But it's a funny hoax. Click here to be punk'd.

Gay marriage is so easy a subject that simply arguing for it feels like a strawman contest. The state recognizes a lifelong commitment of companionship, fidelity and asset commingling as a contract, nothing more romantic or mysterious than that.

The state allows two adults of different sexes to enter into this sort contract, but not two adults of the same sex. Why? With the same logic, shouldn't the state prohibit gay men from entering into employment contracts?

This just in: four out of five men would rather lose their wives or girlfriends to a woman than to another man. DVD rentals of Mulholland Drive confirm.

I always shout at prizefighters to stop smiling. All boxing fans (and more, all boxers) realize is that a grin is simply a flash of inverted logic. The message is supposed to read: you punched me, you think it hurt, but it didn't hurt.

Of course I said "inverted." The message is the exact reverse of the intended one. If every fighter wanted to prove his beard with every punch that didn't hurt, the game would fast deteriorate into an eternal return of jab, smile, jab, smile, jab, smile, jab. They wouldn't call it boxing anymore, they'd call it dental shilling. So instead a smile can only mean one thing: you punched me and you hurt me. Do it again. You may as well put on sign on your front door saying, "We are on vacation. Please do not rob house."

Lennox Lewis smiled twice before losing to 20-1 underdog Hasim Rahman -- a nuclear straight-hand right that briefly sent Lewis to Narnia and back. Naseem Hamed showed his mouthguard to Marco Antonio Barrera for 12 humiliating rounds. And I could have sworn I saw Shane Mosley flash a second-round grin at Vernon Forrest, just moments before the worst ninety seconds of his career. There are other, less notable examples. Do not smile, not ever. Even if you're not fighting, or not a fighter, don't smile. Just in case.

And now that it is properly introduced, I leave you with the comment of the day yesterday:

"I never smile if I can help it. Showing one's teeth is a submission signal in primates. When someone smiles at me, all I see is a chimpanzee begging for its life."

In Wikipedia's withering takedown of What the Bleep Do We Know? -- which I featured here -- you can find the following:

Emoto appears to have arbitrarily decided what constitutes a "brilliant crystal" and an "incomplete crystal."

In this context, "brilliant" was meant to be synonymous with "beautiful." The word "arbitrarily" was the only one in the entire review that bothered me, because I have always suspected that beauty was somehow quantifiable.

To wit, from Marginal Revolution:

Three Israeli computer scientists from Tel Aviv University (TAU) have developed the ultimate enhancement tool for retouching digital images. Called the Beauty Function, their program scans an image of your face, studies it and produces a slightly more beautiful you.

Alex Tabarrok's comment:

Photoshop artists, make up artists and cosmetic surgeons have been doing this for years, of course, but it's quite interesting that a computer can identify beauty in a photograph and make the requisite changes.

The results are subtle and fascinating. Check some of them out here. Without exception, I find each after picture more beautiful than the before picture. And in each case, as the title of this post suggests, the subjects seem leaner and happier, but not obnoxiously happy. The lighting seems somewhat better in some cases, and in one case the woman's make-up seems a bit less pronounced, and her expression is more symmetrical.


(This dispatch wouldn't be complete if I failed to come clean: with so little in the way of source material, they would have to run my after picture back through the software all over again, for a next-generation after picture. Possibly multiple times. Possibly until everything everyone ever said was "Malkovich" or whatever.)

-- 3/4 cup strawberries (frozen if possible)
-- 1 banana (frozen if possible)
-- 1/4 cup plain yogurt
-- 5-6 walnuts, shelled
-- 1/2 cup water

Directions: liquefy. Serve before collapse. Explain mess to spouse later. Do not black out in any room without carpet. Do not take diet or exercise advice from a blogger who does not provide his last name.

Calorie count: 302
Fat content: 6.7g
Carb content: get over it

Experiment with flavored yogurt, ice instead of water, ripe bananas instead of those unbreakable yellow bastards. Some folks put peanut butter in smoothies, but this sounds patently revolting.

My restaurant will not serve smoothies.

For the most part Lou Dobbs behaved himself Friday night, although his insistence that Corporate America is actually passing legislation is getting tiresome. Does it matter who drafts federal legislation? Of course not. I'll draft a law myself this week, if it helps to prove the point. What matters is that the final version of any piece of legislation is voted on by the House and Senate, signed by the President, heard by the Supreme Court, and that the elected officials responsible are held accountable at re-election.

I suffer from both white coat hypertension and blue blazer hypertension, the latter of which has no backgrounder on Wikipedia. I've checked.

Maybe it was dad's military upbringing, or maybe it was my coming of age in the mid to late 70s. Or hell, maybe it's something in my proteins. But whatever the cause, I have a bit of a problem with authority. And one of the effects that authority figures have on me is making me feel like I'm lying, even when I'm not.

Short, true anecdote: I took my only polygraph test when applying for a job with a hotel chain. If you've already rolled your eyes, that's precisely my point. Not the NSA, not the DOD. I took a pre-employment polygraph screen to work at a hotel chain.

The process of strapping me in and revving it up had already made me very nervous, so, inevitably, blue blazer hypertension seized me before the test administrator even spoke. I failed the very first question. "Is your name Fred ____?"

This bears repeating. The whole process rattled me so terribly that I felt I was lying when I stated my name. And I didn't get the job.

Which is why this story spooks me a bit, in spite of my libertarian bona fides. Money quote:

No Lie MRI asserts that its technology, "represents the first and only direct measure of truth verification and lie detection in human history."

I strongly believe in voluntary association. There is only one alternative to that, and it is involuntary association. There is no distance at all between state property and affirmative action, between state property and wrongful termination claims. In each case, the policy is one of involuntary association.

But I also believe in contract law. Extra-contractual language, such as pre-employment drug screens and pre-shift stretching on job sites erode the relevance of the contract. (For the latter example, the general contractor requires not only their own employees to stretch (no problem here) but requires the employees of their subcontractors to stretch as well. Silly, arrogant, and coercive.)

An apparently accurate polygraph machine could easily reinvigorate the private sector's interest in our private lives. Yes, I would rather work -- and it is my right to associate -- with only those men and women who think like me, act like me, share values and beliefs with me, listen to the same music as me, watch the same TV shows as me, consume only the same intoxicants as I do, and are married and have two kids like I do. But if a candidate otherwise presents well, has the CV I am looking for, and brings impeccable references, I will have to take on faith that he won't use MDMA on the job, prefers hiking to yoga, and doesn't like jazz.

From Lou Dobbs Tonight last night:

The great equalizer in our society [is] public education. Corporate America is quite content -- and so have both the Democratic and the Republican parties been content to allow it to fail.

The patient viewer can only assume that his sources for this claim will come during tonight's broadcast.

(Warning: speculation ahead.) Not all public schools are failing, not by a wide margin. So my divining rod tells me that Dobbs is probably most concerned with public education because it is not as centralized as other governmental functions are. School systems are funded with property taxes and administrated by local boards. State-level departments and our cabinet-level federal department only offer the most general of oversight.

But this reality belies the flaw in his argument: Corporate America can wield as much real or imagined power as he claims. But something tells me that blue chip giants have no interest in wrecking, to name example, Maine School Administrative District #55, "serving the communities of Baldwin, Cornish, Hiram, Parsonsfield, and Porter." Or any other school districts, for that.

Last night Lou Dobbs Tonight made the case for continued marijuana prohibition. Arguments from their bewildering array of experts fell into three broad categories:

1. Marijuana use is harmful to the user,
2. Marijuana is a gateway drug, and
3. Marijuana legalization advocates don't want to stop there. If they have their way with smoke, legalization of heroin, cocaine and MDMA are surely next.

But # 3 is not technically an argument against legalization, and # 2 is simply an extension of # 1. More, # 1 is a paper tiger. Smoking cigarettes and overeating, to name only two, are far more harmful than is smoking marijuana, yet they are still legal. And they should be.

If this is the best the opposition can offer, legalization proponents should expect an easy victory. So where is this easy victory, then?

--Explosions in the Sky has a new LP out, titled All of A Sudden I Miss Everyone. Check out their web site for more. This is an early candidate for the 2007 Flyleaf Award for I Can't Believe Someone That Sounds Like This Is From Texas.

--I'm ready to go to the mat: Pilot Speed's "Barely Listening" was the track of the year last year, barely edging ahead of Muse's "Knights of Cydonia." Click here to access Pilot Speed's MySpace page, and to hear "Barely Listening" both live and Memorex.

--Here is a track you might not have heard before. The ensemble -- excuse me, "the ensemble" -- is named Indian Jewelry. Check out more of them here.

--Everyone stunk up the joint last night on American Idol. I'm giving no link to the show, to the contestants or to the network -- none of them deserve one.

Update (Thursday morning): the girls were much better last night. Lakisha Jones absolutely slaughtered the rest with "And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going." Can a female contestant win Idol without first proving herself with this song? If the answer is no, the season is wrapped up.

