It reminded me a lot of the trailer for Fallout three: (http://fallout.bethsoft.com/eng/downloads/videos.html)
which I guess puts it somewhere between fascist steampunk porn and fascist post-apocalyptic porn.

And if it was a game, it'd be fantastic

As a fan of speculative fiction and historical what-ifs, that was absolutely beautiful. I can't wait to see the film, and for there to be classic 1940s style propaganda posters for it.

WIIIILLLLSSSON!

I mean, that was awesome

@ 122

I'm not saying evolution discards morality, I'm saying evolution is presented as discarding morality by religious fundamentalists, and the ID is the compromise accepted by people who want to trust science, but want to trust religion as well.

And I'm not speaking about the people who advocate ID, but the people who follow it, and who have moved to follow ID from following creationism. These people are well-intentioned, but they aren't putting in the full effort to understand the science of evolution, which is a problem.

@ 108

ID is any attempt to be scientific without really understanding what science is. It's not good science, but at least they want to try science instead of just renouncing it as the devil's work. I see this as progress, and I take their attempt at science in good faith.

@ 104

ID means "I have serious qualms reconciling my deeply held convictions with a scientific practice that is portrayed as eroding all deeper value in human life. I like science, I want to accept science, but I don't want science to discard morality out of hand. Please help me find a way to reconcile morality and science."

Soundbites are easy. Real understanding of the problems we are faced with is hard.

I think there is a serious flaw in assuming poor intelligence and malicious intent on behalf of people who accept ID. ID, while unscientific, is not Creationism, which is specifically anti-scientific. It is a step in the right direction, an attempt to reconcile deeply held religious beliefs with accepted scientific practice. It'd be going to far to say that this is something that needs to be taught or the scientific truth, but to discard entirely these peoples opinions as identical to the pre-enlightenment consensus is a failing. That we can distinguish between ID and Creationism is a step in the right direction. And this is more applicable to evolution - Creationism attacks abiogenesis, while ID posits an alternative (and, yes, faulty and problematic) theory of evolution. Relentlessly decrying this train of thought is the wrong way to go about things. Yes, ID shouldn't be taught in school. Yes, it is terrible science. And yes, it is religiously motivated in a nation that doesn't allow for imposition of religion. But it's a believed-in concept despite it not being taught in schools, it's a good example of how to use the scientific method to detect bullshit/expose flaws, and this is a nation where the vast majority of the populace is religious. It is divisive to dismiss people out of hand, to assume poor intelligence, to attribute religion as the cause of all this strife, and to assume being a scientist is such an overpowering aspect of a person's personality that they cannot also be religious, or that their decisions are not motivated by ideologies and personal beliefs (which most humans happen to have).

The point here is that attacking ID is the wrong way to go. The discussion has moved from Ben Stein, though his inability to distinguish the use of the scientific method from the application of ideologically motivated results is relevant, as it is the same flaw being made in a blanket attack on ID. The way to stop being frustrated by ID is to assume good faith in, but a poor understanding of, the scientific method. Taking that, a rigorous application of the scientific method to ID will show it as flawed. Important care must to taken, however, to show that evolution, which is a process, does not exclude the possibility of God (which is a worldview that may or may not pertain to the overall shaping of the process, but given a vague enough input doesn't have to interfere with the science of the process). Also, evolution needs to be understood as a natural process, but not one that automatically leads to the dehumanizing "survival of the strongest" ideology (that's eugenics, which is based on altering natural selection, but is not itself part of the understanding of the process of natural selection).

ID is an attempt at science, and it is poor form for people who are fond of science to throw away an opportunity by dismissing ID as just ideology.

17 & 18 - hivemind!

Umm, Mr. Stein, this here is the internet, and over here we have a few rules:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

Also, Noen - great video. thanks for sharing that with us

Neat!

To go with the CC text and audio, here's* a CC review by a high school (underground) newspaper from the book giveaway. Any idea if the other high school paper reviews are available?

