Busy day Open Thread
Bookworm on Mar 12 2013 at 1:45 pm | Filed under: Open Threads
Sorry for the silence today. I’ve been running about (a) creating posts for Mr. Conservative and (b) dealing with a chronic knee problem. (Thankfully, surgery will fix it.)
I’ve found writing for Mr. Conservative quite fascinating. It’s very different from the stream-of-consciousness posting I do here, where I latch onto anything I find interesting and then just see where it takes me.
Mr. Conservative is a breaking news site that’s shaped around giving the people what they want: they want very current stories, they want stories about guns and the military, they want stories about school craziness, and they want other “newsie” stuff that has a conservative slant. They are not interested in the “inside politics” posts that many in the conservative blogosphere find so fascinating.
It’s actually great to discover this new world because it explains a lot about what’s going on in the street, away from our obsession with political details. We who care about the sausage-making aspect of politics know what we politicians to do, or not do, but we forget that most voters don’t care about politics per se. They care about the effect politics has on their lives — and in the conservative world, they don’t like it when the Obama government tells them what to do. To them, the gamesmanship behind the results is dull.
I’m therefore learning how to make a “gotcha” first paragraph, how to front-load a post with all the pertinent stuff, and how to put the interesting (to me) stuff at the back-end, next page, for anyone who has enough interest to follow through. I’m also learning how to work a very nice WordPress interface, and that’s fun too. The one thing that I’m still struggling with his making catchy headlines. Mine still sound like treatise titles for people studying Atlantic fishing patterns in the mid-19th century.
It’s funny — Cyrus is quite young, but he has more sechel about the internet, blogging, and information dissemination in the new media than just about anyone I’ve ever seen. He’s also got raw courage, because he’s willing to put himself on the line in terms of time and commitment based upon his faith in himself and his ideas. Speaking as a lifelong wage slave, I admire that.
I’m heading back to putting up fresh content on Mr. Conservative. When it overlaps with stuff I like to blog about in my beloved Bookworm Room, I’ll share it with you. In the meantime, please enjoy yourself here with an open thread.
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10 Responses to “Busy day Open Thread”
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I commiserate with you on writing heads, Book! My first newspaper job out of college was editing wire copy and writing heads to fit column space. I sat next to the managing editor who threw the copy back at me when I didn’t use a good active verb in a headline. I quickly learned that forms of the verb “to be” don’t cut it even though they fit well in one column!
Writing pithy headlines is an art. Much as I hate to give it a kudos, the San Francisco Chronicle has some headline writers on the sports pages that could give SADIE a run for her punny.
Best headline I ever read was one atop a tiny story about 35 years ago in the now-defunct San Francisco Examiner. It concerned a small tremor in an eastern Mediterranean island: “Quake Rattles in Rhodes.”
One other thing: Thank you, Book, for finally taking down the photo of that pus-oozing beef roast that was otherwise a splendid-looking hunk of meat. It took all I had not to become obsessed with that damned thing. Had to learn how to scroll past it at Mach speed.
Open link! Oh goody. First off a pop quiz..
NPR
For only the second time ever, the Securities and Exchange Commission is charging a state with fraud, for allegedly misleading investors about the health of its pension funds. The SEC says the state of {answer below} did not properly inform investors that its pension funds were significantly underfunded when selling bonds from 2005 to 2009. This is the latest fiscal black eye for a state with a pension shortfall approaching a whopping $100 billion. The state has agreed to settle the charges.
Care to weigh in on matter, Charles?
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $1.5 million to study biological and social factors for why “three-quarters” of lesbians are obese and why gay males are not, calling it an issue of “high public-health significance.”
Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Mass., has received two grants administered by NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to study the relationship between sexual orientation and obesity.
“Obesity is one of the most critical public health issues affecting the U.S. today,” the description of the grant reads. “Racial and socioeconomic disparities in the determinants, distribution, and consequences of obesity are receiving increasing attention.”
“[H]owever, one area that is only beginning to be recognized is the striking interplay of gender and sexual orientation in obesity disparities,” it states.
Answer to NPR quiz: Very ILLinois.
I enjoy heading over to mrconservative once or twice each day to see what is up there.
But I can tell you I am already getting irritated at one thing that may cause me to limit my visits. In most of the posts that interest me enough to dig deeper, when I click on the content, I see that I am going to have to page through ten or so further clicks to get the entire story. (At the bottom of the teaser are the page links “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next”.
ONLY if I am *extremely* interested in the topic, will I go further. The vast majority of the time, if I’m facing ten such clicks, I reject the post immediately and go on to other things. John Hawkins has figured out how to keep me interested at his main site(s). He has multi-page links requiring multiple loads, too… but he always has a ‘View As A Single Page’ link where all the content loads into a single page, scrollable, at once, and I can scroll to my heart’s content. As a consumer, that’s my viewing pleasure.
