Monthly Archives: August 2008

Wasserman Schultz Must Support Taddeo

Daily Kos: Debbie Wasserman Schultz Still Sandbagging Taddeo.

Which reminds me: I got a robophone poll a couple of days ago which asked who I supported in the Presidential election. Then it asked what I think of Sen. Mel Martinez (I think he's doing a terrible job).

Then the poll asked who'd I'd support in an election between Bob Graham and Martinez. I actually think Graham would be a bit old by then to be my candidate of choice, but I said I'd support him. I suppose they include him as he's sort of the gold standard for calibrating support for Democrats in Florida state politics.

Then it got interesting: the robopollster asked who I'd support in a matchup between Martinez and Wasserman Schultz. Panic. I couldn't of course support Martinez. After the way she's dealt with Taddeo, and south Florida in general, I had no desire to support Wasserman Schultz in a poll. But should I say Martinez as a form of protest? Could I say Martinez?

No, I couldn't. So I copped out and said I was undecided.

At that point the robopoll voice switched (and got much softer), as if I'd triggered something, and I got asked some demographic questions, and it was over.

Attention Debbie Wasserman Schultz: what you are doing is not costless behavior. We are taking notes, and we have long memories. And megaphones. And friends.

Posted in Politics: FL-18 | Comments Off on Wasserman Schultz Must Support Taddeo

Offline Wikipedia — Only 3.5GB

WikiTaxi offers you an offline snapshot of the Wikipedia. The full English dump is only 3.5GB. (An abridged version is a svelte 25MB.)

Did you ever want to take Wikipedia with you while you are offline? Call on WikiTaxi: It is a portable application that delivers the Wikipedia of your choice to wherever you go.

WikiTaxi enables you to read, search, and browse Wikipedia offline. No Internet connection is needed, all pages are stored in a WikiTaxi database. Because Wikipedia is constantly growing, WikiTaxi uses compression to make sure that the database stays reasonably small.

WikiTaxi is up to date. It works with the original Wikipedia database dumps, which are updated regularly every few weeks or so. If you feel that your offline Wikipedia is getting to old, you can go online to download a more recent version or just copy it from a friend.

Not only is this just simply kewl, but I imagine scholars looking for a way to measure changes in the wikipedia will love this.

Posted in Internet | 2 Comments

Annals of Progress

This just in:

Dear Faculty:

After careful consideration and to better reflect the services and resources we provide to our students and alumni, we are pleased to announce that the Career Planning Center is now called the Career Development Office (CDO). The role of law school career offices throughout the country, including our office, has considerably changed in the last decade. Career offices have expanded their role by giving students and alumni lifelong services that not only help the students and alumni identify and use the appropriate resources to obtain their first jobs but also help them assess and discover their ideal careers. We feel that the new name accurately represents this progressive change and ask you to join us in using the name and sharing it with others in our community. Also, please note our new website address: www.law.miami.edu/cdo.

I'm not a big believer in name changes. On the other hand, I am pleased to see that the whatever-you-call-it has adopted a suggestion of mine and resumed making business cards available to students:

Student Business Cards are Here!

The Career Development Office is pleased to offer business cards to current students.  For more information please click here.

And I think business card style option “B” looks pretty good.

UM Student business card option B

Posted in Law School | 1 Comment

‘88% of YouTube is Original Content’

Groklaw, 88% of YouTube is New and Original Content, Professor Says.

The citation is to this (long) YouTube presentation, “An anthropological introduction to YouTube” by Dr. Michael Wesch, an anthropologist at Kansas State University.

(Lots of other interesting stuff there too.)

Posted in Internet | 1 Comment

New Low For McCain Campaign: Obama == The Anti-Christ

Normally I save the anti-McCain stuff for Friday, as don't want the blog to become a one-note operation. But this …

The McCain campaign just released another anti-Obama commercial, The One.

Perhaps to most viewers this one will seem like the political equivalent of scoring against yourself as much of it is about how wonderful Obama is, and the attack part involves a clumsy use of Charlton Heston. But there may be a (very evil) method to the madness: SoonerG at Daily Kos suggests that the point of the latest McCain ads is to depict Obama as the anti-Christ. Don't laugh. The first thing I thought of when I saw the ad was that it was a dog-whistle call-out to evangelicals who would be offended by Obama's suggestion that “a light will shine down upon you” and inspire people to vote for him. But it could well be that other people will see it as a more direct appeal (consider, a Google search for “obama anti-Christ” finds “about 990,000” pages).

In light of last week's attack on a Unitarian church for being too “liberal,” is it so far-fetched to worry that some unhinged true believer may hear all this and decide he has a call to assassinate the anti-Christ? It's perhaps fortunate that, as one Christian pastor put it to me via email, “the people who believe in the anti-Christ tend to believe that he/she is too powerful for one person to take out with a .30-.06.”

Nevertheless, McCain is playing with nuclear weapons here. It's despicable.

Here's what a poster at Progressive Revival had to say,

A vote for Senator Obama is a vote for the man we think will make the best President, not for a new Messiah. As Christians, we have one Lord And Savior. Jesus Christ. It is blasphemous to suggest otherwise.

And it is beyond offensive to suggest that Senator Obama is a false Messiah or the anti-Christ himself. How low can we go? It shows the McCain campaign is willing to make a mockery of our faith to feed people's fears. Christians need to reject this out of hand.

We will be calling on the McCain campaign to repudiate this ad and take it down immediately. If you would like to add your voice to this effort, please email me at mara@matthew25.org.

Finding something even lower will be a great challenge for McCain. Based on the past couple weeks, however, I'm now ready to believe they are up to it.

Posted in Politics: McCain | 29 Comments

CERN Rap!

Is this the best rap song about particle physics ever? Must be.


CERN Rap from Will Barras on Vimeo.

Posted in Science/Medicine | 1 Comment