Reason: PEBCAK. I didn’t have the user authorized to post … this, after not having the API open to allow posting.

Gosh, I R SMRT.

GAAAAAAAH! UPDATE, DAMMIT!

I took some time at lunch and watched/listened to Clay Shirky’s talk about the cognitive surplus, which I’d seen linked a lot of places, but today by Jeremy Zawodny.

I was reminded of a pledge to use time-shifting for awesome. I then sent myself to the penalty box for a ten-minute misconduct.

Okay, off to watch some Law & Order. :sigh:

Watching the comments on Andy Baio’s post on Infocom is endlessly fascinating for me, as I’m the Web host for the Interactive Fiction Competition, which is organized by my good friend Stephen Granade. Just earlier this week [or was it last week? They're running together], I had been telling Dr. Boom at lunch that he needed to check out Waxy. Heh.

I think my favorite thing is how Stephen just matter-of-factly points to Baio’s entry, too … me, I wouldn’t have been able to resist discussing how I would be freaking out if internal emails were getting posted on the Internet. Of course, I realized long ago that I was only one forward away from any of my emails being read by the one person I least wanted to see them, privacy disclaimers I might make to the contrary.

An aside, because I think it’s worth considering: email from 25 years ago was far more likely to be for-the-record, memo-style stuff than what you typically see today in business. There certainly was a lot less of it sent [as we were less used to it as a communication medium], and so everything was more focused—and, sometimes, strident. I think this accounts for some of the tone you see in some of the emails that Andy reproduced, and I think the following quotation makes my point:

I just wanted to clarify in writing what we discussed about “Restaurant” last Tuesday — what I will and will not agree to.

I will not sign a blank sheet of paper: I refuse to take responsibility for “Restaurant” in the state it presently is in — not knowing who is creatively in charge, how much thinking has actually been done, or how much of a script is written. …

– Amy Briggs

Consider the difference between this opening and most of the business email you send and receive. Do you write stuff like this from time to time? Sure, we all do. But those are the emails that we stay after hours to write—or, better, sleep on and write first thing the next morning. But it would be a mistake to not recognize that many of these emails were of a for-the-record nature, the kinds of things that make positional statements, and as such sound more assertive than we’re used to.

In the drive-thru line at Hardee’s this morning [I know, I know], I was behind a large Toyota SUV with a “Paul Finley for Mayor” set of stickers. So I whipped out the iPhone and pulled up the URL to see if this was a Madison thing or not. It is.

Made me realize that, other than incumbent Sandy Kirkindall, I had no idea who was even running for mayor, and I have no idea what any of them really stand for. Oh, there’s Finley’s “A Fresh Approach”, and I’m sure that Kirkindall’s slogan will be “Proven Leadership” like any good incumbent. But it occurs to me that I maybe should get involved and blog about this, because it means something to us here in the L:35758.

Would this be interesting to any of the locals?

When you perform
It’s so intense
When the critics pan
I write in your defense

I understand I am just a fan
I’m just a fan

Wilco, “The Lonely 1“, Being There

Andrew wrote about going to see Sixpence None the Richer play on Sunday night in Nashville, and a good chunk of what he wrote resonated with me.

I’ve lived here for eleven years and I’ve had the real honor of working with just about everybody I listened to in high school who’s not dead or in U2, Pink Floyd or the Beatles. It’s shocking and amazing at first, but it wears off and you realize they’re just dudes like you, and the magic fades away a little bit.

Except for this band Sixpence. I don’t care. I just freaking love them. They’re one of my favorites. They always have been and they always will be. I’ve played a few things with Matt, mostly at Andy P’s Christmas shows, and Leigh sang on the first Normals record. But somehow, they never faded to me. I’m a fan. And I love it.

Despite it all, Caedmon’s Call is still that way for me. [Derek or Andy solo? Not so much. Both of those are very much old hat, to the point that if either asked me to sing BGVs or something during a show, I wouldn't be intimidated.] Every show is still pretty special for me, because the music takes me back to a far more formative period of my life. I connect to it in ways that really only I know about, because I’ve never talked about with anyone in the band. [Unlike, say, some of Andrew's stuff.]

Another thing I want to note here: I try to maintain a certain distance with Over the Rhine. I freaking love them, and while I guess there are chances for me to get to know them—and they’re certainly inviting of those opportunities—I really just want to remain a fan. Unlike most of the shows of bands I attend whenever they’re in my area, I go to those shows, make my recording, take my photos, and go the hell home. No waiting for two hours after the show to talk to the band [because we want to talk to each other, but I'm willing to wait out the other fans] or anything. I just watch the show, capture it, go home, and revel in the remembrance later. I like that.

