John Mark Ockerbloom

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• Commented on Mitch Horowitz: What is the occult?
  "Sometimes, these discussions are like listening to blind people claiming that visible light doesn't exist. Just because you have no direct experience of a phenomenon doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Just because there's not scientific proof of something doesn't...
• Commented on Mitch Horowitz: What is the occult?
  One of the more interesting, and cautionary, aspects of occult beliefs is that the way they are presented (as secret or hidden to all but the select few) can often make them more appealing and credible to many people than...
• Commented on XKCD explains how to be a tech-support guru
  This cartoon was funny. Though when I thought about forwarding it along to a relative of mine, I found myself adding various qualifiers about updates, Google-fu, and other context. Which makes me wonder if this is essentially an update on...
• Commented on The Pyramid of North Dakota
  I'm reminded of "Pyramids for Minnesota", a piece by the late Thomas Disch published in the 1970s. If I remember it correctly, he half-seriously called for pyramids to be built in North Dakota's next-door neighbor to give folks something to...
• Commented on Tiananmen Square, + 20
  Rebecca MacKinnon is also the author of the 2006 report, "Race to the Bottom": Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship. You can download it from Human Rights Watch's website, and learn about how some well-known US tech firms are helping...
• Commented on Searching for an Honest Bank
  You might also want to check out mutual banks. These are banks, not credit unions, but they're owned by the depositors and operate for their benefit, not distant stockholders. When I lived in Pittsburgh, after our old banks were eaten...
• Commented on Conan copyright trolls censor fan-readings of public domain stories
  @24: Your general proposal is the structure I favor as well, though it would be difficult to enact now with the current treaties in place. One interesting proposal I've heard combines both approaches: fairly short, renewable terms, with the first...
• Commented on Conan copyright trolls censor fan-readings of public domain stories
  Copyrights surviving an author for a period of time can be useful, yes. But if your goal is to support your widow(er) and kids, life plus 25 years should be quite sufficient. By then, any kids will have grown to...
• Commented on Official "SCRABBLE Word of the Day": Dildo
  In the 1990s, the third edition of the "Official Scrabble player's dictionary" removed a number of controversial words, which made some schools and home players happy, but really ticked off competitive players. Most tournaments use the full unexpurgated word set,...
• Commented on Free book on Free Range kids
  Re: dangers. The book quotes unofficial statistics stating that the number of primary-school age children murdered by strangers in the UK pretty consistently averages around 2 per year. (It generally varies from 0-4, with no overall trend.) The book doesn't...
• Commented on Viridianism's last note: surround yourself with beautiful, excellent things and get rid of all else
  (Sorry, I meant "Bruce", not "Vernor", in the last message. I think "Veridian" was making me assume V-names too freely...)...
• Commented on Viridianism's last note: surround yourself with beautiful, excellent things and get rid of all else
  Vernor's note makes most sense for folks who are essentially global nomads, as both he and Cory seem to be. It's always made sense for nomads, whether the shiny 21st-century variety or the historic preindustrial variety, to travel light. But...
• Commented on Gender Analyzer: did a man or woman write that blog?
  I fed in the URL for A Celebration of Women Writers, which is not only edited by a woman (my wife) but is all about women's writing. As of the time I write this, Genderanalyzer says "We think [this page]...
• Commented on God Hates Signs protest waged against Westboro Baptist Church
  "Why have none of the free speech defenders on this thread taken up Antinous' point that in fact the US government limits speech all the time?" The government does, and often for good reasons. But the reasons need to be...
• Commented on Erik Davis on Clark Ashton Smith's The Hashish Eater
  There's also the definitive online resource for CAS's writings: The Eldritch Dark. It has an online copy of "The Hashish Eater" and lots of his other writings, with the permission of the Smith estate....
• Commented on Bank Robber Uses Craigslist To Hire Unsuspecting Accomplices
  I don't know about the rest of you, but the first thing I thought of when I read this was "The Red-Headed league". On the bullet-proof glass thing: Some US bank branches have them, some don't; around here it seems...
