25 November 2005

Today's reading list

  • The Wilson-Plame-Novak-Rove Blame Game [ via FactCheck.org ]
  • Painfully detailed and dispassionate timeline of what-happened-and-when. Worth several readings.

  • So I says to myself, "Self, what's up with these Googlecounts?"
  • Whilst researching a snowclone, Benjamin Zimmer points out some interesting inconsistencies with Google searches when used to research statistics of language use. For example: the search count for "A" should be equal to the sum of the search counts for "A" "B" and "A" -"B". Instead, the numbers are wildly different. The first search can return thousands more results than the sum of the other two.

  • Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse [via Wikipedia ]
  • I recently had heard several comments suggesting that America did not torture its prisoners. Some people apparently still believe that. With Bush and Cheney double-speaking their way around questions on the military's policy, was I missing something? I don't think so. Major General Antonio Taguba's report from April 2004 states that we committed egregious acts and grave breaches of international law. It also states that 60% of the Abu Ghraib prisoners were not a threat (a point I noted back in June 2004). Why is this forgotten?

[ posted by sstrader on 25 November 2005 at 12:45:00 PM in Language & Literature , Politics , Today's reading list ]