Archive for May 2008
How Gay Marriage Polls
Two things I’ve been meaning to share from Political Animal:
- A historical analysis of poll shows acceptance grows about about a point a year, with some violent perterbations around all the hubub of 2004. (via)
- And a recent California poll suggest voters actually support it, and oppose a ban. (via)
Tyra is the New Oprah
Perhaps it’s coincidence, but one wouldn’t have to squint very hard to think that the New York Times is waging a publicity campaign against Oprah in favor of Ms. Banks. Earlier this week they reported Oprah’s decline, and now they’ve made Trya Banks the Magazine’s cover girl.
The Geography of Gnomes
Am I the only one who thinks it’s odd that that no gnomes live in France or Italy?
How Asia Shops
The Economist’s Asia.view column has some interesting thoughts about how Asians shop to day and how they’re likely to shop in the future. It’s not unlike America at the start of the last century:
But as America grew richer, people started buying more processed foods, which supermarkets could sell more cheaply because they could buy them in bulk. Refrigerators spread, allowing households to shop only once a week, not every day or two. And women entered the job market in large numbers, where they found better uses for their time and talents than sizing up a cut of meat or double-checking the shopping bill.
What most distinguishes South Asian shopping is not culture, but abundant labour and onerous regulation. The number of human transactions required to buy a packet of milk or a loaf of bread in India can be bewildering: a boy gathers your order and dusts it off, another man handwrites the bill and tots it up, a third hands you your change, if they have it. But Indian shops employ so many people because they can. The family members who help out at the store often have nothing better to do. Likewise the customers who shop there rarely have to be anywhere else anytime soon.
The Luke Arm
Per-Capita Carbon for US Cities
Per-Capita Carbon for US Cities
Wired Science has an approachable look at this report which measured the per-capita emissions of the 100 largest US metro areas. There’s not much terribly surprising — density is good, public transportation is good, coal is bad, mild weather is good — but the map’s still interesting to see.
A Mechanical Jellyfish
Agenbites
Joseph Bottum’s neologism for words with a ” kind of poetic, extralogical accuracy.” Some exploration:
In a logical sense, of course, some words are literally true or false when applied to themselves. Words about words, typically: Noun is a noun, though verb is not a verb. Polysyllabic is self-true, and monosyllabic is not. And this logical notion of autology can be extended. If short seems a short word, true of itself, then the shorter long must be false of itself.
But what about jab or fluffy or sneer, each of them true in a way that goes beyond logic? Verbose has always struck me as a strangely verbose word. Peppy has that perky, energetic, spry sound it needs. And was there ever a more supercilious word than supercilious? Or one more lethargic than lethargic?
(via Coudal)
President, Chest-Bumper
This picture may be the most awkward to ever feature an American president.
Recently, In Brains
More stories on which I am behind the crowd:
- Monkey’s with robotic arms. What more is there to know?
- Age is Wisdom. Really. Well, maybe really. The conditions: “If older people are taking in more information from a situation,” as the article suggests, “and they’re then able to combine it with their comparatively greater store of general knowledge,” which the article doesn’t suggest, “they’re going to have a nice advantage.”
- We have two parallel but separate kinds of memory: “verbatim” and “gist.” This can explain how people so often believe things happened differently than they actually did. (via Marco)