Dispatches from the engagement-ring front

Swishhhhhhhh.

What's that sound? Oh, it's a bunch of money flowing from my bank account into the coffers of Blue Nile. Your loyal pundit has, at long last, made the most important purchase of his life (OK, the Wii was close).

The decision took a great deal of research, so I figured I'd synthesize what I learned for my millions of readers (hi Mom!). First and foremost, do not buy an engagement ring from a jewelry store . They jack their prices up and then haggle, making it very difficult for an unsophisticated consumer to get a fair offer. They also use annoying, high-pressure sales tactics. (On a Saturday I told a saleswoman I'd call her sometime the next week about a ring, despite her insistence that they could only give me the best deal if I plunked down the money right now. On Monday she took the initiative and pestered me instead. I hung up on her.)

If it weren't for these unsavory practices I'd feel bad saying this, because stores do legitimately have overhead costs they're recouping, but the best bet is to try on rings at a bunch of stores to see what you like, and then order online. I heard about Blue Nile from this excellent Forbes profile, and their selection, pricing and Web site navigation are terrific. I haven't received the ring in the mail yet, but I will update when I do.

As I see it, when picking out a ring, there are three things you want to decide: Band, diamond configuration and a specific diamond.

When picking out the ring itself, the choices are gold, white gold and platinum. If you want a gold-colored ring, obviously go with gold. For a silvery color, pick platinum or white gold -- the former is far more expensive and shows scratching a little more easily, but the latter is darker in color and needs to be coated to shine the way you see it in a store. Over time the coating wears off, and you have to either live with a darker ring or have it re-coated. If a platinum ring gets scratched, it's quite easy to restore.

The diamond configuration is a more daunting choice. Oftentimes a simple solitaire (one diamond in the middle) will do the trick, but there are other setups that use more diamonds. One type I particularly dislike uses little bits of diamond around the band to add sparkle. It looks like gravel. My girlfriend and I settled on a five-stone configuration (four side, one center).

Cost is actually an advantage, in my opinion, for multiple-stone rings. The reason is that the price of a diamond increases exponentially with its size. It's much cheaper to have a .7-carat center diamond with four .15-carat side diamonds than it is to have one 1.25-carat solitaire diamond. More bling for your buck.

Which brings us to picking out the diamonds themselves. The "four Cs" are cut, color, clarity and (as already discussed) carat. The best way to balance them is to put in your price range on Blue Nile, and then adjust the parameters until you've narrowed it down to a couple really good deals.

The one dimension I would minimize is clarity, or the measure of "inclusions" in the diamond. As long as you stay in and above the SI ("slightly included") range, inclusions are not visible to the naked eye. So it's mainly a tradeoff between sparkle (cut), shade (color) and size (carat). Introducing the three Ss.

And consider paying by money wire. Blue Nile offers a slight discount, and many rings are expensive enough that the savings will more than make up for the cost of wiring money. If you pay with a debit card, check with your bank first to make sure there isn't a per-purchase limit.

If I'm bicurious and I'm somehow made from God, then I figure God must be a little bicurious himself

Jeremy Lott finds a hilarious quote from the Westboro church's anti-homosexual Web site. A jury recently found against the church for protesting military funerals with hateful signs:

WBC engages in daily peaceful sidewalk demonstrations opposing the homosexual lifestyle of soul-damning, nation-destroying filth. We display large, colorful signs containing Bible words and sentiments, including: GOD HATES FAGS, FAGS HATE GOD, AIDS CURES FAGS, THANK GOD FOR AIDS, FAGS BURN IN HELL, GOD IS NOT MOCKED, FAGS ARE NATURE FREAKS, GOD GAVE FAGS UP, NO SPECIAL LAWS FOR FAGS, FAGS DOOM NATIONS, THANK GOD FOR DEAD SOLDIERS, FAG TROOPS, GOD BLEW UP THE TROOPS, GOD HATES AMERICA, AMERICA IS DOOMED, THE WORLD IS DOOMED, etc.

Legally, though, he comes down on the side of the church, on First Amendment grounds. I'm a little more on the fence. Certainly, it's important for people to be able to speak on public property, even when they're saying something ridiculously offensive.

But to me, there's something to be said about the choice of venue. They're not in front of courthouses, they're in front of funerals, and there's a privacy angle to funerals even when you're protesting from public property. And they weren't found guilty of "hate speech"; they were found guilty of invasion of privacy and causing emotional distress. The slippery slope makes me queasy (if we prosecute these people on vaguely defined charges, where do we draw the line?), but by the same token, a military family really is entitled to a decent ceremony. It's hard for me to get too uptight about a court ruling making that possible.