I think I set the trend with OtR when, at the first show I attended, Rick and I sat right along the walkway from the green room to the stage. Didn’t talk to them then … probably won’t in the future.

If I believe NPR’s David Kestenbaum—and I generally do—then Barack Obama’s views on manned spaceflight have cost him my vote. I recommend listening to the entire story, but the blurb listed on NPR.org is very telling:

Advocates of NASA’s plan to return to the moon are concerned that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has said he will raid NASA’s budget to fund education. While the issue of space exploration hasn’t gotten much attention this campaign season, it is a topic on which the candidates do differ.

Raiding NASA’s budget to fund education is like sponsoring the US Olympic Team but then not sending them to Beijing this summer. Admittedly, I’m quite biased as someone who works in manned spaceflight, but space science is one of the few endeavors that mankind has left that is, on the whole, quite positive. Sure, there are negatives—one reason NASA will continue to get funding is fear over the Chinese space program, and the International Space Station largely has justified a jobs program to keep Russian rocket scientists from going to work for Iran, North Korea, and China—but that we’ve gotten the world’s nations to push together for this quite lofty goal is impressive. That we won’t let the Chinese be a part is sad, to be sure, but that’s something that talk-with-your-enemies Obama would support, right?

When I posted about voting in Alabama’s primaries last month, I was leaning Obama. Hillary’s desperate tactics in the face of Obamamania have pushed me further in his direction. But just as I did in 2004, I’ll vote with my job, even if that’s “fucking idiotic” to some. Admittedly, part of the reason that I like both Obama and McCain is that they don’t seem to fall into the “you’re stupid because you disagree with me” argument. I’m fairly convinced that either candidate would make a good President; I hope you’ll understand why I’m likely to make the choice to vote with my job.

[I mean, I guess that, now that I'm management, my skills are portable, but ... I do kinda like this shit. I mean, I did get one of NASA's highest honors last year. ]

[This post is a shameless attempt to keep GFMorris.net from having only Whiskerino photos. But I also wanted to spend more than 255 characters on each of these.]

Link the first: Bemidji State and WCHA announce scheduling agreement:

Bemidji State hopes to play an annual 12-game, non-conference schedule against members of the WCHA with an even split of home and road contests. However, no specific details regarding the scheduling agreement have been finalized at this time.

“The WCHA congratulates the City of Bemidji and Bemidji State University on their commitment to build a new ice hockey facility,” WCHA officials said in a statement released Friday. “[The WCHA] looks forward to helping showcase the sport at the highest level to the citizens of Bemidji, Minn.”

[Emphasis mine.]

That’s the key thing: BSU gets WCHA home games. They’ve had some, but not enough.

For those who don’t know: BSU’s current conference is that of my alma mater, Alabama-Huntsville. Our league has a team in northern Minnesota [BSU], north Alabama, Detroit, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. Ummmmm … we’re not exactly centrally located. The Detroit team folds at the end of the season, meaning that no team is within an afternoon’s drive of the other. [You could do Det-Pitt okay, or Det-Niagara if you went through Canada.] The WCHA, rather, has several teams in the state of Minnesota, plus North Dakota [a few hours from Bemidji], Wisconsin, Michigan Tech, two schools on the Front Range, and Alaska. Only the last three would be fly dates for Bemidji, whereas all four of our schools are for them.

Why not just accept them into the WCHA formally? Well, the WCHA doesn’t want to kill our league, College Hockey America, because it’s the only easy place for western schools to expand into. Of course, being a geographic hodgepodge has made it hard for teams to stick in the league because of the travel costs. That’s a function of western collegiate hockey, though; when “west” starts somewhere around Harrisburg, PA, yeah, you’ve got bigger geographic problems in the west.

I think the only way for the CHA to be a viable conference is for the WCHA and the CCHA to sign scheduling agreements with all our member schools. Bemidji has been a natural fit for WCHA schools because of proximity. If the two big western conferences are serious about western expansion, well, they’ve got to give us games with their teams in our barns to make us viable. Why does that make us viable? It’s not so much us as other teams that might come up—you’ll get a lot more push to go varsity at Penn State, or Illinois, or whoever if you know you can get Michigan or Wisconsin or Denver to come to your barn every so often.

