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Google power
On Friday I created my post on the new NineRodessa.com site. Monday morning I hear from the client that the post is showing up third on Google. Things have changed considerably since the Yahoo and Alta Vista Days.
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A handy link for househunters
It seems that one can search country property records online, Dekalb County (Georgia) is here.
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NineRodessa.com website!
Ever since I went in business for myself (5 years ago now) my largest client has been Nine Rodessa. And we’ve talked about doing a new website since then; happily other projects have taken priority and there has never been enough time to actually build the site. At long last the site has been created and built. It’s a fine mix of high-end design, Flash video and Ajax, all administered via a lovely content administration system. For this type of work I think it’s the finest I’ve ever done.
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Your tax dollars at work
In the form of a brazen retirement scam at the Fulton County Clerks office. Basically the old clerk retires and her successor hires her back at $55 an hour.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution learned through open-records requests and interviews that Hicks is working without a contract, that her new job has no written goals or deadlines and has delivered no tangible work product in six months of employment.
All this and the roads aren’t fixed.
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Wisdom from the Agitator
From his post on America and Life Expectancy
The United States counts all births as live if they show any sign of life, regardless of prematurity or size. This includes what many other countries report as stillbirths. In Austria and Germany, fetal weight must be at least 500 grams (1 pound) to count as a live birth; in other parts of Europe, such as Switzerland, the fetus must be at least 30 centimeters (12 inches) long. In Belgium and France, births at less than 26 weeks of pregnancy are registered as lifeless. And some countries don’t reliably register babies who die within the first 24 hours of birth. Thus, the United States is sure to report higher infant mortality rates.
The other factor here is that thanks to our access to medical technology, we’re more likely to try to save premature deliveries that in other countries would result in stillbirths or miscarriages. So every time an infant dies in the U.S. that would never have been born alive (or counted as born alive) in other countries, it registers as a life that died at the age of “zero.” That’s a pretty significant downward-tug on the national life expectancy.
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I’d actually like to see where we rank in average life expectancy from, say, the age of 30 or 35 onward. I couldn’t find any such data, but it seems to me that would factor out much of the homicide problem, would negate the problems with how we measure infant mortality, and would probably result in a better showing for the U.S.
All quite true.
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A short adage
Julian Sanchez comes up with a new term, the Outsight, defined as the opposite of insight, further defined as an
elementary point that everyone else had taken for granted as a premise of the conversation, and indeed, one too obvious to be worth stating.
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Tuesday link clearing festival
- Noir is a new club/restaurant in Atlanta that just opened up, decorated entirely in a film noir motif. They have movie nights too. Sounds perfect for me. The AJC review is here.
- WikiBroker and Zillow seem quite handy as well. The Zillow link is set to where I am thinking about moving.
- Robert Patterson (a blogger new to me) posts this excellent link to the Battle of Algiers.
- The Chinese ARE building the first affordable electric cars! Which is one of my predictions from a while back.
- Curiously underreported story about Global Warming.
These graphs were created by NASA’s Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data. . . .
NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.
- PurpleSlog responds to my 8 Random Facts Question. His blog tagline is now “Accepting the World As It Is Until Robots Get Better”
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Random links from the laptop
- Christianity and China – history is going to be interesting for a long time to come.
- Confessions of a BBC Liberal – The politics of it aren’t terribly interesting, but the illustration of groupthink is. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of party affiliation by profession.
- Nerds One and Two: The Hyperwhite – It seems that someone did research on nerdiness. Some choice excerpts –
Nerdiness, she has concluded, is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, “hyperwhite.”
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In a 2001 paper, “The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness,” and other works, including a book in progress, Bucholtz notes that the “hegemonic” “cool white” kids use a limited amount of African-American vernacular English; they may say “blood” in lieu of “friend,” or drop the “g” in “playing.” But the nerds she has interviewed, mostly white kids, punctiliously adhere to Standard English.
The author seems not to realize that the appeal of hyper-proper English is that the rules are memorable and never change, which reduces the aren’t tied to a peer group to stay current. That’s my theory anyway.
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Jury Duty Again!
And only two years after the last time.
And question #4 on the questionnaire (along with name, address, etc) is “Are you Hispanic?”
Weird.
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The rest of the Chicago photos
I’ve finished processing the pictures from my small Canon camera from the Chicago trip. I wasn’t able to bring the big Nikon into the event, so this gallery consists of the road photos and the non-closeups of the Crossroads Guitar Festival.
As you might guess from the quantity of photos, there was a long wait outside Buddy Guy’s nightclub.
