thinkness - February 2005 Archives

February 2005

Three times something equals bullshit - thinkness was sad to not have found any more triple mixers recently. Sad no more: "It's got to be the beginning of a thaw. It's like a family that got a divorce. You have to kiss before you go to... Posted in language | 0 Trackbacks | 24 Comments

Dear Democratic hay-makers, - Can you please make a demagogic, heart-string-tugging ad about how Republicans are eliminating the poor mustang from the American West? I'm thinking basically a live-action Disney scene where helicopters scare a bunch of horses into a truck and the protagonist-type... Posted in political currents | 1 Trackbacks | 40 Comments

The quiet majority - Last week I was driving home a friend of mine, a law-school grad who clerks for a federal judge, and he remarked that most legal journalism was garbage -- inaccurate, simplistic, and uninteresting. One story that was bugging him was... Posted in journalism | 0 Trackbacks | 66 Comments

Mickey's dope architecture - So it turns out that Celebration, Florida -- the Disney-designed planned community -- is not as lame as I thought it'd be. This Slate photoessay shows that it's actually got some pretty good urban/suburban design. It might even [gasp] help... Posted in random bits of detritus | 0 Trackbacks | 29 Comments

Idiotic design - Michael Behe, one of the "scientific" leaders of the intelligent design movement [as opposed to one of the overtly religious leaders who push Behe's ideas], wrote a really just quite stupid op-ed in the NYTimes. The first problem is that... Posted in evolution | 0 Trackbacks | 200 Comments
Criminals aren't crazy, they're evil! - Previously thinkness blogged about a very relativist trend in Europe in which psychologists are beginning to think that criminality is an a priori sign of craziness. They said this conception didn't necessary change the way we should treat criminals, but... Posted in psychology & consciousness | 1 Trackbacks | 164 Comments

And now, ladies and gentlemen: Lakoff the Genius - So it was slightly dodgy of thinkness to start filing posts into a category without properly defining it, so here it is: I'm starting a new category called Lakoff the Genius. I read his book Don't Think of an Elephant... Posted in lakoff the genius , political currents | 21 Trackbacks | 175 Comments
Conservative environmentalism - Last week Slate highlighted the trend of environmental-minded neocons, who are now advocating green policy and even driving hybrid cars. It makes sense for them: they don't want to feed tons of money to Saudi Arabia's conservative, autocratic regime [among... Posted in lakoff the genius , political currents | 2 Trackbacks | 404 Comments

Time-to-time correctness - Jack Shafer remembers that "even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day." [The quote is immortalized when sampled [from some British something-or-other I can't identify] at the end of the track Planet of the Spheres on Orbital's... Posted in color | 0 Trackbacks | 143 Comments