From his “drama” essay. See also his example for Venn diagrams.

This hack got added to my Mac about 10 seconds after I read about it.

[albook:~/Documents] jeff% calc c in fathoms / fortnight
1.98287925 × 1014 fathoms / fortnight

I was just invited to a conference in Lusaka, Zambia. Barring hitting the PowerBall, I won’t be attending.

The cheapest flight on Orbitz is a BA connection through London for the bargain price of $1,925. The most expensive flight is United to Zurich; Swissair to Jo’burg; and South African Airways to Lusaka. In coach. For $8,262.

You’d think they’d at least have the decency to not call that “economy”.

This reminds me of a conference I attended in Italy in 1999. The ticket cost me what I can bill a client in an afternoon. For the African man who attended the same conference, the ticket cost more than he could make in three months; in real dollars, his travel was five times the cost of mine.

Ya know, I’m not sure why I put up with it for so long, but after seeing an animated cockroach crawl across my screen and feeling my stomach churn, I finally DNS blocked web ads.

The process is simple, really:

1. Web ads come from web servers, which typically are not the same servers that are feeling you the stuff you want to see.
2. Therefore, if your computer can’t find the servers sending you all that garbage, you miss pretty much nothing.
3. So you fool your computer into thinking that all of those garbage-spewing computers no longer exist.

I neither know nor care how this is done on a Windows box, but on Mac OS X you can find fairly useful instructions here. Note that if you have BBEdit and know your way around Unix line endings, you can skip all that stuff with the akamai script and dos2unix.

If you’re not reading The Daily Howler, give it a shot. Bob Somerby is the only guy I’ve seen who consistently nails the reasons why reading a newspaper is a gut churning experience these days. In the past week:

Monday: Slams Tim Russert and Joe Klein for softballing Republicans, hardballing Democrats, and generally getting the facts so mixed up that they can’t even phrase the questions correctly.

Tuesday: Questions why the Bush claim of Social Security bankruptcy isn’t being refuted as the calumny it is. (EJ Dionne sez, because mainstream media can’t print factual information without being called liberal, so they just print the Republican version.)

Wednesday: Quote of the day: Scribes like Russert flee lucidity as their ancestors might have fled Lucifer himself.

Thursday: The same nonpartisan budget analysis can be used to quote a $2T, $4T, or $15 trillion dollar costs for the Bush plan, depending on the chosen time scale. So why is the “liberal media” quoting the Bush-friendly smaller costs?

Friday: More on the Bush-friendly cost numbers, plus a much-deserved evisceration of a self-proclaimed and self-loathing liberal Post columnist.

Monday: More from the columnist, as he proceeds to mostly agree with Ann Coulter, only with more polite language. QotD goes, as it so often does, to Ann: “Conservatives believe in God. All of our beliefs proceed from that…. That is why we love the United States of America, a country—I mean, I would be a peasant selling moccasins on the street or being beaten when my shoes make noise if I had been born in another country. What protects me is the United States of America, based on the Christian premise that all men are created equal…. By contrast, liberals believe they are God.

Something I just submitted to Interesting People:

SMS spamming isn’t restricted to businesses. I signed up for the DC Alert system , which generally has been a reasonable announcement service telling me about street closings and snow emergencies. Of course, the real reason to sign up for such a service is to get information telling me whether to get the heck out of Dodge in the event of terrorist incidents hitting the proverbial fan.

So you can imagine my annoyance when this emergency system was used to send me a greeting from “my new ANC commissioner” in Dupont Circle. For those of you not from here, ANCs are the very loud and largely toothless neighborhood councils that were established to provide grassroots democratic feedback to the largely toothless City Council. I don’t live in Dupont Circle (nor am I particularly affected by the ANC dealings in my own neighborhood), so this is spam, pure and simple, which serves to degrade the overall trust in an emergency network.

One could generally argue with the value of this service since it’s been already proven that in the event of a real attack, the federal jurisdictions are perfectly happy to withhold information from the local government which controls the service. I’m already acclimated to getting a disturbing message, waiting a few hours, and then getting an all-clear. So call me paranoid, but I think the true value of the service will be when I receive the message initially telling me “all is well, remain calm”, which I’ll take to be the trigger to start making tracks.

Amazingly, on the day of 9/11, people left to their own devices remained calm. It’s when they begin collating and distrusting information flows that mob mentality seems to set in. Given what I hear on a daily basis from my astoundingly uninformed neighbors, I fully expect the next incident to be managed straight into a major crisis.

Scientists demonstrate that stock trading can be rather well described with a completely random, irrational model.

Ted Barlow at Crooked Timber really nails how I’ve been feeling for the last few months:

Too many mainstream conservatives have adopted accusations of treason into their regular toolbox, and I guess I’m sort of getting used to it. But it isn’t OK. Not to mince words, this is insanity. This is mistaking the left for the Red Skull.

[Senator Rick] Santorum is essentially a poor man’s version of Tom DeLay without the charm or brains. From the Bull Moose Blog.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has shed some light on EULAs, which among other things can impair your rights to free speech, take over your computer, bind you to contracts that haven’t been written yet, and charge your credit cards without your permission.

Via BoingBoing and the great State of Alaska, Spazzstick. I’m fairly sure I saw some Jolt Chapstick in Japan a few years ago, but then again, that version probably wasn’t made by trolls.

This essay seems to be making the blogging rounds.

The market itself has forced companies to be as competitive as they can be, and the same technology and systems that allow US companies to outsource to India can also be used to let you work in your pajamas from your ancestral home in Mt. Airy North Carolina instead of the inner city hell you once had to settle for because thats where the work was. I say this with total command of my faculties that fully 25% of the US workforce could start working remotely within 90 days.

Speaking as someone else who commutes about ten feet, I think Varifrank misses a few points:

1. Maybe it’s true that “workplaces” are due to inertia, but that doesn’t change the fact that inertia is the third most powerful human drive.
2. There are some bosses who want to have their employees in person because he doesn’t trust them, or his own ability to manage them, if they’re home in their bathrobes.
3. There are some employees who don’t trust their own ability to get anything accomplished without a boss literally over their shoulder. In my book, I called them the “untrepreneurs”—they get all they need from their dream of working from home by dreaming it, not living it.

Believe it or not, I have only owned 16 of the top 100 gadgets of all time. And thank God they included a Tickle Me Elmo in the list, because that should innoculate me against another useless collecting habit.

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Can someone please explain to me why, when you change your Yahoo! marketing preferences, you are required to please allow approximately ten (10) days for this change to take effect? “That’s the time it takes to fill in our marketing request form with a #2 pencil, and ship it ground from our web servers to the guy with the Teletype who enters it into our Offshore Marketing Database SAN.”

Note to Yahoo: please allow ten days for me to reconsider next time I think about purchasing one of your services.

So true, it hurts.

You probably have to be utterly blue state liberal to find this amusing, but I thought it was a hoot. Via How We Work: