The Third Rail
The third rail on electric railways carries the electrical current. Touching the rail will cause death. By extension, a number of topics in politics have been c...
Month: December 2008
Charitable Giving
As I pay the last set of bills before the New Year, I also make final charitable contributions. There are some guidelines that I use to select to which charitie...
Slow Banking Day
Odd. All of the banking sites I use are slower than molasses in winter. The rest of the Internet is responding fine. I’m finding this intriguingly strange...
Attack of the Killer Slime Mold
via Massengale,
Marshalls’ View of Over-Production
The Marshalls department store has a great advertisement playing now, on the subject of over-production, which I would re-post here for your enjoyment, if it we...
Now Where Did I Read That?
Dear Google, where did I read that thing I remember reading a few days ago? Can you find it for me? kthxbye. Google’s goal is to organize our information....
It All Averages Out in the End, Does It?
The law of large numbers does not invalidate garbage in, garbage out.
Deferred Consumption
I recently subscribed to a number of podcasts in an effort to drown out the unbearable background noise in the Fishkill office: Fox News. One of them was a prog...
Full vs. Abbreviated Feeds
It has been some matter of argument in what passes for the blogosphere for some time whether or not full-content feeds are better than partial-content. Some of ...
The Value of an Automobile
It is said that an automobile loses half of its value when it drives off the dealer’s lot. That is, the price that is willing to be paid for it, now that ...
Expanded Horizons
I used to follow about 300 or so websites, but pruned that back to about 10 and my friends’ shared items in Google Reader around two years ago. My job res...
Interregnum
I’ve seen several references to this time between the election and the inauguration as an interregnum, and many writers expressing concern that President ...
Breaking News: Entropy Exists!
The Economist reports that the broken windows theory of policing is correct. I think some theories are controversial only because the people who start the contr...
Coerced for My Own Good
H. W. Brands, in his biography of F.D.R., Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, writes, Many of the pro...