*http://ahsfoliage.blogspot.com/2008/04/foliage-guide-to-little-brother-vol-2.html
**http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/10/200-free-copies-of-m.html

@ 24

I wonder, would it break the system to report absolutely every person with a camera pointed at a building? Would the sheer volume of it be such that cops knew this was a ridiculous way to catch people, and that it was only going to be enforced arbitrarily anyway? I'd test this theory, but I'd worry that it wouldn't work, and that somehow the arrests of hundred of photographers taking pictures would do nothing to point out the flaws in that cops' logic.

If they are trying to catch members of Al Qaeda doing surveillance by the book, wouldn't it be a good idea for them to not mention that they have the book. By admitting they have this knowledge, they are merely encouraging the terrorists to innovate.

Also - this is batshit crazy why why why why why is terrorism even a minor concern for Tennessee police? ARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Is it bad that I want this to be redone to talked advantage of engrish?

Yes?

okay I'll be quiet now

@ 14 - I know exactly the feeling.

*nerdgasm*

That was awesome. That was me at 14. Heavy games = lots of pieces = so much potential for a game that the sheer scale of what could happen in said game is immense. It's the fun potential where, instead of discarding the toy to play with the box, it's building a shrine to the heavy unopened box because the possibilities of what is inside, and the standard geek inflated expectations of those contents, makes the whole thing, in theory like the coolest thing on this earth ever.

Greater weight = greater real basis for horrendously unrealistic expectations. Long set-up time is good similarly because it allows for the same level of expectation, while playing with the toys, without the immediacy of the game ruining the experience.

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Nihilism

I was sitting in a bathroom stall the other day at my college. The walls had been painted over, marking that day as the third time I'd ended up vandalizing fresh pain over graffiti. It seemed to me that bathroom stall graffiti had become quaint, an almost archaic notion of a simpler time. After all, the internet is the wall everyone writes on with anonymity - the physical object stands as a reminder of old days, like a dial phone complete with cord, or like a do-it-yourself radio kit. That era is done.

It figures, then, that the appropriate response is to the internet as a modern repository of the vulgar and the trite would be to post blank space.

Congrats, Mark. You have just won the internet. Everyone else can pack it up and go home.

Need that subtle edge to one-up the person you've been living with on those days that don't end for weeks? Functional and unnerving!

I like. So much.

Cyclops Rock by They Might Be Giants is 2:42. It's about as close as they come to a perfect pop song, but if "There She Goes" is the gold standard, this is a terrible field to compete in.

Also, yeah, it's a joke, but it's still funny to think about.

If you don't except the King James version of LSD right now, you're going to hell

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

MarignyMohican - I was at that show! It was fantastic, and we were watching from the awkward corner of the balcony. Funny enough, I saw a student at the school I work at wearing the "Start Wearing Purple" shirt just two days ago. She was like 9 maybe. Awesome band, awesome time.

Those were really, really cool. The half-finished one is my favorite

So, high time for squatters communes?

Second Amendment and snark are all well and good, but seriously, can we get the Supreme Court on this, like, ASAP?

wait - Thai is "ethnic" not "Asian"?

that's... wow. I'll wait for someone more articulate to explain it, but just...wow. How did they think that would work?

1960s nukes = steampunk? I need to write that story...

I think that whole "attic-cleaning" bit is tied into the argument of what to do with the aging nuclear stockpile - modernize or abolish. Some people don't want defective nukes, some people don't want any nukes at all, and there really hasn't been a good incentive to do anything about it, especially since most change regarding nukes gets peoples attention and brings scrutiny of how legal the action is under existing treaties. Given that, letting the weapon sit with decades old technology seems to be the easy option, and I'm pretty happy that we haven't really seen the need to change this.

It's brilliant, if absurdly meta. Reminds me of the finer points of Robot Chicken, assuming Robot chicken could hold a coherent plot for that long

I like the conspiracy theory where clear channel claims it was a paid ad to cover up for the fact that their billboards are hackable

@ #7 - someone complained about his arms, and so complaint remover did away with them

Wow. Just...wow. Purge the unclean and whatnot. This strikes me as a hilarious way to set a scary service up for failure. And I can't wait to see the caturday mafia fight back.

