I've come to realize that this isn't a "blog" in any meaningful sense. I just don't update it enough. It's more a website that happens to have an RSS feed if you care.

So as blogs go, this site is fairly poorly linked.

Nevertheless, I periodically check Technorati, just in case. I'm sometimes surprised. But at least as of this writing, the top three hits are clearly spam blogs. What I find most odd is how they pluck postings not from my current feed, but from the distant past. This is probably to foil the easiest countering methodology, which would be noticing certain blogs that just clone other blogs. (In that case, regardless of whether they are spam or legitimate aggregators, you probably don't want them in your Technorati results, if you're Technorati.)

I've long believed that unless the Democrats really change something, they are likely to be marginalized, while the Republicans will split in two, with the two pieces dividing the remnants of the Democrats in some way until the natural near-50/50 equilibrium of our system is restored.

Something's going to trigger that, but I don't think immigration is going to be it. If an issue doesn't come close to splitting the party 50/50, then the Republicans will just follow the issue. I don't think Republican voters are anywhere near 50/50 on this. The third party will be offered some concession, and stripped of their major issue (if it's immigration), they'll take it unless they're stupid.

This fall scientists announced that they had put a half dozen beryllium atoms into a "cat state."

No, they were not sprawled along a sunny windowsill. To a physicist, a "cat state" is the condition of being two diametrically opposed conditions at once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive.

These atoms were each spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Moreover, like miniature Rockettes they were all doing whatever it was they were doing together, in perfect synchrony. Should one of them realize, like the cartoon character who runs off a cliff and doesn't fall until he looks down, that it is in a metaphysically untenable situation and decide to spin only one way, the rest would instantly fall in line, whether they were across a test tube or across the galaxy.

I have a history of being strongly in favor of civil rights.

I can't imagine anybody important would be upset about passive radiation monitoring if it wasn't a way to Get Bush^TM.

If there were some legitimate reason to own large quantities of radioactive materials without government knowledge or control, maybe I'd be more concerned. But I can't think of any.

Under the circumstances, I'd be upset if they weren't monitoring.

If you want to say, "I hate you, but I'm culturally obligated to give you a Christmas present", is there a better gift than an Arch card?

The Belmont Club asks:

One of the questions I'm interested in exploring is whether politics somehow prevented environmentalists from reaching the conclusions described by the NYT years earlier; and if the answer is yes, whether there is any way, in principle, one can detect whether politics is twisting a current public policy debate away from its rational path.

I wanted to highlight this comment by "meme chose", which I though was wonderful:

What worries me most about the riots is not the riots themselves; it is their disturbing similarity to the trigger events of the previous two World Wars, along with all the political and economic dry powder lying around. All the reading from various blogs I've done and I've only seen hints of this point here and here. The continental Europeans have a history of denying problems and taking the easy way out until things are absolutely out of hand, and then suddenly solving the problem by turning it over to a fascist dictator. Who, upon discovering that his policies aren't really fixing the problems after all, comes up with the brilliant idea of trying to externalize the problem.

Been really busy with my new job. It's a dot-com, and I tend to spend spare time working on that in a push for First Release, rather than blogging. Plus my net connection during weekdays is basically non-existant. But I had to comment on this; normally I don't do these, in fact I think this is the first time I've posted one of these, but I find this interesting. (I slightly tweaked the HTML they gave me to also display the Bush/Kerry vote chart too.)

According to Federal Law, you must be able to request a free credit report once a year from the major credit agencies. The companies were required to roll this out in 4 phases. I remember the annoucements, but either I missed the news reports that they were now available in my area, or the stories were not run. (Either are quite plausible.)

For everyone except "the Eastern States and All US Territories", the deadline has passed and you can now get your free credit report from this web site. (The Eastern States et al come online Sept. 1st, 2005.)

If an adjective is in a statement, but the statement is just as true without the adjective, with its opposite, or with a generalization, then the statement fails my adjective test.

Examples:

• Opposite: "Democrats prey on the weak-minded." <-> "Republicans prey on the weak-minded." Both are demonstrably true; I had a senile great-aunt that was preyed on by both, quite without shame.
• Generalization (by dropping the adjective): "A New Computer from ComputerCompany will speed up your photo processing!" -> "A new computer will speed up your photo processing."

(Sorry for the political nature of that first one; I tried to come up with a non-political one, but equal-or-greater truth with the opposite mostly comes up with groups of people, which is political.)