Whitman boys.

CLONES! Okay, all anyone can talk about today is not North Korea’s nuclear weapons (eeks!) but ClonAid’s announcement that they have successfully cloned somebody, with the predictable brouhaha about ClonAid’s being a subsidiary of the Raelian cult. Great. Only two observations need be made:

GOVERNMENT “BRANDING” SINKS to a new low.

BLAME CANADA. Some of us really enjoy making fun of Canada. Here, John points out a way in which the US falls short of its purported “neighbor to the North”: stinky money (requires Quicktime).

ANOTHER SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE: Neon Deion is talking about (another) comeback.

UPDATE 12/25/02: Praise Allah, it won’t happen.

LYING MEDIA BASTARDS is the blog of Jake Sexton, a DJ at a counterculture radio collective in LA. I’ve been reading through his archives, which are great. I’ve added a link at left. And to give you a flavor of the bitter cynical hopeful glory LMB features, here’s his piece on some culture-jamming of Dow Chemical. And here’s Dow’s “ethics page”.

JACK’S ADDENDUM TO THE BILE-O-METER: My blogging Godfather Jack thinks I missed one:

“Hillary Clinton. A crook of the highest order whose crass Bobby Kennedy ripoff in “I’m Really a New York City Puertorrrrrriqueña” has been followed by her new initiative to become the Oprah of the Senate. “Coffee, Trent?” When you see her up there on the stage at the DNC two summers from now, you’ll get a tremendous nauseating rush and admit that W. has a better shot at re-election than you thought previously. 9.7.”

Now, I don’t disagree with what Jack says about Hil, but the CW is that she’s angling for 2008 rather than 2004. I caught Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on The Daily Show the other night, and he swore up and down that she was not running in 2004. And if you can’t trust Chuck Schumer talking to Jon Stewart, who can you trust?

One that I didn’t hit on my short list of non-candidates: Sen. Jon Corzine (D-N.J.). Cuddly, great politics, gave up great wealth to purchase his Senate seat–a stirring story. Unproven on financial issues and fiscal policy, great on the environment; we suspect he will be persona non grata on Wall Street reforms. Likes Amtrak. An even 2.0 on the BoM.

BAD MATH=BAD RHETORIC. One of the joys of Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column on espn.com [see link at left] is that it is only nominally a football column. While it reliably has some football content, Easterbrook also riffs on things like potential slogans for government agencies, Star Trek, and Catherine Bell. He nicely blends the wonky with the footbally. And he’s a smart guy, so when he gets something factually wrong, it incenses loyal readers to a degree that some may think disproportionate. This week, he rants about how Segways are going to be dangerous, and backs it up with bad math and a bad analogy:

“Everyone who walks will intensely hate Segways. The manufacturer has already persuaded 32 states to certify these monstrosities for use on sidewalks; without that permission, no one would buy one. But the Segway is 200 pounds of metal with a 200-pound rider atop moving 12 mph, velocity of someone who runs track in the 100-meter event. This means a pedestrian struck by a Segway will be hit by 400 pounds moving at sprinter speed. Being struck by a Segway roaring down the sidewalk will be significantly worse than being popped by an NFL linebacker at maximum warp.”

Um, wrong. Simple math: the record for the 100m sprint is less than 10 seconds. 1000m = 1km, so 1 km in 100 seconds. 1 mile = 1.609 km, so round up and say an Olympic sprinter runs a mile in 161 seconds, or 2.68 minutes. 60 minutes in an hour divided by 2.68 minutes to the mile = 22.38 mph, way faster than a Segway. 12 mph is about what Khalid Khannouchi averages for the marathon. And Segways don’t weigh 200 pounds, they weigh more like 83 pounds.

I still haven’t tried a Segway, so have no opinion on their safety (but they’re fascinating both as a gadget and as a cultural meme), but the manufacturer says they can stop on a dime, which of course sprinters and linebackers can’t. And they’ve got speed settings, including a “sidewalk” maximum speed setting of 8 mph, but of course users cannot be trusted to abide by those guidelines.