by Doctor Science
I'm a pollworker tomorrow, so I have to go to bed at 10 tonight and get up at 4:30am, to be at the polling place by 5:15. Here are my tabs, in lieu of an actual post:
- Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era | Matt Richel, New York Times: part of the Times' ongoing series, Kids These Days and That Music They Play on My Lawn. Summary: oh noez! Now poor and/or non-white kids have computers, they mostly use them to waste time! It's the fault of their shiftless parents.
- Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds: the 2010 report which is the only source of actual data cited in the NYT article. It found:
- race and economic status actually made no difference to the amount of time teens spent using the Internet for homework.
- the big difference is that black and Hispanic kids watch (or watched -- data are from 2009, which is the Pleistocene in Internet terms) YouTube a lot more, and listen(ed) to music more
- no information about how much time teens "waste" online reading or writing. It's my observation that, compared to my youth, Kids These Days read and write a *lot* more on average, because so much of their entertainment comes embedded in text and so many of their social interactions are text-based.
- What Filesharing Studies Really Say - Conclusions and Links; by Drew Wilson at ZeroPaid. Wilson did an exhaustive, exhausting look at scientific research on file-sharing:
Based on all the scientific reasoning, scientific predictions and models and a whole lot more that we got from this series, we shouldn’t even be anywhere near the kinds of debates we are having now with respect to copyright enforcement (yes, not even close). Instead, we should, at minimum, be seriously considering things like an ISP levy or creating a framework for legal file-sharing or trying to think of services that imitate the file-sharing structure to help artists and the industry make money. It’s like we’ve shunned all science and economics and headed down the road of trying to constrain, restrict and, in some ways, shut down the Internet instead. It really puts into perspective just how shocking idea’s like the “graduated response” or three strikes laws and censoring websites really are.
- Marriage Compromise and a Counteroffer They're doing it again: driving up my blood pressure by saying, as Bob Hyatt does,
The State needs to get out of the “marriage” business. It should recognize that as long as it uses that term, and continues to privilege certain types of relationships over others this issue is going to divide us as a nation, and is only going to become more and more contentious. We need to move towards the system used in many European countries where the State issues nothing but civil unions to anyone who wants them, and then those who desire it may seek a marriage from the Church.
vorjack at Unreasonable Faith comes around to noticing the problem:exactly what claim does Hyatt think Christianity has over a civil institution that predates the religion, and which the religion resisted for centuries? So here’s a counteroffer for Hyatt: let’s leave "marriage" as a civil institution. It has an extremely long history of being a civil institution, and for most of its history the Christian church was happy to leave it as such. Perhaps the Church could use a more theologically loaded word like "covenant," since that already has some legitimacy among conservatives.
- Paul Krugman on Newsnight, 30 May 2012 - YouTube: from Krugman's UK tour. A particularly clear demonstration of what the K-Man is up against, because we can see people, more coherent than most of their US counterparts and not carrying the baggage of US political familiarity, stating clearly what they believe: that the government throwing people out of work will give business "confidence", which will lead to more hiring. Because virtue (which is money) must be rewarded, and vice (which is debt and poverty) punished.
The fact that he doesn't do this is one of the things I most respect about The Shrill One. At Digg; I don't know the original source.
- It turns out that newspapers are still good for something, and here are two shining, Pulitzer-worthy examples:
- Stand your ground law, Trayvon Martin and a shocking legacy | Tampa Bay Times:
Florida's "stand your ground" law is being used in ways never imagined — to free gang members involved in shootouts, drug dealers beefing with clients and people who shot their victims in the back.
Includes a *searchable database* of cases, so you can check their work or take it further.Defendants have invoked the law to excuse all manner of mischief, from minor fistfights to drug possession to killing an endangered species.
And who goes free can sometimes depend as much on where a case is heard as its merits.
- Louisianna Incarcerated: How We Built the World's Prison Capital by Cindy Chang, Scott Threlkeld, and Ryan Smith at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, linked from Charles Blow.
A prison system that leased its convicts as plantation labor in the 1800s has come full circle and is again a nexus for profit.
...
Locking up as many people as possible for as long as possible has enriched a few while making everyone else poorer. Public safety comes second to profits.
- Stand your ground law, Trayvon Martin and a shocking legacy | Tampa Bay Times:
- While at Princeton Reunions, I nipped into the Art Museum and saw the Constable Exhibit. Among the great things:
I had never before appreciated how great a draughtsman Constable was.
The plaque surprised me, because it mentioned that the man is in the picture to give an idea of the trees' "enormous size". I measured, and if the man (including top hat) is 6 feet tall, then the largest tree is about 60 feet: large, true, but not what I'd call *enormous*.
Just outside the museum, for instance, was a scene rather like this:
The building is Nassau Hall, and it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 110 feet tall to the top of the spire. Some of the White Ash trees are as tall or taller than the spire; they were probably planted around 1825 -- which is pretty old for America, but not a big deal in England. I guess I expected planted English trees to be taller -- but maybe they aren't planted as close to each other as American trees often are, so that they force each other to be tall and thin.
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