What is this, 1999?

My latest Amazon.com e-mail advertises all those cutting-edge music groups: "Britney Spears, Andrea Bocelli, Backstreet Boys, Levon Helm..."

HIM review up at antiMusic

Here it is.

Main point:

In the eternal struggle between alienating longtime fans and releasing the same album over and over again, HIM strikes a decent balance with Venus Doom. It's far more guitar-centric than previous releases – plenty of Sabbath-esque riffs and even some shredding solos, popping off the speakers thanks to returning producer Tim Palmer. But the band's appeal still revolves around Ville Valo's dark, catchy, gothic vocals. The haunting-yet-upbeat atmosphere and romantic themes remain as well.

In terms of quality, Venus Doom is perhaps the most consistent HIM record to date. 2005's Dark Light lost its momentum about halfway through, and most of the band's other CDs include good helpings of filler. Unfortunately, this also means there's no unstoppable standout like "Killing Loneliness" or "Your Sweet Six Six Six," but it's worth the tradeoff to have an album that's listenable straight-through.

The most important issue of our time

Over at Galley Slaves, Jonathan Last has been chronicling the failure of the PlayStation 3 . It's not that surprising to me -- of the three current-generation consoles, it's the most expensive and has the fewest unique features. I own a Nintendo Wii myself, but I at least understand the case for Xbox 360. I can't imagine advising anyone to buy a PS3.

The Wii has numerous advantages. It's the cheapest system and the only one that relies on motion-sensitive controls (for example, in a baseball game, you actually swing the controller like a bat). Nintendo has some pretty good first-party games (titles that are not available on the other systems), including the Zelda and Mario franchises. It's backward-compatible to the GameCube, and you can download old NES, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64 and Sega Genesis games to it pretty cheaply. (If you'd rather a bikini-clad model explain the Wii's advantages, go here.)

Xbox 360 has better graphics than Wii does, and it has the best of all first-party games in the Halo franchise. It's backward-compatible to the original Xbox.

Playstation 3 shares Xbox's graphics, and some third-party games are only available on PS3 and Xbox 360 -- when a game is designed for a regular controller, it's hard to "port" it to a system that uses motion controls. But PS3 has nothing that isn't available on one of the other systems. Even its backward compatibility to PS1 and PS2 is iffy. Offhand I can't name a first-party game (though I once noted this one), so certainly none are must-haves.

By the way

Buy the current issue of Outburn; it has a bunch of CD reviews from me in it. The text isn't online.

Here are the albums I wrote about:

Watershed, Three Chords and a Cloud of Dust II
Rosetta, Wake/Lift
Between the Wars, Death and the Sea
Terra Diablo, Deluge Songs
Amorphis, Silent Waters
From the Shallows, Beyond the Unknown
Drop Dead, Gorgeous, Worse than a Fairy Tale
Bedlight for Blue Eyes, Life on Life's Terms
Nodes of Ranvier, Defined By Struggle

If it's uncomfortable, just don't think about it

Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder have a willfully naive Spectator piece about race, intelligence and the James Watson controversy today.
First they write:

Apparently a subject that has attracted scientists is the question of the correlation between race and intelligence. Now don't get us wrong. We believe that basically this is an area of wasteful analysis. In our lives, we don't deal with "races," we deal with individual people. For instance, if science has determined that Jews are smarter than Buddhists, the fact is if we needed an operation, we would rather have a smart Buddhist picking up the scalpel than a dumb Jew.

Sure, there are some situations in which individual performance, not statistical trends, matters most. But in other cases -- say, a given group is underrepresented in a high-IQ field, and someone proposes quota legislation to fix that -- public policy demands accurate group profiles.

Then they make the same mistake Watson did: They claim to know the answer to the question at hand.

[W]e believe it is not [true]...[this is] psuedo-science

At this stage in the game, there is simply no way to tell. I propose that, for 10 to 15 years, we call off the debate while we wait for the genetic testing results.

On the one hand, it is an absolute fact that some genes are more common in some races than others. Researchers are in the process of sorting through what those genes are and what they do, and it would be rather surprising if none pertained to cognitive function at all. Also, intelligence testing has shown large gaps by race that persist over time and don't go away when you statistically control for various environmental factors.

Further, twin studies indicate that identical twins reared apart have far more similar IQs that fraternal twins reared together; from this, heritability estimates tend to say an individual's IQ is mostly genetic. This doesn't mean that racial IQ differences are mostly genetic, but it means that environmental differences would have to be very severe to account for the entire racial gap.

