Maybe I’ve become old and cranky, but this is patently ridiculous:

Abit has just unleashed their first “Fatal1ty” motherboard. For those who don’t know, Fatal1ty is the name used by 19-year old Jonathan Wendel, one of the most respected gamers in the world.

Early in his gaming career, Fatal1ty became the number 1 ranked Quake 3 player in the world. This was followed by wins 3 years in a row at CPL competing in Quake 3, Alien vs. Predator 2, and Unreal Tournament 2003. Fatal1ty also won Quakecon 2002 and became the world’s first Doom 3 champion at Quakecon 2004.

Call me back when he starts acting like most responsible 19-year-olds and goes to fricking college—or at least drops the stupid l33t handle.

The best part is the “badass” pose he strikes in the included photo. That’s worth the click-through on its own.

I have to agree with Amber Taylor, and disagree with Will Baude.

If one wishes to be asked on a second date, one must in some way indicate the desire to be asked. The easiest way to do this is a goodnight kiss. If one is, as Will writes, “shy, or merely very very reluctant to make bold moves,” then I recommend learning to say the words “Can we see each other again sometime?”

It's hard enough to ask a person out on a first date and face the possibility of rejection. One should not have to do so for the second.

I haven’t been in the dating scene for about eleven years, but when I was, I always interpreted no kiss as “kiss off.”

Dear lord, what a miserable display the Rebels put on today. BigJim blames the coach for the downward spiral, and I think it goes back to a decision I’ve mentioned before:

I think a lot of what we’re seeing is the result of Cutcliffe not playing Spurlock enough last season—I don’t think Spurlock saw a single snap in an SEC game until Saturday—and some of it is growing pains with working with what Spurlock’s strengths are. Flatt, who does a lot of the same stuff Manning did (not to mention having another half-foot on Spurlock), is actually a better fit in the playcalling “package.”

The Spurlock QB problems led directly to fumbling around with this 2.5 quarterback system (mostly featuring Flatt and Lane, with Spurlock coming in apparently solely so Cutcliffe could hear some boos from the stands*) which has been generally unsuccessful except in its debut against a fairly mediocre South Carolina squad.

The question still, however, is whether the Rebels can expect to find anyone better on the market. Spurrier isn’t coming to Oxford—the golf sucks. Petrino will be in BCS land next year. The best that can be hoped for is probably an assistant off of a decent staff, and there is going to be a lot of competition for those guys even in the SEC (with both Florida and South Carolina apparently looking for replacements, and LSU likely to be looking too if Nick Saban goes to the Dolphins, as many expect).

In Thursday’s Clarion-Ledger, former U.S. representative David Bowen distills some advice for the national Democrats that’s been floating around the punditocracy over the past week:

The Democratic Party could once again become America’s majority party if it chose a more conservative path on social issues while remaining liberal on economic and governmental issues. That combination is sometimes called populism, an unbeatable combination.

It is not necessary for Democratic nominees to abandon a pro-choice or stem-cell-research position. Just abandon partial birth and late-term abortion. Respect and defend gay Americans, but abandon gay marriage. Don’t abandon your consistent support for African-Americans, but modify race-based discrimination. Don’t think you have to speak in tongues or teach Sunday school to get the evangelical vote, but do show respect and understanding for all people of faith and demonstrate some faith of your own.

I’m not entirely sure populism is “unbeatable” (ask Ronnie Musgrove, the highlights of whose unsuccessful reelection campaign were joining Haley Barbour in pathetically pandering by offering to take on Roy Moore’s Ten Commandments monument and running away from the unpopular state flag referendum he helped engineer), and referring to affirmative action as “race-based discrimination” probably won’t play well with the left-wing set, but nonetheless Bowen may have a point.

It turns out a friend from ICPSR is passing through Jackson next weekend, so I’ve reached my “LSU-Ole Miss fever” tipping point and decided to save the hassle and expense of a trip to Red Stick. So do me a favor and take my ticket off my hands. Thanks!

