Wear Egg Nog

2011-04-15T23:26:00.000-07:00

Obama plans to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion in the next 12 years. What does this mean? $8 trillion of new debt in 12 years not $12 trillion in debt. In 2011, the federal government had $2.2 trillion in revenue and $3.8 trillion in expenditures (wiki).

Having some debt is OK and can be sustainable. Here 3% of debt to GDP ratio seems to be a number that is sustainable. And this can be achieved by perhaps 2018 based on Obama's budget, which may not include all of his budget deficit fighting measures. But does this all matter? Japan has been borrowing at a 1.4% interest rate with a total debt of over 200% total GDP. Currently, we're close to 100% of total GDP (here).

Eventually it will matter and when it does health care costs will be the biggest factor. Interesting blog post about comparing the Ryan and Obama plan on controlling Medicare costs. How do we control costs and give people the health care they need. Do we use market forces or a government panel?

"Medicine is an inexact science that with deals with life-and-death questions. In many cases, there's little evidence to determine whether a particular treatment will help. In that gray area, it's very difficult to define what counts as "needed services.""

$33 Billion

2011-04-02T08:51:00.000-07:00

$33B/$3,819B = 0.86% of the proposed federal budget.
$33B/$1,645B = 2.0% of the budget deficit.

For the proportion of the federal budget being addressed, is it a real cry for fiscal sanity? is it worth a federal shutdown?

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/spending-growth-nondefense-discretionary/

AIG

2008-09-16T22:21:00.000-07:00

Why is AIG important? Why did the Fed rescue AIG?

AIG insures banks and other institutional investors in on securities that they buy.

Having the insurance reduces the security owner's risk and allows them to buy more securities and have less capital on hand in order to back themselves. It's my understanding that goverments regulate how much capital companies need to back their securities.

If AIG goes under then all of the banks and investors would have higher risk and would have to have much more capital in order to protect themselves from defaults of their security.

The CEO of Bank of America says that he "doesn't know of any major bank that doesn't have some significant exposure to AIG." More here

So what about Lehman Brothers? It's mainly banks and pension funds that have deals with Lehman. I imagine these are investments with Lehman and banks probably hold Lehman's debt.

"Unwinding Lehman's complex deals will take months if not years. During that time the global financial system will be snarled up. Many banks won't know for sure how much they are exposed to Lehman, and will have difficulty freeing up the money in those deals." From BBC

Stop Eating Meat

2006-12-11T00:52:00.000-08:00

A UN report claims that cows are the biggest threat to the environment:

The 400-page report by the Food and Agricultural Organisation, entitled Livestock's Long Shadow, also surveys the damage done by sheep, chickens, pigs and goats. But in almost every case, the world's 1.5 billion cattle are most to blame.Livestock are responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together.

Livestock are also a major cause of acid rain as they emit more than two-thirds the world's ammonia. Ranching and overgrazing are destroying forests and pastures; cows need 990 gallons of water to produce one gallon of milk; and the amounts of pesticides, antibiotics, and hormones used in livestock are all lead to dangers in human health.

"The report concludes that, unless drastic changes are made, the massive damage done by livestock will more than double by 2050, as demand for meat increases."

The Independent

Go Bucks?

2006-12-05T16:21:00.000-08:00

We may be number one in the football rankings but based on an NCAA annual report the academics of our football team are poor at best.

Under an NCAA measurement called the Academic Progress Rate, teams are scored on a scale of 1 to 1,000 based on whether their athletes stay enrolled and make adequate progress toward their degrees. Teams that do not achieve a score of at least 925, which equates to roughly a 50-percent graduation rate, may lose scholarships.

Ohio State scores a 925. 24 of the 64 bowl-bound football teams are under 925. A closer look at Graduation Success Rates shows that 55% of all Ohio State football players graduate. The shocking statistic is that out of the 64 teams we have the lowest graduation rate for African-American football players: 32%.

Ohio State may make me happy winning football games but at whose expense?

Chronicle article
Football Study

Milton Friedman Quote

2006-11-17T00:09:00.000-08:00

From Andrew Sullivan.

"Alcohol and tobacco cause many more deaths in users than do drugs. Decriminalization would not prevent us from treating drugs as we now treat alcohol and tobacco: prohibiting sales of drugs to minors, outlawing the advertising of drugs and similar measures. Such measures could be enforced, while outright prohibition cannot be. Moreover, if even a small fraction of the money we now spend on trying to enforce drug prohibition were devoted to treatment and rehabilitation, in an atmosphere of compassion not punishment, the reduction in drug usage and in the harm done to the users could be dramatic.

This plea comes from the bottom of my heart. Every friend of freedom, and I know you are one, must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence," - Milton Friedman, in a 1990 open letter to Bill Bennett, big government conservative.

Homosexuality is Natural

2006-10-15T20:17:00.000-07:00

"We may have opinions on a lot of things, but one thing is clear -- homosexuality is found throughout the animal kingdom, it is not against nature," an exhibit statement said.

Geir Soeli, the project leader of the exhibition entitled "Against Nature," told Reuters: "Homosexuality has been observed for more than 1,500 animal species, and is well documented for 500 of them."

Yahoo! News Article

The Economic Case Against Charity

2006-10-15T20:10:00.000-07:00

"If people really were altruistic, there would be much less volunteering. It would almost always be more effective to volunteer less, work overtime, and give more. A Dutch banker can pay for a lot of soup-kitchen chefs and servers with a couple of hours' worth of his salary, but that wouldn't provide the same feel-good buzz as ladling out stew himself, would it?"

Slate article

Kill Us, Too: We Are Also Americans

2006-09-19T00:27:00.000-07:00

A great article from Hans: article.

2006-09-19T00:23:00.000-07:00

Some commentary from Hans:

"Yes, the war in Iraq is not looking so good. But, that doesn't change the fact that fundamentalist Islam is a collection of very bad people. At what point do you draw the line between a culture just being different from ours and a culture where power is dominating by inhumane treatment of its people. I hate when people use overuse hyperbole, but there is a reason that parallels can be drawn to slavery and Nazi Germany. I'm not saying American Democracy and capitalism is the best for every culture, but it is a pretty darn good alternative to living under Islamic Sharia law. Is humanity better off if everyone has free choice and free expression? I believe yes. But, with free choice has to come responsibility...that's a different topic.

"Is it too much to ask that the world stand up against anyone that believes it is justifiable to blow up the person sitting next to you because they don't agree with you? Because they don't pray like you? There will always be violent people in this world and bad people and senseless killing will happen. I can go on an on here...

"But, the point is that in the United States we live among Jews, Christians, Muslims, anarchists, right wing evangelicals, and lefty tree huggers and still no one in this country has been able to mount a sustained violent effort to undermine American society. Why? Because Americans won't stand for it. We look out for each other. We "rally around the flag" whenever someone is able to slip past us. But, the world is shrinking and isolationism is no longer a viable answer like it was before transcontinental flights in 8 hours. So the question I leave to ponder is one of sovereignty. At what point do we see the "rally around humanity" effect? We did not see it in Somalia. We did not see it in Rwanda. Bosnia? Not really. At what point do the first world countries shrug their shoulders and say, whelp George and Tony really screwed this one up. Then everyone sends all the troops it takes to Iraq because the current bloody mess just is not acceptable. Can that ever happen? And then we say to Kim johns IL that he's one messed up piece of crap for starving his people and playing around with nixes and that the world won't stand for that. And an intel force removes him from his nice little dictatorship.

"So please, don't just tell me I'm wrong. Don't just tell me why George Bush sucks and make me beg for forgiveness for invading Iraq. Tell me why I'm wrong and offer me an alternative. "Serious times call for serious people.""

The Economist on Global Warming

2006-09-10T23:46:00.000-07:00

This week's issue of the Economist contains a survey of climate change in which the writers argue for mitigation. First economists have calculated that although there would be some benefits due to increases in temperature (e.g. Russia can develop many currently uninhabitable lands) the summation based on climate economists is from a loss of global output by 0.1% to 3%. Africa and India are especially vulnerable to hotter temperatures because so many people are dependent on highly vulnerable agriculture systems.

The costs of mitigating the rise in temperatures is dependent on the cost of implementing energy saving techniques and how fast mitigation is implemented. Companies stand to lose substantial amounts of money if machinery needs to be changed to energy efficient ones before the end of their useful lives. The calculations for mitigation are from 0.2% to 3.2% lost in global output.

Mitigating climate change is not just a consideration of the costs of global warming versus the cost of prevention. Ethics need to be considered also. Global warming is caused in large part by the developed world however the damage will likely fall unpropotionally to undeveloped countries. Although there are some critics that argue spending money mitigating global warming could be better spent developing undeveloped countries, other economists believe that it is not the likely outcomes of global warming that are worrisome it is the outlying possibilities that we need to fight to prevent. Similar to-cost benefit analyses on terrorism: the outside possibilities massive floods and droughts are so catastrophic that prevention is required.

Live Woolly Mammoths?

2006-08-29T20:19:00.000-07:00

Researchers have shown in the most recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that sperm from a mouse frozen for 15 years at -20 degrees Centigrade could be microinseminated to produce normal offspring. This is much longer than ever thought possible. The authors' final sentence:

If spermatozoa of extinct mammalian species (e.g., woolly mammoth) can be retrieved from animal bodies that were kept frozen for millions of years in permanent frost, live animals might be restored by injecting them into oocytes from females of closely related species.

