January 2011
Monday, 24 January 2011
The people who will really decide whether health-care reform succeeds or fails
Ezra Klein: “We don’t really know if his success can be replicated. But somebody’s can be.”
Sunday, 16 January 2011
everyone has a right to their beliefs
Manifest Density: “It’s disrespectful to let writing’s constituent elements bleed into one another through imprecise demarcations. If you see me ‘making mistakes with comma placement’, please rest assured that I’m doing it deliberately.”
Bad News for Tattoos
Stuck on Lou: “Those people understandably assumed that their zodiac signs would remain consistent for the rest of their lives. Other announcements that could render seemingly timeless tattoos embarrassingly outdated […]”
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
Interior of Moon imaged using 40-year-old data
ars technica: “One interpretation of the data is that the deepest interior regions of the Moon have similar structure to the inner regions of the Earth.”
Friday, 7 January 2011
Exactly!
Giles Bowkett: “It’s simply impossible to come up with status updates that make sense to every group. For instance, my parents recently encountered rattlesnakes on their property, and I proposed a system for preventing this which they rejected for, as far as I can tell, being too logical and too likely to succeed. If this was a topic of discussion on my Facebook page, my programmer friends would focus on the system, my actor friends would focus on the experience of encountering rattlesnakes - as well as the experience of attempting to talk sense into crazy people - while my high school friends would tell me what was going on with their own parents, and my raver friends would go off on a crazy tangent and start making jokes about peyote. These are all pretty great ways to deal with this kind of news, but not at the same time.”
Google’s decreasingly useful, spam-filled web search
Marco: “Part of what exacerbates this is the apparent explosion recently of cheap-‘content’ sites that try to answer every search query ever asked. Like affiliate-marketing spam, much of it seems to be generated by humans (technically — I wouldn’t classify them as such), but it’s functionally useless: sites like About.com, eHow, and countless clones with .info domain names that promise to address every niche question and informational topic, but whose content lacks all quality and substance.”
Monday, 3 January 2011
Poll: Tax the rich to balance the budget
msnbc.com: “The next most popular way – chosen by 20 percent – was to cut defense spending.”
Sunday, 2 January 2011
Future Shock
Yglesias: “The US, the Eurozone, and Japan are so terrified that real growth might lead to growth-imperiling inflation that we’ve just decided to live without the growth in the first place.”
The world is socialist
Scripting News: “Another thing that’s socialist is sickness. Like snow, it’s universal. Everyone gets sick, sooner or later.”