How old are you? Older than 25? Well then you better face the facts: you're past your prime; each new day just brings you one day closer to death.

Take this post from boing boing on video arcades:

In this RPGNet forum, a youngster asks, "I was reading about arcades and how you'd have to queue to play popular games as well as follow rules like no throwing in fighting game or the others wouldn't let you play. This seems rather strange. The money cost must have gotten expensive pretty quickly as well. I'm not old enough to have been to them when they were around so I'm curious about what they were like."

In arcades, you queued up for popular or new games, usually. You set down a quarter or a button or something on the machine (quarters were the popular choice), and you watched, and when the next round came up (in fighting games, this was when someone lost, but in other games, it was when they ran out of quarters), you jumped in. This usually meant you were playing against someone else, so you got to know everyone who was a regular quick.

I know in our arcade, there was a little sticky on the Street Fighter machine, reading, "M.Bison is an automatic forfeit of next turn", which meant that, if someone chose Bison (who, in the older Street Fighters, was dangerous as hell in an experienced player's hands), they got to play one round with him, and, win or lose, they had to hand the controls over to the next player in line.

If I've learned anything from the many seminars I've attended over the years, its that pretty pictures are a huge asset. Take this map of the Iranian blogosphere. I don't know if it proves anything, but it sure looks cool. If I were a department head, it would make me more amenable to throwing some cash their way.

P.S. What's up with the massive interest in Persian poetry? Looks like all those friends of mine with Poetry MFAs have finally found their market. Now all they need to do is learn Persian...

Is this a flying sausage or flying balls. I can't decide...

P.S. Flying buttocks?

Nobody puts baby in a corner... Unless it's with a synthesizer!

So Blow really freaked me out yesterday. Apparently even though I voted for Obama, watched the Wire, and support affirmative action (in France), I'm probably still a racist!

See there's a study at Harvard that can tell you whether you're a secret racist using next generation super duper science techniques. But fret not, dear reader, not only did I pass, I demonstrated a "slight automatic preference for dark skin over light skin." According to the website only 9% of all white people are in this group, whereas a whopping 76% are racists. I guess those hundreds of hours spent on hotornot were not in vain...

Can I get a certificate for this because I think it would really help my white-liberal street cred. This seems like a far better liberal status-symbol than, a prius or a mod haircut. The idea of walking down Bedford avenue in Williamsburg and shaming 76% of all hipsters is golden.

Cease your protests, the deal is done! You are to make a fine wife for uncouth American businessman!

Somebody stole my slate attack idea, except they honed it into a fine dagger aimed at the heart of Mickey Kaus!

[What do you have against Kausfiles? -- ed.]

Okay, you sit down to read your Slate, and you're enjoying your Daniel Gross and Fred Kaplan and Dahlia Lithwick, right? And then there's Mickey fucking Kaus, bottom right hand corner, just waiting to suck. And it's the last thing you read, so it spoils everything you read before it.

[You could just not read it. -- ed.]

I hate it, yet I'm uncontrollably drawn to it.

Is it just me or is Bob Herbert's love affair with Obama starting to get a little creepy?

Before Herbert was boring because he would talk about social problems that still exist but no one cares about anymore. Now he's boring because he seems to have morphed into fluffer in chief. Fire the man damn it!

...Or keep him on if he starts to write about his dreams of Obama riding around on a white unicorn, and then the unicorn suggests that they stop at the beach and the unicorn asks if he can apply some tanning oil to Obama's back because he wouldn't want Obama to get burnt. No no no he wouldn't want that... And then the unicorn unzips itself and out comes... Bob Herbert. Oh God!

I feel nothing but jealousy with respect to this research team who have gained access to 60 terabytes of Everquest 2 data! With so much data, they will surely be able to reach the mythical land of Asymptopia, where the laws of large numbers actually apply.

Words can't explain how much I've been enjoying Danny Choo's guest blogging on Boing Boing. He's the guy who did the storm trooper earth wind and fire dance.

I just can't get enough of this clip that he found. Especially the guy coming out of the turnstile.

Aha. Here's the science behind the goodyear advertisement. Seems pretty ironclad to me, no?

Maybe sexism really is worse than racism. This ad doesn't even look like it's that old. Too late now... I already voted for Obama.

David Brooks is a guilty pleasure of mine. Why guilty you say? Because I get the impression that he doesn't really have an opinion on anything and simply writes whatever seems hip. Take, for example, his wild love/hate swings on Obama, or his defense wayback when of big government conservatism.

Still, given that he's often taken as the metric of moderate conservatism, neoclassics may have reason to be worried:

The nation had essentially bet its future on economic models with primitive views of human behavior. The government had tried to change social psychology using the equivalent of leeches and bleeding. Rather than blame themselves, Americans directed their anger toward policy makers and experts who based estimates of human psychology on mathematical equations.

When Democrats open their mouths, they try to say something interesting. If the true thing is obvious and boring, the liberal person will go off and say something original, even if it is completely idiotic. This is how deconstructionism got started.

I always heard that Fidel Castro loved to give four hour long speeches, but I never really stopped to think what he actually talked about. Is this what it's like? It's worse than the Film Noir professor I had in college whose lectures were a hopeless mash of: recollections about his battle with alcoholism ("alcoholics like to think they can get better just by switching from hard liquor to beer, but believe me it doesn't work") , speculations on the sexuality of actors in the 1940s, and panegyrics to his dog (who was admittedly very cute).

Here are some of Castro's thoughts on Rham Emanuel's name:

What a strange surname! It appears Spanish, easy to pronounce, but it’s not. Never in my life have I heard or read about any student or compatriot with that name, among tens of thousands.

