Of the Character of one Mr. Brownlow
From There’s Pippins And Cheese To Come, by Charles S. Brooks (Yale University Press, 1917) By some slim chance, reader, you may be the kind of person who...
Month: April 2009
Speaking of Hate
I really hate that the rhetoric of liberty is perverted in the service of illiberal causes. And I hate this not just because of the hypocrisy of it. I hate this...
On the Nature of Power
Like electricity in the grid, use it or lose it.
Bobby Dunbar
I’m listening again to This American Life‘s story “The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar.” The story is remarkably affecting, sad, and hard to imagi...
What, Me Worry? I’ve Done Nothing Wrong.
One thing I’ve never quite understood is how advocates for expansive government power never quite seem able to imagine themselves as being on the unpleasa...
Footprint per Capita
The newspaper had a map of each country’s carbon footprint per person. Something like this one from Wikipedia. This is one of those graphics that misleads...
Faded Memories
All I remember of one of the few records I owned as a child is a line that ended one of the songs. Save your Confederate credit cards. The South’s gonna r...
What Benefit are Wire Services in a Well-Connected World?
As a former employee of The Associated Press, it’s been somewhat embarrassing to watch their plodding attempts to control data which has already escaped f...
Statistical Enquiry of the Devil’s Playground
Certain laws and regulations, and policies related to those, have a non-trivial impact on statistics which are not normally thought of in concert with those law...
Like, but not totally unlike, Useful
IBM has a way of making software that looks like it would be really helpful and of great utility — if it didn’t totally suck. Stick to hardware, guy...
New York City Department of Kafka
What the fuck? We hear from New York City school teachers about a secret room in the New York City Board of Education building. Teachers are told to report ther...
Where Have All the People Gone?
… long time passing … This video comparison of Barcelona in 1908 and in 2008 by Fotos de Barcelona is striking, and not just in the differences in t...