H/T to Mark Frauenfelder for the link.
August 3, 2010
Badminton, as described by professional sports announcer
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July 29, 2010
Other things that (some) economists discover unexpectedly
Terry Kinder rounds up a few more things that economists find surprising:
Other Things That Surprise Economists (other than the economy sucks):
- Sunrise
- Sunset
- Lifetime Television has a lot of chick flicks
- Milli Vanilli were lip syncing
- Summer
- Politicians lie
- Gravity
- Christmas
- Their own shadows
- Sneezing
- Near beer isn’t
- Knock knock jokes
. . . and a whole lot more.
To be fair, Terry is really poking fun at only some economists, but the 90% that work for the government are giving the rest of them a bad name.
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July 27, 2010
Short form: he’s treating them like civilians
In the elevators of my clients’ office building, there are video displays with short news items, stock market performance, weather, and (of course) ads. The short form of this story was something like:
Top RCMP officers claim boss is verbally abusive, close-minded, arrogant and insulting
My immediate reaction was “so he’s acting like a cop dealing with a group of citizens?”
Four weeks in Canadian history
Scott Feschuk has been out of the country for a while. He’s delighted to find that something actually happened in Canada while he was away, and provides a useful summary for those of us not paying attention:
I’ve been away from Canada for four of the past five weeks, and it’s always fun to return and see what’s been missed. A comprehensive review:
1. The dominant domestic news story of the past month hinges on the intricacies of statistical analysis.
2. Finally demonstrating a populist touch, Michael Ignatieff has started production on his own Speed sequel: If his party’s popularity in opinion polls falls below 25 per cent, the Liberal Express explodes! (Subplot: If the bus keeps stopping for Timbits, the occupants of the Liberal Express explode!)
3. Conrad Black has apparently tunneled out of prison and escaped.
4. Upon being informed of No. 3, David Radler has soiled himself.*
* Not reported, but a safe assumption.
Don’t ever change, Canada.
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The Guild goes Bollywood
July 26, 2010
July 25, 2010
QotD: Writing
Writing is a slow and a difficult process mentally. How you physically render the words onto a screen or a page doesn’t help you. I’ll give you this example. When words had to be carved into stone, with a chisel, you got the Ten Commandments. When the quill pen had been invented and you had to chase a goose around the yard and sharpen the pen and boil some ink and so on, you got Shakespeare. When the fountain pen came along, you got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, you got Jack Kerouac. And now that we have the computer, we have Facebook. Are you seeing a trend here?
P.J. O’Rourke, “P.J. O’Rourke: ‘Very Little That Gets Blogged Is Of Very Much Worth'”, John Brown’s Notes and Essays, 2010-07-23
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July 22, 2010
Cultivating a taste for parody
The Economist reviews The Oxford Book of Parodies by John Gross:
Writing a parody is hard. In the 1940s, a competition in the New Statesman invited readers to parody Graham Greene. Greene himself entered under a pseudonym and only came second. Get it right, though, and you have a withering form of criticism and an immortal entertainment rolled into one. John Gross’s new anthology of parodies in English (with a few foreign titbits) has samples both high and low of this diverse genre.
[. . .]
Any well-known poem or character is fair game. A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin is revisited as an ailing pensioner who has retired to Spain (“He peers through a pair of bifocals;/He talks quite a lot to a bear that he’s got/Who is known as El Pu to the locals.”) Ezra Pound wrote a wintry variation on “Sumer is icumen in” (“…skiddeth bus and sloppeth us…”) But why limit oneself to a single writer? Portmanteau parodies let writers do two voices at once, thus “Chaucer” rewrites Sir John Betjeman (“A Mayde ther was, y-clept Joan Hunter Dunn…”) and “Dylan Thomas” redoes “Pride and Prejudice” (“It is night in the smug snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug household of Mr and Mrs Dai Bennet and their simpering daughters — five breast-bobbing man-hungry titivators, innocent as ice-cream, panting for balls and matrimony.”)
