this - Today was supposed to be treadmill day, but my back, knees and hips hurt too much for that.
The developers were in the office and I got bombarded from all sides. Around noon, I thought, "So this is what it's like to
work for a living?" I do
not approve.
Warcraft Wednesdays - BadToast's base came under fire repeatedly, but we were able to repel them each time.
- We saw more dryads on Turtle Rock then I've seen on any map, ever.
- A double NE team harassed me for a bit before laying siege to Toast's base w/ the sort of incompetence I'm legendary for.
Very weird day.
Whenever I think about steampunk, I think about
pneumatic tubes. If you wanted to mail a package, would you really get out on your steam-powered mecha and walk to the post office? Hell no, you'd put that shit in a tube and let the steam zip it to wherever it needed to go.
A century ago, futurists predicted that pneumatic tubes would be the transportation systems of tomorrow. That idea never came to fruition - until recently. Stanford University's medical center uses a 4-mile-long pneumatic tube delivery system. And it saves lives.
Before the tubes were installed in the mid-1990s, Stanford had a team of 20 people who ran samples from doctors' offices and operating rooms to the lab. But as the hospital expanded, it became impossible for humans to run fast enough - especially with delicate blood samples that can't change temperature before analysis. So the university turned to yesterday's futuristic technology. With an 98.8 percent uptime and packet speeds of 18 mph, this pneumatic tube system is a physical information network that is invaluable for surgeons who need samples analyzed in real time during operations.
Annalee Newitz
This is why no one puts me in charge of anything: if it was up to me, I would've just moved the labs closer to the emergency rooms.
Prairie dogs may use spoken language more effectively than monkeys or dolphins.
Prof Slobodchikoff details the experiments he has done to reveal the hidden structure of the prairie dog's language within the BBC natural history programme "Prairie dogs, talk of the town," broadcast as part of the Natural World documentary series.
Once existing in their billions, prairie dog numbers have now plummeted as ranchers view them as vermin competing for resources with livestock.
But those remaining still live in huge colonies of hundreds of animals, digging complex underground burrow systems.
Whenever a predator approaches, the small rodents let out a series of barks, squeals and squeaks.
…
The researchers found that the prairie dogs are confronted by so many predators that they have evolved different "words" to describe them all.
Matt Walker
As long as they don't have opposable thumbs, I think we're safe... (hattip pdorrell)
Physicist
Niels Bohr spent too much time watching westerns.
Bohr noticed that the man who drew first invariably got shot, and speculated that the intentional act of drawing and shooting was slower to execute than the action in response.
Here was a hypothesis that could be tested, and with the aid of cap guns hastily purchased in a Copenhagen toyshop, duly proved it.
In a series of mock gunfights with colleagues Bohr always drew second and always won.
According to Manjit Kumar, the author of Quantum, Bohr's prowess as a gunslinger was such that his victims wrote a ditty about him.
On pistols and lead, now Bohr had to prove
The defendant is quickest to move.
Bohr accepted the challenge without a frown
He drew when we drew, and shot each one of us down.
This tale has a moral, tho' we knew it before.
It's foolish to question the wisdom of Bohr.
In developing his theory of the shootout Bohr went on to suggest that the logical conclusion was a negotiated settlement.
Since neither protagonist would want to draw first, there was nothing to do but talk.
Tom Feilden
There's a finding that needs to be more widely shared...
Iran launched a rocket full of animals into orbit. Really, this is all you need to know about it:
Ahmadinejad may be an evil prick, but his black, kinky sense of humour is undeniable. Obama just cut the nuts off NASA, and Iran (it claims) puts a capsule in orbit.
Warren Ellis
Congratulations to the Iranians! I hope they do a better job looking to the future than we do.
I'm disturbed
Haiti's debt has yet to be forgiven.
I made another chart from data from Haiti's budget. (The Port-au-Prince government, it turns out, posts its budget documents online.) Last year, it shows, Haiti spent around $37 million servicing its debt. (I looked up the numbers in Haitian Gourdes, and performed a current-day currency conversion -- note that the currency has cratered recently.) That's more than the government spent, say, on agriculture -- despite the fact that a massive proportion of Haitians are subsistence farmers. It's more than it spent on its ministry of tourism, despite the fact that tourists once posed the best way for Haiti to bolster its economy in the short term. Had Haiti not had to repay external debt, it could have boosted its education budget by nearly a third.
…
Haiti's debts remain significant. Moreover, it has garnered new ones, including a $100 million emergency loan from the IMF -- which comes with strings attached, including, for instance, a requirement to freeze government-employee pay. The country's debt has been a millstone around its neck for too long. It has a horrible history of economically encumbering the country. Why, with the outpouring still ongoing, though not for long, let that legacy remain?
