Steve Kass

“Screaming performance” is a label journalists seem to apply judiciously. The vast Google News Archives records only 28 outbursts having met the high bar. However, a trend is clear. Did Howard Dean kill screaming? Is technological singularity just around the corner?

Science overload — always a welcome thing — happened at The Greene Space last night. On the menu? Radiolab Live: Symmetry, with guest artist John Cameron Mitchell singing Origin of Love from Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Hosts Jad and Robert dwove¹ expertly, pointing out many wonderful (mostly asymmetric) sights left and right. Looking-Glass milk, carvone, tartaric acid, and Jimmy Carter, to name a few.

I pulled out my notebook twice during the show: first, to jot down a hairy pun, and second, to sketch a schematic of the cloud chamber I owned as a kid. I’ve retired the pun and won’t divulge it here; it served its intended purpose. (Andy responded, “Ow. Even I’m offended.”) But I have a bit more to say about the cloud chamber.

In my hasty schematic, I labeled the head of the pin AMERICIUM, but subsequent research suggests that it was radium, not americium, on the head of the pin. Fortunately, I never suffered from pica. The kit also contained a chunk of uranium ore.

I didn’t play with the cloud chamber quite as much as I did with some of my other dangerous toys like the Creepy Crawlers Thingmaker (my favorite childhood toy of all, no contest), the Wham-O Air Blaster (which became increasingly dangerous each time my brother thought of something new, like pencils, to fire from it), the Vac-U-Form, the chemistry set — mercury (I especially enjoyed freezing bits of it with dry ice), carbon tetrachloride, ammonium dichromate, and potassium permanganate were among my favorite chemicals — the Slip-’n-Slide, the lawn darts, or the Clackers.

Nor was the Atomic Energy Lab the radium-containing possession I carried with me most often as a child. That distinction goes to the radium-dial watch Dad gave me in junior high school. The watch was stolen from my gym locker one morning in 1970, unfortunately — but perhaps unfortunately for the thief more than for me.

The only radium I know I own any more is in the painted dial of the Jefferson Electric Golden Hour clock in my bedroom. The radium is no doubt decaying apace and will continue to do so for centuries to come. But alas, the zinc sulfide phospor has broken down, and the dial no longer glows.

¹ The verb dweave (past tense dwove) and the noun dwive will be coined in a future installment of “Word of the Day.”

A  is for  amazon.com 
B  is for  bit.ly 
C  is for  chase.com 
D  is for  dessoff.org 
E  is for  ebay.com 
F  is for  facebook.com 
G  is for  gmail.google.com 
H  is for  homedepot.com
I  is for  i.imgur.com/bPOxq.jpg 
J  is for  jsomers.net 
K  is for  nothing 
L  is for  loweringthebar.net 
M  is for  mathoverflow.net 
N  is for  nytimes.com 
O  is for  okcupid.com 
P  is for  paladinoforthepeople.com/issuedetail.php?id=1 
Q  is for  nothing 
R  is for  retractionwatch.wordpress.com 
S  is for  stevekass.com 
T  is for  twitter.com 
U  is for  nothing 
V  is for  volokh.com 
W  is for  wunderground.com 
X  is for  xkcd.com 
Y  is for  youtube.com 
Z  is for  zillow.com

Roundup from the October Southwest Airlines Spirit magazine.

Misspellings

• “Give” (as “Hive”, page 40)
• “learn” (as “lea040n”, page 40)
• “green” (as “gree”, page 95)
• “quinceañera” (as “quinciñera”, page 97, in Neal Pollack’s quite awful short story Down with Ice Cream!

Unexpected nonmisspelling

• “minuscule” (as “minuscule”, page 93)

At which point I went back to reading the Holiday 2010 issue of Sky Mall.

For your entertainment, some choice quotes from Carl Paladino’s campaign web site, most with pithy commentary. Would that it were all a joke.

