Likelihood of Success

Ron Coleman’s pretty good blog

The perfect Aryan

Posted by Ron Coleman on October 9, 2007

From Germany, with hate:

The tensions in the Middle East seem to have influenced the decision of Iranian-born German international soccer player Ashkan Dejagah’s decision not to travel with the national Under-21 squad for a match in Israel.Dejagah, who plays for Bundesliga club VfB Wolfsburg, asked his national team managers to withdraw him from Germany’s European Championship qualifier against Israel, to be played in Tel Aviv on Friday, citing “personal reasons.”

“He came to us citing personal reasons that seemed very plausible,” DFB spokesman Jens Grittner said in a statement.

Dejagah was quoted by mass-circulation tabloid daily Bild as saying his motive was cultural.

“I have more Iranian than German blood in my veins,” he said in a report published Tuesday. “That should be respected, and besides I’m doing this out of respect. My parents are Iranian.”

Ja, the blood thing — should definitely be “respected.” With prejudice.

Posted in Oppression, Orient | Leave a Comment »

Bad conservatives

Posted by Ron Coleman on October 8, 2007

But in a fun way!

Posted in Blogophilia | 4 Comments »

Blogophrenology

Posted by Ron Coleman on October 7, 2007

“Blogger” Cory Doctorow utilizes scare quotes — “scientists” and “predict” — to mock a proposed anti-terrorism strategy:

Computer and behavioral scientists at the University at Buffalo are developing automated systems that track faces, voices, bodies and other biometrics against scientifically tested behavioral indicators to provide a numerical score of the likelihood that an individual may be about to commit a terrorist act. “The goal is to identify the perpetrator in a security setting before he or she has the chance to carry out the attack,” said Venu Govindaraju, Ph.D., professor of computer science and engineering in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Govindaraju is co-principal investigator on the project with Mark G. Frank, Ph.D., associate professor of communication in the UB College of Arts and Sciences.

Doctorow “links” to this story, which treats the project very seriously, but he obviously “thinks” it’s a joke, comparing it to the discredited discipline of phrenology. He doesn’t explain why it’s like phrenology, but expects us to “get it” that because they are both based on the observation of physical characteristics which supposedly lead to a prediction of behavior, both must be equally lacking in validity.

This is called a “faulty analogy” or “sloppy journalism,” because, in fact, the story linked to suggests that this nascent science may in fact be very promising. Certainly no one is suggesting that anyone could be arrested or convicted on the basis of the observations, technology and algorithms that would be employed, but considering the cost of letting a person who is just a little better at hiding his intentions than Richard Ried get on a plane and hijack it to 70 Virgins Interplanetary Airport, it sounds like a good idea to try this technology.

Cory Doctorow, however, thinks it is a joke, and offensive to his libertarian instincts; and no explanation is necessary to explain why.

Perhaps the next time some airplane falls out of the sky because Cory Doctorow or the ACLU object to “profiling” and projects such as this are shouted down, Doctorow will “find” someone else to “blame.”

Posted in Futurama, Oppression | 37 Comments »

Kollege kapers

Posted by Ron Coleman on October 7, 2007

Not only at left-wing bastions such as Columbia and other Ivy League schools is the fox in charge of the hen house. Oral Roberts U. is in trouble, it appears.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Today it is the mandarins of big-money academia — regardless of politics — who live high off the fat of the land via inflated tuitions, unquenchable fundraising drives, Wall Street-fueled endowments, government grants and non-profit status. At Dartmouth, the entrenched bureaucracy is struggling with activist alumni that want to prevent the school from becoming responsive to any but its self-perpetuating institutional self. At Ave Maria, admittedly no Dartmouth — well, who knows what’s happening? This is all related to the political correctness and on-the-fly ethical situationalism displayed by Columbia’s recent provision of a platform for Iran’s fascist president, because ultimately it’s about a class — the heads of universities and the trustees they put in place to keep them there — that answers to no one.

Perhaps at some point Congress will recognize that there is little functional difference between these institutions and “for profit” corporations, and require regulation and disclosure in academia the way they do under the securities laws. In both cases, the people at the top make a lot of money and bear virtually no risk for where they take their institutions. The difference is that shareholders in corporations can sell their stakes any time if they don’t like corporate governance; alumni and students are stuck with their alma maters and sheepskins forever.

