Wonderful:

The assessment, which took four years, found that the Arctic may hold as much as 90 billion barrels of undiscovered oil reserves, and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This would amount to 13 percent of the world’s total undiscovered oil and about 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas.

At today’s consumption rate of 86 million barrels a day, the potential oil in the Arctic could meet global demand for almost three years.

Wow, time to fire up those oil derricks. Three years! Woo!

Meanwhile, the half a trillion they'll probably pump into getting that oil out of the (frozen, sub-sea, arctic) ground could be better spent on developing other sources of power ... but hey, what do I know?

Well, what I think I know is that we're fucked until someone creates a fusion reactor.

Apparently the problem is not that John McCain is too old to be President, it's that Barack Obama is too young.

hat tip to fengi, who brings it better than me.

This is the To-Do manager that Apple should have included with the iPhone. It looks that good. The inclusion of Notes and To-Dos in Mail (and iCal, as well), and the fact that they mean nothing on the iPhone, is a gross oversight. Perhaps they're waiting for version 3 to roll out that sort of integration.

Fourth picture down: The water monster is totally going to eat that kid alive.

Apparently last Saturday's walkoff HPB was the first for a Yankee in 43 years.

I also had not fully appreciated just how long that game really was until now.

Someday when I have 10 minutes free I'll have to start looking into creating a decent LJ client for the Mac.

ETA: To be more specific - I am aware that Livejournal clients for the Mac exist. I am just not feeling any of them - they all have that same checkbox-heavy, clunky interface that looks like it stabilized around OS X 10.2. Plus, it's 2008, we can have WYSIWYG editing, perhaps? It can't be THAT hard to do. (He says, foolishly .... )

(After experiencing a round of annoyance with Google Reader's formatting of some of the blogs I read, I downloaded NetNewsWire, added my subscriptions exported from GR, and synced it through NewsGator so I'll have the same at home and on my laptop. That got me thinking about other areas where a client might be better than the web app, and here we are.)

ETA2: Except NewsGator's NetNewsWire for the iPhone seems wonky; although it functions well, it doesn't download all the feeds, and it's pretty slow to do so when it does; that's what asynchronous transfers are all about, folks! Oh, well. Back to Google for me. Shame, too, NetNewsWire is a nice app. But I need one pipeline. (Yes, I am a dork)

Those who are forced to drive in big cities might find this amusing:

The City was willing to spend large amounts of money for electronic sensors, cameras, hardware, software and a huge bureaucracy to collect “congestion pricing” fees.
How about a similar technological fix for intersection-blockers?
My modest proposal is to, at select intersections of One Way streets, install a 60-ft. diameter turntable that would rotate 90 degrees with every change of the traffic light.
Blocking the intersection of 5th at 38th when the light turns red? Sorry pal, youre still stuck in traffic, but now youre headed for the Midtown Tunnel.
Nobody’d do THAT twice.

When we drove to the city for my brother's wedding, K was driving, and was filled with rage when people would honk and block the box ... myself, I knew what was coming.

Also, I agree with the multitude of commenters who stated that buses were 9/10 of the problem. The double-length monsters are the worst. Of course, ideally city streets would be for the buses, and not the individual, private cars, as the buses would be the best communal use of resources, but I can't just hand-wave away the private cars, and, well, buses are single-handedly able to take over an entire intersection, at times.

This is why I always took the subway. Of course, one could always walk, too.

docmanhattan, you'll be leaving the door open for Elijah and Estelle Getty come next Passover.

The point is not whether John McCain is merely old or an idiot - the point is that by getting out in front of criticism of him with verbiage linking his "gaffes" to suspicions about his age, refutations of those "gaffes" can then be seen as ageist overreaction. It's laying the groundwork for pre-emptive concern-trolling.

To be clear, I don't think that this article is addressing my alma mater, or schools like it, or attempting to comment upon students in general; rather it's addressing a very small, rarified segment of society. I don't necessarily agree with or want to defend all of its conclusions or method of argument, but I also don't want people to say, "but that didn't happen to me!" in response, as though their honor were being personally assaulted.

(Perhaps I muddied the waters by relating to it personally, but I don't think he was talking about me, no matter how much it may have resonated with me.)

