Trailers on TCM rock.

Forgive me for calling this hope.

What the Republicans Could Learn from Hayek: "

I was talking to someone tonight about whether there is a unifying theme to the Republican setbacks of this winter and spring -- Social Security, the Bolton nomination, and DeLay, to name the three biggies. I don't want to make more than should be made of things that are very much in media res, but I think the answer is simple and predictable: A command-control system like the White House-led Republican congressional system can be absolutely formidable for a certain period of time. But when it breaks down, it breaks down completely. The collapse is sudden, and total. Signals get crossed, backs get stabbed, the suddenly leaderless pawns in the system start acting for themselves, with no system or structure to coordinate their individual impulses.

Is this happening? I don't know, but it's getting close. I thought I'd seen it before, but each time they've pulled it back together. This time, I think there's too much happening at once.

The irony of all this for conservatives is that if they actually read Hayek and got anything out of it other than 'government sucks,' they would know this. Hayek's libertarianism was very pragmatic. Centrally controlled systems are flawed above all because they have no mechanism to correct their own errors, unlike distributed, self-organized systems. The Democrats in the Clinton years always operated in chaos, no one followed the party line, and there was a cost to that, but in the chaos and improvisation they found ways to get out of the holes that they had dug for themselves. The Rove/DeLay/Frist system doesn't have any means for correcting its mistakes -- look at the blank, lost looks on the faces of Senators Lugar and Chafee yesterday when they just had no idea what to do with a nomination that had fallen apart and couldn't fulfill their promises.

The Republicans accomplished unimaginable feats through the centralization of power. Three tax cuts, a prescription drug plan that will make Americans hate government, an insane war. But if the goal was long-term power, it is a strategy they will come to regret, if not today, someday.

"

(Via The Decembrist.)

Also, Con Listings.

There's a new study linking low levels of Hydrogen sulfide (80ppm) to induced, completely reversible torpor in mice.

The mice enter a hibernation state, reducing their oxygen intake by 90%.

Absolutely amazing. If this scales up to humans, we could see a radical change in the way surgery is done, as well as long distance space flight. Imagine inducing hibernation in the case of a heart attack or stroke until you can get to a hospital.

The Adobe Macromedia acquisition, unorwellianized.

The BBC has put up a page in Bengali.

They've even included a font to be installed. I'm very impressed. They are actually using a Unicode font, instead of that Netscape era embedded font crap that is being used by papers like the Anandabazar Patrika, which doesn't work in Firefox, or at all on the mac.

Amy Ray in concert

At the Bowery Ballroom, last night.

Solid Rock.

Crappy pic.

Exactly what I was thinking.

Blog Hoax Goes Mainstream: "

Tonight's episode of CSI: Miami ('Killer Date') must have been filmed before the 'toothing is a hoax' story broke. The show's plot featured toothing, the now possibly-debunked cultural and sexual phenomenon toothing, wherein persons used Bluetooth-enabled cell phones to engage in random sexual encounters.

On the show, a CSI's badge went missing, and he had to explain to his co-workers and internal affairs that he was unable call the girl he was with the previous night (who might know something about the missing badge) because he met her through 'toothing.' 'Toothing?' another CSI responded (I'm paraphrasing here), 'you mean random anonymous sex?'

He knew her only by her screenname--'up4anything'--through which they try to track her using some ridiculous mis-representation of the real technology. Using a soldering iron and several small screwdrivers, and accompanied by some exciting techno-rock, a nerd in a lab coat attached a '2.4 gigahertz antenna' to his phone, 'increasing the range to one mile' and he engaged in some wardriving (or, er, toothdriving?) around the streets of Miami to find the girl again.

Amazingly, the show concluded without resorting to reference to the other obvious tidbit of current events involving mobile phones... although it did end with the toothing-CSI entering a shrink's office... I guess all that engaging in a fictitious activity finally got to him?

"

(Via bIPlog at boalt.org.)

Forgive me for reposting from boingboing, but this kept me amused for several minutes.

Apparently, men link more than women.

Here's the "science":

...To you and me, a link is just a link. To a guy, however, a link is something special, a part of himself. The most,um, important part of himself.

Bergen-Belsen was liberated 60 years ago this week.