I know Mr. Conservative does the ten-link approach on purpose, probably to generate more traffic and because that approach puts more eyeballs on more ads? But he should be aware of people like me who abandon it, not because the story isn’t compelling enough, but PRECISELY because of the multi-link, multi-page-load phenomenon that irritates us so.
“Mine still sound like treatise titles for people studying Atlantic fishing patterns in the mid-19th century.”
Pardon me, but that actually sounds quite interesting… possible fodder for a game called SimFish, or Age of Fisheries, or something. How far out from port did the typical boat go? Without electrical refrigeration, how did they slow the spoilage of their catch, if at all? Could they process and preserve onboard, like they do now? Absent refrigeration or processing, what kind of an operational radius did that give them? What were the laws of the sea like back in those days, de jure and de facto? Given the relative scarcity of weather satellites, what effect did the possibility of boat-sinking storms have on where a boat would dare to go, and when? Steam power had begun to augment sail as a means of propulsion, but how many fishing boats were among those with steam? And aside from having a backup plan in the horse latitudes, did that make much difference? In what areas did the fish tend to concentrate, and why? Were there enough fishermen to make a dent in the fish populations in those areas?
Interesting!
Damn you, Spartacus, you remind me what a noble and deep thing our nerd mind can be. Proof again that anything under the sun can be a fascinating thing to study if only you bring the right and curious frame of mind to it.
Re 19th c. fish: Captain’s Courageous, anyone? My children watched excerpts of this fabulous film in 4th grade (the theme for the year was water, and as we live near Cape Ann, MA, it was fascinating to see the boats as they were used a century ago.) For the anecdote, trawlers still pull up mastodon bones from George’s Bank. It seems that when the Wisconsin Glacier was around, most of the existing, fossil-rich topsoil was pushed south to PA and east into what is today the Atlantic. This is the theory, anyway, as to why we have lots of bedrock, and why we get fossils out of the ocean.
Well, we all know Bloomberg’s high-capacity soda ban has been halted, for now. I didn’t realize that beyond the complete disrespect for others as individuals that it was also a perfect example of government bureaucrat stupidity. What does New York City have against the Metric system? You’d think they’d want to embrace the ways of Europe.
Seth Goldman: Mayor Bloomberg and Our 16.9-Ounce Tea – WSJ.com
Seems in their regulatory rush, they banned things sold in the standard 500 ml (16.90z) bottle from being sold in restaurants, etc. I wonder if we can name other regulatory zeal that turns out to have unintended consequences because the nanny-staters rushed through the rules to avoid open, democratic discussion?
Speaking of treatise titles, here’s one for an economic theorem that is both true and not obvious: The Chamley-Judd Redistribution Impossibility Theorem
econlog.econlib.org…redistributing.html
The theorem for those of us who avoid economic-speak is that it is an impossibility to redistribute from the capitalists to the workers, i.e., from the rich to not so rich in the long term. Of course, Obama and the Progs aren’t in it for the long term, they are in it for the immediate advantage. They are also in it for the central thesis of socialism which is to which is to use government threat of violence to achieve the material wealth the socialist lusts after since their skills are inadequate to achieve that wealth by being a value to others. Well, if you have the right connections in the socialist hierarchy otherwise, you usually end up in the impossible position of the Chamley-Judd Redistribution Impossibility Theorem, i.e., poorer.
One big lesson I draw from Chamley-Judd: Good economic policy doesn’t try to do things that are impossible. And if the world works roughly the way Chamley and Judd assume it does, a long run policy that redistributes total income from capitalists to workers is impossible.
”why we get fossils out of the ocean” took me back to quite a few years. Buddy Hackett was doing his schtick on Johnny Carson’s show …..
I was sitting on the beach in Atlantic City, basking in the sun, when an older woman exited the ocean, soaked to the bone with her hair tossed around like more than a few waves had taken over her. As she stood at the edge of the water catching her breath and shivering, shaking her arms and waving them around …. so I jumped out of my chair with a towel and ran towards her shouting, “Are there any other survivors?”
“For the anecdote, trawlers still pull up mastodon bones from George’s Bank. It seems that when the Wisconsin Glacier was around, most of the existing, fossil-rich topsoil was pushed south to PA and east into what is today the Atlantic. This is the theory, anyway, as to why we have lots of bedrock, and why we get fossils out of the ocean.”
Actually, evolutionary scientists have discovered that modern lemmings are descended from mastodons; what is today an ankle-high, furry flurry of suicidal rodents was, back in the Pleistocene, a thunderous, elephantine stampede of the apocalypse. Because of their much greater body mass, with most of the heat deep inside, mastodons were far more able to withstand the chilly waters of the Atlantic than lemmings are, and some were able to swim as far as Atlantis, which is why they are depicted on several denominations of Atlantic coins. But yes, many succumbed not far off the North American coast.
As Dave Barry would say, “I am not making this up.”