The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Blog

  • Information in Action: What is a parent?

    I was just watching a season 2 episode of Castle called “When the Bough Breaks” and it annoyed me, by going along with a societal convention that annoys me.  In it, a young Czech immigrant is murdered and, after a convoluted investigation, it’s revealed that a doctor had switched his baby for hers in the delivery room.  The doctor’s child had an untreatable always-fatal condition and he couldn’t face it, so he changed the babies.  Eventually, she figured it out, arranged to get access to his son (which was in reality the child she bore), swap the boy’s mouth for DNA, and get a lab to confirm the identity.  The doctor panicked and killed the woman before she could tell anyone.

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  • WordPress and the iPad

    So I wonder why my iPhone can run the WordPress app and see Mongrel Dogs but the iPad (running the same app) cannot see the posts (but it -can- see the comments). Odd.

  • Sometimes the worst thing is saying, “I’m sorry”.

    So, last Saturday (Sep 11), a paper in Maine ran a story about the local celebrations at the end of Ramadan the day before.  It was a pretty innocuous piece, a typical fluff article about local culture.

    Then the Internet happened.

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  • My summer reading

    Just to put it in one place, here’s what I’ve read and what I hope to read this summer.

    Already Read

    • Neverwhere by Niel Gaiman
    • The Engineer Trilogy by K. J. Parker
      • Devices and Desires
      • Evil for Evil
      • The Escapement
    • To Engineer is Human by Henry Petroski (2010 0708)
    • Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay (2010 0715)
    • Ghosts of Manhattan (2010 0720)
    • Metatropolis edited by John Scalzi (2010 0722)
    • Stardust by Neil Gaiman (2010 0724)
    • The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction by Max Page (2010 0726)
    • Tron by Brian Daley (2010 0731)
    • 1453 by Roger Crowley
    • The Unincorporated Man by Dani Kollin & Eytan Kollin
    • Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
    • The State of Jones: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy by Sally Jenkins & John Stauffer
    • The Affinity Bridge by George Mann

    On the agenda

    • The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner
    • The Book in the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegree

  • I like programmers with a sense of humor…

    dropbox is one of my favorite “cloud” utilities.  It keeps a directory synchronized across many computers, allowing remote access and automatic backup.  Whenever you set up dropbox on a new computer, all of the files need to be copied across.  As you might imagine, this can take some time.  Usually, dropbox pops up a little balloon telling you how many files are left and about how long it will take.  But if you are syncing a huge amount of data…

    … well, you get the message below.

    🙂

  • Nice metaphor

    Neil Irwin explains the current dilemma faced by the Fed by extending a metaphor promoted by guest host Christopher Hayes on Monday’s episode of The Rachel Maddow Show: The Fed is in charge of watering the fields but has exhausted its usual reservoir system.  Anything new will be risky and the Fed leaders tend to be conservative about risk.

    At this point, the economy is so anemic we should probably be considering nuclear-fueled desalinization plants (whatever their fiscal equivalent would be)…

  • Review: Billy Goat Tavern, Chicago

    Billy Goat Tavern
    430 N Michigan Ave., Chicago IL

    Billed on several sites as home of “Chicago’s best cheeseburger” and made famous by a skit on early Saturday Night Live (“cheezborger! cheezborger! cheezborger!”).

    As part of our very-intermittent plan of sampling “the best of…” in Chicago eateries, Annie and I decided to stop at the original Billy Goat’s Tavern on the way back from the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.

    What can I say?  Meh.  The burger wasn’t bad but it was far from the best I’d ever had.  Heck, it wasn’t even the best I’d ever had in Chicago.  (That goes to the Jona’s burger we had at Jacky’s on Prairie yesterday.)  The Billy Goat burger was, well, ordinary.  It was quick and it was priced right.  But I think that all the raves reflect more on nostalgia than quality.  If I happened to be out and about near the Tribune building, and I happened to be hungry, and someone happened to suggest Billy Goat’s Tavern, I would not be opposed.  But it’s not the sort of experience that makes me want to plan a return outing; it’s not the sort of burger that demands a second sampling.  The tavern has a real working-class ambiance and the place is decorated with more Chicago history than you can imagine…  but the burger?  Just OK.

  • Political snark of the day

    Regarding the fact that Fox News will now have a front-row seat at the White House briefing room:

    Fox News is a propaganda outlet, a detail everyone seems to know, but which is apparently impolite to say out loud. The network’s proponents will likely argue a front-row seat is warranted because Fox News has a lot of viewers. Perhaps. But Milli Vanilli sold a lot of records, and success didn’t make them legitimate recording artists.

    The quote comes from Steven Benen at Political Animal; the emphasis is mine.

  • Political snark of the day


    I stole the tagline from a commenter at Political Animal and the picture from a public domain image at Flickr, and put it together using the motivational poster generator at Big Huge Labs.

  • Quote of the Day

    Why did the stimulus go wrong?

    In the end, we took a soapbox racer to a go-kart track and then realized we were competing against actual cars.

    Great analogy — and better analysis — by Ezra Klein.