ciphergoth

The time is coming for lovelybug to get a new Android mobile phone. My feeling is that it should be at least the same resolution as my HTC Desire (ie 480x800), and should be able to be a USB host - ie it should be possible to connect things like digital cameras to it and copy off the photos. Apart from that the most important consideration is cost, though a better battery life would be nice.

Any recommendations? Should we get a phone with a contract, or buy the phone separately and get eg this £10/month deal from 3?

Thanks!

Update: damn, very sorry to hear the USB host thing isn't going to work :-(

Newspapers everywhere are finding it progressively harder to make any money, and their future is in doubt. Lots of people have opinions on what should happen next, or what newspapers should do. I'm interested in a different question here - leaving aside all normative discussion of what we might like or not like, what do people think is actually going to happen?

-- from then last page of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Visiting Cambridge this weekend, would be lovely to see some of you in the Elm Tree for GothSoc tonight!

This is not at all meant as an argument against robustly disagreeing with public people - I think that's very often a good thing - but:

It seems to me that when you criticize public intellectual A for arguing X, you implicitly criticize all those who argue X. If I say that Ray Comfort is an idiot for arguing that the shape of bananas demonstrates the existence of God, I'm not saying that all theists are idiots, but I *am* saying that anyone who similarly argues that the shape of bananas demonstrates the existence of God is being idiotic.

I'd go further and say that this is a key role of debate among public intellectuals, that often we attack a particular published position not just because we disagree with the individual but because we want a response for all those who share their position.

Am I mistaken?

I've been reading The Winterval Myth, and wondering, what's the left-wing equivalent? What's a story that

• is told over and over
• to support a left-wing narrative
• as if it were an unquestioned fact, a simple matter of public record
• when it is in fact incontrovertably false
• and has been utterly debunked in detail?

Obviously I tend to think that those I've got more sympathy for have a more fact-based way of talking, but it would be odd if there were no examples. There must be some program that a specific named Tory council implemented, only they never did, or some awful thing that Thatcher or Cameron never in fact said (or whose meaning is so utterly changed by the context that once you knew the context you couldn't possibly apply the original meaning to it) or some terrible "fact" about nuclear power that isn't a fact at all. Anyone able to link me up?

Thanks!

Have bought a Dreamwidth paid account for just one month, because I miss being able to post polls. So to start with one key question:



I believe that LiveJournal users can vote in DreamWidth polls using OpenID, but it would be good to see that confirmed!

Thinking of going to Inferno at the Electric Ballroom on Friday evening - first time out clubbing in a long long time!

via Pharyngula:

Unable to bear any longer the tedious work of seeking out all the instances of these two comment types so I can delete them, I have decided that from now on I will hunt down the relevant commenters and kill them.

I realize that it is unusual for a popular science blog to launch upon a policy of killing its own readers. That is why I thought an explicit warning should go up on the site first. This is that warning.

Boring preposition jokes: new termination policy, Language Log