JT dreams of replacing me someday, and thinks all he has to do is acquire a Trophy Girlfriend. How wrong he is.
I will give him a little hint.
Don’t worry, JT. Puberty is almost inevitable.
Never let it be said that I am ungenerous to the younglings. I have a suggestion for JT that will help him immediately.
Hoping to start the kid off with a properly snarky elitist attitude? Then shop here. I know what my grandchildren would be wearing, if I had any (and no, that’s not a hint to my kids — I’m in no hurry).
I hope you’ve all gotten yourself straight with the big guy in the red suit.
(via Scott Brundage)
All it took was one post, and I was enraptured by the sweetness and light.
I’ll start promoting Newt tomorrow. It’s a small first step.
Urglegurgle. I’m trying to prep a lecture on synapse formation, and just discovered that Herzog’s amazing film about Chauvet cave is available…so I’m trying to scribble up technical notes on molecular biology while getting constantly distracted by 32,000 year old cave paintings. It’s good to live in the 21st century, but I think my brain is getting full.
(Also on Sb)
I was sent this comic by Ian.
I have a vague impression that he might have been making some point or other to me, but I can’t quite imagine what it would be. Of course I know how to hug. Hugs are for crushing everything.
My day is done. I’ve read the one quote that makes me happy, so now I can buckle down to grading. It’s from Ai Weiwei, the artist and dissenter the Chinese government would love to silence.
My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression, a new way of communication. It is never about exhibiting in museums or about hanging it on the wall. Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don’t think art is elite or mysterious. I don’t think anybody can separate art from politics. The intention to separate art from politics is itself a very political intention. I definitely know people who are shameless enough to give up basic values. I see this kind of art, and when I see it I feel ashamed. In China they treat art as some form of decoration, a self-indulgence. It is pretending to be art. It looks like art. It sells like art. But it is really a piece of shit.
There’s more about his politics: China keeps trying to control the free expression of the people on the internet by shutting it down. They argue that they’re better than they were in the days of the Cultural Revolution — which is setting the bar rather low, I think — but it’s still a restrictive police state.
I’d argue that the US is better than China, but still, especially considering the record of the last few weeks, is likewise a police state.
The infamous Kensington Runestone is kept in a museum just a few miles up the road from me. It’s a carved rock that was dug up on a farm in the 19th century by a Swedish farmer, and purports to tell the tale in runes of a doomed Viking expedition that had come down from Hudson’s Bay to meet a tragic end at the hands of the Minnesota natives. More likely, it’s a cunning artifact produced by the farmer, Olof Öhman. It’s an unlikely bit of pseudo-history, and I’d love to see an unassailable disproof of its source.
Martin Rundkvist is reporting that Öhman’s signature has been found on the stone. Unfortunately, I find the evidence for that even more weirdly unlikely than that Vikings carved it. There are various numbers scattered around in the account written on the stone — the number of Vikings, the days spent traveling, that sort of thing — and the guy who claims to have detected the signature uses these numbers in a bizarrely oblique way.
The inscription has twelve lines. Larsson counts the words from the left on odd-numbered lines and from the right on even-numbered lines…
Uh, why? What if you counted from the left on even lines and from the right on odd lines? What if you counted characters up from the bottom, or whatever other random number-juggling you could do. This reeks of post-hoc fitting of an interpretation to the data set, and I don’t believe a word of it.
Rats. We’re going to have to keep on rolling our eyes at the silliness in that little museum to the north, I guess.
(Also on Sb)
You’ve probably already heard that Bill O’Reilly wrote a ‘history’ book about the Lincoln assassination that contains enough factual errors that it was rejected by the National Parks Service for sale at Ford’s Theater. I say you’ve probably already heard it because the media everywhere is chuckling over the humor of pissing off BillO with the ignominy of it all. Now I loves me some O’Reilly bashing, but Chris Rodda asks a very good question about that.
Why isn’t the media going after all the other right-wing pseudo-history? David Barton still appears on TV fairly regularly, and he’s far worse than O’Reilly. The Texas board of education tried to disappear Thomas Jefferson from history textbooks. Aren’t those more significant phenomena than that one lazy loud TV blowhard tried to pretend to be a serious historian and failed?