Where does it come from? I wondered. Over and over, the name came to mind of the brilliant German thinker, Immanuel Kant, who together with Aristotle and Plato, formed a trio of philosophers that have most influenced human thinking. Doubtless he was not very far, as I discovered later, from the philosophy of the man closest to the current president of the United States, Barack Obama.

Another recent possibility led me to reflect on the strange surname, the book of Germán Sánchez, the Cuban ambassador in Bolivarian Venezuela: The transparence of Enmanuel, this time without the “I” with which the German philosopher’s name begins.

Enmanuel is the name of the child conceived and born in the dense guerrilla jungle, where his extremely honorable mother, Colombian vice presidential candidate Clara Rojas González, was taken prisoner on February 23, 2002, together with Ingrid Betancourt, who was a presidential candidate in that sister country’s elections that year...

Is this clip racist or has it gone so far overboard that it's broken through the space-racist continuum and is now lost somewhere in the uncanny valley.

I have my first irate comment. This is a good start, the sparing use of caps is a nice touch, as is the confusing grammar (what does "their" refer to in the second paragraph?). However, it would be nice if there was a bit more swearing and such. Could I suggest this as a template?

Anyway, onto the comment:

You're all over the place, Gimpei! You just repeated all the points i was making with my comment, and then claiming them as your own, at length.

The fact that your vaunted lab experiments FALSIFY their assumptions suggests they are FALSIFIABLE, no? So just say that their assumptions have been shown to be wrong. Otherwise you're like the Derridean who uses ersatz logical reasoning to proudly prove that there can be no such thing as logical reasoning.

Five responses to a single post, it's a Gimpei record! I have challenged you reader. Do you feel your mind expanding? It's because I'm blowing it! Hmm... that didn't come across right. Anyway, the debate seems to have progressed. Take the latest response:

We can predict the economy with much better precision than we can the weather: ie. I can tell you roughly what the economy in China will look in 6 months far more accurately than I could the weather -- even taking into account seasonal variations! So there goes meteorology.

Romoney raised an interesting point in response to the previous post:

But aren't economic theories at least theoretically falsifiable? The problem is that they are so very hard to falsify.

I've been meaning to read more econ blogs, because they are so insightful, especially about other disciplines. Take this post on Marginal Revolution:

The author is Kristin Luker and the subtitle is Research in an Age of Info-Glut. I enjoyed this book very much and I thought it was one of the best books on the philosophy of the social sciences I have read, ever. In part it is good because it ignores philosophy of science (and Continental philosophy gobbledy-gook) and focuses on the anthropology of how research is actually done. Here is the author's summary of her message

As part of my research, I've been delving into some papers from other disciplines. Now I am a big fan of interdisciplinarity; I'm delighted by the move in economics to borrow from other disciplines like psychology, sociology, and history and hope that it accelerates. But... Man is there a lot of crap in other disciplines. I guess I shouldn't be surprised given the amount of crap churned out by economists, but still.

Take this anthro paper on the internet in Malaysia. First off, the writing is terrible:

Having visited putatively exemplary innovative spaces such as Silicon Valley, Cyberjaya planners were clearly convinced of the importance of creating an environment of interactive conduct.

If Southern California was the exemplary intelligent space on account of its ‘technical virtuosity and economic dynamism’ (Winner, 1992, p. 32), then its inhabitants--what Nigel Thrift has termed Homo Silicon Valleycus (Thrift, 2000, p. 688)--were imaginatively positioned at a global evolutionary apex in the minds of MSC planners.

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to 'normalize' formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

Wowa! What do we have here? Obama naked, getting a sensual rubdown from a unicorn. I think what makes this painting classy is the painstaking detail on the unicorn's buttocks. Makes me think of the horses that Whitman rides through Leaves of Grass:

A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,
Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,
Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,
Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.

His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him,
His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and return.

I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion,
Why do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them?
Even as I stand or sit passing faster than you.

As part of my ongoing obsession with Slate (actually I'm not so much obsessed as too lazy to hunt out my own set of blogs and tie them into google reader), I point you, dear reader, to the following post by Timothy Noah.

So as to spare you the bother of the click-through, let me summarize: summer internships are now being sold for as much as 2,500 a pop! What a scandle! In fact there's even a web site where any old schmoe can purchase these internships.

From my experiences in the media sector, I can confidently say that this new development has probably increased equality. Whereas in the past, cushy internships were limited to the immensely wealthy and well-connected, now the wealthy, or even the upper middle class can get their foot in the door.

I know what you're thinking: you're being too cynical Gimpei, the MSM must rigorously screen their interns. They wouldn't, for example, give an internship to the daughter of the editor-in-chief's psychoanalyst, to a well-respected foreign academic's son who wants to improve his english, or to the children of fellow journalists. Actually, they do and almost exclusively.

Here's the thing:

1) Editors are lazy. What other business has half-days on fridays during the summer so that the staff can go off to their country homes?

2) The work that interns perform requires absolutely no ability. None. They could easily be replaced by monkeys.

3) From the editors perspective then: why bother going through an intensive interviewing process when you can just ask a friend if their kid needs some work sending faxes and making copies?

The problem is that although internships are a poor signal of ability, they are the only way of getting your foot in the door. In my opinion, if some middle class kid likes music enough to get his parents to drop 2,500, more power to him. Worst case he'll just be taking the place of one of Peter Travers' kids, which can only be a good thing.

With a little bit of snow, London can actually be beautiful in a spooky sort of way.