A really fascinating read : "The political system is broken partly because of Internet," Barlow said. "It's made it impossible to govern anything the size of the nation-state. We're going back to the city-state. The nation-state is ungovernably information-rich." I like it because it challenges the notion that the 'new media' is always inherently good or 'better' than it's 'old' media counterpart. It's not a universal truth. It never was. It will never be. ...
Link : Sometimes you read something, and you know there's some bad statistics going on somewhere. You can just smell the problem there: The top four big cities in America with the lowest rates of violent crime are all in border states: San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and Austin, according to a new FBI report. "the top 4 big cities". Really? Austin? San Diego? Wow. Austin is a 'big city' now? Who the hell figured this out? Barney Fife? Don't get me wrong: I like...
Link : Comedy Central's "JC" is currently in development, which means it's still a couple steps away from becoming a Go project. The show is about Jesus trying to live as a regular guy in New York City and wanting to escape the shadow of his "powerful but apathetic father" (more details here). With Comedy Central having recently censored frequent parenting group target "South Park" for trying to portray the Prophet Muhammad, some Christian leaders see the ...
I think I should probably agree with this piece in the NYT : For all the criticism BP executives may deserve, they are far from the only people to struggle with such low-probability, high-cost events. Nearly everyone does. “These are precisely the kinds of events that are hard for us as humans to get our hands around and react to rationally,” Robert N. Stavins, an environmental economist at Harvard, says. We make two basic — and opposite — types of mistakes. When an event is difficult to i...
That's pretty awesome, if you ask me. You almost feel bad for the guy who screwed up that big. It's not like that's the way people want to end up with Stanley Cup immortality . Game tonight, where the Hawks take on the Flyers in Philly for game 3. Monday as any indicator, it could be a rough one.
Real Clear Markets : Indeed, one doesn't have to be a small-government libertarian to understand that our federal minders don't possess the competence to deal with oil spills anymore than they have the foresight to rein in faulty banking practices. The founders didn't so much despise government as they were properly skeptical about a centralized bureaucracy's ability to handle specialized situations. I agree with the premise on this one. W was no more able to prevent the di...
See here for how to: I forget exactly what the requirement was, but this came up on a forum. That's what I cooked using the in cell bar charts. It's certainly not good...but most definitely not bad.
Linky : But in this dysfunctional right wing political climate, there are never any consequences for lying or promoting false outrages. They simply ignore the inevitable debunking, then move right on to the next phony story, as if they were never caught hyperventilating over nothing. Then they refer back to the phony story endlessly, as if it were never proven false. Which about sums it up. Look, I'm not convinced the GOP has a single candidate in their clown-car-of-fail list...
Maybe I've been living under a rock, but this is the first I've heard of this : About 2.4 billion people live in “water-stressed” countries such as China, according to a 2009 report by the Pacific Institute, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit scientific research group. Water scarcity and pollution reduce China’s gross domestic product by about 2.3 percent, the World Bank said in a 2007 report. The article goes on to talk about chip manufacturers and soda companies are taking up...
Pretty funny . "AFTER THE 2006 MIDTERM ELECTIONS, RAHM EMANUEL JUMPED ON A TABLE AND SAID THE REPUBLICAN PARTY "CAN GO F*** THEMSELVES" RAHM EMANUEL SENT A ROTTING FISH TO A POLLSTER HE DIDN'T LIKE » All have references. Of course, Rahm has a long way to go before he can achieve the bad ass level of the previous CoS .
This is actually one of the most frustrating things I see on a daily basis. People spend time manually merging two datasets together or doing other stupid stuff like sorting and praying everything matches up. It pisses me off for 2 reasons: 1. There's a better way and it's absurdly easy, assuming you'd just get off your ass and learn something about the software that's been on your desktop for most of your career. 2. You should know number 1. Anyway, a friend sent me a URGENT ...
This one is pretty much old as dirt and not really all that elegant, but: It can be implemented now , to whatever stupid report your boss has you do - without you having to really learn anything new It generally has a little bit of 'wow factor' to Excel noobs (like your boss). Even though it's a stupid trick You can couple it with some static color, conditional formatting, stuff that may already be in your tool box If you're totally bad at Excel, this is a great little formula to start...
I think I'm still digesting this post , which probably does as good a job as can be done making an argument that the iPad (or probably, more to the point - products like it) represent a threat to Windows. In my comments I was about the price point vs the product recieved and was pretty adamant about the iPad costing too much while providing comparitively very little functionality. Not to say that it it won't have some great niche legs - but rather I just can't see it getting mass iPod like adop...
It is totally unoffensive and lacks any entertainment value whatsoever.