17
posts labeled rant
07.02.2010
(See below for an ) Last month my dear friend committed suicide, and in the middle of many emotions I came into contact with that part of the Internet that specializes in the business of dying. My friend's parents had bought an online obituary at the , something I later found out was run ...
Glorious Friedman
04.15.2009
See also these . ...
Shell Game
03.24.2009
If this second point of view is true, then the bank rescue plan is a shell game. Half a trillion dollars is going to make a one-way trip from the FDIC to a number of large banks, with a big taste skimmed off for the usual Wall Street intermediaries in return...
Andrew Ross Sorkin Explains
03.17.2009
Today's New York Times features a fascinating front-page , entitled "The Case for Paying Out Bonuses at A.I.G.". Sorkin argues that if we do not pay $165 million in performance bonuses to executives at the failed insurer, we risk chipping at the very foundations of the rule of law: If ...
Cowpox, Smallpox
03.05.2009
Unnoticed among the financial headlines last October was the scariest news story of 2008: Ironically, this outside force may already be here, in the form of the economic crisis itself. ...
On Bilingual Ballots
05.31.2006
I've always thought of George Will's columns as a standing reminder of the dangers of overtightening a bow tie, and been content to leave it at that. But occasionally he manages to produce an essay that rises above this very high threshold of provocation, and his Washington Post column last we...
Ruling Antarctica
03.07.2006
On first coming to Argentina, I was amused to find that every map of the country included a little pie-slice of Antarctica. Whether it was the bus map, the television weather forecast, or the Aerolineas Argentinas in-flight magazine, no map of Argentina was complete without the two dots of...
Dating Without Kundera
11.16.2005
One of the terrors of dating is Milan Kundera, and specifically, , the sexually-transmitted book that this Czech-born author has inflicted on a generation of American youth. Given these requirements, it's not surprising that many people have gravitated towards . Th...
A Rocket To Nowhere
08.03.2005
There are , firmly or tentatively, through 2010, when the current orbiter is supposed to retire in favor of a yet-to-be-designed replacement (which will not fly until 2014). On the eve of this launch, NASA put the likelihood of losing an orbiter at 1 in 100, a somew...
Dabblers and Blowhards
04.04.2005
I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would *really* like to avoid it - Paul Graham, posting on About two years ago, the Lisp pro...
An Audioblogging Manifesto
08.31.2004
I demand four minutes and twenty seconds of your life [ ]. ...
100 Years Of Turbulence
12.17.2003
If simply getting airborne is the criterion, honors have to go to the New Zealand eccentric Richard Pearse, who in 1902 built a that enabled him to reach an altitude of several dozen feet and crash into gorse hedges. If powered flight without a...
Best Practices For Time Travelers
09.29.2003
When John Titor on IRC chat in October of 2000, he was enjoying a neat kind of double billing - as his 38-year-old self sat downstairs in the kitchen, typing away, a two-year-old version of himself lay sound asleep upstairs in bed. The elder Titor had been sent back in time by the U.S. Army,...
French Week: On School Lunches
03.16.2003
Take a look at these two school lunch menus, both for the week of March 24-28, 2003. The menu on the left [ ] is from a school in the town of Montigny le Bretonneux, just southwest of Paris; the menu on the right [ ] comes from a school in Pittsford, New York. ...
The Future Is Boring
02.22.2003
Of course, this lousy track record has never deterred people from making predictions. It's especially fun when you get to revisit old ones, and see how well they fared . Over at LA Weekly, they've a 1979 issue predicting what the world would be like in 2002. The...
False Pretenses
02.16.2003
Not only is Iraq supposed to be more of a threat, but we're told that it is such an threat that we must act right now, without taking the time to build United Nations support, even if we could easily build that support by agreeing to a harmless (if ineffective) ...
Automated Checkout: Interfaces Attack!
02.10.2003
And of course, if you actually want to steal anything, all you have to do is . ...