These cartoons are very blatantly anti-semitic and quite nuts.

There should be a profession called an arguer. This would not be like a lawyer, because few of their arguments would focus on the law. They would be called in when a company made a controversial decision and expected a lot of public discourse. They would accept jobs on a case-by-case basis so that they only argued for things they believed in (some wouldn't operate that way, but the good ones would).

Their job would be to engage with the public. This would be nothing like a Public Relations guy giving a statement, customer service giving a run around, or a press release. They would spend their time reading comments by the public -- both in public places and sent directly to the company -- and having conversations with those people. They would not give a statement and move on, instead they would actually engage with what the person was saying.

In some circumstances, this would be a far more effective use of money than advertising. There are all these people who want to interact with the company. So why not hire people to tell them a personalised version of the company's point of view?

A good arguer would persuade a few people that the company was right, and a fair amount would become less hostile. But more than winning arguing points, he'd show the company *has* arguing points that can hold up in a sustained debate and don't fall down after a few back and forths. He'd be demonstrating that people seriously believe the company is right and have thought it out.

Another part of his job would be to relay any opposition to the company that he considered especially interesting or thought had a good point. A company has a hard time reading and filtering a huge in basket, but when you cut down incoming arguments by a factor of a thousand or so (removing duplicates and bad arguments and fluff) it gets way more manageable.

Unfortunately the primary problem I see with this idea is the difficulty of hiring qualified, competent arguers. Letting people speak for your company is risky, so you need to be sure they are good at it. And the arguers job requires a lot more skill to avoid mishaps than a press release writer's job. The arguer will write a thousand times as many words, but every single one could end up quoted by the press if he messes up.

One day in the future, arguers will not be expected to be perfect and if they messed up now and then the press would realise this doesn't reflect badly on the company.

In Iran, a girl was sentenced to death by hanging for defending herself against rapists. If she hadn't defended herself, she would be stoned as an adulterer.

Rule 1) Do *not* second guess your memes

this applies to most forms of popularity, especially school grades k-12. it applies 10-20% less at college.

Yannis has proposed Yannis's Law which states that programmer productivity doubles every 6 years. He gets the figure from a project that took a week or two in 1972, but would now take an hour or two. I just did it in twenty minutes using a plain text editor (with python syntax highlighting) and a unix terminal. My Python is rusty.

The KWIC index system accepts an ordered set of lines, each line is an ordered set of words, and each word is an ordered set of characters. Any line may be "circularly shifted" by repeatedly removing the first word and appending it at the end of the line. The KWIC index system outputs a listing of all circular shifts of all lines in alphabetical order. This is a small system. Except under extreme circumstances (huge data base, no supporting software), such a system could be produced by a good programmer within a week or two.

Here's my code:

#!/usr/bin/env python
def main():
    f = open("kwic.txt", "rU")
    out = open("kwic-output.txt", "w")
    final = []
    for line in f:
        words = line.split()
        count = len(words)
        for i in xrange(count):
            final.append(makestr(words))
            cycle(words)        
    final.sort()
    for ele in final:
        out.write(ele + "\n")
        
def makestr(li):
    s = ""
    first = 1
    for ele in li:
        if first == 1:
            first = 0
            s += ele
        else:
            s += " " + ele
    return s
    
def cycle(li):
    tmp = li[0]
    del li[0]
    li.append(tmp)
    return li

if __name__ == '__main__': main()

By the way, if someone knows a more elegant way to avoid having an extra space in makestr, let me know. I'm aware of the option of deleting the first character after making the string, but I don't consider that very nice either.

Wikipedia says:

Diet. One flawed study purported that Chocolate, french fries, potato chips and sugar, among others, affect acne. A recent review of scientific literature cannot affirm either way. The consensus among health professionals is that acne sufferers should experiment with their diets, and refrain from consuming such fare if they find such food affects the severity of their acne.

But how is someone supposed to know what foods increase or decrease his acne? Try to pay attention to what he eats and what changes in diet are linked to what effects? How will he know which food did it, and how will he know what the time delay between diet changes and acne changes is? (If acne changes, was the it due to the food 2, 4, 6, or 20 days ago? Or not due to food at all?) Scientists trying to do controlled studies haven't figured anything out yet. A person who goes on his own anecdotal evidence will almost certainly be creating unscientific superstitions for himself to follow. This should not be encouraged. People have enough hang-ups about food already. The only responsible advice for scientists to give is, "don't worry about it, eat what you want."

That some scientists would encourage people to act on anecdotal evidence in this way suggests they are not competent to perform studies themselves.

LOL

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2002822474&slug=harrop23&date=20060223

just bury the CO2, says article. until then blow on windmills all day to check your email.

don't lefties usually oppose burying pollution in the ground? it could get into the water!! we'll never survive the dual threats of CO2 and dihydrogen-monoxide in the water!!

why not just turn the CO2 into something else we like more? we already have machines to do this: we call them plants. especially seaweed. i hear there's plenty of space left in the sea.

kill terrorists with collateral damage, and leftists hate you

refrain, and they hate you too

"Richard Clarke has charged that fighting terrorism was not the top priority with the Bush administration"

http://in.rediff.com/news/2004/mar/25osama.htm

Rantissi killing: World reaction

Dear God, the entire world except Israel and USA condemned killing a major player in Hamas. And USA's statement was far too weak.

My preferred statement by the USA would be something like:

Good riddance to bad men. We pray Israel will continue this policy of making the world a better place. We are currently developing methods to coordinate with Israel to aid in future strikes. We will treat any condemnation of this action as condemnation of the United States as well. We wish to stand united with Israel, and the Jews, hand in hand, if they will have us.

I realise the "wish to" and "if they will have us" is a bit weak for a public statement, but i can dream.

The most interesting quote was:

Lebanese Culture Minister Ghazi al-Aridi:

"This is an ongoing soap opera and we'll see more murders of Palestinian leaders... This is absolute terrorism in all senses of the word."

Hamas leaders are "Palestinian leaders"?

I think some liberals (in the modern sense meaning 'leftist') believe this or similar:

All voluntary actions are self-interest based, therefore to rise above self-interest and have an ideal society *requires* involuntary actions: government force.