My Quiet Life

Mark Santow says what I would say about the draft, were I ever to bother:
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Money laundering? Illegal. Loan sharking? Dangerous. Re-selling beanie babies on ebay? Passe. Where is the quick and dirty money these days? Over-billing in the wireless industry, it seems.
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An interesting tidbit from PhysicsWeb:

Fame in science is different to fame in other areas of life according to physicists at Clarkson University in the US. Daniel ben-Avraham and colleagues have shown that the fame of a scientist - as measured by the number of hits on Google - is directly proportional to their merit as measured by the number of research papers they have published. Such a relationship is not found for other groups such as sportsmen or actors (J P Bagrow et al. 2004 arXiv/cond-mat/0404515). The Clarkson team says that the research could shed new light on the science of networks and help researchers working in social sciences and psychology.

This is kinda cool:

Gov. Phil Bredesen signed into law a bill he says could ”help preserve farming as a way of life” in Tennessee.

The legislation encourages private investment in rural technology by allowing the formation of limited liability cooperatives.

Depends on how it’s implemented and used, I suppose, but I am all for community agriculture to compete with Big Food.

An interesting bit of news for the cotton industry:

WASHINGTON, April 26 — Brazil won a preliminary ruling at the World Trade Organization on Monday night that could force the United States to lower the subsidies it pays farmers to grow cotton and, eventually, most subsidized crops.

The decision supports Brazil’s contention that the subsidies paid to American cotton farmers violate international trade rules. A final ruling against the United States could lead to stiff penalties if it fails to change its practices. In another recent case involving steel, President Bush chose to remove subsidies and therefore did not have to face the penalties.

The U.S. plans to appeal, of course, claiming it sets a precedent for other crops. Well, duh. This is great news, as far as I am concerned. For the reason why, see my post about corn subsidies.

Fred Kaplan asks some good questions in Slate on Friday. These questions will be familiar to some of you. (Dennis Kucinich asks them just about every day.)
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The Nashville Scene had an article last week about Harold Ford. Ford is being hailed already as a potential choice of opponent for Bill Frist’s vacant seat in 2006. The article is very lauditory of Ford, painting him as a sort of super-Democrat. However, it’s also fairly irresponsible and in the end, to me, paints a very unflattering portrait of Harold Ford.

Let’s start with a high-level summary of Ford’s place in the political spectrum:
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I have always been perplexed at the anti-cellphone-conversation backlash. Granted there are some situations where talking on a cellphone is rude (movie theatre, for example). But I have seen people deliver the most resentful looks of disgust at people talking on a cellphone in the most innocuous places, including places where it would be perfectly acceptable to be having a face-to-face conversation. Professor Andrew Monk, a researcher at the University of York in the UK, noticed this too:
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Question: Is this really something that belongs in the constitution?

Elderly Tennesseans could get some property tax relief if voters decide to amend the state constitution in 2006.

A constitutional amendment proposed by Sen. Mark Norris, R-Collierville, would freeze property tax amounts that people age 65 and older pay on their residences. It passed the Senate Finance Committee yesterday.

Last time I checked, legislature was able to pass these things called “laws”.

For those of you in the Nashville/Tennessee area, you may be interested to know I’ve created a few scraped RSS feeds for the following sections of The Tennessean:

• Columnists
• Editorials
• Nashville Eye (guest editorials)
• Politics and Government

They are updated every 5 minutes. Let me know if you run into any problems.