DanKohn.com

Awesome NYT piece on the two Voyager craft:

In 1990, as its last act of planetary observation, Voyager 1 turned its camera on the receding scene of its triumphant journey and snapped a sequence of pictures of most of the Sun’s family. A mosaic of the pictures showed six of the nine planets in orbital array like diamonds laid out on black velvet. From 3.7 billion miles out, Earth was barely the size of a single pixel, or picture element.

Then both craft turned their attention forward, to the heliosphere and beyond. The Voyagers are expected to survive millions of years of interstellar travel, steadfast as ever. But silent, their computers and radios dead and the Sun receding into cosmic insignificance, the two spacecraft will have long since lost touch with their makers and the home they left behind in 1977.

The opposition leader on how Mugabe is destroying their country: “Zimbabwe is now a country where everything is in short supply except misery, starvation and death.”

Martin Indyk, Clinton’s ambassador to Israel, has an NYT op-ed with a scathing review of Bush’s Middle East policy, or lack thereof:

None of this would matter much if we were talking about policy toward Benin. But in the Middle East our vital interests in oil and Israel intersect with the war on terrorism. It is a region seething with anger toward the United States. Our credibility is essential to our effectiveness there. But the administration’s lack of coherence, and the widening gap between its rhetoric and its actions, are casting doubt on that credibility.

Of course, you already knew that Benin was bordered by Nigeria, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Togo.

William Saletan in Slate crystallizes why Clinton won (twice) and Gore lost:

Like Clinton, Gore said he would fight to help ordinary people. But Gore seemed more interested in fighting than helping. “I’ve taken on the powerful forces, and as president, I’ll stand up to them, and I’ll stand up for you,” he proclaimed. In the environmental war, he boasted, “I’ve never backed down, and I never will.” To Gore, conflict seemed noble. “The presidency is more than a popularity contest,” he said. “It’s a day-by-day fight for people. Sometimes you have to choose to do what’s difficult or unpopular. Sometimes you have to be willing… to pick the hard right over the easy wrong.”

This love of fighting was exactly what Clinton criticized in 1992. “The Republicans have campaigned against big government for a generation,” he observed. “They’ve run big government for a generation, and they haven’t changed a thing. They don’t want to fix government; they still want to campaign against it, and that’s all.” Besieged by Republican attacks on Arkansas, Clinton smiled and talked about lifting people up rather than tearing them down. The objective, as Clinton described it, wasn’t a victory of one group over another but a nation in which “no one is left behind.”

I love the us/them quote, which is remisniscent of Orson Scott Card’s ramen/varelse dichotomy, which as an evocation of the liberal arts concept of The Other, one of the central ideas of our civiliization and culture.

WSJ reports on the absurdity of publishers opposed to deep linking: “If they didn’t want to call it the World Wide Web, they’d call it the World Wide Straight Line,” says Mr. Adelman. “This is the Web, kids, get used to it.”

NYT’s Greece Hopes Arrests Earn It Europe’s Embrace on whether Greece is becoming a mature democracy. When was the last time you heard a beekeeper referred to as “clever and dangerous”?

From long, painful experience, I can tell you that if you’re getting a company logo made, you need to have the graphic artists send it to you in 3 formats: GIF, WMF, and EPS. Note that everything else can be converted from those (e.g., GIF->PNG, WMF->SVG, and EPS->PDF).

Many folks aren’t familiar with WMF, which stands for windows meta file. It’s a vector file format (unlike GIF and TIFF which are raster formats) and so prints out well at any resolution (curves are represented by mathematical equations rather than dots). It also does a nice screen preview (unlike EPS), and so is perfect for inserting into powerpoint and word docs.

Generally, you want to get the logo in both color and B&W versions. You might also want the original FreeHand source, in case you decide to ever do a derivative logo, but GIF, WMF, and EPS should meet all corporate needs.

Nerve magazine reviews the classic 1980 summer camp flick Little Darlings:

Her seduction is deliciously to the point: “What’s your name?” [Exhale] “Mine?” [Inhale] “Yeah, yours: I already know mine.” [Exhale] “What’s yours?” [Inhale] “Angel. Don’t let the name fool you.” [Exhale] “Randy. Don’t let the name fool you.” Turns out he’s staying just across the lake (not to mention the wrong side of the tracks).

Randy is played by Matt Dillon, who went on to even more absurdist sexual romp in Wild Things, which is available through NetFlix.

AO Scott in the NYT on M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie, Signs:

The lesson that “Signs” imparts — have faith! — is ubiquitous in the culture, from the pronouncements of certain politicians to television shows like “Touched by an Angel.” (This version might be called “Mauled by an Alien.”) The movie’s fuzzy pop-spiritualism carries a disturbing implication. Unless you have faith (in something tactfully left unspecified), it says, you are putting the integrity of your family and the very lives of your children at risk, and you no longer deserve to be called father — as if skepticism, or indeed any but the most literal-minded expression of belief, were a form of child abuse.

Of course, even as an atheist, I’ll be the first to admit that a world where “happens for a reason and that we are therefore not alone” makes for much better movies.