Annie Lowrey
It's hard to believe the IMF is still out there grinding countries into the dust.
Senator
Mitch McConnell is a huge fan of cash from foreign companies.
In the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has been quick to denounce a bid by Democrats to stop foreign corporations from pouring money into U.S. elections, claiming current law already bars such spending. As we've reported before, it's not nearly as simple as that -- but McConnell should know: The GOP Senate leader has raked in campaign cash from a subsidiary of a major foreign defense contractor that's currently being investigated by the Justice Department for bribery.
As we reported yesterday, McConnell, a longtime foe of efforts to get money out of politics, last week took to the Senate floor to pooh-pooh the notion that the court's decision could allow a flood of foreign money to sway our elections, citing an existing law that prevents foreign nationals, including corporations, from spending on U.S. elections. But that ban doesn't cover the U.S. subsidiaries of foreign companies, or to foreign-owned corporations that incorporate in the U.S.
…
Since 2005, McConnell has received $21,000 -- spread between his campaign and his leadership PAC -- from a PAC run by BAE Systems Inc., according to federal campaign disclosure records examined by TPMmuckraker. BAE Systems Inc. is the American subsidiary of BAE Systems, the world's second largest defense contractor, headquartered in Britain.
…
McConnell has been good to BAE, which owns a facility in Louisville, Kentucky. For fiscal year 2010, the senator requested earmarks for the company worth a combined $17 million.
Zachary Roth
For $21,000, all he had to do was
ask for $17,000,000? Must be nice!
Speaking of the
Citizens United case, I
still can't tell if this is a joke:
Following the Supreme Court decision implicitly granting corporations the right to free speech (by determining that political spending is a kind of speech), a corporation has decided to take what it believes to be "democracy's next step": It is running for Congress.
With more than a twinge of irony, Murray Hill Incorporated, a liberal public relations firm, recently announced that it planned to run in the Republican primary in Maryland's 8th Congressional District.
Catherine Rampell
I don't think this is funny at all.
Senator
Evan Bayh is deeply upset by bloggers.
And Evan Bayh again bashed "left-wing blogs" for criticizing the budget freeze idea. I guess left-wing blogs include Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman, along with Bayh's own colleagues like Sherrod Brown. Also, left-wing blogs must have made Evan Bayh vote to eliminate the estate tax and give hundreds of millions of dollars to super-rich trust fund kids. We're all-powerful.
David Dayen
Evan Bayh is a cunt.
The other day, I mentioned my schadenfreude at seeing
Colorado Springs go out of business. Here is a slightly more mature take on it:
This to me is one of the larger failures of the progressives and Democrats in general: we never talk about what it is your tax dollars do for you! It's never explained in simple, easy to understand terms like, picking up the trash, keeping your streets safe, providing security and health care in your old age. We never talk about the benefits. It's always some kind of abstract, statistical gobbledey-gook. It's very similar to repeated Democratic failure when it comes to income taxes. Instead of saying, "we're going to raise taxes on people who make more than $300,000 a year, they always default to "we're going to raise taxes on the top 3% of earners." It's stupid. Most people in America really believe they are in that percentage.
Progressives and Democrats have ideas that consistently poll above those of the Republicans. But the Democrats fail to enact good policy and fail to communicate it in an easy and understandable way. Instead falling into technocrat speak. And this is what happens.
Sean Paul Kelley
I predict the elected officials of Colorado Springs will cut taxes and let trickle-down economics take care of the rest.
On the other side of the country,
Philadelphia's taxpayers are getting their moneies worth.
My local transit authority is making a fairly major change to its regional rail system. Without boring you with all the history, roughly speaking, a few decades ago they connected up the two "sides" of the system. Part of the motivation was so that they could create more suburb-to-suburb routes, with each line going inbound into the city from one outer suburb, and then back out to another outer suburb. Whatever the merits of this idea, in recent years changing train routing needs have meant that a lot of trains aren't actually one seat rides from one outer suburb to another, and the trains change their route designations when they hit the city.
So they're going back to a pure hub and spoke system now. I'm not entirely sure why train routing needs required a lot of trains to change rout designations, but presumably this does provide for some additional flexibility in changing train frequencies. For example, it might make it easier to run relatively more outbound trains at night, or perhaps have more trains which only travel a truncated route, providing greater frequencies over shorter segments.
All very exciting!!
Atrios
Meanwhile, Chris Christie wants to reduce the # of trains NJ Transit runs.
Moment of Zen Little programs are delightful to write in isolation, but the process of maintaining large-scale software is always miserable. ... Technologists wish every program behaved like a brand-new, playful little program, and will use any available psychological strategy to avoid thinking about computers realistically.
Jaron Lanier
Despite stiff competition, I was declared the weirdest person in the office. 
