:: blame the extended gestation.... ::

:: Friday, April 30, 2004 ::

"I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat" --Rebecca West, 1913

:: Jim Nichols 4/30/2004 08:10:00 PM [+] ::
...

From Daniel Dennett's Brainstroms:

"Lingering doubts about whether the chess-playing computer really has beliefs and desires are misplaced; for the definition of intentional systems I have given does not say that intentional systems really have beliefs and desires, but that one can explain and predict their behavior by ascribing beliefs and desires to them, and whether one calls what one ascribes to the computer beliefs or belief-analogues or information complexes or intentional whatnots makes no difference to the nature of the calculation one makes on the basis of the ascriptions. One will arrive at the same predictions whether one forthrightly thinks in terms of the computer's beliefs and desires, or in terms of the computer's information-store and goal-specifications."

:: Jim Nichols 4/30/2004 05:53:00 PM [+] ::
...

Yahoo! News - Professor Develops Robotic Highway Cones:

"The orange construction cones and barrels that litter Nebraska's highways may be going high-tech. "

:: Jim Nichols 4/30/2004 04:52:00 PM [+] ::
...

Slow and steady...

I just hit the 1000 hits mark...

:: Jim Nichols 4/29/2004 09:33:00 PM [+] ::
...

UC Davis awarded $10M for hydrogen research - 2004-04-29 - Sacramento Business Journal:

"UC Davis transportation researchers will receive approximately $10 million in research and outreach grants as part of a U.S. Department of Energy program to bring the hydrogen economy closer. "

:: Jim Nichols 4/29/2004 09:32:00 PM [+] ::
...

IWFL - Independent Women's Football League Supporting Women in Football huh...

:: Jim Nichols 4/27/2004 04:01:00 PM [+] ::
...

The Philosophical Roots of the Marx-Bakunin Conflict:

"THE TEMPESTUOUS relation between Marx and Bakunin is a well known legacy of the history of western socialism. "

:: Jim Nichols 4/25/2004 06:56:00 PM [+] ::
...

Yahoo! News - Sweden to Charge Traffic Toll in Capital:

"Motorists will have to pay a toll of between $1.30 and $2.60 to get into increasingly congested Stockholm during a trial period beginning next year, officials said Thursday.

The 13-month trial period will start on June 1, 2005, and end on July 31, 2006, six weeks ahead of a referendum on whether to make the tax permanent.

'The trial period should be long enough for the Stockholmers to get an idea of how it will work and for a serious and scientific evaluation of the trial,' said Annika Billstroem, head of Stockholm's administration.
The different tolls will depend on the time of day a motorist drives into the Swedish capital and are designed to alleviate traffic congestion and stem pollution. Taxis and buses above a certain weight are exempt.

The city plans to install devices around the city to read electronic tags on the cars. Every time a car is registered, a signal will be sent to a central computer, which will bill the owner.
London adopted a similar plan last year, charging motorists on weekdays to enter a crowded, eight-square-mile zone that includes the bustling financial district.

The tolls were hailed as a success by Mayor Ken Livingstone, who in February said they had cut the traffic volume in central London by 18 percent since the program began. "

:: Jim Nichols 4/23/2004 01:24:00 AM [+] ::
...

Passion In The Era of Decaffeinated Belief:

"The credentials of those who, even prior to its release, virulently criticize Mel Gibson's new film on the last 12 hours of Christ's life, seem impeccable: are they not fully justified in their worry that the film, made by a fanatic Catholic traditionalist with occasional anti-Semitic outbursts, may ignite anti-Semitic sentiments? More general, is Passion not a kind of manifesto of our own (Western, Christian) fundamentalists and anti-secularists? Is then not the duty of every Western secularist to reject it? Is such an unambiguous attack not a sine qua non if we want to make it clear that we are not covert racists attacking only the fundamentalism of other (Muslim) cultures?"

:: Jim Nichols 4/21/2004 10:49:00 PM [+] ::
...

An audience with Jacques Derrida
:

"The atmosphere at the Royal National Hotel in central London on a freezing March night resembles the humming anticipation before a rock legend's gig. Some 850 people are crammed uncomfortably close together. Dozens more sit or stand around the edges of the hall and scores queue outside for returned tickets."

:: Jim Nichols 4/21/2004 10:45:00 PM [+] ::
...