• Commented on Reuters sues academic for making a Firefox plugin that lets you annotate and reference articles
  "Can anyone confirm the post above that import from EN into Zotero has actually been disabled?" The suit only deals with import of style files from EndNote (which tell the program how to format references for different publications). You can...
• Commented on Reuters sues academic for making a Firefox plugin that lets you annotate and reference articles
  Whatever the legal merits of their suit (which are debatable), I think Thomson has shot themselves in the foot from a marketing perspective. I have a longer blog post at Everybody's Libraries that gives an overview of the case, and...
• Commented on Celebrate Banned Books Week!
  As I noted in a reply to a similar comment on my blog, the source for my claim that Venezuela is among the countries where there are "grave threats to freedom of the press and freedom to protest" is not...
• Commented on LOL Street: open thread on Lehman/Merrill/AIG/Dow/Fed/FUD/OMG/WTF
  Well, it didn't take long for the "we wouldn't have made these bad loans if it weren't for those mean liberals *forcing* us!" canard to pop up this time. (I debunked this in comments #119 and #134 of the previous...
• Commented on "America's financial system was shaken to its core on Sunday."
  "Due to the high astroturf potential, I'm disallowing links to partisan websites and blogs for this thread. Links to creditable news organizations are, of course, welcome." Fair enough. I think the Federal Reserve should be sufficiently creditable. Here's a speech...
• Commented on "America's financial system was shaken to its core on Sunday."
  "Dumb question, is there anything to the conservative claim that "banks made dumb mortgage loans because they were compelled to by equal-opportunity-ish legislation", or is it just greed?" It may be more appealing for some folks to blame the current...
• Commented on "America's financial system was shaken to its core on Sunday."
  USAA bank deposits are FDIC insured, as is the case with most other banks: https://www.usaa.com/inet/ent_utils/McStaticPages?key=2008_07_bank_fdic_insured If you do a Google on usaa bank insured you'll see a short snippet on the first result saying "Investment/insurance: Not FDIC insured", which may...
• Commented on How to buy a new car and not get screwed
  Toxonix implicitly gives the alternative way to buy a car and not get screwed: Buy the 3-4 year old car from the guy who's selling it on Craigslist for 1/4 or less of what they bought it for. (After you've...
• Commented on Copyright renewal records for US books finally online
  A variety of links to various versions of these and other renewal records can be found at http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/ along with some tips on how to use them....
• Commented on Bigoted Ford dealership isn't actually sorry for its non-Christians "should sit down and shut up" ads
  TNH@57: The word my church uses for those that Jesus describes as entering the Kingdom of Heaven is "saint". Which isn't the same as "Christian", as I see it, but is what Christians aspire to become: someone who has been...
• Commented on We could have colonized Mars with the money we spent on the Iraq war -- what else could we do?
  While I don't find yet another True-Libertarian-Philosophy[tm] argument all that interesting, it's worth pointing out that the basic argument of this post works for libertarians too. The basic argument: on the one hand we have trillions of dollars expended for...
• Commented on Freeman Dyson on global warming
  David Archer posted a critique of Dyson's article to RealClimate a few days ago ("Freeman Dyson's selective vision"). There's been an ongoing discussion in the comments thread (now up to 133 responses). You can read the whole thing here....
• Commented on We could have colonized Mars with the money we spent on the Iraq war -- what else could we do?
  It's not surprising, or particularly worrisome, to see the broken-windows fallacy in a blog discussion thread. (See Zepelini @ 27 above for a recap). It is more worrisome, if perhaps not too surprising at this point, to see an argument...
• Commented on UK teen faces prosecution for sign calling Scientology a "dangerous cult"
  C0nt1nu1ty@48: There's an important difference between criticism and threats. Saying "Jews (or Scientologists) should be exterminated" is a threat of violence (you're calling for particular persons' deaths, after all). Saying "Judaism (or Scientology) is a cult" is a criticism, which...