The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

“War and the military are, without question, among the very worst of the earth’s afflictions,” an American conservative of distinction once wrote, “responsible for the majority of the torments, oppressions, tyrannies, and suffocations of thought the West has for long been exposed to. In military or war society anything resembling true freedom of thought, true individual initiative in the intellectual and cultural and economic areas, is made impossible—not only cut off when they threaten to appear but, worse, extinguished more or less at root. Between military and civil values there is, and always has been, relentless opposition. Nothing has proved more destructive of kinship, religion, and local patriotisms than has war and the accompanying military mind.”

That was Robert Nisbet in 1975. In The Conservative Intellectual Movement Since 1945, George Nash identified Nisbet, along with Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, as one of the three most noteworthy of those intellectuals he identified as traditional conservatives

Twilight of Conservatism

Banned and censored album covers

"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you" --Leon Trotsky

Pentagon investigations in to prisoner deaths are "grossly inadequate and flawed", according to Human Rights First (HRF), "a 25-year-old lawyers' group":

"...criminal investigators have routinely failed to interview key witnesses or collect and maintain usable evidence, such as body parts or basic ballistics evidence, for possible prosecution"

"In addition, commanders have often either repeated failed to even to report deaths of detainees in the custody of their command, or delayed reporting them for days or even weeks after they occurred, greatly complicating efforts to collect relevant evidence. In one case, a death of an Iraqi detainee was not reported until a year later, and the case was closed without any determination of the cause of death"

Let Those Dopers Be (Thanks to Mike!)

Myth: Hitler was a leftist.

Fact: Nearly all of Hitler's beliefs placed him on the far right.

Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All

The residents of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, nicknamed soldiers at the nearby base "the Murderous Maniacs," New York-based Human Rights Watch said. "The soldiers considered this name a badge of honor."

Soldiers in the Army's elite 82nd Airborne Division vented their frustration by systematically torturing Iraqi detainees from 2003 into 2004, hitting them with baseball bats and dousing them with chemicals (according to HRW)...

The Ten Worst Jobs in America
The Ten Stupidest Utopias

"But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

--Barbara Bush on Good Morning America March 18, 2003

'Satanist' dances on Reagan's grave

None Dare Call It Stolen

Leaked email from US military prosecutors desribes Guantanamo tribunals as "rigged" and "a fraud on the American people"

"The White House on Thursday threatened to veto a massive Senate bill for $442 billion in next year's defense programs if it moves to regulate the Pentagon's treatment of detainees or sets up a commission to investigate operations at Guantanamo Bay prison and elsewhere..."

PATRIOT act being used to go after "common criminals" instead of against terrorists, as it was supposedly created to do. Story here

"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." --James Madison

Ever had two sound files which were identical, except for the quality they were encoded at, and wanted to find out if one really sounded better than the other?

Of course, if there's a great difference in quality then just playing one after the other will be enough to tell. However, it's more difficult to tell if the files are close to each other in quality.

That's where my little s0ngfr0g program comes in. It will play short, random segments from each file and let you vote on the quality of each segment. The file that has the most votes overall is considered to be the better sounding file.

The hope is that listening to short, identical segments from each file, back-to-back, will give you a good idea of their relative quality. Also, the file that's being played will be hidden from you until all the voting is over, so that knowing which file the sample came from won't bias your decisions.

The name s0ngfr0g comes from the program jumping around to different parts of the songs it plays.

This program requires:

perl (tested on v5.8.5)
xmms (tested on 1.2.10)
xmmsctrl (tested on 1.8)

NYT reports details of prisoners being tortured to death at Bagram air base in Afghanistan