Following on from the terrible tsunami, the New Yorker recalls a fascinating and beautifully-written article from the 1950s about waves, both regular and tidal.
Blog
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The Holy Grail chatter that
The Holy Grail chatter that has resulted from the Da Vinci code has spread to an unlikely location – the county of my birth. The Guardian has an article in today’s supplement about claims that the Holy Grail itself is buried somewhere beneath the sleepy market town of Hertford. There is a slightly more manic article here.
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Bush fatigue
I think I may have Bush fatigue. I’ve just been reading a post and comments on MetaFilter, and I wasn’t able to work up any sort of outrage or disgust at all, even though the US administration is flying a kite about indefinite imprisonment without trial. It wasn’t that I approved, just that I wasn’t horrified that a civilised country could act that way.
Perhaps the Bush administration has gone ultrasonic, and passed beyond the normal range of outrage, so that normal human beings can’t hear it any more.
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Do we need an inquiry on inquiries
Inquiries for opposition politicians are a bit like Chinese food – all very well but thirty minutes later you fancy another one.
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MUMMEEEE!
The Scared of Santa photo gallery.
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Rights? Who needs them?
From the “only the guilty have anything to fear” department: almost 1/2 of Americans polled for MSNBC believe that Muslims living in the US should have their rights restricted. Interestingly, the (to me) less atrocious idea of infiltrating of civic and voluntary groups (something I’m sure MI5 do over here right now) was much less popular – only 29%.
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The OSCE’s media freedom guide
The OSCE have published a Media Freedom Cookbook.
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Advice for the budding writer
John Scalzi’s “Utterly Useless Writing Advice” isn’t.
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The wisdom of markets
Crooked Timber looks to squash a spreading error – the idea that electronic markets predicted the US election better than the polls did. The actuality – that the markets were as inaccurate as the polls – indicates to me both the reliance of markets on available information and common wisdom, rather than anything more ethereal; and the primacy of polling data in the US political newsline. Are there alternative means of sampling public views than opinion polling? How reliable is it? Where is the political bias?
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Citizen journalism – Dan Gillmor speaks
An interview on OhMyNews International with Dan Gillmor, who recently quit regular journalism to start a citizen journalism venture. (via Power of Many)