February 2012
6 posts
Newt or Schrute: the Quiz | Mother Jones →
Can you tell the difference between Newt Gingrich and Dwight Schrute? The average is 45%; I got 40%. With help. And I’ve seen every episode of The Office.
Iran Worried U.S. Might Be Building 8,500th... →
Burgled in Philly « The Bygone Bureau →
When John Davidson’s apartment gets robbed, he learns that the easiest way to get his stuff back is to have one drug dealer lie to another drug dealer while he lies to the police.
This story is punchy and funny. If you read it, I think it will help you understand why I am confused about the role of police in my neighborhood. That is, police provide one kind of enforcement: if there’s...
To My Old Master | Letters of Note →
Shaun Usher:
In August of 1865, a Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, wrote to his former slave, Jourdon Anderson, and requested that he come back to work on his farm. Jourdon — who, since being emancipated, had moved to Ohio, found paid work, and was now supporting his family — responded spectacularly by way of the letter seen below (a letter which, according to newspapers at the...
By the Numbers: Life and Death at Foxconn -... →
The surprising number from this list was,
40: Estimated percent of the world’s consumer electronics manufactured by Foxconn.
I first learned about Foxconn because it makes many Apple products, and that’s how Foxconn is frequently covered in the news, as a company that assembles products for Apple and other technology companies. Except, while maybe Apple is their biggest...
Arby's Now Charging $2.99 To Let Customers Go... →
ATLANTA—During a press event at Arby’s headquarters last week, the company officially launched its new $2.99 Grab-N-Go Meal Deal, which allows patrons to go behind the counter at any franchise location and grab as much roast beef as they can with their bare hands.
“We’re thrilled to announce an exciting new dining option that lets customers step right into our kitchen and...
January 2012
25 posts
One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly... →
A timeline of programming languages, including the one I have to use for work,
1957 - John Backus and IBM create FORTRAN. There’s nothing funny about IBM or FORTRAN. It is a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie.
And my favorite language,
1991 - Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum travels to Argentina for a mysterious operation. He returns with a large cranial...
Calvin Trillin: “President Romney Meets Other... →
A Shouts and Murmurs piece, based on this premise from The Times,
When Mitt Romney introduces himself to voters, he has a peculiar habit of guessing their age or nationality, often incorrectly. (A regular query: “Are you French Canadian?”)
When making small talk with locals, he peppers the conversation with curious details… . Mr. Romney has developed an unlikely penchant for trying...
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Announcing Ruffle →
Ruffle is a tool I made that can help you make annotated bibliographies with LaTeX by making links between each article and the articles it cites and is cited by in the output PDF. You can get it on GitHub.
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The Book of Jobs | Joseph Stiglitz | Vanity Fair →
Joseph Stiglitz writes in Vanity Fair regarding the recession. Many people draw parallels between the Great Depression and the current recession, but Stiglitz sees a different parallel. He rightly notes that monetary policy was unable to fix either the Depression or this recession. Instead,
At the beginning of the Depression, more than a fifth of all Americans worked on farms. Between 1929 and...
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Does Airport Security Really Make Us Safer? |... →
Bruce Schneier is a security expert and a strong opponent of “security theater” and other measures intended to confirm the validity of people’s fears instead of actually making things safer. He also doesn’t like the term “cyber war” unless people are using “cyber” things to actually harm people physically. Schneier sees these sorts of things as both...
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McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: The More the... →
“Well, what about three men?”
— Rick Santorum, explaining his objection to gay marriage.
About six months after I decided I was gay, I got married. Nothing fancy, just city hall and a small party afterwards, and then Tim and I bought a nice place in a nice part of town and went about with our lives. We cooked meals or ordered out. We puttered around the house, not fixing things...
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Arrested Development paper dolls | flannel animal →
In the category of “there is a Tumblr of it”, Kyle Hilton has a set of paper dolls based on characters in his favorite movies and TV series. (Hilton doesn’t only Tumbl paper dolls, but, man, he makes a lot of paper dolls.) I link here to the Arrested Development dolls.
There are also dolls for Breaking Bad, Parks and Recreation, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,...
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Why Twitter Engineers And Execs Keep Quitting –... →
I’m an avid tooter and Facebooker, and so I was interested in this. In my opinion, except for the iPad app, Twitter hasn’t had a new feature in the last two years that has made it better for me. Facebook, on the other hand, has improved. I think the following quote is the best explanation of the ones listed in the linked article by Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider, and I think...
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Accounts from men who shop in bulk | New York... →
Evidently, I am not alone in buying some garments in bulk. Most of the men interviewed here are fancy people who buy many fancy things at once. My dad has worn the same shoes for the past ten or fifteen years; not the same pair, but the same product. When he’s asked me to fetch his shoes for him, I’ve had trouble getting the moderately-worn pair, as opposed to the rather old pair or...
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Simon Rich: “Center of the Universe” : The New... →
A Shouts and Murmurs story in which God creates the universe and goes through a tough time with his girlfriend, Kate:
On the fourth day, God created stars, to divide the light from the darkness. He was almost finished when He looked at His cell phone and realized that it was almost nine-thirty.
“Fuck,” He said. “Kate’s going to kill me.”
He finished the star He was working on and...
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“In order for something to seem true to man, it has to be visibly supported in...”
– Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, p200.
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Iowa: The Meaningless Sideshow Begins | Matt... →
Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone, regarding the meaninglessness of the Iowa caucuses and the rest of the primary season:
This caucus, let’s face it, marks the beginning of a long, rigidly-controlled, carefully choreographed process that is really designed to do two things: weed out dangerous minority opinions, and award power to the candidate who least offends the public while he goes about his...
