Month: November 2006
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Defense Expenditures: More, more, more!
Matt Yglesias on military spending: If you want to know why US foreign policy is the way it is, a big part of the reason is that the overwhelming majority of the financial support for people doing policy-and-politics relevant stuff is defense contractors. Then there’s some money to be raised from people with right-wing views…
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Ode to an Actress
Malcolm Jones writes a moving tribute to actress Adrienne Shelly–who was murdered almost a month ago: I went back while I was writing this and watched some of “Trust” again. In an interview, Hartley once explained that he made the movie on the spur of the moment because he wanted to work with Shelly again…
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100 Uses of Vinegar & Too Many Pages
About.com’s Pat Varetto offers a long list of ways to use vinegar for cleaning: Page 1, 2, 3, 4. See also the tips for baking soda (Page 1 and 2). Franny Syufy writes a 3 page description of cleaning in an environmentally friendly way. Page 1, 2, 3. More: Correct way to load a loadwasher…
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Fighting Traffic on the Highway
Fascinating look at highway traffic, from a perspective of social psychology: WHY must a bottleneck develop at a merge zone? Well, obviously because there’s too many cars on one road. And because everyone must take turns slowly merging together. WRONG! Wrong wrong wrong. Even during extremely low-traffic conditions, everyone still takes turns, yet everyone merges…
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Mental Cost of Blogging
There are days when I feel like blogging, days when I don’t. I have four or five notable things to link/blog about, but honestly, the world would survive if I didn’t blog about it. Sometimes I put it off and never get around to posting about it again. Occasionally , I have some free time…
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Mental Cost of Pennies
One commenter writes on Matt Yglesias’s post about dollar coins: My argument against the penny is as follows. Let’s say that minimum wage is $6/hour (for ease of calculation). That’s $0.10 per minute, or $0.01 per six seconds. The amount of time that it takes to dig one or more pennies out of your wallet…
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International Comparisons of Military Budgets
Pie chart of government expenditures.. I can’t tell whether there is another slant to the figures. For FY 2007, the entire budget is 2,251 billion dollars. Out of that, $563 billion goes to current military projects, $100 billion goes to unbudgeted projects (i.e., Iraq, Afganistan), and $439 goes to military pensions. The site comments: The…
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Exciting Things about Ebooks & Mobipocket
Very fast posts. I tried out Mobipocket Creator 4.1 Publisher Edition. Previously this version cost $150, but now it’s available for free. This tool is really sweet. Might post something more thorough later. The written agreement isn’t so bad; 50% (+10% if customers buy it through your personal website). At this point I’m nearly ready…
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Ebooks, WordPress and OpenOffice
I was using this page to troubleshoot the wordpress rich text editor. The editor seriously messed up my ebook creation links page. But it’s fixed now. I really hate the WordPress rich text editor. It really messes up my format, layout and markup. Inserting extra tags, validating and converting ampersands (so you don’t see messy…
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Notes on 49 Up
Yesterday, I saw Apted’s 49 Up, the amazing documentary that tracks British children every seven years. It was as exhausting and emotionally satisfying as previous years. I saw 7 Up, 7+7, 21 Up, 28 Up, 35 Up and 42 Up in about two weeks. On the other hand, I had to wait an entire year…
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Paris Hilton for Prez!
Kay Hymowitz on the Paris Hilton phenomenon: Paris’s presumption comes off as especially obnoxious in this hard-nosed, meritocratic age. Who is she to flaunt her easy privilege, her mindless entitlement, her careless idleness? One reason her “celebutard” IQ grates on us so much—“Could anyone be this stupid?” Newsweek asked in its review of The Simple…
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8 Nuts a Day for Good Health
Medical research about the health benefits of eating nuts (specifically hazelnuts, almonds and walnuts). I’ve known about this research before (though not its depth apparently), and I’ve tried eating nuts on occasion. The main problem I’ve had is that the jars or bags I buy don’t seal or are in sizes so big they invite…
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Mating and Art
Geoffrey Miller in The Mating Mind: “Sexually mature males have produced almost all of the publicly displayed art throughout history. Males produce about an order of magnitude more art, music and literature…than women, and they produce it mostly in young adulthood. This suggests that…the production of art, music and literature functions primarily as a courtship…
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Survival Rates for AIDS
Amazing statistic: average survival lifescan after AIDS diagnosis in USA is 24 years (it was 10 years over a decade ago). A decade ago, I did volunteer work for AIDS care teams, and patients were dropping away fairly quickly. (One of them dropped off within weeks of diagnosis). Of course, I was working with terminally…
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Peace Corps Houston
Personal note: I just bought another web domain for my local Peace Corps Houston group
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Thoughts on Getting Things Done
Linksfest for David Allens’ Getting Things Done. I deal with organization issues every day, and honestly I don’t think I’ve succeeded. Here are thorny organization issues for me: How clean is clean? For me I never “catch up” with my cleaning. Often when I travel or become sick, I get totally behind on housekeeping, and…