UPDATE:  Emerges a meme.

Posted in Americana, Gelt | 3 Comments »

Out of this world

Posted by Ron Coleman on October 3, 2007

I’ll be out of the electronic, workaday world again observing Sukkos and Simchas Torah for the next couple of days.

So what?

Now, I don’t say this because I consider myself such a big blogger that people will notice if I don’t post.  My mom, after all, knows it’s a holiday.  But sometimes someone comes here for the first time and is interested, in one way or another… then sees a couple of days with no posting… and perhaps thinks the project has been abandoned and that person never returns.

This would be a shame, no?

So come back!  I will.  I’ll be posting again over the weekend.

Posted in Faith and Works | 2 Comments »

New levels of losing

Posted by Ron Coleman on October 3, 2007

In sports, in politics, as in real life — there is nothing like the Mets.

Posted in Americana, Jocularity | 5 Comments »

Jimmy Carter does nothing

Posted by Ron Coleman on October 3, 2007

Moral equivocationist Jimmy Carter and his celebrity friends get humiliated by Sudanese thugs — and the headline? “Jimmy Carter faces down Sudanese officials.”

Well, he did yell at one who tried to stop him in Sudan, when he wanted to go somewhere that “wasn’t on the program.” Then he “compromised”… agreed to talk to the guy they wouldn’t let him see some other time, some other place… who, of course, at that time and that place, never showed.

That’s “facing down”? More like face down. More like our tough old friend, Give ’em Heck Jimmy.

Maybe he should go yell at the Jews about “apartheid” again. They’ll usually flinch a little.

Posted in Medialites, Oppression | 2 Comments »

Ballmer bombs on social networking

Posted by Ron Coleman on October 2, 2007

Robert Scoble on how Microsoft still just does not get it:

Remember how dozens of competitors tried to get into the eBay space? (and still are?)Why aren’t they succeeding? Because eBay is NOT about the technology. It’s about the community and unless you have something that’ll convince the buyers and sellers all to switch all at one moment you’ll never be able to take eBay’s market away. Translation: it’s too late and eBay has huge defensibility around its business because people won’t move away from it even if you demonstrate 5x better technology.

Same with Facebook. I’m not moving away from it. Why? I have 5,000 reasons why (and another 500 already who want to be included in my Facebook network). Unless you can convince them all to move I’m not moving. This is why LinkedIn isn’t going to disappear anytime soon, even though I like Facebook’s approach a lot better….

Mr Ballmer also noted that sites such as Geocities, an online community that was bought for $3 billion by Yahoo! in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, “had most of what Facebook has.”

Oh, boy. No way, no how.

First of all, I never joined Geocities. It never had utility for me. It was a place to build free Web sites. I found it had all the disadvantages to me that MySpace has and NONE of the advantages of Facebook. It was NOT a social network that exerted the kind of social pressure on me to join the way that Facebook did. I tried to ignore Facebook for years. Same with MySpace. But people I kept meeting kept begging me to join. Kevin Rose, when we had dinner, told me I was blowing it by not being on Facebook. That NEVER happened with Geocities.

Bingo, and ditto on LinkedIn, too. This article is good; read all of it!

Posted in Futurama, Nuvo-Techno | Leave a Comment »

What “life” can do

Posted by Ron Coleman on October 2, 2007

Assembla Blog discusses ” 4 Things Life Can Do that Engineers Can’t.”

1) Make something big by starting with something small and expanding each part
…
2) Grow all of the differentiated parts of an organism, starting from a single cell, using only local cell-to-cell signaling.

3) Make 100,000 proteins from 30,000 genes …

4) Make a brain with 100 billion neurons using 10,000 or so genes

An odd choice of things, isn’t it? I get a kick, though, out of the choice of words — what “life” (also called “the universe”) can do. Yeah, thank life.

Posted in Faith and Works, Nuvo-Techno | Leave a Comment »

Obama quits race

Posted by Ron Coleman on October 1, 2007

The New York Times reports:

Senator Barack Obama will propose on Tuesday setting a goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world, saying the United States should greatly reduce its stockpiles to lower the threat of nuclear terrorism, aides say.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Politics and Poker | 9 Comments »

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