A Curious Little Blog

I'm excited about writing this blog entry because I get to spread the word that today is Peace of Westphalia Day. 361 years ago today, representatives gathered in the town of Münster signed two documents, the Treaty of Onsabrück and the Treaty of Münster, that ended the Thirty Years' War. Not many people celebrate this holiday in the way it deserves, with a full day off from work, lots of decadent food, and reading my books on the subject, but I think that will change once I get the word out and people start to realize what they are missing. Okay, I might be a little biased on the subject. Hardly anyone knows what the Peace of Westphalia is or even what century it occurred in, which means I probably could have picked a better subject to pour my heart and soul into writing a book about. Heck, hardly anyone knows that October 24th is United Nations Day -- the U.N. charter was signed on this day in 1945 -- so I can hardly expect its predecessor by 300 years to catch on. Someo...

If you use Firefox, you should definitely get this Halloween theme . It is beautifully well-done, and gets me in the spirit for a holiday that I don't even particularly care much about. I look forward to this time of the year just so I can use this theme for a few weeks. There is also an excellent Christmas theme available. I should probably be more upset by the White House's attempt to discredit Fox as a news agency, but in fact I find myself just shaking my head. No presidency has attempted to take on an entire news station, and I doubt if any attempted to take on a particular newspaper, either. And for good reason. First, in a country devoted to free speech, it is dangerous for a government institution to try to decide who is and who isn't authorized to deliver the news. Second, it seems unlikely to work, and may very well backfire. Third, it is pointless. News agencies are not sworn to neutrality. We went through a period of history when journalists claimed t...

Yellow has never seemed like much of a colour to me. It's more like off-white than a separate colour. I want to describe it as a dark white, but at the same time as a bright white. Are dark and bright opposites? I don't think so, because light blue is not bright; but I'm not really sure what bright means, unless it's perhaps "reflective." This brings me to the question of what distinguishes yellow from gold (and grey from silver). I remembering wondering about this when I was a kid, because Crayola's 64-pack had separate colours for yellow and gold, but I couldn't figure out what mixture of paints would reproduce gold. The trick, I realized, was that gold-coloured crayons had a sparkly element in them that clearly distinguished them from yellow; ditto for silver vs. grey. In practice, gold seems to be a little darker than pure yellow, but that doesn't stop people from describing blond hair as "golden." Yellow is one of the three pr...

You have probably seen the following on a bumper sticker: "It Will Be a Great Day When Our Schools Get all the Money They Need and the Air Force Has to Hold a Bake Sale to Buy a Bomber." (For information on the origins of this sentence, see here .) I don't see it as much as I once did; I'd like to think it's less common because it is such a fatuous sentiment that people see through it, but it is probably just the fact that it is too long to be really catchy, like "Make love, not war" or "Yes, We Can" (which are equally fatuous, but far more popular). But I don't want to focus on the military side of the slogan; instead, I want to ask about the school side. Because the fact is that I am inundated with school fundraisers, and I'm really tired of them. My question is, just how much money does my children's school need, and why can't they get adequate funding through taxes? I realize that there is always a tension between gove...

Are red, yellow, and orange really "warm" colours? I remember learning about warm vs. cold colours in 1st grade, and I had absolutely no idea what the concept meant. The first thing that came to my mind was that blue must be a warm colour, since blue was my favourite colour. You can argue that yellow is warm because it is the colour of the sun and red because things turn "red-hot," but there are serious limitations to this claim. Fire is yellow, but it is also blue; items that get hotter than red-hot turn white-hot. Water and ice are commonly associated with blue and green, but they are really clear, and only appear in colour in certain circumstances. Maybe red, yellow, and orange share some common characteristic that we have arbitrarily designated "warmth," but I don't think it has anything to do with temperature. Green is generally seen as a cool colour, even though it is a mixture of a warm and cool pigments. What is purple? I'm not su...

Today is National Bosses' Day. That sounds like a great idea. Bosses make more than anyone else in the office, and spend all day telling people what to do. They need a special day for themselves. I'm not that crazy about Secretaries' Day, but at least it makes sense: secretaries do the menial work in an office every other day of the year, so having one day in which they get special treatment seems appropriate. I'm fortunate that my boss is very nice. I've heard that your relationship with your boss is the most important factor in job satisfaction, and I've been lucky that all but two of my bosses have been very easy to get along with. The other two weren't bad; they just weren't as good. About hating: Liberals love the subject of hating. They accuse their opponents of it all the time. One of their biggest insults is to call someone a "hater." Of course, they are immune from hating -- or rather, anytime they hate it is justifiable, b...