And Now Our Day Begins

2006-08-26T05:23:00.000-07:00

Greetings Egg Nog fans. I was thinking about putting what I am about to write up on my blog, but then determined that its audience wasn’t ready for it. So I thought I’d test it out on you guys. Now, you all know that I’m pretty easily influenced and that my mind can be convinced of anything really if it’s told to me in the right fashion and at the right time. Case in point: Joe: “Ranz, you should join USG, you’d be GREAT.” Thanks, Joe, I owe you one. Kirk: “Ranz, you should join the Peace Corps, you’d be GREAT.” Just kidding of course friends, those were both very good choices for me, I’m just lucky enough I had you guys around to recognize it. Because for whatever reason when it comes to my life I’m dangerously blind to what will work for me. Either that or I just don’t want to make decisions. Too much time hanging out with GW, I suppose.

Anyway, the point is, I’ve been doing some reading lately that has really got my mind rolling about how we live in this world and what can be done to possibly help it out. We all want to save the world, right? Well, I think I’ve gotten a hold of some ideas that could potentially really shake things up. Or perhaps I’m being naïve and these ideas really just hit home for me but are pretty ludicrous to everyone else. I’m talking about an author named Daniel Quinn who wrote Ishmael and followed it up with The Story of B. I know I’ve harped a lot on Ishmael before but what I’ve recently realized is that The Story of B is where the real guts of the ideas are. Ishmael got me thinking in a way I’d never done before, and The Story of B took my mind to a whole new level and I can honestly say I don’t think I’ll be the same after having read it it. I had read them both before, but I just finished reading them back to back these past couple weeks (yeah, I’ve got free time) and it all started making more sense than it ever has. So please, I beg you, read these books. I want to see what you guys think…if you agree with me then sweet. If not, I guess I’ll have to save the world on my own.

I have never had any strong religious beliefs by any means and perhaps that is why these ideas sit so easily in my mind. I think to the lifelong Christian person (or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or Buddhist), these ideas would be much harder to swallow. Not so much because it might mean admitting they were “wrong” (although that’s a part of it), but simply because there are things we’ve learned from the beginning of our lives that just seem absolutely true, and we’ve never questioned them because we’ve never seen the need. I think that people raised in deeply religious homes are sometimes not given the chance to believe anything else…I mean isn’t that kind of contradictory to what our religions teach us? They don’t say, “sure, go out and look around and see which religion fits you best,” it’s usually more like, “you’re this religion because your parents are, and here are your beliefs.” Now, I’m not here to dog on religion in particular, that’s an entirely different can of worms to be saved for a later date. For me, the most fundamental change in the way I think came when I realized I could learn things I thought I always understood or that simply because we are told something our entire life doesn’t necessarily make it true and that is sometimes hard to swallow. But let me reiterate that I think it might be easier for someone like me without a religious background to swallow some of the ideas Quinn puts forth. Mainly because it doesn’t draw into sharp contrast what my belief system is. These ideas, on the contrary, have more or lese become my belief system…something I have really never had before.

There’s no way I’d be able to articulate the things Quinn says…and I honestly think that if I try, I might actually turn you guys off from reading these books. But I’m going to try my best to give you a taste of what I’ve been eating up and processing here.

First of all, when do we all learn that human civilization began? My answer would be back in the Mesopotamia days…the days of the Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates. This was where people first began farming and henceforth began being civilized, right? They put aside their hunter-gathering pasts and finally got smart and planted their food instead of just finding it. And to think, some day this “revolution” would lead to the greatness that is the FFA, with all of its blue corduroy and laser light shows. Where does the FFA get their funding anyway, Joe? Do you guys pay dues or what?

Anyway, I digress. The fact of the matter is that these people in the fertile crescent (around 5000BC) were NOT the first humans on earth. The agricultural revolution did NOT occur in an empty world. According to Quinn (and I have not researched this at all, so I could be completely off base believing this stuff), Paleontology has placed humanity at an age of about 3 million years old. Now, just think about that for a second. I was pretty much taught in 9th grade that these Fertile Crescent guys were pretty much the beginning of humanity, when in reality, it had been around for MILLIONS of years. Just take a second and think about the difference in age of what we generally accept as the first humans (7,000 years old) and the actual age of humanity (3,000,000 years old). That’s quite significant. And in that time period of 7,000 years following the agricultural revolution, we “revolutionized” humans have managed to take this planet to the brink of destruction. Seven thousand years is a mere blip on the geological time scale. Not even a freaking dot. Humans lived on this earth without destroying it for approximately 2, 993,000 years. And in a relative split second, we’ve gone from there to here.

Where is “here,” you ask? What exactly does that mean? “Here” is the world we live in today…a world with famine, war, genocide, seemingly unstoppable diseases like AIDS and cancer (keep working, George), among other things. Granted, we also have amazing things like Apple Computers, automobiles, cd players, indoor plumbing and all that as well (yes, I just put Apple Computers on the same level as indoor plumbing). And I suppose we have always just accepted it as “the price we pay” to live like this. Yeah, there’s a lot of crappy things going on in the world but there are a lot of good things as well. And I would agree, I’d be the first one to say that I don’t want to give up my laptop or my car…but I think it would be hard for anyone to deny that the world is being destroyed, and we continue to do nothing. We continue to consume it. I’m not suggesting we go back to being hunter-gatherers…we’re too far “along” to even dream of trying to do something like that.

Getting back to the agricultural thing…I’m not about to blame the downturn of humanity on agriculture, although Quinn does. I’m on the brink, but not quite confident enough to look Joe Shultz in the eye and say “your way of life has destroyed us all.” I like Joe too much to say that. But Quinn doesn’t know Joe and instead says things like, “Agriculture doesn’t cure famine – it promotes it. It creates the conditions in which famine occurs,” and “starving people don’t plant crops any more than drowning people build rafts.” Quinn likens the spread of agriculture to the immense population expansion that has taken place since the Fertile Crescent people. Before the agricultural revolution, their world consisted of about 10 million people (once again, I have done no research to back up these numbers). That’s 10 million after 3 million years. Then, that population doubled in a mere three thousand years (thanks to agriculture, according to Quinn), and then doubled AGAIN in 2,000 years. We went from 10 million after about 3 million years to forty million in about 3,005,000 years. Seven thousand years after the onset of agriculture, our population sits around 5 1/2 BILLION people, the last doubling of it taking only about 40 years. I find this mind blowing. And Quinn goes on to say that the only way to keep it from doubling again is to stop producing food surpluses. He argues that we produce enough food each year for 6 billion people, even though there are only 5 1/2 billion, and that if we keep producing enough food for 6 billion, then there will eventually be 6 billion. He says that our food surpluses don’t go to feed the starving people in Africa, they go to feed our population expansion. What if we only produced enough food for 5 1/2 billion people this year? Would population level off? Would all the starving people in Africa just pass on into history? I would say that those people who die in Africa would have died whether or not we produced food for 5 1/2 billion people or 6 billion people. Obviously Quinn articulates this much better than I ever could.

Enough about agriculture, on to religion. What is the highest level one can achieve in any of the religions I mentioned earlier? Is it salvation? Is that not really the point of all of those religions? That man is inherently flawed and needs to be saved? According to all of these religions, that is the case. Quinn says, “They tend to be much more aware of their differences than their similarities. It’s the same with your revealed religions. To you, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism look very different, but to me they look the same…[They] all perceive human beings as flawed, wounded creatures in need of salvation and all rely fundamentally on revelations that spell out how salvation is to be attained, either by departing from this life or rising above it.” He says that there still exist “uncivilized” hunter-gatherer cultures that haven’t bought into the Agricultural Revolution yet. They are few and very far between, but they are there. He specifically references a few of them, but I can’t remember their names off the top of my head. These are the last few examples of what humans were like before agriculture arrived. In none of these cultures will you find a religion that even comes close to the widely accepted and practiced religions of today. After all, they existed for 3 million years without needing to be “saved,” but then all of the sudden we come to this conclusion that there is some inherent flaw in humans, from which we need to be saved? Personally, I don’t buy it. For example, Christians believe that God sent his only begotten son to earth to be sacrificed and that his death would somehow pay for all of our sins. I personally have never seen the connection, and no one has ever been able to explain it to me enough to my liking. If God had a son, why would sending him to earth to die mean that the people that believed that it happened got to come to heaven too? We all know that God is forever a forgiving God and that regardless of what we do we can ask for forgiveness and will get it. Where did sending his son to earth to be crucified get added into the mix? I don’t mean to pick on Christianity, but I don’t know enough about the other religions to dog them. God sent Jesus to save humans, because this world was made for humans and humans were made to rule and conquer it. So, it obviously makes sense that Jesus wasn’t sent to save the jellyfish or albino squirrels or tiny beetles. He was sent to save man, man and no other. Which begs the question, where do we get off thinking that the world was made for us? And if we don’t believe that, why wasn’t Jesus sent to save everything else and not just man? The fact of the matter is, humans lived for 3 million years without religions like the ones we have, mainly because they accepted their role as a member of the world and not the ruler of it.

Quinn talks about “gods” in his books. To quote: “Not God with a capital ‘G’ but rather one of the gods with a little ‘g.’ Not the creator of this universe, but the animator of this single place.” “A god is a strange force that makes every place a place – a place like no other in the world.” “The gods I’m talking about write in galaxies and star-systems and planets and oceans and forests and whales and birds and gnats.” For me, this spells out ideas I’ve had about the higher powers of our universe for a long time but was never able to articulate them in a very effective way. These ideas are much easier and much simpler for me to grasp than what I have learned about what Quinn calls the “revealed” religions. However, I respect that what makes those religions special is the faith. That simply having that faith was what made it special. Of course it makes no logical sense that Mary was a virgin and that Jesus walked on water or made water into wine or rose from the dead. You can’t deny that those things happening would be miracles. Hearing in your whole life, it may just be second nature to believe these things. But for someone like me, who began examining ideas like this perhaps when I was 14 or 15 years old, this stuff just doesn’t fly for me. I also believe that Jesus wasn’t just some schmuck off the street. He was obviously enlightened and I think everyone can learn something from him and his teachings, but I see him just as that, as a teacher. Someone I can learn something from. No more or less a teacher for me than any one of you guys or a teacher I had in high school.

