Stuart Newman is a graceful man, about 6'1" with the hands of a microsurgeon – which he is. He is dressed in casual European elegance with sleeves turned up. I try not to be, but am affected by his sincerity and focus. There is an exotic twist to his hair, which in earlier photos makes him look North African.

LOL Counterpunch.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 12:26 AM on September 2, 2008

Having now read through a few chapters of the Mazur's ebook, I have to say that there may be an interesting story in here about research suggesting an increased role for epigenetics in evolution, but it's completely obscured by Mazur's paranoiac writing. The whole thing ridiculously unobjective, and it seems like she doesn't really understand the science, and is primarily enthusiastic about this topic because she believe that evolution by natural selection has served as a political... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 1:32 AM on September 2, 2008

Stephenson's political views are an interesting mystery; he's pragmatically cagey in all interviews. No one that smart falls cleanly into either major party, of course, but my best guess is that he's libertarian leaning, based on the fact that they're the single political subgroup I've seen him mention positively (in this piece about the film 300) and the fact that he did an interview with Reason magazine when The Confusion was released. Along with his... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 12:23 AM on September 2, 2008

Why did the conductor keep telling the engineer to "stick with her"? Did he want the engineer to try to warn people ahead, as he did, or did he somehow expect the engineer to find a way to slow the train?
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 2:10 AM on August 24, 2008

It must be frustrating to be able to dissect the fossilized cowardice of the MetaFilter patriarchy so effortlessly, while the moderators aren't even perceptive enough to recognize the scope of the threat you pose to their thinly-rationalized dictatorship of mediocrity.

RON PAUL 2008!!!!
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 10:00 PM on August 21, 2008

For the record, making a weak post while intentionally being an asshole about it is, in fact, not endearing.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 9:19 PM on August 21, 2008

A post about a pro-Obama site like this was deleted several months ago, and this strikes me as even less meritorious.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 2:53 PM on August 9, 2008

Bloggers seem to be willing to criticize Edwards for putting the Democratic party at risk by running for the nomination, but it seems to me that that criticism can be leveled just as easily at his wife. She knew about the affair when he decided to run too, and she was as willing to put the party, the cause of universal health care, etc. at risk for the sake of his ambition as he was.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 3:59 PM on August 8, 2008

There have been requests for a BookFilter subsite before. If you guys want to try to start a MeFi book club, just let me know what the first selection is and I promise to participate in the first round.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gsteff at 12:13 AM on August 5, 2008

That served mainly to remind me of how much I like Danny Elfman's original Batman soundtrack.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 6:26 PM on July 18, 2008

I think gamers should feel lucky that they patronize the only mass entertainment medium that is able to charge $60 per product. That may sound like a bug, not a feature, but the book, film and TV (excluding HBO) industries all face much more pressure to market to the lowest common denominator, because their audiences don't value their products enough to pay that much for them (in the case of TV, audiences largely don't value it enough to pay at all). In my opinion, there's a much stronger... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 6:57 PM on July 16, 2008

Also: Nintendo has a long history of optional peripherals for their console, and every single one has failed, starting with the Power Glove. I'm guessing this one will too.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 7:00 PM on July 16, 2008

The secrecy described in smackfu's link is interesting, but I don't really understand why bank runs are even technically possible now. Shouldn't any U.S. bank be able to get a much cash as it needs from the Fed? Or is the fear that even though the bank wouldn't actually run out of money, people would still move their assets to other institutions if they were frightened by news of the takeover, making the new institution unviable?
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 4:50 PM on July 11, 2008

I wish I hadn't watched that.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 8:26 PM on June 24, 2008

My preferred solution would be to generously pay off as many of the members of Mugabe's inner circle as possible accept voluntary exile immediately- I'd think that several African countries would be willing to accept them if it might help resolve the current conflict- and then offer Mugabe a similar deal if he agrees to hold a real election with UN observers in a year, and not stand for reelection himself at that point. Any deal would have to, publically, be brokered by someone other than the U.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 10:53 AM on June 23, 2008

er, people who could derail it.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 11:19 AM on June 23, 2008

Why would Mugabe's cronies accept payoffs?

