All posts by Chris

Conservatism and what’s wrong with it

Politics

Phil Agre has written an excellent article on Conservatism, both defining what it is and illustrating its opposition to democracy and equality.

Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple…

UPDATE August 2006:  I’m adding the keyword “aristocracy” to this, because that’s the real crux of Agre’s argument.

How real is real?

Technology

OK, a question for the jewelry enthusiasts among you. Does it matter if a diamond was mined in Africa or “manufactured in Florida”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html ? If diamonds stop being expensive and rare, are they still beautiful? Are they still desirable?

We’re winning the spam war

Blog

…against blog spam, at least. Thanks to “MT-Blacklist”:http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/ and diligent spam-swatting by our authors, this site has sucessfully repelled thousands of attempts to hijack comments pages. Good job!

Now if I could just get something that effective for my e-mail…

Space Race II progress

Space

Space Daily has an engaging “overview of X Prize progress”:http://www.spacedaily.com/news/xprize-04u.html, including both the trials and the triumphs of the frontrunners. Even the mistakes are exciting, as fun to follow as the series of progressively-more-impressive rocket tests in “October Sky”. Go teams!

Athens

World

Twenty years ago, excited by the Summer Olympic Games being in Los Angeles (and by playing “Summer Games”:http://screenmania.retrogames.com/c64/01/c64_0008.html on the Apple //c), some friends and I recreated the Olympics in our own neighborhood. Each of us picked a country to represent, and we competed in a series of (probably very lame) “events” to determine who would get the (probably plastic) “gold medal”. Like the actual Olympics, we spent much more time and effort on the rules and ceremonies than on the actual sports, but that wasn’t the point.
Continue reading →