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