The results: Nobody saw it coming when the tournament began, but everybody saw it coming entering the Great 8, I’ll bet. So now we know – one of the four greatest artists of all time is Neil Young. The numbers: #5 Neil Young 62%; #2 The Clash 38%. NY is into the Final Four.

Up next, our search for the greatest Baby Boomer band of all time takes you to the Fillmore region. Hold still – this is going to sting a little.

#1 Led Zeppelin: Listen	#2 Pink Floyd: Listen

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(Note—this is an updated version of a group of posts I last updated about four years ago—so those of you who remember the earlier posts may find some of this familiar.)

Now that Thanksgiving is over, and the Christmas shopping season has kicked in, we need to note that Christmas is coming. Christmas is a very big deal in the Wufnik household. For most people who celebrate Christmas it means the usual things–family, a time to reflect, presents, feeling really full, that sort of thing. But for some of us, it has a deeper, more personal meaning. Specifically, it means “OK, now I get to go out and buy more Christmas music.” I’ve been doing this for an embarrassingly long time, several decades. You know, you buy two or three or four or more of these every year for forty some-odd years and they start piling up. But I can’t help it. I’ve already bought a bunch this year, and I may not be done yet. Full Story »

More from iPhone-only land.

Happy Thanksgiving from your friends at Scholars & Rogues. Let’s go around the table and everybody say what they’re thankful for. I’ll go first.

I, Dr. Slammy, am thankful that the local news shows here in Denver aren’t any dumber than they are. Because if they were, the anchors would be on the set communicating in grunts and taking turns picking lice off each other’s backs.

Your turn.

Welcome to my home Full Story »

Results: And Carlos Santana’s magical Cinderella run to the Great 8 … well, as they say, it’s not the fall that hurts, it’s when you hit the ground. The numbers: #2 Pink Floyd 81%; Santana/Carlos Santana 19%. Pink Floyd advances.

We have reached the Great 8 in our contest to name the greatest band of all time. Let’s begin with the Red Rocks regional final, where our readers’ apparent choice for best punk band ever takes on the lowest remaining seed.

#2 The Clash: Listen	#5 Neil Young: Listen

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As a follow-on to Dr. Denny’s post on Rupert Murdoch way back on 29 August, there have been further developments worth noting in this space. There has been a flurry of headlines the past few weeks over recent comments by Murdoch, who now is making noises about removing News Corp news stories from Google. He’s not alone, apparently—Belo is considering removing some of its stories as well, as is the owner of the Denver Post. These are all entities that have been seeing their print output hit hard by the drop in advertising over the past year or two, coupled with an outright (and possibly accelerating) decline in newspaper sales. And Murdoch’s comments (and those of other publishers) represent some frustration over the fact that Google News aggregates headlines from all news sources without any fee to the source provider. (Yahoo does something similar, I think, but I’m not sure; but no one seems to care about poor Yahoo these days). See this Bloomberg story or this New York Times story for more details. Murdoch’s plan is to block Google from access to News Corp content, and rather make it available only on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. This is an interesting strategy—how likely is it to succeed? Full Story »

Word on the street is that Obama will send 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan. He really stared McChrystal down, eh? It’s expected that he’ll make a public announcement on Tuesday; i’m sure it will be a fine speech. He’ll talk about freedom and how important it is to defend it. He’ll have tough words for Hamid Karzai and corruption in Afghanistan. He’ll tell us that this is all necessary so that the terrorist bogeymen don’t come back and kill us all at the mall. And most importantly, he’ll tell us that this “surge” is temporary; it will facilitate the development of the Afghan National Army and provide security until that body can take on the job of defeating the Taliban.

That is, Mr. Obama will produce grand words that will, hopefully, mask the taste of bullshit. There’s a video going around the internet that you should watch so that you have the right visual for the moment our President tells you about developing the Afghan Army.
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South African track runner Oscar Pistorius, though not a double amputee — he was born without lower legs — has enjoyed great success competing in that class wearing state-of-the-art carbon-fiber prosthetics. After setting world records in the 100, 200, and 400 meters, he sought to move up in weight class, if you will.

Initially, he was prohibited from competing against able-bodied runners on the grounds that, because they were a little too state-of-the-art, his prosthetics gave him an unfair advantage. (Of course, he was still allowed to crush other double-amputees.) Ultimately, though, he was cleared to compete against all runners. But the unfair-advantage issue is not a closed book. Full Story »

Results: Those of you expecting surprises, please move along. Nothing to see here. The numbers: #1 The Beatles 67%; #4 Elvis Costello 33%. The Beatles advance to the Great Eight.

Up next, our search for the greatest Baby Boomer band of all time takes you to the Fillmore region, where the ToR’s upset king (and our lone remaining unseeded contestant) faces The Wall.

#2 Pink Floyd: Listen	Santana/Carlos Santana: Listen

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There has been a pretty steady drumbeat of news coming out of Latin America recently surrounding the possibility of war between Venezuela and Colombia. In most of this media coverage, the blame here has been placed pretty squarely on Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s president, who is portrayed as a possible warmonger against our valiant ally in the War on Drugs (TM), Colombia. However, recent developments have raised the somewhat alarming prospect of further destabilization in the region, and, not surprisingly, the US seems to be behind it all.

The story is fairly straightforward–the US and Colombia have signed a new agreement that would expand the ability of the US to station forces on Colombian territory, and the range of what possible military operations might be. Full Story »

Oh dear: Newtongate: the final nail in the coffin of Renaissance and Enlightenment ‘thinking’

It’s now clear that “Sir” Isaac Newton and a series of co-conspirators were guilty of several crimes against science, including:

• Conspiring to avoid public scrutiny
• Insulting dissenting scientists and equating them with holocaust deniers
• Manipulation of evidence
• Knowingly publishing scientific fraud
• Suppression of evidence
• Abusing the peer review system
• Insulting their critics

As this analysis makes clear: Full Story »

The first human-like creature to pick up a pointed stick and use it as a tool to slay another creature changed everything.  Instead of waiting for the accumulation of random genetic variations to impart gradually improving biological tools our creature could create tools itself.

