I'm still alive!

Not that you would know it by my pathetic posting. Here's some links for you, my loyal and neglected followers

• Comparing Modern Education to a Placebo
• Ideas and Execution
• More from Sivers -

  Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would seriously surprise me.
  
  A fancy tool just gives the second-rater one more pillar to hide behind. Which is why there are so many second-rate art directors with state-of-the-art Macintosh computers.

• I really liked Never Eat Alone

Yet another belated tab clearing post

• Economics of Ticket Scalping
• The end of newspapers and the future of newspapers
• A tech support secret handshake

Belated post

• Bet On America -

  The evidence for our nation's downward spiral isn't sufficient to rule out the very opposite possibility: that the United States will become, in purely geopolitical terms, even stronger in coming decades. The mistake we make is not so much overestimating our problems, but underestimating the problems of our potential rivals. We think we're the only country with decline-and-fall issues.
  
  I'll wager that many of the toughest challenges for Americans in the future won't be associated with our geopolitical decline, weakness or decrepitude. No: Our challenges will be the unimagined consequences of our many successes.

• A travelogue on East St Louis
• Predictions from the year 1900 - a must read
• ASP.net Chart Controls
• The economics of Scientology

Link clearing roundup

Thoughts on the recent events soon, here we are just to clear off some tabs

• Walmart is going to carry the G1
• The coming liberal area will be funny
• Fun Alaskan secessionists
  
• One of the weirdest ads ever

A lovely new site

Check out Skeptoid. It's a bit better than Snopes.

Saturday link clearing roundup

• Visual thinking from the 1960s
• Schelling and the Nuclear Taboo
• Mexican cartels running pot farms in U.S. national forest - who says no one makes things in America anymore!
• The Pill makes women pick bad mates
• 'Peter Pan', 'Snow White' busted at Disneyland - People and their free time...
  

Thursday link roundup

• Bill Buckley and Hugh Hefner
• Town buys strip club to shut it down -

  The town of Lavonia shelled out nearly $1 million Tuesday to buy and shut down the strip club along I-85. Then, the city quickly burned the interstate signs advertising the club, which was popular with truckers.

  For those curious, that's $1,287 per household. Such a wise use of taxpayer dollars.
• Toby Keith opposed the Iraq War
• Quote of the moment (by Ben Franklin) "A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle."
• Check out this Despair.com post, and the government reply - quite funny, and scary too.
  

Your saturday morning reading

• Dead Left - Jon Chair on Naomi Klein
• The Atlanta PD and their odd hat history
• Radley Balko and the non-existent presidential crime policies of the candidates
• American Murder Mystery - everyone should read this, it's about the current and future face of crime.
• Report: Rich Consistently Outearning Poor

  Armbrister stressed that it would be premature to draw any final conclusions from the 550-page report, cautioning that "much supplementary research must still be done."
  
  "Yes, we do need more data," she said. "But regardless, it is apparent that a severe gulf exists between rich and poor. And this cannot be mere coincidence. There is clearly an unknown mitigating factor at work here, and I strongly suspect it may be financial in nature.

  
  

Link clearing blog post

• Garet Garrett - an early libertarian writer, I just added his Atlas Shrugged precursor novel to my amazon.com wish list
• This story about a black widow who has just recently been revealed

Jeff Carstensen was spooked when he learned his grandmother planned to buy him a $100,000 life insurance policy -- and name herself the beneficiary.


"She told me that people of our stature have insurance policies on each other," he said. "That way, if something happens to you, you take care of me, and if something happens to me, I take care of you. It was all too suspicious. So I got out of there any way I could, as soon as I could."

Thursday rapid fire

• Zinger of the day - Cop's special treatment after DUI examined - it's the usual "How did this happen" finishing with "But he said he didn't anticipate any criminal charges against anyone involved in Stephens' release." Lame.
• Bike boxes
• John Templeton has passed away - he started his financial company in the 1930s! That fills me with awe for some reason, I'm not sure why.
• PublicDomain4U.com - cool stuff
  

Random links

• Joel Spolsky "If something seems possible, that's probably because someone is already doing it. When something seems that it can't possibly work, nobody tries it. Real innovation happens when someone tries anyway, overlooking an obvious flaw, and finds a way to make an idea work."
• Female Patriarchs in Albania - apparently they swear virginity, live as men, and take over the male role as head of the family. Very weird.
  

Saturday rapid fire

• Dean Kamen's Robot Arm - simply incredible. Why Kamen isn't America's most highly regarded public citizen is a mystery.
• The liberal media follows me around an takes notes - I had this conversation with some friends last week, it's an odd coincidence. I don't cry at movies but my the movies that come closes are The Virgin Spring and On The Beach.
• More HDR Photography
• Groupware is bad
• Russia's Hypermortality -

  Moreover, a large proportion of the Russian workforce may be too drunk to function. Almost one male death in three is alcohol-related. “The increase of alcohol consumption from 10 to 15 liters and an almost simultaneous increase in mortality suggests the central role played by alcohol to mortality, in average up to 426,000 per year in 1980-2001. Alcohol-related deaths total 29.6 percent of total mortality for men and 17.0 percent for women,” the report says.