One of the main things I’ve taken from Quinn’s work is that we need to stop living as if, “The world was made for man, and man was made to conquer and rule it,” but rather as if, “The world is a sacred place and a sacred process, and we are a part of it.” The other resounding idea is that, “The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will saved by new minds – with no programs.” We continually try to ease and reduce the effects of our consumption of the earth. But wouldn’t it make more sense to reduce the causes? “Isolation is supported by vision, so it takes care of itself, but community building isn’t, so it has to be supported by programs. Programs invariably run counter to vision and so have to be thrust on people – have to be “sold” to people. For example, if you want people to live simply, reduce consumption, reuse and recycle, you must create programs that encourage such behaviors. But if you want them to consume a lot and waste a lot, you don’t need to create programs of encouragement, because these behaviors are supported by our cultural vision.”

What does all this mean? Hell, I don’t know. I just know that my mind has been changed. And although he says that “the world won’t be saved by programs” and I am in fact participating in a big-time program right now, I understand that this is just a step along the way. There’s no doubt that being the Peace Corps will help mold my mind and make me a more well-rounded person, as well as give me some time to sort out exactly what it is I believe about the world. I am in search of the truth and nothing more.

Thanks for reading. Any thoughts? Am I crazy? Have I fallen off the left side of the spectrum?

Need Travel Ideas?

2006-07-25T01:27:00.000-07:00

"The World Heritage List includes 830 properties forming part of the cultural and natural heritage which the World Heritage Committee considers as having outstanding universal value." Link

Confused about the Middle East?

2006-07-23T11:49:00.000-07:00

Here is an interactive chart from Slate indicating each group's relationship with each other. Are Saudi Arabia and Hezbollah friends or enemies? What about Israel and Egypt?

iTunes....iMovie Rental?

2006-07-18T00:07:00.000-07:00

"Because the movies will be rented and not sold, people familiar with the situation report downloads will be coded with a date stamp that will restrict playback. It is not known exactly how the coding system will work, but industry experts tell Think Secret the software would likely either limit the number of playbacks or provided unlimited viewing for a period of time, after which the movie will be "turned off" and no longer available." Link

The release of these iMovie rentals will be certainly be the start of a hackers versus Apple battle to keep the movies rentals not purchases.

The Fight Against Terrorism

2006-07-16T11:26:00.000-07:00

We have commercials that warn us of the dangers of drugs and alcohol and tobacco. This site has produced a spot that captures the brutal violence and death of innocent civilians within the blast range of a suicide bomber. Is this approach enough to motivate moderate Muslims to revolt against extremists and terrorist tactics? When it comes to foreign policy should we ever make any concessions to groups that employee such recklessly bloody means if they do not get their way? NoTerror.info

And a link for propaganda from the other side: memritv.org

From Hans.

One Red Paper Clip = House

2006-07-10T01:34:00.000-07:00

The guy did it. He traded a red paper clip for a house. Link

Military Comic from 1942

2006-07-07T11:55:00.000-07:00

This is amusing and could help you identify me. It includes a special cartoonist some might know.

Link

Internet Whiteboard

2006-07-07T00:55:00.000-07:00

Pretty neat website that allows to work with others on a virtual whiteboard.

From digg.com

Campaigns Wikia

2006-07-06T01:14:00.000-07:00

Campaigns Wikia is a new website started by the Wikipedia guy that is trying to make politics more participatory .

This website, Campaigns Wikia, has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.

Together, we will start to work on educating and engaging the political campaigns about how to stop being broadcast politicians, and how to start being community and participatory politicians.

Looks interesting to me....

Global Warming: A Moral Dilemma or An Engineering Dilemma?

2006-07-05T11:07:00.001-07:00

We all agree that global warming is occurring. So let's all go crunchy and do our part to save the world right? Get out the bikes and go hybrid!

An Op-Ed in the Washington Post today lays out the practical implications of global warming.

From 2003 to 2050, the world's population is projected to grow from 6.4 billion people to 9.1 billion, a 42 percent increase. If energy use per person and technology remain the same, total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions (mainly, carbon dioxide) will be 42 percent higher in 2050. But that's too low, because societies that grow richer use more energy. Unless we condemn the world's poor to their present poverty -- and freeze everyone else's living standards -- we need economic growth. With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more than double by 2050.

Having postulated a crash energy diet, the IEA simulates five scenarios with differing rates of technological change. In each, greenhouse emissions in 2050 are higher than today. The increases vary from 6 percent to 27 percent.

No government will adopt the draconian restrictions on economic growth and personal freedom (limits on electricity usage, driving and travel) that might curb global warming. Still, politicians want to show they're "doing something." The result is grandstanding.

Only an aggressive research and development program might find ways of breaking our dependence on fossil fuels or dealing with it. Perhaps some system could purge the atmosphere of surplus greenhouse gases?

The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.

Doonesbury

2006-07-05T00:08:00.000-07:00

This Doonesbury cartoon is great.

Free iClip from MacZot

2006-06-30T12:03:00.000-07:00

Until July 2nd you can get iClip 3 from MacZot for free. Looks pretty neat.

William Sloane Coffin

2006-06-29T00:32:00.000-07:00

"Whereas charity alleviates the effects of poverty, justice seeks to eliminate the causes of it. Charity is a matter of personal attribute; justice is a matter of public policy.

A person's moral character, sterling though it may be, is insufficient to serve the cause of justice, which is to challenge the status quo, to try to make what's legal more moral, to speak truth to power, and to take personal or concerted action against evil, whether in personal or systemic form."

It is not good enough to live life in the harbors of status quo, safe and uncontroversial, for justice is achieved through risk and controversy.

Wine Woot

2006-06-22T08:16:00.000-07:00

Kirk with the great find: wine.woot.com Why not just have tech woots?

Go Bucks!

2006-06-21T13:05:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan comments on Ryan Fournier the new student body president of The Ohio State University.

Will Shortz: Puzzle Master

2006-06-21T12:47:00.000-07:00

This is from an article in the SF Chronicle about Will Shortz and his comments on the importance of the New York Times crossword to folks.

And then there was the time Shortz got a call from a young lawyer who wanted to propose to his girlfriend through the crossword. Shortz' first reaction was that it was a preposterous idea. The New York Times crossword was an august institution, a puzzle consumed by a huge global audience. It was no place for dispensing personal favors. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized it could be "very cool." So he assigned the crossword to one of his regular creators, and coordinated with the boyfriend about when the puzzle would appear in the paper. On the agreed-upon day, the man and his girlfriend went out for brunch, and on the way, they picked up the Times, just as they always did.

At the restaurant, she opened the crossword page, as was her custom, and started doing the puzzle. He pretended to read the front page, but in reality, he was watching her. He'd only slept 15 minutes the previous night. The theme of the puzzle was "A Modest Proposal," the title of a Jonathan Swift pamphlet. "Oh look, your name's in here," she said at a certain point. "Oh, my name's in here, too," she said a few minutes later. One of the answers was THIS DIAMOND RING, a '60s hit by Gary Lewis and the Playboys; another was WILL YOU MARRY ME, the title of a Paula Abdul song. She looked up. "This puzzle," she said. "This puzzle!" The moment was right. He got down on one knee and asked for her hand. Her reply, too, was in the crossword, under the clue, "hoped for response." The answer was YES.

Shortz also comments on how upset the crossword puzzle can make people:

The most offended people ever got, though, was by a puzzle that ran on the day of the 1996 presidential election. Two of the answers were clued as "lead story in tomorrow's newspaper!" The second word was ELECTED, and the first word was seven letters. The crossword provoked something like a popular uprising. Shortz got dozens of phone calls. How dare the Times presume the winner of the election? Furious solvers called in accusing Shortz of being biased, presumptuous, wrong and worse.

The genius of the puzzle was that there were two possible answer sets. An entire section of the grid had bivalent answers. "Black Halloween animal" could be either CAT or BAT; "French 101 word" could be LUI or OUI; "provider of support, for short" could be IRA or BRA. And the answer to the clue about tomorrow's top story could be either BOB DOLE ELECTED or CLINTON ELECTED. Once the diabolical double solution was revealed, Clinton (as he recounts in the movie) made a copy and sent it to Dole, after calling him and saying, "We both won after all!"

GOOOAAAAALLL!

2006-06-20T00:29:00.000-07:00

As World Cup fever is on the rise, Nature comments on a paper about the distribution of goals scored in a soccer match. One might think that a team has a certain probability of scoring during a game and this probability remains roughly the same throughout the game. The resulting distribution of scores would be a normal bell-curve.

However, researchers looking at thousands of games have found that the goal scoring distribution is skewed towards high scores. Using a formula for which the probability of scoring goals is increased every goal scored, the researchers matched the skewed distribution. Anecdotally this might make sense, once a team scores it gains confidence and produces one GOOOAAALLLL! after another.

Found in Stanford Daily

2006-06-19T01:26:00.000-07:00

Post Editorial on Net Neutrality

2006-06-13T09:16:00.000-07:00

An Washington Post editorial from yesterday makes an argument against net neutrality. It argues for the need for internet infrastructure innovation and the preemptive nature of a net neutrality law.

If you want innovation on the Internet, you need better pipes: ones that are faster, less susceptible to hackers and spammers, or smarter in ways that nobody has yet thought of. The lack of incentives for pipe innovation is more pressing than the lack of incentives to create new Web services.