Books | The semantic engineer:

"'Some of the most beautiful and deep ideas of the 20th century come from engineering. Certainly in America, engineering is very declassé. It has never had the cachet of physics, or even chemistry. And yet the deep insights of computer science, and a lot of the insights of molecular biology, are fundamentally engineering insights. Thermodynamics, too - a lot of it came from work with steam engines. So I think that thinking about machines, and how to get purpose out of material, has been a wonderful source of insight. I don't think it's an accident that some of the greatest artists of all time have been engineers.' "

:: Jim Nichols 4/21/2004 09:34:00 PM [+] ::
...

UC Davis to enroll 10 percent fewer freshman - 2004-04-21 - Sacramento Business Journal:

"The University of California Davis has offered freshman admission to 11 percent fewer California high school students due to a state-mandated cut to UC's freshman enrollment. A total of 15,499 California high school students will be offered admission for fall 2004, compared to 17,418 in fall 2003. "

:: Jim Nichols 4/21/2004 09:05:00 PM [+] ::
...

Study to probe genetics of depression: Finding genes linked to mental illness may yield new drugs.:

"A massive project to probe the genetics of depression was launched this week at the Human Genome Meeting in Berlin, Germany. The multinational study aims to aid the development of the novel drugs against the condition."

:: Jim Nichols 4/19/2004 11:17:00 PM [+] ::
...

Been watching the Stanley Cup...

tonight....Calgary v. Vancouver... sweet last second goal to put it into OT

:: Jim Nichols 4/19/2004 10:13:00 PM [+] ::
...

Politics returns to campuses | csmonitor.com:

"Suddenly, young people matter. More than at any time in recent history, the MTV crowd is capturing the attention of both major parties in a presidential election year. Traditionally, they've been a great source of free labor, foot soldiers willing to stuff envelopes and knock on doors. But few campaigns have spent significant resources on the young, in part because 18- to 24-year-olds have proved unreliable voters, turning out in much lower numbers than their older siblings, to say nothing of their parents and grandparents.

But this year, a combination of factors have converged to put Generation Y on a more equal footing with the Social Security set. First, there's the whole notion of the '50/50' nation. With the country deeply divided, and all but a small percentage already decided, young people have emerged as one of the few large demographics with votes still up for grabs. Then there's the shift from televised persuasion toward more grass-roots mobilization. Studies have long shown that the traditional nasty ads and robo-calls have little impact on students' voting patterns. But grab one by the arm, as Ms. Stollwerk plans to do, sit down and talk to them, and they're far more likely to vote.

Finally, there's some precedent: Youth turnout during the Democratic primary surprised many experts - call it the Generation Dean effect. Young voters' turnout quadrupled in Iowa and was up more than 50 percent in New Hampshire. A newly released survey by Harvard University found that 62 percent of college students say they will 'definitely' vote in November."

:: Jim Nichols 4/19/2004 09:21:00 PM [+] ::
...

Yahoo! News - Ballot Measures Flourish in California:

"Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has championed 'direct democracy' since he was swept into office in an extraordinary recall election last year. But come this fall, he could be confronted with too much democracy for his own liking. "

:: Jim Nichols 4/19/2004 01:59:00 PM [+] ::
...

A New Kind of Social Science:
The Path Beyond Current (IR) Methodologies May Lie Beneath Them

Existing formal models of political behavior have followed the lead of the natural sciences and generally focused on methods that use continuous-variable mathematics. Stephen olfram has recently produced an extended critique of that approach in the natural sciences, and suggested that a great deal of natural behavior can be accounted for using rules that involve discrete patterns. Wolfram’s work generally does not consider models in the social sciences but given the similarity between many of the techniques for modeling in the natural and social sciences, his critique can readily be applied to models of social behavior as well. We argue further that pattern-based models are particularly relevant to modeling human behavior because human cognitive abilities are far more developed in the domain of pattern recognition than in the domain of continuous-variable mathematics. We test the possibility of finding pattern-based behavior in international behavior by looking at event data for the Israel-Palestine conflict for the
period 1979-2003.

:: Jim Nichols 4/17/2004 07:36:00 PM [+] ::
...

Abandoning the Middle:
The Revealing Case of the Bush Tax Cuts

:: Jim Nichols 4/17/2004 07:11:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: Friday, April 16, 2004 ::

Yahoo! News - Cobain Movie to Rock WB:

"The WB has always smelled like teen spirit thanks to Smallville, Gilmore Girls and Angel. Now the Frog is really going grunge, developing a TV movie about the life and death of Kurt Cobain. "

:: Jim Nichols 4/16/2004 10:20:00 PM [+] ::
...

My blog is gone... no wait it was just slow to load.

:: Jim Nichols 4/16/2004 03:16:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: Thursday, April 15, 2004 ::

T.E. Lawrence - Dreamers of the Day: "Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible."