The advantage to humans of being able to organise, teach and use weapons to catch food may initially have been slight.  That marginal advantage has allowed a single species to migrate, settle and dominate their entire planet; something unprecedented in all of Earth history.

The study of human evolution covers a period of six million years, during which a semi-upright-walking woodland ape eventually developed tools, learning, and culture, and survived ice-ages, earthquakes and climate disruption.  Adding to the complexity of this epic tale is that there appears to have been overlap between at least two intelligent species of human-like creatures in the last 50,000 years. Full Story »

When we think of art, we don’t generally think about the functional pieces of our lives. I wouldn’t claim that my grubby Levis – torn, covered in dried paint and stained with automobile grease and ground-in grass – are art, for example. But as our “What’s it Wednesday” feature has shown, everyday functional objects can be made into art by the perspective of a photographer or an artist looking to create art, but does that mean that the object itself was art? Perhaps, but probably not.

But sometimes functional objects are art. The most common example is architecture – eminently functional, but created to be beautiful or disturbing or awesome or weird, depending on the desires of the architect and the customer. Still, most people wouldn’t consider something as mundane as an automatic pencil as art. Allow me to broaden your mind. Full Story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — As you no doubt know, deterrence is the product of a balance of power — nuclear arsenals, in other words, that are roughly equal. Constrained by the eye-for-an-eye principle, but to the umpteenth power, states armed with nuclear weapons, such as the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and India and Pakistan today, keep their nukes holstered.

But terrorists, according to conventional thinking, are immune to deterrence. If they ever obtained nuclear weapons, they’d suffer few qualms about using them. First, they’re secure in the knowledge that they’re ostensibly stateless. It’s unlikely that the state which they’ve attacked with nuclear weapons, such as the United States, would retaliate against the state which served as their command center for the attack. (Can’t speak for another possible target, Israel, though.) Full Story »

In case you were unaware, hackers got into the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) servers and published hundreds to thousands of documents and private communications from CRU climate scientists that pertain to climate disruption. And the climate disruption denial and conservative blogs have subsequently gone completely apeshit over it. The Wonk Room has a few of the better quotes from the deniers:

“If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW,” says the Telegraph’s James Delingpole.

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey claims the emails discuss “repetitive, false data of higher temperatures.”

The National Review’s Chris Horner salivates, “The blue-dress moment may have arrived.”

“The crimes revealed in the e-mails promise to be the global warming scandal of the century,” blares Michelle Malkin.

The Australia Herald-Sun’s Andrew Bolt claims the emails are “proof of a conspiracy which is one of the largest, most extraordinary and most disgraceful in moderrn [sic] science.”

So, do these emails and documents represent proof of a “conspiracy” and “scandal”? At this point it seems highly unlikely, and the more that people look at the illegally-obtained emails and documents, the less likely it will become. Here’s why. Full Story »

Let’s say you’re Sen. John Dough. You’re running for re-election. You need money. Often, you have to travel to where the money is to get it. Say, in Los Angeles. So you fly. But you wish to avoid flying commercial. Too much time wasted. Too many hassles, mingling among the proletariat in lines and in the damn crowded plane.

Back in the good ol’ days, you’d merely text your old pal I.B. Loaded, CEO of Amalgamated Rules Bender Inc. Loaded’s given you tons of cash over the years for your campaigns. He, his wife and children, his employees, his vendors — all have seen the wisdom of slipping dough to you, your official campaign committee, and, of course, your “Leadership PAC.”

And, of course, Loaded would have his Gulfstream V (I mean, rather, his corporate-owned private jet) fly into Reagan National to pick you up (after, of course, a taxpayer-paid car and driver deposited you, your luggage, and golf clubs there). Loaded himself would be on the plane to entertain you and see to your every need. After you’d both consumed a few hits from Loaded’s stash of 40-year-old Glen Garioch, he’d probably steer the conversation into an arcane tax-policy issue that would likely benefit Amalgamated Rules Bender Inc. to the tune of millions of dollars.

You’d be the only passenger on a sophisticated jet costing $59 million with an hourly operating cost of about $7,000. Yet, before 2007, you’d only pay the cost of first-class airfare to LA — maybe a grand or less, depending on discounts. Then Congress shut the door to corporate-provided air travel by passing the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act.

And this week, those idiots at the Federal Election Commission reopened the door.
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Results: It was only a matter of time: there are now officially no Gen Xers left in the ToR, as a great Boomer legend waxes U2 … by nearly a two-to-one margin. Wow, on so many levels. The numbers: #5 Neil Young 65%; #1 U2 35%. NY moves on to the Great Eight.

Up next, our search for the greatest Baby Boomer band of all time takes you to the Hollywood Bowl region where the heavy favorite awaits another challenger. Can Elvis pull off the biggest upset ever?

#1 The Beatles: Listen	#4 Elvis Costello: Listen

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Results: I know. It’s only rock & roll. But I like it. So, too, do our voters, although it was a pretty good race from wire to wire. The numbers: #2 The Rolling Stones 54%; #3 David Bowie 46%. The Stones move on to the Great Eight.

Up next, our search for the greatest band of all time takes you to the Red Rocks region. In the red corner, a band that’s had the same lineup since day one. In the blue corner, an artist who has established his greatness in three different incarnations. Get your thinking caps on, kiddies.

#1 U2: Listen	#5 Neil Young: Listen

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It has been my honor to host these weekly Wednesday gatherings for nearly a year. Full Story »