Posts by Zachary Johnson

Well, 1-8 anyway, and this is only if you ignore “Brian Eno & David Byrne” up there (which I’d argue should just be combined with #1 the Talking Heads, unarguably the best band in music’s long history).

Oh, and #3 only works if I’m allowed to combine Sunset Rubdown with Wolf Parade (#10 on the 6 months list).

BTW, if you’re not on last.fm, WTF? It’s great. Joel (browndotjoel) and I (indiemaps) are neighbors — not to mention friends — up in there.

Snuff, nasal snuff, is pretty alright. My buddy Care Bear recently exposed me to it. If you’ve “lived” this long without it: snuff is a finely ground tobacco product, typically perfumed or mentholated, meant to be inhaled through the nose, not snorted, and certainly not dipped, in your mouth, as the famed doctor-farmer Brain was wont to.

Snuff was all the rage in the 18th Century, but has since dropped off. There were brief resurgences of popularity in the 1930s and 1980s; apparently we’re in another minor snuff renaissance. And why shouldn’t we be? Snuff is still provided at public cost (since smoking is not allowed) in the U.S. Senate chambers and the British House of Commons (few members of either apparently partake). Prominent snuffers include Ben Franklin and my friend Care Bear.

Why should hipsters be doing snuff? The fact that you are asking such critical questions suggests that you are not yourself a hipster. But seriously folks.

• Snuff is incredibly good for you

  Hipsters like to take part in sporting events, like kickball, and to jump really high in the air, during freestyle walking competitions. Snuff is slightly better for you than cigarettes, unless you hate nose cancer.

• Snuff is old-timey

  Look at those tins!

• Snuff seems European or at least foreign

  Though the U.S. is cool again, you never know when we’ll elect another yahoo. Best to have some European dry snuff on hand to even out the rough patches.

• Snuff is cheap as sin

  Sin is cheap, dirt cheap. Just like snuff. Most of the hipsters I see in my neighborhood seem to be quite wealthy. But others, in places like Rockford or St. Louis may not be so fortunate. A tin of snuff costs about the same locally (much cheaper online) as a pack of cigs, but lasts a regular user much longer.

• Snuff makes you feel like you can fly

  You know, just like cigarettes. Seriously, try it. It will make your nose burn and you will cry. Once you’ve learned how to do it right, your nose will burn but you will only cry a little bit.

I really don’t get why snuff isn’t more popular. You can do it in bars and on airplanes. It’s the ultimate tobacco novelty product; I recommend it for your next party. Yet it’s also the only way I could ever see consuming tobacco regularly (not that I am, yet).

Ladies, gentlemen, Daniel Marsh, April Johnson:

I deposited my thesis last Friday, meaning I’m done and set to receive my M.S. in Cartography (”the Degree of Champions”). You may have heard that I was going to D.C. this summer to be an intern at the Post. Plans have changed, and I’ve taken a job with Universal Mind, a sweet company that makes rich internet apps, including a couple cutting edge mapping/geoviz apps. Technically, I’m a “Software Engineer”, but I’ll be doing a lot of cartographic and infoviz consulting while I get up to speed on Flex. I start June 2nd.

I can work from anywhere, so Lauren and I are sticking around Madison for the summer, and then moving in August, probably to Seattle.

I opened my iTunes Top 25 Most Played list for (I think) the first time since I bought this new MacBook (last November). I was shocked to find that all 25 of the tracks were by the same band: Beirut. I tried to export the list easily, to either plain text or XML (for your benefit), but neither sufficed. I reproduce my Top 5 Most Played below:

1. Forks and Knives (La Fete) — 71 plays
2. St. Apollonia
3. The Penalty
4. Guyamas Sonora
5. Prenzlauerberg — 47 plays

BTW, my 25th song had 30 plays. Shocking, I guess, that all 25 would be by the same band. Shocking, that is, to those who’ve never heard them, or those who don’t stay up very late tippling and programming. I wonder if others have ever seen their entire Top 25 Most Played lists dominated by a single band.

…you listened to “People of the Sun”?

Still so good after all these years.

Well, OK, maybe not number 9.

The McCain Way: Attack Republicans (A Top Ten List…) — posted on Mitt Romney’s official site. My favorite:

‘Are you calling me stupid?’ Sen. Chuck Grassley once inquired during a debate with McCain over the fate of the Vietnam MIAs, according to a source who was present. ‘No,’ replied McCain, ‘I’m calling you a f—ing jerk!’

