elfs | Tuesday's Brains are Full of Dust... (Reply)

Matt Yglesias looks for a metaphor:: I've seen ads from both Barack Obama and John McCain watching the Olympics this evening, but Obama's ads are in HD and McCain's are not. Please explain how this serves as a metaphor for the entire campaign.
Dildos At the Supreme Court: Ed Brayton brings us news that two different circuit courts have ruled two different ways on the rights of citizens to possess sexual "devices," and now it's up to the Supremes to make the final decision. Eugene Volokh is not sanguine about the outcome.
Substituting "Intelligent Design" for evolution invalidates biology credits needed to meet college admission requirements.: I've been following this case for a while. The Association of Christian Schools International sued the University of California, claiming that their rights were violated because the school refused to accept biology credits from classes that required the children accept the literality of Genesis. They called the UC's position "viewpoint discrimination."

The judge ruled that the material presented by the ACSI did not show an active discrimination against Christians in favor of a different viewpoint (reality is not a "point of view," thankfully; it hurts you whether you want it to or not!), and that the UC did not act unreasonably in affirming its standards.

Huzzah! (via The Questionable Authority)
The Homos are Coming, the Homos are Coming!: Sally Kern, who has appeared here before, used to put on a happy face to the public until she was taped at a private meeting cursing gays. Now she's taken off her mask and says she's a "cultural warrior for Judeo-Christian Values." The article linked says Kerns gave a speech in which she quoted Washington and Jefferson in saying this country was founded on "Biblical values" (funny how those somehow stayed out of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, huh?).

The article mentions that Kern is on crutches these days because of a bulging disc in her back. I wonder how that whole Intelligent Design arguments working out for her. (via Dispatches from the Culture Wars)
Music is Drugs! Save Your Children!: In what has to be the most jaw-droppingly nutty article in months, room-temperature IQ reporter Kim Kommando reports on "binaural beats," tracks that vary the content delivered to both ears in the hopes of evoking some kind of unique experience in the brain. Kommando calls them "digital drugs" and ends with this breathless warning:
The sites claim binaural beats cause the same effects as illegal drugs. These drugs impair coordination and can cause hallucinations. They've caused countless fatal accidents, like traffic collisions. If binaural beats work as promised, they are not safe. They could also create a placebo effect. The expectation elicits the response. Again, this is unsafe. At the very least, digital drugs promote drug use.
And Elvis's hip gyrations encouraged teen sex.
Iran refuses to swim against Israel in the Olympics: What, he couldn't share the same water as a Jew? Or he didn't want to have to admit that he lost to one?
It might destroy the Earth. And it runs Linux: Worldwide, the LHC computing grid will be comprised of about 20,000 servers, primarily running the Linux operating system. Scientists at Tier-2 sites can access these servers remotely when running complex experiments based on LHC data, Pordes says. If scientists need a million CPU hours to run an experiment overnight, the distributed nature of the grid allows them to access that computing power from any part of the worldwide network.
I'm also with Scott Aaronson that the LHC must be started because, as he puts it:
Given our present state of knowledge, we simply cannot exclude the possibility that aliens will visit the Earth next year, and, on finding that we have not yet produced a Higgs boson, find us laughably primitive and enslave us. Yes, admittedly, the probabilities of this event might be vanishingly small, but the fact remains that it has not been conclusively ruled out. And that being the case, the Precautionary Principle dictates taking the only safe course of action: namely, turning the LHC on as soon as possible. The fate of the planet might conceivably depend on it.