No Doubt Ms. McArdle Will Reassure Us That The Rhetoric of Violence Has Nothing to do with Violence

This threat to Senator Murray reminded me of the McArdle nonsense discussed here (at great length, as is my wont). But not to worry.  Just because elected leaders and the highest profile opinion makers on the right have been calling health care reform “armageddon” and the Democrats who passed it tyrants, there is no need [...]

DFH’s are not alone: Some video on the madness of current defense spending

Benjamin Friedman is no one’s idea of a wild-eyed hippie naif. He is, rather, a Ph.D candidate at MIT’s Political Science Department and a research fellow at that well known bastion of tie-dye and patchouli, the Cato Institute. Money fact: as Friedman totes up current defense spending  including all the bits up to the share [...]

Why Andrew Sullivan Continues to Piss Me Off…little things edition

Andrew Sullivan, as I and many have noted, is a true pain in the ass.  He’s sometimes brilliant,  more or less always deeply committed, capable of howling error and, in the one great strength that any opinionated journalist needs, completely unfazed by that fact. But he’s also beset by the one true sin of someone [...]

iPad Whiff

So — even with gadget lust surging through my geekocampus, still, at the last minute, I cancelled my reservation for an iPad.  Decided to wait for 3G, based on my experience using my iPhone as guide to travelling around rural Ohio the week before last.  That GPS functionality that comes with cellular as well as [...]

Stephen Colbert’s Salsa Recipe/iPad App.

Presented, without further comment, for your viewing pleasure.

Sometimes I Just Don’t Get Andrew Sullivan

Usually, it’s pretty easy to parse Andrew Sullivan.  He has some very good instincts — see e.g. Palin, S. and torture for two very passionately argued correct calls — and some bad ones (he appears to be innumerate, and he has shown some willingness to use real sleight of hand in arguing with science he [...]

Megan McArdle is Always Wrong…Completely Outsourced Rate-Spread/Default Risk Edition

No one person (except perhaps the stalwart souls here and here) can stand to read Megan McArdle on a sustained basis.  Or at least I can’t.  She is such a reliable source of fail that reading her on a daily or even a weekly basis would do more damage to my productivity and my blood [...]

Annals of Transport/High Energy Physics division

Via friend of the blog Ian Preston’s comment on this post, I learn of one of the most significant developments in high energy particle physics of recent years. Image:  60 inch cyclotron at UC Berkeley –the world’s most powerful particle accelerator as of 1939.

Annals of Journalism — Don’t Do That edition

Via BarbinMD over at the Great Orange Satan I learn that Dean of the Washington Press Corps™ David Broder just committed this sin against the gods of the press: While terrorist bombs were blowing up in the Moscow subway, Washington was enjoying a week of unusual peace and quiet. Congress was in recess, and the [...]

New Frontiers in Computer Security

A British company takes a genuinely innovative view of network protection, combined with an ingenious use of crowd sourcing. (h/t Andrew Whitacre, communications maven of the MIT C4CM project).