And from the Why the Hell Would Romney Post this on his Website Department:

8. Sen. McCain Attacked Vice President Cheney. MCCAIN: “The president listened too much to the Vice President … Of course, the president bears the ultimate responsibility, but he was very badly served by both the Vice President and, most of all, the Secretary of Defense.” (Roger Simon, “McCain Bashes Cheney Over Iraq Policy,” The Politico, 1/24/07)

The NY Times has a cool article and slideshow about the resurgent popularity of brewed coffee. That’s as opposed to (or perhaps, as a complement to) the supposed “third wave” of espresso coffee that is still being enjoyed (naked portafilters, macchiatos, ristretto shots, etc.). The article focuses on both the Clover (which I blogged about here) and syphon or vacuum pot brewers (which I blogged about here). I haven’t gotten out my vacuum pot in over a year. Perhaps this morning!

concerning xiu xiu’s “Support Our Troops Oh!“

Rarely can one quote a whole song’s lyrics in a blog entry. But Xiu Xiu’s “Support Our Troops Oh!” is so vacuous that its “message” about the Iraq war can be seen in full below:

Did you know you were going to shoot
off the top of a four year old girl’s head
And look across her car-seat down into her skull
And see into her throat and did you know
that her dad would say to you,
Please sir, can I take her body home?
Oh wait, you totally did know… that that would happen
Cause you’re a jock who was too stupid and too greedy
And too unmotivated to do anything else but still be
The biggest and still do what other people tell you to do
You did it to still be a winner

You shot your grenade launcher into peoples’ windows and
Into the doors of peoples’ houses
But you wanted to shoot it into someone just to watch them blow up
Why should I care if you get killed?

Is this sickening to you? I hope so. And I like Xiu Xiu. Obviously they have a right to oversimplify complex geopolitical situations and psychological motives as much as they’d like, but does it have to be this bad? Don’t get me wrong — I like the track. Much like I like the work of Leni Riefenstahl, but reject everything it stands for or suggests. Indeed, as someone who does appreciate the art of Xiu Xiu, I feel I have to repudiate the glaring stupidity of “Support Our Troops Oh”.

I hope these lyrics are obviously stupid. One particular line stands out, though: “cause you’re a jock who was too stupid and too greedy…” Was Jamie Stewart serious here? Did he really believe that it was greedy jocks who were enlisting in our military? Isn’t the standard line quite the opposite?– that it is the underprivileged, largely minorities, who are forced or compelled into service?

One could — but shouldn’t — make a broader point here, about leftist actors and musicians simplifying issues and helping lead to a stultified public debate. I say shouldn’t because this is just one song. One really stupid song.

Listen here to Xiu Xiu (w/ Devendra Banhart) seeming to make a parody of their own song.

I’ve started a bit of a blog over at my site, indiemaps.com. I’m mostly going to be talking about programming, Flash, cartography, graphic design, and more professional stuff over there. And I’ll be keeping up my drunken political ramblings and personal updates here at jttm.

I’m trying to keep the blog as minimal as possible — just color and text, with images only within blog posts. I’m also using an extremely lightweight blogware called Blosxom.PHP, written by a Hungarian dude. It’s helping me develop my PHP skills and I plan to re-write the program and add tagging functionality over the winter break.

I’m with Joel on keeping jttm alive. Indiemaps.com is more of a professional thing for me, and most of its content I wouldn’t post here anyway. Anyway, check it out if you want to. Look forward to jttm posts from me soon on David Horowitz at the UW and Hitchens as a political conservative. Soon.

I’m liking Mark Steyn lately. And I think his recent article — Democracies talk, tyrannies act — gets at the absurdity of what passes for liberalism in academia today. Some quotes so you don’t have to click the link:

The same university that shouted down an American anti-illegal-immigration activist and the same university culture that just deemed former Harvard honcho Larry Summers too misogynist to be permitted on campus is now congratulating itself over its commitment to “academic freedom.” True, renowned Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo is not happy. “They can have any fascist they want there,” said professor Zimbardo, “but this seems egregious.” But, hey, don’t worry: He was protesting not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presence at Columbia but Donald Rumsfeld’s presence at the Hoover Institution.

and

So much of contemporary life is about opportunities for self-congratulation. Risk-free dissent is the default mode of our culture, and extremely seductive. If dissent means refusing to let the Bush administration bully you into wearing a flag lapel pin, why, then Katie Couric (bravely speaking out on this issue just last week) is the new Mandela! If Rumsfeld is a “fascist.” then anyone can fight fascism. It’s no longer about the secret police kicking your door down and clubbing you to a pulp. Well, OK, it is if you’re a Buddhist monk in Burma. But they’re a long way away, and it’s all a bit complicated and foreign, and let’s not “confuse the very dire human rights situation” in Hoogivsastan with an opportunity to celebrate our courage in defending “academic freedom” in America. Ahmadinejad must occasionally have felt he was appearing in a matinee of “A Chance To Hear [Insert Name Of Enemy Head Of State Here].” Could have been Chavez, could have been Mullah Omar, could have been Herr ReichsfuhrerHitler himself, as Columbia’s Dean John Coatsworth proudly boasted on television.

