Seen on a maling list of folks I mostly knew in college:
It's 7 pm in uganda and raining cats and baboons. We've been on the road, if u can call it that, for about 5 hours, with no end in sight. Sent from my blackberry…
If you ask me the “Sent from my blackberry…” line (added automatically I'd imagine), sort of undermines what precedes it.
Meanwhile, here it's not yet 9am and it's already 78 (26 C) and muggy here. But no baboons.
Here's a public service announcement: Don't get too excited about Jim Lindgren's post that Some of the “Homogenized” Temperature Data is False (which relies on Willis Eschenbach's The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero) until you have digested the debunking at Economist.com, Scepticism's limits.
Brad DeLong has renamed his blog to J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with a Prehensile Tail. (It used to be “J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with Both Hands.”) I am not making this up. I have known Brad since grade school and I can testify that if he has a prehensile tail, it is either a recent growth or he hid it very well.
Incidentally, the page I linked to above includes the following line, which I quote out of context since it is funnier that way:
But when I look at Senators Conrad and Gregg, I don't recognize fellow members of my species.
Perhaps they lack a tail?
Editor & Publisher distinguished itself during the Bush regime for its skeptical coverage of the war and more. And now E&P is going to be closed at the end of the month, after 108 of continuous publication.
The new owners of E&P's parent, Nielsen Business Media, made the (to me) surprising decision to close it down — didn't even try to sell it or keep it alive online. How unsurprising, therefore, to learn that one part of the consortium that bought E&P's parent is the Carlyle Group.
Carlyle, like Haliburton and Brown & Root (now merged?), is a key part of the GOP power and influence (and state-sponsored profit) sector.
I'm not saying this is why Carlye will have bought NBM, but I doubt they shed a tear or lifted a finger to save E&P in any form.
Via Talkleft, Records the Government Keeps On You:
The Forensic Scientist Blog has a list of the top six files the government keeps on you, how to obtain them, and why you should have them.
Cateories: The FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, Earnings Records, Criminal Records and Court Records. According to the blog, if your FBI record is under 50 pages, it's free.
How many years before the government has one mega-file, or an efficient and easy-to-collate distributed file, on each of us?
I did not know him nearly as well as I would have liked, but his scholarship was careful and deep, and in person he was kind and thoughtful.
Jotwell Blenderlaw