You can see this imbalance in Wall Street's low valuation of Internet infrastructure firms such as Verizon (price-to-earnings ratio: 12) and its infatuation with Internet service firms such as Google (price-to-earnings ratio: 69). You can see it, too, in the fact that U.S. broadband infrastructure lags behind that of East Asia and Europe. Allowing builders of Internet infrastructure to recoup their investment by charging the Googles and Amazons for use of their network would balance the incentives for innovation more closely.

The weakest aspect of the neutrality case is that the dangers it alleges are speculative. It seems unlikely that broadband providers will degrade Web services that people want and far more likely that they will use non-neutrality to charge for upgrading services that depend on fast and reliable delivery, such as streaming high-definition video or relaying data from heart monitors. If this proves wrong, the government should step in. But it should not burden the Internet with preemptive regulation.

Convinced? I'm not sure I am.

Whole Foods Rocks

2006-06-12T19:10:00.000-07:00

This is a follow-up post to one that I wrote a few days ago on reusable bags. Whole Foods (a specialty grocery store) will give you $.05 for every bag you do not use. You can also donate your $.05s it to one of their three charities, which rotate throughout the year. While this is not as good (in my eyes) as charging for each bag used, it is definitely a really great start. Trader Joe's (another specialty grocery store) has their own deal going. Every time you shop there and bring your own bags, they'll enter you into a raffle for $25 of groceries. I'd like to add that both Whole Foods and Trader Joe's sell reusable canvas bags for a pretty cheap price ($1.25-$2.50).

Net Neutrality

2006-06-11T20:55:00.000-07:00

The constant din of proponents speaking out for Net Neutrality is getting louder and louder. In essence net neutrality wants to ensure that individuals have the ability to 1) obtain access to lawful information of their choice, 2) run the applications of their choice, and 3) connect the legal devices of their choice to the network. One of the consequences is that broadband providers (telephone companies and cable companies) would not be allowed to block access to specific legal sites that they choose. This however is not the main conflict.

The main conflict is a bit more subtle. It involves providers giving better, faster access to specific sites which have formed partnerships with the providers. Why do the telecoms wish to do make better access available only to certain sites and not others? Because as high bandwidth technology such as video streams become more prevalent online, broadband providers need to meet these demands and build more infrastructure to meet future demands. The high demands on bandwidth give the broadband providers an opportunity to cut deals with specific sites to give customers better access to those specific sites. This could mean in the future that if you get internet from provider X that you will in turn have good access to video streams from website A, but slower access to website B, C, D and all of the new innovative websites E, F, and G. Instead of all websites whether old, new, rich or poor that can be accessed equally by consumers--the situation now--discrimination could occur.

The best argument against net neutrality is that broadband providers will not have as much market incentives to upgrade the current connection speeds. Consumer costs would be the only source in which companies can recoup their infrastructure developments. Opponents of net neutrality believe that there is enough broadband competition making it impossible for providers to discriminate against websites.

There is not currently enough broadband providers for ample competition in cities let alone in rural areas. The landscape of the internet might be changing unless the Senate passes net neutrality legislation. New innovative, garage companies might not become the next Google or YouTube, because established companies will be able to pay the toll for the faster lanes of the internet leaving the new companies behind.

The House has already denied net neutrality and it is up for debate in the Senate this week.

Click on the Save the Internet to see the latest news, sign the petition, and contact your Senators.

Nog: Pack Your Lunch

2006-06-11T18:44:00.000-07:00

One of the most emailed stories on the New York Times website is financial advice to new graduates. The story links to online calculators that can provide a lot of interesting information. The Starbucks calculator gives you the amount of money you can save by brewing coffee at home as opposed to buying from Starbucks. Other calculators determines the cost of a cigarette habit, eating out for lunch, and the difference in saving money for retirement now versus 10 years from now.

For example: if you eat a cheap $1.50 packed lunch instead of a $5 fast food meal 250 days out of a year and you put that money in an ING savings account at 4% interest over 5 years you'll have saved over $4,700.

Another example: if you invest $4,000/year at 7% interest until 2046 and you start now you'll end up with $798,540, but if you start 10 years from now you'll have $377,843. And if you start this year and you put in $5,000 you'll end up with $998,175.

Fun Food Definitions

2006-06-09T11:49:00.000-07:00

Recently I’ve run across some foods and/or food descriptions that I wasn’t too sure about. Thought others might have wondered what some of these were, too…

Pancetta—“pan-cheh-tuh” it’s a cured Italian meat seasoned with salt, pepper, and spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, and/or juniper berries. After curing, it is rolled up. You can find it at specialty food stores or Italian delis.

Nettle—the tops of growing nettles are used as cooked greens and are very high in protein.

Mascarpone-fresh cheese made from cow's milk. It's very rich, usually 60-75% milk fat. It's cream-colored and usually the consistency of a thick pudding.

Charcuterie—branch of cooking used to make prepared meat products such as sausage and confit.

Confit—just a term that means “to preserve”.

Two examples: Confit de canard is duck that is preserved in its own fat (fat is discarded before consumption).
Fruits confits are fruits that are preserved in sugar.

Ramps—Basically a wild leek (Allium tricoccum). Found in eastern North America. Richwood, WV has a yearly Ramp Festival. Eat with caution: sometimes they are referred to as “little stinkers” among other things…

Diet Coke is Good for Something

2006-06-09T00:57:00.000-07:00

I heard the following story on NPR about dropping Mentos into Diet Coke bottles.

Shooting Diet Coke 15 feet in the air is pretty neat, but give some bored people a good idea, throw in some imagination and what you can get is out of this world.

Watch this video.

Amazing

2006-06-07T00:26:00.000-07:00

This graph shows the % of adults 65 and older who have had all of their teeth extracted. Any guesses for which state tops the list?

California Primary Elections II

2006-06-06T00:45:00.000-07:00

Proposition 81 is a bond measure to raise $600 million for renovation and construction of public libraries.

And on to bond measures. Bonds are clearly useful in situations when there is a one-time large capital expense to build infrastructure such as highways, school, and libraries. Since there is a one-time building of these structures with lasting benefits, bonds are sold initially to build the structures and are subsequently paid for over time. However the argument against state bond propositions is similar to one IÂd make to any one of my friends. If you can pay for something straight out in cash itÂs much better than having to have to pay interest (unless the interest is lower than you think inflation will be in the future). So for instance Proposition 81 has the state of California selling $600 million in bonds which is going to end up costing the state $1.2 billion over 30 years with $40 million annual payments at 5% interest. If you include inflation estimates conclude that each dollar borrowed by the state will require $1.30 repayment.

The current California state budget is near $100 billion. $600 million/$100 billion = .6%. If you had a friend that wanted to buy a car for $6,000 and she made $1,000,000 a year would you tell her to take out a loan or pay for it in cash?

California Primary Elections

2006-06-06T00:40:00.000-07:00

The California ballot today has two propositions on it. Proposition 82 establishes the right of all four year olds to preschool and provides support and establishes standards through a 1.7% tax increase for individuals making more than $400,000 or couples making more than $800,000 a year.

One of the problems with ballot initiatives is that voters cannot see the context in which their choices are being made. Of course everyone is in favor of preschools for children, research shows the benefits. However, this choice of spending taxpayer resources like any policy decision is not made without externalities, nor is it made with unlimited resources. Is preschool education more valuable than libraries? Is preschool education more important than highway improvements? What about universal medical care? What about improvements in K-12 education? What about benefits to illegal aliens? What about the environment? By choosing preschool education what am I turning down?

Another problem with ballot initiatives is that they are an all-or-none options. There is no negotiation that would occur during legislation. The San Jose Mercury and the San Francisco Chronicle both oppose the universal preschool initiative, not because they do not believe in the need for preschool education but because of the flaws in this proposal. A preschool education proposal presented to state legislators could be vetted and concerns including funding and flexibility could be resolved. This might result in a decent policy as opposed to this doomed-to-fail one.

Anniversary of Tiananmen Square Massacre

2006-06-04T14:42:00.000-07:00

Today is the 17th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre that took place in Beijing, China in 1989. Until recently, I knew embarrassingly little about this event. I've decided to learn more about this topic by reading The Tiananmen Papers, compiled by Zhang Liang. I'd like to encourage those not well-informed about this historical event to brush up on their history, too. For a brief overview, check out Wikipedia: Wikipedia Link

Nog: Looking Out for You

2006-06-02T00:09:00.000-07:00

Think supersizing your fast food meal is a bargain? Researchers from University of Wisconsin Madison have looked into some unforeseen costs of getting the extra large fries and coke.

While the average "upsized" fast-food meal costs a mere 67 cents more than a regular meal, those bonus calories could translate into substantial daily costs due to weight gain.

Based on their estimates, each fast-food "value" meal would cost an adult 5 cents more in fuel expenses -- as heavier passengers reduce a car's fuel efficiency - and about 35 cents in overall food costs, since heavier people need more calories.

Add to that the healthcare cost per super-size meal -- which ranges from 82 cents to $6.64 -- and these fast-food deals are no deal at all.

For every 100 calories a person eats beyond his daily needs, the price in terms of food, medical care and gasoline rises anywhere from 48 cents to nearly $2. The heavier a person is, the greater the cost.

Word of the Day: Ursprache

2006-06-01T22:52:00.000-07:00

Katharine Close was the winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee because she correctly spelled the word ursprache. She knew when she heard the word that the game was over and she had won.

Ursprache: protolanguage, a language that is the recorded or hypothetical ancestor of another language or group of languages. German origin: "ur" meaning "out of" and "sprache" meaning "language or speech." (From answers.com)

Even gamblers got into the act, putting money down on questions including whether the final word would have an "e" in it and whether the winner would wear glasses.

