Another Journalist Who Gets It

At Business Week. Steven Baker doesn’t fear The Blog:

…with all their clout and reach, bloggers alone can’t bring down their enemies. In the end, it’s up to society’s traditional powers — the corporate boards, politicians, CEOs — to rule on these matters. Do they fire an executive for uttering one foolish sentence, ax a reporter for a wrongheaded story, exile a university president for offensive remarks? If the bloggers appear to be censorious, it’s only because the rest of society plays along.

In truth, blogging represents an explosion of free speech. While blogs certainly empower lynch mobs, they can also lead to long and open conversations, virtual town meetings. These are the greatest antidote to censorship and secrecy. The Jordan case gave birth to loads of such discussions.

Like many, he does get one thing wrong, though:

He resigned on Feb. 13 after conservative bloggers feasted on a controversial statement he made in late January at the annual World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, about the U.S. military. His allegation — that coalition soldiers in Iraq mistook journalists for enemies and killed them — brought down a storm of criticism on him and his network.

No, that wasn’t his allegation, at least not initially, if numerous accounts are correct. His allegation was that journalists were targeted by coalition soldiers (and that word includes identification). He then attempted to walk it back to them being hit by mistake.

But the columnist raises an interesting thesis: that the days of privacy are ending. To whatever degree that’s true, if it means that the powerful will no longer be able to get away with slander and bias, it’s hard to see how that’s a bad thing.

As he notes, Jordan losing his job wasn’t a blow to free speech–it was a victory for it. The First Amendment never meant anything more than that the government can’t censor you, or pass laws against the dissemination of ideas (though the current government doesn’t seem to think that the First Amendment applies to election campaigns any more). It was never meant as a shield against potential consequences of speech.

How Is It?

…that the people we’re told are our greatest intellectuals seem so incapable of basic critical thinking, or English comprehension?

Several Harvard professors said they were more furious after reading the precise remarks, saying they felt he believed women were intellectually inferior to men.

Everett I. Mendelsohn, a professor of the history of science, said that once he read the transcript, he understood why Dr. Summers “might have wanted to keep it a secret.”

I’m very glad that I don’t have to be in college today.

A Hint Of Future Space Policy?

Chairman Boehlert had a very interesting opening to today’s hearing on the NASA budget. Some highlights:

I am for returning humans to the moon by 2020. I am for moving ahead prudently but swiftly with the development of a Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) for that purpose. I am for retiring the Space Shuttle as soon as possible, but under absolutely no circumstances later than December 31, 2010. I am for a NASA that sees itself as a science agency, with all of Space Science, Earth Science and Aeronautics receiving theattention and funding accorded to priority areas. I am for a NASA that is open to outside ideas from academia and the private sector…

…We understand that the Administration could send up in the next month or so proposed language to amend the Iran Nonproliferation Act. That

Beyond Parody

You know, it used to be easy to write satire of (literally) sophomoric columns in college newspapers, by writing something like “Top Ten Reasons America Sucks.”

Sadly, they’ve raised the bar, and taken away such an easy theme.

Next thing you know, you won’t be able to spoof the lefty professoriate by calling innocent people who died in the World Trade Center things like “little Eichmanns.”

Lousy Salesmen

A company threw away thirty-five thousand pairs of shoes, because they were like bi-pedal whoopie cushions:

Customers complained that with every step, their shoes made the sound of someone passing gas.

The problem wasn’t the shoes–the problem was that they accidentally sold them to the wrong customers, who weren’t in the market for that particular feature.

If the numbers here are right, the shoes cost them about six to eight bucks a pair. I simply cannot believe that they wouldn’t have quickly emptied the shelves of them for much more than that had they made a minimal attempt to market them, as gag gifts, or a way to keep track of toddlers, or just for kids (of all ages) to annoy adults. Even without bothering to rebrand, or come up with a clever name (feel free to offer suggestions in comments), they could have gotten their money back with profit just by tossing them up on Ebay as is.

Heck, they might have even ended up with a whole new product line. They could have been partnering with the supplier who screwed up, instead of paying lawyers. It could go down in the history of accidental techological innovation, kind of like vulcanizing rubber.

Profound

I just got this as an email signature from an email correspondent who was sending me an attachment:

“Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself: ‘Mankind.’ Basically, it’s made up of two separate words – ‘mank’ and ‘ind’. What do these words mean? It’s a mystery, and that’s why so is mankind.”

Half Educated?

Chad Orzel has a couple interesting posts about the relative value of literacy versus numeracy in both society and the academy.

…I do think there is an imbalance here, and it bothers me. If a student were to come in and say “You know, I just can’t handle literature classes. I’m no good at reading, and I’m not comfortable with it, so I don’t want to take any English classes,” most faculty would think that there’s something wrong with that person. And yet, I hear functionally equivalent statements about math every time I bring this subject up. Bright people will say “I think science is really neat, but I just can’t handle math,” and see nothing wrong with that.

If a student professed a distaste for reading as frankly as some express their distaste for math, we’d think that they were intellectually stunted. Illiteracy is a sign of a learning disability, while innumeracy is shrugged off as just one of those things.

I do think that one could argue that in fact much of critical theory in literature is unadulterated crap. Does anyone think that it would be as easy (or even possible) for an English major to hoax a physics paper as it was for Alan Sokal to mock postmodernists? Clearly Sokal understood much more about the literary theories (to the slight degree that they’re not nonsense) than any of the humanity professors will ever know about physics–at least enough to pull the wool over their eyes.

What’s dismaying to me is that for many, it’s not only acceptable to have no ability at math, but many take perverse pride in it, and are often rewarded both in academia and in life.

[via Derek Lowe, who has additional commentary.]

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!