To avoid prosecution. Africa has a long history of retirement deals like this.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 1:08 PM on June 23, 2008

I loved the fact that on the night of the IN/NC primaries, the network momentarily eschewed fancy graphics in favor of Tim Russert explaining the math with a marker and whiteboard.

That's been his schtick for ever since election night in 2000. It was creative the first time, when perhaps he suddenly realized he needed to be able to diagram stuff live, but came off as pointless, artificial folksiness since.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 1:03 PM on June 13, 2008

Interestingly, several posters in this thread may be skirting dangerously close to endorsing Tony Blair's vision of liberal interventionism.

I've started working on MeFi posts about the situation in Zimbabwe several times over the past three months (how the opposition is using the internet, the exploitation of refugee laborers by South African farmers, an in-depth exploration of that Chinese arms ship, the An Yue Jiang), but never posted. But the most interesting thread... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 2:47 PM on June 6, 2008

For the record, the election date I gave above is totally wrong. Its June 31.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 7:29 AM on June 12, 2008

Oh man.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 7:19 PM on June 12, 2008

I wonder if that plea deal includes an agreement to not prosecute Reiser for perjury.

IANAL, but, um, 5th amendment???
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 12:04 PM on June 9, 2008

How to administer Oracle databases, the fuckers.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gsteff at 6:51 PM on June 8, 2008

I love DaShiv too. It's ruined my chances of parole, but nobody blocks my sun during exercise hour, fuck the warden's rules.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 9:49 PM on June 7, 2008

That took long enough.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 8:34 PM on June 3, 2008

I, too, suspect that there's something fishy about this.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 10:17 PM on May 27, 2008

I'm only coming if our hostess is a pirate again.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 8:00 PM on April 14, 2008

Does 7:00pm work?
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 4:30 PM on May 22, 2008

Relatedly, it's important to note that this is just the Vatican astronomer responding to an interviewer's questions. This person has no authority whatsoever to speak for the RCC.

Not in a doctrinal sense, but the Vatican astronomer has long been treated as the pope's main scientific advisor, and in an organization that swims in nuance as deeply as the Vatican, statements like this aren't made casually. Especially considering that Funes got the job... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 6:38 AM on May 14, 2008

Mugabe's criticisms of sanctions are incoherent. The U.S. sanctions are basically personal financial and travel restrictions against a small number of specific government higher ups and the businesses they directly control. I'm not sure about the details of the EU sanctions. They have nothing to do with Zimbabwe's economic problems, and are simply a convenient bogeyman that Mugabe uses to mislead his own people (and maybe a few Americans).... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 8:02 AM on May 8, 2008

This is a fantastic post (which is to say, it's also a fantastic article by Kevin Phillips). The "hedonic adjustment" described in the CPI is particularly insane. During the 1990s, in the midst of massive productivity gains that were being attributed to IT, the BLS would try to adjust for the continually increasing performance of computer processors by trying to calculate what a computer of similar technical specifications would have cost a few years ago. That essentially means that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 7:44 PM on May 3, 2008

I feel bad for Yahoo. They've got some great engineers doing some great work- their YUI javascript library is seriously high quality (and has led the field of Javascript toolkits in several areas), their engineers have been at the forefront of performance research, and they've been much more heavily involved than Google in advocating for the advance of web standards (even though I don't agree with the incrementalism they advocate for HTML 5 and Ecmascript 4). Flickr and del.icio.us are both... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 6:55 PM on May 3, 2008

This should do it!
posted to Ask Metafilter by gsteff at 3:03 PM on April 30, 2008 marked best answer

FYI, the preserve-space accomplishes nothing... xsl:text was easier.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gsteff at 3:04 PM on April 30, 2008

The real bottom line here is Matt's commitment to minimal moderation. Encourage a committed and intelligent community and allow them to moderate themselves.

