tadhg.com

I doubt this will go anywhere, but a South Texas grand jury has indicted VP Dick Cheney and former AG Alberto Gonzales on prisoner abuse charges. When I first heard about this, I thought it was related to Guantanamo Bay, and hence an overreach by some eager locals, but in fact it appears quite related to their jurisdiction. It would be lovely irony if, after all they’ve pulled, they did get punished by a group of Texas citizens outraged over local crimes.

Michael Lewis returned to writing about Wall Street in this article for Portfolio.com, and naturally it’s full of the tidbits that are so great to hear about how our economy works (or doesn’t work, depending on your perspective). There are plenty of good ones, but my favorite is this:

[Eisman] called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.
—“The End”, Michael Lewis, Portfolio.com, 11 Nov 2008

Yes, those unbelievably savvy people at S&P, whose ratings department are/were supposed to be trusted with assessing the risk of investments/credit lines, simply didn’t have a “model” (that is, some black-box computer program of a mathematical formula some analyst thought would predict market movements) that could cope with the concept that house prices might, at some point in the future, not rise.

Fun might be the wrong word.

(Also, this is long. Condensed: I’ve been using Freebase to store my reading data, I wrote an Acre app to provide a custom view, and I discovered that my data model has some shortcomings.)

I’ve been playing with Acre some more, specifically on a long-term project of mine: to store data about the books I read in some system and then create views about my reading habits. Yes, compulsive list-making combined with programming/data geekery.

Anyway, I could have used a lot of other systems, such as Delicious Library or LibraryThing or Books, to store this information, but none of them seemed to have quite what I want (and most of them are proprietary). I could have written my own, and planned to, but kept tweaking with the data model and generally wasn’t sure how I wanted to deal with it.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is from late 2006, and you’ve probably seen it before, but somehow I missed it then, and I just can’t resist posting it. It’s pretty amazing, showing a level of innumeracy that I have a lot of trouble believing is real—even if it is.

Transcript of the call.
MP3 of the call.
Randall Munroe’s response to the whole thing.

It’s just crazy. A series of people who seem to have difficulty with the concept that 0.002 cents and 0.002 dollars are different. I don’t think they’re pretending to have trouble, either… they seem to actually be unable to comprehend what the customer is saying.

I love this Onion article. In particular, the final paragraph is fantastic in that both-funny-and-sad-and-probably-true way the Onion does so well.

It reminds me another classic, also very close to the truth, that I might have mentioned before: Terrifying Bill Passed During NBA Playoffs.

Freebase recently got a hosted development environment, Acre, and I’ve been playing with it. It makes it quite easy to develop applications using Freebase data (which is the point), and I’m eager to write some of those applications myself.
Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, Bacon beat Fries in the the District 14 Colorado State Senate race this year…

While Obama’s election is a sign of racial progress in the United States, Bernard Chazelle presents some interesting demographic statistics about how his victory came about.

Here’s one number that might surprise some people: whites voted for McCain 55% to 43%. (Note: I don’t buy into the suspect concept of “whiteness”, but this kind of breakdown is still significant given how many people categorize themselves, and others, this way.)
Read the rest of this entry »

Really, how can people say things like this?

“You know, if you were a slave in the old South, what did you get as a slave? You got free room and board, you got free money, and you got rewarded for having children because that was just, you know, tomorrow’s slave. … Can I ask a question? How’s that different from welfare? You get a free house, you get free food, and you get rewarded for having children. Oh, wait a minute, hold on a second. There is a difference: The slave had to work for it.”
—Jim Quinn, The War Room with Quinn & Rose, 6 Nov 2008

I know that idiots like this go on the air just to spew controversial inanities that both outrage others and sit well with their base, but still. (Via Media Matters.)

Amidst the mainly good news from the election on Tuesday was this heartbreaker: Proposition 8, California’s measure to eliminate gay marriage rights, passed. Not by a huge amount: the latest numbers are 52.5% to 47.5%, a difference of 500000 votes.
Read the rest of this entry »