Simon Noble, CEO of PinnacleSports.com, said his offshore Internet sports betting company had received about $70,000 in wagers on seven propositions about the bee as of noon Thursday. Link

A Larger Experiment

2006-06-01T01:22:00.000-07:00

A public good such as controlling global warming tends to be exploited by people and thus becomes a tragedy of commons problem. The direct costs for an individual to be altruistic is larger than the benefits that the individual will receive in return. A new article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (link) shows that one mechanism to bolster altruistic behavior is to publicly acknowledge the good behavior and thus link the behavior to a person's reputation.

In a normal public goods game the most profitable route is to rely on the altruism of others and have no cost, only benefit. The authors of this PNAS article contend that individuals might instead contribute to preventing global warming if the personal benefits paid out in good reputation is high enough. Individual benefit from reputation + benefits from individual cost of preventing global warming > cost of preventing global warming.

This is an easy enough concept. However reputation is built on many acts of altruism, whether or not acts of preventing global warming is valued enough by others to merit an increase in good reputation exists is unclear. (Aren't they too crunchy?) Risking life and limb to save another human is not the same as recycling your milk jugs. The costs are not the same nor are the benefits the same. Is the gap lessened by driving a hybrid? What about biking to work and planting six trees?

On a final note, today when I went to Trader Joe's, I only used my three reusable canvas bags for my groceries.

A Small Challenge

2006-05-31T12:38:00.000-07:00

This morning, I desperately needed to go to the grocery store. I didn’t need to buy all that much, just some milk and cereal and fruits and veggies. I decided to walk, as I usually do, because the store is just down the street from my apartment. But today I did something a bit different. I took two canvas bags with me, so I didn’t have to use the plastic store bags. I’ve thought for quite some time how awfully wasteful they are and they’re not the easiest things to recycle. Plus, they’re made from petroleum, which we all know ain’t cheap these days. And the handles always rip holes in my hands. So I took my own canvas bags. I did my shopping and when I got to the checkout, I proudly refused their bags and put the groceries into my own bags. And when I was walking home, I had a nice thick cloth strap over my shoulder, instead of plastic ripping into my hands. It felt so good, I had to do a little research on the merits of my canvas bag use. It turns out there are tons of web sites on the evilness of plastic bags. Afterall, they’re not biodegradable, only about .5% of them are recycled and the average person uses well over 100 of them every year. There was a National Public Radio All Things Considered story in August 2002 about how Ireland imposed a 15 cent tax on every bag used at the place of purchase. This lead to greater than 90% decrease in number of bags consumed in the first three months of the tax. When asked if this could be applied to a country larger than Ireland, Tony Lowes, director of Friends of the Irish Environment, said he thought it would be possible if there were widespread consultation and publicity. So I’m going to start now. Everyone who reads this blog, I challenge you to try taking your own bags to the grocery store this week (or a box or wagon or whatever, anything to not use the store’s bags) and see how you like it. I bet it’ll make you feel pretty good. For more facts, check out www.reusablebags.com

Track Congress

2006-05-30T12:09:00.000-07:00

GovTrack.us allows you to track legislation and your representatives in Congress. You can see the progress of bills and what your representatives have been saying in session along with their voting records. This site has been recognized by the New York Times and the Washington Post and was nominated for a Webbie.

100,000 year old plant?

2006-05-30T12:06:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if this is true or not...but apparently this is the oldest living organism at 100,000 years old and 8 kilometers long. Link

It's Never to Early to Get Excited

2006-05-30T00:49:00.000-07:00

Football anyone? SI Post Spring Rankings and ESPN Rankings.

Can Marriage and Science Co-exist?

2006-05-28T15:43:00.000-07:00

Several years ago, Satoshi Kanazawa, then a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, analyzed a biographical database of 280 great scientists--mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists.

"The productivity of male scientists tends to drop right after marriage," says Kanazawa in an e-mail interview from his current office at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom. "Scientists tend to 'desist' from scientific research upon marriage, just like criminals desist from crime upon marriage."

Data from the National Science Foundation show that female, doctoral-level scientists, and engineers are less likely to be married than are their male counterparts (66% versus 83%). Among those married, however, women are more likely to confront problems accommodating a two-career marriage--one reason being that they are twice as likely as men to have a spouse who works full-time.

And the final kick in the balls....

"Sacrifice is a two-way street. Sometimes you sacrifice time in the lab to spend with a girlfriend or a wife, … but I can tell you it’s well worth it. In the end, when your friends get married and have their own families, your parents pass away, and families move apart and you grow older, your gel box isn’t going to be there for you on the holidays and those moments when you need someone for support," says Bob. "Really, what’s the point of discovering the greatest thing in the world if you have no one to tell it to when you come home?"

Haven't had enough? Read here.

The Piraha

2006-05-23T20:16:00.000-07:00

Yep, damn interesting. The Piraha, a tribe in Brazil, has no concept of math, no collective history, and no art.

Elie Wiesel Lecture

2006-05-22T12:16:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to hear Elie Wiesel speak. Weisel is a Holocaust survivor who has written over 40 books, including the book Night. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
For me, hearing his lecture was an invaluable experience. As a person who has experienced one of the most horrifying events in the last 100 years, he has a unique perspective on life and world events. He does not harbor resentment for his own or his family’s mistreatment--he wants to make the world a better place and rid it of hatred and prejudice. He began his talk, entitled “Against Indifference: Reflections on “Never Again””, with a discussion about how when bad things happen, we make ourselves feel better by saying “never again”. “Never again” will there be a Holocaust, “never again” will there be world wars, “never again” will there be slavery. And when the year 2000 came, we felt as if we had left a horrible century behind, that we can now start fresh. “Never again” will we let people suffer as they did in the last 100 years. And yet not 6 years later, we are again faced with the problems in the Middle East, Sudan, and other parts of the world. We cannot be indifferent about things that are happening in other parts of the world. We cannot let the hatred and killing continue. He said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference”.

From Harper's

2006-05-20T01:10:00.000-07:00

Harper's Index June 2006:

Estimated percentage of women in U.S. prisons or jails who are single mothers: 77
Chances that an American says he or she uses the word "fuck": 2 in 3.
Ratio of negative portrayals of teachers on U.S. children's TV shows to positive portrayals: 3:1
Ratio for portrayals of adults in general: 10:1

From one of the 262 letters of support written for Jack Abramoff as pleas for leniency: "He assisted my daughter in her acting career. With his help, she worked a little with the Power Rangers."

F**k

2006-05-20T01:07:00.000-07:00

Should I be proud or embarrassed?

CHRISTOPHER M. FAIRMAN
Ohio State University - Michael E. Moritz College of Law March 2006

Ohio State Public Law Working Paper No. 59
Center for Interdisciplinary Law and Policy Studies Working Paper Series No. 39

Abstract:
This Article is as simple and provocative as its title suggests: it explores the legal implications of the word fuck. The intersection of the word fuck and the law is examined in four major areas: First Amendment, broadcast regulation, sexual harassment, and education. The legal implications from the use of fuck vary greatly with the context. To fully understand the legal power of fuck, the nonlegal sources of its power are tapped. Drawing upon the research of etymologists, linguists, lexicographers, psychoanalysts, and other social scientists, the visceral reaction to fuck can be explained by cultural taboo. Fuck is a taboo word. The taboo is so strong that it compels many to engage in self-censorship. This process of silence then enables small segments of the population to manipulate our rights under the guise of reflecting a greater community. Taboo is then institutionalized through law, yet at the same time is in tension with other identifiable legal rights. Understanding this relationship between law and taboo ultimately yields fuck jurisprudence.

Link to paper. From docuticker.com.

Carbon Dioxide: We call it Life

2006-05-18T20:02:00.000-07:00

This was from a posting on Andrew Sullivan's site. The Competitive Enterprise Institute has begun airing TV commercials on the "alleged global warming crisis." Watch the commercial.

Although it's true that carbon dioxide is a product of cellular respiration and plants do indeed use CO2 in photosynthesis, the problem occurs when the balance is disrupted with burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

Domestication of Elephants

2006-05-18T19:17:00.000-07:00

According to government figures, at least 84 people in Sri Lanka have been killed since early 2005, with 156 pachyderms suffering the same fate at the hands of villagers by shooting or electrocution.

"We will be using them for (wildlife) protection work," said Kariyawasam. "Officials can ride on them, where vehicles can't go, to prevent poaching."

Article from Aljazeera.net

Boondocks

2006-05-15T17:34:00.000-07:00

"Hmmm. Selective salvation. You may have a bright future in foreign policy."

Link

Kristof on Smart Asians

2006-05-15T12:45:00.000-07:00

So then why do Asian-Americans really succeed in school? Aside from immigrant optimism, I see two and a half reasons:

First, as Trang suggests, is the filial piety nurtured by Confucianism for 2,500 years. Teenagers rebel all over the world, but somehow Asian-American kids often manage both to exasperate and to finish their homework. And Asian-American families may not always be warm and fuzzy, but they tend to be intact and focused on their children's getting ahead.

Second, Confucianism encourages a reverence for education. In Chinese villages, you still sometimes see a monument to a young man who centuries ago passed the jinshi exam -- the Ming dynasty equivalent of getting a perfect SAT. In a Confucian culture, it is intuitive that the way to achieve glory and success is by working hard and getting A's.

Then there's the half-reason: American kids typically say in polls that the students who succeed in school are the ''brains.'' Asian kids typically say that the A students are those who work hard. That means no Asian-American ever has an excuse for not becoming valedictorian.

''Anybody can be smart, can do great on standardized tests,'' Trang explains. ''But unless you work hard, you're not going to do well.''

If I'm right, the success of Asian-Americans is mostly about culture, and there's no way to transplant a culture. But there are lessons we can absorb, and maybe the easiest is that respect for education pays dividends. That can come, for example, in the form of higher teacher salaries, or greater public efforts to honor star students. While there are no magic bullets, we would be fools not to try to learn some Asian lessons.

