{"id":1691,"date":"2008-04-28T13:13:21","date_gmt":"2008-04-28T18:13:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2008\/04\/28\/vacation-2\/"},"modified":"2008-04-28T13:13:21","modified_gmt":"2008-04-28T18:13:21","slug":"vacation-2-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/28\/vacation-2-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Vacation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m going to take a vacation from blogging for a little while.  Partly a mental-health break, partly a need to get other stuff done. But there are many things I would love to blog about!  So here is a list of recent stuff I&#8217;ve saved &#8212; you can fill in for yourself all the illuminating and entertaining words that would undoubtedly accompany a full-blown discussion.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/thepoorman.net\/2008\/04\/22\/global-warming-is-a-loser-and-i-will-kick-its-ass\/\">Algae<\/a>!  The Editors chide me for carelessly <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2008\/04\/10\/energy-doesnt-grow-on-trees\/\">conflating<\/a> ethanol and biofuels.  Fair enough.  If algae are a clean and efficient way to capture and store energy from the Sun, I&#8217;d be all for it.<\/li>\n<li>Meanwhile, we continue to heavily subsidize corn for ethanol, and as a result <a href=\"http:\/\/www.prospect.org\/csnc\/blogs\/ezraklein_archive?month=04&amp;year=2008&amp;base_name=how_biofuels_could_starve_the\">people are dying<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Don&#8217;t like your government?  Take to sea and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2008\/04\/seasteading.html\">create your own<\/a>!<\/li>\n<li>At some point I will say more about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.benrosen.com\/\">Ben Rosen&#8217;s great blog<\/a>, and especially Harold Rosen&#8217;s great entry for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.benrosen.com\/files\/87fe7b185f0be2a0fab10ff2a498a4f0-25.html#unique-entry-id-25\">Google Lunar X-Prize<\/a>, about which <a href=\"http:\/\/www.googlelunarxprize.org\/lunar\/teams\/scsg\">Deborah Castleman blogs here<\/a>.  Private ingenuity will be crucial to the future of human spaceflight, especially when <a href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/nm\/20080403\/sc_nm\/space_nasa_dc_1\">NASA can&#8217;t remember how to replicate its heat shields from the 1960&#8217;s<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>I was going to score some non-partisanship points by <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/islandofdoubt\/2008\/04\/et_tu_barack.php\">criticizing Barack Obama<\/a> for peddling nonsense about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.prospect.org\/csnc\/blogs\/ezraklein_archive?month=04&amp;year=2008&amp;base_name=obama_mccain_vaccines\">autism and vaccinations<\/a>, just as <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2008\/03\/03\/mccain-talks-nonsense-about-vaccinations\/\">John McCain does<\/a>.  (Hint:  <a href=\"http:\/\/gymno.blogspot.com\/2008\/04\/vaccination-schmaccination-despite-my.html\">there is no connection<\/a>!)  Then I noticed that <a href=\"http:\/\/autism2008.wordpress.com\/2008\/03\/14\/hillary-clinton-a-champ-responses\/\">Hillary Clinton<\/a> does the same thing, sadly. And, worse, <a href=\"http:\/\/inversesquare.wordpress.com\/2008\/04\/22\/really-stupid-ideas-take-two-hillary-clinton-edition\/\">Clinton has bought into John McCain&#8217;s panderiffic notion<\/a> of declaring a summer holiday on gas taxes &#8212; at least Obama has <a href=\"http:\/\/matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com\/archives\/2008\/04\/credit_where_due_3.php\">come out squarely against that<\/a>.  (Encouragement to burn more fossil fuels is probably not sound policy.)<\/li>\n<li>You might also be interested in <a href=\"http:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2008\/04\/22\/disability-and-democracy\/\">Michael Berube&#8217;s rundown<\/a> of the candidates stances on disability issues.  McCain&#8217;s, you&#8217;ll be unsurprised to hear, consists of exhortations along the lines of &#8220;Hey, disabled folks!  Suck it up!&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>John McCain <a href=\"http:\/\/www.weeklystandard.com\/weblogs\/TWSFP\/2008\/04\/mccain_clear_who_hamas_wants_t.asp\">doesn&#8217;t want you to forget<\/a> that Barack Obama is the preferred candidate of Hamas.  He&#8217;s also the preferred candidate of nearly everyone outside the U.S., but whatever.<\/li>\n<li>At The Corner, <a href=\"http:\/\/corner.nationalreview.com\/post\/?q=ZmY5NDJiNWUyMDA1ODFiNjE2ZTk3ODRlMmZmZDRmM2E=\">Michael Novak<\/a> continues Jonah Goldberg&#8217;s project of portraying Fascism as left-wing.  His evidence is that a friend of Albert Camus&#8217;s joined the Nazi Party because everything in the world had lost its meaning.  Novak seems to miss the fact that this anecdote proves the opposite of his point &#8212; Camus&#8217;s friend became a Nazi because the Nazis provided &#8220;a meaning in the destiny of our nation,&#8221; not because they denied the existence of objective meaning.  But keep trying! <\/li>\n<li>Gerard &#8216;t Hooft proposes a <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0804.0328\">locally finite model for gravity<\/a>.  A related discussion of whether the universe is continuous or discrete appears in an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fqxi.org\/community-articles\/download\/details\/High_Fidelity.pdf\">article from FQXi<\/a>, which is annoyingly only available in pdf.  I actually think the universe really is continuous, not discrete, for reasons that might become clear if I can just get this paper finished.<\/li>\n<li>Tomorrow, April 29, is <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Duke_ellington\">Duke Ellington<\/a>&#8216;s birthday.  He was the master.\n<p>And here is the orchestra, with Paul Gonsalves on tenor.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>Oops, almost forgot this one:  <em>Cosmo Girl!<\/em>  suggests you should <a href=\"http:\/\/jezebel.com\/384817\/cosmo-girl-choosing-a-religion-is-just-like-choosing-a-myspace-wallpaper\">design your own religion<\/a>, just like you design your favorite Starbucks coffee beverage.  (Simile theirs.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Be excellent to each other.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m going to take a vacation from blogging for a little while. Partly a mental-health break, partly a need to get other stuff done. But there are many things I would love to blog about! So here is a list of recent stuff I&#8217;ve saved &#8212; you can fill in for yourself all the illuminating [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1691\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}