@ #8 - best comment on the post. Makes me wonder about the Airport scene in Spinal Tap, and how the modern TSA would deal with it.

I think we're missing the point - this is master lock entering into a new market, that of bondage gear you can pass off as something else.

Though I guess it'd make crappy bondage gear too

The video was great, and the abrupt ending almost fit. As for the explanation, Youtube commenters just happen to be the worst pretty much ever, with the possible exception of 4chan.

How specific is the target range of this? It seems like it was pointed at one person, with two others in the room. If this thing is going to disrupt crowds, they might need to make an organ gun version. Which, for purely steampunk-aesthetic, would be awesome

man, microwaves and glass. I once burnt a marshmallow on a plate for probably between 1 1/2 to 2 hours, and the marshmallow grew gigantic with a charcoal core while the plate had a hole burnt through the bottom. Exciting, but all kinds of dumb

I think the best outside perspective was from Bigger than Cheeses "http://www.biggercheese.com/?comic=732"

I'm terribly amused by the whole thing, but I can't imagine it having any real effect or being more than some quasi-cult inside joke activity.

So. Kewl.

@ #3

The image reminded me of the broad fields of limited color that happen when images are converted down to bmp. The color palette, and the smooth effect without rogue pixels, make the image work way better, but it still has a resemblance of the broad reductionist quality. The image is fantastic; I should have just attributed this more to early printmaking than to goofing around on paint as inspiration.

The propaganda angle is right one, but it seems more subdued than soviet posters. This is not a man giving a speech or emanating an image of overt strength. It looks more like a man sitting in a legislature and troubled by what he hears. The technique is propagandish - the pose just doesn't seem to fit.

I like it, but couldn't the same effect more or less be made by taking a jpeg photo down to a 16 color bitmap in paint?

The something_positive guy has a good take on it, and offers his commentary as

I carried this game around for finals week during high school, and as a quick set-up-and-play game that fit into the time parameters of between ten and forty minutes of free time, its great.

It isn't a game to devote an evening to, and its a game as much about learning to play it as to playing it. Yes, this can make games dull, but then you quit, draw a new hand, and try to avoid bad rule combinations the next round.

As a game for a few minutes, or for play while waiting somewhere, its great, a good alternative to a regular deck of cards, and not nearly as high-cost and high-anger as, say, Magic: the Gathering.

That's great! Also great? Disney princess pasta and Games Workshop Balrog juxtaposition.

Yay. God I miss white dwarf, even if it descended into little, more than really pretty pictures. They were SO. PRETTY.

Yeah, total nerdgasm here as well.

looks like today's xkcd has a take on this issue. Or at least, is very similar
http://xkcd.com/374/

15 posts until Godwin;s, which isn't bad.

Not to defend the scientists choice of "crazy" and dumb", as those words do serve to help alienate people from understanding evolution, I think its fair to say that this seems like an unusual process, and the scientist was naturally excited, as scientists can be. I'm thinking the word choice was not ignorance so much as the ability to still be fascinated about nature, even when understanding the whole process as well as a scientist can.

These are great. I'm waiting for the "If this van's a rockin', some guy named Ricky is drilling my wife" shirts.

So buses and grades now join Channel One and in-school vending machines. I'd be dismayed, by kids are really really good at ignoring things.

The library of congress photo archive is great. The other day, I found it had color photos of Tsarist Russia! (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/)

why does dolphinsex fag get no love?

...Right, that's why

And I would have thought he favored Watchmen's Rorschach.

This is a great question, though. I'm waiting to see who just buckles down and says "I like superman", and who goes the extra mile for the nerds and claims Booster Gold. Captain America's too obvious, but with the civil war in the Marvel Universe, anyone who supports Cap will be an adamant advocate for privacy laws.

This, of course, affects all three voters out there who see comic book preferences as the most reliable standard of a persons character and belief.

where's the wedding ring?

so, linked to on the Albuquerque placeblog. (http://www.dukecityfix.com/).

I think it's awesome, but then I read tubesoda's comment and nearly puked.

level 18 is a jerk (gravity pod, of course)

great stuff

@ PrimalChaos - it's pretty smart fearing RIAA-like action here, as after all Games Workshop is the company that threatened to sue a fan-made movie out of existence, after they had already given it the okay and free advertising.