• My next project is going to be something like this
  

Links to the sound of impacting bugs

For some reasons bumblebees have been smacking into my office window for the past hour. Here's some links for your reading while I'm uploading...

• Night Photography Tutorial
• Linq tutorial videos
• AskTheBuilder.com is a handy site
• I should probably be more outraged about this, but Planned Parenthood took a donation (later revealed to be a politically motivated prank) specifically for abortions for black women. All a part of the grand evolution I suppose
• The last doughboy - an era is ending and we're not seeing it.
• Free bricks to anyone in Atlanta
  

Friday links

• Everybody kills Hitler - quite good
• Interesting bit by David Friedman on public education
• Bob Barr might be running for the LP nomination, that would be strange
• The best cartoon I've seen in quite some time, everybody check this out...
• The ocean is cooling... - Global warming enthusiasts are sounding more and more like defense lawyers.
  

Tuesday morning link roundup

• Berkeley wants the Marines out - not surprising given their history. We're in the age when everyone delights in acting according to stereotype.
  
• More biofuel scams
• This looks cool
• I'll be attempting somethign like this soon
• Multiple video chat
• A brilliantly simple image stabilizer

Quick links while compiling

• A good NYT profile of Michael Yon
• The Reason-Ron Paul smackdown
  

That's it for now. Work has still been crazy...

Sunday rapid fire

• Living in three centuries - amazing photography
• Public defender suspended for using n-word - while quoting someone no less! Inoffensive language has become the new way to show social piety.
• A profile of David Simon, author of two of my favorite books, and creator of one of my favorite television shows. The Wire starts tonight.
• The evolution debate is strange. Ron Paul says he doesn't believe in some version of it, and an army of commenters jumps in to criticize. For something as trivial as the evolution-Creationism debate (trivial in the sense that being wrong does not affect the outcome) the level of vigor and venom is surprising. It would be interesting to know if belief in evolution was proportional in someway to having children.
  

Recommended viewing

The stuff of thought, an interview with Steven Pinker. It's a lovely interview with braniac Steven Pinker on the development of language. Not safe for work, surprisingly.

Your Friday links

As the implications of the Bhutto assassination are too scary to think about, here's some links for you.

• Via ZenPundit, check out this time lapse mural
• Jack Nicholson on Politics, he usually doesn't talk about it, and judging from the statements in this interview, he knows very little. It's nice when that happens.
  

X-Sql, welcome to the Blogroll

I have recently discovered that my friend Naim has recently started blogging about software matters and such at http://xsqlsoftware.blogspot.com/

Welcome to the blogsphere!

Tuesday links

• Iraq vets take lemons and make.... something.
• Delphine LaLurie - very creepy
• Time management
• I do believe I'll be building these bookshelves
• Ron Paul - comic book president
• Putting Bush on Mt Rushmore - be sure to read this one from Scott Adams
  

Friday morning rapid fire

• The rules on using the names Mohamed and Jesus
• How to hold a digital camera
• This collection of anti-drug commercials. It certainly makes me never want to cook.
• Film Noir Lighting
• The marines and laser guns, it has the memorable line - "Photoshop can quickly solve all engineering challenges."

Thursday rapid fire

• The Ron Paul Blimp - really!
• Chet Richards on Decision Cycle Speed
• An online chat with Reason Magazine editors about Ron Paul, notable ending quote

  And remember as we go into that dark night that is the American election season that you can't abort a fetus with nuclear arms

• An ergonomic way to set up your computer desk
• Ottok Photography
  

Tuesday link roundup

• Advice from your public defender (best of Craig's List)
  
• Why we should hang out: a mathematical proof, this sounds like something I would do actually
• Interesting post on academic taboos from David Friedman
• Another blog post about Sarah Stever, from one of my realtors actually
• Ron Paul Facts, my favorite -

  Ron Paul has been shot at more than a dozen times, but the
  

  "pro- 2nd Amendment" bullets refuse to harm him.

Friday link round up

• Intown Coyotes - They're in Oakhurst, which while wooded, is certainly not a suburban area in the traditional sense. I wonder if they make fun of the country coyotes and get weird tattoos...
• A profile of the last remaining WW I veteran, here is one who passed away last year at the age of 113. To quote from the article

  "Census records show that Mr. Hardy’s father was born in the 1830s and that both his parents were slaves, Mr. Young said."

  It's amazing that the past is that close in the human chain.
• Michael Yon reviews the combat cameras
  

Friday recommended reading

• On a funny note, the Ladder theory
• On a serious note, a short bio of James Stockdale

  When Collins asked who didn't make it out, Stockdale replied:
  
  "Oh, that’s easy, the optimists"
  

What I'm reading while uploading file...

• Monkey Attack!
• A long profile of David Simon, creator of the Wire, and Homicide, Life on the Streets
  
• This article and this one got a student newspaper pulled, maybe there's hope for this new generation.
• Advanced Flash techniques
  

Tuesday morning rapid fire

• Lincoln and the Jews - from the Federation of American Scientists
• The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk - the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe
• Two from Charlie Rose, specifically this interview with Petraus' main counter insurgency adviser David Kilcullenm and also with Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater.
  

