Internal Monologue

A language preserved only in certain obsolete texts, whose more recent editions, though much clearer and better organized, have been drained of a sense of wonder. What a treat, to grow up reading text like this: The true splendor of the Vault can be appreciated only by those with infravision, or by use of the roseate lenses or a gem of seeing. The Vault is a strange anomaly, a hemispherical cyst in the crust of the earth, an incredibly huge domed fault over 6 miles long and nearly as broad. The dome overhead is a hundred feet high at the walls, arching to several thousand feet height in the center. When properly viewed, the radiation from certain unique minerals give the visual effect of a starry heaven, while near the zenith of this black stone bowl is a huge mass of tumkeoite -- which in its slow decay and transformation to lacofcite sheds a lurid gleam, a ghostly plum-colored light to human eyes, but with ultravision a wholly different sight. The small "star" nodes glow ...

As I once pointed out, messaging, instant and text, has replaced the phone call as the chief means by which teen-agers communicate their woes to other teen-agers—but if messaging had come along first, and the phone call just been announced by Steve Jobs a week ago, can anyone doubt the huge technological leap the phone call would present over the instant message? Real-time conversation! Hear your girlfriend’s every breath and sigh! Escape the tyranny of the keyboard for the roaming realm of the real voice! “Real Speech, Real Time, At Last The Real You,” Steve would say, and we would all be rocking in his wake. - Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker

UPDATE: More at boingboing . UPDATE 2: The Volokh Conspiracy and Sullivan have now posted on this. (But you read it here at Internal Monologue first!) Story seems to have touched a nerve. I think everyone can empathize with a guy in prison for life who has had one of his few sources of richness and pleasure taken away. Punishing people who are already helpless just seems awful, no matter no matter how much they deserve it. Question: does putting people in prison really reduce crime, or does it just push crime into a hole where most of us don't have to deal with it? ...and I say give it to him! Yes, he was convicted of 1st degree murder, but when you take his D&D stuff away , I'm on his side: MADISON, Wis. - A man serving life in prison for first-degree intentional homicide has lost his legal battle to play Dungeons and Dragons behind bars. Kevin T. Singer filed a lawsuit against officials at Wisconsin's Waupun prison after a pol...

If the typical furry is a humanoid being with a animal head, then these are sort of reverse furries : Question: Were the ancient Egyptians furries? I'm not the first one to have pondered this .

While waiting for the next season, we call mull this over: No contemporary television show employs a quieter camera than Mad Men. Its disdain for the Law & Order version of cinematic realism that reached its apogee (or nadir) in Cloverfield is palpable: the camera frames scenes from multiple fixed positions and the shots are spliced together at a pace designed to have a soporific effect on anyone born after 1980. The framing and the pacing are a deliberate homage to the films of the period represented on the show. Though it may seem natural to direct a series set in the early 1960s in the same mode Douglas Sirk shot films in the 1960s, it is anything but. Most films that aim to be realist depict the past in the dominant contemporary realist mode: Saving Private Ryan looks realistic to us because it panders to what we think looks realistic. Had Spielberg directed it in accordance with the realism regnant in 1942 the film would have looked dated. I point out the obvious here o...

Would House Democrats please pass the deeply-flawed Senate health care reform bill? We can do some fixes by budget reconciliation later. Don't let one special election against a lackluster candidate send you into some kind of feinting spell tizzy. And if you don't do anything, that will be a horrible moral catastrophe. And if that doesn't motivate you, it will be a horrible political catastrophe for you as well. Your base is already very upset with you. If you let this chance slip away, it will be awful awful awful.

If what I'm hearing is correct, I'm very scared of the latest supreme court ruling. Here's digby : A century of campaign finance law was thrown in the trash today and that is going to be the result. These corporations have virtually unlimited money to spend on this --- ad campaigns are chump change by their standards and well worth every penny if they deliver politicians who will represent them in the congress. The deal is now explicit and it will be very difficult to unseat them if their elections are financed entirely by special interests. Meteor Blades on DailyKos is similarly gloomy: With this ruling, the concentrated big media will now be a megaphone for even more of the oligarchs' points of view. As if we weren't already inundated. As if they didn't already have us by the short hairs. As usual, the class war will be blamed not on the guys who started it, but on those who resist. Here's a brief blurb in The Atlantic's online politics section: Cit...