This doesn’t only concern the invitation to/visit of the totalitarian Ahmadinejad to Columbia, but I do wonder what you guys think of this. I personally can’t decide. I would be radically against his visit, but seeing all the protesters, Ahmadinejad make a fool of himself, and some of the decent anti-Ahmadinejad cartoons published after the visit has made me reconsider — perhaps this visit was just what Americans needed to realize the true threat/backwardness of the Iranian leadership.

I just released the World Freedom Atlas — my project for the past 6 months or so (on and off). I describe it thusly:

The World Freedom Atlas is a geovisualization tool for world statistics. It was designed for social scientists, journalists, NGO/IGO workers, and others who wish to have a better understanding of issues of freedom, democracy, human rights, and good governance. It covers the years 1990 to 2006.

The beast includes over 300 variables from dozens of datasets. It is meant to complement efforts such as GapMinder World and the World Bank Online Atlas of the Millennium Development Goals, though I intended my atlas for a somewhat more expert audience (social scientists and the like). This was a great project for me. I solidified my knowledge of Flash/Actionscript, learned a bit of PHP, even some Python, and worked for the first time with mySQL databases, web servers, and whatnot.

I have been lucky enough to get some attention from the blogosphere — so far the foreign language blogosphere. Check out this Spanish blog and this Italian site.

What has happened to “liberals”? What used to be a humanitarian, internationalist philosophy has turned into a disgusting isolationist movement that cares only about humiliating Bush. And what would be more humiliating than leaving Iraq just when we’re starting to see progress, and causing a genocide that could then be blamed on Bush and his neocon supporters. No one would blame the liberals who actually called for the hasty retreat and had hampered the war effort from its start.

Liberals used to at least pretend they cared about the Iraqi people. Now they’ve lost even that pretense. Did you catch the absurd “The Road Home” editorial in the Times? The thesis is that “It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.” What follows, though, is this:

Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.

The administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress, the United Nations and America’s allies must try to mitigate those outcomes — and they may fail. But Americans must be equally honest about the fact that keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse.

Make things worse? Worse than “ethnic cleansing, even genocide”? Are you serious? Of course, this kind of tripe is easily dispatched with, as has Jules Crittendon and my friend Kevin Sullivan.

Perhaps worse, though, is a man some of you may be thinking of voting for next year (think twice). Barack Obama turns what may be written off as a slip by the Times into a general statement of isolationist principles — principles of indifference to genocide. According to the AP, he suggested that “preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there”. And continued:

Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now - where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife - which we haven’t done.

We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea.

Again, this is easy to dispatch with, as have James Taranto and Jonah Goldberg. But liberals don’t read WSJ or National Review.

But they sure as hell read The New York Times. I mentioned earlier that liberals are marching lockstep towards withdrawal just as the forces are starting to see some real security progress. Though many news sources have been reporting the successes of the Petraeus surge for months, the NYT just chimed in last Monday with an editorial from two Brookings Institute scholars and frequent Bush critics. The point:

How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

The Democratic response to the good news from Iraq? Denial. So much of the Democrats’ 2008 strategy is based on defeatism in Iraq, that any good news for the Iraqi people is actually seen as bad news by the Democrats. From Rep. Nancy Boyda of Kansas:

But let me first just say that the description of Iraq as in some way or another that it’s a place that I might take the family for a vacation—things are going so well—those kinds of comments will in fact show up in the media and further divide this country instead of saying, here’s the reality of the problem. And people, we have to come together and deal with the reality of this issue.

From Rep. Jack Murtha:

rhetoric…I don’t know what they saw, but I know this, that it’s not getting better.

Many will argue that the O’Hanlon and Pollack piece is just one editorial, and that it doesn’t prove anything about Iraq. Well sure, but it’s not alone. Here, here, here. I’ve got a dozen more.

No, these don’t prove anything either. But they do make the case for “rational optimism on Iraq”, to take Max Boot’s phrase.

You were against the Iraq war from the start? Good for you. You can revel in the Iraqi people’s suffering. You may have been right. But that doesn’t absolve you of the duty to help the people of Iraq, and leaving Iraq now, or setting a date to leave there very soon, is not going to help the people of Iraq finally achieve peace (nor us, security). As Kevin Sullivan writes in response to the “gotcha politics” of “progressive” isolationists:

So tell me, if we pat you on the back and tell you that you were right about the invasion, will you stop handicapping our foreign policy? Pretty please?

