July 2010
3 posts
"This project is doomed." (Three Panel Soul) →
How to Lose Time and Money (Paul Graham) →
Poems by Google Voice
First in a series.
I'll I'll it's mean
wondering
if you are going to camp
where i fall and wait
for brides
and he wearing reputational job
together.
Anyway bye.
By Google Voice, with an assist from my mom.
June 2010
2 posts
The Anosognosic's Dilemma →
It’s hard to imagine the NYT knew what a coup it was getting when it signed up Erroll Morris to write about, apparently, whatever he wants. Here’s the auspicious beginning of a five-part series about people who lack the information or ability to recognize the limits of what they don’t know, starting with the Dunning-Kruger effect, and rehabilitating that thing Donald Rumsfeld...
May 2010
5 posts
Word of the day: enthymeme →
It’s like a syllogism with a concealed-weapon permit.
After the Flood (Planet Money) →
Cleaning up unheard Planet Money episodes, I found this follow-up to Chana Joffe-Walt’s blockbuster This American Life segment, in which she went for a ridealong with an FDIC bank closure team. She interviews a couple of the principal players one year later.
Elizabeth Pisani: Sex, drugs and HIV — let's get... →
Plucked at random from a list of “TED talks sorted by PageRank engagement”, her take on the statistics of HIV prevention is great on its own terms, and as an example of statistical presentation for a mass audience. Pisani runs a blog along the same lines, Wisdom of Whores.
March 2010
13 posts
Partisan/Bipartisan (Crooked Timber) →
A lovely parable about how bipartisanship plays if only one side is playing:
None of the proposals of the Bipartisan Party, on the other hand, will ever be bipartisan.
Court-packing
From Alan Brinkley’s review of Jeff Shesol’s “Supreme Power”, about FDR’s attempt to expand the Supreme Court, a charming detail I’d never heard before:
Shesol also draws attention to a more mundane but nevertheless considerable factor in the shift of the court. In 1937 Roosevelt supported, and Congress approved, a bill to assure retired justices that they...
Adam Serwer explains the Obama teleprompter meme →
The bizarre persistence of Republican dog-whistles about Obama’s use of teleprompters, usually coming in speeches themselves delivered using teleprompters, had been bugging me for months.
Texas
An eye-popping detail from Michael Luo’s NYT article on the ACA’s effect on state Medicaid budgets:
Texas, which has some of the most restrictive Medicaid eligibility rules in the country for adults, currently covers working parents only if they do not earn more than roughly 20 percent of the federal poverty level. The program does not cover childless adults.
He mentions in the...
John Gottman
Gottman is the psychologist profiled in “Blink” who analyzes couples’ interactions and predicts whether they’ll get divorced. Sadly, Laurie Abraham notes in Slate that his methodology wasn’t everything Malcolm Gladwell made it out to be:
So what does it mean to predict divorce? For the 1998 study, which focused on videotapes of 57 newlywed couples, I assumed that...
Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective →
Or, how to get burned by the assumptions you don’t even notice you’re making. Would make a great introduction to the realities of software development if it wasn’t so long (which would also make it a less great introduction to the realities of software development).
1 tag
Pro-choice payback →
Katha Pollitt on what’s owed to pro-choicers for letting the Stupak bloc extend Hyde amendment prohibitions to the health cate exchanges. We really took a bullet, which I didn’t catch in my first read of Obama’s Stupak-mollifying executive order.
Tomatoes are a dirty business →
I’d have liked to hear more about how the scams worked.
Luhn algorithm (Wikipedia) →
Nifty trivial algorithm for detecting typos in credit card numbers. Patented in 1954, public domain today.
Going After Food Packaging
Monica Potts in Tapped:
A report from Silvergrade’s group, for example, shows a cake label that separates all the sources of sugar — like refined sugar, corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup — so that it looks like flour is the most prominent ingredient, not sugar.
I’ve wondered about that tactic, and whether there was anything to it beyond brazen hucksterism....
It takes almost exactly four minutes to freefall...
And other unsettling pieces of information gleaned from the crash of Air France 447.
