From the “When Worlds Collide” department, Bob Gibson has been hired as the new executive director of the Sorensen Institute. Sorensen’s founding executive director was also from the newspaper world — Bill Wood had spent nearly as long as Bob as a Virginia reporter and editor.

My daily dose of schadenfreude has come in the form of the utter disarray of the Augusta County Republican Party. The county’s Republicans are finally fed up with the right-wing looney tunes that are speaking for them, and a whopping five people are challenging the incumbent chair. The story gets more embarrassing from there. (As a refresher, these are the folks who were 0wn3d by the Staunton News Leader after the Senate primary.) It’s interesting that the RPV hasn’t brought these clowns into line yet.

How the stars on the U.S. flag were arranged as new states were admitted to the union. The U.S. Army Institute of Heraldry has already planned our flag clear up to 56 states–check out the 51-star version.

From the “WTF?” category comes the announcement this snippet in Tim Craig’s article about a third Republican contender to replace Sen. John Warner, one Bob Berry:

Berry, 51, says “he’s very much the underdog” against either Gilmore or Marshall, but he plans to campaign hard around a “no compromise” theme.

Because if there’s one thing Virginians are clamoring for right now, it’s intolerance and partisanship. With this message, this guy’s gonna be the poster boy for Virginia Republicans before the week is out.

I’m a big fan of This American Life. Every episode I listen to–though always in the car or at the gym–I resolve to blog about, because there’s always something just awesome. That said, the episode I listened to today contained a segment that was unintentionally a brilliant parody of the show. It’s segment four of “Return to Childhood” (episode 351), which begins at 46:13 into the show. It’s so terrible that it’s actually funnier than Kasper Hauser’s TAL parody.

Local SQLite storage in Safari 3.1. My mind? Blown.

Don’t mind me–I’m still busy with Richmond Sunlight. My current task: OCRing 37,152,000 images. It’s every bit as time-consuming as you’d imagine. I’m planning to have Tesseract OCR’s babies. It crushes any other OCR program.

The Washington Post has, cleverly, researched how often presidents have needed to make decisions in the middle of the night. As it turns out, that’s basically never. Reagan’s chief of staff says he wouldn’t “unless there is a nuclear holocaust coming.” I aspire to be the sort of writer who would think to research and put together such an article.

Bob Gibson and I will be the speakers at this month’s Left of Center meeting in Charlottesville, on the topic of this year’s Virginia General Assembly session. That’s this Wednesday, 5:30pm, at Maya on West Main St. It’s always fun–come on down.

Rep. Keith Ellison on Rep. Virgil Goode.

I love this story about an apple grower fighting pests with hogs. Rather than spray azinphos-methyl on his trees, he bought some hogs and lets them wander around the orchard and eat the larvae-bearing young fruits that drop onto the ground. Not only does it fix the pest problem, but he’s got some fattened hogs at the end of the growing season.

There are 917,000 people on the federal terrorist watch list, with more names every minute. Who really believes that this list is doing anybody the slightest bit of good at this point? It’s pure foolishness.

Bad news for Albemarle Democrats: far-right Republican Party chairman Keith Drake is stepping down at the end of his term, which raises the specter of a chair who isn’t totally out of step with Albemarle Republicans. Good news for Albemarle Democrats: his right-hand man, transplant Christian Schoenwald, intends to replace him. Phew — that could have been bad.

For a few months now I’ve been telling anybody who will listen that the suburbs are going to be our next slums, and that the planning that’s fundamental to suburbs will make it enormously difficult for them to go through the standard apartments->business->mixed-use->residence cycles. (Plus, these things are built so terribly that they’ll never last, anyway.) Christopher Leinberger has a great article in The Atlantic about this very topic, with a deck that asserts that “fundamental changes in American life may turn today’s McMansions into tomorrow’s tenements.” I’m not smart enough to know whether this vision of the future is accurate, but it sure rings true for me.

Here’s a small new feature on Richmond Sunlight that I’m excited about: identical bill matching. Any bill that has a summary that is identical to any other bills’ summaries has links to all of the others. For instance, nine of the bills repealing abuser fees were identical. So viewing any one of them (i.e., SB1) provides links to all of the others. And any comment made on any one of those bills will appear on all of the identical bills. Once I add a date filter, this will automatically point out legislation sniping. All sorts of other uses come to mind, like pointing out that the same bill has been introduced before, calculating the frequency with which legislators introduce duplicate legislation, etc.

For the geeks among us: I fought with adding this little feature for weeks — the MySQL query of comparing all of the bill summaries was just too expensive. Then, last night, I had a forehead-slapping realization that this is what MD5 hashes are for. It just took two minutes to add, and the problem was solved.

It occurs to me that some Democrats who don’t know me very well may misunderstand my work with Richmond Sunlight, mistaking it for being partisan. My interest in having recorded subcommittee votes, session video, and accessible legislative data is much like my interest in redistricting reform: it’s got nothing to do with who’s in power, and it’s not going anywhere once Democrats take over the House. That, in fact, is one reason that I gave away Richmond Sunlight as soon as I started it — so it’s not up to me. So if you’re expecting me to fold up shop come November ‘09, don’t.

My friend Bennett Haselton looks into internet child safety statistics and finds they’re BS. Specifically, the often-cited statistic that one in five children is solicited online by a pedophile each year. That’s not even vaguely in the neighborhood of true.