A new months ends an old year. There’s a chance of snow in Whitewater today with a high temperature of forty, but a greater chance overnight tonight. There’s no chance of snow for San Francisco today, but instead a likelihood of breezy skies with a high of sixty-six.
For a while — where a while is defined as about two weeks — the national heavyweight wrestling champ hailed from Marshfied, Wisconsin:
1906 – Fred Beell Crowned Heavyweight Champ
On this date Fred Beell, of Marshfield, Wisconsin, won the American heavyweight wrestling championship in New Orleans, taking two of three falls from Frank Gotch. Beell’s reign was brief. Sixteen days later, he lost a rematch to Gotch. Beell’s victory was the only match that Gotch lost from 1904 until his death in 1918. [Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]
And yet, and yet – however brief his reign, he was the national champion. Well done.
Too, too funny — libertarian Ron Paul hits Newt Gingrich from the right, using conservatives (many of whom Paul himself rejects!), to disparage Gingrich as a money-grubbing, shifty, business-as-usual politician.
Gingrich’s problem is that Paul’s right: Gingrich really is a money-grubbing, shifty, business-as-usual politician.
The potato state bests America’s Dairyland in common sense and consumer choice:
“There were a lot of illegal raw-milk sales throughout the state,” Patten said. “Across-the-fence sales, let’s say.”
So, in early 2010, instead of drawing guns and raiding those operations, the state of Idaho–with the help of raw-milk advocates and a less-enthusiastic dairy industry–modified the regulations to make it easier for small raw-milk producers to go legit.
“After a lot of consternation and battling back and forth, we kind of created what we call the Small Farm Exemption,” Patten said. “And the compromise was that you could milk up to three cows or seven goats or seven sheep, and you could sell milk for human consumption.”
The Small Farm Exemption–also called the Small Herd Exemption–greatly streamlined Idaho’s raw-milk regulatory process. If a dairyman met the requirements, emphasis was moved from an expensive Grade A barn, with all its shiny stainless steel, to little more than a monthly testing of the milk itself.
The Android developer who raised the ire of a mobile-phone monitoring company last week is on the attack again, producing a video of how the Carrier IQ software secretly installed on millions of mobile phones reports most everything a user does on a phone.
Though the software is installed on most modern Android, BlackBerry and Nokia phones, Carrier IQ was virtually unknown until 25-year-old Trevor Eckhart of Connecticut analyzed its workings, revealing that the software secretly chronicles a user’s phone experience — ostensibly so carriers and phone manufacturers can do quality control.
But now he’s released a video actually showing the logging of text messages, encrypted web searches and, well, you name it.
Wednesday: It’s a cloudy day with a high temperature of thirty-nine ahead for Whitewater, a sunny day with a high of seventy-five for Los Angeles, and a mostly sunny day with a high of fifty-four in New York.
The folks at Zooniverse have a new citizen science project for you to play with — matching up whalesong to try and analyze the watery leviathans’ language.
Sounds have been collected from both pilot whales and killer whales (both of which are actually species of dolphin). Each family of killer whales appears to have a distinct “dialect” that it uses to communicate, and closely related families appear to share calls. Biologists have begun to categorize those noises, but the species’ communication is still poorly understood….
If you head over to Whale.fm, you’ll be presented with a large whale call, placed on a Google map, and 36 smaller possible matches. Your task is to pick the one that’s closest to the original call, with the help of visualizations of what the audio sounds like.
More and more officials, including committed conservatives, are willing to concede what National Review declared in 1996: the War on Drugs is a failure, having achived too little while ignoring the real problem of addiction.
There’s a notice over at Gannett’s SheboyganPress that they will be moving their stories’ comments to Facebook.
Two quick observations.
First, comments on Facebook are not anonymous, and the publisher surely (and correctly) hopes that this will moderate the comments posted. Since a private paper is free to publish some comments, no comments, or all comments, this is a private (rather than a First Amendment) issue.
It’s legitimate to criticize a newspaper for its coverage; it’s an infringement on that paper’s liberty to compel it to publish specific content. (It’s both ignorance of the law and a disregard of liberty to contend that the First Amendment somehow compels publication of certain speech.)
I’m a strong advocate of the existing rights of anonymous and pseudonymous speech. These rights are available to anyone, but are especially useful to minority viewpoints. In general, a citizen in a free society owes no one his or her identity before speaking. A community arrogantly and wrongly infringes on individual liberty when it thinks otherwise.
Still, the answer to private restrictions in one place is a private alternative elsewhere. People are free to publish their own, alternative websites.
Second, and tellingly, there’s little practical chance that comments will go away. Running comments (remarks that are less restricted than letters to the editor have ever been) through Facebook is a sign that there’s no going back to a pre-comment era. Few websites are more conventional than Facebook. By the time papers turn to Facebook to manage their comments, they’ve conceded the permanency of commenting.
