December 2003 Archives
Meat From Infirm Animals Is Banned (washingtonpost.com)
"Animals too sick or old to stand or walk will be banned from entering the food supply, federal officials said yesterday, in a move that would keep from 150,000 to 200,000 to "downer" cattle a year from going to the slaughterhouse."
This is progress? (Too little, too late).
"Could it be that our purpose is to tell a story, and that the better lived a life is, the better the story that survives after you're gone?"
Dave Winer sums up the Greek heroic ideal.
Readers interested in Robert Scoble's recent discussion of freedom of religion may want to refer back to TPB's analysis of the Establishment Clause during the controversy over Justice Roy Moore's Ten Commandments sculpture and his follow up post in Unbillable Hours.
Changes in Episcopal Church Spur Some to Go, Some to Join
"The decision this year by the Episcopal Church USA to ordain an openly gay bishop has set off a wave of church switching, according to dozens of interviews with clergy members and parishioners across the country."
Still proud to be an Episcopalian.
MoorishGirl observes that recent scholarship indicates that Nathaniel Hawthorne may have borrowed passages from a poem by James Russell Lowell, and speculates that computer searches through Amazon and Google will turn up more such borrowings.
The default assumption in modern society is that plagiarism is bad. This attitude is hard to reconcile with the fact that many of our greatest artists plagiarized freely and unashamedly. The most noteworthy example is Shakespeare, who blithely stole his plots from other authors. Chaucer was no better. And I am told that early Classical musicians freely lifted each other's musical themes. Scholars such as Jonathon Livingston Lowes have suggested that "borrowing" from other works and transmuting them into art is an essential part of the creative process. The question becomes, then, whether the modern emphasis on originality and copyright has enhanced the creative process or hobbled it.
Strong Support Is Found for Ban on Gay Marriage
"The latest New York Times/CBS News poll has found widespread support for an amendment to the United States Constitution to ban gay marriage. It also found unease about homosexual relations in general, making the issue a potentially divisive one for the Democrats and an opportunity for the Republicans in the 2004 election."
Government of the bigots, by the bigots, and for the bigots.
Never Forget: They Kept Lots of Slaves
"Not only does the overwhelming presence of slavery in early America cast a dark shadow over the sunny aspects of the founding, but it is also driving a huge rethinking of our history. Previous historians of early America, of course, never entirely ignored slavery (how could they?), but they did not bring its harsh brutality and its influence front and center in the way recent historians have."
giacalone's Haiku Bar & Grill: giacalone's Bar & Grill
"Pursuant to the following Notice, we'll be re-opening soon, with a new name, but the same old management."
Clay Shirky gives a short explanation of the Power Law and its application to the number of readers each weblog attracts. The Power Law basically posits that distribution in certain kinds of networks -- whether weblog or wealth -- is weighted in such a way that a disproportionate share of resources -- readers or dollars -- are allocated to the top performers in a group. In other words, the most popular weblogs get most of the readers, just as a few rich people control most of the wealth.
I came across the Power Law upon reading the unfortunate news that BlogShares has closed.
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