The Pats are comfortably handling Miami so I'm surfing the web for comics (following a conversation at lunch last week). For some reason I need to share this with the world [you can click on the post title to see the original over at xkcd.com]:
Happy holidays. No, really. I mean it.
I've spent the last couple of days playing the online mode of Medal of Honor Heroes 2. Nothing special (it really suffers from a lack of player communication--no voice plus grenades equals frustration. But the immersive wii interface makes the game fun. Now imagine if the good people at Nintendo paid more attention to Mr. Lee's newest hack (I posted Lee's motion sensor hack a few months back):
Today science loses one of its most significant public speakers. In an age in which science and technology becomes exponentially more complex, we need more people like Sagan who can connect university research to the general public. I just finished copyediting Dave Tietge's Rational Rhetoric for the Parlor Press, so I've got science and the public sphere on my brain (no link to the book yet).
Anywho, how about some baloney detection[boo flash navigation that doesn't allow direct links--you'll find the baloney detector, a nice primer on Aristotelian logical fallacies, under "ideas"].
Incredible.
I give a big thumbs up to Warner Bros. marketing department for not giving anything away in their commercials. I hadn't read the book, so it was fresh to me. This is the best movie I've seen in a theater in quite a long time; if you have two hours, steal away and see it.
As a baseball fan and a rhetorician, I feel compelled to write something on the Mitchell report. But since I'm in the midst of grading, and my baby's making that "you better be ready to pick me up" face, I'll keep this brief.
The media has consistently framed the Mitchell report as a sign of Bud Selig's complicity in the steroids era. Selig, thinking of his legacy, needs a public display that says "I cleaned up the steroids problem." He is worried, this argument goes, that he will be remembered as the commish who turned a blind eye. This very well might be true.
But I would argue that the obsessive media coverage of steroids and baseball is also significant. It represents the media's guilt over the summer of 1998. I was a cynical and sophomoric 22 that summer and remember looking at McGwire and Sosa and thinking one thing: "juice." I do not believe anyone educated enough to write for a newspaper or work for a television station could look at those players and not suspect that there was something non-natural going on. Especially people who have access to locker rooms. Especially people who could see the bottles of Andro. I know 1998 was way back before Google--but I'm pretty sure professional reporters could talk to doctors. The obsessive media coverage of performance enhancing substances is an implicit acknowledgment of culpability. They know they should have acted on what we all suspect. Their claims that "we didn't have subpoena power" is hollow and shameful. And they know it. So now the witches are contributing to the hunt.
I don't mean to come off as some superior know-it-all. I knew they were using drugs and didn't care. If a professional athlete is willing to risk health and future to smash a ball 400 feet, awesome. 500 feet? Even better. See-- I told you it was cynical and sophomoric. Only one thing makes me care about the issue now, pathetic as it is (and I mean that in the most rhetorical of senses): the children. A trickle-down economics goes something like this: if I want to make the majors, I got to make the minors, if I want to make the minors, I have to get the scholarship, if I want to get the scholarship, I have to start, if I want to start, I have to make the team, if I want to make the team, I have to play AAU, etc. At the end of the chain? Steroids. I have a 12 year old nephew who plays baseball, and he's already aware of teammates using performance enhancing drugs.
But I won't buy into the excessive hype over the history of baseball. I laugh when people ask "how do we compare Barry Bonds to Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth?" A better question would be: how do you compare Hank Aaron to Babe Ruth? Consider:
There's probably more changes that I just can't think of right now. My point is that there are so many changes in the history of baseball that we choose to ignore: steroids is just the line in the sand. I feel that history will view the steroids phenomenon as the first public foray into the ethics of cybernetic enhancement- the first time that science threatens to greatly impact the composition of a human being. It will not be the last.
MTV's Multiplayer site is pulblishing a series of interviews this week with women working in professional games. So far I've read the first two--X-Play's Morgan Webb (who at some point in my life went from being the beautiful woman talking about games to the really cool woman talking about games to the really cool person talking about games) and Jane Pinckard aka Game Girl Advance. Both women talk about how being a woman in games presents both "challenges and opportunities" in Pinckard's words. File this one away for the next time a freshman [male] insinuates that "we've solved that gender problem."
