Chizumatic says (likely permalink):

The future belongs to Robert Rodriguez, who is the only director I've ever heard of who argued for a lower budget for one of his films than the Hollywood studio wanted to give him. Rodriguez believes that tight money brings out the best in a production crew, and his track record backs that up.

See also Serenity, the Firefly movie. I'm the kind of person who enjoys listening to director commentaries, and as I recall the commentary is full of "Well, we didn't have the money to do this, so we had to do that, and I think it came out better" and "Well, the actor accidentally did this, and we didn't have the money to reshoot, so we had to roll with it" and "We told the special effects guys to just come up with something cool within the budget, and they came up with this and it was awesome."

After one too many people describing my website with various synonyms of "ugly", I've taken another swing at un-uglifying it. I think it's progress, but I'm not sure I'm out of "ugly" yet.

Sigh.

Years ago, I set myself a rule that I would create a good website design (not "great", just "good") that used neither black nor white. I'm beginning to think that for someone as graphically talented as I (in one word: "not"), this may be a bad idea. Two or three more failures over a few more years and I may have to reconsider that restriction.

It looks like they're trying for another "Summer of the Shark!" journalistic feeding frenzy again.

They haven't really been able to push a Summer of the Shark through since 9/11, for obvious reasons.

Don't you think these journalists would wake up one day and ask themselves, "Is this what I went to journalism school for? So I could try to jam yet another Summer of the Shark down the public's throat?"

There have been some accusations made lately about "domain swiping". "Domain swiping" refers to the following sequence of events:

1. You go to a Domain Name Registrar to check to see if your desired domain name is available. They say it is.
2. You go away to think about whether you really want it.
3. You come back in two or three days and check again, only to find out it's been taken and now if you can get it at all, you'll need to pay inflated prices. Presumably this is some rare domain name that you can expect a speculator didn't register in the meantime.

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: