The truly sad part is, I think I would buy this.

So why are massive areas of human experience, arguably the most important ones, held to be outside its purview? Why do questions of right and wrong automatically default to answers based on musty tomes of poorly-understood, frequently-mistranslated non sequiturs? Can a rational, scientific approach instead give us a basis for morality? Of course it can.

Objectivism provides us with the crudest first-order approximation of this concept: the choice that minimizes harm is the right one. One can easily conjure up a decision for which it fails (there may be a logical case to be made for the death penalty over life imprisonment, for example, even though it requires one death instead of none) but in most day-to-day situations it holds up just fine. “Thou shalt not kill” isn’t going anywhere.

Anyway, it’s nice to see that I’m not alone in this. One of these years I really have to see if I can wrangle an invitation to TED.

It is the position, generally speaking, of our intellectual community that while we may not like this – we might think of this as wrong in Boston or Palo Alto – who are we to say that the proud denizens of an ancient culture are wrong to force their wives and daughters to live in cloth bags? Who are we to say even that they’re wrong to beat them with lengths of steel cable or throw battery acid in their faces if they decline the privilege of being smothered in this way?

Who are we NOT to say this?

Thai “red shirts” defiant after 21 die in clashes

I’m going to hell.

To give everyone budget parity, only movies released since 1990 are included, and to ensure good statistics (and keep Spike Lee’s dataset from being massive) only movies with more than 10,000 IMDb ratings are included.

I realize this is a bit of trainwreck, but if you study it for a moment some interesting trends actually become apparent. For starters, only two directors’ lines have positive slopes, and Fincher’s is essentially flat. Wes Anderson, however, could apparently direct the greatest movie ever made, given $345 million. Contrast that with Kevin Smith, who could helm the worst movie in history for a mere $142 million.

Another point worth noting is that the y-intercepts of the trend lines actually bracket a fairly narrow range, from 6.92 (Michael Bay) to 8.28 (Quentin Tarantino). And these two directors bring me to my last observation, and maybe a bit of insight into what’s wrong with Hollywood. Their curve fits exhibit what I would imagine to be the typical Hollywood trend of higher budgets corresponding to lower overall quality, although their slopes aren’t nearly as steep as some of the bigger names (Spielberg and Lee). In fact, if you disregard the nauseating outlier that is Pearl Harbor, they both trend within their own fairly narrow “quality bands” of a little over a point each, although of course there’s no overlap. Michael Bay’s best is rated lower than Tarantino’s worst. And yet the most a studio has ever thrown at Tarantino is $70 million. Michael Bay has only headed up one movie under that mark.

So, why does Hollywood reward mediocrity? I don’t know. Does Hollywood reward mediocrity? You bet your ass.

Three of the four words on this tag are lies.

The problem basically is this: even with my tax dollars, the airlines are apparently unable to turn a profit. So they decided to start charging people to check bags. Consequently, everyone stopped checking bags. So now there is no longer enough room on the plane for all the carry-on luggage. Especially when the plane is full – or, technically, more than full. (Sidebar: How hard is it to count the fucking seats, and only sell that many tickets?) Of course, two of my four flights were actually not full; once we all got seated the overhead compartments were totally empty. They didn’t care about that argument either. From which I’m forced to conclude that this policy has nothing to do with the bags themselves.

The simple solution would be to return to the status quo and allow people to check bags for free. But that doesn’t help keep your company from hemorrhaging money, so the airlines decided to go a different way. Now they make passengers wait in a freezing jetway, in the hopes that some will just pony up the cash to avoid the hassle. I call that a shakedown. The airline calls it “valet carry-on service”.

1. This is not a “carry-on” bag. I wanted it to be a carry-on bag, but you wouldn’t let me. It’s a checked bag.
2. This is not “valet” service. A valet is someone who parks your car for you, not someone who walks up and takes your car away before you can park it yourself. Actually, there is an automotive analogy for that situation, but it isn’t valet service. It’s carjacking.

Fuck you, “valet” “carry-on” baggage.