Here's a strange idea explored in this New York Times Magazine article : as American ideas about mental illness spread, the symptoms that mentally ill people around the world suffer are actually changing, becoming more like the symptoms Americans suffer. A snippet: For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreadin...

I once told a friend that going back to Yale felt like visit the set of a movie about my college years. After viewing this, I'll probably feel even more like that. And now my precious college memories have been contaminated by feel-good musical theaterism. Note to prospective Yale students: THE SUN RARELY SHINES THERE (and generally only during spring semester finals). My life at Yale rarely had the feeling of musical theater. Some of it was quite wonderful, but it wasn't musical-theater wonderful. Anyway, if you went to Yale, you might get a kick out of this: I did feel good that when they were listing all the cool stuff Yale has, they mention "8 Comedy Groups." I was a founding member of one of them ( The Fifth Humour ).

A letter to the StarTribune about Pat Robertson's recent comment that Haiti made a pact with the devil (HT: Pablo via email) Dear Pat Robertson, I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox ...

During the movie, I was sure Jake and Neytiri were going to join their interface tendrils. But it never happened. Apparently the scene was deleted from the movie: EXT. WILLOW GLADE He puts his face close to hers. She rubs her cheek against his. He kisses her on the mouth. They explore each other. Then she pulls back, eyes sparkling. NEYTIRI Kissing is very good. But we have something better. She pulls him down until they are kneeling, facing each other on the faintly glowing moss. Neytiri takes the end of her queue and raises it. Jake does the same, with trembling anticipation. The tendrils at the ends move with a life of their own, straining to be joined. MACRO SHOT — The tendrils INTERTWINE with gentle undulations. JAKE rocks with the direct contact between his nervous system and hers. The ultimate intimacy. They come together into a kiss and sink down on the bed of moss, and ripples of light spread out around them. THE WILLOWS sway, without wind, and the night is alive with pulsi...

Via Crooks and Liars .

I grew up in a light green three-bedroom house with a two-car garage on a moderately busy tree-lined street in a nice, urban, residential neighborhood with a grid street plan and flat terrain, within walking distance of picturesque water and a busy commercial district. I now live in a light green three-bedroom house with a two-car garage on a slightly busier tree-lined street in a nice, urban, residential neighborhood with a grid street plan and flat terrain, within walking distance of picturesque water and a busy commercial district. I have exchanged Irving Avenue for Broadway, East Isles in Minneapolis for Otis/Broadway in Alameda, Lake of the Isles for San Francisco Bay, and Hennepin Avenue for Park Street. Congratulations, Zac, you have reproduced your childhood home as accurately as one can in the Bay Area. This is a good thing, I think. That was a very nice house. Funny though, how we come back to what we know, what we find comfortable and familiar.

Click to enlarge. From cinema-and-movie.com via Mad Latinist on Facebook.

From Wired : Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time. It's not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It's as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger. My pet theories as to why this is happening: Drug companies have spent so much money on advertising, telling us that drugs are capable of making us happy and healthy, that our expectations for them are much higher. This might generate a larger placebo effect. The Wired article mentions this possibility. The other possibility is that we are experiencing more psychological discomfort of the kind amenable to placebo treatment now than were were in the past. Thus, placebo treatments are more effective now than, say, 20 years ago. (HT: Mad Latinist via Facebook)

I just heard on the PBS Newshour that airport hassles are going to increase. Can we please weigh the enormous costs (both financial and psychological) against the potential benefits? If terrorists blow up a plane or two a year, it's really no big deal except to those directly affected. Some 30,000 people die in auto crashes every year in the United States, yet there are no calls to lower the speed limit to 40 mph or require breathalyzers to be added to all car ignitions. Stop the hysteria, please. And when confronted by a new "threat", always consider the possiblilty that doing nothing and ignoring it may be the best course of action. Keep calm, carry on. [I sent this from my iPhone, so please excuse any excessive brevity or typographical errors.] --Zachary Drake