They are not the best of companies, simply put

that's incredible. It'd take the better part of a weekend to play through, but...wow.

sweep - great points

"If we had lost, we would have been tried as war criminals," - Robert McNamara

# 13

"Like it or not—as #11 said above—World War II truly was a war in which none of us can judge what was done to end it. If D-Day would have never happened, it's quite easy to see a Nazi controlled Europe. And if Hiroshima and Nagasaki never happened, it's pretty clear the Japanese would not have stopped fighting in any way."

The trick is people have to judge what was done to end WWII. Certainly, as we get further removed from the time we don't have the facts laid out, and some answers may well have never been given. But that doesn't mean the whole thing should be accepted as is, and that other theories have no validity.

There were rumors that Japan was already working on a surrender, that the emperor had been able to regain some control from the military elite, that the public was worn out from war but that the military, and what remained of it, would still fight.

Say the bomb had missed, hit Kyoto. Rather than hasten the surrender, it would have destroyed on the most religiously significant (if not the most) cities in Japan, and mobilized the population to such a degree that the bombings would have done very little to remove from power those in Japan who had led the nation to war.

As for costly invasions, the Allies had been perfectly willing to hand Berlin over to Russia to spare lives, and with Russia's new involvement, Japan could fall while few, if any, American lives would be lost in the invasion. A Soviet Japan may have resulted, but that's trivial relative to the lives saved, right?

There is plenty of room for theory and speculation here. I'm putting forth the the bombings were used, with the perhaps-justified rationale of saving American lives, to keep Russia out of Japan and to show Russia that the United States had military power unlike anything the world had ever seen. This was containment, day one, sending a very strong "stay back" warning to Russia.

#11

The bombings were pregaming for the cold war. While a lesson could be learned from WWI about not fully disarming beaten foes, Japan and Italy were allies who only gained power, so disarming allies is an equally valid conclusion along that line of reasoning.

The atomic bomb was the field test that showed the soviet union the power the US had, and the destruction that war against the US would leave in its wake. With the bombings as such an excessive act of force at a wars end against a nation that was already militarily crippled (hence no remaining military targets), the bombs were all about the Cold War and had very, very little to do with an invasion of Japan.

as for the clarity of pavement, had you not translated it to sidewalk, I would have imagined a man having sex in the middle of the road with the road, probably to the tune of "Why don't we do it in the Road?".

Unfortunately for him, someone was watching

So, xkcd is not the only webcomic that life imitates. Check out this shirt from Least I Could Do: https://secure.leasticoulddo.com/store/product.php?productid=16160&cat=244&page=1

and sorry about the awkward link

it's great when they are talking about wrestlers and get to Jesse Ventura. Hehe, celebrity turned governor

Preview? Awesome.

Chance to redeem Hayden Christiansen and Samuel L Jackson for the new trilogy? unlikely

yeah, wow, okay. It makes sense to me now

Nate - it strikes me as, while not the best of moves for the teacher, an over-reaction from parents that is entirely removed from their daughter's opinion, and it completely eliminates here rights here.

And I have to agree with subgrrl8 - if her parents were involved enough to jumped her up a grade, they should be smart enough to talk to their more mature daughter about this book, and not go jumping to conclusions in outrage and self-righteousness

Adult themes? High school freshman? Those things never overlap!

Mentions of murder and various sex acts is par for the course of high school life. Unless the student specifically complained that this was something that made her uncomfortable, that receiving this as a gift rubbed her the wrong way, the parent is being overprotective. Which is a pity, because it looks like they just drove out a positive adult influence on her life.

to be fair, racism exists in forms other than the overt that we are all used to. In the trial, it shows up as the "jury of peers" is all white, and while Jena is predominantly white, it isn't white to that staggering an extent. Institutionalized racism and subtle racism are worth mentioning in the whole brouhaha

to be fair, I think it's also worth noting the racism inherent in power structures, and the more subtle race-class deal. Racism exists in forms other than the overt kind we're dealing with here.