Link the second: Merlin Mann’s feeling that .Mac is a future sleeping giant:

Think about it: a new lightweight laptop with a small hard drive; an iPhone that’s getting dangerously close to becoming a remote for your home and life; an Apple TV that doesn’t even require a computer; an iPod Touch that (rather mysteriously) now needs your credit card info and a login to get new apps onto the device. Then, fold in a couple big spoonfuls of the company’s clearly increasing interest in becoming the people who sell or rent you the entertainment media that goes on all the machines you bought from them. I dunno.

I suppose it’s my (still congealing) contention that right now, Apple deliberately keeps .Mac a dim-witted, sleeping giant. It’s so unsexy, broken, and behind-the-times right now as to seem like a product out of a less forward-thinking company.

But what happens when that giant wakes up, stretches, and then starts standing in the middle of every single product Apple (and its partners) have to sell? It’s so mind-boggling to consider the implications, especially given that it stands as one of the few persuasive explanations for why such a smart company would stay so quiet for so long about allowing a premium pay service go to seed this badly.

I think something is up. Big time.

I think it’s wishcasting, but that’s because I’m condition to think that .Mac is always going to disappoint us. It could totally rock, but it never seems to rock. [I think it just solidifies the fact that Apple is a hardware company first and foremost; running this service is out of its core competency.]

Link the third: Merlin on the Amazon Gift Organizer:

Now, the cool part of all this — even if you don’t use Amazon very much — is that Amazon.com is friggin huge. Which means that they (or their “Marketplace” partners) carry a ridiculously high percentage of the purchasable, shippable items available in the consumer universe. So, if you start using the Gift Organizer today — even for stuff you have no intention of buying from Amazon — your life is going to be much easier the next time a gift-giving occasion rolls around; you’ve capitalized on several months of passive, half-assed attention to actually do something useful.

Absofuckinlutely.

[And not just because he used the term "Amazon Prime dork", because ... hello. I am one.]

Andy Baio leaving Yahoo! deserves more than 255 characters.

First: it took me a while to get into it, but I freakin’ love Upcoming. If nothing else, it’s a way for me to point where I’m going to be. I began professing my love for Upcoming about a year ago, and Andy taking a personal interest in my issues really helped me come to love it more. I use it a lot, if for nothing else than tour data publishing for Andy Osenga, Caedmon’s Call, Derek Webb, and the rest of the Square Peg Alliance. In fact, were I in my own band, I would totally leverage Upcoming to announce all my tour dates. So, all that Andy did to build Upcoming … well, dude, thank you. You rock.

Second: as Andy notes, Waxy.org took a nosedive when he started Upcoming and it really gathered steam:

In case you haven’t noticed, Waxy.org went into cryogenic sleep shortly after we were acquired as all my energy went into building and growing Upcoming. I’ve missed writing and coding here badly, so I’m thrilled to make a second announcement:

Next year, I’m focusing exclusively on Waxy.org and related coding projects. What does that mean? Yes, more links, but also the same flavor of original research and investigative journalism I’ve done in the past, though on a daily basis instead of the quarterly (ack!) schedule I maintained this year.

I’m going to be taking some time off for the rest of the year to travel and get things in order (e.g. I’m long due for a redesign), so don’t expect things to really get moving until the first week of January. Stay tuned to the feed for details.

Let’s put it this way: there are few Weblogs I read where I stop everything I’m doing, shut down all my continuous partial attention devices, and focus on the writing. Rands in Repose is one; Waxy is another. Examplia gratis: Waxy on sex baiting on Craigslist.

So Andy: thanks. Rest up. Cheers. I owe you several beers on general principles.

Y’know, despite the fact that I throw a crapload of links at you most every day, I find that I’m probably not doing the best I can for you, dear reader. Last night, whilst talking with them about many other things in this really wide-ranging conversation that is typical of us, because they have learned to take my detours in stride, the Granades mentioned that they’re far more likely to look at links if, you know, I leave some context for them. Makes sense: if I’ve taken time to do more than leave a breadcrumb, it’s probably worth you doing. [And many times, all I'm doing is leaving a breadcrumb for myself, Internet. After all, 3500 of the 4750 or so links I've tagged as of this writing are me breadcrumbing my comments in other locations. 3500 comments is nothin' ... I run a forum where I've got 80,000+ posts over the last four-ish years. ]

So I’m gonna try to leave you better context more often. I’ll probably fail; I mean, I do crappy entries like 20 Oct’s pretty often. But hey, I write for an audience that is larger than myself and Mom [hi, Mom!], so I owe it to you to leave more context. And maybe I can guilt Alex into reviving the fine context that made Around the web a must-read, even if it’s slipped a bit lately. [I know, dude, I know. Huge glass house I have here.]

