Sunday, February 14, 2010
I’m having this thing lately where I read something so delightful I have to run and post it before I even finish the article. Apparently, not trying to slaughter your girlfriend is insufficient qualification for public office, even in Illinois, and even at a time when Sarah Palin is considered a serious presidential contender. From [...]
Friday, February 12, 2010
Here’s another chunk from that collection of Edge essays that I linked to the other day: It’s less than twenty years since the living presence of networked information has become part of our thinking machinery. What it will mean to us that vastly more people have nearly instantaneous access to vastly greater quantities of information [...]
Some of you might have already seen this, but seriously, it makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. I swear to god it’s an absolute wonder this country isn’t ten times as fucked up as it is.
Also filed in
|
|
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Obama goes before a bunch of Republicans and takes questions and gives answers here. These days it’s easy to slip back into thinking the American political process is horribly broken, and will always stay broken. And maybe it will. Because I can’t fathom how such a reasonable approach, such a good attitude, and such a [...]
Also filed in
|
Tagged obama
|
This post summarizes a Harvard study on the top-12 preventable causes of death. (Click on the link for a picture that will drive the point home.) The causes, in order of badness, are: Smoking: 467,000 deaths. High blood pressure: 395,000 deaths. Overweight-obesity: 216,000 deaths. Inadequate physical activity and inactivity: 191,000 deaths. High blood sugar: 190,000 [...]
First, and unrelatedly, Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. This makes me feel weird. Thorbjoern Jagland, one of the Nobel Committe and possessor of a very fine name, said: “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” which [...]
Friday, September 11, 2009
The political machinations go round and round.
Also filed in
|
|
This post from the “Creative Class” guy Richard Florida is so short I’ll quote it in full: Political scientist, Andrew Gelman has some great graphs on the connection between economics and ideology. Comparing income levels, ideology and party idenitification, he and collaborator Daniel Lee found the connection between income and party identification was strongest among [...]
Also filed in
|
|
Saturday, August 15, 2009
I’ve been trying not to talk about health care lately, because the whole affair just gets me so worked up. When I imagine shoddy levels of care, overrun by government bureaucrats, like the sort they have to deal with in Europe: Unfortunately for celiac patients, the extra cost of a special diet is not reimbursed [...]
It’s disturbing and interesting to listen to conversations like this one on piracy and realize what a, well, business it is: How much does it cost to outfit a pirate mission? A single mission with 12 armed men and boats costs a little over $30,000. But a successful investor has to dispatch at least three [...]