he was also quoted in the Sun-Sentinel as saying:

"This country is founded on the principles of Christianity, not the principles of Buddhism, not the principles of Judaism. I don't believe the developers of the Constitution would want us to compromise our Christian values."

He also described homosexuality: as "something so nasty and disgusting that it makes God want to vomit."

Quite a theocracy they got going on down there in Florida.

Via TalkLeft.

Very nice. News University: The Poynter Institute and the Knight Foundation will offer online training modules for journalists.

Paul Davies is a professor of natural philosophy at the Australian Center for Astrobiology, at Macquarie University, in Sydney. Last year, he wrote an excellent article for Atlantic Monthly called E.T. and God in which he showed that the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe - like, say, a fossilized bacterium on Mars - could prompt some serious thinking for the more religious among us, perhaps even theological crises for some.

With Spirit taking high-res pics on Mars now and with all the talk of missions to Mars, Davies' piece certainly proves timely. And wouldn't it be ironic if a program initiated by George W. Bush became a catalyst for the advancement of secular thought?

Lake Superior State University suggests we banish these words in 2004. Good on 'em. And good riddance especially to "metrosexual," "X" anything, "punked," "shock and awe," and "shots rung out." Shouldn't that last phrase have been tossed three decades ago? I mean, don't they tell you to avoid that one in Journalism 101?

LSSU is Michigan's smallest public university and they've been creating this list since 1976. There's even a web site for submitting words.

In case you've been wondering, yes, David Foster Wallace really is a pretentious . . . twerp. Scroll down for Languagehat's critique of Wallace's well-known Harper's piece demanding a return to prescriptive English, "Tense Present: Democrat, English, and the Wars over Usage."

Both these guys know so much about language, though, that I'm cringing at the comma and hyphenation mistakes I likely made in that last paragraph. And is is Foster Wallace or Wallace? After a short fact-checking mission: I'm reasonably sure it's Wallace.