DanKohn.com

NYT on 3-D TV:

“The only people who want 3-D television all the time are the people trying to sell it,” he said. “3-D television is like caviar. You buy a little. But if you had to live on the stuff all the time, it would be awful.”

As head of Pixonics, I hope people don’t feel this way about HD.

The Independent of London reports: “A tourist gored by a bison in America’s Yellowstone National Park was facing criminal charges yesterday for harassment of protected wildlife. No action, however, was expected against the bison, which punctured the man’s thigh and tossed him several feet into the air when he approached to take a photograph.” Let this serve as a friendly reminder that Yellowstone is not Disneyland.

NYT reports that the Dow hit a 4 year low: “Since President Bush came to Wall Street to reassure the markets on July 9, the Dow is off 13.5 percent and the Nasdaq composite index is down 6.1 percent.”

Many commentators suggested that it was not feasible for our civilian judicial system to handle a man like Zacarias Moussaoui. Dahlia Lithwick reports in Slate on the hearing today:

“I don’t have outside legal assistance,” he sputters (apparently forgetting about the five stand-by lawyers she’s appointed). “I didn’t have a printer until today.” He calls his computer “aging” and says it would take him until the trial simply to load all the CD-ROMs the government has produced for his discovery requests. “This is a farce of justice!” he cries.

The man is either crazy or stupid (he tried to enter a plea of guilty, perhaps, as Lithwick speculates, because he though the judge wanted him to plead not guilty). But, he is no threat to the common law system that has been the right of citizens since Habeas Corpus was guaranteed in the fields of Runymede in 1215.

It is time to fix the travesty of not giving Padilla and Hamdi access to counsel. Finally, a Federal District Court judge today ordered the government to explain within a week how they could hold a man without charges.

Slate on the shopping complex that ate the World Trade Center memorial:

“What is [the site] going to say to a 2-year-old that is going to be 7 five years from now? What are we going to say — ‘Your Daddy died right where the Starbucks is?’ ”

To be fair, though, Daddy did die where the Starbucks is — metaphorically, if not literally. The WTC victims were killed in the middle of the city, in the middle of life, in the middle of carrying out mundane tasks like ordering lattes. Unlike most memorials, the one at Ground Zero will pay tribute to people who died right there on the spot. To entirely strip the place of offices, shops, and other hallmarks of urban life would risk abstracting the slaughter.

Here’s a slideshow of the 6 options. I like #5.

The NYT has a fascinating editorial page biography of Philip K. Dick: “This Generation Needs a Paranoid’s Paranoid”.

The NYT movie review for Tadpole, in which a teenager develops a complicated taste for (older) women, includes this clever turn of phrase to describe his feelings: “milky ardency”.

I finally have my “extreme wireless” home music setup working. In my bedroom, I have a Bang & Olufsen Beosound 9000. This is great for playing 6 CDs, but all of my music is now MP3s. So, I got the Rio Receiver, which pulls MP3s off of any Windows machine on the LAN and outputs them to a stereo system or directly to speakers. However, I have no Ethernet jack in my bedroom, so I hooked the Rio up to this wired to wireless Ethernet converter from Orinoco.

My laptop, a Toshiba Tecra 9000, also includes integrated Wi-Fi (i.e., 802.11b wireless Ethernet). So, the music is being served wirelessly from the laptop in MP3 format, sent through the bedroom wall to the Linksys wireless router in the livingroom, and then sent back through the same wall to the wireless card in the converter. From there it goes by Ethernet to the Rio Receiver, is converted to analog signals and sent via RCA stereo cables to the Beosound and its speakers.

Anyway, this was still not quite meeting my needs because it’s hard to read the screen of the Receiver from my bed on the other side of the room. Besides, when I’m using my computer, who wants to locate the remote to change the song or the volume? And so, I was lucky enough to locate these anonymous directions for patching the Rio Receiver (it runs Linux and pulls MP3s over the network using HTTP) so that it is controllable from a web browser. Specifically, the Rio Receiver’s IP address now hosts a web server, including a java applet, that shows an image of the Rio’s control panel. Thus, I now have complete control of my music from a web browser, and I can also use the remote if (amazingly) I’m reading a book instead of using the computer.

The Onion on efforts by the powerful penis enlargement lobby to oppose anti-spam legislation:

If this legislation passes, the government would, for all intents and purposes, be taking three to four inches off America’s cocks…. For millions of poorly hung American men, spam is a vital source of information about penis-enlargement options, and our elected officials have no right to take it away from them…. Sales of penis-enlargement treatments and devices in 2000 totaled in excess of $600 million. Cock-lengthening is, no pun intended, a consistent growth industry in the U.S., and this bill would severely emasculate it. As usual, it’s the little guy who suffers.

Brings new meaning to the term “swing vote”.

My friend Chris Hurley and I have been suggesting a new motto that politicians (of all parties) can end speeches with, echoing Cato the Elder’s “Delenda est Carthago” (Carthage must be destroyed).
It is “Delenda est terror patrocinata gubernatione” (Government-sponsored terror must be destroyed).

Walter Laquer facetiously suggests in a WSJ op-ed an alternative way of dealing with terrorists:

Some U.S. and many European media have become very coy lately about using the term “terrorism,” which they consider loaded and prejudicial, or “tendentious and propagandistic” (to quote the Chicago Tribune). Not that they’ve ever been shy about using the term “guerrilla.” There are books about “guerrilla theater” and “guerrilla marketing” and even, I am told, “guerrilla kindergarten.” The difference? A guerrilla is proud to be called a guerrilla but most terrorists resent the terrorist label. In order not to offend the terrorists there has been a frantic search for synonyms.

We can anticipate, no doubt, a plethora of new entries in Roget’s Thesaurus. “Activists” and “militants” are among the most favored terms, closely followed by “resistants,” “combatants,” “fighters,” “partisans” and others. “Gunman” has been very popular, even though sometimes the gunman does not use a gun but a bomb or a knife, and sometimes it has been a woman rather than a man. (Should “gunperson” be the new correct term?)

On the subject of lexical quibbling with terrorists, also see this Holocaust survivor quote.