Not So Fast

NY Times has an article on the Great Leap Forward. Which led to an interesting discussion about intentions at Instapundit.

It’s interesting that because the first academic knew Marxists as people, they weren’t evil. Since he/she didn’t know any Nazis, they are still mass murdering jerks. People are people and very, very few do evil things with no justification of a greater good.

bugmenot for the NYT.

I freely admit I don’t know what a lot of those movies are.

When everyone’s unhappy, I take that to be a sign that it’s a solid compromise.

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It is really weird to see math reduced to something as physical as gears. I tend to think of it as a mental / electrical thing.

I normally don’t bother posting pictures of cute animals, but these pandas are so dang cute they deserve your attention.

The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time.

Life Magazine has a lot of awesome pictures from 2010 in the horrible, and small, slideshow format.

I would be far more excited about A Game of Thrones if the story had come to any sort of (hopefully satisfying) conclusion.  Having suffered through hundreds of pages of meandering through various stories with no end in sight, I’m having a hard time getting excited about this, though it looks awesome.

It’s my own fault that I kept on reading, thinking surely one storyline or another would have to come to a conclusion. I was wrong.

IBM has come up with a super fast, awesomely named Silicon Nanophotonics chip technology that will make your chips communicate amazingly fast, but won’t help as your RAM, hard drive or network drags everything back down to normal speeds.

A million dollar nest egg would allow me to retire into a slightly better lifestyle than I currently enjoy. Which, trust me, isn’t saying much. And let’s not talk about what inflation will do to that. La, la, la, I can’t hear you…

Between this and the Mythbusters dance bit, I’m warming to him.

I’ve seen blue dog democrats. I’ve voted for blue dog democrats. You, Mr. President, are no blue dog democrat.

The BBC’s iPlayer is coming to an iPad near you. With a subscription price. Which isn’t entirely unreasonable. But, since I don’t have an iPad this will not affect my BBC show viewing techniques.

The faces make you laugh and watch more and the sound makes you want to turn it off. I’m conflicted.

RIP, Leslie Neilsen

Shep Smith has a list of what you shouldn’t take through the thing this Thanksgiving.

Big Picture brings you some of the best pictures of the year from National Geographic. Truly stunning pictures that will make you throw your camera away in despair of ever capturing something half as good.

A security expert answers questions about the TSA’s new techniques for Popular Mechanics.

Spoiler Alert: the TSA comes off poorly.

Google is hiring, but this paragraph is what caught my eye

This month, Google internally announced plans to give all of its employees a 10% raise in 2011, according to media reports, a move that many in the industry interpreted as an attempt to retain its best workers.

Insane. Ahem.

Thank you, Bill Watterson, for the greatest comic strip ever.

The American Traveler Dignity Act. Call your congressman.

Text of the Bill.

Jay Rockafeller hates that Americans watch those stupid Fox and MSNBC channels. How dare they give Americans exactly what they want to watch. I love the faces of the TV execs.

Post-acquittal detention power. It gave the judge a nice out though.

Mark Twain’s autobiography vol. 1, comes out today, 100 years after his death as he  requested.

Dang it, I already have 2 books stacked up waiting to be read.

An excellent overview of the net neutrality issue from NPR. Audio only, though. Sorry.

Tom Lehrer’s song is making a bit of a comeback lately. Second time I’ve heard it in as many weeks.

Peter Rez, a physics professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, did his own calculations and found the exposure to be about one-fiftieth to one-hundredth the amount of a standard chest X-ray. He calculated the risk of getting cancer from a single scan at about 1 in 30 million, “which puts it somewhat less than being killed by being struck by lightning in any one year,” he told me.

While the risk of getting a fatal cancer from the screening is minuscule, it’s about equal to the probability that an airplane will get blown up by a terrorist, he added. “So my view is there is not a case to be made for deploying them to prevent such a low probability event.”

If Americans thought that these measures would in any way actually stop a terrorist attack, they probably wouldn’t be so upset about the whole thing. As it is, I’m glad I’m not flying any time soon.

Also, it’s nice to see Americans united in  drawing a line anywhere on privacy invasion.

Hmm: Airports can use private security instead of the TSA. Though the government still has all the control since they are paying for it and regulating it.

He’s either naive or stupid if he really is surprised by this development. On the other hand, the stupid and naive are a significant proportion of the country and deserve representation in the government.

This would be politically astute of the GOP. Therefore I expect them to ignore it.

What does that mean? [NSFW language]

This post was clearly written by some impostor because any Gen-Xer that hasn’t been disillusioned since about high school isn’t really a Gen-Xer. Or was on some hippie drugs or something.

Of course the coming hyper-inflation will not be the fault of the government that can’t stop spending and then printing money to pay for it. Since it’s a bit late to be blaming Bush for things these days, time to switch gears. It’s those darned annoying kids and their rabble-rousing ways. Hyper-inflation takes over the economy, blame the Tea Party. Global Warming/Cooling is killing the polar bears, blame the Tea Party. LHC keeps interfering with itself from the future, blame the Tea Party. Aliens abduct the president, blame the Tea Party.

