Janelle Brown interviews Katie Hafner about her book on The Well.

Over at Slate, Robert Wright reviews three currently fashionable arguments in favor of creationism (err … “intelligent design”) which attempt to refute good old Darwinian evolution. Needless to say, all of them boil down to faith in one way or another, and thus are more or less scientifically invalid. Unfortunately, they’re put forth by academics and have at least the sheen of science, and thus require some actual research to refute.

Here’s something I found interesting: Mark Twain voluntarily paid personal reparations for slavery back in 1885.

I’ve long wondered how Aaron Sorkin was able to come up with a concept as far fetched as a liberal President for his show The West Wing. It all makes sense now that Sorkin was arrested for possession of hallucinagenic mushrooms at Burbank Airport. Apparently he was on his way to Las Vegas for some sort of Hunter S. Thompson-esque vacation — I wonder if he had ether in his bags as well.

Twenty-twenty-twenty four hours to go
I wanna be sedated
Nothing to do
Nowhere to go
I wanna be sedated
Just get me to the airport
And put me on a plane
Hurry hurry hurry before I go insane
I can’t control my fingers
I can’t control my brain
Oh no oh ho
Just put me in a wheelchair
And get me to the show
Hurry hurry hurry before I go loco
I can’t control my fingers
I can’t control my toes
Oh no oh ho.

Damn.

Can we blame the death of Kozmo.com on lack of viability or bad management? I read somewhere over the weekend that Kozmo was actually profitable in some of its more established markets (I believe the three profitable markets were San Francisco, New York, and Boston). That indicates to me that the company failed because management squandered its opportunity, probably by expanding too quickly.

Today, Salon runs Andrew Leonard’s interview with Barbara Garson, the author of Money Makes the World Go Round. Garson put part of her advance in a bank account and the rest in a mutual fund, and then traced the path of the money around the globe. The point is to expose the huge set of interdependencies on which globalization is based in terms that a layman can easily understand. I’m a major sucker for systems theory, the more complex the system the better, so this book looks very fascinating to me. I’ve also been puzzled for quite some time about the inner workings of globalization, and also about why most hardcore leftists are against it. Is it a kneejerk reaction against capitalism and foreign investment, or is there a legitimate beef. I’m looking forward to reading the book in hopes that it will shed some light on the subject. I imagine the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

I’m back!

These days, I’m doing the first real GUI programming of my life using Java and Swing. All I can say is that I’m ready to get back to the world of Web application programming as quickly as possible, even though I think the experience is valuable. The most useful resource I’ve found so far (outside the good old JavaDoc) is Sun’s Swing tutorial.

It seems like professional sports franchises are always trying to get the cities where they’re located to pay for new stadiums. The most common tactic is to simply blackmail the citizens of the city by threatening to move elsewhere, but along with that there’s usually some study or another talking about how much better off the city will be financially with the new stadium. Well, as it turns out, those studies are a bunch of crap. Professional sports doesn’t a thing financially for the regular joes who eat the cost of new stadiums.