Or five bottles, to be precise. Following up on their successful turkey and gravy soda from last year, the Jones Soda company is selling a holiday five-pack: turkey and gravy soda, cranberry soda, mashed potato and butter soda, greenbean casserole soda, and fruitcake soda. (þ apostropher.)

The sociology department at the University of Wisconsin is 22 times bigger than the political science department at Millsaps (or, perhaps more “apples-to-apples,” 11 times bigger than our sociology/anthropology department). I think (not being bored enough to count faculty in the sciences, which both soc/anth and polysci are at Millsaps) it’s bigger than the whole sciences division here. Yowzah.

Both* of us polysci types, incidentally, got our Ph.D.s in “red” states (and at SEC schools, to boot), for those of you playing along at home.

You know, I was all for this whole Iraq War thing… but, goshdarn it, Madonna’s opinion pushed me over the edge. No Blood For Oil! But, you know, they make the plastic in CDs from oil… Help me, I’m confused! (þ: memeorandum)

Apparently I’m easily amused:

The search for “Killer Grease Munkowitz” turns up nothing. Or at least did before this post was indexed by Google.

Mungowitz End points in the direction of an interesting Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed by Mark Bauerlein, an English prof at Emory, arguing that left-wing dominance in the academy is detrimental to intellectual discourse.

I tend to think that it’s important in the classroom to ensure that everyone’s ideas or preconceptions are challenged; ironically, I think this makes me look like a flaming liberal in front of my (quite conservative, with a few exceptions) Intro class and something of a greedy capitalist bastard in front of my (bleeding-heart liberal) Con Law class—of course, Methods makes me look like a sadistic bastard who likes to torture students with math, but that’s to be expected, and rather non-ideological (at least outside of The Discipline) to boot. So be it.

I can’t say I’m particularly disappointed to see John Ashcroft getting shown the door at DoJ, although his caricature as the bogeyman of America’s civil liberties has been just a tad exaggerated over the years.

Free hint to the Palestinians: you’re supposed to hire the actor to pretend to be the guy before he falls into the irreversible coma.

Yeargh!

It’s apparently Renee Zellweger day on the blogroll; Sheila O’Malley wonders why Ms. Zellweger has a career, while Alex Knapp thinks she* looks better with a few extra pounds on her frame.

This half of Signifying Nothing is agnostic on both questions.

Tyler Cowen wonders why health care sucks:

It remains a mystery, why private health insurance has performed badly in holding down costs. Companies compete fiercely to shed costly patients but they do less to invest in reputations for reliability and trustworthiness. Similarly, it is a puzzle why HMOs don’t do more to invest in good reputations; lately Kaiser has moved in this direction.

All of this, I suspect, can be traced directly to the disconnect between health care consumption and health care customers; employers contract with health care plans as a fringe benefit for their employees (which Cowen has noted before), but they have no real incentive to make sure the health insurance is good (although there certainly is an incentive to make its cost as low as possible), except to the extent that a good health insurance plan can attract new employees; but, once employed, few people change jobs solely because their health insurance sucks (and nobody in a cartelized labor market, like academe, does so), so there’s little incentive to improve health care coverage.

It seems to me the sensible course forward is to couple HSAs with incentives for employers to provide a health insurance purchasing account (in lieu of employer contributions), which employees could use to purchase a health insurance plan in a competitive market. This would align the customer-consumer interest much better than the present system.

Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh helpfully rounds up all the vote fraud allegations in one place, while Slashdot’s CmdrTaco continues to parody DemocraticUnderground. (Oh, you mean he’s serious? Never mind.)

I’ll just join the bandwagon by complaining that I had to stand in line for 30 minutes in a fire station that was open to the elements at both ends to cast my votes, zero of which turned out to be pivotal. I blame Diebold; they had nothing to do with the electronic voting machines in Hinds County, but I think they’re vicariously to blame somehow anyway.