I’m surprised there’s one still around. There was a chance for serendipity when searching through a card catalog, despite the undeniable inefficiency of it, too:
It will be the end of an era when the public card catalog is removed from its home in room 224 of Memorial Library on the UW–Madison campus.
It’s a windy day with a high-temperature of thirty-eight ahead for Whitewater, with similar conditions for both Madison and Milwaukee. Listing the weather that way leads with a tail wagging a dog: most would expect the bigger cities to appear first in the order. That’s something along the lines of the joke about a British weather forecast: “Fog in Channel; Continent Cut Off.” No matter — it’s too late (and unnecessary) to fall into conventionality now, four-and-a half years on.
For those who’ve just come off a day of Thanksgiving cooking, with Christmas and New Year’s Day yet ahead, there’s good news: Cooking can be surprisingly forgiving. Rachel Ehrenberg writes that
If your pumpkin pie recipe calls for cinnamon but you’ve used the last of it, nutmeg, ginger or cardamom will do. Out of olive oil? Try applesauce. A new in-depth analysis of recipes, reviews and suggestions from an online foodie site reveals that many recipes are more flexible than standard cookbooks suggest.
Researchers mined more than 40,000 recipes and nearly two million reviews from the website Allrecipes.com, investigating various aspects of cooking and ingredient preferences. “We wondered if the analysis would let us see how flexible recipes are,” says coauthor Lada Adamic of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Her team discovered that there’s a lot of wiggle room. The analysis, reported online November 16 at arXiv.org, identified several clusters of ingredients that can be swapped for one another.
That’s clusters of ingredients, as some substitutions won’t work, no matter how inspired they might seem to the cook. Still, it’s a reassurance (and confirmation) for those who do cook that substitutions are certainly possible (and sometimes inspired).
Today’s Google puzzle comes from Fozzie Bear of the Muppets: “I knew I was a bear of many talents, but in one episode with the help of Rowlf and a big instrument, I found a talent I never knew I had. In what episode did I discover my new talent?”
Today’s the anniversary, from 1972, of the release of the arcade version of Pong, one of the first commercial, arcade video games. Nolan Bushnell’s description of his inspiration (created by engineer Allan Alcorn): “I had to come up with a game people already knew how to play, something so simple that any drunk in any bar could play.”
Turns out Newt Gingrich, the man of a thousand shifting, contradictory, and I’ll-considered opinions, wants to escalate the Drug War. If there’s worse news for drug warriors than this, short of an endorsement from Syria’s Assad, I can’t imagine what that worse news might be.
In an interview with Yahoo!, Gingrich finds his model for a clampdown on drugs:
Places like Singapore have been the most successful at doing that. They’ve been very draconian. And they have communicated with great intention that they intend to stop drugs from coming into their country.
Vast, diverse America and the autocratic, city-state of Singapore: that’s Gingrich’s idea of a suitable analogue.
It’s late November, and surprisingly Mitt Romney has yet to write to me for campaign advice. (I’ll be sure to check my email again after I publish this post.) If he were to solicit my opinion, I’d recommend that Gov. Romney use all his campaign funds to put Gingrich on the air, nonstop and unscripted, for week after week.
There’s no better path to the GOP nomination for Romney that that.
I don’t support government funding for art any more than Brownback does, but as for tweeting, Sullivan owes neither Brownback nor her principal any apology. On the contrary, they owe her one for their wrongly intrusive, restrictive (and oddly creepy) concern with an eighteen-year-old citizen’s use of Twitter.
A U.S. teenager who wrote a disparaging tweet about Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback said Sunday that she is rejecting her high school principal’s demand for a written apology.
Emma Sullivan, 18, said she isn’t sorry and doesn’t think such a letter would be sincere.
The Shawnee Mission East senior was taking part in a Youth in Government program last week when she sent out a tweet from the back of a crowd of students listening to Brownback’s greeting. From her cellphone, she thumbed: “Just made mean comments at gov. brownback and told him he sucked, in person (hash)heblowsalot.”
She actually made no such comment and said she was “just joking with friends.” But Brownback’s office, which monitors social media for postings containing the governor’s name, saw Sullivan’s post and contacted the Youth in Government program.
Sullivan received a scolding at school and was ordered to send Brownback an apology letter. She said Prinicipal Karl R. Krawitz even suggested talking points for the letter she was supposed to turn in Monday.
Later in the story, it seems the principal has since recognized the mess into which he’s stepped, and is now insisting this is a ‘private matter.’ It should have been a private matter (without government involvement), but the censorious actions of a publicly-paid governor and a publicly-paid school administrator offer no retreat from widespread and legitimate criticism.
I am chagrined to learn that a well-known signer of the Declaration of Independence did not want the bald eagle to be the symbol of America.What lesser bird did he want to represent our great country?