Quick Links

• Latin Quotes, translated
• Microsoft wants your health data
• 19 Year old hacks 911 system
• Colbert in the New York Times

Morning reading

Check out Steve Chapman on terrorism and Arnold Kling on McMedicine.

Quick link roundup

• Geoengineering
• Economics as Super Power
• 12 Photography Tips
• Accused Mugger Licks Woman's Toes
• Ethanol is in trouble!
• Ron Paul has actually been getting funds
• A good code converter
  

Recommended Friday viewing

Check out this speech by Michael Sheurer.

Somethign work reading

From LifeHacker - 7 Stupid Thinking Errors You Probably Make

Tuesday round up

• France is seeming warlike
• Personal Batwings!
• There's a site for everything it seems. Including celebrity heights. Fred Thompson is six foot six.
• More on the Atlanta BeltLine Scam. There is no definite plan, no construction yet, and taxes are already rising.

  the proposed 22-mile loop of park and trails ringing downtown will create a circle of wealth and an outer ring of concentrated poverty, warns the Georgia Tech professor who conducted the analysis.

  Atlanta is an unconscious conspiracy of real estate developers.
• From LifeHacker - 7 Thinking Errors
• Jane Fonda caused Global Warming! A massive overstatement, but it's sobering to think where we would be in terms of carbon emissions if we had continued our nuclear power pace from the 70s. Given cheaper electricity, we would probably be farther along with electric cars too.
• Zen Pundit on al Quaidastan
  

Friday round up

Sorry for the light blogging, work and the house hunting process have been quite draining on me.

Anyway, Here is your recommended reading for today

• The Economist has a great read Iraqi Kurdistan, or as it will soon be known, Kurdistan.
• The absolute minimum you should know about Character sets and Unicode
• Russia Tests "Dad of All Bombs". It's good they're keeping themselves busy. Money Quote: " Unlike a nuclear weapon, the bomb doesn't hurt the environment"
• Megan McArdle on why we haven't been attacked since 9/11. Personally I think it's a lack of talent/money/motivation on their part, plus a host of supporting factors
  
• The view from the top of the world
• I'm surprised this hasn't come back to life among the many Bush conspiracies.
• There's this from Craigs List

  Sushi Model: Willing to act as display showcase as sushi is displayed placed on body for patrons to eat off of.
  • Model preferable of Asian ethnicity
  • Height requirement: 5'6'' to 5'11''
  • Slim built; clean and body shaven
  • Will wear bottom with pasty/string bikini top or topless
  • Compensation: $200/3 hours

• Don't you just love it when support for Microsoft Products is done using commands only they know? Check this out (which did work for me)
  

Quick links while uploading

An assortment of things I've read while I've been uploading things today

• The golden age of Chicago prostitution - The Everleigh sisters are respoinsible for the term "get laid". An interesting read - the more things change...
• Rifle Robots!
• John Allen Paulos has a new book out soon, I think it's going to a more civil (and knowing Paulos well written and interesting) version of the recent Richard Dawkins screed. My favorite blurb from the Amazon page "A Lifelong Unbeliever Finds No Reason to Change His Mind"
• How to build your business without quitting your day job
• Firefox tune-ups
• Conan O'Brian hates my homeland - favorites

  Brazil
  Home to more than 800 species of unregulated breast implants.
  
  Burkina Faso
  In the traditional tribal language, that's Burkina for "land of" and Faso for "people who want to get the hell out of Burkina Faso."
  
  Colombia
  You'll come for the enticing beauty of the Caribbean Sea. You'll stay because you've been kidnapped and locked in the trunk of a Dodge Dart.
  
  East Timor
  It takes a lot to admit you live on the bad side of Timor.

Quick link round up

• Long range acoustic devices
• The Agitator has a list of questions that should be asked of all presidential candidates, well worth reading
• Ward Churchill has been fired.
• Black straw lighting from the Strobist and Lighting Mods.
  

Sunday rapid fire

• The wealthiest Americans in history
• Lead exposure and crime - interesting if not convincing
• A preachy CNN.com article on vacations - and why some people don't like them. Evidently any deviation from the middle class norm is unhealthy
• The Battle of Omdurman by the War Nerd
  

Quick Thursday links

• The linguistic capabilities of the candidates
• A story about the old Pullman yards I explored a few months ago. Photo gallery here.
• ASP.net and Validation Groups - I can't believe I didn't know about this earlier.
• The NYT breathlessly points to a supposed new trend in econ departments. Intelligent Design is a new trend in biology in the same way I suppose.
• E-Prime is the way to go
• Austin Bay has seven possibilities for Iraq. Number one is the most likely I think.
  

3 random link

• Meaningful advances in battery technology
• A 24 inch monitor for $229. My, how the prices have fallen
• China executes ex-drug chief for graft

  China executed a former drug and food safety chief on Tuesday for corruption in an unusually swift sentence which will serve as a warning amid a series of health scandals that have stained the "made in China" brand.

  Can you imagine that happening in the US? I can't.
  