• “Carl will work for charter schools for the poorest of our urban students as an alterative to dysfunctional schools of today.” Unfortunately, this is our universe, not an alterative one.
• “Carl will consolidate schools to countywide districts to eliminate redundancy of administration and allow for more funds to be devoted to lowering class sizes and excellence.” If anyone knows how to lower excellence, CP does.
• “This is – and more – long, long overdue.” [No pithy commentary.]
• “I am particularly incensed Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s no-show job at a high-priced personal injury law firm.” We should all be incensed CP’s illiteracy. I am.
• “(See more HERE.)” (where HERE is not a link). Thank you no. I don’t care to see more.
• “Carl strongly support the State University at Buffalo 2020 plan and similar programs for other higher education institutions in the State to be able to grow in both size and student population with out State intrusion.” I can has cheezburger, with out State intrusion, please.
• “[Candidate for lieutenant governor Greg Edwards] graduated Panama High School in 1978 and then went to Allegany College in Pennsylvania.” Where correctly spelling the name of the college is apparently not a requirement for graduation.

Over at Language Log, Geoffrey Pullum relates his discovery of “the neolexeme embiggen in a perfectly serious Economist report about Ascension Island.” Should embiggen, um, embiggen its foothold in the English language, its coiner, The Simpsons writer Dan Greavey, might enter into “the very select club of people who invented words that [like cromulent, grok, and Pullum’s own eggcorn] make it into major dictionaries.” (Here, major apparently means at least somewhat more exclusive than Wiktionary.)

Unfortunately, none of the words I’ve coined or threatened to coin, like headlinic, toddfoolery, pastametric, mispostrophe, maniest, alsowise, sicize, vulpigeration, and interludinous, have made it even so far as Wiktionary, my having modestly forborne the public onanism of adding them myself. Still, I do hope to join the club some day.

Let me get this right. Writing for the Washington Post about the tragic suicide of Tyler Clementi, Kathleen Parker (“Decency plunged when Tyler Clementi jumped”) doesn’t “want to play down the gay aspect of this travesty [sic], but there isn’t space in a column to tackle everything.” Then she goes on to recommend solving social problems by making people “feel ostracized” and “targeted as pariahs.” She wants to go back in time to when it was “bad manners to display oneself — or one’s affections — in public,” and she thinks people should “make it unattractive and unacceptable to intrude on others.”

Malicious intrusions of privacy are wrong, but Parker’s idea of “respect for privacy” rings loud and hollow. It rhymes with that facetious definition of “privacy” bigoted homophobes want from gay people when they say (not quoting Ms. Parker now), “Just don’t shove it in my face.” Like, by getting married. Or holding hands in public.

How hard is it for people to understand that gay kids suffer, and some of them kill themselves, because the shame of being gay is so painful to bear. Society ostracizes homosexuality. Straight kids might be embarrassed about their sexuality, but so ashamed to love someone of the opposite sex that they take their own lives to escape the pain? Who can imagine that?

Parker writes, “Although Clementi was filmed with another man, one can imagine as easily a roommate spying on a heterosexual encounter.” Sure, but what one can’t imagine is that the unwitting video star would then jump off a bridge.

By the way, I don’t want to play down Kathleen Parker’s callousness in calling this a “travesty” (does she know what that word means?), but there isn’t space in a column to tackle everything. Fortunately there’s just enough space left for me to say “fuck you” to Kathleen Parker and to mention that I do believe ostracism has a place in the world, but not where she wants to put it.

In contrast to Parker, Bloomberg columnist Ann Woolner (Sex Video Suicide Leaves Shared Guilt Behind) is not a travesty. She understands.

Fuck everyone. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

Via Dan Savage:

A gay freshman at Rutgers University is believed to have committed suicide—he may have jumped off a bridge, no body has been found—after his roommate outed him in the most brutal possible way:

Two Rutgers University students have been charged with illegally taping a freshman having sex and posting the images on the Internet. The Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office has charged Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei with invasion of privacy for allegedly placing a camera in the 18-year-old student’s room in the Davidson residence on the Busch campus.

Authorities allege two encounters were taped.

“His privacy was violated, very, very violated,” said residence assistant Daryl Chan of Long Valley of the student who was taped. “His roommate was a very tech-savvy-type dude. He set up cameras all over the room and didn’t tell him.”

For Tyler, it won’t get better. Oh, and a body has been found. Fuck.