And if I don’t, you can totally give me crap about it. And I will take it, and I will eat my words. Lotsa practice.

My brother is a journalist. I wonder what he’ll think of this.
Fred Wilson argues, “No conflict, no interest.” I think that’s right. I think journalism had this ethos of the disinterested observer at a time when it was needed to gain credibility amongst the readership. But to be honest, unless the journalist is an excellent writer, the disinterested observer’s explication of the situation is often dreadfully boring.

Storytelling matters. Documentary is a great thing, but few are compelling enough to grab mass attention. It’s far more often the biopic that tantalizes and interests. And once you have people interested, they’re gonna be more likely to do their own study. [Some folks just won't; they either feel inadequate or disinclined. Their loss.]

Conversely, the writing of an interested observer can be worthwhile, but you must know the observer’s leanings to fully understand. If I write about manned spaceflight, well, y’all know that I work in it. I quite clearly have a vested interest in the continuance of it for fiscal reasons, but because I care about it—I could make more money on the outside, I assure you!—I also have a passion that, I hope, can be infectious about it.

[And yet I'm aware that I work for a conservative organization that may not react well to me openly blogging my every last opinion on manned spaceflight, which is one reason that I've been quiet about many things here. Just get me in a room and wind me up ... ]

So yes, interested observers with a dog in the fight do have plenty to say. They’re usually more interesting than your dispassionate observer—who rarely exists, anyway. Give me the bias…

Today’s Washington Post has an anecdotal story about the failure of No Child Left Behind to force any improvements at tiny Como Elementary in Como, Miss., a school that has been the state’s worst at a time when Mississippi is coming in last in standardized testing. [Dangit, what happened to "Thank God for Arkansas"?!] The story discusses all what you’d expect: those who can afford it have gone to the local private school, a common occurrence in Mississippi that’s created separate and unequal [although my experience with most of these private rural academies is that they're worse at teaching than the public schools]; the difficulty of bringing in teachers, leading to Como taking on faculty generally considered unqualified or incapable by other districts; and the general issues of getting lost in the system. Most days, I would have read this, shaken my head slowly, and said, “Yeah, NCLB didn’t make much inroads, and it’s made a lot of things worse.”

But as I was in the airport yesterday, I read “How to be top” in the 20 Oct 2007 issue of The Economist. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment studies what makes education actually tick:

Are students well prepared for future challenges? Can they analyse, reason and communicate effectively? Do they have the capacity to continue learning throughout life? The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) answers these questions and more, through its surveys of 15-year-olds in the principal industrialised countries. Every three years, it assesses how far students near the end of compulsory education have acquired some of the knowledge and skills essential for full participation in society. The results of the PISA 2006 survey will be released on 4 December 2007.

–OECD.org, 28 Oct 2007

There are many things that make other countries’ educational systems perform well, but how they do recruiting is, to me, one of the most important:

In Finland all new teachers must have a master’s degree. South Korea recruits primary-school teachers from the top 5% of graduates, Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30%.

They do this in a surprising way. You might think that schools should offer as much money as possible, seek to attract a large pool of applicants into teacher training and then pick the best. Not so, says McKinsey. If money were so important, then countries with the highest teacher salaries—Germany, Spain and Switzerland—would presumably be among the best. They aren’t. In practice, the top performers pay no more than average salaries.

Nor do they try to encourage a big pool of trainees and select the most successful. Almost the opposite. Singapore screens candidates with a fine mesh before teacher training and accepts only the number for which there are places. Once in, candidates are employed by the education ministry and more or less guaranteed a job. Finland also limits the supply of teacher-training places to demand. In both countries, teaching is a high-status profession (because it is fiercely competitive) and there are generous funds for each trainee teacher (because there are few of them).

South Korea shows how the two systems produce different results. Its primary-school teachers have to pass a four-year undergraduate degree from one of only a dozen universities. Getting in requires top grades; places are rationed to match vacancies. In contrast, secondary-school teachers can get a diploma from any one of 350 colleges, with laxer selection criteria. This has produced an enormous glut of newly qualified secondary-school teachers—11 for each job at last count. As a result, secondary-school teaching is the lower status job in South Korea; everyone wants to be a primary-school teacher. The lesson seems to be that teacher training needs to be hard to get into, not easy.