Quick Friday roundup

• E-Snailer - Write a letter on the internet
• High Trust Societies
• Fair and Balanced Radio - by Radley Balco
• Better and better car batteries. From Wired. We probably need at least one generation more of advancement before plug-in hybrids are feasible.
  

Friday round up

• A look at where the I-Pod is made, it's pretty much all of East Asia
• A nice look at Electronic Medical Records
• Coming Anarchy does math
• Get your postal mail over the internet! This would solve a lot of problems for me actually.
• 72 year old Marine beats crap out of 27 year old pickpocket.
  

Quick Friday roundup while uploading

• Cool new wind turbines
• A good article on insanity and Angela Yates
• Oil from Algae!
• 15 year old performs surgery in India
• The art of the doable to do list
• The greatest sidewalk artist ever
  

Quick roundup while uploading

• A nice article on the Golden Section in design
• China and Demography from Coming Anarchy
• Making engines more efficient - using steam of all things - very cool
• Cutting Edge Designers
• Prediction Markets - nice graphics
  
• Woman jailed for testicle attack

  Amanda Monti, 24, flew into a rage when Geoffrey Jones, 37, rejected her advances at the end of a house party, Liverpool Crown Court heard.
  
  She pulled off his left testicle and tried to swallow it, before spitting it out. A friend handed it back to Mr Jones saying: "That's yours."

  
  

Monday link roundup

• Popular Science has a predictions market
• Global Warming makes you fat! Really! Or so say the environmentalists. For some reason we treat a virgin birth as a matter of faith, but the weather in thirty years is a scientific fact.
• Safari is now available on Windows, I'm not sure why.
• An-arrgh-chy - The economics of Pirates. HT: ZenPundit
  

Thursday link roundup

• Ala. Officials Probe 'Monster Pig' Saga

  State wildlife officials said Wednesday they want to know how the huge hog dubbed "Monster Pig" got into a fenced hunting preserve where it was chased down and shot to death by an 11-year-old boy.
  ...
  weighed 1,051 pounds and measured 9 feet, 4 inches from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail.
  ...
  Jamison was hunting with his father and the guides on May 3 when he killed the giant pig. He said he shot the huge animal eight times with a .50-caliber revolver and chased it for three hours through hilly woods before finishing it off with a point-blank shot.

• Are you a good liar?
• Microsoft Surface
• Popular Mechanics how to videos
  

Quick link round

• Puzzles and Mysteries from ZenPundit
• The Captain America Syndrome at the Washington Monthly. - They don't actually call it that, but that's what they're talking about.
• This seems dirty, but it's mostly medical. Quite funny though.
  
• Yet more Stirling engines
  

Thursday link roundup

• Hitchens has a sharp pen - Jimmy Carter is his particular target today.
  
• The economics of The Wire - I suppose I need to write one about the economics of the Shield to fully flesh out the crime show econ world.
• Top 100 website run by one guy - hopefully someone will be writing that about me.
• How to photography silhouettes
  

Random Thursday links

• How to fix the Microsoft Home Page
• Robert Conquest's 3 Laws of Politics

  1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
  2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
  3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

• More Stirling Engines how to guides - this one looks a bit better than the last one I posted. Here is another one.
• The top 100 web apps for freelancers - mine is not on it, yet.
  

Monday link roundup

• A useful post from CodingHorror.com on interface friction
• Al Gore, like Ann Coulter, seems to be a mac person
• A blog for women! And one of the editors might be someone I went to high school with.
• Kuler! The Adobe web color harmony tool - via this site
• Co-Mapping (mind mapping software) looks cool
• Properly bashing ethanol
• HiddenUnities and PurposeSlog have posts on the Wire and 24. I helpfully added the Shield in the comments. All excellent programs, though 24 is basically a commercial for the cell phone industry, not torture.
  

Wednesday round up

• 5 Techniques for Enhancing Contrast in Digital Photos
• "Breeding dysentery in the ranks" - the best misuses of the English language in the Sopranos
• What journalists need to know about economics - quite good
  

Monday link roundup

• It's Wiretap the Internet Day - what have we come to in this country. Sigh.
• Entrepreneurial Adages - All quite true. in particular

  Start with nothing, and have nothing for as long as possible -- small budgets give big focus

• Battlefield spy-bot - really cool
• Tribal Minds
• The indispensable Col. Patrick Lang has an outline of what a diplomatic solution to Iraq might look like. I would read all of it. Webbed version of the outline is here.
  

Tuesday Rapid Fire

• Networks, in Forbes
• Tin Can Stirling Engine - really cool, this would go nicely with the passive solar heating system that I blogged about last week.
• Global warming awareness reaches diminishing marginal returns, aptly explained by Instapundit. I'm still waiting for the Shotgun News green issue.
• Gauss vs Pareto, if you understand bell curves, you should read this.
• Robots, Robots, Robots, in Iraq and elsewhere
• An insightful article on internal migrations in the US. By Michael Barone
  

Random links

• Remove the web developer and the web gets developed
• Term of the day "Fever Swamp - A political website or mindset that is prone to wild accusations and is especially susceptible to conspiracy theories."
• An excellent post on conspiracy theories
  

The old round up

• Digital Camera crop factors
• 20 things not to do when starting a business - I stayed away from most of them
• More solar power
• via Marginal Revolution -

  The public's opinion of past wars improves as a new war approaches. Thus, after Vietnam most people thought the war was a mistake and this held true for decades until the beginning of the Iraq war when the opinion of war in Vietnam suddenly improved! Even more dramatically, a majority of people thought that World War I was a mistake until World War II approached when the percentage thinking it was a good war doubled.
  

