dan collier

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 I did well, but after reading Gladwell’s article, I realize I might have done well on an outdated test.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?”.

Knowledge Sharing Photographic Competition – Creative Commons China held a photo contest and the results are worth seeing. There were three categories: Society, Nature, and Portraits. I linked to translated pages, the original are here and may load faster. Via Joi Ito, who also shares this story concerning his adoptive godfather Timothy Leary.

If I had to pick one photo as the best, Howling winds before the storm is my favorite.

Venice Art Biennial 2007 photos – Lots of nice photos. These are two of my favorite collections.

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Name the 49 Countries in Europe – I’ll give you two that don’t show up on the map: Liechtenstein and Vatican City. Also, name the 50 US states.

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Map of an Operating System – A representation of the layered approach of the OSI Model as implemented in the Linux kernel. This is a case of beauty in the details.

A carving displayed among other more modest ruins in an old church courtyard in downtown Braga, Portugal.
Taken July 6, 2007 1:21 PM.

The video gets funnier as it goes along.

4 suicides – Interesting art on a delicate subject. Blublu.org has lots of great street art photos listed under “Walls“. Here are a few of my favorites(1, 2, 3).

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Joint Failure – I’ve posted before about Andrew Bacevich. In his recent “Ideas” piece for the Boston Globe, he questions the suitability of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as currently established. In this piece he reviews the problem, claiming that the problem started early in the history of JCS.

Although himself a five-star general, Eisenhower railed in private throughout his presidency about members of the Joint Chiefs conspiring to undermine his policies whenever they happened to collide with cherished interests of the military services. His Farewell Address, warning that the “military-industrial complex” could well “endanger our liberties or democratic processes,” amounted to a tacit admission that as commander-in-chief he had lost control of his generals.

The problem more recently is generals that were unable or unwilling to offer honest and forthright advice to policy makers. I heard Bacevich on NPR’s On Point this morning discussing possible alternatives to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Seemingly humble and wise, he appears to be more interested in starting the discussion than providing easy answers. In another recent editorial for the LA Times, he slams the ’08 candidates offering the sound-bite solution of increasing the size of the military to fight fundamentalist terrorism.