links for 2009-11-30
The Daily Beast: Palin's Bus Hoax
Sarah Palin's bus tour is a potemkin bus tour, it turns out. The bus is a prop. In fact, she's jetting around the country on a $4,000/hour Gulfstream II 12-passenger jet. Her recent arrival in Roanoke in her bus? Nope—she flew there. Her only time spent on the bus is [...]
links for 2009-11-29
New York Times: The Safety Net—Food Stamp Use Soars, and Stigma Fades
One in four children are on food stamps. Twenty thousand new people enroll every day. Jesus. I'm grateful that we have a president and a congress who are willing to fund the program adequately.
(tags: economy food poverty)
Wikipedia: List of words having different meanings in [...]
High, Wide and Handsome.
I’ve been enjoying the music of Charlie Poole for the past six months or so, and I was surprised to discover Loudon Wainwright III’s new album, High, Wide and Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project, just before I saw him perform some of the songs at The Paramount last month. If you’re an old time fan—or [...]
links for 2009-11-28
Freeing the Grid 2009
This sustainable energy interest group has released their annual report card for how friendly each state's laws are to net metering and electrical interconnection. Virginia has gone from a C to a B in net metering in the last year, and from an F to an A in interconnection in the same [...]
links for 2009-11-26
Mountain Xpress: Former Asheville firefighter gets 4 months for shooting cyclist
This guy pulled over to yell at a cyclist for having his three-year-old in a child safety seat on the back of his bike, saying it's unsafe. They exchanged words. The cyclist walked away. So the guy shot the cyclist in the head with a [...]
links for 2009-11-25
Richmond Magazine: A Cartoonist’s Mind
A profile of Randy Munroe, creator of xkcd, my favorite comic of the past few years.
(tags: xkcd humor)
links for 2009-11-24
OkTrends: Your Looks and Your Inbox
OK Cupid, the hetero dating site, keeps crunching numbers about their members and blogging them. It's pure stats-porn for numbers geeks like me. In this installment, they point out that men's ratings of women collectively form a normal distribution, while women rate 80% of the men on the site as [...]
links for 2009-11-23
The Decline: Geography of a Recession
An animation of the increase in unemployment rates by county, nationally. The choice of colors rather exaggerates the situation, a situation bad enough that it hardly requires exaggeration.
(tags: geography economy recession)
Chico Enterprise Record: Student expelled for having unloaded shotguns in truck
In Northern California, a high school junior has been kicked [...]
links for 2009-11-21
Richard Dingwall: The trouble with soft delete
A good argument that having a "deleted" flag in a database is often a bad idea, and frequently nothing more than cargo cult programming. (The latter is true in my case.)
(tags: sql database programming)
Wikipedia Talk: There's a Hole in My Bucket
I have occasionally wondered how one goes about fixing [...]
links for 2009-11-20
Carl Malamud: Robots.Txt and the .Gov TLD
An examination of 32,000 US government websites finds that over a thousand of them prohibit indexing by search engines or archiving services (via robots.txt, which is a suggestion, not a technological block), and a couple of hundred of them have an exception, but only for Google. Of course, we [...]
links for 2009-11-19
43 Folders: Adventures in $40 eyeglasses
Matt Haughey wrote this guide a couple of years ago about the magic of buying glasses online. Apparently they're marked up like mad at retail, and you can get a decent pair for $50-$100. Mine won't last forever, so here's my reminder to myself to shop around online next time [...]
links for 2009-11-18
Fraidy Cats
John Gruber has started a list of every politician who is afraid of terrorists who are already in our custody.
(tags: terrorism politics)
WSLS: Hunter charged in shooting that killed one Ferrum College student, hurt another
A Franklin County resident claims to have mistaken a trio of college students for deer, which is how he explains shooting [...]
The Hamilton case has gone federal.
Del. Phil Hamilton lost his reelection bid earlier this month, I was relieved to see–voters saw fit to hand him his hat for lining his own pockets with taxpayer dollars (or so it appears). Democrat Robin Abbott won the Peninsula district with 54% of the vote. Like every other outgoing delegate, Hamilton remains a delegate [...]
links for 2009-11-17
Mother Jones: Anti-Abortion Group to Protest Palin
American Right to Life plans to launch a protest against Sarah Palin because she's insufficiently pro-life. I'll give ARTL this: their position is consistent and logical from the perspective of somebody who believes that every sperm is sacred. But this illustrates the problem of extremism of all stripes: the [...]
The burning of Rep. Perriello has been cancelled.
Teabagger Nigel Coleman on why he’s cancelled his plans to burn Rep. Tom Perriello in effigy:
I feel like I obviously handled this poorly, as far as the press goes. We really should have thought this through more … and seen how this was going to affect not only us, but other TEA parties and the [...]
links for 2009-11-16
Wikipedia: Native Tongues
It turns out that some of my favorite hip-hop artists were all members of a loose affiliation that are united by their "positive-minded, good-natured Afrocentric lyrics, and for pioneering the use of eclectic sampling and later jazz-influenced beats." De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Mos Def, The Jungle Brothers, Talib Kweli, and [...]
links for 2009-11-15
New York Times: In House, Many Spoke With One Voice—Lobbyists’
Genentech got a dozen different congressmen to introduce statements into the congressional record—ostensibly the congressmen's own words—that were all the same. They'd all parroted what the biotech firm's lobbyists wanted them to say. Democrats and Republicans alike.
(tags: congress healthcare lobbyists)
links for 2009-11-13
New York Times: Eating by the Numbers
A trio of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Social and Decision Sciences write that New York City's requirement that chains conspicuously specify the caloric content of items on their menu has had no apparent effect on what people order, even when informed about how many calories they [...]
links for 2009-11-11
Providence Journal: RI Gov. Carcieri vetoes 'domestic partners' burial-rights bill
The governor of Rhode Island has vetoed a bill passed by the legislature that would have allowed gay couples to make funeral arrangements for each other. That's just evil. Crap like this shows that many opponents of gay marriage don't want to "protect marriage," whatever that [...]
links for 2009-11-10
New York Times: Setting Sail Into Space, Propelled by Sunshine
Carl Sagan's Planetary Society is testing out a solar sail next year. A breadloaf-sized satellite will unfurl a mylar sheet that will expand, origami-style, to an eighteen feet square. The pressure of photons (which is to say sunlight) is sufficient to propel the satellite, allowing it [...]
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Waldo Jaquith (JAY-kwith) is a website developer and political pundit who lives in the vicinity of Charlottesville, VA, USA. more »
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