I heard on the radio today that President Obama was in New Orleans, which has still not recovered from Hurricane Katrina. (CNN article here .) I wouldn't expect it to be 100% recovered, but apparently a lot of it is still a disaster area. One of the questions that Obama fielded was, naturally, "Why hasn't the government done more?" Obama's responded by saying that he was working on improving things: "My expectation is that by the time that my term is over, you guys are going to look back and you're going to say, 'This was a responsive administration on health care, on housing, on education, that actually made sure the money flowed and that things got done the way they were supposed to get done." I doubt whether any president can introduce drastic changes into any organization as large as FEMA. Because of the civil service system, 99% of its employees cannot be changed by the new administration. (I don't like to toss around percentages ...

I maintain a list of vocabulary words that I would like to learn. Among the hardest are words for colours, which are almost impossible to define in words. Sure, you can write "a dark grayish-brown," but will someone really be able to picture it in his mind? Among my words are three shades of brown: fuscous, taupe (rhymes with "rope") and filemot (fill-mott). Fuscous and taupe both mean "brownish-grey," which gives them the distinction of combining the two most boring colours. If it came down to it, I think I would choose brown as even more boring than grey. It's the colour of dirt, after all, not to mention other natural substances like wood and, frequently, fur. It's also the colour you get when you mix all the other colours together. According to wikipedia , it's actually a mixture of red, orange, or yellow with black, but that's not the way I remember it when I played with fingerpaints, and it's not the colour my kids get when th...

I listen to sports talk radio when I'm in the car, which means, here in Middle Georgia, that I often hear the Bill Shanks Show. He didn't bother me too much until recently, when he was criticizing Atlanta Braves' manager Bobby Cox for platooning players at a certain position. "Platooning" means playing one player against right-handed pitchers and the other against left-handed pitchers. Shanks hates the idea, explaining, "Hitting is hitting, and pitching is pitching." That's the kind of serious thinking that he gets paid for. Who can argue that hitting is not hitting? That sounds like the kind of paradox Zeno of Elea would come up with. Of course hitting is hitting. But right-handed hitting is not the same as left-handed hitting, at least not against the same pitcher. Baseball players usually hit significantly better against pitchers who throw from the opposite side of the plate, i.e., right-handed hitters bat better against left-handed pitche...

I am proud that an American has been once again awarded the Nobel Peace prize. And who could be more worthy than Barack Obama, because he has...uh...he has...well, someday he might do something for peace. Okay, the award is officially meaningless. It has been meaningless for some time now, really. If Al Gore can get the award for fussing about global warming, it pretty clearly has nothing to do with peace. That's not even to consider the granting of the award to crooks and terrorists like Yasser Arafat and Le Duc Tho. If you think about it, though, the whole idea of a prize for peace is somewhat problematic. Statesmen only make peace when they think it is in their interests. Unilateral capitulation is not a way to advance peace in the long run, but rather a way to invite war. So it is difficult to give the award to statesmen. On the other hand, people with utopian peace ideas don't really do anything to advance peace, either. I read an interesting book, Champions of Pea...

ACORN has put itself in a position of public trust by acting as an intermediary between individuals and the government: helping people register to vote, helping them get government funding, helping the government count citizens. Whether it supported pimping or not, it is clearly suggesting ways for people to defraud the government by cheating on taxes. This is criminal, and it would seem to provide an obvious reason for the government to discontinue all public funds to ACORN immediately. I have read in several places (e.g., here ) that it may be unconstitutional for Congress to cut off funding specifically for ACORN because it could count as a "bill of attainder." `This seems more than a little stretch of the concept to me. A bill of attainder "is an act of the legislature declaring a person or group of persons guilty of some crime and punishing them without benefit of a trial." The laws in question would say nothing about whether ACORN was engaged in crimina...

ACORN's recent embarrassment seems like a redemption to me, as to other conservatives. Like them, I have been very dubious of ACORN's voter registration practices, and appalled at the thought that it was getting millions of dollars of federal funds, some of which was being used for partisan political purposes. The video sting seems like the kind of thing that is too good to be true; and, like anything that seems too good to be true, I am curious to know the downside. To that end, I read a few liberal defenses of ACORN. There is no shortage of arguments in ACORN's favour, but they seem to fall into two broad categories: (1) The videos don't tell the truth; and (2) The behaviour documented in the videos can be excused, or at least explained, at an organizational level. The most fundamental argument of the first category is that all Republicans are liars, therefore the evidence cannot be believed a priori . Obviously, this is not part of a serious argument, but it i...