dan collier

’08 Candidates on Executive Power – The Boston Globe elicited responses from candidates for president about executive power. You can look at answer in a couple different ways, but direct comparison seems best for some of them.

Does the Constitution permit a president to detain US citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants?

Does the president have inherent powers under the Constitution to conduct surveillance for national security purposes without judicial warrants, regardless of federal statutes?

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Who said what about whom? – The New York Times has this visualization tool to see which candidates other candidates are talking about the most.

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The Post-Steroid Record Book Annotation System – Roger Clemens may claim he never used performance enhancing drugs, but he’s guilty of a few of these.

The Official YFSF Record Book Annotation System

* = Steroids
! = Amphetamines
$ = Gambling
|| = Cocaine
~ = Alcohol
? = Before integration
# = Before expansion
. = Dead ball era
? = Wore glasses
† = Crazy religious freak

My uncle gave me this photo from a research trip he captained. I don’t think he took the photo.

He tells me it is a spiny lump sucker, better known as an ugly. But not an ugly baby because apparently this fish is full grown.

Click on the photo to see it full size. The detail is worth seeing.

Design for Asia Awards 2007 – Business Week has a photo set of the winning entries. I would have given it to the camera, about which they write “It evokes the days when cameras lasted a generation with its retro look and feel”.

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Chinese Kids Get Foreign Toys – Time magazine has an article on an interesting trend. In my house it has been a long standing battle against collecting more and more cheap Chinese plastic toys. We last bought a Chinese toy probably in early spring.

About a month ago, I googled Lego to find out where they are manufactured. Jaxon will soon be happy to learn they are made in Denmark and Czech Republic, and decorated in Denmark, Czech Republic, Mexico and the US.

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Race and IQ, cont. – More Malcom Gladwell on genetics and IQ. A good one page summary of the 4 page article I linked to.

Mobile Phone Photo Contest – Boston.com had a mobile phone photo contest. The winner is pretty good, but I think i liked Boston at night best. Here is the best photo I’ve taken on a mobile phone.

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Cagle Cartoons is an editorial cartoon syndicator. They represent cartoonists in the US and internationally, and they take the helpful step of labeling cartoons “Con” or “Lib” (making it easier to ignore the liberals because earnestness is not funny). Here is a decent Hillary Clinton cartoon. A British cartoonist sums up the dollar woes, and a Swede comments on the Russian elections.

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None of the Above – Malcolm Gladwell, the bi-racial author and writer for The New Yorker magazine, wrote an interesting article about genetics and IQ. The topic is back in the news with the recent disparaging and ironic comments about Africans by James Watson, co-discover of DNA. The immutable nature of IQ lost credibility with a recent study suggesting human evolution is speeding up.

I took an IQ test in 6th grade, I was 13 years old, and I found the results a couple years ago. I think it was WISC III, but it might have been WISC II. I did well, but after reading Gladwell’s article, I realize I might have done well on an outdated test. I remember the test clearly, but my overwhelming memory of the event was walking out of the almost two hour long test mentally exhausted and thinking “They think they know something about me from that?”.

Der Spiegel Online, the largest European weekly magazine, has an interesting story about the recently concluded negotiations concerning the fate of Kosovo’s unhappy union with Serbia. The US, apparently not yet threatened by Vermont secessionists, is in favor of independence for Muslim-majority Kosovo. A two-state solution is also supported by 26 of the 27 EU member states. Not suprisingly, Russia is allied with the Slavic Serbians and objects to self-declared independence.

The implications of self-declared independence for Kosovo are both big and small. In former Yugoslavian territory Bosnia-Herzegovina, twelve years after the Dayton Agreement ended the war an EU envoy still governs alongside local representation and ethnic Serbian separatists threaten the long-term future of the nation. In Kosovo, at the very least, NATO would continue to provide military security. Meanwhile, in European countries dealing with secessionist groups, like Spain, Belgium, and Russia, the outcome will either weaken or strengthen the independence movements. While the situation may not draw as much attention as nuclear arsenals in Pakistan or Iran, it is worth remembering that the first and last major European armed conflicts of the twentieth started in the Balkans.

On the first page of the Spiegel article, there is this interesting German perspective on resurgent German foreign clout:

It’s rare that the European Union chooses a single diplomat to represent its interests. When it comes to the Middle East conflict or the Iranian nuclear program, the Germans always have a seat at the table, but so do other countries. Sometimes it’s a preventative measure designed to ensure that Germany, Europe’s dominant economic power, doesn’t overshadow the prestige-hungry British, French and Italians. But despite their neighbors’ fears, the truth is that the Germans have no qualms about being part of a collective endeavor.

Kosovo, though, is a different story. The war over the small, poor Serbian province in the spring of 1999 marked a turning point for German foreign policy. For the first time since its establishment in 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany took part in an armed conflict.

In a related serious but more amusing dispute, Greece and Macedonia, another former Yugoslavian nation, continue to fight over the name Macedonia.

An update about the Money magazine “Millionaires-in-Chief” article I wrote about a couple days ago. The article is now up at CNN Money. Here is the text, and here is the more interesting part: “Where they got it… and where it goes.”