I have friends who are teachers or are studying to be them: Adam, Jeremy’s wife Hallie, Brian, and Kari’s husband Mike. All of them are smart folks who have chosen teaching over other careers where they could make more money or have more prestige. That said, I don’t think that any of them would feel that there was much competition for them to get into their educational coursework. At many universities, including my alma mater, the education department is the 90-pound weakling; as an engineering major, I arrogantly considered most of my liberal arts peers to be slacker punks, but I at least knew that the kids majoring in English or history or whatever were working their asses off. It never felt like the education majors were pushed all that hard, and it was widely known at UAH that education majors had the lowest average incoming ACT and SAT test scores.

And sure, we all know an Adam, a Hallie, a Brian, a Mike—a smart, dedicated student who chose education. But are those folks the norm? The statistics nationwide say that they aren’t. Why is education not considered a high-prestige major at UAH, where nursing is? I’ll argue along with the PISA folks and McKinsey: at UAH, nursing is a selective major. The upper division slots are limited—more folks are trying to get into them than spots exist. Do nurses make more money than teachers—certainly they do. But at UAH, nursing majors were respected because there was competition; conversely, education as a major seemed like a last resort, the degree you got if you weren’t smart or hard-working enough to stick in some other major. Sure, we all know the smart folks who choose to become educators, but they feel like the exception, rather than the rule.

Smart students today in America have a lot of educational and vocational possibilities. Medicine is still considered an ideal, despite the hours and workload, despite the time commitment of medical school, internship, and residency. Even in a time when our nation needs desparately needs more doctors, our nation’s medical schools refuse to lower their standards; instead, we import top talent from South Asia. The statistical evidence of other nations, as taken by PISA, would argue that we might see the same network effects if education suddenly became a difficult school to get into. Just as with highly-selective educational institutions themselves, smart kids seek the selective places not because they’re demonstrably better than anyplace else—most studies show that undergraduate education is generally good at most any nationally-recognized university—but the best of the best want to go to the toughest places not only because they are good, but because there is prestige merely in making it there. Education doesn’t have that cachet these days, and so I believe that smart students generally pass it by in favor of more prestigious, challenging, and lucrative prospects.

[And hey, I'm one of these people that argues that it's not all about the money. I could make a lot more money in middle management in fully private industry than I do working as a government contractor. But dadgummit, there just aren't that many people who get to put stuff into space, either.]

People have riffed on email addresses as unique identifiers for some time now. Heck, any good user database, in my mind, uses email addresses as the unique identifier, because they’ll nudge the user to keep the email address up-to-date. Rex Hammock’s “Twitter joins the email address as universal-identifier club” is just the latest to cross my radar screen, and he does so interestingly enough (for me, anyway, giving what I’m geeking out on these days):

Simply put, I can upload a list of my e-mail contacts to be bounced against their database of registered users and they will tell me who among my contacts are already users of their service. This feature allows me to jump-start the creation of my personal network of users of the service. Some services like Linkedin and Plaxo allow me to export my list of contacts maintained within their “walls” back into my contact list. In other words, they are — in effect — allowing me to brick-by-brick, tear down their walls: They are allowing me the opportunity to export my social network with me when I start using another service. That’s the type of win-win relationship all sites that are “social” in nature should offer their users…and, in the future, no doubt, some form of “persistent network identifier” will be an expected feature of all sites that want me to share with them who my contacts are.

I’m just an amateur networker, but I am one—just ask any of my friends. I look at my Address Book database on my Mac and go, “Just 658 entries? Is that all?” If I call a number twice at work—BOOM! it goes into the iPhone. [And it did that before with the Treo ... but now that I'm Jobsian, I can "BOOM!" Ahem.] One of these lazy Saturdays, I’ll sit down with my church’s pictorial directory and input every last scrap of data—and maybe even photos if I can get a scanner hooked up to my Mac. [Mental note: ask Misty for scanner advice.] But here’s where Rex really gets me:

I really like this “import” feature [Ed.: GMail contact list import into Twitter] as it provides a benefit to the user while adding to the growth potential of Twitter — we all benefit. However, there needs to be a corresponding “export” feature whereby I can export my Twitter contacts back in my direction.