I believe I've stated that half-reason before.

Kristof, May 14th, 2006 New York Times.

Awesome

2006-05-15T10:02:00.000-07:00

AVirginsPlea.com

US Losing Influence in Bolivia

2006-05-13T15:42:00.000-07:00

Even though the US sends more money (and its finest citizens) in aid to Bolivia than other countries, Bolivians are embracing the new aid programs from Venezuela and Cuba.

"The Cubans and Venezuelans are putting a human face on what they're doing, so they can get a hell of a lot of mileage," said Myles Frechette, a former United States diplomat in Latin America. "We have been the donor of choice for a very, very long time, and the kind of things that we help with pay off in the long run. So they tend to be undramatic and people don't notice and seem to take them for granted."

Link

EggNog

2006-05-11T12:17:00.000-07:00

"A gang of anarchist Robin Hood-style thieves, who dress as superheroes and steal expensive food from exclusive restaurants and delicatessens to give to the poor, are being hunted by police in the German city of Hamburg."

Link

Andrew Sullivan and God

2006-05-09T19:37:00.000-07:00

"And there are those who simply believe that, by definition, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls. If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God's real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a gay couple? Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt, a doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow. That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one's beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else.

I dissent from having my faith co-opted and wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I abhor. The word Christian belongs to no political party. It's time the quiet majority of believers took it back."

Link

Rumsfeld vs Rumsfeld

2006-05-09T15:44:00.000-07:00

Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, speaking truth to power. This video quotes Rumsfeld to Rumsfeld asking for explanations on Saddam's connection to al Qaeda and the knowledge of WMD.

On To the Point, McGovern states that the CIA had no real links between Saddam and al Qaeda. CIA members have also come out to say that the policy was set and that there were no active WMD programs in Iraq.

Why did the administration cherry-pick information for public release before the war? How good was our pre-war intelligence? How good was our policy?

Three sites to see...

2006-05-05T00:04:00.000-07:00

ChannelChooser.com 70 free channels you can watch online. BBC News comes in awesome.
PeekVid.com has a bunch of TV shows. Highlights include: 31 episodes of Thundercats, 38 episodes of Smurfs, and 40 episodes of Home Improvements. This must be illegal. Hosted through Guba.com
Eyewitnesses of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on a more serious note. It's hard to imagine this occurred.

Bolivia Gas Takeover

2006-05-04T09:09:00.000-07:00

Here is an interesting view from what I've read about the situation.

Save the Internet

2006-05-04T00:21:00.000-07:00

May 2nd, New York Times editorial:

"Net neutrality" is a concept that is still unfamiliar to most Americans, but it keeps the Internet democratic. Cable and telephone companies that provide Internet service are talking about creating a two-tiered Internet, in which Web sites that pay them large fees would get priority over everything else. Opponents of these plans are supporting Net-neutrality legislation, which would require all Web sites to be treated equally. Net neutrality recently suffered a setback in the House, but there is growing hope that the Senate will take up the cause.

One of the Internet's great strengths is that a single blogger or a small political group can inexpensively create a Web page that is just as accessible to the world as Microsoft's home page. But this democratic Internet would be in danger if the companies that deliver Internet service changed the rules so that Web sites that pay them money would be easily accessible, while little-guy sites would be harder to access, and slower to navigate. Providers could also block access to sites they do not like.

That would be a financial windfall for Internet service providers, but a disaster for users, who could find their Web browsing influenced by whichever sites paid their service provider the most money. There is a growing movement of Internet users who are pushing for legislation to make this kind of discrimination impossible. It has attracted supporters ranging from MoveOn.org to the Gun Owners of America. Grass-roots political groups like these are rightly concerned that their online speech could be curtailed if Internet service providers were allowed to pick and choose among Web sites.

Opportunities abound to take action for this cause: Sign the Petition, Call your Congressional Reps, Write a Letter to Congress, etc. However consider the following from the Economist:

An overly prescriptive set of net-neutrality rules could prove counterproductive. For a start, it would mean that all new network construction costs would have to be recouped from consumers alone, which could drive up prices or discourage investment. Ensuring neutrality could require regulators to interpose themselves in all kinds of agreements between network operators, content providers and consumers. If a network link is too slow to support a particular service, does that constitute a breach of neutrality? Strict rules could also hinder the development of new services that depend on being able to distinguish between different types of traffic, imposing a one size fits all architecture on the internet just as engineers are considering novel ways to improve its underlying design (see survey).

While the two positions might appear to be incompatible, there is in fact a sensible path that should suit everyone. A minimal set of rules to protect net neutrality would still leave room for operators to experiment with new premium services. Even Edward Whitacre, the boss of AT&T, says he is happy to go along with the simple rules proposed by America's telecoms regulator that forbid discrimination against particular websites or services. Blocking or interfering with existing traffic on the internet is unacceptable; but if operators want to build fast lanes alongside it, they should be allowed to.

Here is the bill introduce by Edward Markey, Rep from Massachusetts two days ago.

Read more:

New Yorker article
San Francisco Chronicle editorial
SaveTheInternet.com
Wikipedia article with counterarguments from the Cato Institute (at the bottom).

Global Index of Failed States

2006-05-03T01:01:00.000-07:00

The top 10 failed states

Sudan: Chaos in western region of Darfur has undermined the peace dividend from the end of the north/south civil war

Democratic Republic of Congo: Millions have been displaced by a bloody internal conflict that has lasted for decades

Ivory Coast: Protracted civil war has shattered country and government has only now met after two-year hiatus

Iraq: In political deadlock and on the verge of civil war after US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein

Zimbabwe: Facing starvation and in economic freefall under the regime of Robert Mugabe

Chad: Destabilised by Darfur fighting

Somalia: Still in near anarchy under warlords. Government has only recently returned from Kenya

Haiti: Massive human rights abuse and popular unrest followed a US-backed regime change

Pakistan: Tensions between secular government and popular Islamist pressure

Afghanistan: Taliban insurgency on rise again and government hemmed in at Kabul

Summary from the Independent.
Full article from Foreign Policy

The Independent

2006-05-03T00:52:00.000-07:00

The Independent is a great online news source, especially for a non-US perspective. Today's headlines include the Catholic church considering allowing the use of condoms (for married couples when one has AIDS). This comes after much criticism for being complacent in the epidemic.

According to sources close to the Vatican, a document setting out the new position has already been approved by the health pastoral care office. It awaits review by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and finally the approval of Pope Benedict XVI.

Nothing will be certain until the Pope has signed it. But the fact that the change has got this far, with carefully placed and worded endorsements by half a dozen influential cardinals, is seen as an indication the change is almost certain.

What has always impressed me about the Catholic church is its rich traditions and the consistent logic the church uses (although not always timely).

2006-04-30T23:20:00.000-07:00

Remind the President about how he promised "Not on my watch" for allowing genocide to occur in the world. (Link, an interesting article in itself on war)

Call the President and leave a message urging him to take action in Darfur. DarfurPledge.org (Don't dig too far on this website....)

Kristof on Education

2006-04-30T23:04:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Kristof's column in Sunday's New York Times argues for public schools in the US to lower the requirements for teacher certification. In order to keep the current teacher-to-student ratios, there needs to be a 35% increase in the number of people entering teaching.

Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the best private high schools in the nation, says that 85% of its faculty have advanced degrees but only a handful have teaching certificates.

Teach For America is another example Kristof uses to indicate how alternative routes into teaching not requiring normal certification can be successful. 17,000 applicants vied for 2,000 spots this past year with 12% of Yale seniors applying and 8% in both Harvard and Princeton's seniors.

Suppose Colin Powell tires of giving $100,000-a-pop speeches and wants to teach high school social studies. Suppose Meryl Streep has a hankering to teach drama.

Alas, they would be ''unqualified'' for a public school. Elite private schools would snap them up, of course, but public schools that are begging for teachers would have to turn them away because they don't have teacher certification.

That's an absurd snarl in our education bureaucracy. Let's relax the barriers so people can enter teaching more easily, either right out of college or later as a midcareer switch.

Sure, there are lots of other problems in the U.S. education system. But this is one of the easiest to solve.

Save Darfur

2006-04-30T11:44:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post

Despite the attention, the United Nations has been unable to raise enough money to support its operations in Sudan. On Friday, the U.N. World Food Program announced that it had received only 32 percent of its appeal for $746 million for its operations in Sudan, and that food rations to the camps would be cut in half.

"It's really our worst nightmare," said Marcus Prior, a spokesman for the U.N. agency, who was with me during one of my first trips into Sudan. Behind the headlines, he said, there is little hope.

Donate to the UN World Food Program here.

Amazing 3D Site

2006-04-27T02:27:00.000-07:00

Some modules are better than others. tekhna3d.com

From digg.com.

Save Darfur

2006-04-27T01:46:00.000-07:00

Join the Virtual March to end Genocide in Darfur. 400,000 people have already died.

Join a real march in DC, San Francisco, Houston, Chicago, Seattle, etc.

I say (on the coattails of Holmes):

2006-04-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

Being unaware of the tragedies of our world shields us from the sadness, the guilt, and most importantly the responsibility.

Amazing what you can think of in the bathroom.

Stanford and Berkeley iTunes Courses

2006-04-25T00:35:00.000-07:00

Berkeley's and Stanford's iTunes University like MIT's Open Courseware are amazing resources.

Capital Punishment

2006-04-21T01:04:00.000-07:00

According to Amnesty International capital punishment was reported to have occurred at least 2,148 times in 2005 in 22 different countries. 94% of all executions occurred in four countries: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the US with 1,770, 94, 86, and 60, respectively. This map shows which countries have abolished the death penalty (blue), abolished the death penalty except for exceptional circumstances (yellow), abolished the death penalty in practice (orange), and retained the use of the death penalty (red).