And too bad it wasn't Shyamali Malakar (sister to current contestant Sanjaya) who was born with that voice. It'd be about time to wrap the season up.

Meow!

Lifted straight from the pages of Marginal Revolution.

His first answer, "Losing Weight," requires clarification: society complicates all matters pertaining to health, not just weight loss. Some will claim that special interests (read: "corporations") intentionally cloud matters to further their cause (read: "to make more money"). This is not totally unfair, either. Yes, beef consumed in moderation is acceptable, but the expression "everything in moderation," while true, is also missing the first half of its sentence. "Eat vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, in that order" is much better diet advice, without the "everything in moderation" suffix. Which version do you expect to hear from cattle ranchers?

And what do you expect to hear from weight lifters selling exercise books? That distance running is the most effective way to burn fat?

So, yes, the profit motive clouds matters. But individuals cannot absolve themselves of responsibility, as tempting an offer as it is. I never see overweight veteran distance runners. Veteran weight lifters? A different story.

And while vegetarians are normally skinny, cattle ranchers are quite often overweight. So do the math, and listen with your eyes.

Satellite radio operators Sirius and XM are expected to announce their long-awaited merger today, according to a source familiar with the deal.

Source.

I'm an XM subscriber. If I lose my Verge or XMU, I'll be furious.

Money quote from the source article: "With antitrust issues of paramount importance, this source said lawyers for both companies were working overtime to fine-tune the language of the agreement."

Emphasis mine: the idea that the question of monopoly even comes up at all is absurd. These are two struggling radio spectra merging for the sake of survival, not a pair of government-subsidized telephone cartels.

This just in: Zimbabwe's crushing rate of inflation does not even consider subsidies on "most essential commodities," such as maize, wheat, fuel, and utilities. The subsidies will soon be scrapped, and prices are expected to escalate further. Recent estimates set the nation's hyperinflation at nearly 1,600%.

Most observers credit recent land seizures with starving and bankrupting the country.

To be fair, we should mention that other outlets credit severe drought in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi with the economic collapse.

Smith mentioned to me that he would like to comment anonymously. No problem -- I've just now enabled all comments.

Of course I've just outed Smith, but, hell, life isn't fair.

And speaking of outing people, whiskey tango foxtrot?

(The only other rule is that they must at least appear coherent:)

"People without mouths prefer Pepsi to Coke."

"This afternoon I watched three different movies in four different cities; all new releases."

"I did my first Google search in 1970, so this was about 8 years from now."


Hopefully the outrage over Bank of America issuing credit cards to customers without valid Social Security numbers will pass. Until then, all I can add to the rattletrap of national dialogue is this: voluntary exchange. Private citizen A chooses to lend Private citizen B money, and they agree on the terms. How is this a national security matter?

Not much, apparently.

From the Wikipedia backgrounder:

-- Dave Kehr of the New York Times described in his review of the movie, the "transition from quantum mechanics to cognitive therapy" as "plausible", but went on to state that "the subsequent leap — from cognitive therapy into large, hazy spiritual beliefs — isn't as effectively executed. Suddenly people who were talking about subatomic particles are alluding to alternate universes and cosmic forces, all of which can be harnessed in the interest of making Ms. Matlin's character feel better about her thighs."

-- The movie states humans are "90% water" when in fact newborns have around 78%, 1-year-olds around 65%, adult men about 60%, and adult women around 55%.

-- The movie also relates a story about Native Americans being unable to see Christopher Columbus' ships. However, there is no mention of this in any of the journals of those voyages, and the oral traditions of the Native Americans were lost in the following 150 years of Spanish rule. None of the people that Columbus first encountered—the Arawaks—had any descendants survive into recent times, so it is impossible for anyone to know what their experience was.

-- The most severe criticism of this film is that the ideas and theories presented are based upon the beliefs of JZ Knight, a medium who claims to channel a "Lemurian" warrior Ramtha who raised an army and fought against the Atlantians over 35,000 years ago.

-- Masaru Emoto's work (The Hidden Messages in Water) ... is criticised for being more artistic than scientific. His doctoral certification is on alternative medicine from an unaccredited institution. His work was never subject to peer review, and he did not utilize double blind methodology. Emoto also claims that polluted water does not crystallize. Depending on the properties of the pollutant, heavily polluted water will still form crystals, though the crystals may contain more crystallographic defects than pure water would. These changes in the way the crystals form can be readily explained using basic chemistry and physics.

-- The experiment in [transcendal] meditation won John Hagelin the 1994 Ig Nobel Prize for Peace, an award for work "that cannot, or should not, be reproduced."