Portal 2 →
Nuts to Mario. Valve doesn’t write for the PS3, and I don’t have an Xbox or a Windows machine, but if the rumors of Mac support for Steam are accurate, this will probably be the first videogame that I’ll buy while it’s still new since the NES. The original Portal remains one of the most absorbing games I’ve ever played.
“I actually think the way they should do the [Oscars], I really think this, is...”
– Matt Damon
February 2010
7 posts
Super →
I haven’t played a Mario game since Super Mario Bros 3, but this kind of makes me want to buy a Wii and spend six months catching up.
Stieg Larsson's estate makes a movie
Oy. I liked these books, but it occurred to me at no time while reading them that they would ever be adapted. The eponymous girl exists almost entirely in her own head, and in one of the books, a main character practically doesn’t get out of bed.
With astonishingly lucky casting, I could see how this might work as long-form television on HBO or Showtime, but not as a movie. And in this...
Mmm, Sexy Cookie Monster →
The Buckfast Belt
Great story about Scotland’s favorite caffeinated alcohol beverage.
“It goes straight to your head,” he said, “but it’s not my cup of tea.” (Mr. Rooney noted that his cup of tea is half a bottle of vodka a night).
January 2010
19 posts
Tesla’s Roadster To Exit In 2011 (Wired) →
Yikes. I’m pulling for Tesla, but ceasing production on their only model line before the replacement is ready (and not, it sounds like, of their own volition) is unsettling. Meanwhile, I hope I don’t have to move to the suburbs to justify buying a Model S.
From "Watching The English" (Matt Davis) →
This book sounds terrifying.
The Physics of Space Battles (Gizmodo) →
More interesting than iPad analysis.
Sports, sex, and the runner Caster Semenya (New... →
In which I learned, among other things, that the etymology of “hermaphrodite” is based on the omnigendered offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite.
the genuine shame of Ross Douthat’s New York Times... →
It’s instapaper cleanup day. Hey, remember when Obama’s biggest problem was having won the Nobel Peace Prize? That was nice.
The Americanization of Mental Illness (NYT) →
The story goes off the rails a little bit toward the end, but the cultural communicability of mental illness, and the way people react differently when they perceive a biochemical basis for it, were both holy-shit moments of the first order.
Andy Ihnatko on the Leno/Conan scrap →
I learned some things.
Prawn, PDF generation in Ruby →
I don’t understand why a library designed to produce good-looking PDF output has such a bad-looking web site.
Neapolitan Dynamite
I am a man of firm and fixed Ben and Jerry’s preferences, but the new-to-me Neapolitan Dynamite — one half Chocolate Brownie Batter, one half Cherry Garcia — is a victory for the ages. A good portion of its manifest wisdom is the rejection of a strawberry component.
MockSMTP.app →
“MockSMTP is a native Mac application that embeds its own SMTP server. It also features an e-mail client browser, enabling instant viewing of both raw content and HTML rendering, so you can see how…
Handy sudo Settings - Dave Dribin's Blog →
I’d gone quite a long way with no idea the sudo command was so configurable. Saved my bacon yesterday.
We're from the government, and we're here to help...
The FDIC: impressive as hell. They close the 12th biggest bank in Washington after hours on Friday, and reopen parts of it under new management on Saturday:
Horizon’s three drive-up branches, which normally are open on Saturdays, will reopen today with normal business hours as Washington Federal branches. Horizon’s 15 other branches will reopen on Monday.
Over the weekend,...
The Anti-Terror Right’s Incentive Problem... →
“This is all phrased in a pretty insulting manner, but I think it contains more than a grain or two of analytic truth. Which leads to the conclusion that left-wing politicians have strong political incentives to succeed in reducing the incidence of terrorism. Right-wing politicians, by contrast, have no such incentives.”
The Secret Lives of Amazon's Elves (Gizmodo) →
An account of routines inside one of Amazon’s fulfillment centers, where they’re apparently recruiting RVers for short stints.
“Only one carry on? No electronics for the first hour of flight? I wish that,...”
– Bruce Schneier, 12/26/09
Pinboard
As long as I’m adopting new things, time to make a concerted effort to switch to Pinboard for bookmarks. After reading the man for donkey’s years I’ve also learned how to pronounce “Maciej”, and discovered his horrifying side project.
These things usually end badly
For the reverse-chronological, it ends badly at both ends.