In a strange and entertaining social experiment, in the late 90s Bill Geerhart “launched a letter-writing campaign to some of the most powerful and infamous figures in the country, posing as a curious 10-year-old named Billy.” These people included Donald Rumsfeld, Oprah Winfrey, Arnold Schwarzenegger — and also some more… evil celebrities, including Charles Manson, [...]
Monthly Archives: April 2008
Props to the Ontario Government
April 29, 2008 – 4:47 pm
Ordered my replacement birth certificate (old one is being used as a bookmark in some forgotten book somewhere in the Concordia University library): Friday.
Replace birth certificate arrives: Tuesday.
Who says we don’t have a fast, efficient bureaucracy.
The unmarked envelope it arrive in was a bit sketchy, thought. I half-expected to just find it filled with mysterious [...]
The ethics of race- and ethnicity-based statistics
April 28, 2008 – 11:07 pm
Since the Vichy government, France has been more than just reluctant to collect statistics based on race, ethnicity, skin colours, etc. — it has positively banned such activities, and recently ruled that a sociology professor’s survey which sought to collect such data was unconstitutional. This from todays’ episode of CBC Radio’s Dispatches.
The EU has recently [...]
Washington DC bike rental program — not enough critical mass?
April 27, 2008 – 8:46 pm
According to the New York Times, Washington DC will launch a public-private partnership initiative to provide 120 rental bikes at 10 locations across the city, available for a $40/yr membership.
Good idea, but you have to wonder about the numbers. I’m sure they’re “starting small to see how things go,” but the success of similar initiatives [...]
Great conference on bikes; less great over-reliance on “tipping point”
April 27, 2008 – 5:43 pm
I was at an excellent conference yesterday called Bike Summit 2008 that brought researchers, policymakers, politicians, etc. from across North American to discuss biking, infrastructure, public transit and all that stuff.
What was a bit less excellent, though, was the continual reference to the pop philosophy concept of “tipping point,” an idea that has some merit [...]
Slavoj Zizek web 2.0
April 18, 2008 – 1:14 pm
Some thoughtful and entertaining musings from everyone’s favourite neo-Leninist:
Zizek’s reivew of Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding appeared in the February 2008 issue of Harper’s, and in the current, May 2008 issue we are treated to Critchley’s response. (Disclaimer: I haven’t read Critchley’s book.)
While I agree with Critchley on the unfortunate fact of Zizek’s tendency towards “rhetorical [...]
Stiglitz: Iraq war to cost US close to 5 trillion USD
April 17, 2008 – 12:59 pm
In an interview in the March issue of New Perspectives Quarterly, Joseph Stiglitz suggests that the Iraq war will cost 3 trillion by “conservative estimates” (the most recent figure I’d heard), but is more realistically expected to cost nearly 5 trillion.
Some of the ironies and contradictions of this war identified by Stiglitz include:
this is the [...]