Ouch!

The paranoid reaction of the police means that basicly anyone can throw a few fake bombs around, not hurt anyone, and pretty much cripple the economy of any major urban area in the United States.

Read the whole thing here.

PS, if it's not already clear, comments are copy-pasted according to our strict [sic] policy.

BEIJING (AP) -- Negotiators reached a tentative agreement on initial steps for North Korea's nuclear disarmament, the U.S. envoy to the talks said Tuesday.

Prepare for all sides to the debate, foreign and domestic, hawk and dove, red state and blue, to declare victory over each other in T minus 5...4...3...

I'm adding "inequality" as its own category, since the issue is heating up again. (Update: category removed.)

-- I do not think the increase in wage, social or asset inequality is up for debate. The jury is back with a verdict, guilty as charged. The spread between wealthy Americans and poor Americans is clearly widening. Where the jury is still deliberating is what should be done, if anything. Of course, my short answer is "nothing." (That's my long answer as well.)

-- It is also clear that, as is promised by open and unplanned societies, purchasing inequality is narrowing. A $17,000 Honda Element takes passengers to and from work with nearly the luxury as an $ 85,000 Range Rover, which costs five times as much. The two cars are virtually identical in terms of safety and the Element actually surpasses the Range Rover in fuel efficiency.

-- Those who doubt my claim that purchasing inequality is narrowing will point to the health care industry. But I also wrote "as is promised by open and unplanned societies." The health care sector is likely the most heavily regulated industry in the country.

-- I have to wonder how much desktop technology is responsible for layoffs, which would depress wages and increase wage inequality. Gone are the days of two-martini executive lunches and handshake agreements over golf. Today an executive can print, mail and fax without leaving his desk. Cell phones, voice mail and electronic calendars have virtually eliminated the need for secretaries. E-mail has largely replaced courier services and the electronic meeting has largely replaced travel. So while the executive is widely reviled in contemporary culture (the corporate scandals early in the decade didn't help), there is no doubt that he is more efficient, and paid for his efficiency.

John Flynn's "As We Go Marching" provides a fairly convincing account of fascism as simply an attempt to manage and eliminate unemployment, largely through deficit spending ("fiscal policy" in its crudest form). It's easy for a totalitarian government to obtain full employment -- the hard part is to figure out what to do with all those troops, or how to pay down that debt. The solutions attempted in Germany did not prove universally popular elsewhere.

Fiscal policy can eliminate unemployment. That it did not do so in the US should be regarded as extremely fortunate: The other effects of such a policy would have been bad indeed.

Read the whole thing here.

A great question, and some great answers, too, all posted over at Freakonomics Blog. Read the whole thing here.

Some gems:

Perhaps the audiences at U.S. sporting events don’t include the criminal element — the result, perhaps, of high ticket prices.
[...]
Soccer is a game fraught with increasing tension. Games last 90 minutes and only 1 point might be scored. Basketball, baseball etc. all have scores on both sides throughout the game. There might be 90 minutes of increasing tension with no release as neither team scores.
[...]
I live in Ireland. We don’t have a hooligan problem in Ireland even though we would have similar demographics to the UK for example. So I would guess a lot of it is cultural as opposed to anything else. There is no segregation at Irish sporting events.
[...]
In the Netherlands there is (still) no hooligan-law that requires known offenders at soccer games to register at their local police station at the time of soccer games, effectively preventing them from being at the game.
[...]
In America rooting for a team doesn’t align you with a certain ethnic/social/religious class. Anytime an activity creates those sorts of boundaries it becomes far more likely to incite violence.

Cuennei recently discussed the comparisons between football and war, and the finer points of NFL scoring here.

Francis Crick was on LSD when he though up the structure of DNA

Read the whole thing here.

Yesterday a friend wrote to me, of over-doing it while running:

Every so often, I'd have blood in my urine. Keep in mind that heavy training back in the day meant 70 to 100 miles per week. This symptom is common for marathoners and nothing to be too concerned about, although it should be checked out.

"Should be checked out?" If I ever saw blood in my urine I’d promptly black out. So if the condition of my kidneys wasn’t of medical interest, the concussion I received when I fell certainly would be, so, yes, there’d be a trip to the whitecoats either way.

My overtraining symptoms are anxiety and flu-like symptoms, both of which take several days to pass. If any runners are passing through, leave your own overtraining anecdotes inthe comments section.

Previously I posted this letter, which I also sent to John Cornyn, U.S. Senator from Texas.