I was challenged by Boo, like six months ago, to post a defense of Christopher Hitchens. I apologize. It took me a while.

First, what are we talking about here? Boo himself wrote the following: “he is SOO brilliant and SOO entertaining…I like him for all the obvious reasons (sarcastic wit and brutal argumentative style)”. But Boo concluded that he couldn’t “overlook the occasional selective soundness of his reasoning”. I understand. What are we really talking about here? Hitchens, the dauphin, or heir, to Gore Vidal, the longtime Nation correspondent, the ally of Susan Sontag and Edward Said, had the audacity to support the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. That’s what we’re talking about here, right? Just to be clear. And not only that. I mean, Andrew Sullivan, Dan Savage, the New Republic, the Economist, the majority of Americans, etc. supported the initial decision to go to war. While this is unforgivable to some, it is OK to most, as long as you decided (typically sometime around late 2005) that the war was a bad idea, you could rejoin the antiwar side (as has, I’m afraid, Sullivan). Hitchens, though, still maintains that the war was at worst unavoidable and at best the right thing to do. And Hitchens was particularly vocal with his support for the war in Iraq, and for his support for GWB in 2004 (though he was then not an American citizen and couldn’t vote, he commented that he was “slightly for Bush” in 2004). Liberals hate this guy, though I would argue that he has been the consistently liberal party in this whole mess. First, a brief biography:

Much is made of Hitchens’ former Trotskyist days. Hitchens was an aggressive left-winger, credentials he showed off in the 1980s as a harsh critic of Ronald Reagan (esp. on foreign policy). He’s also (still) an ardent supporter of the Palestinian cause (he co-edited a volume with Edward Said, released in 2001). Hitchens has always taken positions, though, that didn’t seem in line with his socialist or leftist credentials. He supported Thatcher’s military response to Argentina in the Falklands, became a fierce critic of “fascism with an Islamic face” after his friend Salman Rushdie’s life was threatened by it, and was a constant antagonist of both Clintons during the 1990s (he wrote a slim volume, No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family). He was perhaps the only one on the left to call Clinton’s 1998 raid on a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum a war crime (others on the left refused to condemn the attack, at the time anyway, as it may have furthered the impeachment efforts against Clinton).
Read the rest of this entry »

Got a spare 90 minutes? Check out the video of Christopher Hitchens debating (or schooling) Al Sharpton. It’s on Slate. It’s better seen as a monologue by Hitchens as Sharpton is terrible throughout. Start, if you must, at 1:14:30, for a particularly good Hitchens response.

I just dropped my third interactive map. It is called streamViz, which is pretty stupid. But the map/visualization is awesome!– at least in my opinion (but then again, I’m biased). This gets more into geovisualization than cartography, and people in cartography like to argue about whether geovisualization is just a part of cartography or vice-versa. The assignment was to just map streamflow data for 3 months in 1993 (a big flood) but I have a hard time spending a lot of time on such a one-off map. So I decided to load in 10 years of daily data off the USGS website. StreamViz is so powerful — please do not use it for evil.

Hey gang, here’s the second map I’ve produced for my animated and interactive cartography class. The assignment was to map like one variable over time, and presumably to have this variable hard-coded into the map. As you can/will see, I kind of went crazy on this assignment. If applicable, this map is the reason I have ignored your emails and failed to return your phone calls over the past two months.

There are two datasets available to be loaded right now, but in theory any dataset of Wisconsin counties could be loaded. There are a ton of things that could be fixed or added, but for now I have a bigger final project to worry about.

After years of unquestioned dominance in the blogosphere, JttM now has two worthy competitors:

412 Science Hall

&

413ScienceHall

The former is penned by my office mates here in Science Hall and is dedicated to all things wholesome (example). The other, written by our across-the-hall enemy, Reyerson, is dedicated to baby-eating and reactionary politics. Check em out!

This is my Lab 1 for my interactive mapping class. Check it out.

As snow turns to rain in Madison, so comes an end to lake dancing. So yesterday, two Gilbey’s and tonics in, my comrade Joel Przybylowski and I took one of our prop umbrellas out on Lake Mendota for one last hurrah. Cinematography by Andy Woodruff. Inspiration provided by Gilbey’s gin.

A video has surfaced of myself and my mentor Joel Przybylowski dancing on solid lake water. And we weren’t even drunk…yet. Livin’ the dream folks, livin’ the dream.