People, newspapers, bloggers, and darn near everyone — all of them continue to misunderstand or misrepresent Obama’s proposal to extend some of the Bush tax cuts. In fact, Obama can’t even describe his own proposal correctly.

Wrong or misleading:

• “Obama and congressional Democratic leaders want to allow the Bush-era breaks to expire for families earning more than $250,000 beginning next year. But they’ve run into opposition from Republicans as well as a growing number of centrist Democrats.” [Wall Street Journal]
  Fact: Under Obama’s proposal, Bush-era tax breaks will continue, not expire, for families earning more than $250,000, but they will only continue on the first $250,000 in income. Families making more than $250,000 will receive the largest benefit from Obama’s proposed legislation.
• “Asked at a CNBC forum what he would do to improve the outlook, Obama repeated his opposition to extending Bush era tax cuts for those with incomes over $250,000 a year.” [Associated Press, via Yahoo!] Fact: Obama is not opposed to extending Bush era tax cuts for those with incomes over $250,000 a year. In fact, he proposes to do exactly that — extend Bush era tax cuts for them, although only on the first $250,000 in income.
• “[B]y proposing to extend the rates for the 98 percent of households with income below $250,000 for couples and $200,000 for individuals …” [New York Times]
  Fact: Obama proposes to extend those same rates (the tax rate on the first $250,000 of income) for the other two percent of households also.
• “Obama wants to eliminate the cuts for wealthier taxpayers — individuals making more than $200,000 per year and families with income totaling more than $250,000.” [Boston Globe]
  Fact: Obama does not want to eliminate the cuts for wealthier taxpayers, only reduce them, and only on income earned above the threshold. Ironically, eliminating the tax cuts in 2011 (for both wealthier and non-wealthier taxpayers) is what Bush signed into law.
• “Here’s what I can’t do: I can’t give tax cuts to the top 2 percent of Americans—86 percent of that money going to people making a million dollars or more—and lower the deficit at the same time. I don’t have the math.” [President Obama]
  Fact: Obama is proposing tax cuts for the top 2 percent of Americans. Bigger ones than for the rest of us, in fact. He’s right about not having the math, though.
• “The other day I noted that five national polls revealed solid majority support for ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.” [The Washington Post]
  True enough, but why are all the pollsters measuring popular support for a policy no one is proposing? Both the Democrats and the Republicans propose continuing Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. The Republicans propose continuing all of them, the Democrats only some (but “only some” still means more than for nonwealthy Americans).
• “President Obama proposes to let the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire …” [Diane Lim Rogers, in CNN Opinion]

Right:

• “[T]hose rich people are getting a tax cut, too. In fact, in terms of total dollars they are getting the biggest tax cut of all.” [Newsweek]
• “I think people are actually quite confused about how the tax cuts work.” [Ezra Klein, in The Washington Post]

Ezra illustrates his point with the picture embedded below. (The folks who get it wrong don’t draw pictures. If you can’t draw it, you probably don’t understand it.) In Ezra’s chart, the blue and grey dots measure the proposed 2011 tax cuts under the two parties’ proposals. I’m not sure why the Republican’s aren’t their usual red. Maybe red evokes red ink? (But how wrong would that be?) Under current law, there will be no 2011 tax cuts, so you can imagine a third column, labeled “Bush Law” with no dots.

Under Obama’s proposal, the biggest dots go to those making the most. Under the Republican proposal, the biggest dots go to those making the most. The difference? Under the Republican plan the biggest dots are rather grotesquely big. No one (except for the Bush law, and perhaps Obama in a past life) is proposing “no tax cuts for the wealthy.” No one is proposing “tax cuts only for the middle class.” Not even close. Both parties are proposing to give the biggest¹ tax cuts to the wealthiest, and smaller tax cuts to the middle class and poor.” Of course, for the middle class and poor, there’s not as much to cut from, and there’s no simple way to grasp the bigger economic picture that surrounds this issue, but that doesn’t excuse all the misinformation.

You know Facebook is down. You probably didn’t know that Facebook is now a clock.

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Reference #11.793f748.1285274611.44f235

Notice the number 1285274611 in the error message? That’s the time. Numbers a little over 1.2 billion are almost always times. Unix times. UTC.