:: Jim Nichols 4/15/2004 11:54:00 PM [+] ::
...

A life lesson...

Kung Fu is so much fun. Tonight he brought out the pads so we could practice our punches for real... it was funny cause i've never hit anything in my life. He'd go HIT! and I'd swat a fly. NO NO HIT. "Swat." HIT "Swat" I finally got the hang of it. Needless to say its a new experience for me.

:: Jim Nichols 4/15/2004 10:20:00 PM [+] ::
...

Google e-mail faces possible legislative challenge - 2004-04-13 - Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal:

"The same California lawmaker who brought you the Do-Not-Call list and the tightest medical privacy legislation in nation is now onto Google and e-mail scanning."

:: Jim Nichols 4/15/2004 10:19:00 PM [+] ::
...

Dissent Magazine - Winter 2004:

"The Republican governor of Alabama, Bob Riley, stunned conservatives last year by pushing through the state legislature a tax reform plan that offered tax relief to the poorest in his state while significantly increasing the burden borne by wealthy individuals and corporations. It is unusual these days for a Republican politician to raise taxes on the privileged. What is truly remarkable in this instance, however, are the reasons Riley gave for his tax plan. He argued that the present tax system, which requires Alabamians with incomes under $13,000 to pay 10.9 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes while those who make over $229,000 pay just 4.1 percent, is un-Christian."

:: Jim Nichols 4/15/2004 10:16:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: Tuesday, April 13, 2004 ::

Yahoo! News - Poll: Balanced Budget Beats Tax Cuts:

"By almost a 2-1 margin, Americans prefer balancing the nation's budget to cutting taxes, according to an Associated Press poll, even though many believe their overall tax burden has risen despite tax cuts over the past three years. "

:: Jim Nichols 4/13/2004 06:41:00 PM [+] ::
...

U.C. Berkeley report: Renewable energy could mean more jobs - 2004-04-13 - San Francisco Business Times: "Money put toward solar, wind and other renewable fuels will produce more jobs than a comparable amount of money invested in fossil fuel sources, said a report issued Tuesday by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. "

:: Jim Nichols 4/13/2004 05:40:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: Monday, April 12, 2004 ::

Consumer-driven healthcare plans catching on quickly:

"Even in their infancy, consumer-driven health plans are causing a stir.
While several nationwide companies have built their entire businesses on the idea, other health plans put consumer-driven plans on the buffet table as recently as several months ago. Either way, employers and employees alike are gobbling them up. "

:: Jim Nichols 4/12/2004 09:04:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: Wednesday, April 07, 2004 ::

Yahoo! News - Pole reversal: Feared "flip" of Earth's magnetic field takes 7,000 years:

"A reversal of the Earth's magnetic field, a rare but feared event due to the catastrophic effect it could have on human life, takes about 7,000 years to complete, according to a study. "

:: Jim Nichols 4/07/2004 10:56:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: Monday, April 05, 2004 ::

Radio Killed the video star... and the other greatest hits for 13 year olds...

I'm not big on being nostalgic by way of calendar but the radio is doing a ten year anniversary of Kurt Cobain's suicide so I woke up to it. It feels really odd how something that shouldn't matter to you can still bring up so many memories; how something can have such a dramatic effect on the direction of a persons life. Without Nirvana and that teenage obsession with his suicide I never would have found my way to punk rock, never would have dropped out of high school, never found my way to backpack through Europe, never would have made my way through LA City, never would be here at Davis. Then again i'm bi-polar so all of that probably would have happend without some redneck depressive from washington killing himself.

:: Jim Nichols 4/05/2004 09:33:00 AM [+] ::
...

The Composer and the Dictator:

"Was he a faithful servant of the Soviet regime, as his public behavior and official pronouncements might suggest? Or was he a secret dissident who expressed with musical signs and subtexts all the protest he could not make in words? "

:: Jim Nichols 4/05/2004 09:19:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: Saturday, April 03, 2004 ::

Look what I found...

Abbott and Costello, Who's on first? audio and text:

"WHO'S ON FIRST?
Abbott & Costello's classic routine."

:: Jim Nichols 4/03/2004 09:30:00 PM [+] ::
...

Modern History Sourcebook: Wallerstein on World Systems:

"THE DEVELOPMENT OF A WORLD ECONOMIC SYSTEM

A Summary of Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974) "

:: Jim Nichols 4/03/2004 09:13:00 PM [+] ::
...