The letter earned me this reply:

Thank you for contacting me about the challenges facing America's agricultural producers. I appreciate having the benefit of your comments on this important matter.

Agriculture is vital to the Texas economy; one in five jobs in our state is related to the agriculture industry. However, countless Texas producers are struggling to survive because of extreme weather conditions, unfair trade practices by foreign countries, and burdensome tax and environmental regulations.

Over the past decades, Congress has taken steps to temper financial hardships and maintain agricultural income through federal assistance. Five years ago, President George W. Bush signed into law the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 (P.L. 107 - 171). This law authorizes funding for most agricultural commodity programs through Fiscal Year 2007. However, I believe more needs to be done to promote a stable and lasting environment in which farmers and ranchers can prosper for generations to come.

Although I am not a member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, I understand the needs of Texas farmers and ranchers, and I will keep your views in mind as relevant legislation is considered by the full Senate.

I appreciate having the opportunity to represent the interests of Texans in the United States Senate. Thank you for taking the time to contact me.

Indonesia, which has had more human cases of avian flu than any other country, has stopped sending samples of the virus to the World Health Organization, apparently because it is negotiating a contract to sell the samples to an American vaccine company.

I'd love to know the terms of the original arrangement -- and this new arrangement -- before I came down irreversibly on one side or the other. But if I were to decide in strict accordance with the Sniff Test, this one fails.


Update
It took me a couple of hours to recognize the key question here, which is this: Should a public agency take public domain information, then suppress it for private gain? Of course the answer is no. No sniff test needed.

For the record, I can't stand football. I'm glad the season is over. My family spent the day at the zoo yesterday, and outside digging in the mud, and at the only restaurant in town not broadcasting the game. I allow myself a little cultural vanity in that I rarely know what teams are meeting in the Super Bowl. (I knew this year. Too many NFL goons around me to not know)

My complaints about football are boring and unoriginal (too much time spent watching for too little action; sport dominated by overweight, over-juiced prima donnas; season is too short, both in calendar length and in number of games played; the game is over-commercialized; rules are often ridiculous and penalties excessive, even counter-productive).

But my defense of the sport may surprise you. To wit, NFL football...

1. ...Has the most interesting scoring system of any major sport. It is possible to score 3 or 6 points in normal offensive play, 1 or 2 points after a touchdown, and 2 points in normal defensive play. Scores therefore follow bizarre patterns and tell narratives that you do not see in other sports. Example: once in high school our team beat the strongest team in the league 2-0. The headline wrote itself: dueling defensive lines. Yesterday's score of 29-17 tells of rain, turnovers, and broken plays. You hardly need to have seen the game to know that much.

2. ...Is agonizingly incremental. A good prizefight can end with a single punch, but a good football game can spend an excruciating amount of time around midfield. Ground gained is precious, and erased with a single mistake. Comparisons to infantry combat are not unfair.

3. ...Given the above, and given the sad state of network broadcasting, is one of the most intellectual exercises on television. Fans give no quarter to home teams for its choice of plays, following the quarterback and offensive coordinator doggedly through a calculus of yards left for first down, points for and against, injuries for and against, division rankings, status of other division games, and time left on the clock. This chance for critical thinking is missing in all other television broadcasting, and most other sports.

4. ...Quite graceful. Enough said?

Michelle Malkin and her ilk have practically earned their living bemoaning those media outlets that eschew the phrase "illegal aliens" for the more palatable "undocumented workers." It is political correctness at its most organized and calculated, they say. Take the language first, and the policy will write itself afterward. The words "agenda," "infiltration," and "subversion" arise time and again.

Interesting, then, this:

Entering the country without documents is a civil violation. It's neither a felony or a misdemeanor, as is, say, driving without insurance documents.

(Source: "The Mexican Invasion" by Rod Davis, in the February 2007 issue of D Magazine.)

Can you say "right wing political correctness?"

Deaf Woman Heard Tornado Before Home Destroyed

Somehow it reminds me of this poem by Lawrence:

I like relativity and quantum theories
because I don't understand them
and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can't settle,
refusing to sit still and be measured;
and as if the atom were an impulsive thing
always changing its mind.

The headline is much more interesting than the story, and is slightly misleading.

Last night on American Idol a contestant and her boyfriend spoke of how they met at "The Woodstock." I laughed, and then my wife pointed out that they had actually said "the bus stop," not "The Woodstock," which somehow made the thing all that much funnier. I was still laughing about it when I woke up this morning.

No idea which of Friedman's policies or non-policies I can counter tomorrow, but today, my fourth of five is this.