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Always End with Poopy-Head: Conan O'Brien's Kids'... →
Last night, I listened to This American Life #80, Running After Antelope, which was mostly about whether and how human beings could hunt antelope without tools, by competing with them in a feat of endurance. However, what I want to mention here is the discussion at the end of the episode, with Andy Richter, regarding the August 8, 1997 episode of Late Night with Conan O’Brien, in which the...
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“LET THE HEALING BEGIN
This bothersome sentiment is usually heard following...”
– George Carlin, in When will Jesus bring the pork chops?. He’s in a better place now.
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The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix - IEEE... →
You probably use Microsoft Windows on your computer, which is not a unix. However, you use Unix whether you know it or not. You use a unix if you use Linux, and you know that, if you use Linux. You also use a unix and might not notice it, if you have an Android phone or iPhone or if you use Mac OS X. You used a unix just now to read this webpage, because so many of the servers on the internet run...
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What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream, by Noam... →
If you’ve read George Orwell’s Animal Farm which he wrote in the mid-1940s, it was a satire on the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state. It was a big hit. Everybody loved it. Turns out he wrote an introduction to Animal Farm which was suppressed. It only appeared 30 years later. Someone had found it in his papers. The introduction to Animal Farm was about “Literary Censorship in England” and what...
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Did the United States Beat Sputnik into Space? |... →
Those of us with an interest in the early days of the space race — won by Sputnik 1 in October 1957 — might need to broaden our disciplines a bit to get the whole story. It turns out that the race might have actually been won two months earlier, by the United States, with an entrant from outside the space program. Its name was Operation Plumbbob.
For six months in 1957, Operation Plumbbob...
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“Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable...”
– James Madison, Founding Father, or, perhaps, the time-traveling Koch Brothers. Source: Avalon Project: Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787
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Nine Thoughts: Five By Five →
ninethoughts:
I apologize, but unless you listen to the shows at 5by5.tv, you will most likely not enjoy the following, but otherwise, you might get a kick out of these observations.
EVERY ‘BACK TO WORK’ EVER
Merlin: Hello?
Dan: HI, AUM MERLIN MANN! I LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO AND I’M FANCY COOL ‘CAUSE I’M MERLIN MANN!
Merlin: Hi! Can I aks you a question? Can I aks you another...
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News coverage of Republican primaries: idiotic
The news coverage of the Republican primaries is idiotic. There narrative that’s being presented is that there is a wild struggle for the lead. The story is told this way because news presents data rather than insights, and, while there’s a lot of new data (unveilings of potential scandals, gaffes, resurgences) these data don’t have any effect on the outcome of the primaries....
December 2011
30 posts
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The mourning of the death of Kim Jong Il is not a...
After Kim Jong Il died, many North Koreans mourned publicly and histrionically. From The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker,
This aspect of group psychology explains something that otherwise staggers our imagination: have we been astonished by fantastic displays of grief on the part of whole peoples when one of their leaders dies? The uncontrolled emotional outpouring, the dazed masses standing...
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Mitt Romney spars with Vietnam vet over gay... →
The scene: Mitt Romney visits a diner in Manchester, New Hampshire:
Noticing [Bob] Garon’s black Vietnam veteran cap, Romney sat down beside him and tried to strike up a conversation about his military service as reporters and cameramen crowded around the booth.
“I’ve have a question for you,” Garon said, cutting off the former Massachusetts governor’s attempt at chitchat. “New Hampshire...
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Fox and Sarah Palin Freak Over White House... →
Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin told Fox News & Commentary that she found the card to be a bit unusual. “It’s odd,” she said, wondering why the president’s Christmas card highlights his dog instead of traditions like “family, faith and freedom.”
Compare and contrast the White House card and the Fox News Card in the linked story.
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“What is most interesting about Ron Paul is the extent to which his domestic...”
– Rachel Maddow
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If Laws Change, 'Penny Hoarders' Could Cash in on... →
Because of rising copper prices, people are hoarding pre-1982 pennies. They can’t legally melt them down for their copper, yet, but are saving them now in case they are later allowed to melt the pennies.
Inside a shed next to his house, Henry has orange tubs filled with 200,000 pennies, and he spends hours sorting through roll after roll of the coins. But it’s not just any and all...
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Pobot time: Allow me to recommend latex-diff and... →
In which I describe ways to track changes to text written in LaTeX, especially if you’re using git. I recommend latex-diff and latexbatchdiff.
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Schneier on Security: The Curse of the Secret... →
Bruce Schneier on “secret questions”, like what your mother’s maiden name is.
The point of all these questions is the same: a backup password. If you forget your password, the secret question can verify your identity so you can choose another password or have the site e-mail your current password to you. It’s a great idea from a customer service perspective — a...
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“His — history will tell. We missed the Persian spring. The president...”
– Jon Huntsman on foreign policy in the Middle East, making me give up on my mystical belief that he might be a crypto-Democrat, or at least crypto-pal-to-the-not-right-wing, in the same way that Obama was a crypto-not-socialist. In response to the question,
So many people view the Arab spring as...
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Literary Genre Translations|McSweeney's →
Cirocco Dunlap reveals everything bad and good about genres.
Original Text
“I ate a sandwich and looked out the window.”
Sci-Fi
“I placed the allotted nutrition capsules on my tongue bed and looked to the Nahin VI-8373 space podhole.”
Fantasy
“My dragon, Ralfarus, and I, Genflowfla’ii, choked down the hardened cheese curd and two-part-moons-old bread as we peered out...
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A Christmas mystery - All this →
Dr Drang on the abomination, “Wonderful Christmastime”, by Paul McCartney, the song which does not have my permission to enter my ears.
The problem with a lot of Paul’s post-Beatles work is the awe others have for his great musical talent. If his own inner editor fails him, there’s no one around to tell him he needs to work harder on a piece.
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