Looking at the red/blue county map, it’s pretty easy to correlate most of the blue counties with major urban population centers.

One thing that has me mystified, though, is the neat blue line bisecting otherwise red Alabama horizontally, seemingly following the path of Highway 80, as far as I can tell, and bleeding over slightly into Mississippi and Georgia on either side. Montgomery, Alabama’s capital and second largest city, is in the middle of the blue strip, but what about the rest of it? What’s the explanation of Alabama’s “blue belt”?

Update: Chris explains in comments that Alabama's "blue belt" is Alabama's black belt.

Hugh Hewitt thinks the Bainbridge-Corner campaign to push Arlen Specter out of the judiciary chairmanship is a really bad idea. Perhaps if they won’t listen to me or Hei Lun of BTD, maybe they’ll listen to him (þ: Glenn Reynolds).

Update: Ok, so much for that idea. These guys at NRO really don’t get it, do they? Meanwhile, James Dobson has joined the pile-on (þ: How Appealing), while Michael Totten is unimpressed to say the least.

I tend to agree with James Joyner and John Cole that putting creationism in the public school curriculum on-par with evolution is a thoroughly dopey idea.

That said, Jim Lindgren points out that the textbook on evolution in question at the Scopes trial was a load of racist, eugenicist trash—the sort of stuff that’s fortunately marginalized (though perhaps not marginalized enough in Hart’s case) in today’s society.

Prof. Peter Smith of Cambridge University has posted sixteen chapters of his work-in-progress on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and related mathematical/logical/philosophical goodness in PDF format, beautifully typeset using LaTeX.

I’ve read the first twelve chapters, which take you through Gödel’s first and second incompleteness theorems, Tarski’s theorem on the undefinability of truth, and (the most surprising result, IMO), Löb’s theorem.

You’ll need a background in symbolic logic to understand it. If you don’t know your ∀s from your ∃s, you’ll be lost.

Smith takes the opposite approach from Boolos and Jeffrey, taking you through Gödel’s theorems using only the apparatus of primative recursion, saving full-blown recursive function theory and other topics in computability theory for later.

It’s been a while (about seven years) since I’ve been through the material, but I learned a lot of stuff I didn’t pick up the first time around.

(þ Brian Weatherson.)

Matt Welch notes the irony of a wine-sipping, BMW driving, California law professor lecturing liberals on “elitism”.

Prof. Bainbridge responds to Welch with “I know you are, but what am I?”

Racist and eugenics advocate James Hart garnered 59,602 votes in Tennessee’s 8th Congressional district, 25.8% of the total vote. (Final results for all Tennessee U.S. House elections.)

Of course, I know that only means that nobody pays attention to Congressional races in uncompetitive, gerrymandered districts, and almost everyone who voted for him did so only because he was in the Republican column on the ballot.

Still, it’s pretty sad.

Jim Leitzel at ViceSquad points out an unusual intersection between liquor laws and ballot referendums in Chicago. In Chicago, individual precincts can vote themselves dry in referendums, or even vote to outlaw sales of liquor at a specific address in the precinct.

Here are some examples from this year’s ballot. Ward 11, precinct 35, voted, 178 to 88, to forbid the sale of liquor at 4220 South Halsted Street.

I think it’s important to point out that there was no surge of evangelical voters for Bush that made the difference in the election. It simply wasn’t there. The gains Bush saw came as a result of terrorism. That’s what the numbers say.

Maybe I'm missing something, but based on my read of the exit polls, the religious right had a significant impact on this election. White evangelicals were 23% of the electorate, an increase of +9 points from 2000! They broke 78% Bush, 21% Kerry. Is a 9 point increase insignificant?

Bad news for my co-blogger as my employer’s football team beats his alma mater’s, 28–19. Congratulations to the Millsaps Majors (4–4, 3–2) on getting back to .500 after two consecutive road wins, heading into next Saturday’s final game against #6 Trinity (8–1, 5–0).