But on the other hand, as James Flynn has been arguing lately, those estimates ignore the "multiplier" effect -- if one fraternal twin has a slight advantage in a given skill early in life, he tends to work on it intensely. For example, if he's a little taller, he'll not only be naturally better at basketball, but he'll spend more time playing basketball because he's better and likes to win. This makes fraternal twins have very different skills, and researchers wrongly conclude that their genes, not the different environments they created for themselves even though they were reared together, caused the gap.

If individual IQ differences are far less genetic than we'd thought, it's very possible that racial IQ differences aren't genetic at all.

And they get their history wrong:

Watson's position is eerily similar to that of Professor Arthur Jensen, who wrote an article in 1969 in the Harvard Educational Review wherein he postulated that racial differences in intelligence test scores may have a genetic origin. He suffered the same fate as Dr. Watson.

Sure, Jensen got the same protests. But he didn't grovel, retired on his own terms and still sits on academic journal boards.

For a lesson in logic...

...just read Chuck Colson's latest column on pornography. It's one example of bad reasoning after another.

Now, it's probably true that violent pornography can put ideas in people's heads, and that the people who participate in pornography tend have severe personal problems. This isn't a "pro-porn" post, though I think the government should stay away from consensually created adult materials with proper content warnings.

But just read what Colson has to say:

A teenage girl was recalling what her childhood had been like—a childhood marred by porn. "When I was eight years old," she wrote, "my father made me look at [pornographic] pictures" involving sex acts he wanted her to perform. "I went along with him, not knowing any better," she said.

For years this girl's father raped her while using these pictures—and at age 16, she had a sexually transmitted disease. "I may die of this disease," she wrote sadly. "Pornography has ruined my life."

So much for the claim—often made by porn advocates—that pornography is a victimless crime.

Obviously, this girl's childhood was marred far more by rape than by porn. It's far from clear that, absent the pornographic pictures, the girl's father would have left her alone. By this logic, if at any time in history someone has been raped while Beethoven played, that would lay to rest the claim that listening to classical music is a victimless crime.

Colson just doesn't grasp the distinction between correlation and causation; in fact, to him, correlation proves causation beyond "any doubt":

There is no longer any doubt that pornography inspires crime. Most child molesters admit that they consume hard-core porn on a regular basis.

Actually, there's quite a bit of doubt. One fairly recent study even concluded that pornography decreases rape, though I was skeptical of the methodology. Regarding the fact that child molesters watch hard-core porn, it's hard to tell whether the urge or the visual stimulation inspired the other. Given the growing body of evidence that sexual preference is biological, I'd guess that sick sexual tendencies lead to sick porn consumption, not the other way around.

Then, for good measure, Colson intentionally lumps child pornography in with consensual adult pornography:

And those who create porn are now victimizing even the youngest children. Police who seize pornographic films and pictures note that they are seeing X-rated images of toddlers and even babies—this is sickening.

Yes, that's sickening, but it's "those who create child porn" that are doing it, not porn producers generally.

Finally, on a lighter note, I'd question the wording here:

As surprising as it may seem, sexual addiction—like all addictions—represents a deep hunger for God.

Some really smart Ron Paul analysis

That's really smart as in Stewie from Family Guy. You know, reeeeaaally smaaaaart.

Courtesy AOL's Political Machine:

these libertarian ideas have traction with many Americans, including those who want to keep the races from mingling.

Yup, that's what libertarians stand for! The government telling you who you can and cannot mingle with!

Super-size me (but warn me first)

This is un-libertarian of me, but I like Matthew Yglesias's case for prominent calorie lists in restaurants:

After all, this won't prevent anyone from buying a Big Mac or some KFC — the only reason for thinking it would be bad for business is that these businesses believe that consumers wouldn't want to eat their products if they were better-informed about them.

My problem with most regulation is that it steps between consenting parties. This just requires that one party be given better information, which at the very least isn't nearly as bad an intrusion.

The only issues would be (A) whatever aesthetic blight a list imposes, especially on fancier places, and (B) the fact that when people indulge an unhealthy instinct -- and face it, the guy walking into a McDonald's already knows its not good for him -- they'd rather not be constantly reminded of it. Without a new law, if someone who's health-conscious really wants a list, he can request it or look it up online. Or do what he knows is healthiest and avoid restaurant food whenever possible.

Somebody shoot me

Reason.tv has Ron Paul's New Hampshire ad. Boy is it bad. Bad acting, bad script, bad organization, bad choice of talking points, bad directing. Bad.