Right-wing Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin is tired of willfully ignorant Republicans:
[Perry] was trying to be self-deprecating, but it’s disturbing to see that he thinks being a rotten student and a know-nothing gives one street cred in the GOP. Is it so important to defy the MSM by flaunting affection for anti-intellectualism? Just imagine if Sarah Palin had said all that — the conservative cheerleaders who gave up on her (but are still rooting for Perry) would roll their eyes in disgust.
Moreover, what Perry is doing here is telling moderate Republicans and those voters genuinely concerned about his electability to buzz off. He doesn’t need them, and he doesn’t intend to make it easy for them to vote for him. He’s telling them he is happily impervious to mainstream sensibilities. It’s the sort of thing that a Texas pol, not a presidential candidate, would do.
I'm not only tired of GOP anti-intellectualism, I'm terrified by it, because someday we'll have another Republican president. I hope that he or she has more respect for brains than most of the current batch of GOP candidates.
One of my friends, Nature Nerd Naomi, reported that she saw frost on her roof this morning. She lives about 40 km away. And Chicago Tribune meteorologist Tom Skilling says yesterday was the coldest September 14th in 37 years:
Temperatures failed to reach 16°C
at the city's official O'Hare observation site Thursday, topping out at 14.4°C
instead. It's the coolest reading which has occurred there since late May and a temperature which equals the normal high on Oct. 28. But even more significantly, a review of weather records here indicates the reading was the chilliest to occur so early in the "meteorological" fall season in the 37 years since 1974.
Thursday isn't likely to be much warmer. Though readings are likely to creep into [around] 17°C
at the area's warmer observation sites, the predicted O'Hare high of 14°C
is close to the record low Sept. 15 maximum of 13°C
set in 1993.
So just a few days ago, as I turned my air conditioner on to cool down from 30°C heat, I hoped for an early fall. But wow, I didn't expect temperatures to plunge so quickly.
Of course, on Tuesday when I'm back in San Antonio and it's 36°C, I'll be missing the cooler weather again.
Apparently my creativity isn't alone in its suffering this time of year. I'm also finding it a lot harder to learn Japanese than I expected.
Anyone else feeling a little leaden the past couple of weeks?
For the last three years running—including, it seems this one—my ability to find passably-interesting topics to write about plummets in September and picks up again mid-October.
Any hypotheses about why? I haven't got any, except maybe that the shortening days do something.
Which is all just a longer way of saying, chirp...chirp...chirp...
It happens every year, and every year it surprises me: from mid-August to mid-October, the days get shorter quickly. Three weeks ago I was waking up to daylight; this morning, I realized I was waking up to twilight. In three weeks it'll be dark at that hour. Right now, every day, the sun rises a minute later an sets a minute earlier.
Nothing profound or particularly surprising here. Just an observation.
On this day in 1986, I got my first PC: an original, 1982-vintage IBM PC, with a 1 MHz 8088 processor, 256 kB of RAM, twin 360 kB drives, a 30 cm 80 x 25 character green monochrome monitor, and a steel clickety-clackety keyboard.
The laptop I'm writing this on, 25 years later, has a 3 GHz Intel Core 2 processor, 4 GB of RAM, an internal solid-state 250 GB drive, a 36 cm 1280 x 800 pixel monitor with 16 million colors, and a silent keyboard. And this laptop cost less than half what the PC cost in nominal terms, which makes it about one-sixth the cost in real terms.
Twenty five years of computing, and I still don't have a fast-enough computer.
From the Hoboken Ferry:
27 June 1998, Canon EOS Rebel with Kodachrome 64, 35mm, about here.
The view on 20 October 2001:
I don't have all the details, but it looks like an employee at one of the hospital's vendors did something really stupid:
A medical privacy breach led to the public posting on a commercial Web site of data for 20,000 emergency room patients at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., including names and diagnosis codes, the hospital has confirmed. The information stayed online for nearly a year.
Since discovering the breach last month, the hospital has been investigating how a detailed spreadsheet made its way from one of its vendors, a billing contractor identified as Multi-Specialty Collection Services, to a Web site called Student of Fortune, which allows students to solicit paid assistance with their schoolwork.
Gary Migdol, a spokesman for Stanford Hospital and Clinics, said the spreadsheet first appeared on the site on Sept. 9, 2010, as an attachment to a question about how to convert the data into a bar graph.
One can easily see how this happened: someone on the billing contractor's staff was taking a class of some kind and decided to use real, live, HIPAA-protected data for a project. My law-school Wills instructor, Jerry Leitner, would explain this by the "omnibus explanation," the thing that explains nearly every human endeavor that ends badly: stupidity.
The article mentions Stanford got fined $250,000 from the breach. I wonder if they'll be able to get a contribution award from the contractor?
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported yesterday that 2011 was hot, damn hot, real hot:
The average U.S. temperature in August was 24.3°C, which is 1.7°C above the long-term (1901-2000) average, while the summertime temperature was 23.6°C, which is 1.3°C above average. The warmest August on record for the contiguous United States was 24.3°C in 1983, while its warmest summer on record at 23.7°C occurred in 1936. Precipitation across the nation during August averaged 58.7 mm, 7.4 mm inches below the long-term average. The nationwide summer precipitation was 25.4 mm below average.
Climate highlights include:
- Excessive heat in six states – Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana – resulted in their warmest August on record. This year ranked in the top ten warmest August for five other states: Florida (3rd), Georgia (4th), Utah (5th), Wyoming (8th), and South Carolina (9th).The Southwest and South also had their warmest August on record.
- Several major U.S. cities broke all-time monthly rainfall amounts during August. New York City (Central Park) measured 481.3 mm of rain, exceeding the previous record of 428 mm in 1882. In Philadelphia, 490.5 mm of rain was observed, besting the previous monthly record of 332 mm in September 1999.
So, weather extremes, a hot summer, record rainfall, and massive property damage from storms. Can't wait to see what happens this winter.
David Frum is calling Rick Perry's statement last night about Social Security "the mother of all unforced errors:"
Perhaps not since George McGovern’s annihilation at the hands of Richard Nixon in 1972 has a candidate’s Primary base been so alienated from the center of American political thought as the Tea Party is today. Make no mistake: no candidate who doesn’t convincingly throw the red meat to the Tea Party audiences will have a sliver of a chance of getting nominated.
I’m not going to go so far as to predict the result of a Presidential Election that is 14 months away, but I will posit that while “Change we can Believe in” might be a somewhat tired slogan by that point, it sure as hell beats “Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme”
That, and his complete misunderstanding of Galileo's trial kind of made the evening.