Chris @ 25, Olbermann may or may not have integrity, and I may or may not agree with his positions, but his "lefty Limbaugh" presentation ("you can applaud now," etc.) hurts his credibility enough that what he says loses its punch. He can say anything as long as he makes an easy target of himself; unfortunately, he does it at the expense of making the same easy target of his positions.
It's a shame that he can only say what he believes if he says it in a way that makes people distrust him or dislike him.
Leah @ 13, re "no actual news network has decided to give half an hour or an hour to a cleverly-written, well-investigated daily news show that covers things internationally."
Fox news thought they tried. It was called The Half Hour News Hour. (http://www.foxnews.com/halfhournewshour/index.html)
It was not cleverly-written or well-investigated, nor did it cover things internationally (for whatever definition of "internationally" you want to apply to covering things... I like creme freche, myself), but Fox was certain they had the right-wing Daily Show-killer on their hands.
On another note, I had to get the meaning of "MSM" from context (mainstream media, perhaps?), but was at a loss to expand the acronym until I remembered Mechanically Separated Meat, a thing legitimized by, and I'm not making this up, a document wherein the USDA redefined meat. MSM is the result of forcing bones with a bit of meat left on through a sieve, which pretty much describes the network news process.
re: Jon Sobol @ #50
These days it's plastic figures and they come pre-painted or you can paint your own. The plastic is better for disassembling and recombining to make custom poses, put on your preferred weapons, etc., and they seem to have some preference not to sell children lumps of lead these days.
Yummy, yummy lead.
Which does mess up the old standby for CofC miniatures:
1) melt down a few lead minis
2) drop the liquid in cold water, like dropping cookie dough
3) paint
I have a wowquaintance who explains the general recipe for adding the Secret Ingredient to all cookie recipes:
1. Increase cooking temperature by 25%
2. Decrease cooking time by 50%
3. Serve with fork and steak knife
I asked if the secret ingredient was Love and she explained that no, it is Efficiency.
On Ed Yourdon, if you go back to his "state of the industry" from the Guerrilla Programmer days, they're pretty good. He clearly indicates the regional and industry-specific sources of his information and his biases are clear from the start. Anything where he was selling his consulting services (Y2K, etc.) is marketing material and should only be cited as such.
"The Caecilians of the World, A Taxonomic Review," by Edward Harrison Taylor, but if you're citing this you probably already know its limitations. Use it only for generailities (and never for taxonomy) if you need to talk about caecilians in a non-herpetological context. While we're on the subject, anything you got from the web site caecilians.org (mostly written by some loser named Seth Morris) is astoundingly suspect if it doesn't reference the researcher who sent in the information.
In software engineering, any computer science reference unless you're demonstrating the difference. Presumably the same in reverse.
Re: Christopher Alexander. ATWoB doesn't really try to be scholarly. It's a proposal for a way to think about construction, building architecture, and urban design in one framework.
(Same with Paolo Soleri, but he's even clearer about not writing reference works.)
I'd say anyone using "Design Patterns" without a reference to the pattern language they extend or create, but the ship has sadly sailed on that one. The main value of Alexander's approach was lost in the early days of adoption in the programming community.
Re: Illuminatus. It is a *great* game to open to a random page in a good library and start fact-checking. The Roberts were great at confounding your expectations as to what was based on (amusingly distorted) fact and what was invented.
Anything in the field of Neurolinguistic Programming that purports to reference history (as opposed to present new technique or models--and these are as suspect as any new techniques or models should be in any field!). The (chummy) NLP authors are chock full of stories, history, and references to "studies" that someone once made up as a joke and everyone bought it. See the murder trial, the 5-plus-or-minus-two number, and the (well-known outside of NLP as well) story about a (nonexistent) Yale study on writing down life goals.
I'll ignore Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code, etc. Anyone reading this site knows about those.
And, of course, anything citing Wikipedia directly. Shudder.
... well, maybe I shouldn't be taking my meds then.
And I don't understand in what way checking on Cho's possible use of antidepressants could qualify as "related to an individual investigation or proceeding involving the unlawful diversion or misuse of a schedule II, III, or IV substance" or by one of the other organizations in any function that is not investigative by nature.
Or can they only say "we looked at all his prescriptions in case some Dr had Rx'd PCP"?
Some more details for the curious who don't want to read the whole thing:
On the plus side (such as it is), the act allows (but does not require) states to exclude data on drugs administered directly by the prescriber and drugs administered in a dose for intended 48 hours or less.
The information required is the expected prescriber, prescription, and refill information as well as the name, address, and phone number of the "ultimate user" of the drug.
And doctors can search the database at will as well. Well, "a practitioner (or agent thereof)" can. And any other state can get the data if they have "interoperability." States are required to have interoperability with geographically adjacent states. Apply the transitive property as needed to see where this goes.
The act also authorizes (but does not require) the state to "to the extent permitted under State law, notify the appropriate authorities responsible for carrying out drug diversion investigations if the State determines that information in the database maintained by the State under subsection (e) indicates an unlawful diversion or abuse of a controlled substance." In other words, they can troll the db for things they want to report to the DEA.
Interestingly, veterinarians are included. I wonder how my cat's atenolol gets reported.
And this was a $15 million dollar expense last year and this year. It will be a $10 million dollar expense the next three years (unless amended).
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 4 |
| 2007 | 3 |
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