• The worst school murders actually happened in 1927, though it did not involve shootings. It's a horrifying story.
  

Friday round up

• Crime Crews
• Where the Fortune 50 CEOs went to college - appearances by Georgia State and Georgia Tech, surprisingly little Ivy League.
  
• Government menstrual forms, really, to quote

  Women officers must write down their "detailed menstrual history and history of LMP [last menstrual period] including date of last confinement [maternity leave]," the form says.

  I like the use of the term "confinement" for maternity leave.
• Solar Power - I was wondering why companies like this didn't already exist. Essentially they install (and own) solar panels on top of your house, and you buy it from them them at the rate you're paying the power company. I met them yesterday at the Home Show at the World Congress Center. A good idea.
  

Friday night round up

• Hansellman on graphing - the data "wants" to be presented in a certain way
• Hansellman on a family backup strategy - for all of those of us who give out free tech support to family and friends
• Perceptions of America and Iran in der Spiegel
• Der Spiegel again - Muslim integration into Europe
  

This site took a chunk of my day

Overheard at Work - it makes me a bit nostalgic for the old days of the office world.

Sunday round up

• A good read on economics and statistics
• Islam and Christianity - IBM and Microsoft - Embrace and Extend
• Resiliancy, and how to measure it
  

Quick Thursday round up

• Interesting solar thermal plant in Nevada.
• George Eastman - founder of Kodak, and the originator of two of my favorite quotes. He named his company Kodak because he thought the letter K was "a strong, incisive sort of letter". His suicide note was "My work is done. Why wait?".
• Tech Recipes - Vista Tips
• A good bio of Albert Jay Nock.
  

Sunday round up

• Interesting post on carbon offsets from TreeHugger.
• DIY efficient cards
• More Flickr printing
  

Quck roundup

• An interesting look at the military aspects of social networking.
• Underwater windmills
• How we would fight China
• The metaweb/FreeBase
• Evidently February was cold
  
• Blurb has dropped their prices.
• Strangest suicide attempt, ever

  Two Georgia men survived a gruesome suicide attempt Friday after cutting their own arms off with a saw, reported Atlanta's Journal Constitution.
  
  The 40 and 41-year-old men managed to remove three of their four arms, cutting them about six inches above their wrists, Atlanta Police Major Lane Hagin told the Journal.

• Baby steps to a better editorial, it's easier to see why this one is so wrong.
• The 20 best comic book weapons.
• It's odd seeing this already existing - I stumbled across this C.S. Lewis quote yesterday "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.' which is the general gist my future novel The Comedian.
  

Random assortment of links

• Frank Miller is going to be on G4 on Sunday.
• A 96 year old mobster has his day in court. His mob name is "The Old Man" which is rather unimaginative. His record goes back to 1932.
• Stand-in mistress sought to take wife’s abuse
• Your tax dollars at work, in hovering cloud of smoke form.
• Underground coal fires.
• A horrible abuse of language from the junior senator from Massachusetts. "

  Might I ask you what your opinion is with respect to the state of American politics as regards the politics of personal destruction?

  He has the perfectly descriptive term, slander, to use and yet he came up with that. He makes Bush seem downright articulate sometimes.
• A lot of interesting talk on Gore, and specifically his carbon offsetting program from Marginal Revolution and The Economist. FYI - he seems to be a part owner of the offsetting company.
  

Quick tab clearing round up

• Meanest quote: they "breed like flies but die in the same way.”
• Joaquin Murietta
• The funniest thing I read on Sunday "A small group of the SOF participated in mass nudity and arson as means of protesting against materialism". Mass nudity and arson! Probably not at the same time though.
• Why the camera adds 10 pounds.
• Bikes must ride single file on Columns Drive
  

Quick tab clearing roundup

• The Sunni-Shia Quiz - I got a 100!
• Private solutions to Global Warming
• Ron Paul is running for president! Finally a good republican.
• Engineering Quotes
• Woman Fired For Writing About Avoiding Work
  

Monday rapid fire

• An interesting John Robb post - check out the map
• Solar powered home fueling station
• "I'm proud to pay taxes in America, but I could be just as proud for about half the money." by Arthur Godfrey
  

Thursday rapid fire

• Hitchens reviews Stein - personally I don't think the demographic argument carries much weight - look at the performance of Japan vs China and Germany vs Russia in WWII. A productive culture beats a backward one in a life or death struggle. It's an interesting read though. To clarify - the reason that Japan and Germany lost was American material and military support. While they could die bravely, that doesn't lead to many wins.
• Toddler's Temper Ousts Family From Plane -

  She was removed because "she was climbing under the seat and hitting the parents and wouldn't get in her seat" during boarding, Graham-Weaver said.

