Embeddable if only for the fantastic photograph.

Street rebellion is part of France's iconography. It is part of the theatre of French life. Why is this time different? https://t.co/H9dZPLjKni

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) December 9, 2018

"They operate like the mafia. If they pull your hechsher, you are screwed. They tell other places not to give you a hechsher."

Said Chaim Kirshner, the owner of a Kosher restaurant — a "hechsher" is kosher certification — quoted in "NYC kosher cops force restaurants to cancel bookings of lesbian Jewish comic" (NY Daily News).

[Leah] Forster’s life as a Jewish lesbian isn’t part of her act, but rabbis from the Vaad Harabanim of Flatbush, the kosher certification organization, still decided hosting her event would be a violation of Torah law.

And what about the city's anti-discrimination law? The Commission on Human Rights may look into the problem. Must the restaurant refrain from discrimination and forfeit its kosher certification (and thus be ruined as a business) or does the anti-discrimination law somehow forbid the kosher certification organization from pulling the certification on this ground? Notice how in this case — unlike the Masterpiece Cakes controversy — the business owner does not want to discriminate against the gay person: he wants a private organization to regard his business as properly religious and that organization demands discrimination.

"Tony Evers 'not particularly encouraged' by chat with Scott Walker on vetoing GOP lame-duck bills."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports. It's interesting that they did meet and talk. When Evers first asked for the talk, I thought maybe it would be difficult for Walker to sit there with Evers face to face and justify cutting back the incoming governor's power.

Taking to the national airwaves on NBC's "Meet the Press," Evers said in an interview airing Sunday morning that he "communicated with Gov. Walker over the telephone a few days ago."

Oh! It was not face to face.

"I made that pitch, and he was noncommittal," Evers said. "I know publicly he has said in other arenas he plans to sign most of all of it. So I'm not particularly encouraged at this point in time. But it's around Scott Walker's legacy. He has the opportunity to change this and actually validate the will of the people that voted on Nov. 6."

No "smocking" gun.

“Democrats can’t find a Smocking Gun tying the Trump campaign to Russia after James Comey’s testimony. No Smocking Gun...No Collusion.” @FoxNews That’s because there was NO COLLUSION. So now the Dems go to a simple private transaction, wrongly call it a campaign contribution,...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2018

It's not a typo if you do it twice. The question is whether it's a deliberate misspelling to infuse the message with virality. "Smocking" is what makes this special.

By the way, the Urban Dictionary definition for "smock" is "small cock."

"Meet the Bottomless Pinocchio, a new rating for a false claim repeated over and over again."

Glenn Kessler, the WaPo "Fact Checker," is thoroughly exasperated.

Trump’s willingness to constantly repeat false claims has posed a unique challenge to fact checkers. Most politicians quickly drop a Four-Pinocchio claim, either out of a duty to be accurate or concern that spreading false information could be politically damaging.

Not Trump. The president keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or misstating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation....

It used to work, this fact correction power. What happened? Well, Trump happened....

ADDED: Jack Kerouac advised: "Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind" (previously quoted by me in July 2009).

Out on Lake Mendota today: trumpeter swans.

Video'd by me from the beach on Picnic Point.

It was 50 years ago today: "The Mother of All Demos."

"'The Mother of All Demos' is a name retroactively applied to a landmark computer demonstration, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, which was presented by Douglas Engelbart on December 9, 1968," says Wikipedia.

The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s....

During the 90-minute presentation, Engelbart used his mouse prototype to move around the screen, highlight text, and resize windows. This was the first time that an integrated system for manipulating text onscreen was presented publicly....

Prior to the demonstration, a significant portion of the computer science community thought Engelbart was "a crackpot." When he was finished, he was described as "dealing lightning with both hands."

Snoop Dogg has some advice for Kevin Hart.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by snoopdogg (@snoopdogg) on Dec 7, 2018 at 7:14am PST

Addressing the ousting of Kevin Hart as Oscars host (because of some bad homophobic jokes years ago), Snoop Dogg says, "That ain't our kind of shit, no way. Oscars??! Yeah, right. Come do the BET Awards. Or Soul Train. They don't care. You're a comedian. Cracking jokes. Really? Y'all want me to host it now? Nah. I don't think so. I got shit to do. And I got way more customers before I get to you. Kevin Hart, smoke a blunt. Tell the Academy to suck a dick or die trying. Fuck 'em. We still love you... Fuck the Grammys too."

I enjoyed that little tirade, with very amusing comic pauses. It expresses something it's important to notice — the racial dimension of a strict enforcement of political correctness. As I said in the earlier post about the crushing of Kyler Murray's great moment — political correctness itself can be politically incorrect.

If you want to talk about Mueller and Trump...

... please feel free to use the comments here to link to things and discuss them.

I feel myself to be in a state of resistance. The headlines seem constructed to create anxiety and anger, and I decline to be sucked in. I'm tired of the dribblings from the investigation. Let Mueller come out with a complete report. Lay out all the evidence, and let Trump and his people provide their context and argument, and I will pay attention again.

"I used to be quite attractive — classically handsome male, some might say..."

"The 'yellow vest' protests have been 'a catastrophe' for the French economy, the finance minister says...."

