don't see this
latest comments:
P(dead-man)<P(trigger) | forrestEasy | ronald
Killing me softly with science | forrest
Puncture | edward
higher standard | edward
I reside in the grey area | helena
Wielding | edward
The President today said that he estimates--apparently based on media reports--that about 30,000 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion. He's getting a lot of credit in the media for finally answering questions. I agree that we should give him credit for finally exposing himself to questioners who aren't pre-screened. However, the number is one which merits some questioning.
A Lancet statistical study by Dr. Les Roberts, an expert in counting war dead, found that--excluding Fallujah--there were an estimated 98,000 extra Iraqi deaths between the invasion and late last year (some of whom would have been combatants). Violence accounted for most of the extra deaths, and coalition airstrikes and artillery accounted for most of the violent deaths. Here's the study (unfortunately, registration is required, but Bugmenot works). Here's an episode of This American Life in which Dr. Roberts explains why the study is statistically credible.
Crazy at work. But in this holiday season, if you're going to shell out a couple benjamins for a shoddy wine-bottle opener that breaks within a few months, you might consider heading over here to give some cash to ActBlue.
Looking at the numbers now, less than 20 people have given on average to each of these five states. That's too low. Only 80 people have given in total! Look, I'll cough up $20 to help out. Will you?
Richard Pryor is dead.
This world may be constructed for me, but Pryor's death is a serious flaw in said design.
I have three words to say about the Miami Air Marshal story: dead-man's switch.
Each time someone claims that use of deadly force is acceptable in situations like this, I want to remind them that anyone capable of building a bomb is capable of creating a simple fail-deadly trigger to said bomb.
Shooting people, when explosives are in the mix, is rarely a good idea.
At the very end of this article in Slate about the atrocious Black Eyed Peas ditty "My Humps", there is a section that says "related in Slate". In it is a link to an article the author previously wrote, as well as a bizarre link to a Christopher Hitchens' obit for Susan Sontag.
Get the connection? Well, I sure don't. Unless, horrifically, "My Humps" is an homage to Susan Sontag.
As someone who enjoys good design, I hate websites that look like
Yes, I admit, my website is far from perfect. But the upcoming redesign should help out a bit. Until then, I think the biggest mistake with most websites today is a lack of focus on typography.
Principally, most blogs seem to ape each other's design, but very rarely focus on the implications of resizing and coloring text. The result? Text-ads that distract from content. Blockquotes highlighted in awful colors. Five to six different kinds of subheads that completely confuse users as to their purpose.
It doesn't have to be this way.
HTML, oddly, was designed from the beginning around outlines. With different header tags, one could quickly transform a document into a web page. Yet as frames, and then tables, and now divs quickly became the norm, designers needed to compress a bunch of information into a format that wasn't mature.
Consider the lowly book: chances are every book shares a set of common features that the casual reader can ascertain at a glance. Page numbers, or folios, commonly adorn each page in the margin. Chapter headings mark the beginnings of chapters. A title page, an index and a table-of-contents are all standard fare.
With a web page, there is no such set of common features. (Again, somewhat ironically, every web page must have a set of common features, namely, the (x)html markup that under-girds each page...yet the data is often curiously uncommon as compared to said markup.) Blogs tend to look like one another only using the same system. CSS-driven table less sites tend to look polished, while those designed using frontpage look as if they fell off the back of a truck.
As the site design changes once again, I'd just like to remind everyone that the focus should be on readability, rather than flashiness. This site is, at heart, a series of articles. So that's what I've tried to emphasize with the redesign.
Just a quick note: sometimes I'm reading an article in the WaPo and suddenly find myself driven insane because of idiocy spewed, without correction, such as this:
"By cutting taxes, you grow the economy, and you generate an enhanced flow of revenues to the Treasury," said Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Rules Committee.
Look, I know that Econ, much like Sociology and Political Science, is a soft science. Any "science" that lets you model the past perfectly yet still remain unable to predict the future with any degree of certainty isn't much of a hard science. Still, no professor of economics, anywhere, believes that by cutting taxes, you can increase revenue.
Sure, you could argue that you're "growing the economy". But to make the next leap over the cliff and say that reducing taxes actually increases revenue is nonsensical. David Dreier is an idiot, but Weisman shouldn't have included such a quote to begin with.
Unless, of course, he was overruled from above. Which is somewhat frightening.
Ian Frazier has a stunning article in this week's (dated Dec. 12, 2005) issue of The New Yorker about feral hogs. It's a fascinating read for a variety of reasons. But one of the most pleasurable, disturbing, and potentially illuminating discoveries the piece makes is that there's almost a direct correlation—not only on the state-by-state level, but even according to county—between feral hog populations and the likeliness that area went for Bush in 2004. I know correlation doesn't indicate causality, but the coincidence(?) does send one's mind down some interesting avenues, especially since feral hog ranges are expanding. (Sadly I can't link the article because it's not online, but I can link this conversation about the swine art. There's some other nice online-only content there as well...)