[. . .]
Documents, philosophies and schools of thought can be good fodder, too. H.L. Mencken did a “Declaration of Independence in American” (“When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody . . .”)
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July 20, 2010
The Guild S4 Ep.2
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July 15, 2010
Pleated-Jeans identifies the modern Maslow’s hierarchy
Pleated-Jeans has done the heavy lifting to pull the old, outdated Maslow diagram into the 21st century:
H/T to Michael O’Connor Clarke who advises “Caution: may cause psych majors to eject hot coffee through nasal passages.”
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QotD: Auto history repeats itself
In the twinkling of an eye (by the standards of bureaucratic time, which is slower than geologic time but more expensive than time spent with Madame Claude’s girls in Paris) the thing was done. On March 7, 1989, the DOT-NHTSA-ODI-TSC-OPSAD-VRTC . . . effort produced an eighty-one page report written by an eight man group of engineering savants with more than fifty years of college among them. This document presented evidence from exhaustive experiment and analysis that proved what everybody who understands how to open the hood of a car had known all along about SAIs: “Pedal misapplications are the likely cause of these incidents.”
Yes, the dumb buggers stepped on the gas instead of the brake. [. . .] Anyway, the truth was out at last. The government had released a huge report showing that there was no such thing as unintended acceleration in automobiles. Stand by for huge government reports on fairies stealing children and poker wealth gained by drawing to inside straights. Meanwhile, cars did not fly away of their own accord. They could be safely left unattended.
. . . So the truth was out, and we people who like automobiles and can tell our right foot from our elbow should have been glad. But there was, in fact, no reason to celebrate. This message from the federal bowl of Alpha-Bits had cost us taxpayers millions of dollars and came too late to save Audi from the ignorance, credulity, opportunism and sheer Luddite malice directed toward that corporation and its products. Furthermore, the Department of Transportation press release introducing the SAI report absolved the paddle-shoed, dink-wit perpetrators of sudden acceleration. It just let Betty Dumb-Toes and Joe Boat-Foot right off the hook:
NHTSA declined to characterize the cause of sudden acceleration as driver error. Driver error may imply carelessness or willfulness in failing to operate a car properly. Pedal misapplication is more descriptive. It could happen to even the most attentive driver who inadvertently selects the wrong pedal and continues to do so unwittingly.
The next time I get pulled over by the state highway patrol, I’m telling the officer, “You probably intend to ticket me for speeding, which would be driver error. But pedal misapplication is more descriptive of what occurred. It could happen to even the most attentive driver who inadvertently selects the wrong pedal and continues to do so unwittingly.”
P.J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire US Government, 1991
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July 14, 2010
iOS4 doesn’t play quite as nicely with older iPhones
adamburtle: “The first iPhone captivated the world because the interface was so well done, so snappy, so interactive; it was like nothing before it. Of course it was, it was an Apple product. That, right there, is why I buy Apple products. And I didn’t even mind that it was missing “copy and paste,” MMS, ringtones, etc — because I knew Apple would eventually get to these through software updates. And eventually they did. Unfortunately they kept coming out with new phones. With faster processors. And they wrote all their software updates for these phones, with little attention to deprecated models. I don’t really use third party software on my phones, I honestly don’t even use ringtones. I just my phone for SMS, web, maps, and occasionally as an actual phone, so the 3G model was more than I ever needed.
“Except over time, it’s fulfilled my needs less and less. And it’s not because my needs have grown. It’s not because I’ve installed a bunch of laggy software. It’s because Apple’s firmware has become bloated, with respect to the processing power of the 3G iPhone. I just installed iOS 4 two weeks ago, and at this point, I’d be happy to roll back to the first firmware I ever had, just to have that original speed again; forget about the copy and paste, I don’t need it that badly. “
H/T to Michael O’Connor Clarke for the most graphical example of why you don’t always want to be the first one to install new software.
July 13, 2010
The Guild Season 4 Episode 1
July 12, 2010
The Guild Season 4 trailer
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