"About 125,000 protesters took to the streets on Saturday, with more than 1,700 people arrested. Several tourist sites, including the Eiffel Tower and Louvre Museum, are closed this weekend... 'There was much more damage yesterday than a week ago' because Saturday's protests were more dispersed, deputy mayor Emmanuel Gregoire told local radio.... There are concerns that the protests could lead to a drop in tourism. Paris was visited by a record number of tourists in 2017 - more than 40 million.... The government has... agreed to scrap the fuel tax increase and has frozen electricity and gas prices for 2019. But protests have also erupted over other issues, including calls for higher wages, lower taxes, better pensions and easier university entry requirements. The movement's core aim, to highlight the economic frustration and political distrust of poorer working families, still has widespread support."

BBC reports.

"Here’s a thought experiment: where do you end? Not your body, but you, the nebulous identity you think of as your 'self.'"

"Does it end at the limits of your physical form? Or does it include your voice, which can now be heard as far as outer space; your personal and behavioral data, which is spread out across the impossibly broad plane known as digital space; and your active online personas, which probably encompass dozens of different social media networks, text message conversations, and email exchanges?"

From "Where is the boundary between your phone and your mind?/As our online existences become less distinct from ‘real life’, experts raise concern about the growing power of big tech" (The Guardian)(worth a click if only for the nice illustration).

"Some insist we’re a blank slate on which we write what we want/Others say we’re a Kindle book where all we can change is the font."

"I’m not slate nor tablet/I’m more hat and rabbit."

You win the Heisman Trophy and...

I googled the name because I wanted to get a link to somewhere other than The Washington Post for Kyler Murray's decision to go into a baseball, not a football, career. And I thought he sounded like a really sweet guy:

“This is crazy,” Murray said repeatedly during a brief and soft-spoken acceptance speech. He thanked teammates on either side of the ball for putting him in a position to win so many postseason honors. “You make me look so much better than I am,” he said....

Murray called his father, “a legend to me,” and added, “You taught me everything that I know about this game. I honestly feel like you should be up here with me.” He called his mother, “my best friend.”

He teared up while thanking Sooners Coach Lincoln Riley.... “You kept me going. You kept me focused,” Murray said, while Riley leaned forward in his chair in the audience with tears welling in his eyes.....

That was last night. This morning, the news of Kyler Murray was about his "homophobic tweets." Apparently, when he was 15, he used a word ("faggot"?) to taunt his friends. Murray (who's only 21 now) has apologized.

At some point, I think — and this is it — political correctness is itself politically incorrect.

I wish Kyler Murray well in his baseball career. Great choice: baseball!

"When I try to connect with [my 15-year-old daughter], it backfires. A few months ago she cued up 'The Rain Song' by Led Zeppelin..."

"... one of my favorites when I was her age. I told her so, and she didn’t respond. I made the terrible mistake of attempting to play it for her on the acoustic guitar when we got home. She was learning to play the guitar herself, and I thought maybe she’d want to know the chords. She barely stayed for the glissando intro and then fled upstairs. As far as I can tell, she hasn’t listened to Led Zeppelin since. I know. I know. I remember how I treated my mother at that age... But now that I had my own teenage girl, I realized for the first time that my mother was[... t]rying to catch a glimpse of the girl she had given birth to, the full-grown person she had nurtured who was now walking swiftly away from her. ... I no longer saw Paulina in her natural habitat, telling jokes or even crying with those she was close to...."

From "Rediscovering My Daughter Through Instagram/Paulina was as remote as a 15-year-old could be. And then I saw her photography" by Helene Stapinski (NYT).



I felt the coldness of my winter... These are the seasons of emotion....

The difference between reading a book and listening to an audiobook.

Analyzed by a psychology professor, Daniel T. Willingham (who wrote "The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads"), in the NYT:

Although writing lacks symbols for prosody [the pitch, tempo and stress of spoken words], experienced readers infer it as they go.... But the inferences can go wrong, and hearing the audio version — and therefore the correct prosody — can aid comprehension....

That assumes a good narrator. I listen to many audiobooks, and I've found mistakes in prosody. When someone else is imposing their understanding of the meaning of the words, you have the added task — if you bother to do it — of judging whether the reader is getting the right meaning.

It sounds as if comprehension should be easier when listening than reading, but that’s not always true... Although students spent equivalent time with each format, on a written quiz two days later the readers scored 81 percent and the listeners 59 percent.... When we focus, we slow down. We reread the hard bits. We stop and think....

You can pause an audiobook (and rewind and relisten). If the material is difficult, you really should. I usually get the Kindle version of a book and add the audio version, and I listen to the audio while walking but I often then go to the text to find parts I want to experience in the visual form and to think about more (or blog about!). With an audiobook, you might treat it more like music and relisten. If the reader's performance is excellent, it can become like a favorite song. I have some audiobooks I've listened to a hundred times.

So although one core process of comprehension serves both listening and reading, difficult texts demand additional mental strategies. Print makes those strategies easier to use. Consistent with that interpretation, researchers find that people’s listening and reading abilities are more similar for simple narratives than for expository prose. Stories tend to be more predictable and employ familiar ideas, and expository essays more likely include unfamiliar content and require more strategic reading.

This conclusion — equivalence for easy texts and an advantage to print for hard ones — is open to changes in the future. As audiobooks become more common, listeners will gain experience in comprehending them and may improve, and publishers may develop ways of signaling organization auditorily....

The article begins and ends with a focus on something that I think is a silly concern: Whether it's "cheating" to listen to an audiobook.