• Police in Tijuana Issued Sling Shots -

  The police department has issued about 60 slingshots to officers in the violent border city of Tijuana, where soldiers confiscated police weapons two weeks ago on allegations of collusion with drug traffickers.

  Yet the war on drugs continues. This time for sure!
  
• Battery Breakthrough - Well worth reading. If true, this changes American society for the better in ten years or less. Sadly, most scientific breakthroughs tend to be either false or meaningless
• Diane Feinstein and conflicts of interest
• Winning the battle for freedom - RTWT - from the founder of Whole Foods no less.
  

3 very cool links

• The Gap Minder - From Google, it tracks life expectancy, income, population in a very cool graphical use of flash
• "Things My Boyfriend Says" - pretty funny
• Apple Dei - the cult of the mac
  

Day after Christmas rapid fire

As my hard drive is changing itself over, I thought I would share some stuff

• Jetpacks!
• Sin City Photoshop
• Digital Monochrome, absolutely beautiful photos
• Digital Monochrome forums

Three good links

• A planned economy fails again
• Cooking with Sartre
• A good photography site
  

One liners and things that caught my eye

• Good one liner -

  If there is a motto for the Bush Administration’s war policy, it is, “Doing the Right Thing Wrongly.”

  The argument on the neo-right these days resembles the 30s debates between Stalinist and Trotskyist on the nature of communism, i.e. can one separate the theory and practice.
• The nature of motion sickness
• From an article about the Skyhook (sort of a reverse parachute) -

  The first live test was conducted with a pig as the target. Due to some stability issues, the pig spun in the 125 mph wind, and arrived on the plane dizzy and discombobulated. It recovered, however, and promptly attacked the crew.

Friday rapid fire

• A quick review of video hosting services
• DIY public hotspot
• SQL Refactoring and formatting - a bit pricey, but it seems interesting
  
• Yet another electric car - due sometime next year
• Revealed: Why understanding economics is hard
• What economists agree on
  

Quick Wednsday rapid fire

• Free Fusion Razors
• Folk Alley seems cool
• Photoshop Tutorials
• Microsoft launches an html editor called Expressions. I'm quite curious.
• Republican uses animals, mariachi band to critique border security
• Google goes solar
  
• Crunching the Numbers on Hydrogen
  

Still uploading

Pesky large files. Anyway, here is some lovely reading material for you.

• This is the strangest article you will read this week. By a lot.
• Profanity across languages- the Dutch "May you get the measles" is my favorite
• Deadweight Loss / Excess Burden - if more people understood this, the world would be improved remarkably. Short version, it's a cost to someone with no benefit to anyone.
• Human Powered Vehicles - a bike that goes over 40 miles per hour

Photo composition round up

If it weren't for long uploads, I don't think I would ever post anything. Here are the good sites I found while looking for info on photographic composition

• articles on the Golden Mean
• a nice little manifesto, with math!
• Short descriptions
• Selective Vision
• Another nice article
• Plugs for photoshop on the matters above
• The Golden Sections
  

Tuesday round up

• Liberal attitudes about Islamist terror by Sam Harris - not terribly relevent since they control little, but it is not good for one side to drop out of contention
• More on the Atlanta Path Foundation
• DIY home photo studio setup
• The Beltline crashes - the enthusiasm of some people for real estate scams is an enduring mystery.
  
• Greshams law and criminal investigation
• John Robb on what's next in Iraq - very interesting. One thing that goes unmentioned is that the more chaotic Iraq gets, the more valuable Kurdistan gets. Also, after a certain point, a volatile Iraq becomes a liability to Iran, particularly with American troops withdrawn.
• Headshaver - mine is on it's way.
• Investing the fun way, in vice and sin. "...invests in casino stocks and companies that make liquor, tobacco and bombs."
• Fatwa Friday!
• Steve Tyler has Hepatitis C
  

Quick Sunday rapid fire

• An hourly motel in the sky, more info here.
• The funniest quote I read yesterday is from this blog, to wit

  Every adult must at some point have paused during some slapstick piece of debauchery and thought, "Christ, this is ridiculous". Having testicles is like being chained to the village idiot. Sad, but there it is.

• The famous "What year is it?" essay. What year you compare our modern times to determines your current outlook, pretty interesting. Personally I think it's 1905, and Radical Islam is best compared to the Bolshevism of that period, but all comparisons are, by definition, imperfect.
• The Seventh Seal was an incredible movie
• This is an incredibly cool time lapse movie, regrettably, in QuickTime, but still good.
  

Quick rapid fire

• A company that makes secret passageways
• Electoral-Vote.com is back!
• Slate has an interesting article on survival in emergencies
• This is a very cool OSX simulator
• The American Scene is quite interesting sometimes
• Ultramarathoners
  

Tuesday rapid fire

I'm back from Kentucky, I'll have a recap of that soon, in the meantime, here are some interesting links

• Harry Anderson and New Orleans
• An underappreciated man of all time
• Ranking Blogs as newspapers
• Radio Shack fires 400 people by email
• Offshore wind mills - seems pretty cool
• Man Lives to 112 Despite Junk-Food Diet
• This was the funniest SNL skit of all time, surprisingly it's not on YouTube
• Another good skit is, specifically, Seinfeld meets Oz.
• A seemingly major oil discovery. Probably not as big a deal as everyone thinks it is, but then again, maybe not.
  