Immanuel Wallerstein: America and the World: The Twin Towers as Metaphor:

"Today, we live in the shadow of an event that has shaken most of us, the destruction of the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001 by a group of individuals so dedicated to their ideology and their moral fury at the United States that they conspired for years to find ways to deal a deadly geopolitical blow to America and those they deemed its supporters around the world, and they did this in a way that required sacrificing their own lives. Most Americans have reacted to the events with deep anger, with patriotic resolve, and yet with considerable and persistent puzzlement. Puzzlement about two things: why did this happen? and how could it happen? And the puzzlement has been laced with a good deal of uncertainty: what must be done, what can be done in order that such an event will not, could not happen again?"

:: Jim Nichols 4/03/2004 09:10:00 PM [+] ::
...

Yahoo! News - Papers on 1964 Brazil Coup Declassified:

" Newly declassified U.S. documents show the extent of American willingness to provide aid to Brazil's generals during the 1964 coup that ushered in 21 years of often bloody military rule. "

:: Jim Nichols 4/03/2004 05:30:00 PM [+] ::
...

Yahoo! News - AP: Developers Get Farmers' Tax Breaks:

"Millions of dollars in property tax breaks intended to preserve farmland are going instead to companies that bulldoze farms to build housing subdivisions, malls and industrial parks, an Associated Press investigation has found. "

:: Jim Nichols 4/03/2004 03:57:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: Thursday, April 01, 2004 ::

LRB | Sara Roy : Short Cuts:

"September 2002 saw the establishment of Campus Watch, a website whose primary purpose is to monitor Middle Eastern studies faculty in departments across the US for signs of anti-American and anti-Israel bias. Campus Watch is the invention of Daniel Pipes, a colleague of Kramer's, and director of the Middle East Forum, a think-tank devoted to promoting American interests in the Middle East.

'I want Noam Chomsky to be taught at universities about as much as I want Hitler's writing or Stalin's writing,' Pipes said to an interviewer. 'These are wild and extremist ideas that I believe have no place in a university.' Not only does Campus Watch monitor universities for signs of 'sedition', i.e. views on US foreign policy, Islam, Israeli policy and Palestinian rights that Pipes considers unacceptable; it encourages students to inform on professors whose ideas they find offensive. Recently, Bush appointed Pipes to the board of directors of the US Institute of Peace, 'an independent, non-partisan federal institution created by Congress to promote the prevention, management, and peaceful resolution of international conflicts'."

I was really disappointed when I got to University and found out it wasn't a hotbed for crazy radical leftist politics. Maybe its just UC Davis but the right is loud and visible...

:: Jim Nichols 4/01/2004 04:18:00 PM [+] ::
...

News Analysis: U.S. Optimism Is Tested Again After Ambush Kills 4 in Iraq:

"Nearly a year into the insurgency, the command, in lock step with the civilian administration headed by L. Paul Bremer III, remains relentlessly positive.

But along with the publicly expressed confidence, there are hints that American generals are not as sure as they were only weeks ago that they have turned a corner in the conflict. Nor do the scenes from Falluja on Wednesday — Iraqis mutilating American bodies, and crowds cheering at the sight — appear to fit the theory put forward by the American military that Islamic militants, including foreigners, rather than Iraqi supporters of Saddam Hussein, are increasingly behind terrorist attacks. Falluja, 30 miles west of Baghdad, has been the volatile center of support for the toppled dictator, and a bellwether of the wider war."

:: Jim Nichols 4/01/2004 04:08:00 PM [+] ::
...

All 128 of them!!:

"Nearly three in four residents of Portugal, or 71 percent, want the country's 128-strong contingent of national guards in Iraq to be withdrawn from the war-ravaged country, a poll published on Monday found."

The coalition of the willing; not so willing anymore?

:: Jim Nichols 4/01/2004 04:00:00 PM [+] ::
...

Rules for Philosophy

Today my Professor put up nine rules for doing philosophy well. They're good food for thought even though I don't do many of these very well.

1. Identify the philosophical issues and focus on them
2. Read early (obviously this only applies to a philosophy class)
3. Be clear
4. Organize your thoughts and present them systematically
5. Keep an open mind
6. Follow your intuitions, but dig deeper
7. Respect the views of others
8. Be rigourous and logical
9. Talk with others

:: Jim Nichols 4/01/2004 03:54:00 PM [+] ::
...

Boost in California minimum wage gains initial approval - 2004-04-01 - Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal:

"California businesses would have to pay their workers a minimum of $7.25 an hour starting next January under a bill authored by Mountain View Assemblywoman Sally Lieber which was approved Wednesday by the Assembly's Committee on Labor and Employment. "

:: Jim Nichols 4/01/2004 03:37:00 PM [+] ::
...