We're in good company, huh?

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics from US Department of Justice we are moving towards less executions:

The Innocence Project states that 14 people so far have been exonerated from death row using post-conviction DNA evidence. One must immediately assume that many convicts sentenced to death are innocent now, and many convicts have been wrongfully put to death. At what percentage error is the irreversible state punishment of death acceptable?

Map from Wikipedia

One Red Paper Clip

2006-04-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

This is nuts. One Red Paper Clip

From Hans.

Save Darfur

2006-04-17T15:35:00.000-07:00

Nicholas D. Kristof from the New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize on Commentary, "for his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world."

Go to this website and send a postcard: SaveDarfur.org

The Da Vinci Code Quest

2006-04-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

Looks pretty cool.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

2006-04-16T16:01:00.000-07:00

"I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived."

William Sloane Coffin

2006-04-16T14:57:00.000-07:00

Reverend William Sloane Coffin was a political activist, a scholar, and a minister. He passed away last week and countless articles have been written about him. He seemed a noble man that fought against the injustices of his time. A peace activist during the Vietnam War and a civil rights activist during the 60s, Coffin preached a religion that I could believe. Quotes from the NPR story:

My view of the faith is it should make it possible for you to live with uncertainty.

The integrity of love is much more important than the impurity of dogma. You'll find that those who are really law and order Christians are more impressed with God's power than they are with God's love.

The cruelty that fundamentalists as a rule show to homosexuals is to me quite abhorrent. I also think they are quite ignorant. I know the Bible as well as they do. Maybe there's more to be learned than what's to be found in one or two Biblical passages.

People have some very goofy ideas about how the will of God operates. People think that God goes around the world with fingers on triggers, His hands on steering wheels...People say how can God let that happen? God is not in the event but in the response to the event.

We really do have free will. You have to have freedom if love's the name of the game. To blame God with what people do with their freedom is not fair....You can blame God for giving us human freedom, maybe we're not ready....It seems to be about where the blame stops.

I can't bear to be bored and I think a lot of the people that live safe, sterile lives are bored to death. Oliver Wendell Holmes: "If you do not share in the action and passion of your times you must count yourself as not having lived."

From Scotty McLennan's Boston Globe piece:

Coffin's contention was: ''Many of us are eager to respond to injustice, as long as we can do so without having to confront the causes of it. There's the great pitfall of charity. Handouts to needy individuals are genuine, necessary responses to injustice, but they do not necessarily face the reason for injustice. And that is why so many business and governmental leaders today are promoting charity; it is desperately needed in an economy whose prosperity is based on growing inequality. First these leaders proclaim themselves experts on matters economic, and prove it by taking the most out of the economy! Then they promote charity as if it were the work of the church, finally telling us troubled clergy to shut up and bless the economy as once we blessed the battleships."

New York Times Obituary
Boston Globe article (by Stanford Dean of Religious Life, who in conjunction with Coffin is the inspiration for the Rev. Scotty Sloan in Doonesbury)
Wikipedia article
NPR Story

Pork-Barrel Projects

2006-04-16T00:48:00.000-07:00

The watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste has come with their 2006 Congressional Pig Book which compiles the pork-barrel projects in the federal budget. The report includes the Oinker Awards, State Rankings, Historical Trends, and a searchable index.

All of the pork-barrel projects meet at least one of the following criteria:

Requested by only one chamber of Congress
Not specifically authorized
Not competitively awarded
Not requested by the President
Greatly exceeds the President’s budget request or the previous year’s funding
Not the subject of congressional hearings
Serves only a local or special interest

Each of the listed designated projects includes the cost, the state, a description, and an indication why it was a pork-barrel project.

While some of the projects are amusing, such as the $500,000 for the Sparta Teapot Museum in Sparta, North Carolina, and other maybe appropriate uses of money, such as the $1,000,000 for the Ohio State University 4-H Green Building Project, all of these appropriations circumvent normal budgetary procedures.

Other highlights from the website include the "Byrd Droppings" and a sortable list of Congresspeople and their pork ranking.

Best Sites on the Web

2006-04-15T10:37:00.000-07:00

Web 2.0 Awards and Webby Awards are two website that categorize and rank the best websites available. For example:

Blogniscient ranks the best and most popular blogs.
Esnips is a web storage site that allows you to store up to a Gig of information for free.
Pageflakes, if you don't use Google homepage, then this site is a great as a start page.
The Smoking Gun has 100% authentic documents from courts, law enforcement, and government files. (I especially like the one where the DEA agent shoots himself in the foot.)

Google

2006-04-12T21:19:00.000-07:00

Google has just started calendar.google. finance.google is pretty cool too.

Ohio English Unity Act

2006-04-12T19:42:00.000-07:00

State Representative Courtney Combs introduced an act into the Ohio Revised Code that would require all government documents and meetings to be only in English. Combs wants to unite Ohioans with this new legislation and to encourage Ohioans to learn and speak English. The Hamilton Republican has said the following on the subject:

It makes us, in my opinion, all Americans if we speak the same language.

I do not want to see the U.S. as a bilingual nation; it divides it. The business language of the world is English. If we go down the line and have different pockets of different people speaking different dialogues, it creates a problem.

Arguments for English-only:

Unless we accommodate every language are we giving some immigrants an advantage?
The state will save tens of thousands of tax payers money.
Encourages assimilation into American culture because current social pressures are not high enough.
Helps bolster English dominance in America and in world business.

Outside of the possibility of justifying blatant acts of racism arguments against English-only include:

Restriction on suffrage as ballots will only be printed in English.
Reduction in safety as Columbus now provides smoke-alarm testing information in Spanish.
Economic loss due to the loss of future non-English speaking workers.

Are the motives of State Rep. Combs just? What is governments role in social assimilation? Are non-punitive solutions to encouraging unity and the English language possible?

Resources:

The Ohio English Unity Act
Columbus Dispatch 10/31/05
Columbus Dispatch 4/11/06
U.S. English Inc. Resource Room loaded with interesting information
ACLU Brief on English Only

Calculate How Far You Run or Bike

2006-04-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

This site is amazing.

Gmap-pedometer.com is based on googlemaps and you can double-click to make waypoints and then it calculates the distance between the points. It even can calculate caloric usage and elevation change. Once you've made you route you can even save it for future reference.

Too Much Music? How to Organize it.

2006-04-09T22:56:00.000-07:00

I have too much music on my Ipod and I find it cumbersome and annoying to get a good mix of music that's outside of my well-worn tracks. Here is a great blog about how to set up good smart playlists to get control of your musical selection.

Scott McClellan: Sucks to be you.

2006-04-07T20:37:00.000-07:00

This morning I saw Scott McClellan’s forehead glisten as he was getting hammered with questions involving the President’s role in releasing classified information. “Again it is this administrations policy not to comment on ongoing investigations.”

What strikes me about the issue is that the President has the ability when he sees fit to release bit by bit classified information at his discretion, to bolster his case, for his (political) gain, but can simply not disclose classified information that counters his arguments. This I believe is at the heart of the administrations arguments for getting into the Iraq war.

Ayn Rand Institute Response to Prayer Study

2006-04-06T00:45:00.000-07:00

A Harvard Medical School study on the effects of prayer on patients undergoing bypass surgery showed that patients receiving prayer faired no better than those not receiving prayer.

1,800 patients were used in the study, split into three groups, 1) were told they might or might not receive prayers and did receive prayers, 2) were told they might or might not receive prayers and did not receive prayers, and 3) were told they would receive prayers and did receive prayers. In group 1 52% of the patients had post-surgical complications, group 2 51% had complications, and in group 3 59% had complications.

The Ayn Rand Institute commented in this study with the following:

The Harvard medical study showing that prayer has no effect on recovery from heart surgery is shocking. It is not shocking that prayer has no medical effects--what's shocking is that scientists at Harvard Medical School are wasting their time studying the medical effects of prayer.

Science is a method of gaining knowledge by systematically studying things that actually exist and have real effects. The notion that someone's health can be affected by the prayers or wishes of strangers is based on nothing but imagination and faith. Such blind belief represents the rejection of reason and science, and is not worthy of serious, rational consideration. What's next? A study of the medical effects of blowing out birthday candles?

Every minute these doctors spend conducting this sort of faith-based study is one minute less spent on reality-based research--research that actually has hope of leading to real medical cures.

From Boingboing

01:02:03 04/05/06

2006-04-03T17:58:00.000-07:00

This Wednesday...happens every one hundred years...varies in different parts of the world. Sounds like a reason to party.
(From BoingBoing).

Climate Change

2006-04-01T21:36:00.000-08:00

Although the media and politicians often portray dissenting scientific views about climate change, this is an incorrect depiction of the scientific community. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), looks at peer-reviewed published scientific literature and "states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities." (Science Magazine Link)

In agreement with the IPCC, the National Science Foundation, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science all have issued statements stating that humans have played a role in climate change.

Are there dissenting scientific opinions that are being overshadowed by these organizations? Not published in peer-reviewed journals. Peer-reviewed articles labeled "climate change" during 1993 to 2003 totaled 928. Of these 928 articles, none disagreed with the consensus opinion.

Dissenting opinions often come from "[i]ndustry-financed groups like the Global Climate Coalition and the Western Fuels Association [who are] quick to send out press releases, giving the impression that there [is] an active debate within the scientific community about the threat of climate change. Mainstream media's notion of journalistic balance resulted in stories that gave the naysayers equal time to dispute the notion of catatsrophic (sic) climate change, setting the standard for all future climate change narratives." (The Nation Link)

The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it. (Science Magazine Link)

Bored?