Y’know, there used to be this beautiful app—a real one, mind you—that pulled data out of Facebook and dumped it into Address Book. I loved the idea, but because I was using a Treo at the time and was having Address Book horkups where the whole DB would wipe out, I never tried it … and then Facebook shut ‘em down. This one-way valve stuff? It sucks. You gotta let me in and out, man.

Data lock-in is just something that gets under my skin, whether it’s at work—oh, the stories I can’t tell you now but will after I retire or leave aerospace—or at home. I’m not quite Pilgrimarian about freedom, but I do nod my head at what he says.

I originally posted this just to del.icio.us, but the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. There’s apparently a movement to have high school students “major” in something as they progress towards college.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

I attended a magnet high school for science and mathematics. So did many of my friends: Jonathan, Rick, and Jess went to MSMS with me, Kat went to ASMS, and Brian went to NCSSM [which I didn't know until a few weeks ago]. I think that most of our friends very definitely could have gone to those schools if those opportunities had been available for them when they were ready for them. All of us lived away from home for two years in a magnet environment, but I bet that we’d all feel the same about this: specialization at that age is a bad, bad idea.

When I look at my curriculum, I made a bet going in that I would be an engineering major in college, so I was very, very heavy on physics and mathematics, taking every course offered by the school in both curricula. I discounted everything else that I could to focus as much as I could, forsaking AP courses in the humanities that I really wish that I’d taken because they would have interested and challenged me. [Some of my peers did take those courses, but they weren't able to take all the physics courses I did or able to do research at Mississippi State as I did.] At this point, you’re thinking, “What’s your point, Morris? You have an aerospace engineering degree and work in aerospace. You’re the prime candidate for this idea.”

Well, that ignores the fact that, for a period of time between 18 and 23, I felt like I’d been called into ordained ministry. [I now think that I was wrong, but man, the guilt messed me up for years.] I thought that all I’d done was very wrong for myself. I had a time of crisis, and I was ready to change. But because I had built up this massive momentum—insert your favorite fat joke here ;)—I was never able to break out of it. Granted, I am totally happy with things now, but what if I’d gotten into my field and hated it? All that work would be for naught, and at 22, I would have been starting over in school. Sure, that wouldn’t have fazed me much, but what about the very kinds of at-risk kids that the program in Jersey is trying to reach? Those kids don’t have the resources to change horses mid-stream.

High school kids are not equipped to choose a career as they enter those hallowed halls.

Why are we tempted to believe in conspiracy theories? New Scientist has a theory:

So what kind of thought processes contribute to belief in conspiracy theories? A study I carried out in 2002 explored a way of thinking sometimes called “major event - major cause” reasoning. Essentially, people often assume that an event with substantial, significant or wide-ranging consequences is likely to have been caused by something substantial, significant or wide-ranging.

I gave volunteers variations of a newspaper story describing an assassination attempt on a fictitious president. Those who were given the version where the president died were significantly more likely to attribute the event to a conspiracy than those who read the one where the president survived, even though all other aspects of the story were equivalent.

To appreciate why this form of reasoning is seductive, consider the alternative: major events having minor or mundane causes — for example, the assassination of a president by a single, possibly mentally unstable, gunman, or the death of a princess because of a drunk driver. This presents us with a rather chaotic and unpredictable relationship between cause and effect. Instability makes most of us uncomfortable; we prefer to imagine we live in a predictable, safe world, so in a strange way, some conspiracy theories offer us accounts of events that allow us to retain a sense of safety and predictability.

[Emphasis mine.]

Typically, I scoff at conspiracy theories. [For example, I usually want to go all Buzz Aldrin on moon landing fakers. Crap, I shouldn't have said that, because now I'm going to draw wacko comments.] But in preparing this post, I had to consider something: I’m one of the people that has bought into the argument made about baseball’s performance-enhancing drugs problem that there had to be an active ignorance on the part of the caretakers of the game to allow all that stuff to happen. I’m now second-guessing this stance.

[HT: Schneier on Security]

So the other night, I’m watching Bill Engvall’s 15° Off Cool. [Happy 50th birthday a few days early, fella.] In it, he mentions the AMC Gremlin. I realized that I knew nothing about it, so I fired up Wikipedia. I sorta vaguely knew about American Motor Company’s history, but I learned a lot more of it. And no, I’m not going to say that I followed the rabbit trail of George W. Romney, father of Mitt. No, I went through Georges Besse straight on through to him being assassinated by Action Directe.

Yep, from Bill Engvall to Maoist rebels in six leaps. Man, I love the Internet.