Glenn Beck's Socratic Discourse

Finally a serious thinker addresses Glenn Beck: http://beckstudies.blogspot.com/. I highly recommend these well-considered remarks on the important contemporary thinker, Glenn Beck. This blog presents a welcome addition to the nascent field of Beck Studies.

Cutting and Pasting from Google Books

Just thought of a nifty way to copy text from Google Books (say, in one needs to quote an extended passage in a paper).

1. Place the desired page in the viewable portion of the screen.
2. (On a Mac) Crtl+Shift+3 for screen capture.
3. Cut and Paste the portion of text using Preview into a new file, Save As 'pdf.'
4. Open PDF with Adobe Acrobat Pro and use the OCR.
5. Voila!

Neeto.

The good is that I am less likely to mistranscribe text. The bad is that the OCR is not perfect, particularly with transliterated Arabic (though it got Mu'tazalite every time!) so I did have to fix the I~;I which was actually an H.

Why do Dems have so much more academic firepower on the Judiciary committee?

Why is FB so Evil?

I feel like much of the internet has desisted with the evilness arms race. Google and Wikipedia have both been upfront about the alterations they undergo and take precautions not to trample over people's privacy (pace Google Buzz). Why can't FB do the same? Or rather, why does FB believe that the only way to grow its corporation is by exploiting its users when other companies choose to take a different tact?