The mods do a great job, but compared to any other large community out there, the moderation is not "minimal." MeFi is distinguished by an unusually large amount of moderation.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 6:51 PM on April 28, 2008

Yeah, I'm not seeing it on Firefox 3 beta 5/Linux.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gsteff at 2:58 PM on April 23, 2008

Zimbabwe's state-run paper, The Herald, is now sending mixed signals. Yesterday they published an Op-Ed suggesting a "transitional government of national unity" headed by Mugabe. Unfortunately, the same piece also suggested that no fair runoff election is possible (because western sanctions put the ruling party at an unfair disadvantage).
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 8:53 PM on April 22, 2008

I swear to god, if the CIA were disbanded tomorrow, our nation would be 80% safer. What a bunch of fucking clowns. I'm tempted to think the CIA itself might be a massive KGB operation to bring down the American government.

I've read that intelligence agents like to joke that the CIA, NSA et al. are actually just supposed to provide cover for the real U.S. intelligence community.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 1:30 PM on April 22, 2008

The graphic currently on the NYT front page makes it clear how important a prominent forehead is to being credibly manly.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 7:26 PM on April 19, 2008

Becker's argument strikes me a textbook example of the libertarian tendency to ignore all the data contradicting their position, on the assumption that no one has implemented real libertarianism yet. His first objection- that preventing people from screwing up prevents them from learning- is basically tautology. If the evidence shows that people are making good decisions on their own, libertarianism is working, and if it shows them screwing up, you should give them less... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 5:40 PM on April 14, 2008

It sounds like this might be relevant to any kind of research in which people are asked the same question more than once, and inconsistent answers are thrown out- a standard technique in opinion polling, I believe.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 7:04 PM on April 8, 2008

How do they still not have coverage for DC?
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 11:54 AM on April 8, 2008

One of the biggest reasons that more and more intelligence work is being contracted is that Congress has put hard limits on the number of people the various intelligence agencies can employ. In addition, as with most of the executive branch, intelligence agency salaries are governed by the federal government's General Schedule. When many of the skills the agencies seek, such as foreign languages, or, you know, experience with intelligence, are very rare, its basically inevitable that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 5:00 PM on April 3, 2008

If you asked this in 6 months, I would likely suggest Adobe AIR with ExtJS. But AIR is still in alpha for Linux.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gsteff at 8:10 PM on March 31, 2008

I was actually in Hanoi last week on vacation and stopped by the "Hanoi Hilton" where McCain, and all the other US pilots spent their days.

In David Foster Wallace's essay "Up, Simba", about McCain's 2000 campaign, he says that there's a statue of McCain by the lake where he was shot down with the inscription "John McCan: famous air pirate" [sic], but I've seen no confirmation of this on the internet or elsewhere. Has... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 8:11 AM on March 31, 2008

The destruction of the earth via a runaway artificial black hole also figures prominently in Dan Simmons's Hyperion books. I know very little about modern physics, but as near as I can tell from the NYT article and Slashdot, the concern is that while the scientists expect the tiny black holes to evaporate due to Hawking radiation, that has never actually been observed. In addition, there's a concern the machine could generate millions of black holes, and they would... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 9:24 AM on March 29, 2008

Peedro indeed did a fantastic job. Finally, something for the show-offs in NYC to feel jealous about.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 9:01 PM on March 28, 2008

So did peeedro.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 9:07 PM on March 28, 2008

Truly an awful situation. I have no idea what to hope for on Saturday- if Mugabe wins, ZANU will strengthen its position even further, and Mugabe's eventual successor will be equally corrupt. In the unlikely event that he loses, there will probably be civil war, and the refugee crisis will put Iraq to shame. On the other hand, perhaps once the election is over, his forces won't have to deny food to opposition party members.
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 8:04 PM on March 27, 2008

There is no "if".

True.

Also, though I don't watch either, I just emailed CNN and the BBC to thank them for violating Zimbabwe's government's ban on foreign media coverage of the election (at least, the government is accusing them of violating it and broadcasting from secret locations).
posted to MetaFilter by gsteff at 8:14 PM on March 27, 2008