Next time someone tells you that the rich are paying too much taxes, just remember this. Oh, and remember it when you're flying this summer, too.

Interesting article on how elite education fails its clients:

An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn’t understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students’ experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State. There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.

That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy; it’s not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by smiling clerks. There are few, if any, opportunities for the kind of contacts I saw my students get routinely—classes with visiting power brokers, dinners with foreign dignitaries. There are also few, if any, of the kind of special funds that, at places like Yale, are available in profusion: travel stipends, research fellowships, performance grants. Each year, my department at Yale awards dozens of cash prizes for everything from freshman essays to senior projects. This year, those awards came to more than $90,000—in just one department.

Students at places like Cleveland State also don’t get A-’s just for doing the work. There’s been a lot of handwringing lately over grade inflation, and it is a scandal, but the most scandalous thing about it is how uneven it’s been. Forty years ago, the average GPA at both public and private universities was about 2.6, still close to the traditional B-/C+ curve. Since then, it’s gone up everywhere, but not by anything like the same amount. The average gpa at public universities is now about 3.0, a B; at private universities it’s about 3.3, just short of a B+. And at most Ivy League schools, it’s closer to 3.4. But there are always students who don’t do the work, or who are taking a class far outside their field (for fun or to fulfill a requirement), or who aren’t up to standard to begin with (athletes, legacies). At a school like Yale, students who come to class and work hard expect nothing less than an A-. And most of the time, they get it.

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out.

[snip]

For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend. If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of the characteristic products of an elite education, George W. Bush represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale. Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club. But you don’t need to remember Ken Lay, because the whole dynamic played out again last year in the case of Scooter Libby, another Yale man

Boy, did I milk that "always another extension" thing for all it was worth in college (so clam it, you wags)! Certainly didn't really do me any favors (Not to beat myself up too much, I do just fine, thanks), and I certainly don't want to credit my failure of ambition with any sort of craftiness in working the system.

You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?

Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

Boy, does that sound familiar. Even today, I feel pangs of guilt and remorse sometimes over having chosen to "merely" be a computer programmer (and a mediocre one at that, but I'm working on that .... )

Teri Garr is pretty awesome, is all I have to say.

(hat tip to ludickid)

Could most of the native iPhone apps be written as web apps instead? Maybe, but I think the author is going double down on a model that doesn't necessarily need to be either-or. For example, maybe Cocktails doesn't need to be a native app, but something like Phonesaber? Definitely not :)

(Besides, the "always-connected/web über alles" rhetoric presumes that a phone will always be connected to a high-speed, responsive data network, which, yeah, not so much)

Interesting comment - everyone wearing a Yankees shirt in any of the artists' renderings for the New Yankee Stadium is wearing a #2 Derek Jeter shirt.

One photo gallery did manage to catch a Cano fan in the wild, though.

I was also excited to see another person at Saturday's game rocking a #15 Munson t-shirt. Gotta represent, you know.

I went to what will probably be my last baseball game at Yankees Stadium this past Saturday, and it was a fun time. A-Rod couldn't hit, Melky and Cano were my faves, and Derek Jeter did OK. The seats were third row from the very top of the upper deck, but I didn't care, because, blind bastard that I am, the only way I can tell what the hell is going on is against the unvarying backdrop of the field. Plus, you can see everything at once. So I liked our seats. The game went to 12 innings, and the guy next to me who'd been at the All-Star game was having deja vu.

Also, it was hot. Thank goodness we were in the shade of the upper deck, because I could not have done that in the sun.

I got jazzed when I saw one of the new stadium's portals, complete with the embossed "Yankees Stadium", rising to the north as I got off the subway. Next year! Plus, the House that they Built on the Plot where the House that Ruth Built holds not so much sentimental attachment for me.

Man, too right. Let's get the fuck out.

Somewhat related, I just re-watched the first episode of Battlestar Galactica's third season today, and man, we are the Cylons. Not a good thought.

Please please please pleeeeeeeeeeeease God, if you're out there, let it happen. Oh, please let it happen.

If you want a particular picture of yourself to show up when you call me on my phone, post it here in the comments.