We are ill-equipped to deal with huge numbers. Many of couldn’t tell the difference between 100,000 people and 1 million people. We are notoriously bad at estimating, conceiving of and comprehending large numbers. This makes it that much easier to pull the wool over our eyes when it comes to budgets and finance. Take, for instance, the $1 trillion figure being bandied about these days. What does one TRILLION dollars look like? (PageTutor) provides a handy visual mnemonic, starting with a single $100 bill... [More]

If you spend any amount of time reading online, you know how difficult it sometimes is to get the text into a format that makes for comfortable reading. All the more so for those doing their reading on portable devices. Web sites have several tools at their disposal to ease both online reading and printing:

• Offer a printable stylesheet that is used when the browser prints the document, so that advertising, comments, and other garbage are left out, leaving only the text of the article.
• Offer a... [More]

Stop wiping your ass with them.

According to this article, Mr. Whipple Left It Out: Soft Is Rough on Forests by Leslie Kaufman (NY Times), “[a]lthough toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel.”

Regrettably, America manages to stand pretty much alone in demanding super-soft toilet paper for home use, although even in European countries, recycled paper makes up only 20% of paper intended for home use. That’s still ten times... [More]

Conservatives are fond of invoking the Constitution and the “founding fathers” in order to end all discussion when a proposed change to existing law would evolve in a direction that they don’t like. This is not always wrong, but often seems quite cherry-picked. For example, when the Supreme Court granted corporations full rights as citizens in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (Wikipedia), there was no hue and cry about activist judges. That single decision has arguably had a tremendous... [More]

Here’s a story originally published back in the Seventies and carefully passed from hand to hand to newsgroup to newsgroup and now from blog to blog: How to Build an H-Bomb. There’s a lot of pseudo-realistic–sounding scientific babble about various chemical compounds and elements, but the home-liquefaction process guide takes the cake:

“First transform the gas into a liquid by subjecting it to pressure. You can use a bicycle pump for this. Then make a simple home centrifuge. Fill a... [More]”

Obama joins the mainstream media as well as his compatriots across the aisle in a call to forgive and forget. As a constitutional lawyer, it’s not that he doesn’t see that crimes against the Constitution were committed, it’s that he sees more important tasks at hand. It’s an interesting logic that he is likely only willing to apply to the greatest criminals this nation has seen since, well, ever. It is unlikely that he will find a similar softness in his heart for more everyday criminals who... [More]

With an unwavering adherence to the party line, several political cartoonists giddily convey far-right talking points word-for-word, promulgating a severely twisted—and context-free—view of history and the world. Let’s take a look at a sampling from the last couple of months.

The Failing economy proves that Social Security doesn’t work

With Bernie Madoff’s admission that he’d been running a Ponzi scheme for decades, astute commentators asked whether there was a difference between Madoff’s... [More]

The article, I Twitter for you! by Mark Morford (SF Chronicle), is about a great new service called Geekamania. This site takes mechanical turking to a whole new level by providing a service unique to the new millenium: integrating you into the online world in a “cool” way.[1]

Here’s the sales pitch:

“We design, set up and maintain as many hip social networking pages as you want, spinning off the information you provided but also totally rearranging it and making it up at will, all to make you sound exactly as... [More]”

Man Up! Hedge-Fund Man’s Advice for Wall Street by Michael Lewis (Bloomberg) is a (somewhat) amusing look at the world through the eyes of “typical” trader on Wall Street. This trader is wondering why Wall Street is wasting its time worrying about what the rest of the non-Wall Street-world thinks. Instead, he feels his fellow traders should stick to the plan and stick it to a government that gave them so much money without bothering to force any conditions first.

“Think about this. Some fool comes along and gives you $15... [More]”

After nearly a decade of using Perforce for my private source control, I’d decided to switch to Mercurial. Mercurial is a distributed version control system and open-source and all kinds of awesome and I won’t go into why I made the switch here. Suffice it to say it makes it much easier to release code and work with others.