Quick round up

• Criminal caught due to Skype trace
• Al Gore in fact environmentally friendly, or at least environmentally correct.
• Trees that grow 90 feet in six years sound really cool
• This was the problem I had with my car
• Annoying quote of the moment, from CNN.com which has been irritating me lately, after such good coverage of the Israel-Hez conflict (absent Anderson Cooper)

  In the immigration debate, I've tried to do three things:
  
  One is to deplore the degree to which the debate is driven by the dark impulse of racism. What concerns many Americans about illegal immigration is the sense that it speeds up the Latinization of the United States -- where Anglo-Saxon culture is replaced by Latin culture, where English gives way to Spanish, and where we Americans become strangers in our own land.

  He "tries to deplore"? Even, or perhaps especially, in our secular public age need the trappings of religion and loud protestations of faith, but this is taking it to the riduculous. How is it racist to want to keep English as the dominant language, and to not want to become a "stanger in our own land"? That's dumber than claiming Islam as a "race".
  
• Women and their brains
  

Sunday night round up

• Vile behavior from the bench
• Interesting thoughts on Hezbollah
• One off furniture
• Ipod photoshop style
• Bashing Al Gore
• Scary police impersonators
• Product photography
• Cool bike photos
• The right wing look at the NY Times. This is the only worthwhile thing to appear on the Huffington Post so far.
• An apt cartoon
  

Monday rapid fire

• The best use of graphic thumbnails I've seen
• Calculate your Body Mass Index. This seems a tad unrealistic, and if this is what people are using to measure America's obesity "Epidemic" I'm much less impressed. It seems over broad and crappy. For instance, my ideal weight range is between 137 and 183, a difference of 46 pounds.
• Stirling Engines!
• Kurdistan, the other Iraq, it's where all of the American troops will be should a full fledged civil war break out. Described my Michael Totten as "a Muslim Utah". Shoul Iraq break up, this will be the country we subsidize most, besides Israel.
  
• $10 Panoramic Tripod Head - I need one of these.
  
• Apex Predators
• How much is inside....
• Cheap Handlebar mounts - something else I need.
• Milton Friedman TV!
  

Friday rapid fire

• NutritionData.com - very good site
• Lebanon Metaphor One
• Web Photo School
• Lighting 101
• More on Kyoto
• Building the $14 steadycam, you can buy it here
• GPS Article One, Article Two, Windows Media Info
  
• Alt Energy Blog One
• WindHunter - a good idea, but like most energy ideas, doesn't exist
• Supacam
• An angry analysis of the current Business Week cover story (about Digg) over at 37 Signals.
  

Quick round up

• The great migration period
• Interview with the 37 Signals Founder
• Free Visual Studio stuff
• Free technical tutorials stuff
• The Alternative Energy Store
• More electric cars
• Carbon fiber - seems cool

Saturday rapid fire

• Make a timeline of your life - it could be cool, but too revealing
• Time Maps
• Top 10 Signs You're Made to be an Entrepreneur 6.

  You spend more time and energy looking for easier, faster, cheaper, more effective ways of accomplishing something than if you just did the task outright.

• Prosopagnosia - The inability to recognize faces. Or the way of the Steve.
• A good wrap up of the Goldstein - Frisch battle by Wendy McElroy. I still find it odd that Fox News employs a Canadian anarchist as a columnist, but she does seem popular there.
• The Agitator's Fox column about Swat Teams and no-knock warrants. It would seem that the best way to fix the problem is to assign liability to Judges who sign errant warrants, though I don't think anyone has suggested that yet.
• A very good post on why the current world situation is NOT World War III.
  

Saturday round up

• Magnificent photography from Afghanistan
• A guide to chopping foods
• Race, Advertising and the Sony Playstation.
• Big Brother mixes with the cast of Friends to create Dodgeball
• An insightful post on Energy from the Winds of Change; it starts

  An optimist says the glass is half full, the pessimist says the glass is half empty and the engineer says the glass is the wrong size.

  Read the whole thing.
  
• Some quite impressive numbers you're not likely to hear about.

  In less than three years, the U.S. economic pie has expanded by $2.2 trillion, an output add-on that is roughly the same size as the total Chinese economy, and much larger than the total economic size of nations like India, Mexico, Ireland, and Belgium.

  I think Iraq is keeping the political class occupied, much like the Clinton scandals did in the late 90s, and saving us from grand new ideas.

Sunday rapid fire

• Create Visio diagrams programatically
• An interesting interview with Frank Miller
• Creepy pictures from North Korea
• A new studio album from Ramblin' Jack Elliot!
• I rode past this last week.
  