2006-03-29T18:49:00.000-08:00

Curious about population statistics in the US? Want to know how many Asians live in Hilliard, Ohio? What about how many average cars are in Palo Alto? Population of females in DC?

A mashup of GoogleMaps and some census and housing data has all those answers and more. Click anywhere in the US on the GoogleMaps and information will be avaliable for 1 mile, 3 mile, and 5 mile radii.

Link from Lifehacker

Harvard: Secrets to Happiness

2006-03-29T14:39:00.000-08:00

The most popular course at Harvard is Psychology 1504: Positve Psychology. Tal Ben-Shahar teaches in this course to ask the right questions: "What is most meaningful to me? What provides me the most pleasure? and What am I good at?"

He advises to simplify. Following this, Professor Ben-Shahar has taken himself off the tenure track because he does not like publishing but likes to teach.

From NPR's All Things Considered, March 22nd, 2006. Link including 6 tips from Ben Shahar.

w00t!

2006-03-29T00:40:00.000-08:00

Woot = great site. I bought my first item tonight. An wireless mouse for $8.99, including shipping.

Every night at midnight Central Time, the site sells one and only one item. Sometimes the item is refurbished, sometimes the item is new, but almost always it is at a great deal (especially with $5 shipping for every item). Key to using this site is the "“discuss this product"” link in which you can find out whether the woot price beats froogle prices and ebay prices. The quantity of an item is unknown except for the hint that less than 10% of the item is left when the "I want one"” button is flashing.

Most of the items are computer or technology related. Some of the items I'’ve seen are include a great deal on a 61'’ plasma TV for $2500, computer parts, paper shredders, and phones,.

Woot sometimes also has specials such as $1 brown bag deals in which the contents are unknown, but it only cost $6.

One might ask, how does this work as a business model? The woot website states that they don'’t plan on making money until 2043 However, wikipedia states that they have made ~$40 million dollars annually.

Nice Quote

2006-03-25T16:03:00.000-08:00

A nice George Orwell quote that Andrew Sullivan had on his blog.

"[I]ndifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be doubt about the most enormous events ... The calamities that are constantly being reported - battles, massacres, famines, revolutions - tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. Probably the truth is undiscoverable but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or for failing to form an opinion ..." - George Orwell, "Notes on Nationalism," 1945.

Is the SAT necessary?

2006-03-24T14:29:00.000-08:00

In light of the recent blunder by ETS (Educational Testing Service), resulting in ~4000 students who took the exam last October receiving wrong scores, I’ve thought about the SAT, its importance, and whether or not it’s really the best tool to use in college admissions.

I remember taking the SAT in high school. I remember freaking out because this was one major factor in determining where I would go to college. I had this weird misconception that if I scored a 1350 or higher, I would be admitted to any school. And if I didn’t, I was out of luck.

Granted, my Type A personality definitely gets the best of me sometimes, and this was one of those times. But the SAT remains a huge factor in the college admissions process, especially at the most elite schools. Even with its admitted biases (women consistently score ~40 points lower than men, scores are positively correlated with household income), over 80% of colleges use the test in their admissions decisions (Sparksnotes). It’s an obvious problem to try to compare students around the world, all from different high schools, without a common denominator—and so the common denominator has become the SAT. And today, the SAT remains a huge deal to many high school juniors and seniors, many of whom freak out like I did over this exam.

What does SAT even stand for? It used to be Scholastic Aptitude Test, then it was changed to Scholastic Assessment Test, and now it’s just the SAT, standing for nothing. There is some evidence suggesting that SAT scores are positively correlated with freshman year grades in college (College Board). After freshman year, the correlation disappears. High SAT scores do not indicate likely career success or pretty much anything after freshman year of college.

The SAT was created by a Princeton professor (Carl Brigham) to test the IQ of army recruits prior to WWI. It was used as a college entrance exam for the first time in 1926. ETS was established as a nonprofit at the end of WWII. Brigham did not approve of a nonprofit organization being in charge of the test, because a company that must rely on fees from test-takers to survive would inevitably have to promote the test, not work towards improving it (“Is the SAT a fair test?” A Chuang). Evidence indicating that Brigham’s fears are now a reality is that the test prep business is a billion dollar industry. Interestingly, the College Board claims that coaching only helps the average student get three extra answers correct (Cloud, Time Reports).

The president of the University of California wants to drop the SAT as a factor in its admissions ("Dropping the SAT." G Will). Schools that do not use the SAT in their admissions process (mostly small liberal arts colleges) claim that the diversity in the student population has increased, while student quality has remained high. With all the heartburn caused by the recent score fiasco, affecting students and admissions offices across the country, getting rid of the SAT is an appealing idea. But without standardizing national high school curriculum and high school grading procedures, it seems almost impossible to have a way to compare students from various backgrounds without using a test such as the SAT as a standard. It seems that the SAT could be extraneous for a small liberal arts college with a relatively small applicant pool, but scores provide an easy filter for larger universities with tens of thousands of applicants each year. It seems likely that if the SAT is eliminated, something similar will eventually take its place. The question is: would the substitute be any better than the SAT? That is, would it properly predict success in college and be completely unbiased?

Belarus

2006-03-24T12:14:00.000-08:00

The valiant efforts of the protesters in Belarus are inspirational. Fighting against unbearable odds, students are standing up against the autocratic rule of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko.

"We live in a country of total fear, and very few people are brave enough to come out like this," he said, standing in front of the ranks at 4 a.m., as the temperature dropped to 10 degrees. "This action destroys fear inside the country because it tells people it is possible to fight for your own destiny."

The protesters see little chance of changes in government anytime soon. To the extent that this is a revolution, Mr. Milinkevich [the second place finisher in the presidential election] often says, it is a revolution not on the streets but in the mind.

An opposition has been born. It is small, but one sign of its early resolve is that almost everyone who stands until dawn not only gives his or her last name for publication, but also insists that it be written down, knowing then that the authorities will see who they are.

Sadly these protesters were arrested in a cowardly attempt of suppression at 3am this morning.

Shred your credit card applications

2006-03-23T00:02:00.000-08:00

This is an interesting story that should add to your typical paranoia level. Basically this guy taped together a hand torn credit card application, put it in the mail with his cell phone number and a different mailing address, received and activated the card.

Link from Lifehacker.com.

North Korea Human Rights?

2006-03-22T11:19:00.000-08:00

"North Korea has no people with physical disabilities because they are killed almost as soon as they are born, a physician who defected from the communist state said on Wednesday." Link from Digg.com.

66-year-old guns down boy

2006-03-22T09:18:00.000-08:00

Martin: I've been being harassed by him and his parents for five years. Today just blew it up. Kid's just been giving me a bunch of shit, making the other kids harass me and my place, tearing things up.

Operator: OK, so what'd you do?

Martin: I shot him with a goddamn 410 shotgun twice.

Operator: You shot him with a shotgun? Where is he?

Martin: He's laying in his yard.

Above was from the 911 transcript after Charles Martin killed his 15-year-old neighbor in Union Township outside of Cincinnati. Apparently the boy was going home to get a video game and crossed through Martin's yard. Link Cincinnati Enquirer Link

The Guardian quotes the following facts on guns:

Forty per cent of American households own guns, but those guns are 22 times more likely to be involved in an accidental shooting, or 11 times more likely to be used in a suicide, than in self-defense.

Curious about these facts, I looked up the paper citing the likelihood of self-defense versus accidental shootings. The paper was published in 1998 in the Journal of Trauma, Injury, Infection and Critical Care. The methods and more statistics were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The Guardian incorrectly quotes the numbers from this study. Unintentional shootings involving guns kept in the home (as opposed to those brought from another location), N=30, occurred 4 times more often than legally justifiable/self defense shootings with guns kept in home, N=7. Attempted or completed suicides involving guns kept in home, N=79, occurred 11 times more often than legally justifiable/self defense shootings with guns kept in home, N=7. The combination of unintentional shootings, attempted/completed suicides, and criminal assaults and homicides (N=49) with guns kept in home, totaling an N of 158, occurred 22.6 more times than legally justifiable/self defense shootings with guns kept in home, N=7.

Caveats to this study include the following:

Data was taken from three cities Memphis, Tennessee; Seattle, Washington; and Galveston, Texas. This maybe generalizable for cities but cannot be generalized for the entire country especially less urban areas.
Statistics were only captured from persons shot by a gun that were serious enough to merit emergency medical care. Thus exempt from the study were incidents when unfired guns or fired guns that missed were used in self-defense.
The raw numbers of this study are not high.

According to the authors studies that look at the use of guns for self-defense are difficult because the events are hard to record and opinion polls may be inflated. However, this study indeed shows that odds are if a gun kept in a home is used to injury someone it is more likely to be used not in self-defense.

Boondocks

2006-03-21T19:29:00.000-08:00

I read this comic everyday. I wish I could post today's but I think it's illegal. "Let's stop talking and DO something!"

Where Our Tax Dollars Go

2006-03-18T22:01:00.000-08:00

Here is an interesting view of how Congress has decided to spend the discretionary part of our income taxes in 2004.

Some highlights include:

$359 million on the Peace Corps
$5.481 billion on the National Science Foundation
$27.742 billion on the National Institutes of Health
$19.503 billion on the Department of Agriculture
$28.192 billion on the combined total for the F-22 Raptor, C-17 Transport Aircraft, AEGIS Destroyer, F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, Virginia Class Submarine, Joint Strike Fighter, Blackhawk Helicopter, Commanche Helicopter, Stryker Armored Vehicle, V-22 Ospery Aircraft, and TRIDENT II Ballistic Missile.
$29.446 on elementary and secondary education
$399 billion on total military
$383 billion on total non-military (not including "mandatory expenditures such as social security and medicare"

I found this link through boingboing.