Archive for March, 2005
Contracts
I don’t know what it is about bankruptcy law. It seems really difficult to get any kind of traction on this issue. Most people understand that the credit card industry bought this legislation, and that “the overwhelming majority of people in bankruptcy are in financial distress as a result of job loss, medical expense, divorce, […]
EOGEO
Years ago I had a vision of what my ideal world news web site would look like. Well, it still isn’t there, but several sites now come close enough that I can provide examples.
The problem is that interesting news is happening all over the world, but the focus of the US media tends to be […]
Miss America Conservatives
Sometimes a blog post deserves to be quoted at length. Such is the case with this post from Mark Schmitt:
I’m tired of giving quasi-conservatives credit for what I call Miss America compassion (I’ll explain in a minute). Smith’s son’s suicide led him to support more funding for suicide prevention and for mental health care generally. […]
Makeover
I’ve given Shashwati’s blog a makeover. Check it out!
It was a tougher theme to work with, since it uses images and not just straight CSS, but hopefully it works OK. Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions! (The old theme is still in use for her homepage.)
{themes, wordpress, blogs, shashwati talukdar}
Science
I’ve been mulling over how to respond to Mark Liberman’s recent jibe at semioticians. This jibe was provoked by my claim that linguistics should be thought of expansively, as a subfield of semiotics (as Saussure initially intended) and not in the more narrow modern sense.
In his post Liberman picks on Roland Barthes, and his “euphoric […]
Statistics
Writing in Mother Jones, Bradford Plumer says we need better statistics to gauge the situation in Iraq:
according to the Pentagon’s own estimates, that need is increasing far faster than the U.S. can train new troops. Official statistics currently claim that 145,000 Iraqi Security Forces are “trained and equipped.” Yet the estimated number of troops required […]
Discrepancies
Nathan Newman asks why the Republicans aren’t planning on fixing racial differences in health care, when they have so recently been willing to exploit those differences for political gain. He then goes on to highlight some of the most shocking discrepancies:
Sixty-nine percent of whites are insured through their employers, compared with only 52 percent of […]
France vs. Google
Why do the French hate Google?
First the national French press agency is suing Google:
Agence France Presse is suing Google for $17.5 million for aggregating and extracting headlines and excerpts from AFP stories on its Google News service. Google claims its use of AFP material is protected by fair use laws; AFP denies it.
But also, the […]
Last Supper
This ad, by French clothing company, Marithe et François Girbaud has caused a big stir in Europe:
It wasn’t just that it was based on Leonardo’s famous painting:
But that it featured a half naked man. I think historian Jo Guldi is probably correct when he says that this is probably not the real offense caused […]
Snooze
Getting up is hard to do, and here is a gallery of some ingenious gadgets that are designed to get you out of bed:
Tennis alarm clock
This tennis alarm clock is made out of a soft, rubber-like material. When the alarm goes off, it can be turned off by throwing the tennis clock at the wall, […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
