Frag Doll Brookelyn discusses Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter's team gaming, materiel and the potential for the fairer sex in simulated soldiery in her interview with Red Storm Entertainment's lead multiplayer designer Christian Allen; part of this week's Frag Doll podcast.
Gliding past Saturnine moon Titan, NASA's Cassini spacecraft furthered its cartography work by spattering the methane-girdled orb with infrared. Titan, Saturn's largest and most compelling moon by virtue of its appearance as primordial Earth on ice, is just one circling the ringed planet. Between Sol's nine planets is the ownership of thirteen dozen moons. The asteroid and Kuiper belts each boast thousands of objects with size enough to be called, if but they were adopted, satellites. Astronomers have detected over one hundred extrasolar planets, a list growing monthly, the discovery of the smaller, nickel-iron variety only a matter of instrument refinement. There are billions of stars in this galaxy and, should providence have smiled on corporeality when the cosmos sprang from nothing, collections of little worlds to match our own. The knowledge, the knowledge, the knowledge.
The stalwart, the circannual and the nascent: Martian rover Spirit and Saturn probe Cassini will be joined by the New Horizons craft in space later this afternoon when an Atlas V rocket brings it to low-Earth orbit, and joined in vocation nine years later when New Horizons travels thence to Pluto. It has been observed that with the first images of Pluto and its known moon Charon, the last uncharted heliocentric principal may be contemplated by man in terms more expository than two salient jots of light on a starfield. And there we have a paradox. The more familiar our little family rounding Sol, the more commonplace is each discovery, the splendor NASA shows us already less astounding than animated and fanciful sequences filmmakers build from composites of nature. Until, that is, we see Mars or Saturn or Pluto right there, there in front of us, through the larboard viewport.
1. Gazing intently at a driver who has pulled her car well over the crosswalk's threshold will, if the woman is unaccustomed to city etiquette, compel her to throw the transmission into reverse and resile from the province of pedestrians.
2. Cleveland parking meters are exo-dimensional, partially residing where time runs at about one minute to every four of ours (which may explain one cause of the city's money troubles). Four to one? Were that the case here, France would have two times as many cathedrals, Leonardo da Vinci would have left us the Battle of Anghiari instead of three-fifths thereof, and no one would either chuckle or shake his head at the mention of the "Big Dig."
3. Dear Gary So-and-So: A man standing outside the Federal Building mistook me for you, it seems. He called over a greeting but I did not turn to respond; the general sentiment, if misdirected, was appreciated but I feared that had I returned in kind the error would have been compounded, even constituting a breach of an obscure law against Conspiracy to Defraud the Office Colleagues of Gary So-and-So. If your friend is tart later this morning, now you know why. He does, however, wish you a Happy New Year.
John Derbyshire scolds busybodies who have made a spectacle out of Jennifer Aniston's choice of whether to keep a top or not. I agree. Have people become so parochial that they no longer read tradition in a name? Jennifer spins a dreidel.
Via the Associated Press: "Amtrak President David Gunn Is Fired."
1. A panhandler will place himself in perfect equidistance to all nearby hot dog vendors.
2. One man stepping out onto a crosswalk athwart traffic is as propelling of his fellow pedestrians as a "Walk" signal from the streetcorner opposite.
Sung to the melody of Michael Jackson's "Beat It."
There's trouble on the highest court in the land
Four judges run amok — they need a reprimand
O'Connor's seat is open and George Bush has found the man:
Scalito, Scalito
A public servant whose career is first-rate
He knows that judges judge; he doesn't legislate
He's just the nominee that the left loves to hate
Scalito, 'cause the country can't wait
Scalito! (Scalito!)
Scalito! (Scalito!)
Win one for plain meaning's credo
If it's not Miers, this one will do
Plenty of choices; it don't matter who
Ad hoc opinions have become standard fare
They say "penumbra" when they really mean "thin air"
The left draws everything from law except for what's there
Scalito, he's Ralph Neas' worst nightmare
Scalito! (Scalito!)
Scalito! (Scalito!)
Damn the Democrats' torpedoes
Sixty for cloture, if there's a fight
Time to move SCOTUS back to the right
Scalito! ('Lito, 'lito, 'lito!)
(Guitar solo; cut to the Justices' Conference Room; members of the court wear bandanas and sleeveless black robes, cheering on Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas as they circle, left wrists tied together, in a gavel duel)
The Democratic Party's fit to be tied
Their living, breathing document's about to die
They'll try their best to Bork — Bush says, "Go ahead and try"
Scalito! They can kiss Roe goodbye
(First and Second Chorus, repeat; outro fade)
In the course of a letter conversation with a friend and fellow rightist about ideology and politics — how some policies are founded upon world views that are ultimately irreconcilable — I threw together a representation of the epistemological matrix described in detail six weeks ago. I claim no authority on the academic subject (another colorfully deprecative phrase could be "My theory, based on words I learned the night before") but do have confidence in moving towards understanding the phenomenon of idea and practice — which does exist beyond the present compilations of men. There is far more about this figuration of mine to be written and spoken but the graphic was interesting enough, I thought, to show to readers.