Mercurial itself is an easy installation and I had it running both on my OS X 10.4 and Windows XP in a flash. I even installed the newly released HgTortoise plugin, which... [More]

The article, Why I am a Green, not a Democrat by Mitchel Cohen (Informed Comment), wasn’t exactly about finance, but it did involve this interesting question that the author wanted to ask of the exceedingly smarmy Senator Chuck Schumer. It’s about a slated fare increase on NYC transit from the current $2.00 to $3.00 per ride. The fare increase is “to raise $1.2 billion claimed by the MTA as its deficit”. Naturally, the MTA is not allowed to run a deficit, so it has to make up the difference. Since bailing out a transportation... [More]

The blog entry, Washington Post Crashed-and-Burned Watch (“Bipartisan” Edition) by Brad DeLong (Grasping Reality), lists the actual votes for the spending bill recently passed by the Congress and the Senate.

“The Obama bipartisan proposal receives 0 Republican votes in the House, and 0 Republican votes in the Senate. An extremely small group of posturing senators makes the plan materially worse – reducing its likely efficacy as an employment boost by roughly 600,000 or so – and it looks as though the final passage bill will... [More]”

The blog post, Gary Ackerman goes off on the SEC (NY Newsday), refers us to a five-minute video of a portion of the investigation of how the SEC managed to avoid shutting down Bernie Madoff ten years ago. The video is linked below.

Rep. Ackerman on Madoff Fraud (YouTube)

I’ve taken the liberty of providing a rush transcript of the best bits below. In all cases, “you” refers to the SEC.

“Your mission you said was to, ‘protect investors and detect fraud quickly’. How’d that work out? What went wrong? […] One guy with a few friends and helpers... [More]”

The 20 Worst Foods in America 2009 (Men's Health) catalogs exactly that. The listings are nearly unbelievable, especially the number one entry. It is the Baskin Robbins Large Chocolate Oreo Shake, which boasts the following characteristics:

• 2,600 calories
• 135 g fat (59 g saturated fat, 2.5 g trans fats)
• 263 g sugars
• 1,700 mg sodium
• 73 ingredients (or more)

That’s a whole day’s worth of calories and three days’ worth of fat in a container that can be slurped empty in less than ten minutes. Not that 263g is... [More]

In a move that should suprise no one who actually read his foreign policy statements, President Obama ordered his first attacks of autonomous foreign soil just three days after his inauguration. As reported in the article, President Obama ‘orders Pakistan drone attacks’ by Tim Reid (Times Online), the strikes took out 15 people, 3 of them children and 7 of them “foreigners” (assumed to be code for legitimate targets) and were delivered by drones. Perhaps the change is in the improved actual target/innocent victim ratio,... [More]

Even the pundits most slavishly devoted to the myth of the free market think that the economy is in dire straits. Things look bad on many fronts and even those that denied that anything was wrong even as late as August now agree that the recession actually started in December of 2007. As the elections neared last year, it was accepted wisdom that all of our woes were due to the poor taking out shaky mortgages. Once that canard failed to hold up, the media stopped trying to come up with causes... [More]

Courier IMAP has a default certificate for SLL communication, but it’s only valid for a year and has bogus, default information in it. You can use a utility to generate a new certificate and, with a little perseverance, find the configuration file from which it draws its parameters. With these parameters, you can make a slightly better certificate, but it’s better to use OpenSSL to generate a proper certificate, based either on a trusted certificate or self-signed. However, OpenSSL’s default... [More]

As reported in Obama Ends Global Family Planning Restrictions by Julie Rovner (NPR), president Obama issued an executive order “rescinding a policy that since 2001 has barred U.S. financial aid to international family planning groups that “perform or promote” abortion.” That now-rescinded “global gag order” was also broadly used to funnel public funding to organizations whose primary measure in family planning was abstinence, with the expected scintillating results.[1] This is fantastic news, despite pro-life opponents... [More]

The following radio address is the speech given by Martin Luther King at Riverside Church in 1967. The full transcript is available from the UC Berkeley archives. In it, he talks for twenty-three minutes—at times employing exacting historical detail—about the Vietnam War and its effects on the Vietnamese, Americans and the U.S. role from the very beginning. This was back in ‘67, when many Americans were barely aware of the conflict in the first place. Listen to the speech below and hear a... [More]

