Thursday, September 05, 2002
Obviously, I'm not personally affected. But .. if it were me, I think I'd just pack up and leave them to starve themselves. Is emigration really that difficult? When the alternative is a forcible dispossession followed by a fusillade of bullets into you and your family?
And we're accused of decadence? Those Aussies have nothing on us! We still laboriously drag ourselves out to lie about in the sun in order to get tanned! You decadent moderns with your tanning implants and steam-powered ipsemobiles! Bah!
Football predicting at its finest!! Let me just grab this bit out of the middle of the article:
All told, of the roughly 300 Super Bowl predictions tracked by TMQ through this period, two were right -- a one-in-150 performance. If you simply placed into a hat the names of the 31 NFL teams that existed in those years and drew a name at random, your odds of predicting the Super Bowl winner would be 1-in-31. This means that in the past three years, professional sportscasters and commentators, possessed with their incredible insider knowledge, have proven themselves five times less likely than random chance to predict the Super Bowl winner.[emphasis in the original]
Why I'm too fat, courtesy of Megan McArdle. I notice, by the way, that no day can really be a good one unless she posts something. I am a lamer ... I'm a fanboy to a blogger.
Still more on why Gulf War II ought to happen. I keep trying to find a rational article claiming the opposite, but the only ideas there seem to be "war is intrinsically bad", "you can't prove anything, so you're not justified in acting", "you need permission from the U.N.", and "we should wait until they actually deploy WMDs before attacking." I would claim that none of these are actually compelling. Can you point me at another defense of the status quo?
Hey Lee! If you don't wanna go to the party, you can stay home. We don't mind, but the bastards are going to pay and dearly. After the U.S.S. Cole, I told my cow-orkers that any long-term solution would either be killing nobody and accepting that American losses were inevitable, or killing so many of the lackwits that there wouldn't be anybody left who wanted to fight. I now think that only one of those courses of action is acceptable. Two guesses as to which one I like.
Wednesday, September 04, 2002
Tuesday, September 03, 2002
Lance seems to be a little short on cash, and the Russians have asked him to leave. Immediately. Once again, if I had the money, my ass'd be in that seat too.
It appears that at least one Middle Eastern country is busy cleaning their own house. I wish we could do something constructive to help them, but I suspect that anything overt would be counterproductive. More's the pity.
Eventually, I'll get time and motivation to lean CSS. Until then, I'll just bookmark the knowledgable people's writings.
Dan at Happy Fun Pundit relays a story about a not-so-radio-friendly album from a not-so-easily-pigeonholed band that was posted in its entirety on a website and still managed to hit #13 on the album charts in its debut week. This would, it seems, suggest that there's more to sagging record company revenues than "evil file-sharing copyright infringers," wouldn't it?
Mark Steyn says "I'll have the rhino." Man, I wish I could write like that. Even during my heady college years when I was cranking out three 1,000 word essays per week, I never quite got that level of over-the-top-ness. That's probably why I write software for a living; computers are pretty much ignorant of entertainment value.
Once again, the inestimable James Lileks!!!!1! Two quick bits therefrom:
Now: why do most folk go to CompUSA, the computer store? I’m going to take a guess here and say “computers,” or things related to them. A USB hub. Some paper. Some ink cartridges, whose price reflects the fact that they contain ambergris and gold.
The Windows instructions were three pages long, and advised that you go to three different websites, find a driver on a page whose url was as long as an NBA player’s shinbone, sacrifice a songbird to the Santeria deity of your choice, and give it a shot. The Mac instructions were: plug it in. Turn it on.
Monday, September 02, 2002
BWA-hahahahahaha! Not only does he possess a loverly image for his page, but he's now created the Justice-to-Jesus raio, a measure of organizational conservatism easily measured using nothing more than Google.
"It's an epidemic!!!!!" screams Bill O'Reilly. "Not exactly," replies STATS.org. The first person to say to my face "but what if you're the one?" gets a free lottery ticket and a whack in the back of the head from my ever-handy LART.
Ho ho hooooo. Once again, Steven Den Beste has the scoop on why Kuwait just bought a pile of U.S.-made Apache attack helicopters. They've been trying to since 1998, and Congress just approved the purchase. I wonder what that means ...
A textbook example of a bunch of people more interested in placing blame than in fixing the problem: "What does this switch do?" the trainee asked plaintively. Wouldn't it have been simpler and/or safer to have designed either a single switch that controls both buses, or at least a safety interlock that prevents them from being throw in the unsafe order? How in the world could a system that allows a two-week trainee to destroy half a million dollars worth of equipment possibly be the trainee's fault? I also enjoyed this bit of "knowledge transfer":
Stephenson said Coady had no clue what had happened. "He was completely unaware," Stephenson wrote in a memo to Baker. "With his lack of knowledge of the plant electrical controls, it was not even possible to explain to him what he did. He would not have understood. His training did not include these advanced concepts."
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