| Saturday, June 27th, 2009 |
| 7:23 pm |
Strangeness within strangeness
About that video you've probably seen of prisoners in orange jumpsuits dancing to Michael Jackson's Thriller, from CNN: "Every able-bodied prisoner must dance. If they refuse, they lose privileges, mostly conjugal visits. According to Garcia, the dancing occupies up to five hours a day. However he rejected claims he's abusing the prisoners' rights by forcing them to dance so many hours a day." Being made to dance to Michael Jackson's music 5 hours a day?!?! |
| Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 |
| 11:45 am |
Sex offenders
How come convicted sex offenders can't live near a school, are on a public list, and have to tell their neighbors that they're sex offenders - - but convicted murderers don't? |
| Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 |
| 6:15 pm |
|
| Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 |
| 5:08 pm |
User interface simplicity!
Apple believes that having more than one button confuses people! Hence the simple interface on their iPhone earbuds: Phone: Press once to answer a call. Press twice to send the call to voicemail. Press once to hang up. Call-Waiting: Press once to hold the current call and switch to new call. Hold for 2 seconds and release to ignore the new call. When listening to music: Press once to play or pause a song. Double-click to skip to the next song. Triple-click to return to the previous song. |
| Friday, May 1st, 2009 |
| 1:38 pm |
Stupidity roundup
I heard an "expert" on child care on NPR asked about parents being abusive by leaving their children unsupervised. She said that it was probably acceptable to leave children unsupervised once they reach the age of 13. Thirteen?!?What kind of pampered attention-hungry wussies will the next generation be made of? |
| Thursday, April 16th, 2009 |
| 8:05 pm |
Stupidity roundup
A commentator on NPR representing an insurance agency said that it was too expensive to hire guards for all of the 30,000 ships that pass by Somalia every year. Instead, he suggests we add to the 20 warships already patrolling the area. Everything's cheap when somebody else pays for it! |
| Monday, April 6th, 2009 |
| 2:16 pm |
|
| Thursday, March 19th, 2009 |
| 6:04 pm |
|
| 4:57 pm |
Is anybody keeping track anymore?
With the new $1.2 trillion bailout of mortgages etc. the Fed announced today, the US government's total spending on bailouts since November comes to $6 trillion. That's nearly half of the US 2007 GDP of $13.8 trillion. We've spent that in less than half a year. Congress and the Fed are literally spending money faster than America earns it. I don't mean tax dollars. I mean total pre-tax money. In November, Congress raised a fuss over a mere $900 billion. Now, anything less than a trillion barely makes the news. I thought that whoever was elected President couldn't possibly do worse than Bush. I may have been wrong. |
| Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 |
| 12:18 pm |
Good jobs
Obama said today: "The jobs that we're creating are good jobs, that pay more than average, jobs grinding asphalt and paving roads, filling potholes, making street signs, repairing stoplights, replacing guardrails." WTF? We could create millions of "good jobs" like these by deporting illegal aliens. Alternately, we could let the Mexicans in and use bailout money to send Americans to college. But instead we have a border policy that says we need cheap foreign labor, and a domestic policy to spend $1 trillion to hire Americans to fix potholes. |
| Saturday, February 21st, 2009 |
| 2:42 pm |
The Fall
A new top-10-favorite movie for me: The Fall"Set in the 1920s, director Tarsem Singh's visually lush drama stars Lee Pace as paralyzed movie stuntman Roy Walker, who bonds with an imaginative 5-year-old named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) as they convalesce together in a Los Angeles infirmary. To coax the girl into procuring the cache of morphine he wants from the hospital pharmacy, the suicidal Roy regales Alexandria with an elaborate fantasy about larger-than-life heroes." Thanks to Sir Muckford! |
| Friday, February 20th, 2009 |
| 11:17 pm |
Rimming
"A symphony for YouTube"The LSO plays a piece for YouTube. The conductor's expressions are great. But did anybody notice the percussionist about halfway through, who appears for about half a second playing... the rims? Pause the video at 2:58, and you'll see a guy in the London Symphony Orchestra, playing a bunch of automobile wheel rims. |
| Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 |
| 5:47 pm |
How did we fail to foresee the financial crisis? I heard on NPR today that the largest Chinese bank had only 0.02% of its assets invested in the "toxic derivatives" associated with our financial crisis. So apparently one-sixth of the world's relevant population foresaw it. Economists used to believe that technological innovation and competition was a matter of some companies adapting to new technologies, and others failing to adapt and going bankrupt. That's still the popular view. But studies have shown that it's more profitable for some companies to continue doing what they've been doing and go out of business, than to adapt and survive, because the larger short-term profits can be invested long before the eventual profits of adaptation. Adaptation is more favorable to small companies. Similarly, conservation groups who want to encourage African countries to conserve their endangered species out of economic considerations were horrified to discover that it can bee more profitable to kill all of your elephants this year and sell their ivory, than to keep a constant population of elephants alive so that you can sell their ivory forever. Who "failed" to foresee this crisis by investing in toxic assets? Big companies. The same types that profit more by exploiting a resource to its extinction than by managing a sustainable system. The "failure" to foresee the crisis is taken as proof that the market is not smart enough to regulate itself. Maybe the market succeeded. Has anybody asked whether the financial organizations that failed, and the people running them, made more money by failing than they would have by not failing? If so, then the problem is not that the market doesn't work. The problem is that the incentives were wrong, and that we let the power to prevent a financial collapse be concentrated in the hands of people who had no reason to prevent it. |
| Friday, January 30th, 2009 |
| 3:28 pm |
|
| Monday, January 26th, 2009 |
| 5:22 pm |
|
| Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 |
| 12:34 pm |
|
| Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 |
| 9:57 pm |
Religious fiction: One God, two color schemes
I noticed the Religious Fiction part of the bookstore in Barnes & Noble the other day. When I think of religious fiction, I think of Carlos Casteneda or the Satanic Verses. (Or, well, religion.) But this was all Christian fiction. What drew my eye was the strange color scheme. The books were a combination of soft pastels, and harsh reds and blacks, as if someone had shelved romance and horror together. The books with soft pastel covers were stories about the love God would show for you if you accepted him. The books with red and black covers were, in part, stories about what God would do to you if you didn't accept him. |
| Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 |
| 12:09 am |
|
| Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 |
| 11:44 am |
Children's literature
Why do people think having child protagonists is a necessary and sufficient condition to make a book children's literature? When I was a kid, I didn't want to read stories about kids. I wanted to read stories about adults, because I wanted to be an adult. Do kids want to read stories about other kids, or is that just what we feed them, and what we stock their section of the library with? Maybe 5-year olds do, but I think by the time you reach the double-digits, you get enough of being a child in your everyday life. Why would children want to read about being children any more than office workers want to read about being office workers? |
| Monday, December 22nd, 2008 |
| 11:37 am |
Stupidity roundup
Today's moron is the NPR announcer who said that the price of crude oil has now dropped from over $140 a barrel, to less than $40/barrel, "due to a decrease in demand." Why can't they just say "we don't know why"? Why does the US spend $15 billion/year on space exploration, and $0/yr on economic research, when the price of oil can fall 70% without us knowing why? The pictures from the Hubble are pretty, but I'd rather know what would happen if we raised the minimum wage. |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
shagbark's journal