The “War on Christmas” has been won. (Flash)

A unicorn is just a more violent form of horse.

With all the King Kong hoopla of late, I think a good movie would be one with a similar premise but starring an abnormally large computer panda bear instead of an abnormally large computer gorilla.

They could call it “Really Giant Panda”.

Remember what the doormouse said:
“Feed your Head
 Feed your Head!”

— Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit”

One of the best things about using Wikipedia is stumbling upon pages of lists.

Sometimes they’re of things you’d have never thought to list. Such as “List of films by gory death scene”.

Ever needed a list of movies containing scenes of “Death from slicing by such a sharp object, that it takes some moments for victim to fall apart”?

The idea of teaching this in science class in a public school is astonishing to me.

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Rosa Parks, Misremembered.

[For this post, all links open in new windows.]

Look at graphs of the intensities of several light sources—LEDs, flourescent and incandescent light bulbs, sunlight—across the spectrum. (400 nm is around where violet begins to be visible to humans, 600 nm is orange, 800 nm is about where red stops being visible.) Consider how the differences between the shapes of the graphs correspond to your imaginations of the differences in appearance of an object under those different types of lights.

“Color stubs” at Wikipedia. Read the name of a color. Try to imagine that color, then click the link for that color’s entry. Consider how the color you see compares to how you had envisioned it. (Different experiences will be had with differently calibrated displays; for best experience, calibrate first.)

Consider that it is likely that some very small set of humans are “tetrachromats”—their eyes have four distinct types of cone cells, each type of which responds more strongly to particular wavelengths of radiation. The vast majority of people have only three types of these cells. Consider that no extra brain mechanism is thought to be needed simultaneously with the occurrence of the extra type of cone cells for the processing and integration of the extra sensory data from those cells to occur. Consider what the implications of this might be for the relationships between our sense organs and our experiences of sensations. Read about “qualia”.

Consider what it is like to be a bat. Consider what it is like to be a dog. Consider what it is like to be a computer… or whether attempting to consider such a thing is even rational. If not, why not? Can the rationality possibly change in the future if computers and the software that runs on them continue to become increasingly powerful?

Consider why you were born “as you” rather than as someone else. Is that question rational?

If you want to understand Apple’s thinking behind the iPod announcements yesterday, read this MetaFilter comment.

(Probably) Worse.

This looks very, very bad.

From NOAA:

HURRICANE KATRINA
A MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED STRENGTH…RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969.

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER. AT LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL…LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.

THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL. PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE…INCLUDING SOME WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.

HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY…A FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT.

AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD…AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS…PETS…AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK.

POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS…AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING…BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE KILLED.

La Tertulia caught my attention because it’s exactly what a yuppie, Upper West Side hash bar might look like, if such a thing existed. I’ve often thought that aesthetic considerations—and not moral or health concerns—are at heart the biggest stumbling block for the “legalize it” movement. Because while we associate alcohol with all sorts of vibes and venues—including black-tie affairs and professional gatherings—we associate pot-smoking only with smelly hippies and zoned-out videogamers. Weed’s got an image problem.

What it really needs is a better publicist. Someone who could play up, say, the scene in Eyes Wide Shut where Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman roll a joint. Here we see a successful, rich Manhattan couple (he’s a doctor, even!) smoking pot in a decidedly non-hippy, non-smelly manner. This is good for the stoners’ cause. (Of course, Cruise’s character later attends a perverted, masked orgy … and it seems that Cruise himself is a couch-stomping loon—but a decent publicist could gloss over this.)

— from “Should I Move to Amsterdam?”, a weeklong series by Slate’s Seth Stevenson

Articles of Consternation: Iraq’s infuriatingly vague constitution. (Slate)

Rest in peace, Robert Moog, electronic music pioneer.