Kinda shocking facts about Britian’s government. There’s a cool pic if you follow the link too.

Britain – even more than the US, I think, which is going to be rescued by the values of the Tea Party movement – is en route to disaster. The share of our economy taken up by the government (ie the public sector) is now 53 per cent; in Communist China the figure is 25 per cent. Even at the peak of the Soviet Union the figure was only 70 per cent. At the height of Britain’s economic power in the Victorian era, the figure was 10 per cent.

The rest of the world is upset at the Fed’s decision to keep printing money. While I think America should concentrate on fixing the American economy, if we destroy the world’s economy while fixing ours, I doubt we’ll be much better off in the long run.

Since August, when the prospect of more Fed QE became real, cotton prices are up 68pc, sugar prices have risen 66pc and rice is up by a third.

That’s why QE will be blamed for so much more than “unfair” currency devaluations and for imposing a “soft default” on America’s creditors.

This crazy money-printing is going to be seen as the primary cause of Western inflation, food riots and a commodity price spike.

I’m just guessing here, but since IPv6 has been around for so long and the Internet people have known about this change was coming for so long and given that no business  will willingly lose massive amounts of money due to something easily preventable like upgrading their infrastructure and rolling that out to consumers I think they have it under control.

I like how he compares it to Y2K, which, if I remember correctly, ended up a non-issue. And if you do manage to read to the end of the article, that’s pretty much his conclusion.

Why Firefox is switching to tabs on top.  I didn’t even realize that Chrome had tabs on top, but now that I do, I like it better. Especially on my smaller netbook screen.

American Exceptionalism.

Here’s something you’d never read while Bush was in office.

Bacon soda.

Some man on the street reviews. I’d try it. I’ll try food that’s not actively dangerous once. I’ve added it to my wishlist since, as I’m sure you remember, my birthday is coming up soon.

There are some non-violent felonies that I wouldn’t have a problem with the felon working with children. Or you do something when you were 18 and now your 45 and a completely different person. But I can understand why schools wouldn’t want to deal with the hassle of figuring out which is which. And some other parent is going to be outraged and sue them no matter what they decide.

Hey, there’s a new The Aquabats EP! Radio Down!

While not ska, it’s still classically Aquabats. My favorite is Best Day Of My Life!. How could you have a bad day if you woke up to that song? I don’t know.

I figure if it’s good enough for the passengers, it’s good enough for the crews. Everyone should suffer under the clueless hand of the TSA equally.

Not that I want any of us to suffer under the clueless hand of the TSA. I’d say get rid of it but I’m scared they’d put something even stupider and more demeaning in its place.

Panoramic photos of the Discovery space shuttle. If you don’t do it full screen, you’re wasting your time.

Make your iPad work like a laptop… by spending even more money on accessories. Or you could just buy a laptop at half the price.

Scientists didn’t know boas were parthenogenetic until this boa constrictor gave birth. And then it gets weird.

A popcorn kernel popping at 6200 fps.

Republicans should bear in mind that we didn’t like them either two short years ago as they go forth to spend our money, make new laws and repeal old ones.

See also.

I don’t understand this video, but it is awesome.

The ultimate intelligence test. According to this test, I’m dumb as a stump. I only scored well, and by “well” I mean above the 5oth percentile, on the ones that had to do with words. On those, I was in the top 10%. You start making me rotate shapes and remember strings of numbers  and positions and I’m out.

Oh, and it only counts if you do it straight through. No fair taking a break and coming back to the later ones rested up.

A nice essay on how the saints aren’t as bizarre as we might think.

Tube-free toilet paper.

Polio could be completely eradicated in a few years.

When you cite Star Trek in your judicial opinion, I would think you would want to cite the actual point of the movie, not the point that gets proven wrong.

If Americans wanted the needs of the many to outweigh the needs of the few we would have formed a democracy instead of a federal republic.

Happy Birthday, Banner Ads! From the people that brought you them in the first place.

Some dude at the WSJ goes off.

We still buy it, even though Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, has researched the topic and spends every October telling the press that there has never been a single case of any child being killed by a stranger’s Halloween candy

Day 30 – Saddest character death

What a happy one to end on!

So, trying to think of a character death that really affected me and I’m having a hard time. Aral Vorkosigan’s was sad and I remember it because I just read it, but there’s nothing in books like the shock and NOOooOO! I felt at Wash’s death. Most of the protagonists in books, if they die, come back (ala Gandalf), so I leave this one basically unanswered.

Netflix is the leader in internet traffic during peak evening hours. I was kinda bummed that during the outage I was watching YouTube clips and didn’t even notice, so no $2 savings for me. 😦

And, apparently, it’s a problem that such a relatively small company uses so much bandwidth, though I’m not exactly sure why because