The article Of the Algorithms, by the Algorithms, for the Algorithms by Chris Wilson (Slate) discusses the U.S. state-of-the-art in redistricting theory. The art/science of districting involves designing electoral districts to optimize representation. On paper, this optimization is supposed to focus on representing the people in a particular district. In practice, instead of being dividing by geography, districts are divided by prevailing ideology in order to stabilize that district—make it “safe”, in the... [More]

David Rees weighs in with possibly one of the last GYWO cartoons ever. He started about eight years ago and has moved on to videos instead. As usual, he manages to capture that which is most important out of the miasma of obfuscation that the mainstream media emits (as Homer Simpson put it: “It’s funny because he says what we’re all thinking.”

get your war on 81 − #6

And the money quote, transcribed for posterity.

“Oh, enough with all the “broad bipartisan” bullshit! Did Republicans not got [sic] their asses totally... [More]”

It seems everyone’s got ideas for the Obama administration. Organizations and causes that have had nothing to do with the office of the president for at least eight years are crawling out of the woodwork and once again offering up their agendas to the president-to-be’s scrutiny.

Those agitating for marijuana legalization seem much more hopeful than the situation warrants. Obama ran on a “law and order” ticket—interested in enforcing the laws the way they are—and, though he’s shown... [More]

The following post was written about a month ago and never published. The context is that of the show-throwing furor that has ebbed somewhat lately.

For a solid week, at least half of the political cartoon output of the world has involved shoes. It is well-known that the media suffers from a severe dearth of imagination but there is no reason to display this deficiency with such pride.

As far as shoes go, this author had two immediate thoughts on seeing the video footage:

1. Bush is pretty... [More]

1. A Widow for One Year (1998) – John Irving (second half)
2. Bleachers (2003) – John Grisham
3. The Glass Castle (2005) – Jeannette Walls
4. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) – C.S. Lewis
5. Tuesdays with Morrie (1997) – Mitch Albom
6. Die Weisse Massai (2000) – Corrine Hofmann (de)
7. The Kite Runner (2003) – Khaled Hosseini
8. A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) – Khaled Hosseini
9. The Book of Saladin (1998) – Tariq Ali
10. The Great Gatsby (1926) – F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. More Tales of the City (1980) –... [More]

The protest footage starts off promising, with the happy chant and music. A few seconds in, the lyrics are translated from the Hebrew as “bomb a ghetto, raise a cheer”. The event was attended by both New York Senator Charles Schumer and New York Governor David Paterson. If Hillary hadn’t been interviewing for her new job[1], she would doubtless have been there, dancing.

Pro-Israel Against Gaza by Max Blumenthal (YouTube)

Choice quotes from the interviewees in the street are:

“Nothing good is going to come of this; they’ve got to keep fighting... [More]”

Most of the news coming from the Obama transition team is about appointments to various positions within the administration. For those who voted for Obama because they thought he was a progressive, the appointments provoke reactions ranging from disappointed to appalled. For those who listened to the words coming out of Obama’s mouth during the campaign—instead of hearing a prettified translation in their own heads—Obama’s mostly center-right choices are unsurprising. Some are more utterly... [More]

Heavy Metal Band Names by Doogie Horner (Comics vs. Audience) (pictured below; click for larger version) offers a well-thought-out taxonomy of many heavy metal band names, with five main categories—Deadly Things, Death, Religion, Animals and Badass Misspellings—branching into over a dozen sub-categories, among them “Pleas for Help”, “Umlauts”, “Medieval” and so on. All in all, not a bad job at all.[1]

Heavy Metal Band Name Taxonomy

As the saying goes, everything can be made better with a liberal application of technology. With Guitar Hero and Rock Band making millions of people feel that they, too, could play music, even though they are, at best, doing an instrumental version of lip-syncing along with a recording, Microsoft Research throws Songsmith on the table in what they clearly feel is the answer to many people’s dreams—the dream of having a keyboard from the 80's back up your atrocious singing.

A visit to the... [More]