Rapid fire and random thoughts

• Interesting thoughts on the use of mercenaries to settle third world conflicts (Darfour, the Congo, etc) at Instapundit and Marginal Revolution. I'm a bit queasy about the idea myself, though it's probably worth trying.
• Congress asserts amazing immunities for itself. No-knock raids and tear gas are good enough for you and me though.
• Why do we believe anything sponsored by supposedly independent interest groups, in this case, an epidemic of girls going wild?
• A nice AJAX primer from Brainjar.
• Traffic Data in Windows Live Local.
• The current media created craze is the fight club. I think this article misses out on reasons why it is appealing to techies though. If you're a programmer, you're spending all day in your virtual world, and stepping into the ring is about as far away from that as you can get.
  

Quick Monday round up

• Interesting stats on tattoos (and the people who love them)
• Weddings are costly, asymmetrical boondogles everywhere.
• An inspiring story of a woman donating a kidney to a good friend.
• Creating a 1099 Misc form for blackmail seems about right.
• An interesting chart about the progressivity of the tax code under Bush. One little known fact is that he has actually made taxation MORE progressive, not less, mostly by removing millions of people from the tax rolls. No supply-sider he.
• Dear NSA. Not as good as Postsecret, but similar.
  

Science Tuesday

In further effort to drive the biking in darkness post farther down the page I bring you Popular Mechanics interesting article comparing alternative fuels, as well as their article on souping up the human body.

Rapid Fire Saturday

• How to tell a good story
• Google unleashes free 3-D software
• A very interesting post on how a war with Iran is likely to function.
• LifeHacker on problem solving.
• LifeHacker on starting your own business.
• A guy in Colorado got caught with an infrared traffic light changer, and was only ticket $50! Totally worth it.
• A very good article on this ridiculous "Peak Oil" meme.
  

Monday round up

• Catch and release attention
• Google Earth now tracks flights.
• Michael Yon is in Afghanistan, with some stunning photography.
• A massive list of free utility software.
• Positive imaging.
  

Quick round up

1. Virtual Earth and Local.Live.com are very cool, with very good arial photography.
2. I am undecided about Geek Entertainment TV
3. Charles seems like a cool program.
4. Acronis seems to be a cool backup program.
5. A free book about information markets.
6. N-Unit ASP seems like a good tool.
7. The Russian birth rate is up.
8. Libertarian views on the Iraq war, from Reason Magazine.
9. A budget photography lighting system.
10. A wired article on arial photgraphy.
11. An interesting post from David Friedman about immigration and the welfare state.
12. European Demography.
    

Quick round up

• The Simpson's intro - as done by real people.
  
• Spaceplanes
• It's not fascism because we don't call it fascism - the food police are now after soft drinks.
• Some clear thinking on the morning after pill.
• Evidently AT&T has a 1.9 trillion call database.
• Your tax dollars are paying auto workers not to work.
• An article on tracking public opinion on the internet. I will one day get my blogprophet project up and going.
  

Quick Round Up

• A cheaper hybrid in the works
• Media format by political affiliation
• Dave Chappelle is quite brazen to be offended that Comedy Central might show some of his unfinished shows. And I would imagine that Chappelle Theory.com is a total crock.
  

Thursday rapid fire

• Telegraph fun
• Bluegrass everywhere but here
• It washes, dries and irons! All in one device.
• The Yahoo Ajax blog.
• More Ajax I need to get around to understanding.
• An interesting article about Saddam and WMD. It's odd how no one seems to be interested in what happened to the WMD. While it's been proven they're not there, the details of the removal are absent.
  

I return from my work-related hiatus

• Gaza shopkeeper stocks up on Danish flags to burn
  
• Your tax dollars at work
  
• Some courage in the media
• What is the deal Iranians and the Holocoast? Are they positioning themselves to take over bin Laden's place as anti-west figurehead in spite of whole Shiite thing?
  

Sunday rapid fire

• A nice summary of the demographic predicament of the Democratic Party. The Roe Effect is curiously unmentioned.
• 39 Mega pixel digicam! Via Digg.
• A very good article on NRO about the current state of 527 organizations.
  

  ...led by the so-called 527 groups, was a broad-based, grassroots effort, it was, in fact dependent in substantial part on just five donors: financier George Soros, Progressive Insurance chairman Peter Lewis, Hollywood mogul Stephen Bing, and the California investors Herbert and Marion Sandler. Together, they spent about $78 million in the effort to defeat the president — more than the $75 million in federal funds that each presidential candidate received to conduct his entire general election campaign. (It was also more than twice what the late-starting top five Republican 527 donors spent on their side.)

  The low number of people funding really does explain a lot about the Kerry campaign.
• The Iranians seem to refine technique.
• A good look at what could the scenario with the FISA/NSA case. One thing I would still like clarified: Is it wiretapping when it is recorded, or when someone listens to it? It still seems like a massive amount of datamining to me.
• Blues guitarist Rory Block has an unappealing FrontPage website, but a very interesting life story.
• I intent do explore AJAX more thoroughly when I have more time, but here is a tutorial, and a good open source download site. Here is an AJAX library it seems.
  

Friday roundup

• Do your children determine your politics? The gender of your children that is? VIA MR
• Husband and wife entrepreneurship.
• Sugar in the Gourd - Old time radio.
  

A site for my many readers

As my brain is soft and fuzzy right now, I'll suggest this one without much comment.

Crime Library - tons of great history.