Fixing football
by Josh Witten on August 10, 2012
American football. Not proper football. We already fixed that once. We call it rugby.
Speaking of which, we were at a dinner party when the subject of my rugby career was brought up (not by me). A discussion about surviving a full contact sport without padding (don’t hit with your head and hit with forces below the physiological limits of the human body) transitioned into a discussion of how to …
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Do you want to see the research you pay for?
by Josh Witten on May 23, 2012
Then you should sign a petition to encourage the White House to require all tax payer funded research publications to be freely available online.
WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:
Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.
We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on
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$100 per law
by Josh Witten on March 26, 2012
If you are like me, you will be relieved to know that most public safety standards are not written by our elected officials. Instead, a “standards body”, hopefully perceived to have relevant knowledge, drafts a model code with a “if I was going to write legally binding safety standards this is what it would look like” wink and nod. These model codes are included in full in laws, but are …
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Pi Day?
by Josh Witten on March 14, 2012
In the irrational American way of denoting dates, today is 3-14-2012, which makes it Pi Day as the irrational, mathematical constant π=3.14… The suitability of 14 March as Pi Day is highly dependent on cultural context.
What π really represents is the ratio between the radius of an ideal circle and its circumference (C=2πr) or its area (A=πr2). We can determine the day of the year that best expresses this …
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Laffghanistan
by Josh Witten on February 20, 2012
The Bob Hope USO tours to entertain the US troops in WWII are legendary. As they have become part of the wartime pageantry of the “greatest generation”, they’ve also been stripped of their humanity.
Graham Elwood went to Afghanistan to entertain the troops. Five times. He made a movie, Laffghanistan, about his experience – the satisfaction, fear, responsibility, insanity – the things humans feel when thrown into a new world …
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Glass Closet
by Josh Witten on February 12, 2012
In the 16 January 2012 episode of the WTF with Marc Maron Podcast, comedian Todd Glass came out to the public. Fortunately, in our modern world, coming out stories are becoming so common that they hardly draw notice.
Todd Glass’s discussion of the fear that drove him to hide his sexuality and his hope for a better, more considerate world is far from common. Listening to Glass, comfortable with …
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Super Apathy
by Josh Witten on February 5, 2012
Ah, Super Bowl Sunday, the day I get inundated with people announcing “I don’t care about the Super Bowl” loudly and publicly, as if this is a source of pride or a signal that you are some superior iteration of the species. Are we now defining ourselves, not by our passions, but by what were are apathetic towards? Isn’t that a hipster thing? Don’t we all hate hipsters?
Briefly, I …
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I get mail, SOPA edition
by Josh Witten on January 25, 2012
On Monday, I got one of those electronical mail things from my congressman, Pat Tiberi (R-OH, 12th district), about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, aka HR3261). As I was in the midst of traveling back to sunny England from Science Online 2012, I only skimmed it at first. Close examination will reveal that Congressman Tiberi is voting against SOPA. Reading like a normal human makes that awfully …
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Snowpocalypse
by Josh Witten on December 22, 2011
It is my firm belief that, in future millennia, when the works of Bill Watterson are rediscovered, Calvin & Hobbes will be regarded as one of the great works of philosophy. In the meantime, a loving tribute to Calvin’s apocalyptic musings in the medium of “snowman” by Jim Frommeyer and Teague Chrystie.
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Pardon Alan Turing
by Josh Witten on December 7, 2011
There is a formal petition to the UK government to pardon war hero and computing innovator Alan Turing. Turing as convicted for “gross indecency”, aka being and acting homosexual. He was subjected to chemical castration, which led to his suicide at age 41. One of humanity’s brightest candles was snuffed out because of intolerance.
We ask the HM Government to grant a pardon to Alan Turing for the conviction of
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John Scalzi on the Penn State child-rape scandal
by Josh Witten on November 14, 2011
John Scalzi explains why the non-rapists involved in the Penn State scandal, like Joe Paterno, deserve neither respect nor the position as leaders of men:
. . .ask that first underling why the fuck he did not try to save that kid.
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The Ewok Line
by Josh Witten on October 12, 2011
Frankly, Neil Patrick Harris‘s lecture on Ewoks sounds like the kind of thing I would do. Therefore, I love it. And you should too.
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